2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

Rebecac West - The Fountain Overflows

Chinaski, what you say about TFOS is what seemed to be something of a conensus on the ILB thread, years back. I think I'd largely agree also. The first section is impressing me all over again -- it's by far the richest, deepest, most painterly bout of writing JL has ever done.

The Trip to Echo Spring was mildly disappointing when I finally got round to it. I mean, it was fine, but hardly revelatory.

Never got past the first Red Riding book, it was so OTT that it became ridiculous.

Just finished Who Is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko, which was charming and clever but a bit ruined by endless dream sequences.

Anybody read The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, edited by S.P. Rosenthal? Contents (via page linked below) look even better than this description:

The first section of the volume, Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury, contains the basic memoirs and discussions of the Group itself by the original members, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, and others. These recollections range from unpublished private correspondence and diaries to formal autobiographies. Published here for the first time is the remainder of Desmond MacCarthy's unfinished Bloomsbury memoir. Virginia Woolf's complete Memoir Club paper on Old Bloomsbury and excerpts from her letters and diaries also appear, as do letters about Bloomsbury by Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, and Vanessa Bell. The second section, Bloomsberries, contains observations on individuals by other members of the group and their children. Virginia Woolf's hitherto unknown biographical fantasy on J.M. Keynes is newly added, as are accounts of Molly MacCarthy, Lydia Lopokova, and David Garnett. Bloomsbury Observed, the last section, consists of reminiscences of the group mainly by their contemporaries. Additions to the revised edition include an early anonymous newspaper account of Bloomsbury, and observations by Quentin Bell, Beatrice Webb, Gerald Brenan, Christopher Isherwood, Frances Partridge, and others.

Also included are an updated chronology recording the principal events in the careers of Bloomsbury's members and an enlarged bibliography. (This is the second edition.)
https://www.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Group-Collection-Memoirs-Commentary/dp/0802076408

Just finished The Changeling, by Joy Williams. I found it oddly hard to focus on in the beginning and I feel like I need to read it again but it was deeply unnerving. NYT slammed it when it came out, highlighting the sentence “She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.”

“but”?

“She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.”

lol i love joy

You might enjoy Karen Russell's take on her (they're two of *those* Florida writers):
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-bracing-wisdom-of-joy-williamss-the-changeling

I finished Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. I think I would have preferred more baseball actually, and maybe a bit less on the mayoral race, but it was pretty enjoyable. Now I'm reading Ottessa Mossfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is off to a strong (and funny) start. Not sure if the narrator's eye is jaundiced or gimlet, but probably one of those.

You might enjoy The Red Smith Reader. His takes, his visions of what made baseball and many other sports glorious and childish and corrupt and otherwise involving and emblematic, for fifty freakin' yeahs, from the Great Depression to the Age of Reagan, presented in a very concise, compressed, translucent way--sunlight through the blinds behind the breakfast table, smokelight in the auditorium, etc.=the best rip 'n' read clip file ever. There's also a collection in The Library of America, dunno how much overlap. H'm-m-m

I've been out hiking and camping in the mountains. While out there I read The Grand Babylon Hotel, Arnold Bennett. It was a grandly silly pot-boiler of a novel, written to be serialized in the English popular press of 1902, so every chapter is short and ends with a jolt of mystery or intrigue. It's mostly rather stupid, but fun, about on a par with 1960s 'high concept' television adventure series, like Wild, WIld West or The Man From U.N.C.L.E..

I also read about halfway into Watership Down, Richard Adams, which does a very creditable job of cribbing from such Greek classics as the Oresteia, the Odyssey, and Anabasis and transforming them into something midway between a talking animal fable and an English pastoral. For such a weird pastiche, it is amazingly compelling stuff. They say it's not stealing if you can make it your own.

Milton - Lycidas/Samson Agonistes/Paradise Regained/some translation (Psalms). Connect with Milton a lot more than Shakespeare (maybe its unfair to compare and so on).

Prose-wise I started on a wide ranging selection of Rilke's Letters. Some really entertaining passages, one early on around Count Tolstoy's villa. Other letters display his (really awesome at times) powers of description and making a scene or a person come alive. Plenty of egos stroked and much self-pity too, that can get tiring (I have read a lot of Rilke's letter writing over the years).

Andrew Smith - Grasshopper Jungle

About armageddon, giant insects, sexual confusion, coming-of-age, Iowa, Ronald Reagan's balls, and Exile on Main Street. Edgar Wright apparently has an adaptation in the works.

I read a lot of Kafka in 2015, but am nibbling at him again, and would be happy to delve deeper into this burrow once more.

