2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?

I have set aside Crashed, Adam Tooze, in order to finish Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson, wherewith I am nearing the end. It has been rather scattered for a history, but full of anecdotal interest. Dyson is now riding his hobby horse full tilt as the book nears its end, preaching the 'high-tech singularity' as humanity's final destiny. I remain skeptical of his hallelujahs.

I am not sure I will be positioned to pick up the Tooze book where I left off. I will soon be very distracted by sheparding my daughter through surgery and I am not likely to have the focus or attention required for economics until November at the earliest.

Hre's link back to the 2018 Summer WAYR thread.

as mentioned at the end of the other thread, I was feeling ambivalent about Forbidden Line by Paul Stanbridge. I reached page 45 and have had to give up. I'm predisposed to the picaresque and discursive, but the facetious tone and garrulous, cod-18th century prose manner (a version of it, Smollet, or a botched Sterne), seen somehow to be inherently funny, is disastrous, and not apparently to any purpose. Potentially interesting constraints – one of the main characters doesn't believe in Time, and wants to return to a pre-Roman vocabulary, are just waved aside. Discursions on, say, the Peasants Revolt, feel like research garbled up to fit the style of the book.

Pynchon can't be answerable for his imitators, but he's a bad master. I feel there's a cohort of well-off university educated young men complacent enough to feel this affected, arch, QI style is fine or even entertaining, but it's just horribly irritating and persistently so, line to line, page to page.

This was the second of my random selection to see what's interesting in contemporary British and Irish lit, after Murmur by Will Eaves, which was excellent.

Anybody want a fairly new copy of Forbidden Line by Paul Stanbridge by the way?

When you sell it like that...

rereading Leviathan (new penguin edition) and The Last Samurai.
Spectres of Marx bcz I want to see what Derrida is actually on about w/r/t hauntology (came from being mildly irritated by a podcast that rambles around british creepy vibe/SF/lots of theory; thought I should read for myself rather than having someone bang on in my ear).
Some other stuff which I can't remember right now - a bit all over the place after my run at 3/4 of Dance to the Music of Time.

I finished Howards End last night. What a sweet, sad book.

I'm so going to die like Leonard Bast

Not a bad way to go out tbh

Started Solar Bones by Mike McCormack last night. Now this is more like it. it opens to the sound of an Angelus bell - a call to prayer...

six chimes of three across a minute and a half, a summons struck on the lip of the void which gathers this parish together through all its primary and secondary roads with
all its schools and football pitches
all its bridges and graveyards
all its shops and pubs
the builder's yard and health clinic
the community centre
the water treatment plant and
the handball alley
the made world with
all the focal points around which a parish like this gathers itself as surely as
the world itself did at the beginning of time, through
mountains, rivers and lakes

so that quote hopefully captures the style. barely any punctuation, with prose broke up on the page to regulate the rhythm of the meaning (nicely complementary to the rhythm of the Angelus), and with embodied thoughts about creation and cosmos interleaved with the mundane landscape of County Mayo. The effect is as it should be – investing the quotidian with a weight of magical, cosmic meaning, and giving body to the religious and cosmic.

there are various reasons to suppose and I am assuming that the main narrator is in fact dead, a revenant, haunting the house he lived in, and picking up the daily paper...

that i might have the small pleasure of opening up a fresh newspaper, hearing it rattle and creak as it discloses itself, one of those experiences which properly begin in the day or the afternoon as is the case now, turning it over and leafing through it
starting at the back, the sports pages, to read the headline
Hard Lessons in Latest Defeat
as if this were the time and place for a sermon
which prompts me to close it again quickly, not wanting any homily at this hour of the day with the paper showing the date as
November 2nd, the month of the Holy Souls already upon us, the year nearly gone so

so it's witty too. so, yes, this is just really good i think – caveat that I'm only 40 pages in, but. with this and Murmur I feel that recent lit has delivered a couple of really excellent reads. i want to keep quoting:

he's good on farm machinery, on his father dismantling 'the farm's soul in many ways – the grey Massey Ferguson 35'

the day i came home from school and walked into the hayshed to find him standing over the engine completely broken down and laid on the concrete floor that was dusted with hayseed, piece by piece along its length
cylinder head, pistons, crankshaft
to where I stood in the doorway in my school trousers and jumper, terrified at the sight because to one side lay the body of the 35, gutted of its most essential parts and forlorn now, its components ordered across the floor in such a way as to make clear not only the sequence of its dismantlement but also the reverse order in which it would be restored to the full working harmonic of itself and my father standing over the whole thing, sighting through a narrow length of fuel line, blowing through it till he was satisfied that it was clean through its length before he laid it on the floor, giving it its proper place in the sequence and explaining simply
it was burning oil

a sequence which ends with

this may have been my first moment of anxious worry about the world, the first instance of my mind spiralling beyond the immediate environs of
hearth, home and parish, towards
the wider world beyond
way beyond
since looking at those engine parts spread across the floor my imagination took fright and soared to some wider, cataclysmic conclusion about how the universe itself was bolted and screwed together, believing I saw how heaven and earth could come unhinged when some essential cottering pin was tapped out which would undo the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations and send them plummeting through the void of space towards some final ruin out on the farthest mearing of the universe

he's not afraid of bravura and set pieces – here the way he's framed that entire galactic spiral into the land around him – and they come very consistently, in fact starting before the other has finished.

another section takes its starting point as the photo of a women on hunger strike protesting against a pressurised gas pipeline:

and, not for the first time, stories like this always strike me as
peculiar to Mayo
Mayo God help us
Mayo abú
a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles, a political reflex that has twitched steadily down the years and seems rooted in some aggravated sense of sinfulness because, like no other county it is blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer houses and hermitages just as it is crossed with pilgrim paths and penitential ways, the whole county such a bordered realm of penance and atonement that no one should be surprised that self-starvation becomes a political weapon when, to the best of knowledge, no other country in the Republic has called up three of its sons to starve to death for flag and country so late in the twentieth century
McNeela, Gaughan, Stagg
Arbour Hill, Parkhurst, Wakefield
valiant souls who took their inspiration from our martyred land and saw a world beyond themselves as did
my own favourite
a young hermit who, towards the end of the last millennium, took up residence in a ruined bothán on the side of a hill not ten miles from here, a young woman who, by way of some ancient rite, was professed a hermit by the Vatican with licence to beg and preach among these rainy hills, claiming that God had called her to go deeper into the desert so that she could be more aware of his presence in greater silence and solitude but who, after a few years living the full sacramental life on the mountains of West Mayo with nothing to distract the eye or hand save damp sheep and stone walls, came forth with her message to the world, telling us that
hell is real and it's not empty
simple and blunt as that
hell is real and it's not empty

quoted at length, because that pay-off is marvellous i think, especially given its importance to the book, but also this is a book clearly about Mayo, and that phrase there 'a bordered realm of penance and atonement', yes, this feels like it's about the bordered realm of Mayo as spiritual realm.

he really uses those wheels of phrases well as well:

a large, abandoned industrial facility in the north of the county is being assessed as a possible site for an asbestos conversion plant which will form part of a massive toxic dump to process industrial and medical waste from the rest of the province in a state-of-the-art incineration process which, if economic studies and environmental assessments prove favourable, could come online in a few years' time with the promise of jobs and subsidiary investment across the county and
something out of the past
a psychic link which dates back to my childhood when
my father worked on its construction
he fucking did
worked on it ata a time when, with a similar promise of prosperity, it was spoken of as if it were a cathedral or a temple that was being built on that raised site above the small town of Killala

that 'he fucking did' is almost of the school yard – angry rebuttal of unspoken doubt.

distractingly it has a character called darragh in it. i mean not wildly improbable obv but p much every time i read it a lol circuit fires in my head.

That's great, thanks so much. Land of penance and sacrifice is also the glimpse of late or maybe mid-Twenty-First Century I already had with with first coffee this morning---but reading it in this context reminds me of recurrence more than planetary twilight.

Anyway, before things get worse again, and worser still, I hope to read Solar Bones by electric light.

James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk
Lionel Trilling - The Last Decade

Autumn then. The Plains by Gerald Murnane, an obliquely told tale of a filmmaker's anthropological study of the Plain people (effectively what seems like the Australian - white - inlands). As I am not very familiar with Australian culture it took me a while to grasp what might be going on and I had to model a British rural radicalism onto it - and even then I am not sure that fully works. But I had to find an approach due to the exceptional force of the writing. One of the great reads of the year and I look forward to re-reading, and finding more by Murnane. Followed that up with a few novellas. Grappling with the cruelties of Maeve Brennan's The Visitor where a daughter comes home and is pushed away. Saba's Ernesto is an unfinished slice of mid-20th century queer autofictional literature from the Italian poet - now this had a trick of dialogue and a somewhat cold commentary of the narrator (Ernesto) who is looking back at his actions many decades ahead from when they took place. The dialogue itself is dialect from Trieste (where Saba grew up) and so, as the translator says, the flip back-and-forth between dialect (and crude too, as the discourse surrounds the narrator's first sexual experiences with a male builder and female prostitute) and learned commentary in the Italian original is impossible to render into English. More alienation in Bae Suah's A Greater Music where the female Korean narrator uses an accident as a starting point to reflect on past relationships with a German working class man and a highly cultured woman who is called M. Both the narrator and M are academic minded, and there is a deep connection with Germanic culture in both its love (I loved passages on going to classical concerts - it was great to read about Bernd Alois Zimmermann in a novel and I was surprised that she only mentioned but didn't cover Isang Yun in more depth) and how alienating culture can be (her German bf is alienated from it). There is a Sebaldian menadering quality that I find addictive in the moment but leaves me cold afterwards - although I will pick something more from her if I see it. Finally Tanizaki's A Cat, A Man and Two Women was a strong tale of a love quartet - with Lily the cat holding all the cards. She has a hold over all of them and its a very funny, wonderfully conceived tale.

Autumn then.

Northern Hemisphere hegemony rules all.

I had to model a British rural radicalism onto it - and even then I am not sure that fully works

Yeah, you need to add an undercurrent of white settlers committing genocide: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php

otm, and I did think about that - I couldn't tell whether that was a troubling aspect of this book as I found the experience of it overwhelming, but maybe that's because it felt like I was engaging with Australian literature for the first time too.

And Other Stories are doing a couple of Murnane reissues, which I'm excited about.

https://www.andotherstories.org/authors/gerald-murnane/

I started A Million Windows by Murnane on a flight to Australia earlier this year, and was really enjoying it, but put it down to watch Thor: Ragnarok, I think. Must pick up again.

For those who didn't see this posted on Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction, still an intriguing read:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (the Constance Garnett translation in the old hardcover Modern Library edition that I bought maybe 20 years ago)
Sylvia Plath - Collected Poems
Norbert Elias - The Civilizing Process

Things I can remember since last time:

The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner; I get why the nu-nature-writing crowd like this dude so much but he's a class above I think, deeply-felt connection to place lightly worn (rather than the current Fabery opposites). I would have been quite pleased to not enjoy this but I liked it very much. It's short.

The Peeler by Bertie Marshall; Dostoyevsky Wannabe business, kind of a flash novel featuring a fuggy little slice of a decades-long NYC lost weekend. Slight in the best way.

Gaudy Bauble by Isabel Waidner; more DW, the slippiness of super-experimental* prose put to good use is a kinda-detective story about the slippiness of identity and gender. The rarest thing for experimental detective novels to do is to keep up the energy all the way through and this one does. I wish I'd cared a bit more at the end, but that's asking for a sticky moon I think.

Helena or The Sea In Summer by Julian Ayesta, end of the nineteenth-century, hazy beach-based bildungsroman. Sidra with Rosie, but a bit more buttoned-up, undeniably lovely.

I'm nibbling away at Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, which is doing that Japanese super-flat and super-delicate thing so far.

*?

oh yeah thanks

*experimental is obviously an awful word but I'm trying to be succinct and you know what I mean

no actual experiments were carried out in the writing of this book.

alan garner is a cut above definitely. i loved his books as a child and on the back of a couple of interviews i read recently was thinking about revisiting him so this is timely.

I checked my mailbox today for the new Deborah Eisenberg collection. Anticipating it has given life a purpose and shape.

Going to Lisbon soon so reading Portuguese stuff:

"An Explanation of the Birds" by Antonio Lobo Antunes.
Brilliantly written but saddled with an irritating circus metaphor running thru it. I hate fucking circuses. I couldn't really believe the central character either.

"Lucio's Confession" by Mário de Sá-Carneiro.
Short novel, which I kind of ploughed through, I think I read it in three hours. It's fin de siècle Paris, it's an ingenious little novel about repressed homosexuality by an ingenious but repressed little homosexual poet - actually not sure if he was little or not. If I still had it, I'd quote from the long description of a decadent party the main character goes to, which sounds like the party scene from "Midnight Cowboy" crossed with some E'ed up rave from 1991.

"O Crime do Padre Amaro" by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz.
Not the sort of thing I'd normally read, late 19th century realism which reveals itself as sledgehammer satire/ social commentary by the end - the Catholic Church does not emerge from it unscathed, shall we say - I'm amazed it got published, to be honest. Breasts seem central, almost as much as shit is in "Blindness" by Jose Saramago, which I also read.

For a bit of light non-Lusitanian relief, I started reading "For Marx" by Louis Althusser today. Fuck knows why.

Garner - also a childhood fave, we actually read Weirdstone... at my school (Red Shift was not on the cards, and p much puzzled me when I picked up a paperback copy a little later).

I'm hoping Tim will offer more detail on the 'nu-nature-writing crowd'. I can see how The Owl Service (my top choice) especially would fit into any reasonable 'folk horror' discourse, but I don't know enough of Garner's later books to think of him as primarily a nature writer (tho he is v good on landscape among other things).

yeah i was wondering that. found “lightly worn” and “Fabery opposite” an interesting distinction.

certainly within the pastoral/uncanny crowd i find despite surface similarities and sympathies that there are some i can’t stand and some i love. and i’m interested in that response. pompous emphasis on psychogeography tactics and tropes would be my crude sideswipe.

i wonder if Tim is getting at that. tho “Fabery” are you getting at that dreadful earnest enthusiasm for the effortful sincerity of rural life. trying to think of examples now.

also curious to know why you would have been quite pleased not to enjoy it. because of that crowd?

