Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?

I am almost done with Piranesi, by Susannah Clarke. It is perhaps somewhat slight, especially compared to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but god damn have I enjoyed it. It's bizarre in all the ways I appreciate. I didn't know anything about the historical Piranesi before reading this, and so didn't grasp at first the significance of the application of the name to the narrator.

Susanna *

I loved Piranesi. I listened to the audiobook read by Chiwetel Ejiofor. It was beautiful

History of the Hanged David Anderson
History of the Mau mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s.
Some turns of phrase have had me wondering if the author is fully decolonised. Though I guess the idea fo end of empire may be something that would be in the air of the time. Just does strike me that the author may be a bit too white to have a perfect perspective on the subject.

Animal Land Margaret Blount
a survey of the appearances of animals in fantasy books. Written in 1974 so possibly a bit dated. She has some interesting points of view cropping up in passing that do make me want to learn more about the author.
I think this was in the bibliography of something but can't see what. Either taht or turned up in comment in a podcast. Was it one of teh books being read by hosts or guest on Backlisted or something.

Tim Lawrence Love Saves the Day
I'm finding this pretty interesting so finding it a pain that I keep semi dozing off while reading it. THink I'm doing a lot of early morning or late night reading but trying to get through this.
I think I'm in 1977 at the moment, the Record Pool that David Mancuso set up has just falen apart and been replaced.
Anyway, finding it a bit frustrating cos i do want to get through this and somebody else has it on order so it needs to go back next week. Ho hum.

I am now reading at least four different books because I started rereading Raymond Carver's WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE (1981), in a Harvill edition no less.

It's been a very long time and I remember the outcomes of none of the stories. I like the stories. I like the skewed dialogue (closer to DeLillo than people might think) and quite appreciate how Carver repeatedly generates weirdness, incongruity, in seemingly normal settings.

Carver writes a lot about drinking and alcoholism. I even find this a bit of a limitation. As though he was not a 'great writer who writes about drinking', as I'd like to think, but 'great alcoholic writer whose book is mostly about alcoholism'.

The story 'The Bath' is the one about a cake being made for a boy who is then sent into a coma in hospital. I believe it featured in the film SHORT CUTS. The ending, where the mother receives a telephone call, seemed to be ambiguous: was it from the hospital or the baker? But today I realised that it was from the hospital, the call would be from her husband. So really it has to be the baker. Which would make it a more black-comic ending, less a potentially tragic one.

never thought about that!

can't believe no one's posted this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BATPzXjmV_s

16 years or so on from reading The Bath for the first time - or "A Small, Good Thing" as it was called in Cathedral - and I'm still in love with the lack of the word 'on' in that opening line:

"Saturday afternoon the mother drove to the bakery in the shopping centre."

Making my way through The Ecstasy of Influence and largely enjoying it.

I do, however, have The Recognitions by Gaddis waiting for me at the library so might have to make a start on that pronto. I've never read any Gaddis (outside of an interview or two) so not sure what to expect.

Years ago I read the versions of those Carver stories before his editor ruthlessly chopped them up. The Bath in particular I remember being much less cryptic but also far richer (and it ends similar to the adaptation in Short Cuts). I should compare them again some time.

The version titled "A Small Good Thing"

So is there a book that contains early, pre-editor drafts of these stories?

They are in the Library of America collection of his complete stories. My memory is bad, I think A Small Good Thing is the only one I actually read, and that's included in Cathedral. However, I do remember his editor Gordon Lish took a lot of credit for shaping the work of Carver as we know it, and that the editing process was excruciating for Carver.

I started Richard Holmes' Coleridge bio because he's the Romantic poet I'm meh about besides "Frost at Midnight" and a couple other things. So far it's splendid, especially the footnotes.

From memory, Pinefox, Beginners contains the pre-Lish versions of some of the most famous stories

I've read both volumes of that Coleridge biography. Magnificent. I read them before taking a long walk across the Quantocks and while it didn't really make me any more of a fan of Coleridge's poetry (Mariner, excepted), it certainly illuminated his whole intellectual project.

from my initial research it looks like one of the best of its kind

Holmes's Doctor Johnson and Mr Savage is one of my v favourite non-fiction books.

Not to be confused with the British military historian Richard Holmes.