Aimless: does GRAND BABYLON HOTEL suggest the title of GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL?

WATERSHIP DOWN was my favourite book aged 11.

oblomov

Halfway through The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. So far less racist/orientalist than I expected - the Indian cult trying to recover their gem take up much less space than I'd have thought - and the mystery does keep you glued to it. There's some repetition, owing to the author's choice of having several narrators, all of whom are writing down their experiences at the behest of a character. Reminded me of Nabisco's point about the beginings of the novel, when you would have all these conceits so at some point you're reading a letter of someone detailing reading a ship log that quotes a newspaper article etc.

I think I saw a BBC adaptation of that over Xmas.

The Moonstone is much less racist than the thematically overlapping The Sign of The Four, which is from a couple of decades later.

It should be pointed out that though the Indian cultists in this are portrayed as murderous and implacable to a supernatural degree, it is made pretty explicit that the original theft was shameful, so you've got some pretty obvious subtext regarding guilt over the plunder of Empire in there, even if Collins wouldn't necessairly have looked at it that way.

It's taken me about 4 years so far to read moonstone, but I'll get there. Watched the TV version at Christmas and can't remember the ending.

Frankenstein is the king of a story within a story. I think it gets 5 or 6 levels deep at one point (monster eavesdropping a letter being read)

Currently re-reading Our Mutual Friend. Was my first Dickens 11 years ago and is now the first of the rereads.

GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL?

They're certainly phonemically similar, but I think that 'Grand ____ Hotel' was a fairly common construction for luxury hotels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so it could easily be coincidence.

Keep thinking you people are talking about Grand Hotel Abyss, which I think somebody actually was talking about a week or so ago.

xxp Also The Neapolitan Novels are stories within stories about stories within stories, with the narrator--ageing female literary celeb who has recently seen her career-making roman a clef referred to in passing as "the Italian Bonjour Tristesse", reports that some of her characters/people are less negative about her blend of art and sensationalism than they are about her bungling it--she tells that, works it into the story, like everything else (and justly builds it into the finale and punchline).

I'm reading Grand Hotel Abyss! I don't think I can read 300 pages of it.

Read Roland Buti's Year of the Drought, from 2014. Swiss writer, first book to be translated into English (by Charlotte Mandell), won a few prizes. It was alright. Heavy with symbolism about the battle between atavism and modernity, the battles of puberty. The coda was the best thing about it.

Now reading Butcher's Crossing by John Williams and, slight credulity problems aside, liking it very much.

Now reading an old library book, Rembrandt's Hat, mid-70s collection of stories by Malamud: going or lean yet layered, limber in strict tempo, which makes the rong bits, even when pebbley, more of a stumble, and some are whole paragraphs etc.---there's a sense of a distinguished athlete or musician past his prime, who hasn't adapted accordingly, but will just do what he's always done 'til he falls over. But I'm not tempted to stop reading, it's okay. What else should I read by him? Just start at the beginning? His basic approach also seems a bit---dated? Historical, in that you can tell he's an American who started prob in the early 50s lit mags--but/and still an appetite for bold/abrupt turns, even with the stumbles.

Haven't read The Moonstone but The Woman In White is really really great

xpost to dow

Really enjoyed The Assistant by Malamud when I read it a long, long time ago - realist novel about assimilation and Jewish identity, amongst other things. FWIW, it was chosen by Anthony Burgess for his 99 Novels selection - and he also picked Dubin's Lives, which I haven't read, and which I believe has elements of myth and fantasy, so something of a departure from the norm maybe. I could be wrong, but - at least in the UK - Malamud seems to be rapidly receding from view as any kind of 'significant' writer. Maybe if The Natural had been a bigger hit...

Thanks, Ward! Some implications of myth, fantasy, paranoid vision here, though mainly in the freewheeling opener. Wasn't he the basis for Roth's "The Ghost Writer," the old maestro who was already fading from view in the 70s, 80s---late 60s, even?
These stories orig. pub or copyright 1968, 1972, 1973: eight of them, 204 pages, so a spate, it seems---"going *for*" and "there's *a* sense," speaking of going pebbles.

The fixer, which burgess dismissed as “too parodically Jewish” or something like that in 99 novels, is also really good. Idiots first and the magic barrel are much more successful short story collections imo/iirc; the other year I got the audiobook of the complete stories and the quality definitely got less consistent as the years wore on. I loved the story cycle pictures of fidelman upon revisiting as much as when I initially read it, though.