Mostly laughing out every now and then to Helen DeWitt's Some Trick short story collection where -- for much of it, if not entirely so -- her interests in language and creativity come to the fore, both these aspects being illustrated via examples from the art world and (crucially) the world of technology and management. Her insecurities around finishing or accomplishing a work, that this work could be good, that it somehow not be interfered with by the forces outside of it (commerce, other egos impinging upon) also comes through at times. Giuseppe di Lampedusa's Two Stories & A Memory, an assortment of scraps from the author of The Leopard, has powerful recollections of the author's childhood and its really interesting to see how he translates those to not only his classic novel, but also mining them again and again in the story (The Professor and the Siren) and in the only completed chapter he managed to finish of his other novel - the other 'story' presented here. A distanced nostalgia, at times critical of the past he celebrates, but also with hints of disgust at the world and the things from it being destroyed, its artefacts rotting away. Finally, I failed to grapple with the irrationalities in Yoel Hoffmannn's The Sound of One Hand - 281 Zen Koans with Answers, but it was nice to try. I can see how doing this with a reading group could be interesting.

Really still need to check out Lampedusa and Eisenberg---that recent profile linked from Rolling Contemproary Literary Fiction is very appealing.
my father worked on its construction
he fucking did
worked on it ata a time when, with a similar promise of prosperity, it was spoken of as if it were a cathedral or a temple that was being built on that raised site above the small town of Killala

that 'he fucking did' is almost of the school yard – angry rebuttal of unspoken doubt.
--Fizzles
Also angry affirmation of the hyped hope, desperation, determination in both senses as irony and working days and other limits continue to be ground into the dirt and never (not yet) finished.

I resisted finishing xpost Ha Jin's Waiting,just because I wanted it to keep going, and also because I felt the logic leading to a black hole of sorrow---instead, it was the developmentally perfect punchline (sorrow would have to wait in the wings a little longer, though maybe not all that long), as with The Neapolitan Novels and In Search of Lost Time and not much else that I can think of at the moment (even good or good enough endings often have to glide into place or just stop, either way with the engine shut off and/or the fuel gone).

"Also angry affirmation" just on the face of it of course, having only read your quote of the book (so far!)

Roland Barthes, THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE: INTERVIEWS 1962-1980

I don't think Garner is primarily a nature writer, but "The Stone Book Quartet" is not at all folk-horrory (no figures emerging from the Old Times here, except as real-world traces left on the landscape, and a sense of there being a deep rhythm to human life through generations). I'm no kind of expert on Garner but the few other things of his I've read over the years have had more of a supernatural flavour.

So I see why the kind of people who like the kind of new nature writing touted by John Mitchison on the Backlisted podcast would like this, and the sort of writing I'm on about is Robert Macfarlane and a bunch of sub-Macfarlane writers whose tastefully-covered works (often with a woodcut of a dead tree or live badger) I see on Waterstones tables. TSBQ feels to me like a piece of fiction that's grown from a really deep connection with a place; the nature-writing tendency I'm on about often feels to me like a desperately self-serious attempt to demonstrate a connection with a place but ending up giving the feeling of a urbanites getting back to nature and feeling very pleased with themselves. "Effortful sincerity", quite. Which is cool if people enjoy it but it's not my thing and yes I quite like the idea of contrarily waving away stuff these people like.

I wonder whether I'm mischaracterising the new nature writing tendency (which I've barely read)? Quite likely, but if so I'm going to keep doing so: my perception is the writer is usually volubly present in these books, they're walking through big-n Nature and we see them watching and learning and finding out important things about the world and themselves. It does nothing for me.

Lol I just read Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler in which she goes canoeing on the Birmingham canals and [SPOILER ALERT!] discovers she is a lesbian.

I've just remembered: we read "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" at school and they made us do that thing of designing a book cover, writing a blurb etc etc. I was always dreadful at that sort of thing, everything I've ever drawn looks crap, but the boy I say next to properly went to town: watercolour, gouache, careful lettering he really worked hard at it. I was feeling that resentment one must feel towards anyone who's swottishly gone above and beyond the necessary effort in their homework, when I realised he must have been working on it in front of "The Rockford Files" - his cover had credited the book to James Garner. Imagine my delight.

If, in your own words, you've barely read something, is it reasonable to say that it does nothing for you?

It's true, though, that there are things that I have barely read, which I feel that I don't like.

I think it would be reasonable to read one of the books properly and closely and evaluate it as an individual work.

I did that with H IS FOR HAWK and was ambivalent. I think it is overrated and quite strangely naive or faux-naive at times. But it contains some decent writing also.

I would think that most of these nature writing people know more about nature, are better connected to it, and also by extension are more ecologically sound, than me. I think these are all good things. Saying that they are urbanites seems perverse as I am an urbanite and I understand nature much, much less than they do. I think that for me to attack them in general would really come down to envy and contrarianism.

Tom D, it's partially that the government in charge of Portugal at the time - a liberal, parliamentary monarchy - while not anti-clerical per se, had a somewhat fractured relationship with the church, which was still strongly influenced by the previous regime of absolutist monarchism, so I think a lot of ppl in charge would've been sympathetic to Queirós, though they wouldn't state so publicly. My fave Eça book is The Maias, a huge ol' family saga with a very bittersweet, fatalistic feel to it - tiyl Miklós Bánffy, Thomas Mann, that sorta stuff.

António Lobo Antunes is mostly known for his novels about the colonial war experience. Speaking of which, a recent big hit is The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso - the story of a family fleeing Angola and returning to post-revolution Portugal. Kind of a taboo topic in Portuguese society for decades.

xp My caveat was added precisely to note that I may be being unfair, though maybe not unreasonable (except in so far as it's hard to reason with taste). What I have read has done nothing for me.

xxp Well, I read "The Stone Book Quartet" and that is a book in which landscape is critically important; the point I was making is that I found its engagement with landscape more interesting and convincing than the bits I've read of new nature writing. It's not urbanites I have a problem with, or even urbanites getting back to nature, it's the feeling of self-satisfaction I get from (some of) those books that I find unappealing. I don't think a game of tallying who lives a "more ecologically sound" life would be a very good way of judging whether or not I find value or pleasure in those books or not.

Or not, or not.

I think the point is simpler -- is it OK to knock things we haven't read? (Perhaps 'barely read' contains an ambiguous range. You say that you've read some of the books, so maybe you have actually read a lot more than barely.)

I was implying that it's not really fair.

But I also immediately had to allow that this is something that we seem to do (me quite probably more than you), so perhaps we all feel that there is some validity in it after all? Perhaps the rationale is simply: you don't need to actually read a book to know enough about it to have a cogent view? For there are other ways to know what's in a book. (In fact there are whole books about this.)

Nonetheless we could probably also agree that the policy of not reading leaves the possibility of being mistaken about a book, as in: if you read it, you might feel differently about it from what you expect.

"Barely read" - I suppose that my opinion has been formed by a paltry selection of two or three books and quite a lot of excerpts in places like the Guardian and Caught by the River, laced with bits and pieces of hearing people talk about this kind of stuff on podcasts and in the world. But I'm referring to a growing genre of books and I'm generalising so I think it's important to note my relatively scant engagement with that genre. Goodness knows I wouldn't want anyone thinking I speak with any authority.

You're probably right that the reasonable thing to do in order to solidify my opinion(s) would be to read more of these books more carefully. But then again I'm not sure it's a good use of my time to spend time making sure I'm really actually not keen on this genre. It might make more sense simply to continue to caveat my ill-founded opinions with recognition of my own ignorance.

Tom D, it's partially that the government in charge of Portugal at the time - a liberal, parliamentary monarchy - while not anti-clerical per se, had a somewhat fractured relationship with the church, which was still strongly influenced by the previous regime of absolutist monarchism, so I think a lot of ppl in charge would've been sympathetic to Queirós, though they wouldn't state so publicly. My fave Eça book is The Maias, a huge ol' family saga with a very bittersweet, fatalistic feel to it - tiyl Miklós Bánffy, Thomas Mann, that sorta stuff.

António Lobo Antunes is mostly known for his novels about the colonial war experience. Speaking of which, a recent big hit is The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso - the story of a family fleeing Angola and returning to post-revolution Portugal. Kind of a taboo topic in Portuguese society for decades.

Cheers, Daniel. A Spanish woman I work with recommended I read Antonio Tabucchi next.

Declares Pereira is really good. I got to finally get around to Antunes sometime. There was a big chunk 2nd hand @ skoob last time I checked.

you don't need to actually read a book to know enough about it to have a cogent view? For there are other ways to know what's in a book. (In fact there are whole books about this.)

― the pinefox, Friday, October 5, 2018 4:01 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In this vein, I highly recommend reading How to talk about books you haven't read, which is funny if nothing else.

The Death of Woman Wang - Jonathan D Spence (1977). A brief history of a poor region of 17th century China, T'an-ch'eng, in Shantung Province (where the silk for the ties comes from presumably). It has a central observation point 'the decision of a woman named Wang, who was unwilling any longer to face an unacceptable present.' 'T'an-ch'eng county was not famous for anything; it produced no eminent men in the seventeenth century, the data on economic and social conditions are scant, and though disasters struck repeatedly the people themselves did not rebel.'

It is always hard to conjure up from the past the lives of the poor and forgotten; and the Chinese thoroughness in the spheres of state and county historiography has ironically been accompanied by the nonpreseration of most local records.

In other words it falls almost entirely outside the space of recorded history. Despite this it's consistently giving lines, images and observations that I'm finding magical. This, I should stress, is not because of some orientalist framing, but because of the nature of the endeavour.

The first of those lines is where he says 'I have mainly relied on three different sources in my attempt to penetrate a little way into the world of T'an-ch'eng'. That seems to convey history in the correct way, that it can only be a humble activity – these are the materials available, this is what can be said with those materials, and from it we are able to say a little about a world that seems entirely distant and inaccessible. The effect is almost is if observing through a scrying glass. Will future historians of our age, with the vast wealth of information, or data, be able to have the same humility, and pay attention to the gaps between the vast historic record?

The three sources are a highly competent and assiduous scholar-official magistrate for the two years being examined, Huang Liu-hung, a former (not very competent) magistrate and editor of a Local History, compiled relatively soon after the events described, Feng K'o-ts'an, who 'seems to have been content to compile an authentically bleak record, not touched up with the brush of nostalgia or propriety.' The final source is an essayist and short story writer, P'u Sung-ling, whose vision Spence uses to supplement the administrative and historical sources.

For though Feng and Huang take us surprisingly far into the zones of private anger and misery that were so much a part of their community, they were not concerned with penetrating into the realms of loneliness, sensuality and dreams that were also a part of T'an-ch'eng. Whereas it was just those realms that obsessed P'u Sung-ling.

Again, the clarity and imagination of the approach, and how you might view these lives, even in private, internal spaces and dream realms, had my attention. (After all, the immediate appeal of a small county in 17th century China isn't necessarily obvious – these things are usually very dry and uninteresting).

He describes a savage and quite common cycle of tragedy – earthquakes, floods, famine, and bandits, and the proverbial folk wisdom that emerges from these circumstances (the second set of images that really made me sit up):

"To have the bodies of one's close relations eaten by someone else is not as good as eating them oneself, so as to prolong one's own life for a few days." Or, "It makes more sense to eat one's father, elder brother, or husband so as to preserve one's own life, rather than have the whole family die." Out in the countryside, says the Local History, the closest friends no longer dared walk out to the fields together.

The riverbanks flood, so that a newly appointed magistrate has to sail across the sodden land to arrive for his new job (an image that has stuck with me – the landscape deranged and incoherent, your job to apply the structure of the state and administrate order, what must he have thought as he gazed out from the boat?)

It will surprising you to know inhabitants considered their lives had no meaning and that they were utterly without worth, so that Huang Liu-hung issued a harsh proclamation to stem a spate of suicides:

"Those men who commit suicide, hanging themselves from the rafters or throwing themselves into the water, will an eternity as ghosts, crammed in the eaves or drifting on the waters. Who is there to pity them if the officials refuse to collect their bodies and leave them as food for the flies and maggots? Those women who kill themselves, dangling from ropes or hanging from their kerchiefs, will haunt deserted alleys and inner rooms. Why should anyone feel shame if we delay holding an inquest on their corpses and leave their bare bodies exposed for all to see? You bodies were bequeathed to you by your mothers and fathers who gave birth to you, but you go so far as to destroy those bodies. Only once in ten thousand cosmic cycles can you expect to be reincarnated into human form, yet you treat your bodies as if they were the bodies of pigs and dogs – that is something I hate and detest. If you have no pity on the bodies bequeathed to you, then why should I have pity on the bodies bequeathed to you? If you think of yourselves as pigs and dogs, then why should I not also look upon you as pigs and dogs?"

The overall potent force of this book is in the images and landscape of decline and ruin. Huang obsessively keeps account of the mortality rate in comparison to other similar areas and finds that it's always higher in disaster, he records the amount of taxable land and sees that it's declining faster in his county than anywhere the same around it. It portrays a place that always co-exists with the one we live in, is always there in potential, a persistent other place, that the world we live in could dissolve into. The way such a world changes and contorts perceptions of life and death (state Confucianism is seen to be of little relevance and surrounded by superstition and magic).

The anecdotes of how humanity persists in such a place are also wonderful:

P'u Sung-ling heard the roar of the 1668 earthquake moving up from the direction of T'an-ch'eng as he was drinking wine with his cousin, by the light of a lamp:

"The table began to rock and the wine cups pitched over; we could hear the sounds of the roof beams and the pillars as they began to snap The color drained from our faces as we looked at each other. After a few moments we realized it was an earthquake and rushed out of the house. We saw the buildings and homes collapse and, as it were ,rise up again, heard the sounds of the walls crashing down, the screams of men and women, a blurred roar as if a caldron were coming to the boil. People were dizzy and could not stay on their feet; they sat on the ground and swayed in unison with the earth. The waters of the river rose up ten feet or more; the cries of roosters, the din of dogs barking filled the city. After an hour or so, calm began to return; and then one could see, out in the streets, undressed men and women standing groups, excitedly telling of their own experiences, having quite forgotten that they were wearing no clothes."

picked it up cos of this tweet:

a truly amazing book that packs a huge amount into a monograph on rural misery in 17th century Shandong. Feminism, literature, concubinage, banditry, legal codes, taxation, power structures, famine, natural disaster and scorched earth warfare. https://t.co/eBmcJCyi0Z

— jamie k (@jkbloodtreasure) October 3, 2018

So I see why the kind of people who like the kind of new nature writing touted by John Mitchison on the Backlisted podcast would like this, and the sort of writing I'm on about is Robert Macfarlane and a bunch of sub-Macfarlane writers whose tastefully-covered works (often with a woodcut of a dead tree or live badger) I see on Waterstones tables. TSBQ feels to me like a piece of fiction that's grown from a really deep connection with a place; the nature-writing tendency I'm on about often feels to me like a desperately self-serious attempt to demonstrate a connection with a place but ending up giving the feeling of a urbanites getting back to nature and feeling very pleased with themselves. "Effortful sincerity", quite. Which is cool if people enjoy it but it's not my thing and yes I quite like the idea of contrarily waving away stuff these people like.

