ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

Been reading the NYRB collection of Balzac shorter works "The Human Comedy". Venturing into murder mysteries, war stories, political commentary, and other detours, in addition to the Paris high-society-meets-low-life milieu he's best known for, they showcase his range. Currently, taking a break to re-read Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life. A once every 10 years cycle seems about right for revisiting that great theological edifice of despair.

That reminds me of this post

If anything would cure despair it's surely that cover art.

fragments of a life story: the collected short writings of denton welch

Ooooh

yes, was glad to find a copy of that... a hell of a lot cheaper than this thing if not quite so impressive looking!

Made my way around Malcolm Bowie's appraisal of In Search of Lost Time in Proust Among the Stars. I think it says something about the quality of this work that you wouldn't give it to someone who hasn't read at least a substantial portion of Proust, despite having many excerpts of it scattered throughout -- its so highly detailed in its surgery of the book and will enrich the experience for people who love the book and go back to it. Bolano's Last Evenings on Earth is simply magisterial. Most of the stories (as so much Bolano) centre around literature, politics, love & friendship - its a skilled intertwining of these, and more. How people connect and then can simply disappear (usually because of politics, although sometimes they just do to end a story). Much of it is an affectionate portrait of a person or scene. Above all its his skill as a supreme storyteller in a kinda Arabian Nights mode that comes through.

I'm finishing Henri Michaux's account of his experiences with Mescaline and Hashish in Miserable Miracle. Having read a book on Proust that has a chapter on Time its actually nice to see an account that talks about how drugs enhance space (as well as time). I am rushing through as I don't particularly like it as writing.

I've just started Bolano's "The Savage Detectives". Pretty great so far

Finished Paul Beatty's The Sellout, which was very funny and continued to have laugh out loud moments throughout the rest of the book. Like Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods, it's well-executed satire in the Swiftian tradition and it delivers well on its audacious premise. Unlike DeWitt's more deadpan treatment, Beatty maintains a fast-paced comic energy throughout and it's filled with great asides and one-liners.

At one point he references the book Oreo by Fran Ross (a former writer for Richard Pryor) from the 70s. Has anyone read it? I've seen it around - New Directions Press re-published it in the last few years - but I don't think I've heard much about it (apart from a few reviews). I'm curious to hear what anyone's thought and how it holds up today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo_(novel) and http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-overlooked-classic-about-the-comedy-of-race

I've been wanting to read more Bolano ever since finishing By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas a while ago. 2666 is sitting, daunting, on my shelf and I don't think I'll bring myself to it yet. Perhaps Last Evenings on Earth is a good one to read in the meantime?

Up next for me is The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, or rather, Merseult contre enquete - which I will attempt to read, with the help of a dictionary, en francais - which is a re-telling of Camus' Stranger from the perspective of the brother of the Arab killed in the story.

take a hint from your friend Michael B and read the Savage Detectives!

Another review of "Oreo" from NY Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/07/14/blacks-jews-entangled/

Sounds interesting.

Lol, I'm a Michael B irl and before seeing the message above mine was verrry confused and weirded out for a good minute. Yes, I do want to read it too, but am trying to squeeze in a few shorter things in between longer books. I do mean to read both it and 2666 eventually...

2666is actually much more approachable if you think of it as being the five conjoined novels that it is. Read one, take a break if you need to to read something else, read another, get your momentum, read book 3, really in the grove now, read book 4, then hang yourself, read vol 5. it's easy.

Savage Detectives is technically ""long"" if you count pages but it's p breezy, i read the first half of it in a sitting without even noticing

All this scottish chat makes me wish the once-great Canongate Classics series, full of great scottish lit, was still a going concern
― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Friday, 14 April 2017 07:44 (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what's your search & destroy for this imprint

'savage detectives' is such a satisfying novel. everything hopeful and juvenile; everything looming and setting up 2666. i don't know how you channel that adolescent love in the face of impending doom. i don't know how i could ever stop envying those mexico city cafes and rooftop bodies.

i've been reading harry mathews again ('the conversions'). i prefer 'my life in cia'. i also love that he existed.

i just met with a bunch of people who teach out at montana: david gates (ann beattie's ex) whose novel 'jernigan' is such a world to live in. he's a fucking riot. but i'd really like to recommend kevin canty's novel 'the underworld.' it deals with the aftermath of a 70's mining disaster in idaho. the grief is everywhere; nothing is adorned; the reader lives in the mines and bars and everything else seems utterly true. it's nice to read something without any conceit.

