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

For the Wao-haters out there, have you read Drown? May raise the same set of problematics but it's less dependent on pop culture references to define everyone and everything in it. (am about to begin an essay on the notion of passing in relation to Oscar's failed attempts at cultural assimilation in both the US and the DR in comparison with the 'successful' passing of Coleman Silk in Roth's Human Stain)

Thomp: Yeah, I've not read anything jawdroppingly great on any of the courses on the MA (did a primer on american lit last year that took us from Thoreau to Auster, a postmodernist fiction course that, Pale Fire aside, was largely dull (and was essentially a course in which the novel in question was a conduit for another boring conversation about the nature of reality etc) this term I'm doing 21st

...century American fiction, next term it'll be Literature and Philosophy.

I normally try and writer about off-course texts anyway, so ended up doing my essays last year on Clement Greenberg's art criticism in conjunction with beat writing (linking action painting with 'action writing' etc) and postmodern architecture and the urban imagination.

Prompted by posts above and wanting to see if John E Woods' translations are as engaging as people say, rereading The Magic Mountain (or rather 'rereading' - I read it when I was about 15 or 16 and v ambitious or pretentious, so obviously have next to no memory of what happens in it except that there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens), and although I've thought H T Lowe-Porter has a bad rap and is perfectly readable if a little stiff (I went through the first 20 pages of hers too, for the sake of science), this is obviously a better or more present version - readable, precise, feels like there's more tonal subtlety.

there are some debates about time or something

ha

i might join you. but then i always say i will do this on these threads. and then i don't.

dwight i bought 'drown', diaz seemed fundamentally talented enough i didn't want to write him off. but then i haven't read it because, you know, effort. also i like him in interviews.

If you only ever read one other thing by Diaz make it 'Aurora' from that collection - a genuine masterpiece of a short story IMO.

I'll stop going on about him now. Just picked up my first issue of Bookforum...should I expect good things?

there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens

the #1 thing i was looking for when i read MM was the same thing that's telegraphed so much at the beginning, the experience of seven years of time passing, put into novel/narrative form, and for a long time i was expecting to be disappointed, and then somewhere way through the book, i was like, hey, hans has been here forever, or is it really only five years? etc.

Drown is full of wonderful stories but yeah, Aurora might be the best (if it's the one I'm thinking of - the junkie girlfriend one?). Is his collected work available online or anywhere? I don't fancy Oscar Wao for some reason, but I read an SF story in the NYer about an epidemic in Haiti which was terrific.

that was an excerpt from his novel-in-progress (apparently he's been trying to write a sci-fi book for years). He has a new story collection out now though

hi ILB! I have started reading again after a long uninentional hiatus brought about by procrastination :)

am currently reading:
Laurence Bergreen - Over The Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.
Only a little ways in but really enjoying it.

also aquired from the library:
River of Doubt, the book about Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon
Collapse - Jared Diamond.
dunno, was kidn of in and adventure/exploration/ancient civilizations mood, lol.

just recently finished Anthony Flacco's Road Out Of Hell abt the Wineville murders. So the adventure stuff is kind of a palate cleanser

National Book Award winners and others, anybody read 'em?
http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/11/14/national-book-awards-2012-winners/

Reading Helen DeWitt's 'Lightning Rods', which is really good, and oddly like a Donald Westlake comedy in style

The War: A Memoir - Marguerite Duras.

pretty horrifying

just finished Maldoror, still working on the Blanchot essay. may post reflections, later, somewhere

Following Pere Goriot w The Idiot (Penguin Classic, David Magarshack translation). Halfway through, and the women are amazing (it's all amazing, but didn't know D. had such female characters in him, most don't)

The Idiot was the toughest going for me of Dostoevsky's Big Four; I've never actually finished it. I'm wondering if the Magarshack translation would suit me better; I think it was his translation of C&P that I was reading when I decided it was my favorite novel ever.

Portnoy's complaint. such a great first paragraph, (the rest is very funny too )

Reading Helen DeWitt's 'Lightning Rods', which is really good, and oddly like a Donald Westlake comedy in style

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, 15 November 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So gonna nominate this for the next ILX book club :)

NO REPEAT AUTHORS

OR NATIONALITIES, RACES, GENDERS

Jeffrey Toobin's The Oath and Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means (a surprising disappointment considering how much I love her).

Drugs, if you loved C&P via Margarshack, def check his translation of The Idiot--got hooked at first skim Tuesday, and it's become a way of life. I am able to do other things in between reading sessions, honest. Although at the moment, it's off to the park, and back on the train for a while--bye!

Almost finished with Brothers Karamozov which is my first Dostoevsky.

Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means (a surprising disappointment considering how much I love her).

O no! THis is one of my fav Sparkses!

It was...I dunno, more amorphous than usual? She's the master of abbreviated narrative, but this novel ended just as it was getting started.

I guess that's true, actually. I just really liked the vibe she set up, of all this not-well-suppressed sexual excitement due to the unexploded bomb.

I wasn't a big fan of it either – felt like she wasn't quite holding her tone at points. Admired its frame or structure though - bluntly placing evil-martyrdom-grace around a club-of-types-of-girls story (the kind of story she'd already taken to bits in Jean Brodie). Climax works, I think.

