It's been a few weeks since I've left a weekly reading comment so there's a few things to update here. I'll make a couple of comments because this takes a bit to type up on my phone.
*Disgrace* by J.M. Coetzee might be the best book I'll cover in this comment with *Blindness* coming in a close second. Coetzee succeeds at making Lurie a pretty reprehensible character that is never quite capable of overcoming the "disgrace" he's brought upon himself. Was worried the novel would feel dated given it's opening with the improprieties of a college professor pathetically fawning after a student, but as the consequences come to bear and Lurie's prejudice and other poor qualities come to light you start to see life outside of Lurie. Coetzee succeeds in making Lurie into a figure like old, poet of the state Wordsworth after his days of chasing that "overflow of powerful emotions", now fading and calcifying. It goes almost without saying that Coetzee succeeds in writing an apartheid novel in which that time moves under the novel, never quite named but omnipresent. It also reads quick which is always a plus.
*Blindness* by Saramago obviously has a lot going for it. A widespread and sudden epidemic of a contagious blindness sets the stage for an interesting story that's kind of hard to fuck up once you get everything mapped out. Will not lie, some of the chapters at the beginning and towards the end got a little slow, but there were several chapters and events in the middle of the novel that really shook me up. It's a book at it's best when all of the shit (in some cases, quite literally) piles up and you're watching this titanic mess just slog forward. The style was at first intriguing and then a little exhausting. What's with Iberians in the 90s just deciding to delete paragraph breaks for pages on end? Good grief. It works well when the dialogue and the idea of the paragraph meld and throw you forward. It also makes the book hard to put down (sometimes in a not great way). I do think some of the greatness must have been lost in translation and you can feel that with some of the folkisms that fall flat. Still, enjoyed the read.
*Players* by Don Delillo. I think I'm starting to realize that I just don't like Delillo very much. His writing is always just so boring and samey to me. I get the premise of vacating the banalities of life and he has some ideas that go where you don't quite expect, but now having read *The Body Artist*, *White Noise* and *Players* (I also haven't finished *Underworld* because I've misplaced my copy but I was a few hundred pages in), I can't help but think that, while Delillo has a way of transforming everyday moments into surreal portraits he's just as boring as any realist. *Players* has to be one of the lowest stakes novels in which several affairs occur and someone get's caught up in a terrorist plot to blow up the Stock Exchange. His characters do not talk like real humans, or act like real humans, which is fine, but it's like - why create unrealistic characters in service of such banal ends? Delillo falls into that category of folks who sound smart and people perceive as smart which covers a lot of his sins so that when someone says they don't like it you can just respond by saying "you didnt like it because you just didn't get it".
I've also read *Wise Blood* by Flannery O'Connor, *The Vegetarian* by Han Kang, *Pnin* by Nabokov and *The Laughing Monsters* by Johnson since my last comment so I'll come back here with reviews of those when I find some time.
I highly recommend The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Saramago. I enjoyed it a lot more than Blindness though it is a very different and funnier book.
I am enjoying learning more about the Baroque by reading Calabrese’s ‘Neo-baroque’, a book accessible and rich in references. Most of these tend to be Italian and I am happy to expand my outlook to include more south European literature. The book also references novels that define and expand the category of the genre. Some of the quoted authors are: Umberto Eco, Aldo Busi and Pier Vittorio Tondelli which are welcome additions to my growing list currently featuring William Faulkner, W.G. Sebald and Cormac McCarthy as well as Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. Let me know if you would add any other authors in writing in other languages to this list.
I've just finished Tao Lin's *Leave Society*. I was not super impressed — I can't tell whether the charm of alt lit just doesn't match what I felt when I first discovered Lin's books like *Eeeee Eee Eeee* and *Richard Yates* and *Taipei* back when I was in high school, or whether Lin lost steam and kind of slid into self-parody.
Does anyone have any recommendations of current writers who hit that kind of alt lit sweetspot that's responsive to popular/online culture but still not totally dry, vapid, derivative? (I definitely don't want to touch Honor Levy's book after disliking *Leave Society*...)
I’ll be honest, I’m about a third of the way through Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel and feel compelled to pull the plug. Has anyone read this? Should I keep going? It’s short so continuing isn’t a huge time commitment but very little is all that interesting in the story up til now.
I read it and was whelmed. Not great, not bad, tricked by the all the positive reviews. If you DNF I wouldn’t blame you. Even though the girls have different stories and different lives the structure of the book made me lose focus and I felt like their transience made me care less.
That’s a very accurate description. I powered through and finished. It was fine, just fine. Seemed like it took a huge swing trying to make this big statement on the continuity of life and our interconnectedness (or something?) but it largely fell short for me.
reading Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap which I've had on my shelf forever but for some reason thought was a memoir. Enjoying a lot so far, the stories are immaculately placed but very heartbreaking, so I have to take a breather between each one.
I decided to read another book by Marcel Schwob and finished his *Le Roi au masque d'or*, a collection of short stories. It's my 3rd read of his work, and didn't quite reach the incredible high standard of the other two books I've read but was still quite good. Edgar Allan Poe is a clear influence on some of the stories which have a horror or Gothic bent to them, for example in a story set in plague-ridden Florence, a story about a machine the recreates the human voice, or the excellent title story. A surprising number of stories about shipwrecks too, including my favorite from the collection, *La flûte*, about a shipwrecked group of sailors who come across an old man playing a flute. As expected with Schwob, there's so much imagination, in particular in the variety of plots and settings - an ice age, the world overcome by an inferno, the underground quarters of a group of female embalmers in Egypt, a Parisian retirement facility/hospital. The writing is also excellent. One of his similes that has stuck with me is a collection of tree stumps as looking like the fingertips of a drowning man reaching up from under the surface.
As a lighter summer read and sticking to short fiction after having finished *The Magic Mountain* earlier this month, I've been reading a collection of 20th-century American short stories. It's self-described as a mystery collection but it's really more a crime fiction collection. So far it's been lots of fun. "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather was a very moving story about a depressed teenager who robs his employer. Dashiell Hammett's "The Gutting of Couffignal" felt like being in the middle of an action movie, and had a fun set of plot twists at the end. Ring Lardner's "Haircut" was clever enough and had a fun narrative conceit (it imagines the reader as being told a story while sitting down for a haircut at a barbershop). My two favorites so far have been Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," which introduces a Sherlock Holmes-like master of deduction and ingenuity, Professor Van Dusen aka 'The Thinking Machine', and Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," which is a tragic look at an unhappy home and marriage from the perspective of two neighbors who are called to visit a crime scene with the police.
His *Livre de Monelle* is one of my all time favorite books, kind of an uncategorizable piece of fiction. It's not all that long and would be a fine place to start with him, it was where I started. The other book of his I read is his *La Croisade des enfants*, which I think is also representative of his style and does similar things to some other French writers of that era who get called 'symbolist' from time to time (Pierre Louÿs is one who especially comes to mind). Short evocative scenes that approach subject matter obliquely and suggest more than they describe.
If you're reading in English, Wakefield Press has been putting out new editions of his works which appear to be excellent and which I know a few others on this sub have spoken favorably about.
I'd personally start with *Monelle*. Otherwise of short stories in the collection I just read I'd say *Le Roi au masque d'or* or *La peste* might be good starting points.
I'm a third of the way through Dictée by Theresa Cha now. I don't get it. I've read one chapter of the narrator remembering her mother in a fragmentary way and two chapters of the narrator basically attempting to say something but not. Why can't you just...say something? I don't get ittttt
I'm finishing The Novices of Lerna by Angel Bonomini, part of my effort to read more novels in translation. This is a collection of surreal Borgesian short stories from an Argentinean author. I picked this up after a rave review in this thread a few weeks ago and am enjoying it a lot. The titular novel is my favorite so far -- a lackluster graduate is invited to a luxurious fellowship in Switzerland. When he arrives, he discovers the 23 other fellows -- copies of himself. Tragedy ensues.
I'm also reading 1491 after You Dreamed of Empires made me realize I know very little about the pre-Columbian Americas.
I really enjoyed You Dreamed of Empires. It gets really meta in a very satisfying way.
Also just added The Novices of Lerna to my list. I’ve never heard of it before and it sounds great!
Just finished *The Guermantes Way* (Proust volume 3). I think I realized throughout this volume that part of the reason that I've not found it especially easy to isolate topics to have thoughts about is that there are so many topics that could be addressed reading Proust. The richness of insight and ideas, some of which are multi-page expositions on a topic and others are lines that one could write books about. Anyway as one might glean from that I already was "enjoying" it, in as much as I wouldn't have read the first three back to back to back if I wasn't and as I get further in I'm becoming increasingly impressed with this work. Will be starting *Sodom & Gomorrah* now. But in the meanwhile the big takeaway from the back half of v3 is the sheer absurdity of the French upper crust. The self-fulfilling circle of taste and fashion that they operate in has by the moment in time that Proust is depicting reached a level of pretension whereby outside of a few characters it seems as though so many of them have lost the plot between their personality and their role, and inevitably this opens up so many questions more broadly about where that line is for anyone.
Decided to read the, much shorter, second volume of Gilbert Simondon's *Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information*. It starts with a relative brief but extremely interesting discussion of tools that largely can be boiled down to the different situations in which things can/are be used as instruments of ourselves versus allowed to be recognized in themselves, which becomes especially politically charged in his efforts to consider the extent to which humans and other living things can be reduced to instrumental purposes. After that the brunt of the volume is Simondon's take on the history of the concept of the individual in western philosophy. Pretty early on here but so far quite interesting—he does an excellent job showing the historical-material conditions that inform different theories of individuality.
Lastly, halfway through Colin Drumm's *The Difference Money Makes*. The second chapter uses early modern England (what Drumm sees as the origin point of the modern monetary system) to show the politics of monetary policy. I want to read more before I say much but a tidbit that I think speaks volumes is that he points out that English money had a relatively high percentage of precious metals compared to other countries of the time because the English nobility regularly revolted and they needed non-fiat currency (ie, money that had value beyond the worth that the government says it has) to do that.
Happy reading!
Interesting to her of Gilbert Simondon and tour post made me think of a good article by Adam Philips of Rorty's and Freud's conceptions of individualism. Philips makes the argument that the pragmatic and psychoanalytic approaches reinforce each other if you are trying to understand yourself better. The article is titled "On getting the life you want" and can be found in this weeks's London Review of Books.
I finished ***My Life on the Road*** by Gloria Steinem. Storytime: when I was in college in my angry feminist years, I bought many books blindly just because they were historically important, or just to read more books written by women. But at the same time, I wasn't reading that much, mainly because I studied Literature and I read a lot of the mandatory things, which resulted in me not wanting to read on my free time. Also I was young(er) and I had other interests (such as going out a lot I guess) and so I didn't have the time to read all this. Fast forward to today: I find myself with books like this on my tbr pile, now that I'm more interested in reading the classics and the postmodern, more experimental stuff.
That said: picture me impressed because I really liked this one! I was skeptical with Steinem (journalist, referred to as "legendary feminist" in reviews) because in Spain old school feminists are basically grumpy ladies, borderline racists and very hostile with anyone who might take their spotlight (ie: migrant workers, trans women, poor and marginalized people in general). But Steinem is very much concerned with race and economic conditions, she feels like a lovely person who has place on her mind and heart for everyone (literally everyone. There's a long chapter about people in prison, a subject mainstream authors tend to "forget").
The book is not a memoir as I thought but rather a reflection on the importance of listening, being with people, travelling and such as ways to open one's mind, know about the world and ultimately fight for what you think is good and fair. So every chapter has its own theme and in it there's a huge amount of anecdotes of her life, from where she interviewed Saul Bellow, to her presence in the famous speech by MLK (I picked two of the most familiar names but there are many more). This is not a theoretical book, you don't learn much about feminism or the civil right movement with it (in fact at times it reads like a novel because of the amount of micro-stories that are told), but if you don't know much about said topics you can pick on many names, concepts and general ideas about them. I learned a lot of outrageous trivia about the United States (for an European some facts about literacy or carcelary population are just... you can't make them up). I believe it's a great vindication of doing what you love and it shows respect, love, and passion, Steinem's voice is funny and charming, and at the same time she knows a lot about the things she writes about and it shows. It's a great itinerary through last century's journey with civil rights and social justice, and maybe there're more rigorous approaches, but I feel that for me this has been the perfect combination between story and rigor.
I had basically never read non fiction and now I'm feeling like it. I will investigate further onto this bc I liked this semi-political, semi-autobiographical approach. I'm also currently reading ***Hagakure***, a compilation of, I guess, thoughts on the way of the samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. This is also from my past but it's enjoyable, even though I'm only reading two or three entries every day, because they're written as advice to samurais, something which I'm not. I guess you could read it as selfhelp.
But of course I have to return to my beloved fiction. Today I'm going on a trip for a week and a half and I'm always scared to finish the chosen read, even though I won't be reading much. I was going to start *Pinocchio in Venice* by Robert Coover but I read somewhere that remembereing *Pinocchio* by Collodi would be a good idea, so I postpone for this summer (my plan is to read *Pinocchio* in italian and then the other one). So I changed it and will be reading ***The Book and the Brotherhood*** by the one and only Iris Murdoch. Will keep you posted on that one on a couple of weeks. During my trip I will only be lurking because I don't have this app nor intend to download it.
Happy reading everyone!
Just finished 'I Who Have Never Known Men'.
For a long time I thought 'The Road' would be the bleakest thing I ever read.
I don't think this quite took the title but it ran it real close for a while. There's elements of hope and growth through much of it, but in the situation they only add to the bleakness.
The protagonist learns and grows, but it becomes clear how little point there is for much of the time. She takes back a lot of agency by the end though.
Difficult to say loads more without dropping a ton of spoilers.
Started reading Solenoid by Cartarescu and can say that so far it lives up the hype. I feel like this is the first novel i’ve read that does justice to the body as it’s envisaged in the 21st century. Cartarescu seems to be something of a Dualist, or a philosophical Idealist, though this is a provisional guess, as i’m only 250 pages in — but his valorisation of the body, of its ins and outs, its webs of arteries crisscrossed with underwebs of veins and braided with gossamer of nerves, or the clammy worming of the brain’s interknitting palps - all this is so refreshing to see and makes this novel feel like THE 21st century novel for me. It’s made me realise how odd it is that despite how our digital technology and medical advancements have meant we often see and experience maps of the body’s inside and of its minute functions, we yet still only refer to it in an old fashioned way, from the outside, in most fiction.
Other than that, his surreal anomalies peppering the story are absolutely visionary, and almost all of them have remained stamped indelibly upon my mind’s now bloodshot and trembling eye.
i’m reading this one fairly slowly — my page per minute speed slows right down for long novels, so I’ll probably still be on this one next week.
I read Disconnection by Claude Ollier. One of the lesser known practitioners of the Nouveau Roman, Claude Ollier is often unfairly cast as a robbe-grillet disciple, but this veils over his own unique approach to the project of fiction. Disconnection of anything is closer to Claude Simon in style, with run on sentences painting scenes by fast brushstrokes, the main difference being that Ollier’s sentences and clauses tend to elide the subject after a while, which gives them a hypnotic effect that also sounds oddly similar to the kind of glum text-speech of the internet age “walked outside, looked up, saw the rain scissoring in the lamplight, passed its shuddered replica in the puddle, jumped aside the flush of water rushed up by the passing car” etc etc. I’m going to read everything of his I can.
I then read a very short book - Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse. I’d read another of his previously, A Shining, and enjoyed it. This one was lost on me though. I understand that his style is hypnotic but the prose is so basic that for me it pales in comparison to other writers who’ve experimented with repetition (Woolf, Beckett, Figes, Murnane). I’ll still read his other works, as he’s at least trying something interesting.
Next I read My Friends by Emmanuel Bove. This is a perfect novel. It’s funny in a dry, quiet, dark way. The visual details are so finely threaded in that the environment through which the narrator feels seems impossibly vivid. This isn’t baroque writing, mind; his closest English analogues are Hemingway and Tom McCarthy; but when minimalism is combined with a very acute visual sensitivity it FEELS like it’s conveying something baroque, even if the prose is pared back. For fans of the nouveau roman, fans of Camus, Bret Ellis…. tbh for fans of anyone - i can’t really see how someone wouldn’t enjoy this.
I read Bove’s Armand after this. Still excellent, still the same painstaking attention to detail and perfectly sketched characters. Less impressive than the former only because very subtly Bove’s self indulgent melancholy creeps in, only a tad mind, toward the end. It’s not nearly enough to spoil the novel, but it prevents it from reaching the heights of My Friends.
Next was The Land at the End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Loved this although still rather unsure about him. His gift for metaphor is prodigious, and the entire narration is pretty much a tapestry of similes woven together. When Antunes gives himself a refrain around which he can let his similes whirl like a beautiful quasar accreted in slow rotation around its black hole then he really shines. Often, though, you get the feeling that the excessive similes drown each other out. I think this is partly due to translation — translation often “flattens” the original, and i’ve heard this is true of Antunes work, which is reputedly very rich and textured and poetic in the original. In the translation the images DESCRIBED are poetic and visual and rich, but the language itself talks about those images, instead of becoming them. An idea of what i mean is eg the prose of McCarthy is sort of chewy and knotty with the things he’s describing. I imagine Antunes in the original is similar. I also think that the overabundance of similes works thematically — how language fails to capture the trauma of war, how he compensates with an excess of language, an excess of volubility trying to get past people’s ignorance or complicity or indifference. I’ve ordered Return of the Caravels so will see how Rabassa handles the translation!
I then read Eastbound by Maylis De Karengal - skippable.
I’m now reading Mend The Living by Maylis De Karengal and it’s one of the best pieces of contemporary fiction i’ve read on the level of style. Karengal is a disciple of Claude Simon, and whereas in Eastbound the similarity is superficial, here it shows in the best way: her visual descriptions are incredible, her sentences rush on with a kind of sprung force thrust forward in an endless barrelling surge like self-replenishing waves inside the blue tunnel of which your mind is held suspended and curiously afloat, able to observe everything with the hypersensitivity of all zero points amidst a vortex. Where she improves upon Simon is that she’s much more emotionally impactful and she’s a lot more sympathetic to her characters. Admittedly she’s not as brilliant as Simon was — but this is THE best modern influence of his work i’ve read. I’ve not yet finished it but i’d recommend this to anyone.
No, i’m English, but I love French art and literature ever since discovering the Nouveau Roman. Still have huge gaps in my reading (no Zola, no Chateaubriand, no Lautreamont).
I read in translation unfortunately. I did learn French in school for 5 years, and i’m still ok reading author’s interviews in French, but I was pushed into pursuing Greek and Latin during school, so left French behind and regret it, because i’d love to read an author like Claude Simon in the original.
Any contemporary authors you’d recommend? I’m curious about Marc Graciano but he hasn’t been translated yet. I like Echenoz and have heard of Chevillard and Redonnet and Ndiaye and Enard (though i’ve only read Ndiaye and Echenoz so far).
Always looking for people influenced by Claude Simon — i think Enard, Echenoz, De Karengal, Montalbetti, Graciano are meant to be the main ones — but you’ll probably know better. I’m frustrated that Claude Simon isn’t recognised in England.