Yes, ok, this is exactly a thing for me as well. I just about to start thinking about specific shibboleths that separate the two – I have an immediate and quite visceral dislike for one (the Rob Macfarlane crowd), and a deep, resonating love for the other, and yet they exist in the same space for many people so it's interesting to me to work out what's different.

Instead my brane said 'those fucks who go on about collective nouns like murmurations of starlings are as bad as pub name etymologists'.

By which I *think* my brain was indicating that language is one place this division resides – the perceived folk wisdom of exotic (and often bogus) rural terms as having the pseudo-magical force of 'true naming' is indicative of the tourist, rather than a deep sense of lived-in place. Which is only a more roundabout way of saying what Tim was saying, but does bring in some of the mechanisms that crowd use, which could be generally summed up as 'ironically deployed magic'. ie ley lines, existence of history as a thing *always* giving contemporary meaning to a place (it doesn't).

Perhaps another way of looking at this is that it is an asymmetric relationship: mysticism coming out of an understanding of nature v mysticism and magic revealing the nature of nature. It is not a reversible jacket. The second will produce a heavily reduced, constructed version of pastoral, the former may have elements of that, but will understand observed location.

Tim, although I seem inadvertently to have said something that chimes with you in that 'sincerity', I think I was more aiming for... well, what exactly? I guess I was thinking of the Cowper-Powys world, but that's not right. And maybe in fact they exist on the same vector after all.

Sorry my thinking's messier than usual this morning.

You're probably right that the reasonable thing to do in order to solidify my opinion(s) would be to read more of these books more carefully. But then again I'm not sure it's a good use of my time to spend time making sure I'm really actually not keen on this genre. It might make more sense simply to continue to caveat my ill-founded opinions with recognition of my own ignorance.

I think you and the pinefox and both being too considered and thoughtful here. 1) yes it is ok to knock things you've barely read – it's that visceral 'Oh God ffs' moment you get at certain cadences and expressions. Reading RMcF who writes in an area I like and to which I feel drawn my immediate response is 'no, that's *not* it, you're doing it *rong*'. I know it's seen as bad to let that go unexamined, and it probably is, but equally, a push away from a place or set of things is as useful as a desire towards. I'll let the serendipity of time and happenstance overcome it if necessary (someone on ilx saying 'no, i know x looks like they're doing this, but in fact' or at some point in the future deciding I do actually want to go back and give it another go, for instance).

Also stuff like the McFarlane (now this ad hominem really *is* unfair) feels so latent in the air that I feel I have a tacit understanding of it without engaging with it further (that is an argument for understanding it more, rather than deliberately disengaging I suppose).

I realise these impulses are bad not good.

Also stuff like the McFarlane (now this ad hominem really *is* unfair) feels so latent in the air that I feel I have a tacit understanding of it without engaging with it further

surely we all do this sort of thing and it's the only way to get anything done

^^^

Right but I remain inclined to note my lack of serious engagement when I'm ventilating my easy-won opinions on a genre.

Right, "not interested" is a good position to take, "I have a full breakdown on why this is bad" when you haven't done the reading isn't (though sometimes it feels good!).

Fairly confident about my Harry Potter dislike, despite having read zero Rowling books.

With FIzzles all the way on this. Not that interested in the current bunch, tho' my interests overlap in places.
(I was wondering how they come at the chemicals-and-Brexit present, and imagined a nature book I would read: deeply researched study of ancient ways, mystic landscape, ancestral magic that treats it all with utter contempt, just sheer hatred of the whole history of the countryside from the cannibal neolithic to the tyre-burning now; all these useless ancient words in the service of abuse and peonage.)

Would read.

Or not read and still praise to the skies from a position of ignorance. One or the other.

Currently reading:

Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success - not sure what I think yet. He sure does love a dumb protagonist.

Karin Tidbeck, Amatka - halfway through and it's starting to heat up (first half is a very slow burn). Dystopian communist sci-fi.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States - my friend's first essay collection (out today!). Really great pieces on evangelical Christianity and how it operates in the U.S., the Midwest, etc.

Might be unnecessary to unlurk to defend a writer nobody cares about, but R.McFarlane's book about 'wild places' is really quite good on (and neutral on the moral side of) how people have transformed the landscape over time and is also quite a lot about the practicalities of camping on hills rather than just waffling via evocative nouns. I have another subsequently published book by him which is in fact overdesigned and slight on content. Possibly what's wrong here isn't the original thing that made him write but just that he then tried to make a longer career out of it and wound up stretched thin.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States - my friend's first essay collection (out today!). Really great pieces on evangelical Christianity and how it operates in the U.S., the Midwest, etc.

― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, October 9, 2018 10:15 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ooh, gonna order this now.

<3 <3 <3

It's good to see you Brand Slipper! and if ilb can't be a place where people pop out to defend writers no one else cares about, then what's the point of it. that's interesting to know about his 'wild places' - i should dig it out. I am fascinated by the construction of landscape over time (well 'landscape' itself being a late construction) – nature is extraordinarily pliant to projections. and those projections are mainly bogus, often mendacious.

makes me v sympathetic to woof's suggested work of hate.

i did do a *very* controlled post on a piece of MacFarlane writing on the nature thread here. I seem to remember thinking 'i will try and be reasonable and even-handed here' despite going BOLLOCKS! internally when reading the article itself.

Just realised I have been confusing/conflating Robert McFarlane and Robert McCrum for years, and avoiding the former based on a dislike of a book by the latter.
Currently reading CHARLES BOVARY, COUNTRY DOCTOR, by Jean Amery, a NYRB rediscovery novel/essay defense of being a loyal loving loser.

Jordan, Elliot Bay Books pulled a copy for me right away so they must’ve been getting it in even without me asking, good luck to your friend.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk: short stories, historical vignettes, anecdotes, musings, loosely gathered around the two main themes of travel and, curiously, the effective preservation of body parts after death. From the quietly crushing true story of Angelo Soliman, the ex slave who rose to prominence in Austrian society - friend of the emperor and grand master of the masonic lodge - only to be stuffed and mounted in a museum on his death; to the somewhat flippant theory that English speakers are impoverished because they have no private language, everyone can understand them wherever they go. Reminded me a bit of WG Sebald. Maybe a bit long at 700 pages but easy to dip in and out of.

to the somewhat flippant theory that English speakers are impoverished because they have no private language, everyone can understand them wherever they go.

This is true! But then in London it doesn't matter what language you speak, someone on the bus will know what you're saying.

Good to hear, silby! We had a little party for her last night with the cover on a cake. :)

To the extent I am reading anything atm, I am reading The Stalin Front, Gert Ledig. It is a deep excursion into hell, as found in one small piece of the war between Stalin's and Hitler's armies, busily chewing one another to pieces with artillery, tanks, rockets and machine guns, as told through the intimate details of a few soldiers' experience, including the intimate experiences of a few corpses after their death.

being a loyal loving loser

Charles Bovary, c'est moi.

My reading is mostly for the other thread, but I did read the most recent Le Carre novel (in which Smiley is unmasked as a secret Remainer), and the wonderful Parts of a World.

Some Richard Matheson short stories, the effect overall being slightly blunted as you wait for each inevitable twist to drop in the last paragraph

I finished O Pioneers last night. That something sad would happen in the last third was obvious, but it made me sad anyway.

oh shit i just picked up o pioneers after trying and failing to get into gold fame citrus for the third time

cool I recommend it if you like Stardew Valley

Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success - not sure what I think yet. He sure does love a dumb protagonist.

his self hate is strong

manhattan beach - very trad, very enjoyable. a holiday book. more predictable than goon squad, but waaay more consistent

Now I'm reading The Hobbit for the first time because I guess I should

it's good imo

I finished The Stalin Front. The level of realism made it far grimmer than any war movie ever made. It was more relentless than All Quiet on the Western Front and conscientiously stripped the war of any trace of romance or glory. But the people involved are allowed their humanity, which makes the ceaseless violence all the more powerful.

If I have a lick of sense, I'll read some Wodehouse now. But I currently have a very wide selection on my shelves, so I'll think over my next choice a bit before I land on one.

ledig's Payback is also super grim, told from the POV of Allied bombers on a revenge raid against a German city. Good, though.

The bit in Stalin Front that most stuck with me was somebody's thoughts as they're trapped helplessly under rubble, never to be rescued.

Mr. Morrison, your comprehensive acquaintance with books of all persuasions continues to impress the hell out of me, even though impressing anyone seems to be the furthest thing from your mind. I salute you.

*blushes*

FWIW, this list is pretty good overall: https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/100-must-reads/s-43415865
I can claim 33, so a way to go still

That link being 100 German Must-Reads in English Translation

I've read about a quarter of the writers if not the exact books. Gotta say I wasn't taken with it. Having one book by certain authors here is wrong for a start but if you are going to do that then its the wrong choice for Mann, Musil, Kafka, Roth, Bernhard, Keun (surely its Child of All Nations), Stamm. There are far too many titles from the last 25 years. Also there ought to be some poets (I mean inlcuding Brecht's poetry instead of one of his plays might have been better too). Josef Winkler is an omission.

Having said that I've spent a while googling a few bits. I'll chase that Tucholsky, and Ilse Aichinger's The Greater Hope sounds amazing.

Bah. Am supposed to be learning that language, and know incredibly little of the list. The Trial has got to be the <i> right </i/> Kafka, though? Unless the problem is the listmakers not believing in short stories. Or do they? I'm too ignorant to recognise any collections there.

I would've gone for a story collection (there is a volume that collects all the stories published in his lifetime) or Letters to Felice.

finished Solar Bones and have to say I pretty much unreservedly loved it.

being the idea that
my entire existence is these same thoughts, that each rolling idea, as it occurs now is wholly responsible for my
being here
like
something lost, a revenant who has returned to his house at some grey hour to find the place boarded up and abandoned

it is a review of the main character Marcus' life, of his place in the wider systems of family, of county, of civic structures, as political animal. an individual’s positioning in those structures. the latter part of the book is overtaken by an outbreak of a water born virus in what I assume is Galway, from which his wife becomes seriously ill (and as an image becomes one of patient suffering).

this is my wit's end
my post mortem aria
my engineer's lament

an attempt to divine (the word is correct, this is a religious book) the structures of existence and the universe (the 'solar bones' and damned if i can now find the point fairly early on where he uses the phrase). outwith this order and structure there is chaos and the void.

the Skype calls he makes with his children always conclude with a description of the break of the digital connection:

I will, ok
bye
bye
after which he seemed to reach towards me with his palm outstretched, fingers filling the screen for a darkening moment before it switched off and the line which connected us across the globe dissolved to a black portal, leaving me adrift for a moment, my mind still locked into the conversation we’d just had before I closed down the laptop, the sound of which drew the sitting room with its walls and pictures in around me in the darkness

a representation of the void behind another kind of infrastructure.

That void is also perceptible behind the engineering of physical structures. The inexplicable virus, which is couched in apocalyptic and Biblical terms by Marcus’ children, is a failure of engineering which seems to have no cause. It is implicitly related to a moment when in his role as county engineer Marcus refuses to sign off the foundations of a school which have been poured with three different types of concrete, as they will expand and contract at different rates in the fluctuation between hot and cold weather resulting in the structural failure of the school. He gets political pressure to change his mind and sign it off, which he withstands, but the inference is clear that minor political corruption has structural consequences.

There is a joke halfway through, told by his son, about which the oldest profession in the world is - the engineer claims it is his, as God hands over to him after His act of engineering heaven and earth out of the chaos, saying ‘there you go lads, you take over now’ and the politician says ‘who do you think caused the chaos?’

as I say, i pretty much enjoyed the book without reserve. on occasions the freewheeling biographical review can perhaps seem a little attenuated, so that you find yourself asking ‘to what end is this being put down' but it's the matter no matter how mundane is rarely if ever left unredeemed into the wider context of the book. and although i've emphasised the spiritual this is also very much a book that takes care to describe the every day and does it very well.

and in that depiction of the every day, it’s also about loss. His depictions of his love for and history with his family and his location are a description of what his absence will mean to those people. And by leaving it an absence – those people are never seen in their grief – it is more potent and powerful to consider the structures of love that we engineer, and which are critical fractured by the absence that death brings.

He’s great at momentary descriptions of the shifting light and moods of days spent in a house. That there is something wrong with the day he recognises but it’s never described in terms other than those days we all have where we can’t quite settle into them right. The grey light of thinly clouded days with watery sunshine behind the perfect light for a momentary return:

the light is awash with ghouls and ghosts and the meaning between this world and the next is so blurred we might easily find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the dead, the world fuller than at any other time of year

Generally his ability to span from the cosmic to the quotidian with stretching the tone or language, by using Mayo and this man’s loved, lived life as the space that thinking operates in one of the book's great successes.

Though I’m not sure if what I didn’t enjoy most were the descriptions of his life as a county engineer.

I'm in the final 13th book of Confessions. Books 10-12 were a bit of rough sledding. The autobiography proper takes up the first 9 books, ending shortly after Augustine's conversion, as he's preparing to sail back to North Africa, when his mother - the mother who's faithful prayers on behalf of Augustine's soul have finally received their happy reward - suddenly takes ill and dies. Book 10 turns in a more metaphysical direction, as Augustine interrogates the nature of mind and memory. He carefully deduces how the mind is unlike a physical/material object. He's clearly pretty well-read in philosophy, and his reasoning requires careful parsing at times to follow his train of thought. This mode continues into Book 11 as the preoccupation with memory transitions into an exploration of the nature of time itself. Reading this chapter I had the distinct impression that we don't have any more idea of what time essentially is than Augustine did in his day. He's interesting on how neither the future or the past could be said to exist, and how the present, when we zero in on it, must be vanishingly evanescent. Book 12 turns in a more hermeneutical direction with an exploration of how to understand the first few verses of Genesis, about the moment of creation, and the mystery of the Trinity. This is all rather heady stuff, and in Book 13 Augustine finally turns in a more common devotional mode of prayer and supplication, humbly acknowledging his human limitations and looking forward to the day when he (and all believers) will see God face to face and know directly what is now only dimly perceived. That sort of anti-intellectual move is familiar in Christian literature, the idea that reason can only take you so far and faith needs to make the final leap, but it feels like less of a cop-out after having wrestled with difficult questions over the past hundred plus pages.

the Confessions is probably my favorite book, but I rarely venture beyond Book 9.

