Reviews

Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

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chillcox15's review

5.0

4.5 stars. Ben Marcus makes a good point in the afterword to the Dalkey Edition of Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine; the early 70s abounded with narratives of divorce, both as personal exegeses/catharses and as symbol-ecologies for the slow, painful dissolution of the previous decade. It would be interesting to put this, which isn't really a divorce narrative so much as a marriage in decay rendered fantastically (both senses of the word) into the log of a two-person ship that seems to encompass much more than you would think could fit into the hull of a boat, with something like Gilbert Sorrentino's equally amazing The Sky Changes, which splays divorce across a cross-country road-trip, but adheres to a mortifying realism rather than Crawford's sickly fantabulism. Can't wait to read Susan Taubes's Divorcing in the new NYRB edition!

briancrandall's review

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4.0

I had no one to talk to. Unguentine’s notes were terse, less than a dozen words each. It had been years since we had sighted another ship whole and intact, with living people on the decks, and I could no longer climb the dome and hang out great banners proclaiming certain unfortunate aspects of our marriage, inviting relief, rescue, consolation. Once I wrote a long letter to an old friend, tied it to the feet of one of our pigeons which I secretly dispatched in a midnight gale; next day I found Unguentine silently reading the letter in the pilot-house, his only comment being a grunt, the crackling sound of it being folded up, handed back. So I went on with my chores. What else could I do? [44–5]

xystophi's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

george_salis's review

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"Back in the late 1960s a lot of us thought the world was coming to an end and it was time to head for the hills."

My interview with Stan can be read for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/06/22/consumption-mad-an-interview-with-stanley-crawford/

mattstebbins's review against another edition

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1.0

More like "Log of the S.S. Bullshit." More like the only log use this is good for is wiping my ass. More like find a fucking editor, you fucking twat. I wanted to stab the author by page twenty-one. This is the shit that drives me irrationally angry - no one has the right to write this poorly, to murder words, not even "in the name of art."

Fucking prick. Maybe it'd work as a drinking game? Scratch that - I refuse to try.

[sub-zero stars for sub-zero fucks. This goddamn "book."]

jimmylorunning's review against another edition

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3.0

An amazing invention of a short novel, most impressive for the details that are required for the imagined world of a barge-cum-island to take root in the reader's mind. Fantastic in its Daumaul-ian logic, its Roussel-ish sense of spectacle. I would not go as far as Ben Marcus does in his afterword, in which he praises it for its examination of a marriage--this aspect of the book I found not fully satisfying, existing only in the most allegorically surface sense. We never get a feel for who these characters are except through a fog of whimsy. Certainly I would not (as Marcus does) compare this to the brilliant Bergman film Scenes from a Marriage, a film that plunges deep into the psyche. Instead, we have a book where there is no plunging, only the barest outward remnants of two people's madnesses. Still, quite enjoyable: I especially loved the many parts that strained the boundaries of real possibility, you could see it stretching like the marks from childbirth, but how far? When does reality break through into fantasy?