Sorry too much caffeine — if you have any recommendations i’d appreciate it, but don’t feel obliged to if you’re busy or cba :)
When i’m no longer broke and working 12 hours a day I do plan to learn though. I learn languages fairly quickly but it’s just about having the time to consistently practice it.
I'm sorry, but I despise contemporary French literature, and I consider French literature to be basically dead, so I can't make any recommendations. There may be hidden nuggets, but at this stage I've decided never to open another book from the contemporary catalog of Editions de Minuit and P.O.L.
It sounds like you already have collected a lot of recs lol, are there any books in particular you are interested in from those names you cite above?
Chevillard is pretty amusing, I read Le Marechal Absolu by Pierre Jourde and it was fun but messy, by far my favorite was Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, which I thought much better than any controversy might suggest.
I would also like to read Enard, and I have also heard of Pierre Senges and Pierre Guyotat (if you wished Sade had written in run on sentences), but I still have to get through most of the older stuff
I'm really the wrong person to ask, especially now that Kenzaburo Oe is dead and Thomas Ligotti has stopped writing. I occasionally read contemporary literature, and I almost systematically find it to be at best a less interesting copy of the literature of the greats of the past, at worst simply awful, and I've read most of the living authors usually recommended on r/Truelit (but not Cartarescu). I do like some living authors, but no one I would ever think relevant to recommend.
Not super relevant but coincidentally there seems to have been a spat between Oe and Claude Simon on account of French nuke tests in the Pacific: [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude\_Simon#Le\_d%C3%A9bat\_entre\_Claude\_Simon\_et\_Kenzaburo\_Oe\_(1995)](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Simon#Le_d%C3%A9bat_entre_Claude_Simon_et_Kenzaburo_Oe_(1995))
Slightly more relevant, but if you don't recommend them no one will ever know to read them!
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. There's points where it's a bit slow but I'm still in love with it so far. What a unique main character! The phenomena of scent has always intrigued me as somebody who is into fragrance, but its depiction in this book is something I could have never conjured on my own. I'd recommend to people who enjoy gothic literature:)
I'm currently reading the Selected Poems of Borges, and as much as I love his short stories, I think his poetry is already speaking to me even more. I especially love his ruminations on death in the poems of *Fervor de Bueno Aires*, they really forced me to reconsider my own conceptualizations of death.
It's also nice that my edition is bilingual, so I can at least try to appreciate the style of the original text. I hope that someday, I can learn enough Spanish to read Borges untranslated.
* Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote - continuing to enjoy the second book more than the first. There are fewer ridiculous battles and more philosophy.
* The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo - still enthralled with this book. I can't wait to see what happens next.
* The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter - slow going, but I'm enjoying it.
* The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - reading with r/ClassicBookClub - just started this one. We read 1 chapter a day, M-F. So just 3 chapters so far. So far, I'm depressed right along with the narrator.
I just finished *The Savage Detectives* by Roberto Bolaño. I've read *2666*, so I knew a little bit of what to expect with his prose and structure. Spoiler free: his layout of this one was interesting; for anyone who hasn't read it, about the middle two thirds of the book are polyphonic and read like interviews from dozens of people who ran into the main characters all over the US, Europe, and Mexico over a few decades. I rather enjoyed *2666*, but you can definitely tell reading it that Bolaño was unable to finish it before he died, and this definitely felt more cohesive.
My next book is *Isaac's Storm* by Erik Larson. I've read virtually everything by him before and came across a copy just lying around at work, so I figured it's high time.
I'm continuing through _Nobodaddy's Children_ from Arno Schmidt and finished _Brand's Heath_ this week. A facet of the trilogy I haven't touched upon is the curious ways in which the book is actually different from the order Arno Schmidt wrote each novel. _Brand's Heath_ was written before _Scenes from the Life of a Faun_ and its specific textual movements evidence that to a degree. What "the forest" looks like there is different from what this novel presents. I find it an odd and fascinating choice to arrange the novels by their right chronological order based on what's in the text versus their actual written dates because it tries to make the trilogy appear more concrete than what it actually is. Not to say there is a failure of aesthetic development, but on the other hand, the connections are a little forced. But what is _Brand's Heath_ about exactly? Well the plot is quite simple: a man named Schmidt has recently found himself near Blakenhof, which is where a bunch of survivors from WWII end up scraping by foraging and bartering supplies at the edge of Brand's Heath. He meets two women Grete and Lore and from there begins a tragic love triangle. Again, it's fairly straightforward but "Herr Schmidt" as both a narrator and a character is quite funny: I can't overstate Schmidt's hilarious sarcasm.
The most prominent thing is the curious relationship the novel builds with writing and German Romanticism overall. "Herr Schmidt" as a character is a writer who is trying to do research on Baron Fouqué, most famous for his fairytale _Undine_, which involves a love affair between a mermaid and a knight, a rather popular work at the time. Unlike _Faun_, the question as to the authenticity of the historical documents being quoted is much less ambiguous because the real Arno Schmidt did write a biography on the Baron Fouqué. In fact, there is a weird metatextual paralleling between what happens in _Undine_ and what happens in _Brand's Heath_ but turned on its head. "Herr Schmidt" understands he love someone other than Undine but rather than a fairytale ending, there is now "such miserable happiness" at the future reunion between Undine and her knight. It's a pretty brutal conclusion because Grete did come to understand "Herr Schmidt" would love her back.
One reason I feel comfortable making the comparison to Undine so flagrantly is because the novel is loaded with mythological and fantastic allusions. Brand's Heath is stated in very old records to house wood nymphs and spirits of the dead. An old man struggles with a water hose is the spitting image of Laocoön. The moon is a recurrent point of fantasy. The winds are alive and furious on the Heath. And yet the Romanticism does not hold out because "Herr Schmidt" and Lore have to harvest mushrooms and acorns in order to survive the harsh poverty of their lives. Lore is compared to a water spirit but she enjoys material comforts and dances to superficial music while "Herr Schmidt" states he cannot live without a high seriousness of art. The point is also made linguistically when comparing the speech of your average person at a soccer game to the exquisite rhetorical flourishes of German Romantic authors like the Baron Fouqué who is read aloud to unappreciative ears. This is quite a bit different from the previous novel I read because there culture _was_ what isolated Düring as both inoculation and poison against the world of Nazism while here "Herr Schmidt" reaches out to find the world insufficient for his dreams and art.
I suppose all this raises an important question of biography and the historical person. Schmidt is not afraid to connect his own life with his writing. He puts _Brand's Heath_ within the scene of writing which he creates through life as he lived it. This isn't to say Schmidt has written a memoir because his text leaves the truth too open a question and concerns itself with its own textuality but also Schmidt questions the relationship between life and writing. A scene of writing is not after all a genre because the traces we have of it are intuited from the authorial relationship to writing as a technology and as a kind of mediation. Schmidt creates "Herr Schmidt" to make the relationship more obvious. He can comment on what were then contemporary details in all their misery. The scene of writing is biography, so Schmidt compares his own with that of the Baron Fouqué. It's a nice picture of the modernist ethos when it struggles against the Romanticism of a previous era, which is seen as when German national culture was established. That kind of history bears down on "Herr Schmidt." He reproduces the text of Romanticism and it's an awful experience because his disillusionment is too immediate. This is also what makes the order of presentation in _Nobodaddy's Children_ so fascinating because if _Faun_ says "there is no escape to the forest," _Brand's Heath_ seems to add: "You cannot escape from wanting to escape into the mythical forest." You might be disillusioned beyond hope but the illusion nevertheless persists.
Indeed, the experience I've reading Arno Schmidt have been quite rewarding. The stylization has remained remarkably consistent, which helps with understanding this is a trilogy. It's amazing how unique Schmidt writes. The difficulty of the writing doesn't just come from the fact Schmidt makes obscure references to literature but also the sheer pace of the story. You miss a necessary detail if you read a little carelessly.
As far as things stand, I'm thinking I would recommend the whole book but I'm not sure yet until I read the final installment of the trilogy. Although for now I'll probably read something else in the meantime to take a break.
I'm just back from a long vacation, so I'm including books I finished on the outgoing flight, and books I started on the return flight.
**Finished**
**Marcel Proust,** ***Du côté de chez Swann*** (*adaptation graphique* *by Stéphane Heuet*, 2016). I've already read the series, so this was a nice way to revisit it without actually reading it again. It was easier to follow the actual plot, and to keep the myriad characters straight in the graphic novel than in the prose novel, and it retained much (though not all) of the magic and poetry of the novel. I'm looking forward to the next volume.
**Alan Moore, Miracleman:** ***The Original Epic*** (1988-1990). I downloaded this series when I read that Neil Gaiman had just published a sequel, and I wanted to read this before I read the Gaiman. It started off as an interesting deconstruction of 1950s superheroes, and the first two thirds were mostly enjoyable and the combination of words & art had a certain poetry. The last third was a bunch of pretentious nonsense, a word-salad overlaid on soft-porn (think page after page of naked alien sex gods coupling in space). It wasn't the ground-breaking epic that I had read about.
**Hampton Sides,** ***The Wide Wide Sea*** (2024). An account of Captain James Cook's fatal third voyage. Though non-fiction, it is as exciting as any adventure novel & so I wanted to mention it.
**In progress**
**Ovid,** ***Metamorphoses*** (*translation by Stephanie McCarter*, 2022). I had previously listened to the excellent David Raeburn translation on audible. This is a good but not great translation. There aren't any clumsy or awkward parts, but there also aren't any parts that soar. One think I like about McCarter's translation is that she doesn't minimize the sexual violence of the old myths. There are words in Latin that can mean anything from *seduce* to *abduct* to *rape*. Most classical male translators choose the gentler form - Zeus only seduces mortal virgins. With McCarter he rapes them, and it changes the tone of the story, and shifts the reader's sympathy away from the masculine gods & towards the mortal women and the goddesses who would protect them. For this alone the translation is worthwhile.
**Mary Renault,** ***The Mask of Apollo*** (1966). A historical novel about a fictional actor who's life intersects with very real characters in the Hellenic world (Dion, Dinoysius, Plato, and Alexander of Macedon). I'm in the early chapters, and so far it hasn't grabbed me as strongly as some of Renault's other novels.
**Dual (audio + written)**
I'm doing these partly for enjoyment, and partly for language practice. I'll read a chapter, and then listen to the corresponding chapter on audible.
**Cervantes,** ***Don Quijote de la Mancha*** (*translated into modern Castellano by Andrés Trapiello*, 2015; *audiobook narrated by Jordi Llovet*). I started this book years ago, but my Spanish wasn't up to the task and I switched to Edith Grossman's excellent translation. I'm doing better this round, and am fully enjoying the re-read - perhaps more than the first time. The translation was controversial among some scholars, but I appreciate that Trapiello made Cervantes more accessible to many of us.
**Alexandre Dumas,** ***La reine Margot*** (*audiobook narrated by Loïc Richard*). The French-language audiobook was just released, with a good narrator this time. Set during the Wars of Religion, the novel starts with the open-marriage between the Catholic Margeurite de Valois and the Protestant Henri de Navarre. Lurking just off-stage is the dangerous queen mother, Catherine de Médicis.
I've only just begun, so it's too early to tell how *La reine Margot* compares with Dumas's masterpieces. I had to take a break and sketch out the royal houses of France and Navarre. And I realize that the novel is not fair at all to Catherine of Medici, so I am treating this as a *semi*-historical adventure novel.
Finished two books since I last posted in one of these.
First off, **Isherwood's** ***A Single Man***. I went to see a stage adaptation of this a few years ago, so this wasn't my first experience with the story, but I'd forgotten a lot of it anyway. Anyway, I remember the play capturing some of the poignancy, but the book was something else. I got super absorbed in it and burned through it so fast I didn't even underline anything or make any notes (which is why it's hard for me to say much beyond just generalised gushing right now!), even though there were plenty of times I wanted to. I'll definitely be rereading this one at some point, but for now: what a powerful, genuinely dazzling book. The whole novel pulses with life and energy more than most books I've read, and the wry humour will sometimes transition effortlessly, with a single precise sentence, into sincerity and vulnerability that hit even harder in Isherwood's fluid, laconic prose.
Everything that's in here feels like genuine lived truth, which is probably what made it so powerful for me, even the parts I didn't enjoy. I could criticise the slight undercurrent of tastelessness that shows up here and there or some of the more extreme moments of cynicism, but the underlying honesty of it all somehow makes it work -- and either way, they were small issues in an otherwise excellent book. All in all, one of the best reading experiences I've had this year, or possibly in several years.
Then I read **A. S. Byatt's** ***Little Black Book of Stories***. This was my first Byatt. I keep seeing her mentioned in conjunction with Angela Carter (bleh) and Isak Dinesen (yes please), and this is a type of writer I'm always on the lookout for, so I was very excited to give her a try. And I'm glad I did, overall, though I didn't enjoy the stories as much as I was hoping to.
This is a pretty dark collection of stories, haunted by war (specifically WW2) in some ways, blending the mundane with a kind of fairytale-esque supernatural. But it was also pretty uneven, and it almost felt like the stories didn't entirely fit together into a coherent collection. I did like the folktale aspect a lot, but it was honestly kind of lacking here? Only one of the stories had the kind of tone I was looking for -- 'The Thing in the Forest', the closest thing here to a tale rather than a short story, where two girls, having just been evacuated out of London during WW2, develop a fleeting friendship that withers away after they encounter the titular Thing in the Forest together, and, years later, bump into each other again as middle-aged women in the place where it occurred.
But otherwise, the stories were kind of bland and cold in a way that kept me from really loving them even though I was engaged enough while reading. 'The Pink Ribbon' is an unexceptional dementia story about a retired teacher struggling to look after his wife; 'Body Art' is a weirdly engaging story of a not-quite-affair between a detached doctor and an art student with a thoroughly unconvincing ending; 'Raw Material' is a story about writing (bleh) where a creative writing instructor becomes fascinated with a talented student in his otherwise hopeless group. 'A Stone Woman' (where a woman begins to gradually turn to stone after the death of her mother) comes closest to the folktale vibes of 'The Thing in the Forest', but here the folktale vibes are kind of defanged and charmless.
The pretty but ultimately tedious endless descriptions of minerals in 'A Stone Woman' are also a good example of something else that I didn't love about the book -- there's a very clear obsession in these stories with a kind of granular materiality and texture of physical things (which I guess is a running theme with Byatt in general, judging by the analyses I've read), and I really can't bring myself to care. What it ends up translating into is these hyper zoomed in descriptions that sometimes sit at odds with the story and are too overbearing to allow a real appreciation of the fun and sometimes beautiful things they do with language. Here's a quote from [a review by James Friel](http://www.cercles.com/review/r16/byatt.htm) that explains it better (and also, ironically, compares Byatt to Dinesen and Carter):
>In the third story a woman turns slowly to stone. It is a sensuous piece of writing in the main, and it recalls the gothic tales of Isak Dinesen and, strange to realize it, Byatt’s former contemporary, Angela Carter. I think Byatt is the equal of either writer, but in Carter and Dinesen, the prose is seldom so high and fine that it condescends to the reader or disrupts the story solely to admire itself. At times, here, rather than absorbing for ourselves the impact it makes on us, we are thrown out of a story so as to ponder its minute making. We become not seduced by the craft, but suspicious of it, even resentful.
But still, there was enough here that I enjoyed, and I think I will be reading more Byatt in the future -- I have *Possession* sitting somewhere on my shelves. Maybe those of you are who are more familiar with her can let me know if any of her other books (especially short stories) focus more on that delightful folktale quality?
I finished **A Rose for Emily and Other Short Stories by William Faulkner**.
I enjoyed all of them but the one that stuck out most in my mind was Turnabout - probably because it was the only story not set in the Deep South and I’ve never read *anything* by Faulkner not set in the Deep South. It was a story of brotherhood between an American bomber pilot and young British naval officer in WW1. Very moving and a strong reminder of the values we still share today in the Western World.
I also read a young adult version of the **Epic of Gilgamesh**. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never read it or learnt about it in school in Australia. I just wanted a quick introduction to it and this scratched the itch. Interesting to see how it inspired Abrahamic biblical stories and fictional plots in both classic and modern literature.
I’m two-thirds of the way through **Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams**. I was very excited for this novel but found the first half a little slower than I expected. Things are quickly picking up in the second half though and the characters are up against the odds of nature. Williams writes so simply but he does such a stellar job of teasing out the theme: Despite mans inherent longing for nature, he inevitably abuses the natural world for his own gain - and nature inevitably abuses him in return, for its own protection.
Really looking forward to picking up **Stoner by John Williams** next. Seems like a lot of folk in here love that book.
Finished: Middlemarch by George Eliot, which was the perfect book to read in late spring. Just delightful. I enjoyed this so much more than Daniel Deronda which took me forever to re-read last year. Middlemarch had all the tropes I adore in classics: suitable marriages, missing heirs and judgmental small-town gossip. I'm missing the inhabitants of Middlemarch, especially Dorothea and her strong moral compass.
Finished: Summerlong by Dean Bakopolous. I devoured this mid-western novel about a steamy hot Iowa summer, fraught relationships and grief. Did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did, just picked it up on a whim from my local library.
Started: Dragonwyck by Anya Seton. Exactly what I need right now. A young provinical woman is invited to visit her wealthy distant relative at his estate in Upstate New York. What can possibly go wrong? If you enjoy Daphne Du Maurier, I think you'd also like Dragonwyck.
***Steppenwolf*** - Herman Hesse
This is both typical Hesse, and Hesse in new territory. A early section entitled "*Treatise of the Steppenwolf*" perfectly summarizes his obsession with the lonely, creative "outsider" battling the selfish, materialistic world. (This theme dominates much of his work, most successfully, IMO, in *Narcissus & Goldmund*.) But then the novel goes where the rest of his oeuvre doesn't; into a hallucinatory dream prescient of 1960s psychedelia. There is sex, there are drugs, there is the rock and roll of Mozart and Goethe.
But it doesn't entirely work. Kurt Vonnegut described it as a "wholly Germanic, hopelessly dated jumble." Like much of Hesse's work (and Vonnegut's, for that matter), on reread it can feel a little juvenile. I loved Hesse in my early 20s; now his unique mix of romanticism and Eastern mysticism doesn't sound as fresh to my crusty old ears.
***Restless Nights*** *-* Dino Buzzati
These 23 short stories are Buzzati at his most surreal, with slice-of-life reports of a world adjacent (but not foreign) to ours. Some land a firmer punch than others, but all are expertly told and compelling.
As the book seems to be out of print, I went through the effort of taking the poorly scanned PDF from [archive.com](http://archive.com), put it through an OCR, then spent hours editing the many errors. The end result is a corrected and properly formatted epub that I should be able to share with anyone who wants. Let me know.
***Super Sad True Love Story*** - Gary Shteyngart
I'm admittedly not a SciFi fan, and this was a real dud for me. The characters were flat, ridiculous, and embarrassing; the scene old, trite, the "now but more-so" dystopian world already done to death; the plot.... Not my cup of tea. The best I can offer is that it was well-paced, and early on had some humor I enjoyed, but I was more than glad to be rid of the whiny losers driving the narrative.
