Words! Words! Words!: Autumn 2012 'What do you read, my lord?' thread

woods translates the french iirc. and iirc wasn't untranslated french pretty common in older translations of the russians? (you think it's tough in mann, try reading pre-70s scholarly books where they drop into french, german, latin, and greek without so much as a hey what up.)

and the discourses of settembrini and naphtha seem to have something pretty questionable about them - moreso naphtha's - but that is arguably easy to index to hans's moral/pedagogical development. it's not as if mann wants you to think you're reading kant or something; you're reading about hans caught in the middle of grandstanding intellectual-pedagogical rivals.

i'm not sure what i want to say about 'mann as a thinker' because i haven't read him carefully enough. his artistry is obviously pretty massive, which is part of the problem; he thinks using literature, so it's not like you can just read off 'magic mountain' anything about the quality of his thought. musil codes way more easily as an essayist-investigator and doesn't immediately seem to be as constrained by self-imposed literary structures, which makes him seem smarter and more probing. but they are obviously peers. musil 4 eva but i would totally read 'magic mountain' again (and have plans to read 'faustus', 'buddenbrooks').

try reading Mann's essays! There's a sequence on Goethe that I've only dipped into because my own relationship with Faust is dilettantish at best.

Settembrini and Naphta's increasingly toxic arguments represent the decadence of certain kinds of 19th century isms, no? Positivism, elitism, etc. Fuck, it's been almost twenty years

I don't know if j or xyzzz agree, but Castorp is one of the few blank slates in lit who's actually compelling.

ehh who would want to read a load of mitteleuropean malingerers lazing around & making ponderous challops on the internet

― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Monday, October 29, 2012 1:14 PM (1 hour ago)

My impression is that this is the plot for Magic Mountain, give or take an 'on the Internet'

Anyways I just got a book on Gerard de Nerval that leaves p much all the quotes in untranslated French. Looks like I'll be investing in an English-French dictionary some time in the future

One more thing: first page of Do Androids Dream? = stone-cold classic

Yes we are re-creating The Magic Mountain as the original was so unsatisfying!

I could do w/re-visiting. MM is ideally SO my kind of thing (and Doctor Faustus even more so). I'll make sure to get the later translation.

I don't know if j or xyzzz agree, but Castorp is one of the few blank slates in lit who's actually compelling.

yeah hans is a bro

Virginia Woolf fans: how does Jacob's Room fit within her body of work? I get what's going on here, but it's all so fragmented and elliptical that it leaves me with little to grasp onto.

reading musil - confusions of young törless

Finished The Pale King last night. Now that I have the whole (but whole only in a fragmentary way) book under my belt, I can see better how DFW really was trying to play with boredom as subject matter, but it didn't feel like he ever really got a grip on it, no matter how many approaches he tried. It's hard to imagine that he was satisfied with his results, at least in regard to his stated theme.

The book seemed to me much more to be about how thoroughly his characters were embedded into huge systems, inflexible institutions and complex technologies that originally emerged from the minds of humans to meet our needs and desires, but which now escape our ability to control, while yet exerting decisive control over us. The boredom idea, i.e. controlling one's boredom as a means of thriving in this human-built but not human-friendly environment, was never developed nearly as urgently as the idea of how human-unfriendly and crushingly overpowering our systems have become.

It was also possible in this book to isolate his techniques more completely in my attention, so I could see what effects he was getting and how he got them. For example, he had a knack for extended monologue in his authorial voice, and his characters are most compelling, too, when they are also deep in monologue. What I could not decide was the extent to which these monologues flowed from him roughly complete in a torrent, if you will, or else if they were carefully accreted bit by bit, with their many joins smoothed out by careful polishing. I suspect the latter, but it would be a measure of his achievement that he made them so closely resemble the former.

done with the Dominican Republic for now; moving laterally to Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica, which has received been so lavished with praise (here and elsewhere) that I expect to be... erm... blown away..... (sorry)

Halldor Laxness: The Atom Station -- enjoyed this quite a lot, though also frequently mystified/confused. Did nothing to dispel my preconceptions of Icelanders as an odd people.

Virginia Woolf fans: how does Jacob's Room fit within her body of work? I get what's going on here, but it's all so fragmented and elliptical that it leaves me with little to grasp onto.

it's been about 18 years but my impressions too.

aimless i sometimes think you are the only person i have ever rationally assess dfw without an axe to grind one way or the other

I finished Philip Roth's When She Was Good. Again, all the elements have always been there, but you can see that now he's hit on his thing of getting the hook in and twisting it, and twisting it, and twisting it until you're as wound up as everyone in the book.

This one had a really odd almost perspective shift in the last section, so that I found my sympathies all at odds with where they'd been hitherto. Very strange, and very neat, to make you root for someone all book and then turn the tables so deftly; I can't recall reading anything quite like it.