I am reading The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald. It is non-violent. So far.

christina stead's the people with the dogs

After a bunch of false starts with various things, I have settled into The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson as a good shocktober read.

still plugging my way through moby dick. i think i'm gonna start reading something else in the meantime, as I still have hundreds of pages left, and those pages are DENSE.

Moby-Dick is good imo

yeah, i don't plan on dropping it, i like it a lot. i'm just thinking about reading something concurrently as a counter-weight, perhaps something non-fiction

tbh i feel the counterweight to moby dick is fiction rather’n non fiction.

was thinking the bruce auto-bio, but yeah i get your meaning

oh yeah that’ll do!

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=steve+bruce+autobiography&client=safari&hl=en&prmd=nisv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjiv52T7YveAhWRecAKHfaFC-4Q_AUIECgC&biw=375&bih=553#imgrc=gCewMhZseCdfXM

fuck id forgotten about his thrillers.

https://thesetpieces.com/features/sweeper-steve-bruce-review/

sounds a bit like lanchester in fact.

Another is Bruce’s construction of his own maddeningly specific network of fictional clubs. It’s called the Bruniverse (by me) and it’s a world very much like our own, excepting his decision to mangle the names of those clubs with which he has been connected, as well as an increasingly large, seemingly randomly smattering of others. It’s like a pound-shop Westeros, only made up entirely of places you imagine voted for Brexit despite being largely dependent on EU funding.

that last quote is a bit snide. but the general review is enormous fun.

the bruce springsteen auto-bio i meant ha

finally reading something after a long long dry spell -- outline by rachel cusk. it's likely somewhat due to the rush of reading something self-reflective after not having read anything for months but it's turning me toward attaching a form to the last few messy years of my life, which is nice. the right book at a fertile time.

love it when that happens. when a book does that.

Kind of weird but also likeable that a book like Outline is gathering a sort of 'everybody reads it' status given that the premise of Creative Writing tutor meets rich people while being divorced should be the least interesting and most typical lit-scene navelgazy thing ever. I guess it's that it's stuff about the need for relationships/what 'purpose' they serve that makes it more universal than it should be? I feel like I should hold it in contempt, but actually found it great.

50p charity shop find : Nell Dunn's Up The Junction. Wonderful stuff so far.

I'm reading the final book of stories from Deborah Eisenberg's Collected Stories: Twilight of the Superheroes. I'd been saving that one, but now that she has a new volume out, I don't have to feel bad about finishing it.

I like Bruce's BORN TO RUN book a lot.

I also feel that I should read Steve Bruce's books.

Also Lenny Bruce's autobio, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People.

I finished The Gate of Angels. It had Fitzgerald's characteristic excellence. The story, characters, and prose avoided every kind of cliché and staleness and all were drawn with sure, strong strokes. It even had the tiniest whiff of a ghost story about it, though without insisting. Never insisting. Lastly, in its own indirect and understated way, it was highly feminist and class conscious. A fine book.

I read Municipal Dreams, which is a history of council housing in the UK. It made me angrier and better-informed.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Today I finished How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti which, like all good books, is about women.

(And other things, like the struggles of art and Judaism)

still plowing through vol 3 of Callow's Orson Welles bio ("One Man Band") and Oriana Fallaci's "If the Sun Dies", plus occasionally dipping back into some Ballard and Moorcock short story collections

The Dead Girls, by Jorge Ibargüengoitia: surely an influence on the most gruelling part of 2666. The back cover and the intro by Colm Toibin both describe this book as hilarious, which is wildly innaccurate (not a criticism--it's not TRYING to be hilarious).

I got "If the Sun Dies" and keep not getting round to it. How is it?

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, so now I know where one Ilxor got their screen name...

Coincidentally, I also finished a Fitzgerald novel: At Freddie's, the only one I hadn't read and a minor disappointment.

I got "If the Sun Dies" and keep not getting round to it. How is it?

I am only 75 pages in but I love it. She's a remarkable writer in the right place at the right time.

Anthony Powell - Afternoon Men
Dezso Kosztolanyi - Anna Edes
Anthony Powell - Venusberg
Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

Alternating between the usual (mostly) European/Latin American fiction I read and starting on a few English novels written white, mostly Tory sorts. In these early Anthony Powell novels the comedy really hits, and the dialogue is so good. Afternoon Men has a streak of anti-semitism running through it and both of these books have this deeper tragedy on the relations between men and women that wouldn't be out of place at all today.

I need to give Powell another try after a fruitless summer reading the entire A Dance sequence.

The early novels are short so worth a go at tuning into his worldview. A lot of the comedy is really sharp, actually (I'll need to re-read some of the Perry Anderson essay but I think he undersells this?) I want to finish a couple of his short books before getting to that sequence - maybe next year.

xp Seems like you gave Powell an extensive workout already, so I see no 'need' to go back to him unless it is, in fact, a misnamed 'want' to go back.

vintage aimless

I remember The Gate of Angels being clever further in, but otherwise about all that stuck was the lovely exhilarating opening scene of bicycle action. Should probably go back. That was some great bicycling.

recently read some v. appealing descriptions of short stories and novellas in three new stand-alone Andre Dubus collections. I like that he was an early fan of Chekov (also Hemingway and his own instructor, Richard Yates). Also that he was apparently not a stylist in the-then dominant Carveresque key, and was a deep diver into big messy family situations and resulting inner conundrums of friends and relations. Also saw Part I of The Woman In White on PBS, and thinking I need to check out Wilkie Collins too: seems to have the observant foregrounding of gender codes (def incl. legal) that I associate Trollope at his best, plus melodrama x class-anxious, striving young characters re Dickens---also a detective.

david peace - 1974. gruelling. claustrophobic. in a good way. particularly effective at dragging items of pop culture into the mire. very effective. < note effect of staccato prose rythms.

xp Seems like you gave Powell an extensive workout already, so I see no 'need' to go back to him unless it is, in fact, a misnamed 'want' to go back.

― A is for (Aimless),

"Short and funny" is a wonderful tag, worked for Woody Allen's early movies. I'm a fan of the Anglo-Irish miniaturists (Waugh, Pym, K. Amis, Spark, Fitzgerald).

See also Beryl Bainbridge

I'm a fan of the Anglo-Irish miniaturists (Waugh, Pym, K. Amis, Spark, Fitzgerald).

― You like queer? I like queer. Still like queer. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 October 2018 20:48 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Early Powell definitely fits here. Dance is substantially different in tone, while still retaining many characteristics.

david peace - 1974. gruelling. claustrophobic. in a good way. particularly effective at dragging items of pop culture into the mire. very effective. < note effect of staccato prose rythms.

I read these over the course of last Spring/ Summer and the cumulative power is quite a thing.

I read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. As a tale of the Irish diaspora (though this might just be my prejudice), Toibin's task was somehow a battle with sentimentality. He gets around it by seeming to wrap his character (Eilis) in a kind of bubble wrap of free indirect style, in which he moves her from experience to experience, shielding her, and us, from the worst excesses of sentiment and tragedy.

It does mean a separation from the rawness of things, but I think that's a stylistic choice anyway; it also means that the emotion of the story sort of seeps into you - the tragedy being that of character and circumstance rather than a clumsy tugging at the heartstrings. I don't know if I loved it, but I certainly can't stop thinking about it. I think Toibin, much like people said about Flaubert and Bovary, fell in love with Eilis; I did a bit, too.

I've been vacationing for a few days. I raced through Maigret Gets Angry, Georges Simenon. It was exactly what one wants from a Maigret novel, neither more nor less.

Now I am three-quarters of the way through The Little Nugget, a very early P.G. Wodehouse novel (1913). It demonstrates all the Wodehouse trademarks, but has one unusual feature; it is narrated in the first person by a character who displays an unwodehousian self-knowledge and level-headedness.

The standard-issue lovesick swain in later Wodehouse has been streamlined down the farcical basics and is a chucklehead. Peter Burns is more of a holdover from Wodehouse's earlier public-school hero Mike, the athletic, noble-minded sixth-former at Wryken School, except now he is 30 years old. This makes The Little Nugget one of those evolutionary transitional steps which are so difficult to find in the fossil record, rather like a proto-bird emerging from the dinosaurs, with feathers and wings, but recognizably not yet a modern bird.

https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781613399040_p0_v1_s600x595.jpg

Yes thanks, online bookseller, I'm sure I will enjoy that one too.

Re-reading Kathleen Jamie's Findings. It's very much part of that confessional style that characterises a lot of 00s nature writing (albeit it came out two years before the lodestone, The Wild Places) but it's the pinnacle of that style, I think, and just cuts to the heart of me. I was going to select a bit to share but (to paraphrase John Muir) you pick up one corner and you drag the whole damn thing into the air.

Oh now you gotta do it!

I read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. As a tale of the Irish diaspora (though this might just be my prejudice), Toibin's task was somehow a battle with sentimentality. He gets around it by seeming to wrap his character (Eilis) in a kind of bubble wrap of free indirect style, in which he moves her from experience to experience, shielding her, and us, from the worst excesses of sentiment and tragedy.

It does mean a separation from the rawness of things, but I think that's a stylistic choice anyway; it also means that the emotion of the story sort of seeps into you - the tragedy being that of character and circumstance rather than a clumsy tugging at the heartstrings. I don't know if I loved it, but I certainly can't stop thinking about it. I think Toibin, much like people said about Flaubert and Bovary, fell in love with Eilis; I did a bit, too.

A lovely little novel I read in two sittings in summer '09. OTM.

Read an extended review of CT's new nonfiction Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, biographies of the fathers of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde, whose families were all acquainted with each other in the small, shopworn world of Dublin, when it had "a shapeless aura," according to the author. Mad daddies, each in his own way, but it says here that JB Yeats finally gave up on finishing his self-portrait (after a decade; apparently, none of these geezers ever finished anything), and ran off to NYC at the age of 68, reporting back that he'd found big fun as a Colorful Irish Character, and I'd like to stroll the sidewalks and saloons with him a bit more---maybe I'll get the library to order it. Seems like pretty hairy subject matter for Toibin.

(Haven't read Brooklyn, but enjoyed the movie. don't know if I loved it, but I certainly can't stop thinking about it. Yes, the ending, for instance, did leave me with more to think about than most endings, re how the characters' lives might go later.)

The three essays making up that book were all in the LRB: not sure if they're publicly accessible

John Le Carre's The Little Drummer Girl, an adaptation of which is soon to air on the BBC, directed by Park Chan Wook! First 100 pages are spent setting up all the characters involved, next 100 deal mostly with a truly exhausting interrogation scene which I'm sure forms part of what drew Chan Wook to this material. I've only read one Le Carre before - Spy Who Came In From The Cold - and by contrast this is much less sad-sack, much weirder.

Read an extended review of CT's new nonfiction Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, biographies of the fathers of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde, whose families were all acquainted with each other in the small, shopworn world of Dublin, when it had "a shapeless aura," according to the author. Mad daddies, each in his own way, but it says here that JB Yeats finally gave up on finishing his self-portrait (after a decade; apparently, none of these geezers ever finished anything), and ran off to NYC at the age of 68, reporting back that he'd found big fun as a Colorful Irish Character, and I'd like to stroll the sidewalks and saloons with him a bit more---maybe I'll get the library to order it. Seems like pretty hairy subject matter for Toibin.

― dow

About five years ago he collected about a dozen essays on mothers and mothers in fiction, including a first-rate one on the fucked-up Mann family.

I haven't (yet) read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman but I'm in the middle of The Undoing Project by Michael 'Moneyball' Lewis about Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, their research, and their relationship. Some books are like a gourmet meal, you want to consume them slowly and linger over every detail. This is like a cake you want to cram handfuls of into your mouth as fast as possible.

"A Furious Oyster" by Jessica Sequeira - in Santiago, scientists have discovered that the dead can make shadowy returns to life during storms; the rival schools of research in the field have coalesced around Neruda and de Rokha. This is another Dostoyevsky Wannabe thing and it's really very good.

"Strandloper" by Alan Garner, I wonder whether I will end up liking it very much or not at all? I'm still not sure, two thirds of the way through. The way he does speech is always enjoyable whatever.

Oh I bought a spare copy of the Osip Mandelstam volume in the Penguin Modern European Poets series because I saw it in the shop and wanted to have a read of it. If anyone needs a copy, (London preferred but not essential) let me know.

(Meant to say Pablos Neruda and de Rokha, didn't mean to erase Winett de Rokha. Apols. NB I am not well-versed in Chilean poetry, I'm sorry to say.)

I forgot for a moment that Dostoyevsky Wannabe was a publisher and was struggling to remember which of D's books was about the dead coming back to life in storms.

I spent the whole weekend laying around and reading. I'm mainly reading The Count of Monte-Cristo, which is wonderful and is going by really quickly, and I started on volume 3 of Kilmartin's Proust.

I started Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness last night. Evidently it is a comic-mythic outlier among his works. I'm curious to see what he does with a story that places so few limits on him. Developing any internal logic when your story is akin to a dream is always an interesting task.

I finished Twilight of the Superheroes, and I've started reading The End of the Past by Aldo Schiavone, sticking to my plan of alternating fiction and non-fiction. Schiavone has some interesting theories about ancient Rome.

What are his theories? Intriguing title.

I don't know if I should have used the word "theories". It's more a manner of selectively arranging and emphasizing historical facts to develop themes and patterns that (hopefully) form a more cohesive and multi-dimensional picture of Roman society. One of his main emphases is on the fact of slavery, which is often underplayed in the mostly aristocratic Roman cultural content that has come down to us through literature, sculpture, etc, but which according to Schiavone was a major factor - perhaps *the* major factor in Roman modes of production, both agriculture and manufactures. This rather ugly truth was rather vigorously repressed by Roman aristocratic society and fed into the near fetish on purely mental/spiritual activity over anything that smacked of manual labor, even forms that we would consider highly skilled. Further he sees this feeding into the stagnation of Roman productive capacity. Rome had built an engine of wealth which could only run on veritable rivers of captive slaves fed into its maw by unceasing wars of conquest. Basically once Rome ran out of wealthy provinces to conquer, the engine had to start sputtering. At least that's the impression I'm getting so far (only about a third of the way in).