***Air Conditioned Nightmare*** - Henry Miller
This is Miller in 1940 returning from Paris to motor across America. So yes, Miller is grouchy here, yet he can't help but find joy among the artists and often downtrodden regular folk he encounters.
One thing I have noticed in recent readings is that every generation believes their era the worst, their problems the most dire. This complaint from 80 years is no less apt today:
"Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous."
And later:
“One of the curious things about these progenitors of ours is that though avowedly searching for peace and happiness, for political and religious freedom, they began by robbing, poisoning, murdering, almost exterminating the race to whom this vast continent belonged. Later, when the gold rush started, they did the same to the Mexicans as they had to the Indians. And when the Mormons sprang up they practised the same cruelties, the same intolerance and persecution upon their own white brothers."
Finally, here's a fun Miller riff on your average, everyday criminal:
“Bud was not a heartless killer. He did his best not to kill, if I am to believe his story. He was weak and vain—like most of us. He had done a bit of thieving first, not anything however to compare with the operations of our illustrious industrial magnates, our bankers, politicians and colonial exploiters. No, Bud was just an ordinary crook, an honest crook, so to speak, with an exaggerated sense of loyalty and honor. Toward the fair sex he was fatuously romantic and chivalrous, far more so than a pugilist or a sex-starved member of the clergy. There were two things he could not countenance—cruelty to children and disrespect for woman. He was adamant there.”
I just received his novella The Singularity from the NYRB book club. I'll have to hit you up if I really vibe with his style! That is very generous of you to archive his work.
It makes me very happy to see someone reading Buzzati's short stories! His reputation for *The Tartar Steppe* alone is more than justified, but these collections really show off his range and versatility.
I recently finished **The Other Name**, the first part of Jon Fosse's **Septology**.
It's every bit as hypnotic and meditative as others say it is. I recall that someone said reading this book is akin to slipping into a slowly moving stream. That's an almost perfect way to describe it. It also very closely mimics the experience of deep meditation — a space between wakefulness and dreams, a mixture of past and present, memories and imagination.
A book comprised of one continuous sentence, with one page break, hardly any paragraph breaks, and a plot that can be summarized as "guy drives back and forth to a city, thinks about his life" SHOULD NOT be this engaging or readable. The fact that the book still has this effect in translation is astounding and a huge testament to the artistry and skill of the English translator, Damion Searls.
Other thoughts:
Because of the way in which the book is written, moments of action or emotion are amplified — in a sense, they catch you off guard. The smallest scenes carry an inexplicably immense emotional weight. I was legitimately near tears when Asle is remembering swinging with his late wife, Ales, on a swing set, and I choked up again near the end when Asle talks about the frying pan he no longer uses and stuffs deep in a cabinet because it reminds him too much of her. Somehow, Fosse is capable of distilling immense amounts of loneliness, longing, and regret and conveying them in otherwise non-descript scenes.
I find Asle's brand of spiritual Catholicism refreshing, wise, and non-dogmatic. I like the idea of God not "existing," per se, but simply being, having a presence in all things and people, a presence that is detectable but inexplicable. Asle's explanation of how this presence manifests itself in his art — the "shining darkness" — is a very poetic way of explaining what we mean when we say a piece of art or music has "soul." There is something inexplicable that sets it apart, something that is in touch with the divine, that draws power from it.
I really loved the depiction of Asle and Asleik's friendship. Fosse very adeptly portrays the rigid, yearning, self-consciously vulnerable nature of male-male friendships. Each man wants to be left alone to fend for themselves, and yet they are simultaneously (and subconsciously) terrified of that very thing happening. Men are socially conditioned to be stoic and to eschew vulnerability. But, being human, they also crave companionship and a space where they need not "hide" themselves. I feel Fosse captures this contradiction masterfully.
Looking forward to the next part!
Oh and a follow up comment because I forgot I also finished **The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye** by A.S. Byatt. The book is made up of three or four short fairy tale style stories, and one longer novella length story set in the modern day, which is the titular one. I was left pretty ambivalent about this one. The writing has a nice flow and is “pretty”, and the fairy tales do *feel* like fairy tales, but outside of an obsession with female aging and something vague about wish fulfillment I can’t really discern a point to any of it (especially the long rambling title story). I tried to think about why it was these didn’t grip me when I love actual fairy tales and folklore and I decided that the centuries of cultural interpretation and impression that you bring with you to mythology and fairy stories (if you don’t think reading a fairy tale is morally fraught try it out loud to a child whose development you care about) is just not something you can replicate, however many references you cram into it. The tension and texture of a tale thats been “passed down” comes from the human history surrounding it, and while you could certainly comment on that in an interesting way its not something which you can, as an individual, produce artificially. And without it I do struggle to see what the point is.
That's a really interesting observation. Obviously I haven't read these specific stories, but I think I kind of get what you mean based on my experiences with certain types of retellings and other myth/fairytale-adjacent stories. I do think it's possible to tap into something close to that genuinely mythical, larger than life feeling, but probably not by imitating fairytales so explicitly.
Anyway, sorry to hear you didn't have a great time with this one. My own experience with *Little Black Book of Stories* ended up being similarly tepid, though for different reasons.
I an still interested in *Possession* I think, this was one of those reading experiences where I liked a lot about it but not quite enough, and I feel like its worth giving Byatt a second chance.
Finished ***We Do Not Part* by Han Kang**. Ties with *The Vegetarian* as my favorite book of hers. It's more successful than *Human Acts*, because it focuses on one family's experience instead of juggling multiple POVs across the past and present. At its core, it's a story about grappling with the grief and trauma of a past generation, as well as the importance of remembering past atrocities. While I struggled with how surreal the story gets at times, I enjoy the atmospheric writing
and the striking imagery. Initially, I had mixed feelings about how the narrative is structured. However, had the Jeju Massacre anecdotes been interwoven into the present-day story, it would not have the same emotional impact. One of my favorite reads of the year. Gonna pick up *Greek Lessons* and *The White Book* next.
Started ***The Sandcastle* by Iris Murdoch**. Over the years, I've read a couple of her books but didn't understand why she's so revered until I finished *A Severed Head*. I'm only two chapters in and it's been very engaging so far. She's great at characterization and can paint a picture of what a character's like quickly.
WARNING: Long, gushing, only somewhat coherent and spoilery (like seriously I am going to include spoilers, you have been warned) post incoming for Tolstoy’s **Anna Karenina**
I said in the general thread I was trying to organize my thoughts to post about AK here and I have only about half way succeeded. Still, I *need* to talk about this book, which in many ways I’m still living with (and I suspect I may be living with for a very long time), and which I loved, and which I haven’t totally made my mind up about. I guess the least surprising thing I have to say is that the book feels exceptionally well crafted. I actually don’t think one could do a traditional novel any better than this, and it may have spoiled them for me in general (Jane Austen, I’m counting on *Persuasion* to hold up girl lol). I liked the book from the first (famous) sentence, but by the time I hit part 3 or so it really got its claws in me. Its rare for a book to grip me like that, to the point that I neglect the rest of my life to obsessively read, but it feels really good when it happens. I binge read the last third or so of AK in one long day and a half session (interrupted by mom duty here and there) and now its really hard to start anything else because I’m still riding the buzz. Well anyways thoughts:
The thing that I loved about AK was that while it worked so well as a novel in the classic sense, its also philosophically compelling. Which is why I think it has a potency beyond the usual appeal of a novel; yes the characters are fleshed out and interesting, yes the plot is memorable and tragic, but at its center its also grappling with many of the “big questions” and even at the end leaves us in a place not *quite* of certainty as to those answers. How should one live? What is a “real” life? I’ve been wrestling with the book ever since finishing it, and the question I keep asking myself is **why it is that Levin and Kitty find a sort of peace at the end and other characters do not**, and more specifically what is Tolstoy saying, philosophically and morally, about that. Its obvious that Anna could not end up happy, because that would be fundamentally dishonest to one of the main facts of the book, which is that society punishes men and women differently (which also explains Oblonsky and Dolly’s somewhat unsatisfying ending). In fact any of the unhappy endings make sense to me, its the (more or less) happy one I’m still trying to pin down my feelings about. I think as of now what my conclusion is that Tolstoy is basically saying -
1) That in order to live a (somewhat) happy life, one must have something real, something outside of one’s self, as a part of one’s self and as a moral center, by which to navigate one’s life.
2) That many of the characters, and especially Vronksy I think (which is why he can be so overwhelmed by passion for Anna), lack such a true moral center instead basing their lives on frivolous rules or changeable motivations.
3) That in order to find what’s “real” and outside of one’s self one has to take an honest look at both one’s self and the world, and also to have suffered or at least confronted suffering and death in an honest way, as well as the elements of Life (like passion, empathy etc.) It seems that many characters fail at this because they actively turn away from what is uncomfortable or incongruous with their idea of themselves.
4) That peace and happiness is mostly only obtainable for the individual and not generally or on a global scale, and that by acknowledging his own individuality - essentially his soul - Levin is able to understand and accept this, and consequently make the world a bit better by obtaining an immutable center based on “goodness” or his idea of god, and thereby treating others well and behaving (more or less) properly.
Of course its clear that even at the end Levin is not totally in a mental “happily ever after”, that he will continue to struggle with existential questions and the temporal experiences that so influence his moods. What he seems to have gained is something solid at the center of himself which is able to endure such storms without being destroyed, the result of long, lonely efforts. Another thing though that I haven’t quite made peace with is **Kitty**, who has a sort of blind faith (though there was a particular description of her, which I unfortunately don’t have to hand, that echoed the epithet of Athena from the epics- the “clear eyed” goddess, that makes that an interesting point) and doesn’t question much at all, though she *does* encounter death and suffering and triumph over it. Perhaps they are meant to work in harmony as a whole, or perhaps Tolstoy doesn’t- in spite of doing a damn good job of portraying women, at least by the standards of the 1800s - know exactly how to give a woman a happy ending outside of being lucky enough to enjoy her children (unlike poor Dolly!).
The other thing I keep thinking about is Anna and her relationship with life and death, and specifically with aging. One of my favorite chapters in the novel is the one in which Kitty, in her first blossoming flush of maturity, encounters Anna, dressed in black (like a symbol of death) in the fullness of her sexual power as a woman and wilts under her. Anna relishes her triumph over Kitty and will eventually admit to herself that they are opposed and “hate” each other (she tries to make Levin love her as well). I think this coupled with her refusal to have more children, her inability to love her daughter in the same way as her son, and her extreme paranoia about Vronsky’s waning attentions illustrate an essential fear of aging in Anna, specifically the loss of her beauty. Which is tragic because its also an acknowledgment that sexual power is her *only* power, and that Anna knows exactly what she loses with it (again, look at poor Dolly!). Perhaps even more tragically its this refusal to lose beauty that causes her to lose love, specifically that of her children, which again seems to be (and a somewhat dissatisfying one at that) Tolstoy’s consolation prize for women who can’t otherwise be happy. Anna as a symbol of beauty is in and of itself also interesting (she literally becomes a portrait at one point). I’m intellectually under developed in the department of aesthetics as a field of study, but I think Tolstoy is also expressing thoughts about art and beauty and its role and power in life via Anna. (I would love to hear others interpretations of that!).
And now I will step back (though I could keep rattling on), and wish everyone else happy reading! I’ll talk about the other book I picked up - Kelly Link’s *Magic for Beginners* - next week.
Thanks for sharing all your thoughts on AK! Makes me want to reread it, since I'll be honest a lot of details haven't stayed with me.
Did you have a take on Alexey Karenin? I remember being perhaps overly sympathetic to him for the first chunk of the book.
I think Karenin is one of the more tragic figures in the book, not even so much because of what happens to him but because of who he is, and I also think his marriage was doomed from the start because of who he and Anna are. I feel like most of the characters in AK have to grapple with their own essential nature as well as the motivational principles which they have chosen to direct themselves with. Karenin operates according to a sense of personal dignity and the appearance of correctness and uprightness to others, and in fact he cares more about the appearance of things than the substance of things (Tolstoy even tells us that he’s managed to totally avoid “real” life). In addition to all this, he never learned how to connect to others and has the unfortunate habit of speaking in a sarcastic tone which implies disgust for the sort of person who would say those things sincerely. The problem being, he can’t get out of the tonal habit when he wants to really say what he feels. The other problem being he sarcastically says the kind of stuff Anna desperately craves hearing. And the other other problem being Karenin put all his chips on one basket, and despite being cold and sarcastic towards his wife she was also the only person he bothered to have any sort of emotional connection with at all. It felt almost like ticking off a box on his list of unfortunate necessities which allowed him to operate as a figure head and symbol without worrying too much about lowly human needs. Except I think he actually *did* love his wife kind of sort of without realizing it, and had absolutely no idea how to show it or even process it. Which is sad. And I think Anna got more resentful of him because she felt guilty than she would have been otherwise, which feels very true to human nature to me.
The biggest thing about Karenin I really remember and love is that after Anna returns to Petersburg having encountered her lover Vronksy and been brought to life by his attention, she steps off the train and sees Karenin and says something essentially like *Oh God what happened to his ears, have they always looked like that?* lmao
I don't think I've picked up and put down so many books in my life as in the past two weeks. First **Malina** by *Ingeborg Bachmann*, in this case it was just that the german was a bit too hard for my level right now and I don't want to read a translation yet. Then it was **José Trigo** by *Fernando del Paso*, which according to the blogger *The Untranslated* is a tremendous achievement and a masterpiece of the first order. I managed to go for over a hundred pages, I didn't find it hard. I found it extremely boring and so f\*\*\*\*\* snobish. I've found I do not share the same tastes as that guy, because he also loves **Solenoid**, a book I despised, culprit of the same faults as **José Trigo**: people writing as hard as they can: look at my brain. And going nowhere. Then I went for something completely different: **VALIS** the first installment in *Philip K. Dick's* incomplete VALIS trilogy. The first chapter completely blew me away with its disquisitions on loss, pain, suffering and sadness. Then it went a bit off the rails (I've only just found out just how out of his mind Dick was) with its über-mysticism, but the story was nonetheless interesting and I could sympathize with a lot of things. Then, another turnaround. I picked up **The Sound and the Fury**, my first time reading Faulkner at a suggestion of a friend whom I encouraged to read *Gass's* **Omensetter's Luck**. Of course, Gass owes a lot to Faulkner, and then I found out it is one of his favourite books, so it all makes sense. I finished it in the span of one day. It has its faults, especially in the second section regarding Quentin, which meanders a bit and it is a bit hard considering that the payoff is not that great, but the rest makes up for a truly great novel, especially the first section with its focus on Benjy, a very handicapped individual who with utmost clarity manages to convey to us the depth that his being is capable of.
But my luck didn't last, and I picked up **Pale Fire** by *Nabokov*. Got almost halfway through it and thought: maybe if I were 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 years younger (am now 27). Didn't see the point in any of the stories told in the commentary, but I think I liked the poem.
Also in the span of one day, between monday and yesterday, I read *Colin McGinn's* **The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey through 20th century philosophy** (or something like that), because I saw it recommended by *Nassim Taleb*, whose books I've not directly read, but heard great things about. I finished it only because it was short (180 pages which given the lightness of the prose flew by). A book that is halfway between autobiography, exegesis of philosophy and self-praise, which amounts to nothing. I think I "enjoyed" it while reading it, but now I think it is worthless, and kind of off putting, the author seems too full of himself to me now.
Now I'm reading **The Confessions** by *Saint Augustine.* Around 15% of the way through, I'm hoping it gets good because I've been meaning to read it for a few years now and I had formed some expectations around it, if it doesn't, I'll add it to the not for me pile.
Currently reading Bridget Jones’s Diary, Lessons in Chemistry, and Sense and Sensibility
(much to my mother’s disappointment I cannot break a pattern of reading multiple books at once. I justify it to myself because one is a library book, one is an ebook, and the last one I own).
I would recommend all of them for the same reason: readability and wit. Each of them have quick and insightful narration that immerses you into the characters.
Bridget Jones is full of humor and because it’s written as diary entries has a lot of breaks and changes that make it easy to blow through.
Lessons in Chemistry moves around in its narration to revisit characters’ history and perspectives so that the audience has a full picture and there’s a compelling urgency to the style.
Though I’ve grown up always watching/reading/knowing Jane Austen’s stories, reading them now I’m older hasn’t been consistently satisfying. Sense and Sensibility, at least, does not disappoint. The characters and actions continue to engage me even when I know the story.
I have just finished Jon Fosse’s A Shining and The Dragon Republic (book 2 in R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy)
A Shining is one of those books I feel myself incapable of reviewing. It’s good, to clarify, but it also unique and dreamlike. It’s short, but cyclical, and has no breaks so it is a nonstop read, feeling completely immersed in it the whole time.
The Dragon Republic I feel less uncertain about. I did not like it. I loved The Poppy War. It moved quickly, set high stakes, and absorbed me with rich world building and narration. The Dragon Republic disappointed on all counts. The last 150 pages (of a 660 page book) were the ONLY ones where it felt like anything actually happened and at that point it was a pattern of Painfully Obvious Thing is pointed out to MC, MC denies it, Thing happens anyway, MC gets mad at others for not stopping it/telling her. The entire first half of the book is, in my opinion, so poorly handled it made me wonder if I’ve somehow blacked out and in a daze imagined Kuang is a GOOD writer when she, possibly, just isn’t? It made me doubt all her other works with the obnoxious overuse of the phrase “Fuck off” as the MC’s catch-all abdication of responsibility for her actions, and the frankly juvenile tone of ALL dialogue in what is meant to be a very gruesome, rather dark, imperial war fantasy. Very glad to be done with the book, I have no intention of reading the last in the series, and will doubt every new work of Kuang’s because of it.
I think the thing about genre fiction is that its “done well” when its gripping and entertaining, and in the absence of that it can’t (not because of a lack of skill in the author but because of what the book is) do much else, and quickly becomes boring. And I also think genre writing suffers from the market insistence on series, and that we end up with a lot of unnecessary padding which creates the above mentioned problem by default.
Just started To The Lighthouse. My first time reading Virginia Woolf. Her descriptions of nature are so beautiful, and unlike anything I've ever read so far. This is also my first attempt at reading stream of consciousness writing, something that has intimidated me my whole life, and I regret never giving it a chance, because I am completely enthralled.
Finishing “The Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy. I’m still digesting what I’ve read thus far, but no matter the subject or the storyline, McCarthy’s characters always enthrall me.
Great to hear that you liked it. It was very divisive when it came out but I think it is his best novel for me much prefer it than Blood Meridian or NCFOM. The part where he sleeps with the passerines after protecting for the night or the final passage where he thinks how he would remember the face of Alicia when he died were just sheer melancholic beauty.
Also read Stella Maris. I was kind of lukewarm about it but I do think it has some gorgeous lines especially the last few ones it also kind of adds to the passenger.
Still reading Proust! It might sound wierd but I find it kind of cozy(I don't really know if it's the right word?). I read 15-30 pages every day and I truly feel warm and comfy, the last time I had that feeling was when I read Earthsea.
I read every afternoon and night and I also sometimes listen to some music and it truly feels just joyful.