Canongate Classics worth reading, to start with:

Wild Harbour by Ian Macpherson

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

The Member And The Radical by John Galt

A Beleaguered City And Other Tales Of The Seen And The Unseen by Margaret Oliphant

A Glasgow Trilogy by George Friel

Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark

Plus pretty much anything by Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robin Jenkins, Catherine Carswell, Alasdair Gray (if to your taste), James Kennaway

And also, just because ut's so well done and weirdly charming, The New Testament in Scots

I read "The Wager" very slowly because my eyes have been tired but also because I found it slow going; I was all ready to dismiss it as a piece of tedious mannered Victoriana and then it walloped me with a big emotional sucker punch at the end. Glad I kept going but I didn't find the process of reading it especially enjoyable.

I am now reading "There But For The" by Ali Smith. I like Ali Smith.

started reading calvin trillins 'American stories' I really love how plainly he writes

but headed on a vacay soon so gonna bring rafa nadal autobio & Truman capotes summer crossing

henry green: blindness

it's nice to read something without any conceit.

ain't it the truth. ten years ago that novel would have been narrated from the pov of a local dog. and praised for it.

bringing Jeff VanderMeer The Southern Reach Trilogy on a sorely needed vacation

I finished Sagas of Warrior Poets. The last of the five included in the group, Viglund's Saga was interesting in that it was an attempt to mash-up the usual saga material (envy, lust, raiding, sneak attacks, bloody death) with a romantic tale more along the lines of Tristan & Isolde. But because Vikings did not 'do' chivalry or romance, the romantic parts are bit like crude application of lipstick on the usual blood-and-guts.

I checked out a copy of Wolf Hall from my local library, based on many admiring mentions on ILB. I am only half-certain I'll engage with it, but I'm willing to try it next.

Hilary Mantel's prose is really delicious. I need to read Bring Out The Bodies the sequel to it.
Also have Mantel's French Revolution book somewhere and at least one other.

Just started Positively 4th Street which I've meant to read for ages.
Picked it up for 1p plus p+p.
So far reading about Joan Baez being manipulative in late 50s Boston. I think Richard Farina's just appeared too.

Just finishing Errornomics about Human capacity for error, causes and possible solutions which is pretty interesting.

I loved Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies. I'd be happy to say they were minor novels, but there's something vast in the vision of them, and the undertaking. Mantel is an odd proposition. Given what she's been through, and the breadth of her powers, I find her quite intimidating. There's something of the night about her...

This is making me want to read Beyond Black again.

Yeah, those Cromwell books are, if nothing else, amazingly addictive page-turners. Still a bit puzzled as to why she decided to rehabilitate a figure that, from all the historical accounts I've read, was a pretty terrible guy - it's not like she has a very clear agenda for doing so - but as fiction it's great stuff.

I'm continuing my run of Hitchcock source material with Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca

Having in the distant past (mid-1980s) attempted to write an historical novel, I kind of understand Hillary Mantel's job, so that I notice the author doing her job much more than the average reader. So far, this doubled awareness of seeing both the story and the mechanics of telling the story has not damped my engagement with the story. That's a good sign.

The (completely necessary and unavoidable) anachronisms embedded into the novel are not likely to dissuade me from enjoying it. iow, it looks like a winner. But, this book is not in the same class as Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower which I read last December. That one was a small miracle of concentrated excellence.

I went back, and it was just this past February I read The Blue Flower, not last December!

i'm reading bruce sterling's the zenith angle which is a 9/11 cyber-whatzit. lotsa early 2000s microwave talk.

I've been wanting to read more Bolano ever since finishing By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas a while ago. 2666 is sitting, daunting, on my shelf and I don't think I'll bring myself to it yet. Perhaps Last Evenings on Earth is a good one to read in the meantime?

I can't say I enjoyed Savage Detectives, it felt like he got the shape of the thing wrong and actually got it right in 2666. One thing I'll say about almost any Bolano is that once you start you find it very hard to stop - he was a supreme storyteller.

Nocilla Dream by Agustin Fernandez Mallo. Upthread I said how little I liked Nocilla Experience and this was just to check really (it was a cheap copy), got half-way through before I threw it in my 'to sell' pile. Kinda easy-going and easy to read, a bunch of dispatched stories from around the world with attempted essayisms that is either half-baked or alienated, very little there for me to chew on. It was telling when it quoted from Thomas Bernhard's Correction (a real favourite of mine) that it really felt so so flat, as writing. My problem is the speed at which I read is dictated by the writing and sometimes the things that are easy I justt read way way too fast and with no patience to try and extract more sense out of a thing.