I'm reading Afternoon Men thanks to thsi thread.

Slavery supplied almost all of the labor force for Roman society, from about 100 BCE onward. It took them a while to find a workable equilibrium that created an economic space for non-noble Roman citizens, but they did eventually cobble one together. It included several kinds of public dole, much private patronage, & the professionalization of the army and its pay base. Because the children of slaves were also slaves, the need for vast numbers of new captives eased.

One thing not widely understood about Roman society is how often it went through major political and social upheavals. But through it all, the wealthy and aristocratic families made sure that when the dust settled, they stayed on top, giving the misleading impression of it being a stable system. It was anything but stable. Even Octavian-Augustus ruled through spies, terror, and the constant purging of his enemies.

Also, I should mention that apart from his main thesis, and despite being a rather compact book, Schiavone's writing is filled with interesting asides for the student of history, such as:

Nothing reveals the intensity of long-distance trade in the centuries of the imperial expansion like underwater archeology. The coastal depths of the Mediterranean are an extraordinary involuntary museum of the material civilization of Europe: ships from the days of Augustus or Hadrian lie close to Venetian or Spanish galleys, medieval furnishings, and airplanes (Spitfires or Savoia-Marchettis) from World War II. Sand and rocks a few dozen meters underwater still preserve an incalculable number of Roman relics: hulls, often well preserved, nautical equipment, amphorae, a great variety of objects.

This is into 'cool story bro' territory but what the hell.

It's probably the time of year, but after reading Kathleen Jamie's Findings I needed something even more fey so went for Richard Mabey's Nature Cure. It's the story of his recovering from depression, moving to Norfolk and how place kind of saved him - a change of place and how that influenced his ability to see, to watch narrowly again.

I started the book about 8 years ago and took it on a trip to The Gambia, that, long story short, partly meant I was on a birding tour with Chris Packham - a tour populated by almost entirely old couples, most of whom were led by strong wives, barely hiding their lust for dear old Chris. While I was there, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy - not the ideal choice when I was 2000 miles away from my newly-born son. It destroyed me. Anyway, coming in one evening, having read it that afternoon, I sort of seized on Packham saying I needed someone to talk to fancy a beer? It turned out McCarthy was his favourite writer and we sat out for most the evening talking about books and music and whatever.

Naturally, we got to talking about nature writing and it turned out he explicitly hated it - particularly the confessional style. Part of his love for McCarthy is how he writes about place and landscape as part of a larger picture, not as a thing in and of itself, which is a view. Anyway, he lighted on Mabey's Nature Cure as his bete noire, his exemplar of the particular style, saying it was embarrassing to wash one's clothes in public etc (I think he might have said 'shit oneself in public' but I could be misremembering). Being a mixture of starstruck and suggestible, I mentally put the book behind my back and claimed ignorance of its existence. It's taken until now to take it back out.

All of this is more enlightening given Packham's recent autobiography (which I've not read but know a bit about from radio coverage and conversations) and his own, now very public struggles with depression and Aspergers. I wonder if it was a case of hating that thing that is closer to home than you want to admit or if it was a simple timing thing? Either way, I'd be intrigued to hear what he'd make of Nature Cure now. I think it's honest and fiercely attentive and more than worth a read.

I like this story.

Dag Solstad - T Singer
Juan Rulfo - The Plain in Flames
Ilse Aichinger - The Bound Man

I loved T Singer - at times it was almost annoying how much control over people and events there was on the page. I can see why Solstad said this novel was a high point for him. Like other Euro novelists - thinking of Thomas Bernhard and Peter Stamm - you see a particular kind of life, a post-60s/70s politics reaching some kind of conclusion. Life before the apocalypse. Aichinger's stories start out as Kafka-like but more direct (she starts writing just after the end of WWII), less ambiguous, and there are as many ghosts as the dead in Rulfo's somewhat hard-boiled stories. They were more difficult to get into so I'll need another read through sometime.

Taking Jonathan Swift's Major Works, Natalia Ginzburg's All Our Yesterdays and Violette Leduc's La Batarde on my week off.

"A Furious Oyster" by Jessica Sequeira - in Santiago, scientists have discovered that the dead can make shadowy returns to life during storms; the rival schools of research in the field have coalesced around Neruda and de Rokha. This is another Dostoyevsky Wannabe thing and it's really very good.

this sounds interesting.

my grandfather had a mysterious friendship with De Rokha. they were from the same area of Chile, Licantén commune in the Maule Region. and about a generation apart. they didn't have much in common. my grandfather, a civil engineer, wasn't literary at all, and while De Rokha was a communist my grandfather was a conservative. my grandfather would go and visit him from time to time.

there is no paper record of my grandfather's father in any of the local archives that an uncle of mine with a hobby for genealogy could discover, and while my grandfather's mother was an illiterate washerwoman, one of my grandfather's uncles was named Rabelais.

tl;dr am i the illegitimate great-grandson of chile's 4th most esteemed poet?

answer: probably not

Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire.
Finally got my hands on a book that's an interlibrary loan that I was waiting for for the last couple of weeks.
Interesting stuff, I heard his ideas were taken aboard by the Brazilian education system but were under threat if the Right Wing candidate who just won came in.
Well book is interesting

Rankin: Dead Souls
Gogol: Dead Souls

(too much of a coincidence not to read them both together seeing as the rankin was next in the list anyway)

there are several others on amazon, a couple of which look good (Elsebeth Egholm anyone?), a whole series of which look like sub-mills-and-boon potboilers with bare-chested hunks on the covers

Tim's posts here prompted me to pick up some Alan Garner. Went to The Moon of Gomrath first, and had forgotten that it was a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (which reminded me that I had liked them both very much when I was about ten or eleven I think it would have been... possibly younger? Both set in the Peaks I think. The opening to Gomrath has some elves, which I had forgotten about. I guess my prior assumptions or vague attempts to plug my juvenile reading into my adult understanding was that Garner was part of the 60s/70s dive into British myth – I guess most people itt know my touchstones for that: Penda's Fen, the last Quatermass (oh and Quatermass and the Pit), Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliff – well there's a mass of stuff there. So I was surprised by those elves, and it made me wonder how much he could be said to be part of a Tolkein strand, which I guess would include more Norse elements.

I turned to The Owl Service which I remember reading, but not anything else about. Reading it now that staggers me. It's an extraordinary book. Extremely compressed – the reader is left to infer the various relations of the main characters (three children, a small handful of adults, all staying in a house in a valley in Wales). The relations between these characters are brittle and often acrimonious and the book exudes a sort of malignant bitterness and barely suppressed violence, often pubescent or sexed, which all the characters express and feel in some way. Even as an adult I have felt very tense and frightened at certain points, as various of the characters verge or stray into a sort of violent lunacy. Everyone's pulling in a different direction yet forced into collision with each other.

The landscape is so deranged by magic and ancient, malign enchantment that it feels at times metaphorical – that is to say it's very cut off from the world and feels like it depicts a psychological state as much as anything else.

The relationships between the Welsh and English characters are bitter and often framed in political terms. The English adults are seen to be class snobs, feeding into and off Welsh resentment. (Of the smart Welsh boy Gwyn the English father says 'In the RAF we called them barrack-room lawyers'.) Weirdly, the mother isn't present at all so far (half way through) so that I'm wondering if there's some sort of delusion at work. You get quite presented with quite sophisticated class symbols/shibboleths too, well here's the full quote to show what I mean, between Roger the English boy, and his father, of Gwyn, the Welsh son of the housekeeper:

'Gwyn seems pretty smart.'
'Ah yes: well that's the trouble: barrack-room lawyers we called them in the RAF. They're the worst. But brains aren't everything, by a long chalk. You must have the background.'
'Is that why Margaret's gone so County with Alison?'
'Tricky,' said Clive. 'Very, very tricky – um, you know?'

to which my immediate reaction was er wtf.

Oh and the spoken language is often heavy with slang and mannered phrases, which can read a little oddly.

Some aspects of the writing make me think that a lot of this – both the flinty, chopped up nature of scene descriptions and events, and the elliptical style or reliance on inference – is the result of deliberately savage editing.

The language is often highly elliptical. As a reader you're really made to work for meaning, and there's a constantly reiterated set of statements that have a cryptic poetry 'She wanted to be flowers but they made her owls (or variously 'claws')'.

It won a lot of awards, and it says a lot about the reading intelligence of its intended young audience. It's powerful and like the claws and talons that pervade it, has a potent sense of cruelty.

It's good stuff.

Images of the owl service that apparently inspired the book here:

https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/images/OwlService_2009_03_28_006_detail_edit_c_small.jpg
https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/images/OwlService_2009_03_28_012_detail_edit_c_small.jpg

i just jotted down a few additional thoughts:

> The heavy editing in Alan Garner's 'Owl Service' creates what is almost a collage of violent events, or the collage is itself violent. Emotions run high in most scenes. There is an emphasis on showing emotional interplay at the point of conflict, or rather the events that are shown in the book are those that create or exist at that point of high emotional conflict and stress. That the 'magic' at work also seems to contribute to and materialised by emotional stress is complementary to (integral to?) this. Each scene has force to it, even where the emotions are not high. For instance, a scene in a local shop (one of the few to take place outside a nexus of quite discrete-seeming but connected locations) has two women speaking in Welsh of their foreboding about what is coming. Roger, the English boy, is in the shop and cannot understand what is going on, Gwyn, who can speak some Welsh and is learning (to the disgust of his Welsh mother who doesn't want him speaking like 'a labourer') is not in the shop. This short scene manages to creates paranoia, foreboding, a sense that these things have happened before, with dramatic irony at play via the reader having the Welsh translated, but also partly occluded by the opaque references the women make.

> The text prickles with threat like this throughout.

I bought the DVD of the (late 60s? early 70s?) TV series of The Owl Service last year, which is worth a look.

I finished Strandloper - as with the Stone Book Quartet there's a whiff of magic about the book but it's mostly a deep folk connection with place; where TSBQ is one place over the course of several generations, Strandloper's one life spent in two radically different places: Cheshire and Australia in the very early nineteenth century (the dude is transported for folk ritualling in the local church, nearly dies on the run from the colony, is saved and adopted by an Aboriginal people. True story apparently.)

I'm interested in your observation about emotions running high - in Strandloper the events are tumultuous but the emotional pitch is restrained through death, terror and heartbreak. Which is something to do with the whole of nature and human life being part of a dream, and a dance. It's very good. The opacity in the Cheshire dialect and the Australian language again help to obscure but (I think) also deepen - there's something going on here that the reader won't understand and has to take on trust.

Your description of The Owl Service triggers memories of Ivy Compton-Burnett's imploded lamplight family scenes, aieeee (truly, while most YAF-oriented fiction I've tried tends to overexplain. to reassure).

The Owl Service is great and ripe will allusion and cruelty as you - as the best children's literature often is. Red Shift is even more allusive and elusive - to the point where it feels deliberately, puckishly edited. Landscape and time coalesce and human forces are joined across time and space. I want to read them all again.

This is incidental but I love how Garner's own house is like a living version of his stories: https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/aboutus_medicinehouse.php

Red Shift is the one that, to even understand what happens, you have to work out a letter written in code, isn't it?
Garner's retellings of English folktales is a very good and rich guide to his influences:
https://d1a37ygoufymvg.cloudfront.net/resized/width-298/path-assets/covers/v1/9780007445974.jpg

Am just partway through the frankly bonkers LOGBOOK, a novella by Geza Ottlik, about two retired navy officers living in a Maori-conquered Denmark where people are forced to walk on all fours, the sailors watching athletics on TV and complaining a lot. It's in a collection called HUNGARIAN QUARTET, 4 novellas by different writers, although the Peter Esterhazy entry is only 19p long, making it not a novella.

One thing I forgot to mention about The Owl Service was its epigraph, which along with a quote from an RS Thomas poem, and a traditional song, has this runic utterance:

Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.
Radio Times: 15 September 1965

Finally getting round to something that always seems to get mentioned: Diego Gambatta's Codes of the Underworld. It's extremely good and clear on the nature and mechanics of signalling, signs, and mimicry, and the specifics of how these apply in societies and environments characterised by a lack of trust and necessary concealment.

Although I've dipped into The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard, I don't think I've ever read all of its contents. I'm picking through it again, mainly for the medical and surgical stuff in there.

Got a flight to Sydney this evening, and another one back on Thursday, so I've loaded my kindle up with more easy reading – looking forward to Strandloper (it felt appropriate for this journey from Tim's description, and the first two Garners, which I remember reading as a child. Also Liquid by Mark Miodownik, which is apparently a treatise on liquids from the view of a transatlantic flight – so fuel, taste in the wines, the sea-water beneath, the effect of pressure on bodily liquid etc.

I've also got in my list of books to read City of Devils but I've no idea where I picked this up. I'm assuming it's this 'Shanghai Noir' by Paul French. I will give it a go.

the fantastic tales of fitz-james o'brien... irish writer of proto-sf/horror/orientalist fantasy & supernatural tales resident in america in the the mid-nineteenth century. somewhat derivative (most obviously poe, brockden brown, hoffmann) magazine fiction but entertaining nonetheless.

have now read, Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Liquid. Liquid, soft science, but a fun range around materials and their properties - i learned a lot to bore the next person i’m on a flight with. As mentioned author uses the frame of a transatlantic flight to talk about them - fine - and has this slightly weird, crepey persona to go along with it - obsesses about impression he’s making in other people on the flight, refers to relationship breakdown one too many times.

WoB is v much a children’s novel. i mean i know it is, but The Owl Service wasn’t really. Dwarves and elves etc. Also feels like a juvenile work (tho don’t know if it is). Got a sinister way about it despite. Embedded in the local pennine countryside. Enjoys painting the sinister and unpleasant. Also just *ends* immediately after mass spectral plane carnage.

Things Codes of the Underworld keeps reminding me of:
The excellent Korean Infernal Affairs trilogy
Late Philip K Dick ie A Scanner Darkly

they did these things v well.

this is quite nice on writing Warhammer 40000 fiction.