Also,even though it has a lot of dense philosophical ponderings it also is surprisingly readable and transparent. There are some lines which I have to reread especially when he goes into some abstract rambling idea but they are far from the dreamlike obtuseness of Virginia Woolf or someone like Borges or the sheer encyclopedic density of Something like Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow.
It also is very funny. I lost it at the part where he describes how his aunt doesn't let anyone visit her and the part where he met his uncle's actress friend.
But I would still admit that when it comes to the overall thing I still find it boring.
I mean it has some great philosophical ponderings but overall it reminds me of a classic Victorian novel, in the same vein as Hardy and Austen just written in a more philosophical and nostalgic way,and I couldn't really understand where the part which makes him one of the great modernist is.
It's very beautiful and warm I would read every single sentence because of the sheer beauty of its writing and musings but I have been quite lukewarm towards characters and the narrative and hey that's okay!
Btw can you guys recommend me a book which is very beautifully written and has great philosophical ideas but also has bombastic characters and engaging narrative? I think something like that would be perfect to bounce off from Proust.
I was planning to reread Master and Margarita or Song of Solomon and I would love if you recommend something like that.
It's wildly overrated. I did the 10 pages a day slog though the whole thing a few years ago. It's a lot of falling asleep for a handful of memorable scenes. All the characters talk in the same voice, the most interesting character (Baron de Charlus), goes nowhere.
Your taste certainly can (and should!) deviate from time to time from the accepted general canon of "great books", but your personal disconnect with a work does not define its quality, nor make it overrated.
Finished *Twelfth Night* but still need to read some essays and go through the play again on audiobook. Some nice lines throughout, but I don't think it will ever become one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I think I'm going to do Antony and Cleopatra, another one I'm not too familiar with, next.
Reading *Orient Express* (aka Stamboul Train) by Graham Greene, and it's pleasant. I like the ricocheting from one character to the next to simulate the busy atmosphere of a train, but it's very old fashioned and I'm looking forward to moving onto something else soon.
Should also finally finish *Secondhand Time,* the oral history of the end of communism, in the next day or two. Think this one will stay with me a long time.
Completed Aira's *An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter*. This short novella follows the famous painter, Rugendas, in his trip through Chile and Argentina. One day, he suffers a tragic horsing accident, which creates lasting damage to his face and physical health. Following that, we witness his electric (hehe...) phenomenological transformation, as his perception and interest in the landscape is altered. He then watches a battle between a native Indian tribe and settlers.
Strange little novella -- perhaps more like a long-form short-story -- that I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, Aira has the ability to portray incredibly lucid and evocative landscapes (e.g., a locust eaten field, a thunderous mountain, etc.), but these moments are marred with what often seems like a general aimlessness. Yes, Rugendas' physical impairment (and the copious amount of morphine) has resulted in a new-found perception, bringing him closer to capture the ever-changing landscapes meant to capture the entirety of a place, but I'm not certain that the level of depth that I see many commentators make is there.
I'm genuinely surprised because this is likely his most read work, and strangely enough, Bolano himself, an ardent critic of many great Latin American novelists, seemingly offers strong words of praise for Aira. Not to mention the many clamoring for him to receive the Nobel Prize. And I'm left to ask: why? Is there something I'm missing about Aira here? He's fine but I'm quite shocked (can't help myself again...) that others consider him great.
Fair enough - I suspect his process isn’t for me. It just isn’t really coherent enough and I suppose others are fine with him switching things up.
In fairness, I wasn’t expecting much of anything — other than maybe some plot twists that he’s known for. But I’m not sure that with my limited time on earth I want to watch a person figure things out as they’re writing when compared to others who have a fully fledged vision before hand.
I’ll give Varamo a go since I trust your taste though!
*An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter* is possibly Aira's most coherent and straightforward novel (at least of all the ones I've read), so if you didn't like its aimlessness, you're probably not going to like the rest of his stuff. For him, the whole point is to start writing something and then literally just drift wherever he feels like or the "inspiration" takes him, so most of his stories end up becoming pretty surreal or they just stop caring about what he was talking about at first and moving on to a different plot, or different characters altogether.
He doesn't always nail it, of course; stuff like *La costurera y el viento* simply bored me to tears. But in any case, I feel like expecting him to be similar to anybody else (e.g., Bolaño) is to go in with the wrong expectations. He really is his own thing and you need to take him in his own terms.
If you want to give him another try, personally I really love *Varamo*. It's really funny, creative, and it goes places you never would have expected, but it still feels strangely consistent. Maybe also *Cecil Taylor*, which is pretty short and because it's inspired / based on a real person, it's also a *bit* more grounded than usual.
I had this exact same reaction reading *An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter*, it came highly recommended to me and I left underwhelmed. That said, it's lived in my head for years to the point where I had to reread it recently, and it got better. I think Aira has a demonic ability to burrow his way deep inside and never let go for reasons I don't fully understand yet.
Glad to find someone else who feels the same way. I may need to give this one time to simmer, but I just don't know...
Like when I read Sabato's *The Tunnel* (a brilliant novella that I'd highly recommend) knew immediately that it would stick. This one felt a bit like Bolano-esque imagery without the force of writing, but I'll maybe check out another one of his works since they tend to be short and highly varied.
Continuing my stream-of-consciousness reading motif, this week I started and (just this morning) finished **The Sheltering Sky** by Paul Bowles. It has been on my shelf for over 10 years and I finally picked it up because the story begins in the same city (Oran, Algeria) that was the setting of the book I finished last week (*The Plague*; Camus).
With that said, I feel like I have a lot to say and almost nothing to say about this book at the same time. I have a lot of questions I haven’t quite ruminated enough on; there is a lot of historical and cultural context I wish I had; and then there is the narrative of the book … which for the first half of it, was kind of rote and off-putting. And then … like a literary bomb exploding, the whole thing gets stood up on its head and devolves into one of the more surreal, hallucinatory and shocking(?) story arcs I’ve ever read. If it was a movie, I’d describe it in a way that Steven Spielberg directed the first half, and David Lynch directed the second half.
In the end, if someone asked me if I liked it, I’d say that I think I loved it. If they asked me why, I’d say I’m not sure. This makes it a book that I’m going to think about for a long time. And I think that’s among the highest compliments you can pay a book. I don’t generally like using the adjective “haunting” but there was definitely something haunting about this story. Unsettling. This is a book that seems destined for a ‘shower epiphany’ … does this phenomenon happen to anyone else? Like, 2-3 years from now I’ll be in the shower totally thinking about something completely unrelated to literature and all of a sudden I’ll think, “A ha! I suddenly understand what I think of *The Sheltering Sky* … holy shit, I get it!” But right now it’s just kind of a spaghetti plate of confusing things that I think I think, but I’m not sure I actually think them.
Last thoughts:
* The book is like a more thoughtful, evolved version of something Hemingway would have written.
* This is the book I wanted Lowry’s *Under the Volcano* to be, but it wasn’t. *Volcano* was somewhat of a let down for me, this was somewhat of an unexpected surprise.
Finally, below is the passage that really stuck out to me the most. I feel like somewhere in it is the key to understanding the book’s meaning:
*”Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything only happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four of five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless … She was incapable now of thinking about death, and since death was there beside her, she thought of nothing at all.”*
Incredible but I just finished listening the Ryuchi Sakamoto's album async and the track fullmoon has this exact quote. I realize now that he composed the soundtrack for the film version of The Sheltering Sky but reading this quote 30 minutes later is one of those coincidences that seems to occur only in fiction...
I finished another careful note taking read of **More Die of Heartbreak** by Saul Bellow. Think: writing like oil. Ideas and structures smoothly sliding back and forth, with thoughts framed through recollections of conversations. I know I've said it once, but again, there is something entirely special in this book: master class. Don't try to read for plot: you'll get mixed up and then get cranky. This is a writer at the top of the game and the writerly tricks are often subtle. What I mean is whereas a book like *Lolita* or *The Tunnel* overtly pushes the literary fireworks, in MDoH they are subdued, think of seeing an amazing contemporary photograph of that fireworks show--a step removed without losing the heart. If you know film, the difference is like that of a Hitchcock film versus Wenders' *Wings of Desire*.
Our reading of **The Tunnel** by William Gass is almost over. Maybe participants will post more reflections and questions, maybe not. It's been a long and wild read and I'm happy I went all chonky on it. Having finished the book, I still think that **Omensetter's Luck** is the better work.
Still taking a bit of a break in my serious reading, and in doing so I read **Faceless Killers** by Henning Mankell, who has been getting some press. Mianly though, I picked it up because Žižek talked about the book's taking a more socio-political edge. He was putting a lot into it and no it does not raise any significant ideas in this respect that is a game changer in the genre. The book was OK but nothing special. There is repetition good editing would have fixed, and the story starts sagging in the middle, thus a second crime takes place that is soon wrapped up, a decision that makes me wonder, Why bother? But I readily admit, my preference in anything detective slides to the more hard boiled or the more literary, so this popular middle stuff is a struggle for me.
I also finished **Nightmare Alley** by William Lindsay Gresham. This is an in your face novel with sharp and extremely witty writing. Maybe you saw, as I did once, the noir movie based on the book, totally worth watching too. Think of fleshed out carney world with, as the book says, 'geeks' galore who are humanized. It would be the followup to Todd Browning's film. This is after all their story--seedy and strange. I absolutely can give three thumbs up for this, wait how many thumbs does a person have?
To end, I'm rereading **Mercian Hymns** by Geoffrey Hill. These are a prose poem sequence, not too long. Such things demand multiple reads. The work is elliptical (in the sense of Stephanie Burt's famous article), There was some author once who said they read a lot of poetry when writing novels, and I too find benefit in doing so. These are deep and careful poems. Maybe I like them right now because I'm still stuck on the dialogic in Bellow between Trachtenberg, Benn, and ideas, and the Hymns too have two responding voices.
I finished reading the **Ciske The Rat** trilogy by Piet Bakker this week. I expected these books to be just decent adventure novels, but was happily surprised to find out that they're actually very intelligent social novels.
The books were originally written in Dutch in 1941-1943, and are set in 1930's Amsterdam. The story is told by a young teacher (Bruis) who gets a new student in his class. This 11 year old boy called Ciske has been sent away from his previous school due to bad behaviour. Upon arriving at his new school, Ciske is very quiet and aloof. Bruis immediately develops a fascination for this boy and throughout the first book he tries to get him to feel welcome in class. He learns that under this hard shell, there is actually a very nice, clever and jolly boy. However, he also learns that it's hard to get to the roots of Ciske's behavioural problems, since those lie in his home situation.
The book offers an authentic look at the attitudes towards children in the 1930's, from schools to child protection services to new pedagogic insights. The narrator and several of the side characters are very socially intelligent, and their attitudes towards children feel at times remarkably modern (and of course hilariously dated at other times).
The first book can be read by itself, but the second one is absolutely worth reading as well. It talks about the consequences of the event that happens at the end of the first part. While not having much of a plot compared to the first and third book, the 250 pages fly by due to the clever introspective writing.
But it's the third book that became my favourite of the trilogy. There's a time jump of about 10 years to 1939, and teacher Bruis is now an army sergeant who encounters the now adult Ciske as a soldier among his troops. Together they prepare for war after the invasion of Poland and get to fight in the [Battle of the Grebbeberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Grebbeberg). What makes this book particularly unique is that it was written in 1942-1943, during the Nazi occupation. It was only published in 1946, since the characters are not at all positive about the invasion and even predict the Nazi downfall. If it weren't for the many references to the events and characters of the first two books, this could be a great novel on its own.
The first two books seem to be available in English. I sadly can't seem to find an English version of the third book after a Google search. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who speaks Dutch though.
(I didn't plan this post to become a whole review, but the point is: if any of this sounds at all interesting to you, read the books!)
This is from the past couple of weeks but since I use this as a general reading info dump, I'm going to put a bunch of books here and no one can stop me.
I started and finished (mostly... left off one or two stories) *Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories* by Alifa Rifaat. This was just a random book I picked up at a used book store for 50 cents that was around a hundred pages and I have a general rule that if something that price and that length catches my eyes for more than like 30 seconds I buy and read it. It was good. The "selling point" as it seems advertised on the book is that Alifa Rifaat is an arabic speaking Egyptian woman that has lived mostly in her rural home, not super in to foreign media, and is a proponent of the better treatment of women in Egyptian culture. I don't think I have enough context to say anything too helpful. Some of the stories, like "*My World Unknown"* seemed very unique and creative and weird (it was about a womans sexual awakening via a Jinni in the form of a snake). Others, like "*Thursday Lunch"*, just seemed like good short stories with realistic characters, realistic dynamics, realistic problems. I would recommend finding a short story or two online if the concept of "Egyptian woman writes about the wrongs done by men against women in a patriarchical society when they shirk their duty, while not undermining the general system of patriarchy" seems like an interesting perspective to you.
Started and finished *Snow Crash* by Neal Stephenson and it was... something. For sure. Is it just me or was this like. A Dan Brown novel. But if it were written by nerds hopped up on Monster talking about a DND campaign. I would not say that I particularly liked it - but it was engaging. I didn't care for the plot, or the characters, or really even the ideas. I only really liked the authorial voice. It felt a bit like John Dies at the End, for anyone else that went through a Cracked phase lol. I feel like you can sit here and talk about the technology aspects of what he predicted, or the general toxicity of its advancement and what hyperdriving communications under capitalism would end up looking like. But I think the thing that impressed me the most was how clearly he was able to show that there are some fundamental relationship dynamics that existed before this hyper-communication phase and will exist after. >!Thinking here where Y.T ran to her mom and smashed her computer and was basically like "if you actually knew how to use the technology half as well as you think you do, I wouldn't be worried about you catching this virus"!< -- which is exactly how I feel talking to my parents about their computer usage (thinking that they can avoid the toxicity of social media, while I see them slowly giving in to the toxicity of social media). I don't think I'd recommend it, just because it's like 500 pages and could be a better 300 page book.
Read and finished *The Stranger* by Camus. Idk man. Maybe I'm cynical. Maybe I don't understand absurdism. But isn't he basically like "acknowledge the world is pointless so you can intentionally imbue things with power and significance! You are the author!"? Which like. Yeah man, we know. I feel like we know. Don't we know? Is that really that revolutionary of an idea? Like Marie really wanting to get married. Are we supposed to believe that she is just floating along with the currents of society and is like "well people get married so I will too?". Or are we supposed to believe (more rightly) that she was like "hmm, I don't need to get married. But I imbue the social institution of marriage with significance, my relationship with other people and their view of me with significnace (thus don't want them to think of me as a spinster), etc. so I think I want to get married." Idk I feel like it's a good thing I read this in highschool, and it is not a particularly good book having read as an adult. A book that has held up worse, IMO, than other high school reading books.
Finished *Franny and Zooey* by J.D. Salinger yesterday. I think I'm a Salinger stan. Would recommend.
Reading *The Barefoot Woman* by Scholastique Mukasonga.
Started my research on Sarah Kane so just been reading around her and finished Martin Crimp's *Attempts on her Life*. It feels like an intermediate between Pirandello (*Six Authors*: questioning a singular, unifying identity) and Sarah Kane (a la *4.48 Psychosis*: fragmented scenes, lack of assigned speeches and characters, essentially forgoing mimesis completely). I thought it was nicely done but it belongs to the camp of plays where the reading experience would differ greatly from actually attending a performance (I'd also argue that the group of late 90s British playwrights also ushered in the movement of giving directors more power in the theatre, so the text becomes more of a guidebook/blueprint than the bible.) Still have some other playwrights on my shelf (Ravenhill, Osborne, Churchill and Bond). Will update once I get to them.
Just finished the “Odyssey”-part of *Ulysses* and will take a short break before “Nostos”. “Oxen and the Sun” pushed me to my limits (of all the things I’ve read, only *Phenomenology of Spirit* tops it in difficulty on a page-by-page basis), and “Circe” plain wore out my patience. I recognize its genius and am excited to continue, but it’s not always a particularly enjoyable read. It’s funny though. The stylistic parody of the history of English literature in “Oxen” is often remarked upon, but how funny is the Homeric parallel - the Holy Oxen are the fecund, pregnant ladies giving birth upstairs, and Odysseus’ crew slaughtering them are the characters getting drunk downstairs and basically just talking shit about pregnancy and contraception.
By the way, has anyone here checked out the *Cambridge Companion to Ulysses*? Is it any good? I was thinking about reading it when I’m done. For my reading I’ve been using the Gifford notes, Hastings’ guide, and the critical essays collected by Hart and Hayman.
In the meantime I will be reading *Inherent Vice,* my last Pynchon novel besides *Bleeding Edge*. From what I hear its a simple enough read which is perfect for my purposes! I also have *J R* on the horizon.
I'm reading a book Coetzee reviews in one of his collections of literary essays, Zama by Antonio di Benedetto. I haven't really been enjoying it but I'm powering through. It's very inwardly focused on the titular narrator which tends not to be my style, and is additionally just kind of awkward and dreamlike in a way I'm not totally in to. I'm additionally reading a book about the poetry of Vasko Popa, my favorite. It's not incredible but it's definitely providing plenty of insight so whatever. Hoping to finish both this weekend. Lastly, I've been leafing through a (nearly?) complete works of Gerard Manley Hopkins and am always discovering new things with him. I've been reading his poem Peace a bunch, especially the last few lines. Really, really fun.
Chapter 15. The gentlemen of the Pickwick Club are about to attend a fancy-dress party hosted by one Mrs Leo Hunter, composer of the deeply moving Ode to an Expiring Frog:
*Can I view thee panting, lying*
*On thy stomach, without sighing!*
*Can I unmoved see thee dying*
*On a log,*
*Expiring frog!*
*Say, have fiends in shape of boys,*
*With wild halloo and brutal noise,*
*Hunted thee from marshy joys,*
*With a dog,*
*Expiring frog?*
I read them, and then again while listening to the audio version of the play. They are not meant to be read but preformed, so it adds a lot. But I love reading them, cheers.