Footsteps, his book of capsule biographies disguised as a book about the perils and thrills of writing biographies, is also brilliant.

Shelley: The Pursuit is one of those books I've bought at some point and have lost in the depths of my house, or blindly thrown out in a purge.

The meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth has a John-meets-Paul air of suspense.

Re the pinefox’s point about Carver being an alcoholic who writes about drinking, he was in recovery while he wrote most of his most famous stories, so your perception is on point— but i also think he was a great writer. I love teaching “Cathedral,” always becomes a really amazing discussion of toxic masculinity, grace, and redemption.

Chris L, thanks very much for mentioning the LOA Carver Collected Stories---Looks like it might be a unique kind of anthology:

In gathering all of Carver's stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America's Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish's editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.

Not that the uncut would nec. be better, but I'd love to compare, and might learn something more about the process (there always is more, lorb knows).

Agree. I know, in the vaguest terms, about Lish's alleged role, but to be able properly to compare texts sounds like a good scholarly task.

I used to love teaching "Cathedral" too.

I'm currently reading Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado. It's interesting to me to compare this to another novel that came out a year later, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Both depict gangs of criminal youth in seaside towns and have Catholic themes. However, I would say the similarities end there. Although Amado doesn't shy away from depicting disturbing acts, he romanticizes the gang in a way that Greene never does. The gauzy atmosphere of mischief and hijinks in Amado is worlds away from the creeping dread and menace of Greene. Perhaps it's because Amado wants to show that his gang's way of life is the inevitable product of an unjust society, whereas Greene is more concerned with questions of personal agency and guilt.

Dan s: I also loved the Piranesi audiobook.

Aimless: no worries.

iirc both caek and i quite liked PIRANESI but were not entirely certain the final chapter was necessary

I think a book has to have a last chapter otherwise it never ends

does it tho

I guess by induction if it doesn’t have a last chapter it doesn’t have any chapters

I finished Gwendoline Riley's SICK NOTES (2004). A few things can be said for the book:

* it makes a consistent effort to describe environment, place, weather - very rarely with really fine or memorable writing, but some kind of effort at texture is going on.
* the lackadaisical youths at the centre are at least literary. They talk to each other of Melville, Fitzgerald, Hamsun et al. This is better, to my mind, than if they didn't have these interests. On the other hand, no-one in the book actually produces insight into literature - it's rather like a 'Bookstagram' post in which someone posts book covers to look chic.
* as mentioned above, GR is actually quite good on intimacy; being near someone, even being in bed with someone. When she bothers to find the intensity to try to render such things, there is promise.

On the whole, though, the book is bad, and more annoying than bad. I wondered if it was the most annoying book I'd read, then remembered all the Banville, Rushdie, Amis and Pynchon I've read and realised it isn't, by far.

At a recent in-person event GR was sharp and eloquent, and it was stated that her later work is much better than her earlier. I hope so. She seems like a person capable of better than this.

I'm currently reading Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado. It's interesting to me to compare this to another novel that came out a year later, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Both depict gangs of criminal youth in seaside towns and have Catholic themes. However, I would say the similarities end there. Although Amado doesn't shy away from depicting disturbing acts, he romanticizes the gang in a way that Greene never does. The gauzy atmosphere of mischief and hijinks in Amado is worlds away from the creeping dread and menace of Greene. Perhaps it's because Amado wants to show that his gang's way of life is the inevitable product of an unjust society, whereas Greene is more concerned with questions of personal agency and guilt.

I think they're very different situations. Pinky is a gangster in the James Cagney sense, he's out for himself. The Captains meanwhile are kind of a mutual aid society of runaways and orphans, of an extent that I don't think would exist in 30's Brighton - even with all the poverty that no doubt was around, I'd wager similar structures would still be based around families; Amado's setting is more liked Dickens. Pinkie's also 17, so the senior of most of the Captains. He objectively has a lot more agency than they do.

Re: the Catholic themes, worth pointing out that the Captains reconcile catholicism with worship of orishas in that typically Brazilian way, while true blue catholic Greene is, erhm, less ecumenical.

the pinefox, what you described sounds promising. What ruins the book?

I read My Phantoms last week: a solid novel-length description of a mother-daughter relationship.