& yeah he’s not really much of a figure in the uk at all, though a few years ago I saw that my Hungarian coworker at Tesco was reading a translation of the fixer

I'm enjoying Gallows Pole guys. If I'd read any Game Of Thrones, I'd say it's Game of Thronesy in terms of style, but it's good. Like Game of Thrones for the Quietus / folk horror generation

Thought it was more recent, but the '97 TV series for The Woman in White is also great. Had forgotten Andrew Lincoln was the hero, but Simon Callow's Count Fosco is note-perfect oily and sinister.

Count Fosco is one of the best literary villains ever.

With Malamud, would definitely recommend Dubin's Lives, and I loved The Natural, even though I care/understand nothing for/about baseball.

I like that one Malamud story about the father that wants his daughter to marry an artist while the mother wants her to marry a businessman, can’t remember what that one is called

I finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I read an interview with Moshfegh where she said that she comes to writing almost more from a musical perspective than a literary one, trying to capture the particular flow and rhythm of a voice, a stream of thought, in a way that can take the reader out of themselves like being enraptured by a piece of music. I think that is probably her strongest suit. The narrator's voice is strong and distinctive and intriguing - I'd say a lot of the interest in the book is trying to understand who this funny, frank and disturbing person is. It's not the plot, such as it is. My interest in reading about fictional conceptual art pieces is probably even less than my interest in reading about nonfictional ones, the ending seemed like it belonged to a different book, and I think Moshfegh is perhaps a bit too interested in cultivating a reputation as an enfant terrible, but I'd be interested in reading more of her work.

Things I can remember reading since I last updated here (some months ago):

Ursule Molinaro: Encores For A Dilettante - early seventies experimental feminist New York business, I liked it despite the fact it kept pushing me away. I didn't take it personally.

Egress - interesting new lit magazine from Little Island Press, inc my fave raves Eley Williams and David Hayden.

Therese Bohman: Eventide - Swedish novel of a disappointed Swedish academic getting tangled up in some sort of mid-life love/work crisis, something about vulnerability and agency and victimhood maybe? This one is very good until the end which is very good indeed.

Dag Solstad: Armand V - I think Dag Solstad is a genius and I loved every page of this. IIRC James thought the conceit - these are footnotes from an unwritten novel - was a bit superfluous but I found myself adrift in the unwritten novel itself and I loved it.

Peter Benson: A Private Moon - this is one of those novels (what are the others? Sciascia? Gadda?) that starts off like it's going to be a private detective yarn and then everything falls apart. I really liked this book and I think that Peter Benson is maybe a writer who's drifted out of fashion, but I'm not sure why. I've read three or four of his books and they're all good, and all different.

Victoria Brown: Cherry Bomb - slim volume of piquant pop poetry on Dostoyevsky Wannabe, I kept this next to the bed for a few nights and enjoyed it, must revisit.

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay: Abandon - fractured-self Indian novel of a woman adrift from society and (sense of) self. I thought this was periodically brilliant but came away feeling a bit unsatisfied, like I could see the scaffolding of the novel in a way I didn't want to maybe? I would recommend it, mind.

Richard Brammer: Girl At End - more Dostoyevsky Wannabe, this one might - might - have something in common with the Solstad in so far as it seems to be incidents and reflections from the lives of incidental characters in a story, without that story existing. I might have got that wrong. It's full of northern soul, indie and dance references and it's definitely more Jonathan Richman than Jonathan Frantzen.

Per Olov Enquist: The Magnetist's Fifth Winter - quack medicine / mesmerism in early modern Germania. As ever with Enquist's historical stuff I'm left feeling that I've learned something deep about the nature of human relations and belief, but I can never tell you quite what. Also as ever, hugely enjoyable (I'm less enamoured of his more recent autobiographical bits, I think, but let's not worry about that.)

Rosie Snajdr: A Hypocritical Reader - short stores, fragmentary pieces, some brilliant, others confusing, they might all be linked (certainly you see the same names recur without it being clear whether it's the same characters). I'm going to have to read this again and I'm very much looking forward to doing so.

Oh and I started "Arlington Park" by Rachel Cusk but after two chapters I asked my wife if it got any better and she sadly shook her head. I couldn't stand it. A rare abandonment by me, friends whose taste I trust swear by Cusk so I'll likely try another one at some point.

After about 350 pages of the exploits and adventures of a bunch of rabbits, I am beginning to detect a certain sameness in the sorts of adventures a rabbit might meet with, even in the course of an exceptionally adventurous life. The prospect of reading another 130 pages of the same stuff is beginning to look a bit dimmer than it did 200 pages ago.

lol

I'm sure rabbits think the same about us.