So From a View to a Death >>> Afternoon Men. The former's like Wodehouse with literary ambitions while not as scabrous as Waugh.

I read Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, which among other things seems to be about how men can't understand women's art, or, worse, doggedly refuse to.

I have been a terrible reader this past month, in that my mood has been almost intolerant of any books at all, but I have slowly pecked away at Under the Glacier and it is finally winning me over. I hasten to add that I blame myself, not the book, for my reticence. It's been a hell of a stressful month.

It is one of those weird books which do not conform to any of the accepted norms of novel-writing, but is more of a throwback to pure story-telling of a much older type. The characters do not conform to any reality outside the confines of the tale and the tale happily yokes together whatever incongruities suit the purpose of the teller. All such books are intensely personal and idiosyncratic to their authors and more or less uncategorizable. I'll try to say a bit more after I've finished it.

I read Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, which among other things seems to be about how men can't understand women's art, or, worse, doggedly refuse to.

I liked this book a lot. Did have trouble identifying with the protagonist's obsession - dude really doesn't seem very appealing - but maybe that's part of the point, the irrationality of passion?

The ending really twists the knife, too (SPOILERS):

After all of her obsessing about the dude, he doesn't even acknowledge her enough to write to her, just sends her a copy of what he wrote to the other man involved.

"The Age of Wonders" by Aharon Appelfeld, the best of his I've read I think. It's brilliant on the banality and powerful nonsense/senselessness of popular racism, and of the disorientation afterwards.

Also "Cassette 86", a Dostoyevsky Wannabe sampler which is a very enjoyable half hour but maybe not the place I'd advise people to start with DW.

Tim, have you read Appelfeld's "Badenheim 1939"? Really beautifully done book that somehow miraculously manages not to overplay the temporal irony card (as in what we the readers know about happens in 1939 and beyond)

Partway into Dave Hutchinson's "Europe at Dawn", the deeply enjoyable and clever 4th book in his Fractured Europe series about political shenanigans in a near-future Europe broken up into numerous micro-states.

oh i don’t think i realised there was a fourth. going on the list.

The Iran-Iraq War, Pierre Razoux

At the risk of being down on interesting indie publisher DW, I bought A Hypocritical Reader and was really disappointed. I would have been up for a more developed version of the choose your own adventure closed loop, but once that was done the actual content of the book was torture.

I finished Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE.

His most entertaining since CHRONIC CITY at the least. In some ways excellent, yet curiously inconclusive; maybe a lot of loose ends - more than in his earlier detective fiction.

James, I haven't read that one, sounds good. TAOW also deeply deft with 'temporal irony'; one of the ways I think he does it in TAOW is by having various ironies all at play - in the first half of TAOW the kid narrator half-gets what's going on in the adult relationships around him. In the second half of the book - the "after" it moves from the first person to the third and that that distance is reduced, maybe removed.

Brand - sorry you didn't like that one, I thought it was brilliant almost - though not quite - throughout. Of course it might be that I simply like that kind of torture.

David Stubbs mars By 1980
just read half of the Miles/Sun ra section and found it really clunky.
I thought the future Days book was quite good but not so up on this.

@Tim - maybe it's an academic background question, because stuff like the reference to Barthes on the blurb kind of convinced me that it was being written in some code I'm not inclined to crack. Writers writing about writers and the meaning of writing. The angel story is OK and the repetitive Victoriana was nice (too short?), but stuff like the hipster-bashing segment I'm not sure if it's just stale jokes or a heavy parody of anti-hipster comic novels which as far as I know don't even exist.

It's hard to keep up with what people are talking about but I see this -

https://dostoyevskywannabe.com/sampler/cassette_86

- that Tim mentioned: a compilation of work by this publisher's current writers?

I don't know the writers. Tim can tell us if Mario Kempes is the 1978 Mario Kempes.

According to a note in the back of the book, Mario Kempes is neither the footballer Mario Kempes nor Argentinian, nor even called Mario Kempes in real life.

Aside from the two people who run DW, I don't get the impression that they have "current writers" in the way I think you mean - the anthologies tend to contain a bit of work by people who have "full-length" (ie usually very short) books out on the press but much more by other like-minded souls. "Cassette 85" (which I haven't read) is the most recent of these anthologies. They're doing a "Cities" series collecting groups of writers based in various cities or suburbs, which I imagine will feature even fewer already-DW writers.

I am half-way through "A Slip of a Fish" by Amy Arnold, which I'm enjoying well enough in a "wonder if this would have been published if it weren't for the success of "A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing"" kind of way, which is not to say it's *like* AGIAHFT but it shares a dense interior voice narrative. Anyway I'm halfway through that but the Aharon Appelfeld hasn't quite let me go, I am still thinking about the narrator's father being the world number 1 Kafka fan and seeing him react to the world's bewildering viciousness by working harder, being more honest. Another of the ironies I was talking about, I suppose.

I realise that I have read two novels consecutively by authors with the initials AA. It wasn't deliberate.

Your next book:

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300102734/jazz-modernism

I finished Under the Glacier. Susan Sontag wrote an Introduction in which she called it "one of the funniest books ever written." I beg to differ. It doesn't even rate as one of the thousand funniest books ever written, imo. It was a playful book and it had a humorous streak to it, but it was not especially funny, in the sense that I wished to laugh out loud or even emit a quiet chuckle, as I often do when reading Wodehouse. Perhaps it is funnier in the original Icelandic, or Ms. Sontag has a far different sense of humor than I do.

What the book did do well was to create a timeless, mythic atmosphere, using just the everyday materials one might find laying about fifty years ago in Iceland. As myths go, it was not grim, as for example the myth of Prometheus, but rather was a myth addressing our humanness, not the travails of the gods and heroes. As for giving any better idea of what it was "about", that would require more analysis than the book can hold up under. Myths need to be swallowed and swigged, not nibbled and sipped.

finished "If the Sun Dies", man that's a classic. her deliberately repetitive style wears thin here and there but the subject matter and her eye for detail and emotional rollercoaster throughout is so well conveyed. I admit I kinda choked up when I got to the "every day is a war" thing cuz man ain't that the fuckin truth.

Just found a copy of If The Sun Dies - can't wait to dig into it.

i similarly have a copy from the LAPL here now, going to dig into it after i finish some others:

- a pair of Dan Epstein baseball books clemenza mentioned on ILBaseball

- The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth by Elizabeth Tasker

- If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb (occasionally amusing musings on the theories of why we've never encountered or found evidence of extraterrestrial life. The first solution in the book is "They are already here, and they are Hungarians"

I just read a John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, that offered that Hungarians/aliens thesis based on the experiences of people who worked on the Manhattan Project with seriously odd, seriously brilliant Magyars.

I'm reading Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet - an odd book so far, occasionally funny, somewhat interesting as a panorama of mid-19th century scientific doctrines.

I've started on The Sicilian Vespers, Steven Runciman. Medieval politics are like an overly complicated board game played by hundreds of petty aristocrats and scheming clergy, all throwing their own pairs of dice at once, but Runciman seems determined to explain all the moves, which seems both admirable and delusional.

Simon Garfield: In Miniature -- an interesting and entertaining look at the appeal of small versions of bigger things, but it really stints on the illustrations, which is a shame

Natalia Ginzburg - All Our Yesterdays. Her writing is so...flat (which is almost my only observation from all my time reading her, its a very hard to sensibility to expand upon), but here it feels even more like it - as events and how they impact a group of friends in Italy before, during and after WWII seem just like another slight drama. Its not exactly 'Italian'. I need to check some of her other novels and stories but in this early one there is one page of actual dialogue (a lot of he said, she said, he asked, etc.), which is her own voice sorta coming through (rather than an application of a formal experiment) although later she would distill things a bit more. Worth a read if you lke her already.

I'm still slowly making my way through Proust. Getting into the latter stages of Sodom. May take a break after that.

As what I hoped might be some light relief but turned out not to be, I read The Last Samurai. This seems to be an ILB favourite but I did not care for it.

I'm now reading Kudos, the last of Rachel Cusk's trilogy. I thought the first two were brilliant, particularly the second one. So far this one is a falling off.

Andre Breton's anthology of black humour.

I finished The Sicilian Vespers. The "vespers" themselves, an uprising against and a massacre of the French in Sicily, were mainly carried out over the space of a week, but the history roves all about the Mediterranean and covers the half century from 1250 CE to 1300 CE. What struck me most was how rapidly the cast of characters turned over due to their habit of dying soon after they showed up, even the youngsters in their twenties. The popes especially kicked off within a year or two of their ascension.

Now I really should move directly to reading Dante's Divine Comedy, while all this is moderately fresh in my mind, since large numbers of the people I've just read about show up in Dante, most of them in hell. Instead, I've picked up one of Alfred's perennial recommendations, A Time to Be Born, Dawn Powell.

I finished Bouvard and Pecuchet, at least as much as one can finish an unfinished novel. It's a very odd book, somewhat relentlessly one-note in some ways with masses of undigested information presented to the reader, but at the same time oddly charming. Somehow it also feels quite modern, with the bumbling main pair as antiheroes in the Pynchon/Vonnegut mode, though the book feels ultimately less cynical than Vonnegut at least. There's something genuinely admirable, almost superhuman really, about their boundless curiosity, drive, and idealism. It also works pretty well as a time capsule of the late 19th century.

Finally found a copy of Forgotten Armies by CA Bayly and Tim Harper, and so far it's pretty amazing. It's about WW2 from the perspective of South East Asia, and the way it ties everything into a story told from a different perspective completely changes the way you'll look at that war. There's a sequel, Forgotten Wars, which follows the wars of indepence in the region over the next decades, and apparently does the same to for instance the Vietnam War. Must read for anyone interested in global history and adjusting for eurocentrism.

That sounds interesting - thanks!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51d0kSa43hL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71HAgtzMKbL.jpg

These are both very, very good fictional approaches to what Fred B is talking about--the first about Indian soldiers in WW1, the second about a West African soldier in WW2.

I've started reading Helen C. Epstein's Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror. A readable, interesting narrative about a history (the modern history of Uganda) that I knew next to thing about going in. I'm also interleaving with bits from Maeve Brennan's The Long-Winded Lady.

Struggling a bit with that André Breton collection. He's good at introducing the authors, but the actual content...transgression for transgression's sake, as discussed on ILX elswhere recently? Different times, I know.

Surrealists are terrible at literature. I am not 22 anymore so not allowed to re-think this.

otm

Ballard took surrealism to extraordinary places, but I wouldn't call him a surrealist, per se.

No, not quite.

Breton's Nadja works, but it's short.

"Surrealists are terrible at literature" is one of those statement which, while wrong, is truthy enough to count as good challoping.

This is Breton selected but not Breton written, tho - no actual surrealists in the stories I've read so far. And as I said, his insights on the writers in question are sometimes interesting, the texts he chooses to highlight not so much.

On vacation I read:

The Witch Elm by Tana French. Both a departure and not from the procedural mode of the Dublin Murder Squad books. As ever, she is spectacular at texturing environments and characters, and writing dreadfully plausible stories around what should really be somewhat cockamamie crimes.

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. Much less serious and somewhat metafictional Sherlock Holmes fanfic with the author himself as Watson. I preferred Magpie Murders, but this still made me giggle in parts. Some bits of trite post-2016 liberal handwringing over something or other injected into the narration, for some reason.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Everyone on earth (including Hugo and Nebula voters) has been saying this is good for ages and they're right. Search: political maneuvering, Roman Empire in space, premisey bits about AI spaceships, views into assorted made-up cultures including the genderless one at its center.

Since I got home I started reading Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, which is about how to say things with buildings.

"Surrealists are terrible at literature" is one of those statement which, while wrong, is truthy enough to count as good challoping.

― Tim, Monday, 26 November 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thank you sir, my challops are all I have left for the year

Tho Leonora Carrington can be very very good

There are lots of literary genres, such as ghost stories, some experimental narratives, science fiction, or myths, that contain surreal elements, but do not identify themselves as surrealism. Self-identified surrealism in literature is often too preoccupied with producing surreal effects and not enough occupied with creating an interesting story.

Brian McHale, POSTMODERNIST FICTION.

Properly reading this many years after buying it.

Thoughts:

1: I always felt that it looked dense and dull, but actually I admire the clarity of the writing and thought.

2: PoMo might sound a dreary topic, but what I like about the book is that it's a kind of 'introduction to the poetics of fiction' that goes beyond PoMo - it has a transferrable quality.

3: I like some of the relevant PoMo authors - Vonnegut, Alasdair Gray, for instance - but a lot of them seem quite dull, in their avant-garde way.

4: He tends to come back often to saying 'and the most exemplary case of all is Thomas Pynchon', even though TP seems a lot less extreme and exemplary than his other cases. It makes me think that he just can't get enough of Gravity's Rainbow.

5: One thing that runs through it, unnoticed by McHale but uncomfortable to me - and something I have long tended to suspect. A lot of the PoMo narratives he quotes seem very sexist in some way; or seem to revolve around promiscuity, or the sexual availability of women, sometimes sexualized violence and even murder of women, by men. Every time I have encountered Robert Coover's work it has given me this impression, and parts of TP's GR for instance also echo elements of it. But in McHale, case after case does it. There is plainly a kind of subconscious / cultural / psychological subtext that he doesn't seem able to perceive. I would say reasons for it:

a) it's a period matter: this kind of thing was more normative anyway, in some ways - cf James Bond

b) more damagingly, there is some kind of connection between the sexual and literary 'transgression' - for these, almost all male, writers, writing 'experimentally' also implies having an 'adventurous' attitude to sex (sometimes including violence). So there's a kind of 'dark side of the counter-culture' element.

The curious thing about it is how this repeatedly shows through despite McHale going out of his way to write a formalist book where such issues aren't really up for discussion. Even though almost ruled out of court from the start, the sexual politics keeps insisting on being noticeable.

Despite this, in case of doubt, I find POSTMODERNIST FICTION an admirably clear, inclusive, ambitious, useful book.

I guess if Surrealist lit is limited to those with some connection to the original movement, then I haven’t read much at all, apart from some Artaud. Its influence however probably extends to lots of other writers I like, even though it’s probably stronger in film, having the visual dimension, and poetry.

Someone like Borges for instance seems to have a little Surrealism in him. According to Wikipedia he was involved in the Spanish Ultraist movement which seems to have been a close cousin.

Sure I mean that is part of where Borges came from but his reading is way wider than any surrealist.

