2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

Just read Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley. Wonderful. Written in a slightly clipped arcane 1930s vernacular without seeming forced, and dealing with contemporary issues of English identity in a slyly murderous way. FFO The Falling, Ben Wheatley and the gothic pastoral in general. May contain scenes of harvesting.

Didn't have that modern-writer voice. Was moved to think 'they still make 'em like this!' - but of course the book is as much a critique of such thoughts, of nature-writing, of too-fervently celebrating tradition and history, as it is guided by them

Finished Rachel Cusk's Coventry (first half personal essays is good, second half book reviews is much less interesting). Also Karen Russell's Orange World. I know it's hard to end short stories, but most of these just...end, in a way that probably feels hip or sophisticated to writers (like ending on a jazzy unresolved chord), but also unsatisfying. Still a lot of images that will stick with me. The one about the ferrywoman living in a flooded post-apocalyptic Miami could have been a novel.

I'm reading the new Zadie Smith collection of short stories now, so far so good.

Never read a good Zadie Smith short story, so intrigued that people seem to like the new collection.

I hated White Teeth and the one or two random opinion-type pieces I've read of hers.

Yeah, I don’t get her. Another, similar author I can quite warm to is Helen Oyeyemi. In an interview I found her smarmy, and her fiction makes my eyes roll to clacking.

zadie smith is bad imo

So Zadie Smith is cancelled on here in a mere three posts? "Never read a good Zadie Smith short story", "hated White Teeth", "I don't get her." Really? Get the fuck outtahere.

"I don't get her" is the prize quote, from Remy Bean. Yeah, suppose you do in fact do not *get* her: who might be to blame for that? Her, of you? Sheesh. The worst of times etc :-/

xp lol and another one, "zadie smith is bad imo". Care to explain?

Hostility is fine, "Zadie Smith is bad" is fine, but for god's sake, back up these preposterous claims ppl

Okay: she’s boring.

I think it was over 20 years ago that I started (and put down) White Teeth so I'd be hard-pressed for details. I recall just hating the style and tone of it, overly precious and contrived.

I wouldn't say she's "cancelled" (ie, you shouldn't patronize her because of some loathsome views/actions), go ahead and read her what do I care. I will not.

I've only read on beauty and found it arch and unfunny and a bit "do you see?"

xxxp We're all boring, iirc.

I wouldn't say she's "cancelled" (ie, you shouldn't patronize her because of some loathsome views/actions), go ahead and read her what do I care. I will not.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, November 5, 2019 1:24 AM (fifty-nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't patrronize her, I used the word 'cancelled' after a three-bullets-fired string of posts abt how she is supposedly the worst of the worst. Which strikes me as wrong, or exaggerated at the very least. But yall mmv.

I love her. As I understand it, short stories are a newer thing for her and they're not all amazing, but I'm always happy to spend time inside her brain.
Xp

NW is her best. She was so young when she started getting published.

Yeah, suppose you do in fact do not *get* her: who might be to blame for that? Her, of you? Sheesh.

Chill, LBI. Remy made a statement where the subject of the sentence is "I", not "she". Admitting that you do not *get* an author is intrinsically a statement about the speaker's inability to connect, not about the author's value.

Srsly. Nobody canceled anybody, pls. knock off the hyperbole. Nothing wrong with casually disliking authors, or falling outside of their appeal. For the archives, here’s an unindexed, off-the-cuff list of well-regarded authors I’ve recently read but don’t get:

George Eliot
Henry James
Thomas Mann
Ken Follett
Steven Pinker
Henning Mankell
George Simenon
Elizabeth Gilbert
Marlon James (But I keep trying?)
Lionel Schriver
Ostefa Moshfegh
Neil Gaiman
Elizabeth Strout
Tomi Adeyami
Celeste Ng
Ocean Vuong
Russell Banks
Frank O’Hara

I read White Teeth around when it came out. I was kind of ambivalent on it. I do like her nonfiction writing in the NY Review of Books. She has an interesting piece on Celia Paul and Lucian Freud in the current issue:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/11/21/muse-easel-celia-paul-lucian-freud/

I've recently started Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. So far it's funnier than I expected.

Actually, I read White Teeth in 2007! My review is in the archives of this very board. Apparently my view of the book was remained consistent.