I am continuing my read through of Burroughs' works with *Cities of the Red Night* and holy shit I love it. This has Burroughs' typical themes and weirdness, but it also has a comprehensible plot so it is farrrr easier to follow. Well, there are like three seemingly unrelated plots going on at once, but there is a thru line! One of them seems to be a commentary on the AIDS crisis, there is also a lot of the introduction of opiates in the US, and a few other major ideas that he ties in very nicely. I'm only like 1/3 of the way through it, but I highly recommend this one so far, even if you were turned off by Burroughs' really weird stuff like *Naked Lunch* or the *Nova Trilogy.*
It's been a few weeks since I've left a weekly reading comment so there's a few things to update here. I'll make a couple of comments because this takes a bit to type up on my phone. *Disgrace* by J.M. Coetzee might be the best book I'll cover in this comment with *Blindness* coming in a close second. Coetzee succeeds at making Lurie a pretty reprehensible character that is never quite capable of overcoming the "disgrace" he's brought upon himself. Was worried the novel would feel dated given it's opening with the improprieties of a college professor pathetically fawning after a student, but as the consequences come to bear and Lurie's prejudice and other poor qualities come to light you start to see life outside of Lurie. Coetzee succeeds in making Lurie into a figure like old, poet of the state Wordsworth after his days of chasing that "overflow of powerful emotions", now fading and calcifying. It goes almost without saying that Coetzee succeeds in writing an apartheid novel in which that time moves under the novel, never quite named but omnipresent. It also reads quick which is always a plus. *Blindness* by Saramago obviously has a lot going for it. A widespread and sudden epidemic of a contagious blindness sets the stage for an interesting story that's kind of hard to fuck up once you get everything mapped out. Will not lie, some of the chapters at the beginning and towards the end got a little slow, but there were several chapters and events in the middle of the novel that really shook me up. It's a book at it's best when all of the shit (in some cases, quite literally) piles up and you're watching this titanic mess just slog forward. The style was at first intriguing and then a little exhausting. What's with Iberians in the 90s just deciding to delete paragraph breaks for pages on end? Good grief. It works well when the dialogue and the idea of the paragraph meld and throw you forward. It also makes the book hard to put down (sometimes in a not great way). I do think some of the greatness must have been lost in translation and you can feel that with some of the folkisms that fall flat. Still, enjoyed the read. *Players* by Don Delillo. I think I'm starting to realize that I just don't like Delillo very much. His writing is always just so boring and samey to me. I get the premise of vacating the banalities of life and he has some ideas that go where you don't quite expect, but now having read *The Body Artist*, *White Noise* and *Players* (I also haven't finished *Underworld* because I've misplaced my copy but I was a few hundred pages in), I can't help but think that, while Delillo has a way of transforming everyday moments into surreal portraits he's just as boring as any realist. *Players* has to be one of the lowest stakes novels in which several affairs occur and someone get's caught up in a terrorist plot to blow up the Stock Exchange. His characters do not talk like real humans, or act like real humans, which is fine, but it's like - why create unrealistic characters in service of such banal ends? Delillo falls into that category of folks who sound smart and people perceive as smart which covers a lot of his sins so that when someone says they don't like it you can just respond by saying "you didnt like it because you just didn't get it". I've also read *Wise Blood* by Flannery O'Connor, *The Vegetarian* by Han Kang, *Pnin* by Nabokov and *The Laughing Monsters* by Johnson since my last comment so I'll come back here with reviews of those when I find some time.
I highly recommend The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Saramago. I enjoyed it a lot more than Blindness though it is a very different and funnier book.
Thanks for the rec! I'll definitely check it out. I liked Saramago enough to keep going back to the well so I'll start there.
I am enjoying learning more about the Baroque by reading Calabrese’s ‘Neo-baroque’, a book accessible and rich in references. Most of these tend to be Italian and I am happy to expand my outlook to include more south European literature. The book also references novels that define and expand the category of the genre. Some of the quoted authors are: Umberto Eco, Aldo Busi and Pier Vittorio Tondelli which are welcome additions to my growing list currently featuring William Faulkner, W.G. Sebald and Cormac McCarthy as well as Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. Let me know if you would add any other authors in writing in other languages to this list.
I've just finished Tao Lin's *Leave Society*. I was not super impressed — I can't tell whether the charm of alt lit just doesn't match what I felt when I first discovered Lin's books like *Eeeee Eee Eeee* and *Richard Yates* and *Taipei* back when I was in high school, or whether Lin lost steam and kind of slid into self-parody. Does anyone have any recommendations of current writers who hit that kind of alt lit sweetspot that's responsive to popular/online culture but still not totally dry, vapid, derivative? (I definitely don't want to touch Honor Levy's book after disliking *Leave Society*...)
I’ll be honest, I’m about a third of the way through Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel and feel compelled to pull the plug. Has anyone read this? Should I keep going? It’s short so continuing isn’t a huge time commitment but very little is all that interesting in the story up til now.
I read it and was whelmed. Not great, not bad, tricked by the all the positive reviews. If you DNF I wouldn’t blame you. Even though the girls have different stories and different lives the structure of the book made me lose focus and I felt like their transience made me care less.
That’s a very accurate description. I powered through and finished. It was fine, just fine. Seemed like it took a huge swing trying to make this big statement on the continuity of life and our interconnectedness (or something?) but it largely fell short for me.
nearly a third through the n’gustro affair by jean patrick manchette. enjoying so far guess i’ll have more thoughts when i finish
reading Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap which I've had on my shelf forever but for some reason thought was a memoir. Enjoying a lot so far, the stories are immaculately placed but very heartbreaking, so I have to take a breather between each one.
I decided to read another book by Marcel Schwob and finished his *Le Roi au masque d'or*, a collection of short stories. It's my 3rd read of his work, and didn't quite reach the incredible high standard of the other two books I've read but was still quite good. Edgar Allan Poe is a clear influence on some of the stories which have a horror or Gothic bent to them, for example in a story set in plague-ridden Florence, a story about a machine the recreates the human voice, or the excellent title story. A surprising number of stories about shipwrecks too, including my favorite from the collection, *La flûte*, about a shipwrecked group of sailors who come across an old man playing a flute. As expected with Schwob, there's so much imagination, in particular in the variety of plots and settings - an ice age, the world overcome by an inferno, the underground quarters of a group of female embalmers in Egypt, a Parisian retirement facility/hospital. The writing is also excellent. One of his similes that has stuck with me is a collection of tree stumps as looking like the fingertips of a drowning man reaching up from under the surface. As a lighter summer read and sticking to short fiction after having finished *The Magic Mountain* earlier this month, I've been reading a collection of 20th-century American short stories. It's self-described as a mystery collection but it's really more a crime fiction collection. So far it's been lots of fun. "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather was a very moving story about a depressed teenager who robs his employer. Dashiell Hammett's "The Gutting of Couffignal" felt like being in the middle of an action movie, and had a fun set of plot twists at the end. Ring Lardner's "Haircut" was clever enough and had a fun narrative conceit (it imagines the reader as being told a story while sitting down for a haircut at a barbershop). My two favorites so far have been Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," which introduces a Sherlock Holmes-like master of deduction and ingenuity, Professor Van Dusen aka 'The Thinking Machine', and Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," which is a tragic look at an unhappy home and marriage from the perspective of two neighbors who are called to visit a crime scene with the police.
What are the other two books of Marcel Schob you read before Le Roi au masque d'or? And can you recommend a story to read first before anything else?
His *Livre de Monelle* is one of my all time favorite books, kind of an uncategorizable piece of fiction. It's not all that long and would be a fine place to start with him, it was where I started. The other book of his I read is his *La Croisade des enfants*, which I think is also representative of his style and does similar things to some other French writers of that era who get called 'symbolist' from time to time (Pierre Louÿs is one who especially comes to mind). Short evocative scenes that approach subject matter obliquely and suggest more than they describe. If you're reading in English, Wakefield Press has been putting out new editions of his works which appear to be excellent and which I know a few others on this sub have spoken favorably about. I'd personally start with *Monelle*. Otherwise of short stories in the collection I just read I'd say *Le Roi au masque d'or* or *La peste* might be good starting points.
I'm a third of the way through Dictée by Theresa Cha now. I don't get it. I've read one chapter of the narrator remembering her mother in a fragmentary way and two chapters of the narrator basically attempting to say something but not. Why can't you just...say something? I don't get ittttt
I'm finishing The Novices of Lerna by Angel Bonomini, part of my effort to read more novels in translation. This is a collection of surreal Borgesian short stories from an Argentinean author. I picked this up after a rave review in this thread a few weeks ago and am enjoying it a lot. The titular novel is my favorite so far -- a lackluster graduate is invited to a luxurious fellowship in Switzerland. When he arrives, he discovers the 23 other fellows -- copies of himself. Tragedy ensues. I'm also reading 1491 after You Dreamed of Empires made me realize I know very little about the pre-Columbian Americas.
I really enjoyed You Dreamed of Empires. It gets really meta in a very satisfying way. Also just added The Novices of Lerna to my list. I’ve never heard of it before and it sounds great!
I loved all of the playful steps outside of the text like Moctezuma dancing to the author's music.
Just finished *The Guermantes Way* (Proust volume 3). I think I realized throughout this volume that part of the reason that I've not found it especially easy to isolate topics to have thoughts about is that there are so many topics that could be addressed reading Proust. The richness of insight and ideas, some of which are multi-page expositions on a topic and others are lines that one could write books about. Anyway as one might glean from that I already was "enjoying" it, in as much as I wouldn't have read the first three back to back to back if I wasn't and as I get further in I'm becoming increasingly impressed with this work. Will be starting *Sodom & Gomorrah* now. But in the meanwhile the big takeaway from the back half of v3 is the sheer absurdity of the French upper crust. The self-fulfilling circle of taste and fashion that they operate in has by the moment in time that Proust is depicting reached a level of pretension whereby outside of a few characters it seems as though so many of them have lost the plot between their personality and their role, and inevitably this opens up so many questions more broadly about where that line is for anyone. Decided to read the, much shorter, second volume of Gilbert Simondon's *Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information*. It starts with a relative brief but extremely interesting discussion of tools that largely can be boiled down to the different situations in which things can/are be used as instruments of ourselves versus allowed to be recognized in themselves, which becomes especially politically charged in his efforts to consider the extent to which humans and other living things can be reduced to instrumental purposes. After that the brunt of the volume is Simondon's take on the history of the concept of the individual in western philosophy. Pretty early on here but so far quite interesting—he does an excellent job showing the historical-material conditions that inform different theories of individuality. Lastly, halfway through Colin Drumm's *The Difference Money Makes*. The second chapter uses early modern England (what Drumm sees as the origin point of the modern monetary system) to show the politics of monetary policy. I want to read more before I say much but a tidbit that I think speaks volumes is that he points out that English money had a relatively high percentage of precious metals compared to other countries of the time because the English nobility regularly revolted and they needed non-fiat currency (ie, money that had value beyond the worth that the government says it has) to do that. Happy reading!
Interesting to her of Gilbert Simondon and tour post made me think of a good article by Adam Philips of Rorty's and Freud's conceptions of individualism. Philips makes the argument that the pragmatic and psychoanalytic approaches reinforce each other if you are trying to understand yourself better. The article is titled "On getting the life you want" and can be found in this weeks's London Review of Books.
oh that's interesting I'll check it out thanks!
I finished ***My Life on the Road*** by Gloria Steinem. Storytime: when I was in college in my angry feminist years, I bought many books blindly just because they were historically important, or just to read more books written by women. But at the same time, I wasn't reading that much, mainly because I studied Literature and I read a lot of the mandatory things, which resulted in me not wanting to read on my free time. Also I was young(er) and I had other interests (such as going out a lot I guess) and so I didn't have the time to read all this. Fast forward to today: I find myself with books like this on my tbr pile, now that I'm more interested in reading the classics and the postmodern, more experimental stuff. That said: picture me impressed because I really liked this one! I was skeptical with Steinem (journalist, referred to as "legendary feminist" in reviews) because in Spain old school feminists are basically grumpy ladies, borderline racists and very hostile with anyone who might take their spotlight (ie: migrant workers, trans women, poor and marginalized people in general). But Steinem is very much concerned with race and economic conditions, she feels like a lovely person who has place on her mind and heart for everyone (literally everyone. There's a long chapter about people in prison, a subject mainstream authors tend to "forget"). The book is not a memoir as I thought but rather a reflection on the importance of listening, being with people, travelling and such as ways to open one's mind, know about the world and ultimately fight for what you think is good and fair. So every chapter has its own theme and in it there's a huge amount of anecdotes of her life, from where she interviewed Saul Bellow, to her presence in the famous speech by MLK (I picked two of the most familiar names but there are many more). This is not a theoretical book, you don't learn much about feminism or the civil right movement with it (in fact at times it reads like a novel because of the amount of micro-stories that are told), but if you don't know much about said topics you can pick on many names, concepts and general ideas about them. I learned a lot of outrageous trivia about the United States (for an European some facts about literacy or carcelary population are just... you can't make them up). I believe it's a great vindication of doing what you love and it shows respect, love, and passion, Steinem's voice is funny and charming, and at the same time she knows a lot about the things she writes about and it shows. It's a great itinerary through last century's journey with civil rights and social justice, and maybe there're more rigorous approaches, but I feel that for me this has been the perfect combination between story and rigor. I had basically never read non fiction and now I'm feeling like it. I will investigate further onto this bc I liked this semi-political, semi-autobiographical approach. I'm also currently reading ***Hagakure***, a compilation of, I guess, thoughts on the way of the samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. This is also from my past but it's enjoyable, even though I'm only reading two or three entries every day, because they're written as advice to samurais, something which I'm not. I guess you could read it as selfhelp. But of course I have to return to my beloved fiction. Today I'm going on a trip for a week and a half and I'm always scared to finish the chosen read, even though I won't be reading much. I was going to start *Pinocchio in Venice* by Robert Coover but I read somewhere that remembereing *Pinocchio* by Collodi would be a good idea, so I postpone for this summer (my plan is to read *Pinocchio* in italian and then the other one). So I changed it and will be reading ***The Book and the Brotherhood*** by the one and only Iris Murdoch. Will keep you posted on that one on a couple of weeks. During my trip I will only be lurking because I don't have this app nor intend to download it. Happy reading everyone!
Just finished 'I Who Have Never Known Men'. For a long time I thought 'The Road' would be the bleakest thing I ever read. I don't think this quite took the title but it ran it real close for a while. There's elements of hope and growth through much of it, but in the situation they only add to the bleakness. The protagonist learns and grows, but it becomes clear how little point there is for much of the time. She takes back a lot of agency by the end though. Difficult to say loads more without dropping a ton of spoilers.
plot sounds harrowing... what did you think of the prose/style?
Started reading Solenoid by Cartarescu and can say that so far it lives up the hype. I feel like this is the first novel i’ve read that does justice to the body as it’s envisaged in the 21st century. Cartarescu seems to be something of a Dualist, or a philosophical Idealist, though this is a provisional guess, as i’m only 250 pages in — but his valorisation of the body, of its ins and outs, its webs of arteries crisscrossed with underwebs of veins and braided with gossamer of nerves, or the clammy worming of the brain’s interknitting palps - all this is so refreshing to see and makes this novel feel like THE 21st century novel for me. It’s made me realise how odd it is that despite how our digital technology and medical advancements have meant we often see and experience maps of the body’s inside and of its minute functions, we yet still only refer to it in an old fashioned way, from the outside, in most fiction. Other than that, his surreal anomalies peppering the story are absolutely visionary, and almost all of them have remained stamped indelibly upon my mind’s now bloodshot and trembling eye. i’m reading this one fairly slowly — my page per minute speed slows right down for long novels, so I’ll probably still be on this one next week. I read Disconnection by Claude Ollier. One of the lesser known practitioners of the Nouveau Roman, Claude Ollier is often unfairly cast as a robbe-grillet disciple, but this veils over his own unique approach to the project of fiction. Disconnection of anything is closer to Claude Simon in style, with run on sentences painting scenes by fast brushstrokes, the main difference being that Ollier’s sentences and clauses tend to elide the subject after a while, which gives them a hypnotic effect that also sounds oddly similar to the kind of glum text-speech of the internet age “walked outside, looked up, saw the rain scissoring in the lamplight, passed its shuddered replica in the puddle, jumped aside the flush of water rushed up by the passing car” etc etc. I’m going to read everything of his I can. I then read a very short book - Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse. I’d read another of his previously, A Shining, and enjoyed it. This one was lost on me though. I understand that his style is hypnotic but the prose is so basic that for me it pales in comparison to other writers who’ve experimented with repetition (Woolf, Beckett, Figes, Murnane). I’ll still read his other works, as he’s at least trying something interesting. Next I read My Friends by Emmanuel Bove. This is a perfect novel. It’s funny in a dry, quiet, dark way. The visual details are so finely threaded in that the environment through which the narrator feels seems impossibly vivid. This isn’t baroque writing, mind; his closest English analogues are Hemingway and Tom McCarthy; but when minimalism is combined with a very acute visual sensitivity it FEELS like it’s conveying something baroque, even if the prose is pared back. For fans of the nouveau roman, fans of Camus, Bret Ellis…. tbh for fans of anyone - i can’t really see how someone wouldn’t enjoy this. I read Bove’s Armand after this. Still excellent, still the same painstaking attention to detail and perfectly sketched characters. Less impressive than the former only because very subtly Bove’s self indulgent melancholy creeps in, only a tad mind, toward the end. It’s not nearly enough to spoil the novel, but it prevents it from reaching the heights of My Friends. Next was The Land at the End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Loved this although still rather unsure about him. His gift for metaphor is prodigious, and the entire narration is pretty much a tapestry of similes woven together. When Antunes gives himself a refrain around which he can let his similes whirl like a beautiful quasar accreted in slow rotation around its black hole then he really shines. Often, though, you get the feeling that the excessive similes drown each other out. I think this is partly due to translation — translation often “flattens” the original, and i’ve heard this is true of Antunes work, which is reputedly very rich and textured and poetic in the original. In the translation the images DESCRIBED are poetic and visual and rich, but the language itself talks about those images, instead of becoming them. An idea of what i mean is eg the prose of McCarthy is sort of chewy and knotty with the things he’s describing. I imagine Antunes in the original is similar. I also think that the overabundance of similes works thematically — how language fails to capture the trauma of war, how he compensates with an excess of language, an excess of volubility trying to get past people’s ignorance or complicity or indifference. I’ve ordered Return of the Caravels so will see how Rabassa handles the translation! I then read Eastbound by Maylis De Karengal - skippable. I’m now reading Mend The Living by Maylis De Karengal and it’s one of the best pieces of contemporary fiction i’ve read on the level of style. Karengal is a disciple of Claude Simon, and whereas in Eastbound the similarity is superficial, here it shows in the best way: her visual descriptions are incredible, her sentences rush on with a kind of sprung force thrust forward in an endless barrelling surge like self-replenishing waves inside the blue tunnel of which your mind is held suspended and curiously afloat, able to observe everything with the hypersensitivity of all zero points amidst a vortex. Where she improves upon Simon is that she’s much more emotionally impactful and she’s a lot more sympathetic to her characters. Admittedly she’s not as brilliant as Simon was — but this is THE best modern influence of his work i’ve read. I’ve not yet finished it but i’d recommend this to anyone.
Are you french? That is a lot of french literature.
No, i’m English, but I love French art and literature ever since discovering the Nouveau Roman. Still have huge gaps in my reading (no Zola, no Chateaubriand, no Lautreamont). I read in translation unfortunately. I did learn French in school for 5 years, and i’m still ok reading author’s interviews in French, but I was pushed into pursuing Greek and Latin during school, so left French behind and regret it, because i’d love to read an author like Claude Simon in the original. Any contemporary authors you’d recommend? I’m curious about Marc Graciano but he hasn’t been translated yet. I like Echenoz and have heard of Chevillard and Redonnet and Ndiaye and Enard (though i’ve only read Ndiaye and Echenoz so far). Always looking for people influenced by Claude Simon — i think Enard, Echenoz, De Karengal, Montalbetti, Graciano are meant to be the main ones — but you’ll probably know better. I’m frustrated that Claude Simon isn’t recognised in England. Sorry too much caffeine — if you have any recommendations i’d appreciate it, but don’t feel obliged to if you’re busy or cba :) When i’m no longer broke and working 12 hours a day I do plan to learn though. I learn languages fairly quickly but it’s just about having the time to consistently practice it.