I am mildly interested in Carrington but I bet its merely ok, off-focus bunch of stories. The discourse that I've seen is one of a neglected female writer. Fine, but I need more than that. Might try some if I see it.

xps. Alasdair Grey's opus is about an incel who murders a young woman who spurns his affections

so fits in with your thesis on sexism in pomo

having finished fitz hugh ludlow's the hasheesh eater: being passages from the life of a pythagorean (& continuing with mid-nineteenth century american metaphysical speculation) i'm making a reattempt on melville's mardi which i put down about a fifth of the way in close to twenty years ago... feel morally obliged to get it out of the way before starting on m-d.

Seconding pinefox re Brian McHale. Used that book a lot at university. Should reread, see if it's still good.

I finished A Time to Be Born a short time ago. Whether or not it was based upon the characters of Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce (as is often said to be the case), what stood out for me was that Dawn Powell sank her incisors deep into those characters, along with the many social climbers and sycophants who populate this book, and drew blood repeatedly and voraciously. This was in contrast to every other book of hers I have read, where she reserves some human sympathy for the failings of her characters, even as she exposes them nakedly to the reader. Powell must have truly despised that piece of the NY scene with a depth of scorn unusual for her.

It also had some of her wittiest take downs. For example, (paraphrasing from memory) one character 'attacked her squab with a ferocity that made you think it had pulled a gun on her first.'

Ok, first actual pleasant discovery from that Breton anthology: Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont. Really wild stuff, these rambling pseudo-scientific essays that remind me of a 19th century Groucho Marx monologue. Well worth checking out.

I finished Another Fine Mess which was a great infuriating piece of muckraking. It seems most tinpot dictators have figured something out that still eludes many Americans. The US cares about human rights up until you have something more tangible to offer.

Using whatever brain cells I have left for reading fiction this year on:

Christa Wolf - Cassandra (anyone interested in Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey should give this a go btw)
Gert Jonke - The System of Vienna

re Alasdair Gray, I think of him as a special / different case: unlike the US writers who seem to glory in a kind of misogyny, he (at least in one or two books) explores in a very open way a kind of shameful, pornographic imagination. There is a real element of 'anatomizing masculinity' here that I don't see in the other misogynist PoMo people in McHale. It's connected to a kind of disarming modesty / self-criticism in Gray (though in his way I suppose he can be bumptious / self-important also).

Adam Mars-Jones articulated all this quite well in VENUS ENVY (c.1990).

I just knocked off a quick read of a very short (114 pp.) book, The Wet Engine, Brian Doyle. He's a local author, recently deceased, whose style is very distinctive; it displays a kind of wonder and innocent exuberance while speaking of matters rarely discussed in such a style -- congenital heart defects, open heart surgery on infants and children, the early deaths of many of them and other weighty emotional things. That innocent wonder and exuberance is somewhat refreshing, but much easier to take in small doses, since it slips into emo tweeness a bit too often to gain my whole admiration.

Since my own daughter was born with a congenital heart defect requiring open heart surgery at 8 weeks old, I had more of a reason to read this than most.

Was he a surgeon? I love the title.

Not a surgeon. He wrote novels with a bent toward magical realism, and YA stuff, and some poetry. His day job was editing the literary magazine of a local Catholic university.

I'm now reading Raffles, Maurice Collis, a short bio of the East India Company factotum who founded Singapore and was among the first European scholars of east Asian culture. It was written during the early 1960s, when it was still an article of faith among 'university men' that British colonialism in Asia was a fine thing that brought peace and prosperity to its subjects. So, no breath of criticism of the enterprise seeps into this work. Other than that, it's a fairly good bio, touching all the main points and not getting bogged down in minutiae.

Altamont Joel Selvin
INteresting to hear the background to the story. I knew the basics, Rolling Stone rescheduled gig or relocated gig cos they made the wrong announcement at the wrong time to get a gig in the Golden gate Park. & the deat ho f Meredith Hunter at the hands of Hell's Angels.
Hadn't heard further details Like the guy who claimed he could get the go ahead for passes for the concert to go ahead who just seems to have been utterly shady. Or that when the gig had to be relocated outside of San Francisco it meant that the Hell's Angels chapter that the area would be inside the territory of changed. People had been working with teh San Francisco chapter to some extent and trusted tehm better than the unfamiliar bunch who were now in play 7 who brought a load of prospects with them who caused even more chaos.
Or how bad the area around Altamont was, or the drugs that were available which seems to be all the brown acid and mixed with speed etc.
INterestinig book, but I did notice that Selvin doesn't seem to have noticed who Dillard and Clarke were when he'd just been talking about other members of the Byrds so does make me wonder what else he's missed. He dismissed them as a bluegrass group.

Bob Woodward Fear
Imteresting history of the era. Does have me wondering how well it was researched if Woodward could dismiss the idea of Russian collusion a couple of weeks before some pretty definitive testimony came out.
BUt have wanted to read this since it came out. & it was €10 in a sale last week thanks to Black Friday.

Have you seen Gimme Shelter the Altamont concert documentary? Mostly shot in real time, and could use a re-release w more backstory/aftermath (or maybe it's had that?), but anyway essential film experience re rock history (and no, the murder didn't happen during "Sympathy For The Devil"; Rolling Stone had to retract that, though the legend continued).

Not in the last few years. May be about 20 years ago I remember seeing it.
Book makes it sound pretty hellish. Site sounds like it was bad to start off with quite apart from anything else.
Plus larger crowd than expected with little provision for them.

I read the Bert Berns book by Selvin and thought it was pretty weak

I'm reaching the end of Daniel Deronda. I wasn't expecting the first 12 chapters to be about someone called Gwendolen Harleth. At the halfway point Daniel's story had still barely begun; when Eliot gently admonished him for putting off his search for Mirah's brother till after Christmas I wanted to shout at her "it's not him, it's you." Still. Might have found the best joke in Eliot:

In fact, his mind seems so broad that I find my own correct opinions lying in it quite commodiously, and how they are to be brought into agreement with the vast remainder is his affair, not mine. I leave it to him to settle our basis, never yet having seen a basis which is not a world-supporting elephant, more or less powerful and expensive to keep. My means will not allow me to keep a private elephant.

Maybe you had to be there.

Daniel Deronda is the kind of novel I can't imagine anyone having the patience and vision to plan and execute. So many ideas. So dense. But still a lot of fun.

Yeah it is pretty extraordinary.

The first time I read it I was tetchy about what I thought were the tenuous connections between Gwendolyn and Deronda.

I got it the second time.

And in my Gentile reckoning she rendered the Jewish rituals with great sympathy.

You could definitely criticise the number of fortuitous occurrences, though if you did you'd never be able to read any Dickens.

When the needs of the story conflict with the need for probability, the story should always win.

I've always wanted to read some Margery Allingham, and picked up "Traitor's Purse" at a secondhand without reading the back cover - so glad I did, it's fantastic.

Written during the war, it's a totally weird genre-crossover - part whodunnit, part amnesia story, part Hitchockian man-on-the-run caper, part uncanny English ghost want story, wrapped around a goofy but plausible conspiracy plot. It's basically a Doctor Who regeneration episode minus the sci-fi bits.

It's fun! Would say more but wouldn't want to spoil.

I've started reading Frazer's The Golden Bough, in the OUP one-volume abridgment. Kind of cool that he wrote this huge book (which was eventually expanded to 12 volumes) because he wanted to understand a painting of Turner's.

I discovered Elizabeth Bowen!

What took you so long?

That Margery Allingham sounds ace Chuck, straight to my goodreads want to read pile!

I am reading my first Barbara Pym novel, Excellent Women. So far, she seems like an author who wastes little time in rambling digressions or reaching for 'effects', instead she keeps her attention squarely on exposition and development, with great economy of means. I like that immensely.

Eliot's psychological landscaping---incl. gender and class, natch---provide the hinge or stepping stone between Austen and V.Woolf; for me, they're the Big Three---but her plot twists can seem very conveeenient, not really a prob but keeping her further from protomodernism than say Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy--no not really a prob but duly noted every time and putting a little more distance than would already be there. (Well the ending of The Mill on the Floss bothered even some reviewers of her time, and certainly suggests class-out-the-ass heartplucking 1940s Hollywood treatment---p. sure Austen never bothered with anything any where near this shit.)
Allingham take v. appealing!
The only Pym I've read is The Sweet Dove Died, funny-scary as hell re desperate delusions going deeper in middle age, "the bottom of the bottomless lake," as Prine puts it.

i want to relate a story, or really a finding i guess, and i don't really know where to put it, but since people interested in books frequent this thread it seemed like a reasonable place.

i've been listing books online for a bookstore in a small town since april. the collection of books i've been listing belonged to a lawyer in d3nver named j0hn hutch1ns. apparently the amount of books in this man's basement upon his death was pretty extreme. going through the small sample of his collection represented by 30+ boxes of books my boss hauled, i'm struck that his collecting habits were compulsive and not very discriminating, although there are a few items of value and interest scattered throughout. he mainly collected history -- american, military, western + mining history in other countries. he seemed very into a sort of triumphal mainstream view of history represented by occasionally brilliant but mostly second-rate white male historians erecting tomes in service of the status quo. he wrote a few pieces for local colorado history organization the d3nver w3st3rners. he served in the military in his youth and there are books related to military history, uniforms, flags and seals that give me the impression of an older man playing army men through books. he also seemed to be religious.

anyway, i picked a book out of the box, "love stories of famous virginians," and found a letter laid in at the rear. i'm going to transcribe it, with some google-proofing.

J0hn--

I'm too miserable to sleep, so I'm writing this -- I don't know if 1) you'll read it or 2) if you'll care -- probably not -- since anything I think or feel is my fault because I'm crazy -- but I need to do something, so I'm writing this.

So tell me, how do I live, knowing that any time you get really angry with me -- and it I never knew when that will be -- that you will 1) blame me for the loss of all your hopes and dreams and 2) tell me that I am a rotten wife -- that I have failed to support you, ruined your career, your dreams and your life. I do not agree with your assessment -- but what matters is that you believe it -- so tell me, since I have ruined your life and am a terrible rotten failure as a wife -- why should I live? how can I live under that burden? That burden is more than the weight of the world -- more than the weight of the universe -- but I can't kill myself because that is against God's law and because it would have a terrible impact on 4dam -- so I can't live and I can't die -- what can I do?

Don't answer. I can't take any more. I'm just going to do my best to wipe my memory and wipe my emotions. I'm sorry you ruined your life by marrying me. Feel free to rectify that mistake an way you see fit.

phew!! i was definitely under the impression that this dude was a real dusty dick. i hope the wife left him but i don't think she ever did.

a request to the book collectors of ilx: don't be like this asshole and treat your wife like shit, and don't collect boring, bad books if you can help it.

I read three Pym novels within a week in July and she struck me as the least, ah, fulsome of the Anglo-Irish miniaturists. The gestures in her books I can barely remember.

Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy-

Many times when I praise Hardy as one of my nine or ten favorite novelists I get serious wtf looks. I have to keep explaining, "Have you read one of his major novels? They're weird as fuck."

her plot twists can seem very conveeenient, not really a prob but keeping her further from protomodernism than say Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy

Hardy is the king of the conveeenient plot twist, no?

Also, what's a good Hardy that isn't Tess, Casterbridge, Madding Crowd or Jude?

The Return of the Native and The Woodlander. I've tried Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Every twenty years a publisher attempts to reactivate interest in those minor novels.

The Woodlanders rather

Hardy is the king of the conveeenient plot twist, well yeah, but he wants you to suffer with Jude The Obscure, Jude The Obscene, Obs The June Moon---sorry, that Thurber piece keeps coming back---or anyway keep your head down (and keep reading) and don't show any interest (just keep reading)---wheras Eliot is cute with it, even when it's a sick sad world scene, maybe nudge-nudge invitation to take it as send-up of Victorian conventions, or at least exploitation, because a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

When Ford Madox Ford moved to the country, he wrote about meeting a grocer who found Hardy's books crucial for understanding or at least standing his life out there.

Thos Hardy anecdotes:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DttKs6GU4AAwuS3.jpg

Iirc Two on a Tower is nothing but plot twists - was released as a serial first and has almost laughable cliff hangers ever few chapters.

There’s a literal cliffhanger in a pair of blue eyes!

My high school English teacher was friend's with Thomas Hardy's gardener (!), who - spoiler alert - said that Hardy was a miserable bastard.

There's a story I read somewhere of a younger writer going to visit Hardy and the entire time being spent on an extended tour of the local countryside, having the locations of various pets' deaths pointed out.

Virginia Woolf records in her diary a charming visit to the old man (who kept writing exemplary poetry into his late eighties).

When, in the summer of 1923, the Price of Wales (later and after his abdication the Duke of Windsor) was about to pay his annual visit to the Duchy of Cornwall, someone at Court suggested to him that he should, on his way, visit Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, his home in Dorchester...

A Luncheon (by Max Beerbohm)

Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,
Albeit to see you I'm unglad
And your face is fraught with a deathly shyness
Bleaching what pink it may have had.
Come in, come in, Your Royal Highness.

Beautiful weather? -- Sir, that's true,
Though the farmers are casting rueful looks
At tilth's and pasture's dearth of spryness. --
Yes, Sir, I've read several books. --
A little more chicken, Your Royal Highness?

Lift latch, step out, your car is there,
To bear you hence from this antient vale.
We are both of us aged by our strange brief nighness,
But each of us lives to tell the tale.
Farewell, farewell, your Royal Highness.

-- Jacobus Gerhardus Riewald

Yes. and the dour Male presence, though not omnipresent (thank Christ for V. Woolf and others, also for Molly Bloom etc), is a hallmark of modernism, which is one reason I think of him as proto (also I was taught to think that way, in a 70s course, Modern British Fiction).

Today I learned that if you talk about Fanny Burney on Twitter, a bot comes along and gently chides you, asking you to refer to her as Frances.

Am reading Wolfgang Hilbig's THE FEMALES, which is as jolly and calm as you'd expect.

So many good songs and good performances

Ha, sorry, meant that for the Pete Shelley thread

Hardy wrote tons of good lyrics imo

Ha, exactly

Here's the Hardy/pets anecdote: it was EM Forster:

"T. H. showed me the graves of his pets, all overgrown with ivy, their names on the head stones. Such a dolorous muddle. ‘This is Snowbell––she was run over by a train. . . . this is Pella, the same thing happened to her. . . . this is Kitkin, she was cut clean in two, clean in two––’ ‘How is it that so many of your cats have been run over, Mr Hardy? Is the railway near?’––‘Not at all near, not at all near––I don’t know how it is. But of course we have only buried here those pets whose bodies were recovered. Many were never seen again.’ I could scarcely keep grave––it was so like a caricature of his own novels or poems."

