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

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?

No but it’s on the shelf ready.

I have stopped reading Rilke's letters for now to focus on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. It is for sure - given the nature of the book and its size/scope - a book to dip in and out of however I find myself being swept along on the language and the sheer weirdness of what I am reading. Its a very fun book and difficult to stop. Its the combination of recognition - depression and mental health are (rightly) given such a prominence, recently becoming such a highly charged political issue and its interesting to see, first of all, how preoccupied people were with it at various points throughout human history, and how (edited by Burton like this) its in so much European thought. And, as listed in terms of cause, we know much of what causes depression as known then and discussed, such as diet, loneliness, heartbreak but the aggregation of known detail around these then reads so bizarrely - mostly now just simply wrong or disproven by the very different frameworks we use to look at the detail. Of course much of what is listed as causes, eg. witches, or the positions of the stars, are simply not there anymore, which is very funny too. xp = cool.

reading a short story collection from New Directions in galley by Mexico's Amparo Dávila -- this is remarkably good stuff, eerie little miniatures with incredible atmosphere, images and situations that stick in my mind for days, really highly recommended

pretty interested in Anatomy of Melancholly -- it was one of Gass's favorite books -- I have a very old copy, which means I will have to read it when I'm going to be at home for an extended stretch. Thanks for the write-up xyzzzz__, it will encourage me to get to it.

I finished Naipaul's Guerillas and In a Free State in quick succession, perhaps too quick: they blur. Enthusiasts have praised the former, but the structure and pace don't suit the muddled politics. The latter is better thanks to a road movie structure (and the queer politics surprised me).

The Hard Stuff the Wayne Kramer memoir.
MC5 have moved out to Ann Arbor after trouble in Detroit, I think I may have just got past the events at the Fillmore East when they were sharing a bill with the Velvet Underground and getting hassle with the Motherfuckas about selling out the Revolution.
Pretty interesting so far. Has me wondering how good teh Michael Davis book is.
Also if there might ever be a photobook of the outfits made by the girlfriends

& wanting to read the recent Sylvain Sylvain memoir and Jerry Nolan biography not sure what other semi related rock memoirs.

I'd just got into reading Broadway Babies Say Goodnight by Mark Steyn, a book about Broadway musicals when I bought the Kramer memoir. I had bought that a couple of years back and it had turned up as i tidied up my bedroom.

pretty interested in Anatomy of Melancholly -- it was one of Gass's favorite books -- I have a very old copy, which means I will have to read it when I'm going to be at home for an extended stretch. Thanks for the write-up xyzzzz__, it will encourage me to get to it.

― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, 19 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The NYRB edition (which has a great cover and ideally should've been split into two volumes) has a really terrific intro by Gass. Both Musil (another Gass favourite) and Burton have that similar intellectual density that promotes a dipping in-and-out, one which the A++ rthythm and style does not allow you to really do. The world is in these pages, and you just keep turning them till your eyes tire.

My late summer has unexpectedly turned into a dive-into the English Renaissance (was reading Milton last week and a selection of Thomas Browne's prose is to come).

I've been reading Imagining Robert by Jay Neugeboren, which is frequently quite grim but redeemed by its humanity and (seemingly) rather brave honesty.

Under The Net, Iris Murdoch.

Just finished War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Was much easier than other Krasznahorkai I've tried, since for most of the book every sentence is numbered making it much easier to not get lost, but I can't help but feel a bit underwhelmed. Perhaps too short, perhaps too mundane, but the mystical philosophical core of it wasn't quite as developed as I'd hoped.

Now reading The Temple of the Golden Pavillion by Yukio Mishima and Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich.

xp Stevo, have you seen the MC5 doc, A True Testimony? Release halted at the last second, but turns up online sometimes, currently here---a rip from the promo DVD, I think:
https://archive.org/details/Mc5-ATrueTestimonial-2002#
Still reading Rembrandt's Hat---even more of an improvement than the title story, "Notes From a Lady at a Dinner Party" gives me flashbacks to Grace Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man, although this is from a man's POV, the male gaze taken for a spin. Startling.