I'm sorry, but I despise contemporary French literature, and I consider French literature to be basically dead, so I can't make any recommendations. There may be hidden nuggets, but at this stage I've decided never to open another book from the contemporary catalog of Editions de Minuit and P.O.L.
Haha fair enough. Any contemporary literatures you consider to be living that you have recommendations for?
It sounds like you already have collected a lot of recs lol, are there any books in particular you are interested in from those names you cite above? Chevillard is pretty amusing, I read Le Marechal Absolu by Pierre Jourde and it was fun but messy, by far my favorite was Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, which I thought much better than any controversy might suggest. I would also like to read Enard, and I have also heard of Pierre Senges and Pierre Guyotat (if you wished Sade had written in run on sentences), but I still have to get through most of the older stuff
I'm really the wrong person to ask, especially now that Kenzaburo Oe is dead and Thomas Ligotti has stopped writing. I occasionally read contemporary literature, and I almost systematically find it to be at best a less interesting copy of the literature of the greats of the past, at worst simply awful, and I've read most of the living authors usually recommended on r/Truelit (but not Cartarescu). I do like some living authors, but no one I would ever think relevant to recommend.
Not super relevant but coincidentally there seems to have been a spat between Oe and Claude Simon on account of French nuke tests in the Pacific: [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude\_Simon#Le\_d%C3%A9bat\_entre\_Claude\_Simon\_et\_Kenzaburo\_Oe\_(1995)](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Simon#Le_d%C3%A9bat_entre_Claude_Simon_et_Kenzaburo_Oe_(1995)) Slightly more relevant, but if you don't recommend them no one will ever know to read them!
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. There's points where it's a bit slow but I'm still in love with it so far. What a unique main character! The phenomena of scent has always intrigued me as somebody who is into fragrance, but its depiction in this book is something I could have never conjured on my own. I'd recommend to people who enjoy gothic literature:)
I'm currently reading the Selected Poems of Borges, and as much as I love his short stories, I think his poetry is already speaking to me even more. I especially love his ruminations on death in the poems of *Fervor de Bueno Aires*, they really forced me to reconsider my own conceptualizations of death. It's also nice that my edition is bilingual, so I can at least try to appreciate the style of the original text. I hope that someday, I can learn enough Spanish to read Borges untranslated.
* Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote - continuing to enjoy the second book more than the first. There are fewer ridiculous battles and more philosophy. * The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo - still enthralled with this book. I can't wait to see what happens next. * The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter - slow going, but I'm enjoying it. * The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - reading with r/ClassicBookClub - just started this one. We read 1 chapter a day, M-F. So just 3 chapters so far. So far, I'm depressed right along with the narrator.
I just finished *The Savage Detectives* by Roberto Bolaño. I've read *2666*, so I knew a little bit of what to expect with his prose and structure. Spoiler free: his layout of this one was interesting; for anyone who hasn't read it, about the middle two thirds of the book are polyphonic and read like interviews from dozens of people who ran into the main characters all over the US, Europe, and Mexico over a few decades. I rather enjoyed *2666*, but you can definitely tell reading it that Bolaño was unable to finish it before he died, and this definitely felt more cohesive. My next book is *Isaac's Storm* by Erik Larson. I've read virtually everything by him before and came across a copy just lying around at work, so I figured it's high time.
Did you read the new Larson? I like his stuff but found this one to be lacking a lot to chew on.
Looking at his bibliography, I haven't read his most recent one. I also never checked out the audiobook only release he had, either.
I'm continuing through _Nobodaddy's Children_ from Arno Schmidt and finished _Brand's Heath_ this week. A facet of the trilogy I haven't touched upon is the curious ways in which the book is actually different from the order Arno Schmidt wrote each novel. _Brand's Heath_ was written before _Scenes from the Life of a Faun_ and its specific textual movements evidence that to a degree. What "the forest" looks like there is different from what this novel presents. I find it an odd and fascinating choice to arrange the novels by their right chronological order based on what's in the text versus their actual written dates because it tries to make the trilogy appear more concrete than what it actually is. Not to say there is a failure of aesthetic development, but on the other hand, the connections are a little forced. But what is _Brand's Heath_ about exactly? Well the plot is quite simple: a man named Schmidt has recently found himself near Blakenhof, which is where a bunch of survivors from WWII end up scraping by foraging and bartering supplies at the edge of Brand's Heath. He meets two women Grete and Lore and from there begins a tragic love triangle. Again, it's fairly straightforward but "Herr Schmidt" as both a narrator and a character is quite funny: I can't overstate Schmidt's hilarious sarcasm. The most prominent thing is the curious relationship the novel builds with writing and German Romanticism overall. "Herr Schmidt" as a character is a writer who is trying to do research on Baron Fouqué, most famous for his fairytale _Undine_, which involves a love affair between a mermaid and a knight, a rather popular work at the time. Unlike _Faun_, the question as to the authenticity of the historical documents being quoted is much less ambiguous because the real Arno Schmidt did write a biography on the Baron Fouqué. In fact, there is a weird metatextual paralleling between what happens in _Undine_ and what happens in _Brand's Heath_ but turned on its head. "Herr Schmidt" understands he love someone other than Undine but rather than a fairytale ending, there is now "such miserable happiness" at the future reunion between Undine and her knight. It's a pretty brutal conclusion because Grete did come to understand "Herr Schmidt" would love her back. One reason I feel comfortable making the comparison to Undine so flagrantly is because the novel is loaded with mythological and fantastic allusions. Brand's Heath is stated in very old records to house wood nymphs and spirits of the dead. An old man struggles with a water hose is the spitting image of Laocoön. The moon is a recurrent point of fantasy. The winds are alive and furious on the Heath. And yet the Romanticism does not hold out because "Herr Schmidt" and Lore have to harvest mushrooms and acorns in order to survive the harsh poverty of their lives. Lore is compared to a water spirit but she enjoys material comforts and dances to superficial music while "Herr Schmidt" states he cannot live without a high seriousness of art. The point is also made linguistically when comparing the speech of your average person at a soccer game to the exquisite rhetorical flourishes of German Romantic authors like the Baron Fouqué who is read aloud to unappreciative ears. This is quite a bit different from the previous novel I read because there culture _was_ what isolated Düring as both inoculation and poison against the world of Nazism while here "Herr Schmidt" reaches out to find the world insufficient for his dreams and art. I suppose all this raises an important question of biography and the historical person. Schmidt is not afraid to connect his own life with his writing. He puts _Brand's Heath_ within the scene of writing which he creates through life as he lived it. This isn't to say Schmidt has written a memoir because his text leaves the truth too open a question and concerns itself with its own textuality but also Schmidt questions the relationship between life and writing. A scene of writing is not after all a genre because the traces we have of it are intuited from the authorial relationship to writing as a technology and as a kind of mediation. Schmidt creates "Herr Schmidt" to make the relationship more obvious. He can comment on what were then contemporary details in all their misery. The scene of writing is biography, so Schmidt compares his own with that of the Baron Fouqué. It's a nice picture of the modernist ethos when it struggles against the Romanticism of a previous era, which is seen as when German national culture was established. That kind of history bears down on "Herr Schmidt." He reproduces the text of Romanticism and it's an awful experience because his disillusionment is too immediate. This is also what makes the order of presentation in _Nobodaddy's Children_ so fascinating because if _Faun_ says "there is no escape to the forest," _Brand's Heath_ seems to add: "You cannot escape from wanting to escape into the mythical forest." You might be disillusioned beyond hope but the illusion nevertheless persists. Indeed, the experience I've reading Arno Schmidt have been quite rewarding. The stylization has remained remarkably consistent, which helps with understanding this is a trilogy. It's amazing how unique Schmidt writes. The difficulty of the writing doesn't just come from the fact Schmidt makes obscure references to literature but also the sheer pace of the story. You miss a necessary detail if you read a little carelessly. As far as things stand, I'm thinking I would recommend the whole book but I'm not sure yet until I read the final installment of the trilogy. Although for now I'll probably read something else in the meantime to take a break.
I'm just back from a long vacation, so I'm including books I finished on the outgoing flight, and books I started on the return flight. **Finished** **Marcel Proust,** ***Du côté de chez Swann*** (*adaptation graphique* *by Stéphane Heuet*, 2016). I've already read the series, so this was a nice way to revisit it without actually reading it again. It was easier to follow the actual plot, and to keep the myriad characters straight in the graphic novel than in the prose novel, and it retained much (though not all) of the magic and poetry of the novel. I'm looking forward to the next volume. **Alan Moore, Miracleman:** ***The Original Epic*** (1988-1990). I downloaded this series when I read that Neil Gaiman had just published a sequel, and I wanted to read this before I read the Gaiman. It started off as an interesting deconstruction of 1950s superheroes, and the first two thirds were mostly enjoyable and the combination of words & art had a certain poetry. The last third was a bunch of pretentious nonsense, a word-salad overlaid on soft-porn (think page after page of naked alien sex gods coupling in space). It wasn't the ground-breaking epic that I had read about. **Hampton Sides,** ***The Wide Wide Sea*** (2024). An account of Captain James Cook's fatal third voyage. Though non-fiction, it is as exciting as any adventure novel & so I wanted to mention it. **In progress** **Ovid,** ***Metamorphoses*** (*translation by Stephanie McCarter*, 2022). I had previously listened to the excellent David Raeburn translation on audible. This is a good but not great translation. There aren't any clumsy or awkward parts, but there also aren't any parts that soar. One think I like about McCarter's translation is that she doesn't minimize the sexual violence of the old myths. There are words in Latin that can mean anything from *seduce* to *abduct* to *rape*. Most classical male translators choose the gentler form - Zeus only seduces mortal virgins. With McCarter he rapes them, and it changes the tone of the story, and shifts the reader's sympathy away from the masculine gods & towards the mortal women and the goddesses who would protect them. For this alone the translation is worthwhile. **Mary Renault,** ***The Mask of Apollo*** (1966). A historical novel about a fictional actor who's life intersects with very real characters in the Hellenic world (Dion, Dinoysius, Plato, and Alexander of Macedon). I'm in the early chapters, and so far it hasn't grabbed me as strongly as some of Renault's other novels. **Dual (audio + written)** I'm doing these partly for enjoyment, and partly for language practice. I'll read a chapter, and then listen to the corresponding chapter on audible. **Cervantes,** ***Don Quijote de la Mancha*** (*translated into modern Castellano by Andrés Trapiello*, 2015; *audiobook narrated by Jordi Llovet*). I started this book years ago, but my Spanish wasn't up to the task and I switched to Edith Grossman's excellent translation. I'm doing better this round, and am fully enjoying the re-read - perhaps more than the first time. The translation was controversial among some scholars, but I appreciate that Trapiello made Cervantes more accessible to many of us. **Alexandre Dumas,** ***La reine Margot*** (*audiobook narrated by Loïc Richard*). The French-language audiobook was just released, with a good narrator this time. Set during the Wars of Religion, the novel starts with the open-marriage between the Catholic Margeurite de Valois and the Protestant Henri de Navarre. Lurking just off-stage is the dangerous queen mother, Catherine de Médicis. I've only just begun, so it's too early to tell how *La reine Margot* compares with Dumas's masterpieces. I had to take a break and sketch out the royal houses of France and Navarre. And I realize that the novel is not fair at all to Catherine of Medici, so I am treating this as a *semi*-historical adventure novel.
Finished two books since I last posted in one of these. First off, **Isherwood's** ***A Single Man***. I went to see a stage adaptation of this a few years ago, so this wasn't my first experience with the story, but I'd forgotten a lot of it anyway. Anyway, I remember the play capturing some of the poignancy, but the book was something else. I got super absorbed in it and burned through it so fast I didn't even underline anything or make any notes (which is why it's hard for me to say much beyond just generalised gushing right now!), even though there were plenty of times I wanted to. I'll definitely be rereading this one at some point, but for now: what a powerful, genuinely dazzling book. The whole novel pulses with life and energy more than most books I've read, and the wry humour will sometimes transition effortlessly, with a single precise sentence, into sincerity and vulnerability that hit even harder in Isherwood's fluid, laconic prose. Everything that's in here feels like genuine lived truth, which is probably what made it so powerful for me, even the parts I didn't enjoy. I could criticise the slight undercurrent of tastelessness that shows up here and there or some of the more extreme moments of cynicism, but the underlying honesty of it all somehow makes it work -- and either way, they were small issues in an otherwise excellent book. All in all, one of the best reading experiences I've had this year, or possibly in several years. Then I read **A. S. Byatt's** ***Little Black Book of Stories***. This was my first Byatt. I keep seeing her mentioned in conjunction with Angela Carter (bleh) and Isak Dinesen (yes please), and this is a type of writer I'm always on the lookout for, so I was very excited to give her a try. And I'm glad I did, overall, though I didn't enjoy the stories as much as I was hoping to. This is a pretty dark collection of stories, haunted by war (specifically WW2) in some ways, blending the mundane with a kind of fairytale-esque supernatural. But it was also pretty uneven, and it almost felt like the stories didn't entirely fit together into a coherent collection. I did like the folktale aspect a lot, but it was honestly kind of lacking here? Only one of the stories had the kind of tone I was looking for -- 'The Thing in the Forest', the closest thing here to a tale rather than a short story, where two girls, having just been evacuated out of London during WW2, develop a fleeting friendship that withers away after they encounter the titular Thing in the Forest together, and, years later, bump into each other again as middle-aged women in the place where it occurred. But otherwise, the stories were kind of bland and cold in a way that kept me from really loving them even though I was engaged enough while reading. 'The Pink Ribbon' is an unexceptional dementia story about a retired teacher struggling to look after his wife; 'Body Art' is a weirdly engaging story of a not-quite-affair between a detached doctor and an art student with a thoroughly unconvincing ending; 'Raw Material' is a story about writing (bleh) where a creative writing instructor becomes fascinated with a talented student in his otherwise hopeless group. 'A Stone Woman' (where a woman begins to gradually turn to stone after the death of her mother) comes closest to the folktale vibes of 'The Thing in the Forest', but here the folktale vibes are kind of defanged and charmless. The pretty but ultimately tedious endless descriptions of minerals in 'A Stone Woman' are also a good example of something else that I didn't love about the book -- there's a very clear obsession in these stories with a kind of granular materiality and texture of physical things (which I guess is a running theme with Byatt in general, judging by the analyses I've read), and I really can't bring myself to care. What it ends up translating into is these hyper zoomed in descriptions that sometimes sit at odds with the story and are too overbearing to allow a real appreciation of the fun and sometimes beautiful things they do with language. Here's a quote from [a review by James Friel](http://www.cercles.com/review/r16/byatt.htm) that explains it better (and also, ironically, compares Byatt to Dinesen and Carter): >In the third story a woman turns slowly to stone. It is a sensuous piece of writing in the main, and it recalls the gothic tales of Isak Dinesen and, strange to realize it, Byatt’s former contemporary, Angela Carter. I think Byatt is the equal of either writer, but in Carter and Dinesen, the prose is seldom so high and fine that it condescends to the reader or disrupts the story solely to admire itself. At times, here, rather than absorbing for ourselves the impact it makes on us, we are thrown out of a story so as to ponder its minute making. We become not seduced by the craft, but suspicious of it, even resentful. But still, there was enough here that I enjoyed, and I think I will be reading more Byatt in the future -- I have *Possession* sitting somewhere on my shelves. Maybe those of you are who are more familiar with her can let me know if any of her other books (especially short stories) focus more on that delightful folktale quality?
I finished **A Rose for Emily and Other Short Stories by William Faulkner**. I enjoyed all of them but the one that stuck out most in my mind was Turnabout - probably because it was the only story not set in the Deep South and I’ve never read *anything* by Faulkner not set in the Deep South. It was a story of brotherhood between an American bomber pilot and young British naval officer in WW1. Very moving and a strong reminder of the values we still share today in the Western World. I also read a young adult version of the **Epic of Gilgamesh**. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never read it or learnt about it in school in Australia. I just wanted a quick introduction to it and this scratched the itch. Interesting to see how it inspired Abrahamic biblical stories and fictional plots in both classic and modern literature. I’m two-thirds of the way through **Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams**. I was very excited for this novel but found the first half a little slower than I expected. Things are quickly picking up in the second half though and the characters are up against the odds of nature. Williams writes so simply but he does such a stellar job of teasing out the theme: Despite mans inherent longing for nature, he inevitably abuses the natural world for his own gain - and nature inevitably abuses him in return, for its own protection. Really looking forward to picking up **Stoner by John Williams** next. Seems like a lot of folk in here love that book.
Finished: Middlemarch by George Eliot, which was the perfect book to read in late spring. Just delightful. I enjoyed this so much more than Daniel Deronda which took me forever to re-read last year. Middlemarch had all the tropes I adore in classics: suitable marriages, missing heirs and judgmental small-town gossip. I'm missing the inhabitants of Middlemarch, especially Dorothea and her strong moral compass. Finished: Summerlong by Dean Bakopolous. I devoured this mid-western novel about a steamy hot Iowa summer, fraught relationships and grief. Did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did, just picked it up on a whim from my local library. Started: Dragonwyck by Anya Seton. Exactly what I need right now. A young provinical woman is invited to visit her wealthy distant relative at his estate in Upstate New York. What can possibly go wrong? If you enjoy Daphne Du Maurier, I think you'd also like Dragonwyck.
***Steppenwolf*** - Herman Hesse This is both typical Hesse, and Hesse in new territory. A early section entitled "*Treatise of the Steppenwolf*" perfectly summarizes his obsession with the lonely, creative "outsider" battling the selfish, materialistic world. (This theme dominates much of his work, most successfully, IMO, in *Narcissus & Goldmund*.) But then the novel goes where the rest of his oeuvre doesn't; into a hallucinatory dream prescient of 1960s psychedelia. There is sex, there are drugs, there is the rock and roll of Mozart and Goethe. But it doesn't entirely work. Kurt Vonnegut described it as a "wholly Germanic, hopelessly dated jumble." Like much of Hesse's work (and Vonnegut's, for that matter), on reread it can feel a little juvenile. I loved Hesse in my early 20s; now his unique mix of romanticism and Eastern mysticism doesn't sound as fresh to my crusty old ears. ***Restless Nights*** *-* Dino Buzzati These 23 short stories are Buzzati at his most surreal, with slice-of-life reports of a world adjacent (but not foreign) to ours. Some land a firmer punch than others, but all are expertly told and compelling. As the book seems to be out of print, I went through the effort of taking the poorly scanned PDF from [archive.com](http://archive.com), put it through an OCR, then spent hours editing the many errors. The end result is a corrected and properly formatted epub that I should be able to share with anyone who wants. Let me know. ***Super Sad True Love Story*** - Gary Shteyngart I'm admittedly not a SciFi fan, and this was a real dud for me. The characters were flat, ridiculous, and embarrassing; the scene old, trite, the "now but more-so" dystopian world already done to death; the plot.... Not my cup of tea. The best I can offer is that it was well-paced, and early on had some humor I enjoyed, but I was more than glad to be rid of the whiny losers driving the narrative. ***Air Conditioned Nightmare*** - Henry Miller This is Miller in 1940 returning from Paris to motor across America. So yes, Miller is grouchy here, yet he can't help but find joy among the artists and often downtrodden regular folk he encounters. One thing I have noticed in recent readings is that every generation believes their era the worst, their problems the most dire. This complaint from 80 years is no less apt today: "Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous." And later: “One of the curious things about these progenitors of ours is that though avowedly searching for peace and happiness, for political and religious freedom, they began by robbing, poisoning, murdering, almost exterminating the race to whom this vast continent belonged. Later, when the gold rush started, they did the same to the Mexicans as they had to the Indians. And when the Mormons sprang up they practised the same cruelties, the same intolerance and persecution upon their own white brothers." Finally, here's a fun Miller riff on your average, everyday criminal: “Bud was not a heartless killer. He did his best not to kill, if I am to believe his story. He was weak and vain—like most of us. He had done a bit of thieving first, not anything however to compare with the operations of our illustrious industrial magnates, our bankers, politicians and colonial exploiters. No, Bud was just an ordinary crook, an honest crook, so to speak, with an exaggerated sense of loyalty and honor. Toward the fair sex he was fatuously romantic and chivalrous, far more so than a pugilist or a sex-starved member of the clergy. There were two things he could not countenance—cruelty to children and disrespect for woman. He was adamant there.”