Thomas Mann

booooooooooooo

the George Eliot mention is the real boo

as I get older, her attention to the nuances of weird personalities interacting with small town conventions is almost cosmic in its acuity idk

The Mill on the Floss was my introduction to the Victorian novel way back when. I've been meaning to give it a reread.

Remy, apologies for my misguided posts.

Re Zadie Smith, her first novel was a big baggy flawed fun clever debut novel, promising but not a masterpiece. Her second novel was genuinely awful. Her third was pretty good, but not as good as the EM Forster book it was explicitly based in, and so a bit pointless. Her essays can be very good indeed, but even when not get treated like the pronouncements of genius. Her earlier short stories were rubbish; the newer ones in the new book may be great, as may her most recent novel, but at this point I don't care enough to find out. There, can i go now?

Only after you read her fourth novel!

Middlemarch is tha bomb---altho your challops awaits, Squire:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-truth-about-casaubon-a-great-intellect-destroyed-by-a-silly-woman-1395385.html

But, furtively sounding out friends - male, middle-aged friends - I have discovered that some of us share a grudge. Mr Casaubon is hard done by.

Isn't Lydgate's story enough consolation for all the male middle-aged thwarted geniuses?

I thought On Beauty was great and even as a major EM Forster stan I don't think it's "pointless"; the plot machinations may be the same but the environments they take place in are radically different, the characters are different, the roadmap to only connect in the early 21st century isn't the same as it was in the early 20th. Loved the description of Hampstead Heath and the heartbreaking bit where the academic goes to visit his dad in a shitty part of West London and they just can't relate.

I've started The Flamethrowers , Rachel Kushner.

I was pleased to see Henry Adams, writing in the 1880s, make such a clear and unambiguous condemnation of the treatment of native Americans by the US government and racist white settlers. His condemnation was severe, but it mainly consisted of accurately describing how they acted, which was sufficient to comprise a withering critique.

I finished Firbank's VALMOUTH - rather inconclusive ending. Much to say about race in this author I think. I didn't quite feel up to reading more Firbank immediately, so went on to ...

Stan Barstow, A KIND OF LOVING. Absolutely exemplary post-war working-class regional writing sub-genre item -- like SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING but perhaps more fun and entertaining. Very into the minutiae of clothes, workplace, bus fares, etc. The language 'racy' and actually slightly bluer than I'd have expected from a 1960 novel. Strong sense of passion for the woman the hero desires, but the idiom also rather comes unstuck around this - 'Oh, she was just such a marvellous bint', etc - losing its poise and becoming awkward.

I like reading this novel. There is also a page where the protagonist discovers ULYSSES and it's described pretty accurately.

I've read Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. It depicts girls at border schools, very minimalistic, with a sense of claustrophobia, sexuality and even insanity just below the surface. Robert Walser is namechecked on page one, Young Törless seems an obvious inspiration.

Now I don't really know what to read. Am going away for the weekend, so will get a lot of time to read, will start a couple of new books. Which ones? That will be revealed this sunday, this place. Stay tuned!

I'm intermittently reading Robert Richardson's intellectual biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire (I know it was recommended on here, but I can't remember where). Richardson's method is to take Coleridge's dictum - quantum scimus sumus - we are what we know - and see how it becomes flesh. It's pretty extraordinary - both as a feat of research and immersion in subject matter and in how it brings Emerson into the present.

Listeing to Tade Thompson's 'Rosewater' on Audible - a Nigerian sci-fi. I like it.

(oh, that's interesting - Rosewater is currently 99p as an ebook from amazon.co.uk)

I'm reading Julian Jackson's superb De Gaulle bio. I finished Conversations with Friends. I wanna reread Daniel Deronda.

Nearly finished Dostoyevsky's Demons, which I keep putting aside. I don't entirely trust the translation (Maguire), especially in contrast with the Ignat Avsey Karamazov I read earlier this year.

I also just read Germaine Brée's Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, which was great, one of the best Proust studies I've found.

Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass
Horacio Castellanos Moya - Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador
Yasunari Kawabata - The Old Capital
JM Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians
Gerald Murnane - Border Districts
Girogio Bassani - The Garden of Finzi-Continis
Italo Svevo - As a Man Grows Older

Did I mention Maigret in Society? In the middle of A Maigret Trio, after Maigret's Failure, in which he was accosted by an obnoxious childhood acquaintance, who remembered him as the smart son of the steward of the local estate of tottering aristo relics (well that's how the kids thought of them). (The "failure" was that he let his feelings affect his professionalism---he thought this, though procedure etc. seemed to go as well as possible, in my own practiced judgement). "Society" here mostly consists of other relics, in Paris, who trigger not only thoughts of those behind the gates in the sticks, but also those who emote and pose in bad French novels ca. 1901 (why that year, does he have specific reading in mind?) Yet the more he reluctantly delves into their affairs, the more he is struck by their unabashed personal mythologizing, the way the principal couple have made their own agreements, taking bits of old code, mores and maybe bad novels too. And whatever else life has presented them with (incl. possibly shady yet faithful retainers and skeevy heirs-in-waiting).
I'm not totally convinced by the revelation of the whodunnit, but in effect the point is that Maigret sees it, wants to believe it---and the epiphany of that is what the whole story has been building to, as he grapples once again with feelings and conduct, based in two kinds of experience.

I finished Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. I don't really get who the target audience for this book is. It's kind of an insular, gnomic self-consciously Kafkaesque parable (part of the story revolves around a highly speculative conspiracy theory about Kafka) built around the theme of midlife crisis and spiritual wandering. Besides Kafka, it seems to be influenced by the loose and open-ended ruminative novels of W.G. Sebald. I think it was hobbled a bit by the parallel track structure. It made you think maybe the book should have been a couple of novellas, but I guess those are even harder to sell than novels these days, not that I can imagine this sold in any kind of quantity. There were flashes of real squalid human emotion near the end, but I guess the goal was to go for a kind of passive dreamlike flow. A bit too clinical for my taste.

Finished the Henry Cow biography by Benjamin Piekut a couple of weeks ago. Enjoyed it and it filled out my knowledge of a band I've liked for the last 30 odd years since discovering the Concerts lp (at the time it was a toss up between taht and What A Bunch Of Sweeties by the PInk Fairies in the same record shop at the same time.)
Have been reading a book on Cartoon Music by Daniel Goldmark

want to read Caliban and the Witch cos it was brought up as reading material for an art festival that is happening locally.
& maybe reread Religion and the Death of Magic which I've been reminded of by the same festival.

I've put aside Henry Adams' history of the Madison administrations for the duration of a brief beach vacation, during which I am reading Doting, Henry Green. If I run through it quickly I have At Freddie's, Penelope Fitzgerald, as a back up.

Meanwhile, back in the Madison history, after ~450 pp. of excruciatingly pointless diplomacy, the War of 1812 may soon be declared underway. As I recall, it starts badly for my side, but turned out OK in the end. I expect confirmation of these impressions somewhere within the next 800 pp. (the entire book is just shy of 1400 pp.)

I finished Doting, which was quite funny, though not in a belly laugh kind of way. It's more a comedy of manners, so loaded with dialogue that it could be adapted to a screenplay with minimal effort, but with a plot so lacking in resolution that the resulting film would leave its audience highly amused, but vaguely dissatisfied. That's less of a problem for a novel.

As noted in the 2019 Poetry Competition thread, I have also been reading Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese, a third of which consists of poems by Tu Fu. Rexroth captures the highly condensed and suggestive nature of Chinese poetry, where terse concrete imagery, mostly of nature, provides an objective narrative, often coupled with an unstated symbolic one in parallel.

I haven't read a Green novel that didn't compel me to stop for a minute, return to the start of the chapter, and take notes on lacunae.

I started my third reading of Daniel Deronda and will pick up my copy of Corey Robin's Clarence Thomas book in a bit.

Green leaves little doubt about how we are to view his five primary characters. There is no subtlety in the frequency with which he quotes them directly and then describes their words as having been "wailed" at one another. Lacunae aside, they seem transparently rationalizing, selfish and manipulative.

I am nearly finished with At Freddie's and will resume reading the Henry Adams history after I am done with this short novel.

My impression is that it has all of Fitzgerald's customary strengths of concision, acute observation, and dry wit. Its major weakness is that it revolves around the lives and characters of theatrical people, whose oddities make them appear interesting at first, but when carefully probed, even by Fitzgerald's generous eye, they become rather empty and tedious. It seems wise of Penelope to have confined the book to 160 pages.