I thought you had read this novel? I'm sure you will quickly form your own view if you do.

I suppose a short answer for me is: aimlessness, self-indulgence, too many things that go absolutely nowhere, a narrator who has very little to offer us or anyone else. She randomly smashes all the crockery and her flatmate isn't bothered. It doesn't help that she spends most of the time drinking, and her life is subsidised by - it's hard to tell, as she never seems to work; maybe by the royalties of a book that she has, mysteriously, published, despite, on the evidence of the narrative, being no good as a writer.

I can see some people liking the book. On the whole, I think it's bad.

As mentioned, I can believe that GR's later work is better.

Listening to Piranesi while sick with Covid was one of the high points of last year for me. The fever really added to the experience!

As noted, I have no recollection of how the Raymond Carver stories turn out, so I was shocked and horrified - again? - on reaching the end of 'Tell the Women We're Going', where an already unpleasant, but seemingly quite ordinary character (and married father of three) is suddenly said to have 'used the same rock' on two women he's just met. The implication is that he kills them, though this isn't certain. It's like the horror of, well, horror fiction, but in a piece of what you'd thought was realism. The popular phrase 'toxic masculinity' has never seemed so fitting.

On the other hand, the ageing husband in 'After the Denim' is into knitting and needlework; one of the most profoundly 'feminised' characters I've encountered in Carver, if the term makes sense.

The last chapter wound things up well, I thought.

I finished W.B. Yeats's verse drama THE SHADOWY WATERS. My impression has long been that this text is notorious in WBY's oeuvre for its vagueness, the author's uncertainty over what it was, his vacillation in rewriting it repeatedly. I've meant to read it for years. In fact the version I've now read, at least, is quite short, only 30 pages or so, with a dense prefatory poem about Coole's Seven Woods - the usual material - and another about some mythic figures. The main text is about an ancient pirate ship captained by one Forgael who is given over to some kind of search for immortality. His crew raid another ship and bring him a Queen, Dectora, aboard. Unsurprisingly she and Forgael eventually get together despite her initial great reluctance, mainly I think because he plays a harp and casts a spell on her (and everyone else). It doesn't seem a great model of consensual love, a point noted within the text itself. At the end Forgael and Dectora sail off after the immortal birds with human faces (a pretty grotesque image perhaps) while the crew depart for the real world.

I can't say that this work is great, or terribly interesting or convincing. A few poetic phrases stand out for their directness: 'The whole ship / Flashes as if it were a net of herrings'; 'I am a woman, I die at every breath'. Thematically I suppose what it expresses is a Yeatsian mood in which a 'noble' or aristocratic union can proudly face down death.

I also read a narrative poem, THE TWO KINGS (1914), basically about a Queen, Edain, at Tara, who tells her King, Eochaid, how she had a visionary encounter with some other noble fellow (unsure who - the other King of the title?) who asked her to come away with him for immortality. She refused, insisting that being with her mortal love was what she wanted. This sounds standard fare but there is some poignancy in the passionate words with which she says this:

What can they know of love that do not know
She builds her ledge
Above a windy precipice?

The Captains meanwhile are kind of a mutual aid society of runaways and orphans, of an extent that I don't think would exist in 30's Brighton

I guess I'm skeptical it existed in '30s Brazil either - at least the way it's depicted in the book. It seems more like a myth or a fable. And at book length it becomes a little too predictable: the plucky orphans with hearts of gold vs the cruel police and reformers.

It absolutely existed, at least as late as the 80's when the film Pixote portrayed some kids in similar circumstances, and I wouldn't bet against it still existing today. Whether Amado romanticizes his protagonists is a separate issue - like no doubt these structures were/are full of trauma and violence and abuse, physical, sexual and emotional (which tbf Amado acknowledges, even if I'd agree it's not the main thing to take away), but they're still quite different from the wham bam gangsters of Greene's book.

I mean to a large extent this is just a reality of a society where social services don't have the reach (or most of the time interest) to follow up on individual cases.