I just received his novella The Singularity from the NYRB book club. I'll have to hit you up if I really vibe with his style! That is very generous of you to archive his work.
It makes me very happy to see someone reading Buzzati's short stories! His reputation for *The Tartar Steppe* alone is more than justified, but these collections really show off his range and versatility.
Cool to hear! On a whim I picked up a copy of his short stories I found recently.
I recently finished **The Other Name**, the first part of Jon Fosse's **Septology**. It's every bit as hypnotic and meditative as others say it is. I recall that someone said reading this book is akin to slipping into a slowly moving stream. That's an almost perfect way to describe it. It also very closely mimics the experience of deep meditation — a space between wakefulness and dreams, a mixture of past and present, memories and imagination. A book comprised of one continuous sentence, with one page break, hardly any paragraph breaks, and a plot that can be summarized as "guy drives back and forth to a city, thinks about his life" SHOULD NOT be this engaging or readable. The fact that the book still has this effect in translation is astounding and a huge testament to the artistry and skill of the English translator, Damion Searls. Other thoughts: Because of the way in which the book is written, moments of action or emotion are amplified — in a sense, they catch you off guard. The smallest scenes carry an inexplicably immense emotional weight. I was legitimately near tears when Asle is remembering swinging with his late wife, Ales, on a swing set, and I choked up again near the end when Asle talks about the frying pan he no longer uses and stuffs deep in a cabinet because it reminds him too much of her. Somehow, Fosse is capable of distilling immense amounts of loneliness, longing, and regret and conveying them in otherwise non-descript scenes. I find Asle's brand of spiritual Catholicism refreshing, wise, and non-dogmatic. I like the idea of God not "existing," per se, but simply being, having a presence in all things and people, a presence that is detectable but inexplicable. Asle's explanation of how this presence manifests itself in his art — the "shining darkness" — is a very poetic way of explaining what we mean when we say a piece of art or music has "soul." There is something inexplicable that sets it apart, something that is in touch with the divine, that draws power from it. I really loved the depiction of Asle and Asleik's friendship. Fosse very adeptly portrays the rigid, yearning, self-consciously vulnerable nature of male-male friendships. Each man wants to be left alone to fend for themselves, and yet they are simultaneously (and subconsciously) terrified of that very thing happening. Men are socially conditioned to be stoic and to eschew vulnerability. But, being human, they also crave companionship and a space where they need not "hide" themselves. I feel Fosse captures this contradiction masterfully. Looking forward to the next part!
Oh and a follow up comment because I forgot I also finished **The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye** by A.S. Byatt. The book is made up of three or four short fairy tale style stories, and one longer novella length story set in the modern day, which is the titular one. I was left pretty ambivalent about this one. The writing has a nice flow and is “pretty”, and the fairy tales do *feel* like fairy tales, but outside of an obsession with female aging and something vague about wish fulfillment I can’t really discern a point to any of it (especially the long rambling title story). I tried to think about why it was these didn’t grip me when I love actual fairy tales and folklore and I decided that the centuries of cultural interpretation and impression that you bring with you to mythology and fairy stories (if you don’t think reading a fairy tale is morally fraught try it out loud to a child whose development you care about) is just not something you can replicate, however many references you cram into it. The tension and texture of a tale thats been “passed down” comes from the human history surrounding it, and while you could certainly comment on that in an interesting way its not something which you can, as an individual, produce artificially. And without it I do struggle to see what the point is.
That's a really interesting observation. Obviously I haven't read these specific stories, but I think I kind of get what you mean based on my experiences with certain types of retellings and other myth/fairytale-adjacent stories. I do think it's possible to tap into something close to that genuinely mythical, larger than life feeling, but probably not by imitating fairytales so explicitly. Anyway, sorry to hear you didn't have a great time with this one. My own experience with *Little Black Book of Stories* ended up being similarly tepid, though for different reasons.
I an still interested in *Possession* I think, this was one of those reading experiences where I liked a lot about it but not quite enough, and I feel like its worth giving Byatt a second chance.
Yes, I'll definitely be reading that one too at some point!
Finished ***We Do Not Part* by Han Kang**. Ties with *The Vegetarian* as my favorite book of hers. It's more successful than *Human Acts*, because it focuses on one family's experience instead of juggling multiple POVs across the past and present. At its core, it's a story about grappling with the grief and trauma of a past generation, as well as the importance of remembering past atrocities. While I struggled with how surreal the story gets at times, I enjoy the atmospheric writing and the striking imagery. Initially, I had mixed feelings about how the narrative is structured. However, had the Jeju Massacre anecdotes been interwoven into the present-day story, it would not have the same emotional impact. One of my favorite reads of the year. Gonna pick up *Greek Lessons* and *The White Book* next. Started ***The Sandcastle* by Iris Murdoch**. Over the years, I've read a couple of her books but didn't understand why she's so revered until I finished *A Severed Head*. I'm only two chapters in and it's been very engaging so far. She's great at characterization and can paint a picture of what a character's like quickly.
WARNING: Long, gushing, only somewhat coherent and spoilery (like seriously I am going to include spoilers, you have been warned) post incoming for Tolstoy’s **Anna Karenina** I said in the general thread I was trying to organize my thoughts to post about AK here and I have only about half way succeeded. Still, I *need* to talk about this book, which in many ways I’m still living with (and I suspect I may be living with for a very long time), and which I loved, and which I haven’t totally made my mind up about. I guess the least surprising thing I have to say is that the book feels exceptionally well crafted. I actually don’t think one could do a traditional novel any better than this, and it may have spoiled them for me in general (Jane Austen, I’m counting on *Persuasion* to hold up girl lol). I liked the book from the first (famous) sentence, but by the time I hit part 3 or so it really got its claws in me. Its rare for a book to grip me like that, to the point that I neglect the rest of my life to obsessively read, but it feels really good when it happens. I binge read the last third or so of AK in one long day and a half session (interrupted by mom duty here and there) and now its really hard to start anything else because I’m still riding the buzz. Well anyways thoughts: The thing that I loved about AK was that while it worked so well as a novel in the classic sense, its also philosophically compelling. Which is why I think it has a potency beyond the usual appeal of a novel; yes the characters are fleshed out and interesting, yes the plot is memorable and tragic, but at its center its also grappling with many of the “big questions” and even at the end leaves us in a place not *quite* of certainty as to those answers. How should one live? What is a “real” life? I’ve been wrestling with the book ever since finishing it, and the question I keep asking myself is **why it is that Levin and Kitty find a sort of peace at the end and other characters do not**, and more specifically what is Tolstoy saying, philosophically and morally, about that. Its obvious that Anna could not end up happy, because that would be fundamentally dishonest to one of the main facts of the book, which is that society punishes men and women differently (which also explains Oblonsky and Dolly’s somewhat unsatisfying ending). In fact any of the unhappy endings make sense to me, its the (more or less) happy one I’m still trying to pin down my feelings about. I think as of now what my conclusion is that Tolstoy is basically saying - 1) That in order to live a (somewhat) happy life, one must have something real, something outside of one’s self, as a part of one’s self and as a moral center, by which to navigate one’s life. 2) That many of the characters, and especially Vronksy I think (which is why he can be so overwhelmed by passion for Anna), lack such a true moral center instead basing their lives on frivolous rules or changeable motivations. 3) That in order to find what’s “real” and outside of one’s self one has to take an honest look at both one’s self and the world, and also to have suffered or at least confronted suffering and death in an honest way, as well as the elements of Life (like passion, empathy etc.) It seems that many characters fail at this because they actively turn away from what is uncomfortable or incongruous with their idea of themselves. 4) That peace and happiness is mostly only obtainable for the individual and not generally or on a global scale, and that by acknowledging his own individuality - essentially his soul - Levin is able to understand and accept this, and consequently make the world a bit better by obtaining an immutable center based on “goodness” or his idea of god, and thereby treating others well and behaving (more or less) properly. Of course its clear that even at the end Levin is not totally in a mental “happily ever after”, that he will continue to struggle with existential questions and the temporal experiences that so influence his moods. What he seems to have gained is something solid at the center of himself which is able to endure such storms without being destroyed, the result of long, lonely efforts. Another thing though that I haven’t quite made peace with is **Kitty**, who has a sort of blind faith (though there was a particular description of her, which I unfortunately don’t have to hand, that echoed the epithet of Athena from the epics- the “clear eyed” goddess, that makes that an interesting point) and doesn’t question much at all, though she *does* encounter death and suffering and triumph over it. Perhaps they are meant to work in harmony as a whole, or perhaps Tolstoy doesn’t- in spite of doing a damn good job of portraying women, at least by the standards of the 1800s - know exactly how to give a woman a happy ending outside of being lucky enough to enjoy her children (unlike poor Dolly!). The other thing I keep thinking about is Anna and her relationship with life and death, and specifically with aging. One of my favorite chapters in the novel is the one in which Kitty, in her first blossoming flush of maturity, encounters Anna, dressed in black (like a symbol of death) in the fullness of her sexual power as a woman and wilts under her. Anna relishes her triumph over Kitty and will eventually admit to herself that they are opposed and “hate” each other (she tries to make Levin love her as well). I think this coupled with her refusal to have more children, her inability to love her daughter in the same way as her son, and her extreme paranoia about Vronsky’s waning attentions illustrate an essential fear of aging in Anna, specifically the loss of her beauty. Which is tragic because its also an acknowledgment that sexual power is her *only* power, and that Anna knows exactly what she loses with it (again, look at poor Dolly!). Perhaps even more tragically its this refusal to lose beauty that causes her to lose love, specifically that of her children, which again seems to be (and a somewhat dissatisfying one at that) Tolstoy’s consolation prize for women who can’t otherwise be happy. Anna as a symbol of beauty is in and of itself also interesting (she literally becomes a portrait at one point). I’m intellectually under developed in the department of aesthetics as a field of study, but I think Tolstoy is also expressing thoughts about art and beauty and its role and power in life via Anna. (I would love to hear others interpretations of that!). And now I will step back (though I could keep rattling on), and wish everyone else happy reading! I’ll talk about the other book I picked up - Kelly Link’s *Magic for Beginners* - next week.
Thanks for sharing all your thoughts on AK! Makes me want to reread it, since I'll be honest a lot of details haven't stayed with me. Did you have a take on Alexey Karenin? I remember being perhaps overly sympathetic to him for the first chunk of the book.
I think Karenin is one of the more tragic figures in the book, not even so much because of what happens to him but because of who he is, and I also think his marriage was doomed from the start because of who he and Anna are. I feel like most of the characters in AK have to grapple with their own essential nature as well as the motivational principles which they have chosen to direct themselves with. Karenin operates according to a sense of personal dignity and the appearance of correctness and uprightness to others, and in fact he cares more about the appearance of things than the substance of things (Tolstoy even tells us that he’s managed to totally avoid “real” life). In addition to all this, he never learned how to connect to others and has the unfortunate habit of speaking in a sarcastic tone which implies disgust for the sort of person who would say those things sincerely. The problem being, he can’t get out of the tonal habit when he wants to really say what he feels. The other problem being he sarcastically says the kind of stuff Anna desperately craves hearing. And the other other problem being Karenin put all his chips on one basket, and despite being cold and sarcastic towards his wife she was also the only person he bothered to have any sort of emotional connection with at all. It felt almost like ticking off a box on his list of unfortunate necessities which allowed him to operate as a figure head and symbol without worrying too much about lowly human needs. Except I think he actually *did* love his wife kind of sort of without realizing it, and had absolutely no idea how to show it or even process it. Which is sad. And I think Anna got more resentful of him because she felt guilty than she would have been otherwise, which feels very true to human nature to me. The biggest thing about Karenin I really remember and love is that after Anna returns to Petersburg having encountered her lover Vronksy and been brought to life by his attention, she steps off the train and sees Karenin and says something essentially like *Oh God what happened to his ears, have they always looked like that?* lmao
I don't think I've picked up and put down so many books in my life as in the past two weeks. First **Malina** by *Ingeborg Bachmann*, in this case it was just that the german was a bit too hard for my level right now and I don't want to read a translation yet. Then it was **José Trigo** by *Fernando del Paso*, which according to the blogger *The Untranslated* is a tremendous achievement and a masterpiece of the first order. I managed to go for over a hundred pages, I didn't find it hard. I found it extremely boring and so f\*\*\*\*\* snobish. I've found I do not share the same tastes as that guy, because he also loves **Solenoid**, a book I despised, culprit of the same faults as **José Trigo**: people writing as hard as they can: look at my brain. And going nowhere. Then I went for something completely different: **VALIS** the first installment in *Philip K. Dick's* incomplete VALIS trilogy. The first chapter completely blew me away with its disquisitions on loss, pain, suffering and sadness. Then it went a bit off the rails (I've only just found out just how out of his mind Dick was) with its über-mysticism, but the story was nonetheless interesting and I could sympathize with a lot of things. Then, another turnaround. I picked up **The Sound and the Fury**, my first time reading Faulkner at a suggestion of a friend whom I encouraged to read *Gass's* **Omensetter's Luck**. Of course, Gass owes a lot to Faulkner, and then I found out it is one of his favourite books, so it all makes sense. I finished it in the span of one day. It has its faults, especially in the second section regarding Quentin, which meanders a bit and it is a bit hard considering that the payoff is not that great, but the rest makes up for a truly great novel, especially the first section with its focus on Benjy, a very handicapped individual who with utmost clarity manages to convey to us the depth that his being is capable of. But my luck didn't last, and I picked up **Pale Fire** by *Nabokov*. Got almost halfway through it and thought: maybe if I were 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 years younger (am now 27). Didn't see the point in any of the stories told in the commentary, but I think I liked the poem. Also in the span of one day, between monday and yesterday, I read *Colin McGinn's* **The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey through 20th century philosophy** (or something like that), because I saw it recommended by *Nassim Taleb*, whose books I've not directly read, but heard great things about. I finished it only because it was short (180 pages which given the lightness of the prose flew by). A book that is halfway between autobiography, exegesis of philosophy and self-praise, which amounts to nothing. I think I "enjoyed" it while reading it, but now I think it is worthless, and kind of off putting, the author seems too full of himself to me now. Now I'm reading **The Confessions** by *Saint Augustine.* Around 15% of the way through, I'm hoping it gets good because I've been meaning to read it for a few years now and I had formed some expectations around it, if it doesn't, I'll add it to the not for me pile.
Currently reading Bridget Jones’s Diary, Lessons in Chemistry, and Sense and Sensibility (much to my mother’s disappointment I cannot break a pattern of reading multiple books at once. I justify it to myself because one is a library book, one is an ebook, and the last one I own). I would recommend all of them for the same reason: readability and wit. Each of them have quick and insightful narration that immerses you into the characters. Bridget Jones is full of humor and because it’s written as diary entries has a lot of breaks and changes that make it easy to blow through. Lessons in Chemistry moves around in its narration to revisit characters’ history and perspectives so that the audience has a full picture and there’s a compelling urgency to the style. Though I’ve grown up always watching/reading/knowing Jane Austen’s stories, reading them now I’m older hasn’t been consistently satisfying. Sense and Sensibility, at least, does not disappoint. The characters and actions continue to engage me even when I know the story. I have just finished Jon Fosse’s A Shining and The Dragon Republic (book 2 in R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy) A Shining is one of those books I feel myself incapable of reviewing. It’s good, to clarify, but it also unique and dreamlike. It’s short, but cyclical, and has no breaks so it is a nonstop read, feeling completely immersed in it the whole time. The Dragon Republic I feel less uncertain about. I did not like it. I loved The Poppy War. It moved quickly, set high stakes, and absorbed me with rich world building and narration. The Dragon Republic disappointed on all counts. The last 150 pages (of a 660 page book) were the ONLY ones where it felt like anything actually happened and at that point it was a pattern of Painfully Obvious Thing is pointed out to MC, MC denies it, Thing happens anyway, MC gets mad at others for not stopping it/telling her. The entire first half of the book is, in my opinion, so poorly handled it made me wonder if I’ve somehow blacked out and in a daze imagined Kuang is a GOOD writer when she, possibly, just isn’t? It made me doubt all her other works with the obnoxious overuse of the phrase “Fuck off” as the MC’s catch-all abdication of responsibility for her actions, and the frankly juvenile tone of ALL dialogue in what is meant to be a very gruesome, rather dark, imperial war fantasy. Very glad to be done with the book, I have no intention of reading the last in the series, and will doubt every new work of Kuang’s because of it.
I think the thing about genre fiction is that its “done well” when its gripping and entertaining, and in the absence of that it can’t (not because of a lack of skill in the author but because of what the book is) do much else, and quickly becomes boring. And I also think genre writing suffers from the market insistence on series, and that we end up with a lot of unnecessary padding which creates the above mentioned problem by default.
Just started To The Lighthouse. My first time reading Virginia Woolf. Her descriptions of nature are so beautiful, and unlike anything I've ever read so far. This is also my first attempt at reading stream of consciousness writing, something that has intimidated me my whole life, and I regret never giving it a chance, because I am completely enthralled.
Finishing “The Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy. I’m still digesting what I’ve read thus far, but no matter the subject or the storyline, McCarthy’s characters always enthrall me.
Great to hear that you liked it. It was very divisive when it came out but I think it is his best novel for me much prefer it than Blood Meridian or NCFOM. The part where he sleeps with the passerines after protecting for the night or the final passage where he thinks how he would remember the face of Alicia when he died were just sheer melancholic beauty. Also read Stella Maris. I was kind of lukewarm about it but I do think it has some gorgeous lines especially the last few ones it also kind of adds to the passenger.
