The Checkout Counter #22
August 2024
Aftersun
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Monster
Film
  • Monster (怪物), 2023
    Drama. A mother confronts elementary school administration when her son begins to act differently. A single story told through three perspectives: mother, teacher, and child.
  • Aftersun, 2022that last sequence was equal parts crushing and cathartic. i had been enjoying the movie up until then, but didn't quite grasp what it was trying to tell me until the last ten or so minutes—then everything clicked and fell into place.

    a really lovely film that captures the melancholy of late summer. i'll always welcome more coming-of-age stories set outside of school.
    Drama. A woman reflects on a holiday she took with her father when she was eleven, through memory and camcorder footage.
Short fiction
Articles & essays
Books
  • The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmithhaving loved both the 1999 and 2024 screen adaptations, it was inevitable that i would fall for the book as well.

    knowing all the twists and turns of the plot, the biggest surprise to me was how funny this book is—there are multiple instances of tom giggling to himself as he thinks of fanciful lies, and the way his thoughts are written can be so ridiculous and theatrical. that, combined with his fish-out-of-water nature in the first few chapters, creates a very endearing character that persists and grates against his more calculated actions. i can't help liking this guy even after he bludgeoned multiple people to death.

    towards the end, though, i did feel a bit of a slowing down, and i could tell why the '99 and '24 adaptations both alter their endings. the changes the '24 miniseries made were particularly noticeable, since it stuck near-painstakingly close to the book: but the way this adaptation chose to wrap everything up felt neat and tidy, with the perfect amount of dramatic flourish. the book, on the other hand, has one coincidence too many, and its denouement overstays its welcome. still, its last few paragraphs drew me back in, and gave me the same swelling sense of triumph that the miniseries did: il meglio, il meglio!
    Crime, thriller. Tom Ripley, a destitute con artist, travels to Italy to convince a wealthy man's son to return home.
  • Ripley Under Ground, Patricia Highsmitha majority of this book features tom having a bunch of guests coming and going from his house, which becomes increasingly nail-biting. it has the same issue the first installment did of a slow denouement—is this typical of highsmith? i'll for sure check out the rest of this series and her other works.
    Crime, thriller. Six years after the events of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley is involved in a large-scale art forging scheme from the comfort of his estate in rural France.
  • Babel, R.F. Kuangi had a really bizarre time with this book. i liked its prose, its characters, loved how the magic and world operated—but it's often interrupted by a sudden, over-explanatory tone that can feel condescending or jarring in the time period it portrays. it's particularly noticeable in the footnotes, where any ambiguity or subtlety is quashed and the book grabs my shoulders and says, "do you get it? do you get what i'm trying to say?" i thought there was going to be some clever reveal about the writer of the footnotes, which would justify its tone, but that twist never came.

    still, i'm mostly positive on the book. the last third is relentlessly bleak, and it was easy to see how it would all end; but this came across as inevitable, rather than simply predictable.

    i interspersed my reading with listening to the audiobook, and i highly recommend it—it's nice to hear how the non-english words are pronounced, and the narrator performs an incredible variety of voices and accents.
    Historical fantasy. An orphan is plucked out of his cholera-ridden neighborhood in Canton and dropped into the prestigious classrooms of Oxford, where he learns about translation magic and its significance to the British Empire.
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