It was kinda odd to read a Roth with no Jewish characters. I don't feel like he really got under the skin of Catholicism though, insofar as he was using it as a substitute - all the characters seemed to feed off repression, whether catholic or not, which is fine on its own but I do feel he was partly aiming for loftier themes.

without an axe to grind one way or the other

That's the beauty of knowing one's opinions about books are purely irrelevant to the world at large.

Last night I picked up and started the History of the United States: 1801-1809 by Henry Adams, as reissued by the Library of America. It's too soon to tell if it will 'stick', but HA is definitely using Edward Gibbon as his model, even if his prose is unlikely to sustain that level of exquisiteness.

Haha -- not true. Give it about thirty pages. He WAS our Gibbon.

I spent most of last summer reading it, and part of my graduate thesis used a fair chunk of Adams' essays, and although his posing could be tedious -- he's the scion-who-never-was, the guy who wanted to be asked to lead foreign policy but was too noble to beg -- the calibrated irony is almost European in its breadth.

i have the first of those adams books but haven't cracked it yet.

i wish there were someone out there writing a gibbon-esque history of the post-1945 u.s.

So far I've only read two Adams novels, Esther and Democracy, both pretty droll. Did he write any more fiction? I'll read the history etc. someday (have read excerpts)

That's about it. "Droll" is apt.

My fave character is based on Blaine from Maine (wonder if he read it)

I bought my other half Alice Munro's Hateship, Loveship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage; she hadn't started it so I thought I'd give it a go. I wondered whether it'd stick - small-town Canada is about the most boring setting I can think of. My fears lasted about three pages. This is masterful.

haha god yes

YES

Amazon had Blanchot's Lautreamont & Sade for 9 bucks, so I ordered that + Maldoror (in the Paul Knight translation); I've taken out both from the library before and found them immensely enjoyable. looking forward to singing the praises of evil again this winter.

... ack wrong thread!

Just finished Morrissey: the pageant of his bleeding heart. If you love him and like reading academic stuff about literature, this is your book. Seriously academic, but not dull. Also read the newest Augusten Burroughs, This is how - his take on the self-help book. Very insightful essays about dealing with various emotions and truly dire problems. It was the perfect bookend to Morrissey.

So I've only just finished the first of the Munro stories, but I wanted to say to everyone on here who ever talked her up - you were so right.

This is masterful.
On the basis of this comment, I have bought HLFCM and added it to the queue.

Uh-oh - if this takes a massive nosedive I'll feel bad alright.

You're more likely to enjoy it if you feel pressured to find it good, yeah? Anyway, it was about 40p second-hand, so it's hardly a crippling investment.

"Floating Bridge," Ismael.

I finished the first book of stories in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Some good stuff - emotionally raw at times, makes you wince - but artfully put together. I thought a change of pace would be nice before continuing, so now I'm reading some stories from Steven Millhauser's recent collection We Others. An interesting contrast to the Eisenberg.

how was tess of d'urbervilles in the end?

And did you read the version with or without the undies/cliff scene?

Just started Hatchet Jobs - Dale Peck.

just got to the heavy dialect part in the middle of Cloud Atlas. the next 50 pages will be heavy going.

(also, that's another thing that makes me think of iain m banks as well as the odd palindromic structure)

reading 'i am charlotte simmons' - is fairly engrossing, not as embarrassing as i thought itd be, reminding me of curtis sittenfeld's 'prep'

like a chapter from finishing the steve jobs bio - is fine, mostly hero worship, he sucks as a person

collected amy hempel stories

gonna also start 'the league' a history of the nfl up to like ~'86

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm100008373/murder-in-memoriam-didier-daeninckx-paperback-cover-art.jpg

Its a bit weak as a detective novel I think but the historical stuff (nazi collaborators, the algerian massacre in Paris, 1961) is shocking

I'm about 2/3rds through the new Chabon ('Telegraph Avenue'). The writing is good and I'm enjoying it, but it has moments that read like black people fanfic.

Just finished a review copy of the new (Jan 2013) George Saunders collection---REALLY uneven. He has a few more realistic stories in it, and it really throws the emptiness of the non-realistic stories into sharp relief. Also opens with the longest, weakest story, which seems like a bad idea. But the final story was great.

anyone here read any of Kevin Barry's stuff? I notice he had a story in last week's New Yorker and i'm curious how he comes across to non-Irish readers. I love his writing but I feel like a lot of the humour would be lost if you're not familiar with the distinctly Irish turns of phrase he captures so well

In 2007 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his short story collection There are Little Kingdoms.[1]

uncanny

http://i.imgur.com/dzdKA.png

He has confessed to "haunting bookshops and hiding" to "spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone's tempted by my sweet bait" and has also placed copies of his own work in front of books by other “upcoming” authors.[5]

so have you read any of his stories then