Too bad I changed my screen name moments ago, you just gave me another one.

Reading a few bits of stuff with proper words and sentences as I am mostly reading a technical book these days:

Violette Leduc - La Batarde. Her memoir, points to a lot of the autofiction you see bandied about.

Sir Thomas Wyatt - Complete

Lewis Hyde, COMMON AS AIR

Still on Anna Karenina lol
Also: Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (which just by happenstance made reference to the next on the list)
Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish
Ted Hughes, Crow

I'm still reading The Golden Bough. If there was an even more abbreviated edition, I would probably go for that. If there's any more contemporary author it reminds me a bit of, it would be William Vollmann, in the exhaustive piling up of facts to suggest the faint outlines of a numinous pattern.

I finished Excellent Women, Barbara Pym, last night. It is a beautifully observed and well-formed book. It legitimately rates as a comic novel, but only because the narrator maintains a slightly sardonic view of herself and those she becomes involved with. There is the hint of a smile in most of what is related, but it is tempered by her barely acknowledged distress at living a self-consciously narrow, faintly absurd life.

Now I am reading The Saga of the Volsungs in the Penguin edition translated by Jesse Byock. Reading at least one Icelandic saga each year seems to have become a tradition with me. This may be my second one of 2018. I may have read Sagas of the Warrior Poets already in 2018. I'd have to check.

Excellent Women was by far the best Pym novel I read last summer, most of which had diminishing returns. I agree with that review.

I enjoy Pym, but sometimes I want to scream that I really do not care what the new vicar is up to.

blimey

I have never not cared what the new vicar is up to. What could be more important?

I do care what the vicar is up to, but Wodehouse and Fitzgerald did it better.

Finished Sodom and Gomorrah (re-read) and will take a break from Proust.

Also Noonday (Pat Barker), the London-in-the-Blitz set conclusion to her artists-and-war Life Class trilogy. I suspect if this had been a first novel Barker would have been advised to go away and substantially rework it. Repetition, unnecessary little gobbets of not-quite-there fine writing, poor technical control. And yet I found it enjoyable. It's the 7th or 8th of hers I've read so she obviously has something that keeps me coming back, although I'm not sure I could easily describe what it is.

Now reading Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker which has started well.

I finished Saga of the Volsungs. Its main interest for me were the most primitive parts of it, which were a dim reflection of some very old Teutonic myths, retold in an era that barely recalled and no longer understood them.

Afterward, I picked up Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and read about the first 25 pages. Compared to the terseness of the Volsung saga, Krull is baroquely elaborate. I'll probably stick with it, but it is early days, and I've never managed to be on good terms with Herr Mann in the past.

I enjoyed an earlier book in that Barker trilofy, can't remember which one, but was annoyed by one anachronism: people in WW1 using the word "robot", which wasn't coined by Karel Capek until 1920. I am aware this is a very niche complaint.

Afterward, I picked up Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and read about the first 25 pages. Compared to the terseness of the Volsung saga, Krull is baroquely elaborate. I'll probably stick with it, but it is early days, and I've never managed to be on good terms with Herr Mann in the past.

― A is for (Aimless)

You made the best choice. A decidedly un-pompous book.

Flex Krull! The bit with the military service panel is wonderful, like the whole thing. There's also a German TV adaptation kicking around with a really great lead actor and a stapled-on ending where he flies away in a hot air balloon triumphally.

Weststruckness/Gharbzadegi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad

I've been re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's WAY more overt in its religiosity than I remember (duh), but is still, at a sentence level, one of the most gorgeous books I've ever read - in the sense of it feeling like something you imbibe. It's one of those books that, for a time at least, changes how you see. I can think of no better recommendation.

Now reading Walter Kirn's Blood Will Out which is a car crash of narcissism and doubt - at both subject and autobiographical levels.

Final verdict on Bréton's Anthology Of Black Humour: some good selections, but on the whole it's a bit too Vice Magazine: The Early Years. A rather representative extract, by Jacques Rigaut: "I have never taken much of anything seriously. As a child, I poked my tongue out at the women who approached my mother in the street to beg for alms, and I secretly pinched their brats who were crying from the cold". Uhhh congrats dude?

On some level it seems obvious that all the nihilism and sociopathy in the book's aesthetic has to have had something to do with the trauma of two world wars (in what Bréton chose to highlight, I mean - the authors go back as far as Swift), and he does do a good job of introducing writers, even though he leans on Freud just a bit too heavily. Overall not something I'd recommend.

Now moving on to the first volume of Elena Ferrante's Naples novels.

picked up a copy of Charles Webb's novel The Graduate which the book is taken from. prose is pretty sublime so far.
Not sure to what extent the film changed things. & now realising i can't remember the film as thoroughly as i thought I knew it.
THink this was something i meant to read the novel of for a while and then i just found it for 25c so thunk I'd take the plunge.

Speaking of Ferrante I finally started the fourth one last night, after being too cranky to read for a week and a half

Terry Eagleton, RADICAL SACRIFICE - still

Picked up T F Powys' Unclay at the library - had never heard of it, enjoying it 50 pages in with no idea of exactly what he's going for.

on foot of various related/unrelated waffling last night but specifically discussion of solar bones -from which much spinoff- i read fizzles last few posts about it while he was reading it and im resolved to finishing it, but also ive been almost homesick and certainly nostalgic even from the snippets quoted so i guess thats a testament to the strength of the voice of the author

On one level the Ferrante book is exactly what I'd expect from an account of growing up in Napoli in the 50's. But it's also so accurate in its portrayal of the psychology of children, I've found myself numerous times remembering things from my childhood that I hadn't thought about for ages. Definitley think I'll stick with the series.

In other news, I'm getting married next Summer and since it's a non-religious ceremony, I have to find good readings. Turns out all my favourite writings about love are about it ending, or not working out, or otherwise inappropriate. My fiancee has also struggled, so we've decided to widen the scope to writings about friendship or companionship. Now I'm going through all the Moomin books trying to find something. Didn't remember them to have as many echoes of the Bible - great floods, plagues of locusts - or the Jules Verne influence in The Exploits Of Moominpappa. I did remember the bohemian vibe inherent to Moomin family life, but it struck me more this time too - like in Exploits Moominpappa just casually drops that Snuffkin and Sniff have fathers whom they've never met, and then they show up at the end of the book! And next book no Sniff, and the Snork Maiden's brother has disappeared too, with no explanation.

Congrats Daniel!

I am stil reading my technical book, although I took a break to read about 200 pages of Josep Pla's The Gray Noebook which is a diary Pla kept as a law student (for about 18 months in from March 1918) and then revised decades later (once he had indeed become a published author). Its a mixture of impressions, conversations with friends, a record of his readings and various critiques. It reminds me a bit of The Book of Disquiet, in that sense - form-wise its loose yet ambling along somewhere.

Also started on some Agaha Christie's The Secret Adversary.

Congrats!

PG Wodehouse very good for wedding readings--we made use of him at ours.

I mean, they're not HELPFUL readings, but the guests will enjoy themselves.

Thanks, guys!

Wodehouse might be an interesting avenue to explore. I'm trying to walk that tightrope between not being too solemn but also not giving the impression that I'm treating the whole thing like a joke.

I'm pulling up to the 'end' of Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. The scare quotes are because Mann apparently projected this as the first book of a trilogy he didn't live to finish. My enjoyment of it has been mixed. It did coax audible laughter out of me several times when I read a particularly witty and well-formed phrase. Several of the set pieces, like the Krull's military induction medical exam were engaging and entertaining. That's very much on the plus side of the ledger.

On the minus side, the book (and perhaps the author) began to run out of steam in the latter third of the book. Felix, as the narrator, is allowed to chatter on about costumery, drapery, aristocracy, heraldry, paleontology, cosmology and love, all in a very ornate and oratorical style. All this does is establish him as a very tiresome popinjay. Under the guise of expanding his hero's education in the world, Mann just succeeds in making him shallower and more voluble, to the point where now I just want him to shut up and go away. Luckily, he will in another 20 pages.

When I close this book and set it down I won't regret having read it, but I won't pine for the two further books that were never written.

I'm now reading Fair Play, Tove Jansson, a very short book (100 pp.) consisting of many short vignettes, held together by the fact that all of the vignettes feature the same two women characters. Both are artists, but strangely money seems not to be an issue for either of them. The author is Swedish and everything so far seems very Scandinavian. All the emotional content of their lives is sublimated into a kind of amorphous, highly aestheticized approach to life. The prose is attenuated to the point of near-disappearance.

This book could hardly be further from Felix Krull, even though that wasn't my intent when I chose this book. It caught my eye at the public library because it is a NYRB reissue and those are usually worth investigating.

I love that book and will brook no criticism of it. Fwiw it's autobiographical, they were lovers, and money was no issue because Jansson was author of the hugely internationally successful Moomin books.

Then I shall be careful not to criticize it. However, I may describe it in terms that do not match your own perceptions, which are those of a lover and therefore nothing is likely to satisfy you short of an effusion I may be unable to supply. Be assured my intent is not hurtful.

thumbs_up.jpg

It's such a short book I finished it last night and had some time to ponder on it.

It is a peculiar book. Almost all of its content is not in what the author writes about, so much as how the author writes about it. I would have to re-read it with very close attention to get at the bottom of its style and even then I'm not sure I would capture it.

The best I could do last night was to compare it to a visual artist's control over 'negative space'. There's a very large amount of metaphoric space in the book surrounding a very small amount of description, action and dialogue. That space dominates the book and indirectly provides it with a much larger significance than any of the content provided directly in the words. Which I must say is a weird trick and I don't see yet how it was done.

Anyway, I can see how it is a book worthy of being loved, even if it is a book I don't exactly understand.

Have you read anything else by Jansson? I think Fair Play may benefit from some familiarity with her, her life story, her other work - not that it isn’t a well-written, successful book but I understand being a bit puzzled by it. She was a visual artist as well, by the time she wrote Fair Play I think she had really transitioned away from her identity as an author first and foremost.

I’d highly recommend The True Deceiver and The Summer Book, both of which have more in the way of narrative arcs. They work as mirrors of each other, both about the relationships between two female characters who are many decades apart in age, but where The Summer Book is warm and touching The True Deceiver is harsh and ruthless in the way that it examines its protagonists. (It also reads as the author splitting herself in two and interrogating the different parts of her personality.)

re. Krull, I also think the Portuguese stuff is the weakest section, mainly because the setting is no longer inherently interesting. I think you get the theorising because there's less to say on that side of things. It's also one of those jokes where he talks himself up more and more and more though you know he's going to do something caddish any second, so it just depends how much you're willing to wait for that punchline.

Also, Fair Play is lame, The Summer Book is the real magic.

In all honesty, Aimless, you have written very interestingly and perceptively about it, even if it's not yr thing. You are a very good egg.

Oh hey it’s winter in some jurisdictions

It is, but we ILBers like to assert the year as well as the season in the WAYR thread title and that always makes for a slippery transition into the winter digs. We often consider Dec. 22-31 as an interregnum and just let the autumn thread act as regent until January.

Very good, as ye were

Even in the one-volume abridgment, I think that 800 pages of The Golden Bough is a bit too much for me to do in one go. Since I'm at the halfway point, I'm going to set it aside and read some other things. Next up is All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. James Wood had it in his "Four Books That Deserved More Attention in 2018" list for the New Yorker, and it was already lying around the house, so it seemed a propitious coincidence. I'm enjoying it so far. The theme reminds me of Troubles. The genteel manor, stuck in a time warp, somewhat absurdly persisting against a darkening cloud of violence and chaos. The suspense of how long can it last, but limned with a lightness of touch that is almost gallows humor.

Re Golden Bough, has anyone read The White Goddess, and is it as mad as it sounds?

That kempowski looks good. One of Anthea Bells' last translations

Even in the one-volume abridgment, I think that 800 pages of The Golden Bough is a bit too much for me to do in one go. Since I'm at the halfway point, I'm going to set it aside and read some other things.

i did this, and never went back. then tried again from the beginning a few years later and did exactly the same! i wish you better luck.

I'm reading Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay. The first notable fact about it is that she wrote it in her mid-70s, but the first person narrative voice is that of a much younger woman - and she carries it off believably and with ease. Second notable fact it that the narrator is very droll while giving the impression that this is second nature to her, coming so easily it is rather unconscious. So, a very pleasant read so far.

Whoa I had no idea she wrote it that late in life.

The otherwise immaculately detailed Ferrante book knocked me out of it briefly last night when the narration alluded to AIDS being a topic of conversation in 1980, which is very unlikely, even avant la lettre.

I made a fairly serious attempt to read The White Goddess many years ago, mainly because it was a big thing for Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and I was very interested in them at that time. I maybe managed about a third of it. It was unreadable tosh. Putting it mildly, Graves's gifts did not include a capacity for logical argument or the marshalling of evidence.

I've recently finished Cassandra at the Wedding, which on the whole I enjoyed even though it turned out to be a bit weirder and less good than it promised in the early pages.

Now reading The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann.

Aimless, not to be a pedant but Jansson was Finnish, not Swedish (though she did write in Swedish). Seconding The True Deceiver, that's an amazing novel, but of course it's also very weird for me to imagine someone coming to her work without first having read the moomins books.

After My Brilliant Friend I'm switching to a different epic series and the second volume of Miklo Banffy's Transsylvanian Trilogy. Was quite worried I wouldn't remember enough from the 500 page first volume which I read more than a year ago but it only took a few pages for the characters to feel like old friends. These books are so good you guys.

Seconding the Banffys here.

I seem to be ending the year on a Simenon/Maigret binge, catching up before the last year of new translations starts.

I got <i>My Friend Maigret</i> for x-mas! Also watched the first of the Jean Gabin adaptations, a story I had previously seen acted out by Mr.Bean.

There's a late 50s version of The Man Who Watched the Trains go by with Herbert Lom.
Think it's quite good but it is a long time since I saw it.
That's Simenon but not Maigret.

It is time for the Winter 2019 WAYR thread to arrive. If there is not such a thing already in place later today I'll try to spawn one.

Here it is: 2019 Winter: The What Are You Reading thread that came in from the cold. Have at it.