"Rembrandt's Hat", title story of xxxp Malamud collection, def a step up, woke up this morning still buzzed from bedtime reading. A little contrivey but if this is what his prime was like, I want more! Thanks for recs.

Especially as justified set-up, however contrived, for v. strong, step-up ending---prev. endings tended to let down.

Or let-down, but never noticed it like that.

I finished Watership Down last night. I can see how it fits the arc of the classic hero tale. I wonder if Richard Adams was consciously seeking to duplicate some of the explosive success that Tolkien's books were having in the decade before this came out. Anyway, he did a bang up job, considering the material he was working with.

I have a copy of John Williams' Stoner checked out of the library, but I may delay reading it. I expect to go camping next week and I'm reluctant to take library books on such trips. I'll probably opt for some of my many cheap used paperbacks. I don't mind if they get some rough treatment.

Watership Down is better than Lord of the Rings because the characters in the story realize that not having any women around is actually a big problem.

I've been reading Crashed by Adam Tooze, which I think is really excellent. Aditya Chakrabortty thought it impressive but bloodless. For me the anger is latent in it. Tooze, like his confrere David Edgerton, roundhouses explanatory and subtly or not so subtly eculpatory narratives and explanations by going hard in the detail and having the skill to extract both explanatory narrative arcs and say quite clearly 'no, this is *not* what happened.' He has explicitly stated he wanted to write an economic / financial history, and says at the beginning that this means much of the social impact, the wider human frame if you like, is regrettably absent.

But the mechanics of how it happened, how people missed what they shouldn't have done, and the reasons they took poor decisions, or deliberately avoided taking better decisions are meticulously covered. The book has a very powerful explanatory force, powerful in part because it has underlying it an anger. Chakrabortty's review is worth reading, but i think it misses this.

The timing of the book also gives it an additional facet without which it wouldn't be anywhere near as powerful. Tooze says that he started writing it in 2012,2013, when the dominant story was that liberal economics had won out over the conservative impulses, in terms of how to deal with the crisis. That it was, grotesquely given the impact, a 'success story'. The latter sections of the book deal with the impact of this 'success story' on political narratives and reactions. Because of the rigour of his method he is able to link quite explicitly, through objects and events, the rise of the far right in Hungary and Poland with the economic decisions made in Europe and the States. Again, this ability to do forensic explanatory history is part of the power of the book.

I still don't have the first clue about how anything but the most basic financial instruments work, and these bits I had to take rather on faith, like reading a science-fiction book in a made-up language.

Devices and Desires by PD James. Route into this was slightly odd. I'd been flicking through twitter and seen Emily Wilson (translator of The Odyssey) laying into the Loeb opening line 'that man of many devices' (her 'that complicated man' did a lot to publicise her approach and stir up controversy – i was sceptical at first, but now v much like it). She said it made it sound like he was using android apps and iphones etc. I thought this was a bit silly and remembered the PD James novel – just as a phrase – which pulled 'device' away from 'a mechanical contrivance' and towards a definition located more closely in the human (i thought one was more archaic than the other, but in fact the various definitions of 'device' are equally old).

I wondered whether it was a biblical phrase, tho it didn't look like it from a quick google, so I ended up downloading it to my kindle. There were other reasons as well. I've often tried to read PD James – my mum who has an unaffected good taste in the stuff she likes, has always loved her, and so I've tried several times to get into them, usually starting with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (the first). All the books were on the shelves at home, and memorable for their Sphere edition covers:

https://pictures.abebooks.com/1LACEYLANE/9585688614.jpg

And I've always struggled with them despite liking crime fiction.

It wasn't until I started Devices and Desires that I remembered two things: one that this was late, so late that I remember buying it in hardback for my mum for Christmas when it came out, and two, that I dimly remembered (and had been quite scared by) the TV adaptation. Not enough to spoil the book – just enough to remember the main serial killer MO.

I was going to say 'main serial killer MO that's at the heart of the book' but that in fact is the complete opposite of what it is. It's almost completely irrelevant, as fine an example of a mcguffin outside of the maltese falcon as i've ever seen. (oh, there's that Anthony Price novel, but that's a surreal example for another day).