Ha now I'm sort of convincing myself to reread it, but I've had the Mandelbaum Gate sitting around for years, so maybe that next time I'm going Spark.

actually, make that a question: how's The Mandelbaum Gate? For some reason (length? It looks too long for a Spark book) I've never much fancied it.

Finished The Idiot Friday, been walking around in the reverberations ever since (well, they keep coming back, fairly often). Reminds me of what PKD seemed to be going for with Valis, though more literally there: the novelist vs. and in tandem with the spiritual crackpot side of his brain, seeking a balance, and a struggle. Also, having almost been executed, and always being watched, despite/because of becoming so extremely conservative, he puts his radical testifying in the mouth of the Idiot--whose condition, though it includes D.'s own very real and here indelibly described epilepsy. can also seem like brilliant literary devide--then again, Ippolit's "Confession" includes a manifesto, just about, of the chronically afflicted: his response to society's response to his surprisingly persistent condition and very existence. Also, his illness-related frustrations, his insights and fevered detours intensify his inclinations to shit-stirring. He's among the many Russians who strenuously adapt to the Black Swans, to the Idiot orphan who returns to claim his inheritance--his fortune and his dream homeland--and to Natasha, former child concubine on the loose, or the lam, at any rate. Eight versions of this were attempted. and I like how he lets characters foregrounded in earlier plotlines slide into place here, where they all do their telling bit (in some cases when I'd come to assume they were gone for good). Also, he knows when to examine their interiors, and when just to describe what they did, in whatever elaborate or concise detail. Local rumors and gossip--incl. distortions and canny surmises--appear, when we need a break/set-up for the next suckerpunch.

"brilliant literary *device*", I meant.

i prefer what came immediately before slender means to slender means. peckham rye, bachelors, brodie.

i need to do a spark re-read project. so many of them i read 20+ years ago. then spent the next 20 years filling in gaps as i found stuff that i had missed (or as she wrote them).

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
Memento Mori (1959)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
The Public Image (1968) - Shortlisted for Booker Prize
The Driver's Seat (1970)

there are two of these i haven't read which is all that is keeping me from applauding this as a fucking impeccable run

my phone seems to have eaten my earlier post about the mandelbaum gate. i said that i. it seemed like spark had graham greene in the back of her head when she wrote it, maybe, but that ii. about 40% of what i can remember is that the protagonist has coleridge's rhyming crib on metrical feet stuck in his head throughout and keeps betting people they can't spell 'mississippi'. since then i have remembered that iii. it seems to make a point of avoiding giving you the narrative in a very schematic way.

i liked it, though, though this is probably not the week to read it, what

The Driver's Seat is so good.

cool, coleridge crib sells me, I will finally read it.

It is incredible - I can't think of anyone c20th British with a run of ten novels to match that - and they reflect off one another, it glitters, it's hypnotic.

Maybe Greene? But I've never had a taste for Greene.

1938-1958: Brighton Rock, The Confidential Agent, The Power and the Glory, The Ministry of Fear, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, Loser Takes All, Our Man In Havana. I haven't read them all, but the ones I have ...

yeah, I can see that. I'd still take Spark. I fell off The Ministry of Fear, which was the last one I had a go at, a year or two ago. I'm missing a thriller gene or something. Business with the cake at the start was fun.

Anthony Powell, of course, some people would take Powell.

powell seems a bit of a cheat. i have read more graham greene than i realised.

I've read the entirety of A Dance... and Spark still pwns him.

i've read the entirety of that and six or seven of his other novels and a chunk of the diaries and a bit of the memoirs and i don't know what i'm getting at here actually, i totally agree with you tbh

read 1/3 of A Dance..., I think you can guess where this is going

dance appeals to the part of me that likes grand noble botches, spark appeals to the part of me that likes sonnets. -- was her work in other media any good, come to think?

Not very helpful, but I remember reading and liking her verse. Nothing more precise than that.

I have moments where I can get into the ambition of Dance, & its recording talent but I don't really care about any of it. I felt like I was reading a long, long magazine article about some pointless people. plus the part of my head that immediately dismisses anyone who expresses enthusiasm for the diaries of James Lees-Milne kicks against it - I mean 'snob' always needs unpacking, and that strain in Eng writing is built on national class fault lines and picks up a charge from that at its best (Waugh), but fuck the remainder, novel as polished gossip is its utter horizon.

The novel was never once dull but the examination of Widmerpool came down to how well the English are up the sort of illumination of a shallow man in which Proust excelled -- and the answer is not well.

I retract the statement: the two WWI volumes are boring as hell.

I stopped somewhere in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, and no, I never thought it dull exactly – it was readable, it flowed along, slid down etc, but I wasn't engaged or enthused and couldn't really see why people whose opinions I had lots of time for made such a fuss. But I've said all this before. Mysteries of taste. Abed.

Hitchens wrote the best case for it.

That's in Unacknowledged Legislation right? I'll pull it out, read it before bed. It's one of those subjects I don't trust him on tho' - he was virtually an archivist of the British higher gossip - the 'well, as Driberg said to Connolly of Ken Tynan' sort - which basically means he will instinctively stan for Powell. But I'll look at it now again.

yep!

he was virtually an archivist of the British higher gossip

wait wait -- can you explain? He was alert to snobbery: Waugh's, Powell's, even Orwell's.

bout to start Nicole Krauss' The History of Love - am I in for a treat with this one?