And more than his gaze

I've started UNDER THE NET too!

But also started rereading Lethem's DISSIDENT GARDENS.

XP Yeah i got a copy of True Testimonial several years ago taht looks like it's set up to be an official dvd with bonus tracks etc.
Had a lot of live stuff with it.
Did it finally get the go ahead for release a few months ago? I still don't really get what the story was on its last minute cancellation. It seemed to be true to its name and one of the better band biographies I've seen.

I just got the new Ugly Things yesterday which has a review of the Michael Davis book I Brought Down the MC5 which sounds good from the review so i want to read it. I saw an ad for it somewhere a few months ago which has had me wondering about it.

I started Masters of Atlantis, Charles Portis, last night.

The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century, George Elder Davie

Emma Reyes: The Book of Emma Reyes -- if you don't start this book loathing the Catholic Church, you will by the end - artist's memoir (in letters) of being a child slave labourer in a Colombian convent in the 1920s and 1930s after being abandoned by her mother

In the last (for now) of my Swiss odyssey (Year of the Drought, Clouds of Sils Maria), I'm reading Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Pledge. It's my first of his and it's clouded and dreamlike; the nested narrative is disorienting and keeps me making me think of Coleridge. It's also got a lot of Stefan Zweig in there.

And so help me god, after hours of wondering, it suddenly dawned on me this morning: it reminds me of the 'late' John bloody Lanchester.

Is C.F. Meyer translated at all? There's a Swiss author I enjoyed...

"My Son The Murderer," another one from xp Rembrandt's Hat: son is consumed with fear, which is often expressed as rage, most often at his father, who is what we would call a helicopter parent. The fear-->rage is very fixated, at least currently, on the prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War. There were a number of ways to get out of the draft, or at least to be considered unsuitable for combat, and word about these ways got around campus (son has recently graduated from college), as I'm sure Malamud, veteran teacher at Oregon State etc., still at Bennington when these stories were written, also father of Paul Malamud (b. 1947, draft bait), was aware, even though B was "The Ghost Writer."

Still, there is the implication or at least inference (penultimate story in this lean dense collection, so even noob me has been properly groomed, despite reservations) of dark dim backstories: son has been properly groomed by life, his life, his grubby life, grubby as the lightswitch flick of first person between father and son, grubby and clear as the light can be, in the "smelly"(son's take) apartment hallway where the father tends to hover, near son's room (when they're not out near of at deserted Coney Island in February). Jeez.
Well-enough done, but I give it a B+, really need to get back to his prime time.

near *or*

Little disturbances of man wants an urgent reread

Yeah! Also, having said all that, I should add that son does have a plan of sorts: if drafted, he'll just go Canada dammit. And father, who's started monitoring the mail, suspects that son has recently written to his draft board (there was this whole squirrelly system of local draft boards x Feds), to bring everything to a boil, as perhaps he should, having apparently dismissed all other options---but he isn't depicted as having the kind of resources---other than stubbornness, rage, fear---that would get him from near-Coney Island to Canada. But what he's got counts, to some extent, so maybe.
Some of his mindset comes from being by far the youngest in his family, and some people do get stuck when the support system brings them to graduation (he may be the first person in his family to go to college; father "has a post office job at the stamp window," of course, Malamudy as hell).

No money, and he's enraged by parental suggestion that he should at least "take something temporary," by everything/anytning being temporary.
My father listens in the kitchen.
My temporary son.
She says I'll feel better if I work. I say I won't. I'm twenty-two since December, a college graduate, and you know where you can stick that. At night I watch the news programs. I watch the war from day to day. It's a big burning war on a small screen. It rains bombs and the flames go higher. Sometimes i lean over and touch the war with the flat of my hand. I wait for my hand to die.
My son with the dead hand.

Might be an A- if only he'd stopped closer to that part.

Or maybe not.

One of the things that sets him apart for me is the rhythms of his dialogue, very good and funny