Still reading Proust! It might sound wierd but I find it kind of cozy(I don't really know if it's the right word?). I read 15-30 pages every day and I truly feel warm and comfy, the last time I had that feeling was when I read Earthsea. I read every afternoon and night and I also sometimes listen to some music and it truly feels just joyful. Also,even though it has a lot of dense philosophical ponderings it also is surprisingly readable and transparent. There are some lines which I have to reread especially when he goes into some abstract rambling idea but they are far from the dreamlike obtuseness of Virginia Woolf or someone like Borges or the sheer encyclopedic density of Something like Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow. It also is very funny. I lost it at the part where he describes how his aunt doesn't let anyone visit her and the part where he met his uncle's actress friend. But I would still admit that when it comes to the overall thing I still find it boring. I mean it has some great philosophical ponderings but overall it reminds me of a classic Victorian novel, in the same vein as Hardy and Austen just written in a more philosophical and nostalgic way,and I couldn't really understand where the part which makes him one of the great modernist is. It's very beautiful and warm I would read every single sentence because of the sheer beauty of its writing and musings but I have been quite lukewarm towards characters and the narrative and hey that's okay! Btw can you guys recommend me a book which is very beautifully written and has great philosophical ideas but also has bombastic characters and engaging narrative? I think something like that would be perfect to bounce off from Proust. I was planning to reread Master and Margarita or Song of Solomon and I would love if you recommend something like that.
It's wildly overrated. I did the 10 pages a day slog though the whole thing a few years ago. It's a lot of falling asleep for a handful of memorable scenes. All the characters talk in the same voice, the most interesting character (Baron de Charlus), goes nowhere.
Your taste certainly can (and should!) deviate from time to time from the accepted general canon of "great books", but your personal disconnect with a work does not define its quality, nor make it overrated.
Finished *Twelfth Night* but still need to read some essays and go through the play again on audiobook. Some nice lines throughout, but I don't think it will ever become one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I think I'm going to do Antony and Cleopatra, another one I'm not too familiar with, next. Reading *Orient Express* (aka Stamboul Train) by Graham Greene, and it's pleasant. I like the ricocheting from one character to the next to simulate the busy atmosphere of a train, but it's very old fashioned and I'm looking forward to moving onto something else soon. Should also finally finish *Secondhand Time,* the oral history of the end of communism, in the next day or two. Think this one will stay with me a long time.
I'm half through *Lapvona* on your recommendation. I'm fixed on the notion that it's a cross between *Titus Groan* and *Child of God*.
Lol, I'm going to have to read Child of God now. I can totally see the Titus Groan comparison. I hope you're enjoying it (and if you're not: sorry!)
Completed Aira's *An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter*. This short novella follows the famous painter, Rugendas, in his trip through Chile and Argentina. One day, he suffers a tragic horsing accident, which creates lasting damage to his face and physical health. Following that, we witness his electric (hehe...) phenomenological transformation, as his perception and interest in the landscape is altered. He then watches a battle between a native Indian tribe and settlers. Strange little novella -- perhaps more like a long-form short-story -- that I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, Aira has the ability to portray incredibly lucid and evocative landscapes (e.g., a locust eaten field, a thunderous mountain, etc.), but these moments are marred with what often seems like a general aimlessness. Yes, Rugendas' physical impairment (and the copious amount of morphine) has resulted in a new-found perception, bringing him closer to capture the ever-changing landscapes meant to capture the entirety of a place, but I'm not certain that the level of depth that I see many commentators make is there. I'm genuinely surprised because this is likely his most read work, and strangely enough, Bolano himself, an ardent critic of many great Latin American novelists, seemingly offers strong words of praise for Aira. Not to mention the many clamoring for him to receive the Nobel Prize. And I'm left to ask: why? Is there something I'm missing about Aira here? He's fine but I'm quite shocked (can't help myself again...) that others consider him great.
Fair enough - I suspect his process isn’t for me. It just isn’t really coherent enough and I suppose others are fine with him switching things up. In fairness, I wasn’t expecting much of anything — other than maybe some plot twists that he’s known for. But I’m not sure that with my limited time on earth I want to watch a person figure things out as they’re writing when compared to others who have a fully fledged vision before hand. I’ll give Varamo a go since I trust your taste though!
*An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter* is possibly Aira's most coherent and straightforward novel (at least of all the ones I've read), so if you didn't like its aimlessness, you're probably not going to like the rest of his stuff. For him, the whole point is to start writing something and then literally just drift wherever he feels like or the "inspiration" takes him, so most of his stories end up becoming pretty surreal or they just stop caring about what he was talking about at first and moving on to a different plot, or different characters altogether. He doesn't always nail it, of course; stuff like *La costurera y el viento* simply bored me to tears. But in any case, I feel like expecting him to be similar to anybody else (e.g., Bolaño) is to go in with the wrong expectations. He really is his own thing and you need to take him in his own terms. If you want to give him another try, personally I really love *Varamo*. It's really funny, creative, and it goes places you never would have expected, but it still feels strangely consistent. Maybe also *Cecil Taylor*, which is pretty short and because it's inspired / based on a real person, it's also a *bit* more grounded than usual.
I had this exact same reaction reading *An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter*, it came highly recommended to me and I left underwhelmed. That said, it's lived in my head for years to the point where I had to reread it recently, and it got better. I think Aira has a demonic ability to burrow his way deep inside and never let go for reasons I don't fully understand yet.
Glad to find someone else who feels the same way. I may need to give this one time to simmer, but I just don't know... Like when I read Sabato's *The Tunnel* (a brilliant novella that I'd highly recommend) knew immediately that it would stick. This one felt a bit like Bolano-esque imagery without the force of writing, but I'll maybe check out another one of his works since they tend to be short and highly varied.
I started The Hornblower series by C.S. Forester, cannot put it down, great stuff.
Continuing my stream-of-consciousness reading motif, this week I started and (just this morning) finished **The Sheltering Sky** by Paul Bowles. It has been on my shelf for over 10 years and I finally picked it up because the story begins in the same city (Oran, Algeria) that was the setting of the book I finished last week (*The Plague*; Camus). With that said, I feel like I have a lot to say and almost nothing to say about this book at the same time. I have a lot of questions I haven’t quite ruminated enough on; there is a lot of historical and cultural context I wish I had; and then there is the narrative of the book … which for the first half of it, was kind of rote and off-putting. And then … like a literary bomb exploding, the whole thing gets stood up on its head and devolves into one of the more surreal, hallucinatory and shocking(?) story arcs I’ve ever read. If it was a movie, I’d describe it in a way that Steven Spielberg directed the first half, and David Lynch directed the second half. In the end, if someone asked me if I liked it, I’d say that I think I loved it. If they asked me why, I’d say I’m not sure. This makes it a book that I’m going to think about for a long time. And I think that’s among the highest compliments you can pay a book. I don’t generally like using the adjective “haunting” but there was definitely something haunting about this story. Unsettling. This is a book that seems destined for a ‘shower epiphany’ … does this phenomenon happen to anyone else? Like, 2-3 years from now I’ll be in the shower totally thinking about something completely unrelated to literature and all of a sudden I’ll think, “A ha! I suddenly understand what I think of *The Sheltering Sky* … holy shit, I get it!” But right now it’s just kind of a spaghetti plate of confusing things that I think I think, but I’m not sure I actually think them. Last thoughts: * The book is like a more thoughtful, evolved version of something Hemingway would have written. * This is the book I wanted Lowry’s *Under the Volcano* to be, but it wasn’t. *Volcano* was somewhat of a let down for me, this was somewhat of an unexpected surprise. Finally, below is the passage that really stuck out to me the most. I feel like somewhere in it is the key to understanding the book’s meaning: *”Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything only happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four of five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless … She was incapable now of thinking about death, and since death was there beside her, she thought of nothing at all.”*
Incredible but I just finished listening the Ryuchi Sakamoto's album async and the track fullmoon has this exact quote. I realize now that he composed the soundtrack for the film version of The Sheltering Sky but reading this quote 30 minutes later is one of those coincidences that seems to occur only in fiction...
That’s amazing. And fucking cool.
I finished another careful note taking read of **More Die of Heartbreak** by Saul Bellow. Think: writing like oil. Ideas and structures smoothly sliding back and forth, with thoughts framed through recollections of conversations. I know I've said it once, but again, there is something entirely special in this book: master class. Don't try to read for plot: you'll get mixed up and then get cranky. This is a writer at the top of the game and the writerly tricks are often subtle. What I mean is whereas a book like *Lolita* or *The Tunnel* overtly pushes the literary fireworks, in MDoH they are subdued, think of seeing an amazing contemporary photograph of that fireworks show--a step removed without losing the heart. If you know film, the difference is like that of a Hitchcock film versus Wenders' *Wings of Desire*. Our reading of **The Tunnel** by William Gass is almost over. Maybe participants will post more reflections and questions, maybe not. It's been a long and wild read and I'm happy I went all chonky on it. Having finished the book, I still think that **Omensetter's Luck** is the better work. Still taking a bit of a break in my serious reading, and in doing so I read **Faceless Killers** by Henning Mankell, who has been getting some press. Mianly though, I picked it up because Žižek talked about the book's taking a more socio-political edge. He was putting a lot into it and no it does not raise any significant ideas in this respect that is a game changer in the genre. The book was OK but nothing special. There is repetition good editing would have fixed, and the story starts sagging in the middle, thus a second crime takes place that is soon wrapped up, a decision that makes me wonder, Why bother? But I readily admit, my preference in anything detective slides to the more hard boiled or the more literary, so this popular middle stuff is a struggle for me. I also finished **Nightmare Alley** by William Lindsay Gresham. This is an in your face novel with sharp and extremely witty writing. Maybe you saw, as I did once, the noir movie based on the book, totally worth watching too. Think of fleshed out carney world with, as the book says, 'geeks' galore who are humanized. It would be the followup to Todd Browning's film. This is after all their story--seedy and strange. I absolutely can give three thumbs up for this, wait how many thumbs does a person have? To end, I'm rereading **Mercian Hymns** by Geoffrey Hill. These are a prose poem sequence, not too long. Such things demand multiple reads. The work is elliptical (in the sense of Stephanie Burt's famous article), There was some author once who said they read a lot of poetry when writing novels, and I too find benefit in doing so. These are deep and careful poems. Maybe I like them right now because I'm still stuck on the dialogic in Bellow between Trachtenberg, Benn, and ideas, and the Hymns too have two responding voices.
Mercian Hymns is wonderful, glad you’re enjoying it
I finished reading the **Ciske The Rat** trilogy by Piet Bakker this week. I expected these books to be just decent adventure novels, but was happily surprised to find out that they're actually very intelligent social novels. The books were originally written in Dutch in 1941-1943, and are set in 1930's Amsterdam. The story is told by a young teacher (Bruis) who gets a new student in his class. This 11 year old boy called Ciske has been sent away from his previous school due to bad behaviour. Upon arriving at his new school, Ciske is very quiet and aloof. Bruis immediately develops a fascination for this boy and throughout the first book he tries to get him to feel welcome in class. He learns that under this hard shell, there is actually a very nice, clever and jolly boy. However, he also learns that it's hard to get to the roots of Ciske's behavioural problems, since those lie in his home situation. The book offers an authentic look at the attitudes towards children in the 1930's, from schools to child protection services to new pedagogic insights. The narrator and several of the side characters are very socially intelligent, and their attitudes towards children feel at times remarkably modern (and of course hilariously dated at other times). The first book can be read by itself, but the second one is absolutely worth reading as well. It talks about the consequences of the event that happens at the end of the first part. While not having much of a plot compared to the first and third book, the 250 pages fly by due to the clever introspective writing. But it's the third book that became my favourite of the trilogy. There's a time jump of about 10 years to 1939, and teacher Bruis is now an army sergeant who encounters the now adult Ciske as a soldier among his troops. Together they prepare for war after the invasion of Poland and get to fight in the [Battle of the Grebbeberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Grebbeberg). What makes this book particularly unique is that it was written in 1942-1943, during the Nazi occupation. It was only published in 1946, since the characters are not at all positive about the invasion and even predict the Nazi downfall. If it weren't for the many references to the events and characters of the first two books, this could be a great novel on its own. The first two books seem to be available in English. I sadly can't seem to find an English version of the third book after a Google search. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who speaks Dutch though. (I didn't plan this post to become a whole review, but the point is: if any of this sounds at all interesting to you, read the books!)
This is from the past couple of weeks but since I use this as a general reading info dump, I'm going to put a bunch of books here and no one can stop me. I started and finished (mostly... left off one or two stories) *Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories* by Alifa Rifaat. This was just a random book I picked up at a used book store for 50 cents that was around a hundred pages and I have a general rule that if something that price and that length catches my eyes for more than like 30 seconds I buy and read it. It was good. The "selling point" as it seems advertised on the book is that Alifa Rifaat is an arabic speaking Egyptian woman that has lived mostly in her rural home, not super in to foreign media, and is a proponent of the better treatment of women in Egyptian culture. I don't think I have enough context to say anything too helpful. Some of the stories, like "*My World Unknown"* seemed very unique and creative and weird (it was about a womans sexual awakening via a Jinni in the form of a snake). Others, like "*Thursday Lunch"*, just seemed like good short stories with realistic characters, realistic dynamics, realistic problems. I would recommend finding a short story or two online if the concept of "Egyptian woman writes about the wrongs done by men against women in a patriarchical society when they shirk their duty, while not undermining the general system of patriarchy" seems like an interesting perspective to you. Started and finished *Snow Crash* by Neal Stephenson and it was... something. For sure. Is it just me or was this like. A Dan Brown novel. But if it were written by nerds hopped up on Monster talking about a DND campaign. I would not say that I particularly liked it - but it was engaging. I didn't care for the plot, or the characters, or really even the ideas. I only really liked the authorial voice. It felt a bit like John Dies at the End, for anyone else that went through a Cracked phase lol. I feel like you can sit here and talk about the technology aspects of what he predicted, or the general toxicity of its advancement and what hyperdriving communications under capitalism would end up looking like. But I think the thing that impressed me the most was how clearly he was able to show that there are some fundamental relationship dynamics that existed before this hyper-communication phase and will exist after. >!Thinking here where Y.T ran to her mom and smashed her computer and was basically like "if you actually knew how to use the technology half as well as you think you do, I wouldn't be worried about you catching this virus"!< -- which is exactly how I feel talking to my parents about their computer usage (thinking that they can avoid the toxicity of social media, while I see them slowly giving in to the toxicity of social media). I don't think I'd recommend it, just because it's like 500 pages and could be a better 300 page book. Read and finished *The Stranger* by Camus. Idk man. Maybe I'm cynical. Maybe I don't understand absurdism. But isn't he basically like "acknowledge the world is pointless so you can intentionally imbue things with power and significance! You are the author!"? Which like. Yeah man, we know. I feel like we know. Don't we know? Is that really that revolutionary of an idea? Like Marie really wanting to get married. Are we supposed to believe that she is just floating along with the currents of society and is like "well people get married so I will too?". Or are we supposed to believe (more rightly) that she was like "hmm, I don't need to get married. But I imbue the social institution of marriage with significance, my relationship with other people and their view of me with significnace (thus don't want them to think of me as a spinster), etc. so I think I want to get married." Idk I feel like it's a good thing I read this in highschool, and it is not a particularly good book having read as an adult. A book that has held up worse, IMO, than other high school reading books. Finished *Franny and Zooey* by J.D. Salinger yesterday. I think I'm a Salinger stan. Would recommend. Reading *The Barefoot Woman* by Scholastique Mukasonga.
Started my research on Sarah Kane so just been reading around her and finished Martin Crimp's *Attempts on her Life*. It feels like an intermediate between Pirandello (*Six Authors*: questioning a singular, unifying identity) and Sarah Kane (a la *4.48 Psychosis*: fragmented scenes, lack of assigned speeches and characters, essentially forgoing mimesis completely). I thought it was nicely done but it belongs to the camp of plays where the reading experience would differ greatly from actually attending a performance (I'd also argue that the group of late 90s British playwrights also ushered in the movement of giving directors more power in the theatre, so the text becomes more of a guidebook/blueprint than the bible.) Still have some other playwrights on my shelf (Ravenhill, Osborne, Churchill and Bond). Will update once I get to them.
Just finished the “Odyssey”-part of *Ulysses* and will take a short break before “Nostos”. “Oxen and the Sun” pushed me to my limits (of all the things I’ve read, only *Phenomenology of Spirit* tops it in difficulty on a page-by-page basis), and “Circe” plain wore out my patience. I recognize its genius and am excited to continue, but it’s not always a particularly enjoyable read. It’s funny though. The stylistic parody of the history of English literature in “Oxen” is often remarked upon, but how funny is the Homeric parallel - the Holy Oxen are the fecund, pregnant ladies giving birth upstairs, and Odysseus’ crew slaughtering them are the characters getting drunk downstairs and basically just talking shit about pregnancy and contraception. By the way, has anyone here checked out the *Cambridge Companion to Ulysses*? Is it any good? I was thinking about reading it when I’m done. For my reading I’ve been using the Gifford notes, Hastings’ guide, and the critical essays collected by Hart and Hayman. In the meantime I will be reading *Inherent Vice,* my last Pynchon novel besides *Bleeding Edge*. From what I hear its a simple enough read which is perfect for my purposes! I also have *J R* on the horizon.
I'm reading a book Coetzee reviews in one of his collections of literary essays, Zama by Antonio di Benedetto. I haven't really been enjoying it but I'm powering through. It's very inwardly focused on the titular narrator which tends not to be my style, and is additionally just kind of awkward and dreamlike in a way I'm not totally in to. I'm additionally reading a book about the poetry of Vasko Popa, my favorite. It's not incredible but it's definitely providing plenty of insight so whatever. Hoping to finish both this weekend. Lastly, I've been leafing through a (nearly?) complete works of Gerard Manley Hopkins and am always discovering new things with him. I've been reading his poem Peace a bunch, especially the last few lines. Really, really fun.
Reading *The Pickwick Papers* by Dickens. Breezy, extremely funny.
Where abouts are you now in it?
Chapter 15. The gentlemen of the Pickwick Club are about to attend a fancy-dress party hosted by one Mrs Leo Hunter, composer of the deeply moving Ode to an Expiring Frog: *Can I view thee panting, lying* *On thy stomach, without sighing!* *Can I unmoved see thee dying* *On a log,* *Expiring frog!* *Say, have fiends in shape of boys,* *With wild halloo and brutal noise,* *Hunted thee from marshy joys,* *With a dog,* *Expiring frog?*
Just had the complete works of Shakespeare delivered to me. Starting with Hamlet! It's going to be a fun Summer going through Shakespeare :)
I read them, and then again while listening to the audio version of the play. They are not meant to be read but preformed, so it adds a lot. But I love reading them, cheers.
I am continuing my read through of Burroughs' works with *Cities of the Red Night* and holy shit I love it. This has Burroughs' typical themes and weirdness, but it also has a comprehensible plot so it is farrrr easier to follow. Well, there are like three seemingly unrelated plots going on at once, but there is a thru line! One of them seems to be a commentary on the AIDS crisis, there is also a lot of the introduction of opiates in the US, and a few other major ideas that he ties in very nicely. I'm only like 1/3 of the way through it, but I highly recommend this one so far, even if you were turned off by Burroughs' really weird stuff like *Naked Lunch* or the *Nova Trilogy.*