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

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?

no

xps

right - I see that was a bit telegraphed - I absolutely don't think Hitchens was a snob (def not of the Powell family + titles kind), but he did seem to have titanic supply of info and anecdote about world of mid-century British intellectuals, dons, journalists, authors & I think he had special attraction to inside/outside figures, ppl of the Establishment who would cut outside it (Jessica Mitford!), but still could speak its language - those people a large part of London's traditional fitzrovia/haute bohemia life, which is shared milieu with Powell, later parts of A Dance, as I understand it. The habits + patterns of that world's… gossip?… dialect? are common to both.

Tired! That felt more confusing. Maybe I'll have another go after sleep.

re greene and spark (i love them both)--he kept her supplied with crates of quality red wine when she was starting out as he thought her writing was great but knew she wasn't earning enough to buy good booze

"was her work in other media any good, come to think?"

i love her poems! and her short stories. and her autobio is great. never read any of her crit work though. the book on mary shelley or any of the others.

there is a complete poems volume that i want to get. i only have the selected poems, i think.

"I can't think of anyone c20th British with a run of ten novels to match that"

Blindness (1926)
Living (1929)
Party Going (1939)
Pack My Bag (1940)
Caught (1943)
Loving (1945)
Back (1946)
Concluding (1948)
Nothing (1950)
Doting (1952)

i wouldn't take her over spark but i got mad mad love for this string too:

Pastors and Masters (1925)
Brothers and Sisters (1929)
Men and Wives (1931)
More Women Than Men (1933)
A House and Its Head (1935)
Daughters and Sons (1937)
A Family and a Fortune (1939)
Parents and Children (1941)
Elders and Betters (1944)
Manservant and Maidservant

I love Green but there's a few things on that list as amorphous as weak Spark.

I'm eccentric about Green: Concluding is my favorite but Loving usually gets the edge.

i got lots of lady love though. let's here it for my other sweetheart:

Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Excellent Women (1952)
Jane and Prudence (1953)
Less than Angels (1955)
A Glass of Blessings (1958)
No Fond Return of Love (1961)
Quartet in Autumn (1977)
The Sweet Dove Died (1978)
A Few Green Leaves (1980)
Crampton Hodnet

i just thought i'd throw green in there. there's a case to be made. but i'm a spark lover 4ever. i haven't actually read all of them. read two of the fat paperbacks that collected 3 novels each.

but if you guys aren't on the ivy compton-burnett train please do get on. i have such a crush on those books.

Wodehouse gets a pass because he basically wrote a multivolume novel.

forster didn't write ten but if you include his short fiction...

Just bought a copy of A Glass of Blessings last month, will get to reading it soon I hope. My first Pym.

Other 20th Century Brits w/ a 'good run' - A. Huxley, E. Waugh, K. Amis, J.G. Ballard (and other Brit SF authors - B. Aldiss v consistent, for example), Murdoch (who, according to A N Wilson, v much disliked M Spark), B.S. Johnson, E. Taylor, and yeah, def H. Green.

As for A. Powell, I find Simon Raven's 'Alms for Oblivion' sequence funnier, snobbier, nastier, and altogether much more good gossipy fun.

Yeah, I'd probably read more Raven before reading more Powell, he seemed good fun from the one I read… Places Where They Sing I think.

Waugh's probably my favourite c20th British novelist, but I don't think he's especially consistent - I think there's high contrast even in the 30s novels, like yes there's good stuff in Black Mischief, but it's far weaker than A Handful of Dust. But Ballard! Yes!

Alms for Oblivion sounds good! 'Nastier' is something I look for.

Do need to read more Brit writing...so down on the current lot and I shouldn't use that as an excuse.

Powell's Dance nicely points up the distinction between what I enjoy and what I think is in some sort of quasi-objective sense "good". I love reading his stuff, but almost on the guilty pleasure level. I'd have no interest in trying to make a case for him as a great or even very good writer and I'm always mildly surprised when I come across evidence that people whose opinions I respect think of him as one.

Biggest surprise for me was finding out that Donald Westlake was a massive Powell fan - he even includes a reference to DTTMOT in one of his hardboiled novels, Plunder Squad:

"Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he’d started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool."

Found it funny that Tariq Ali is a huge fan (but it sort of makes sense, again, as with Hitchens, it's that counter- or mirror-establishment, radical dissent via Presidency of the Oxford Union)

I'm surprised to find myself in the opposite camp to many of you - I tend to think ADTTMOT is utterly magnificent - though not flawless - and I'm always amazed when I find people whose opinions I respect (like you lot obv) who think otherwise.

as far as current BritLit goes i feel like i need to read those edward st. aubyn books since everybody and their mother keeps raving about them. i want to see what the hubbub is about.

i think i must have a problem with great wars cuz i never finished parade's end, the powell books, or the sword of honour trilogy. i'd like to give the powell series another go someday. i don't think i actually owned all 12 books and for some psychological reason i didn't feel like i had an obligation to keep going. i'm also curious about his 30's novels. i'll bet i'd like some of those.