I'm reading I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett - a deadpan comic novel. He's good with repetitions:

"To make a long and sad story abbreviated and sad"

"and so my entry was well attended and well documented by a shocked few who told a shocked, though mainly uncaring, many"

"her screams filled the streets like screams"

The main character's family name is Poitier, so his mother baptizes him Not Sidney. She also buys stock in Turner, so when she dies Not Sidney gets adopted by Ted Turner, who is somewhat uncomfortable by how much this reminds him of Growing Pains. From theron it's a picaresque novel. Currently he's going through a clear parody of The Defiant Ones, which makes me worry the rest of the book will also be riffing on Poitier's 60's output, which I am not very familiar with.

the "mutual aid" dimension to nascent mobsterism isn't unusual at all, as a self-ennobling claim if not as a fact: especially in the early stages of organisation -- it didn't take me long at all to find a version of the classic quote abt the krays: "“the krays were very caring and never touched ordinary people, they really looked after their own"

and the opening scene of the godfather also speaks to this ("you come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding", there will come a day when i need a favour of you etc: this is mutual aid). and it's all across peaky blinders also, the local mob as a police force for those that the official police (bcz racist and corrupt) never protect… but of course just as subject to tides of corruption and in-group prejudice and even more to charismatic sociopathy

Yes, agreed - but I'd say within the US and UK contexts the picture that's transmitted is more of individuals within an existing community fulfilling certain roles for it - i.e. there were already Italian-American communities in the US and working class communities in the UK, and they already had elements of mutual aid set up, the gangsters slotted into and/or exploited those.

The Captains are quite a different thing because it's not about a group organising within a community to defend and/or exploit it, it's kids who are mostly isolated from society at large and self-organizing within that; geographically isolated, even, in Amado's novel. Also of course being orphans they lack the family ties that contextualize ppl like the Krays within their community.

I do think there's paralells to be drawn, but I'd place them nearer to contemporary black gang culture in the US than the organized crime of the Krays or the cosa nostra.

And the gangsters in Brighton Rock I don't think fit into any of these modes - they are mostly punks, self styled Individualists, perhaps predecessors of youth cultures to come.

yes it's years since i read or watched brighton rock but i feel like pinkie is p much "charismatic sociopath" from the outset -- if he'd escaped his end in the book the fate of a joe pesci character always awaited him, at the hands of rival mobsters

Carver's stories 'So Much Water So Close To Home' and 'The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off' continue the presence of violence in the stories - in all these cases, violence by men and against women. In the first a girl has been killed and a woman attends her funeral. Here she hears about the violence. The husband is not guilty but seems implicated by having found the body and not immediately reported it. I note that a much longer version of the story appears in FIRES.

In 'The Third Thing', a quite long and dull story, a fellow who cannot talk acquires bass for his pond, then the pond is flooded. The fellow kills his (perhaps unfaithful) wife then drowns himself.

In 'A Serious Talk', yet again, there is at least the threat of violence, as the character Burt takes random vengeance against his wife's having a new partner - cutting her telephone wires, stealing her pies, and raising an ashtray as if to hit her. The last line is black comic / absurd: he has gone back to his car and started driving it: 'It was hard managing it until he put the ashtray down'.

I recalled that Carver wrote about troubled men, but not so much that he wrote about violence. This aspect is, naturally, I suppose deliberately, troubling.

But the collection makes me think about Carver and 'masculinity' (a concept I am not certain I understand). I think:

1: Carver writes about 'tough guys' who can build fences, drive cars, go fishing, drink whiskey, maybe even go hunting. (You may say anyone can do those things.) Carver is a 'masculine' writer.

2: Carver also writes about some of those people being actually violent or threatening violence. Carver demonstrates how such 'masculinity' can be dangerous, especially to women.

3: But more interestingly, Carver also seems to write a lot about men who are not very comfortable with these identities or habits. Men who don't really fit their roles, and feel awkward. Carver seems keen on awkwardness - it's even there in his great title WOULD YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE? (The character who carries away the ashtray then remembers to put it down could be similar in a way - like Alan Partridge with his cheese.) Carver, I think, isn't just writing 'masculine fiction' about real men, but almost the opposite: repeatedly demonstrating how ill at ease these men are in the roles they're given. I suppose that's one reason they drink so much.

I feel a possible contrast with that obvious comparison Hemingway. He seems to me happier to let men be men, not to show them chafing at this role. But that could be because I am thinking of Hemingway the person, who really was masculine or macho, and not his characters.