Better though are essays by William Empson as collected in Argufying (not the best title in the world) and what comes through is a mix of highly analytical readings with oddly sprinkled biographical details and anecdote. Its eccentric to say the least, but never less than exhilarating too. You learn something, or you laugh at something else. Dipping in and out of this as well as Borges' essays as collected in Total Library, basking in the concentrated talk-prose of his lectures given toward the end of his life.

Supplementing the above with a collection of selected poems by Heaney, and another collection of medieval poetry from Portugal/Galicia (Troubadour tradition).

It is hard to stop with Bolano, but I found that I could pace myself, because of his pace--- according to the editorial supplement incl.,each section of 2666 was meant to stand alone, in series, tantalizing but not teasing, to increase royalties for his kids (he knew he was dying, which adds to the sense of walls behind and between the spectacles). But I yammered about all that enough on the Bolano thread.

Sorry for the punctuation---anyway, see James Morrison's advice above.

I can't say I enjoyed Savage Detectives, it felt like he got the shape of the thing wrong and actually got it right in 2666.

my reaction too

2666 is definitely a more accomplished work than The Savage Detectives.

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
*Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

* (zora neale hurston is left-handed)

^ so, had it not been for sexism, she might've had a good career as a boxer or baseball pitcher?

“Future married couples pass by, chatting seamstresses pass by, young men in a hurry for pleasure pass by, those who have retired from everything smoke on their habitual stroll, and at one or another doorway a shopkeeper stands like an idle vagabond, hardly noticing a thing. Army recruits – some of them brawny, others slight – slowly drift along in noisy and worse-than-noisy clusters. Occasionally someone quite ordinary goes by. Cars at that time of day are rare, and their noise is musical. In my heart there’s a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.”

- Pessoa

Is that the Book of Disquiet? For whatever reason, I've avoided that until now. Waiting for the stars to align or something stupid.

I'm reading Harold Bloom's massive book on Shakespeare. While I quite like the central conceit - that Shakespeare has become a kind of secular godhead, and fundamental in our understanding of what it means to have interiority and selfhood - the book is strong bluster and oddly empty of anything new to say.

Yes it is! I just started it

Is Harold Bloom ever worth it? he seems to be a factory for producing high-class Cliff notes

Lol

Harold Bloom cannot write a word that holds the slightest interest for any audience that he would claim to be his peers.

just finished Book 1 of Jeff VanderMeer's southern reach Trilogy. good creepy suspenseful glacially slow reveal

He was a terrific gateway drug, and while signing my copy of The Western Canon sixteen years ago his bullfrog eyes rolled back in his head as he recited the last stanza of "Sunday Morning"; when he finished he said, "Will that do, dear?"

i liked Harold Bloom in college, haven't read since. what i liked about him was not so much criticism but his soaring, hyperbolic praise for the things he liked

Amazing, can very easily picture this --- > "The Western Canon sixteen years ago his bullfrog eyes rolled back in his head as he recited the last stanza of "Sunday Morning"; when he finished he said, "Will that do, dear?"

I think he was best described as a "bloviating windbag" but high-class Cliff Notes is a spot-on description of much of his output (not in a bad way, I read a lot of his ed. collections and intro essays in my undergrad years). When he's on a roll, he can be very good on Shelley, Shakespeare and Whitman, imo.

His lechery is pretty gross though. I read somewhere that he was the thesis supervisor to a young Camille Paglia and David Duchovny (!) at the same time in the late 80s. Must have been uh interesting discussions in the seminars of that cohort.

Just finished the new David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon. As good as any true crime book I've read.

i kinda love harold bloom, but i don't think of the present-day bloom as a real literary critic so much as just a very brilliant eccentric sitting there talking to himself, not really caring if anyone's listening. (not unlike gore vidal in his later years, though harold managed to avoid becoming the conspiracist crank that gore did.) he's definitely not somebody you go to for sustained argument these days. his shakespeare book never really gets around to making the "invention of personality" argument in any depth, apart from talking about some character he loves, like rosalind, and then saying something like "ah, but what real person could compare to the divine rosalind?" but back when i read the book i remember feeling like his genuine and unforced love for shakespeare was contagious and maybe more fun to read than a more serious, less indulgent book might have been. it did bum me out that he apparently thinks all of orson welles's shakespeare films are "dreadful." (i suspect orson's falstaff, sad and alone at the end of life, hit a bit too close to home for harold.)