Out of laziness just going to bung down a few points without trying to order them in any way:

• 'Devices and desires' is not biblical, just a phrase she uses in the novel, but her style, manner and content is laced through with the cadences of pre-20th century religious writing. It means she's got a mean eye for quote. Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, verse 13:

and Burton occurs to Dalgliesh (the main detective-poet, off-stage in much of this book) when he views a suicide:

He thought: Yesterday I was reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Odd. Robert Burton, that seventeenth-century Leicestershire rector, had said all that could be said at such a moment and the words came to him as clearly as if he had spoken them aloud. ‘Of their goods and bodies we can dispose; but what shall become of their souls God alone can tell; His mercy may come inter pontem et fontem, inter gladium et jugulum, betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat.’

As you can probably tell from this, the subject of her writing, the moral cruxes, with Dalgliesh at the centre as a sort of version of Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress, are at the centre of what she's writing.

Maybe this sounds a bit claustrophobic or unappealing, but I think it's one of the positive aspects to her books – this lacing of depraved crimes with an exploration of Christian moralism, both as language and as thought, produces a thoughtful tone in places, to be contrasted with some of the didactic moralism she veers into occasionally.

• Her prose can nevertheless be quiet ponderous. She takes her own time over the construction of scenery and domestic interiors – this may be an aspect of being a crime story writer: the necessity for golden age writers to ensure you know what the lines of sight in a country house are, or the exact time it takes to get from one place to another. The setting, by the way, is intended to be Norfolk, around a power station at Larksoken, similar to but contrasted with Sizewell. I know that area quite well, and it seems far more Suffolk than Norfolk in the book.And actually maybe I'm being harsh on the scenic description. Some of it is quite powerful:

That's not totally successful, but i think it's more successful than not. I remember standing on the Suffolk coast, looking at the vivid stars wheel above me, thinking about the fire and sword of viking incursion, and looking up at the looming shape of Sizewell, and the way it connected the power of the stars to those distant invasions of fire and expressions of violence and power and I think PD James does a very decent job of exploring that space.

• As already noted, the main sinister serial killer is a complete McGuffin, only producing a sort of psychological pressure on the main characters in the novel. Although there are several murders, there is only one murder that counts here. As a consequence you get an odd feeling of irrelevance to portions of the book that deal with the serial killer. The emphasis is on characters who exist around the space of the serial killer. This means the book is a search for psychological motive, and I think this is part of the problem I have with PD James. Naturally nearly everyone is seen to have some sort of motive, so maybe this of necessity makes all the characters unattractive. But it also means you have to sift through their minds in order to try and work out who did it, and because really, well anyone – psychologically speaking, rather than spatially or chronologically as in v traditional stories - *could* have done it, I felt I was just reading for the sake of getting to the end.

Regardless, one way or another the characters are all in one way or another unsympathetic pricks. I don't know whether this is inevitable for a crime book that does have a psychological angle, but it's also the layer of upper middle class society with which it largely deals. I don't give a damn about any of them, therefore a book whose main purpose is to explore their psychologies, is going to be coming from something worse than a standing start for me. That said, biblical and freudian (for shorthand) elements are strong in the analysis, so it is also intended to be archetypal and maybe i need to think a bit more about its applicability.

• Nuclear power and the power station that sits at the heart of the book, science, a haunting which sees one character unexpectedly find herself briefly in the 16th century, PD James includes a *lot* and it's another point in her favour. I think it's fair to say that the space of the serial killings allows her to explore all sorts of things that she's just interested in.

• The lateness of the book means there's some badly handled and almost totally irrelevant stuff about a teacher who had to leave her job due to insisting on calling a blackboard a blackboard despite a pressure from an education board 'pursuing the fashionable orthodoxies' (or some such phrase). It's minor, but it's also significant – it's a casual moral didacticism rather than the more focused and thoughtful stuff, and marrs the enjoyment in small ways that pull you up.

posted all this before actually finishing - D&D veers in a different direction of political intrigue and social activism.

Impressive reading and observation from Fizzles!

thanks pinefox. as always it feels more like imperfect grappling. have just finished the PD James and feel in balance it was better than i was allowing it to be. christian morals, nuclear power, science and nature have an interesting relationship during the post war nuclear period. nigel kneale and also penda’s fen come to mind as they often do. devices and desires is at least in part working in that space.

it also briefly touches on the adjacent theme of where including where nature stops and christian morals kick in - around abortion and birth, which is of course the subject of the science fiction Children of Men, which came soon after.

Dag Solstad: Armand V - I think Dag Solstad is a genius and I loved every page of this. IIRC James thought the conceit - these are footnotes from an unwritten novel - was a bit superfluous but I found myself adrift in the unwritten novel itself and I loved it.

Great to hear it - I'll have to get around to this. Tough to even get the time to go into a shop and buy this rn. Have you read T Singer?