I return to Michael Bracewell's UNFINISHED BUSINESS. I think that the book may be better written and more insightful and poignant than a lot of his earlier work - including THE CONCLAVE to which it's a sequel. I enjoy reading it. What I wonder is whether the book will prove to have any dynamism or plot. MB doesn't seem to have developed any new fictional material or areas of interest at all in the last 30+ years. Suburbia, offices; style and clothing; memories of punk rock.

Carver writes about 'tough guys' who can build fences, drive cars, go fishing, drink whiskey, maybe even go hunting...Carver, I think, isn't just writing 'masculine fiction' about real men, but almost the opposite: repeatedly demonstrating how ill at ease these men are in the roles they're given. I suppose that's one reason they drink so much.

Reading Hemingway's Collected Stories a few years ago, I was struck by how damaged his men and women often already are, no matter what they're doing or trying to do/avoid in the scenes shown. Likewise, in (far as I've gotten in the fiction)The Sun Also Rises, Brett and the boys bust out of Paris, wanting to be tourists again, and taken care of by foreigners as nannies, play therapists, performers.
I recently read a long review of a posthumous collection of his letters, written over many years copiously quoted: he crazy, jittery at best, and even when generating a smooth, cool-to-cold surface, the tremor is often there. (Also: lots of beefs, but more surprising are instances of vulnerability, though some of it seems manipulative.)
Alfred mentioned that posthumously published novel, Garden of Eden, about expermimenting with gender roles, I think? Would like to read that and some other posthumous.

I finish rereading WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE. The main impression that I record is to re-emphasise the presence of violence in these stories. In addition to the several I've already mentioned:

* 'The Calm': a hunter shoots a deer, then almost provokes a fight in a barber shop just by talking about it. (Why? Because he should have killed the deer and put it out of its suffering?)

* 'Popular Mechanics': a husband and wife fight over a baby. My fear is that the baby will be dropped over the hot stove. The ending leaves the possibility that they kill the baby by fighting over it. You could probably reasonably say that the husband is to blame for the violence. The wife is presumably smaller and weaker; by using force he is exercising an unethical domination over her. He's also probably hurting the baby. I thought slightly of THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE.

* 'Everything Stuck to Him': no actual violence in the story but only because the young husband doesn't go on the hunting trip he wants to go on. Classic Carver line when another fellow tells him 'The geese are flying to beat the band'.

The fact is that several of these stories are about males for whom violence, against animals, is normal. That isn't the case for anyone I know, that I can think of. I don't say that hunting is wicked, for that raises the question of hypocrisy for anyone who's ever eaten meat. But I do suggest that for these men, a certain kind of violence is normal and enjoyable. Meanwhile, violence against people also seems much more normal for many of them than it would be for almost anyone I know.

* 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love': well, maybe this will be more peaceful. Not really, as it contains tales of an ex-husband who threatened a couple then shot himself in the head. The cardiologist at the centre of the story is drunken, seemingly depressive, and ominously possibly violent himself. I'm bothered by his aggression. I wouldn't want to be around him.

* 'One More Thing': a male character, LD, storms out of a house after yelling at a wife and daughter, and - definite violence - throwing a jar of pickles through a window.

That's 5 stories in a row!

I posit that if this book were published now, people wouldn't say 'this is moody', 'this is minimal', 'this is the forgotten America of people scraping by' or 'this is how men and women fail to communicate'. They'd say 'this is very violent'.

If that's correct then does it mean that something has changed in c.40 years? That 'our culture' is more sensitive to or bothered by violence? Or more ready to talk about it? Or that potential victims of such violence are more audible in said culture?

If you suppose that 'trigger warnings' exist and aren't a tabloid fiction, then I can fairly imagine this book being labelled something like 'content warning: domestic violence'.

I don't posit that the book is bad because it's so violent, or so simmering with aggression. It could be an achievement that it conveys all this aggression. I do merely note that this is part of its unsettling effect, which makes me doubtful that I'd want to get too close to these characters.

pinefox, not to be weird in stating the obvious, but the US is a violent, patriarchal place. the problems of violence that Carver brings into the work are reflective of that reality. i wouldn’t want to get too close to these characters, either, but wonder if that might be precisely the point?

Or more ready to talk about it? Or that potential victims of such violence are more audible in said culture?