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

RE: "Captains of the Sands", I didn't mean to say that I don't believe gangs of street children exist or existed in Brazil, or that they function as mutual support organizations to some extent. It was more the Disneyfication of the gang in Amado's book that I was objecting to, and the way he uses it to make his political points. It borders a bit too much on propaganda for my taste. On the other hand, Amado's frankness about the sexual activity of young boys seems more psychologically realistic, and unusual for writers during that period, although the way girls and women were portrayed seems potentially troubling from a modern perspective.

xpost

Amazing - that's reassuring to know! I'll see what I can do. I keep thinking, "I'll probably put this down at some point..." but then carry on reading. It never seems to run out of energy.

I lolled pretty hard in public when one of the characters was described as "the James Galway of cunnilingus"

A line that I have tried so hard to burn from my memory. Oh Jilly!

gyac, you may well be all over this, but do you know the sports writer Red Smith? Red Smith on Baseball and American Pastimes are a couple I haven't gotten to yet, but The Red Smith Reader is staggering: two 800-word columns a week, from late 30s to early 80s, models of passionate lucidity, from witty to red-headed furious (punching up at team owners, professional associations, media manipulation, fuck you too racist classist Cold War tool Olympics Committee), in drive-by shots, because always racing to the word limit through crowded bleachers while sorting out fields of play, so that even I (usually) feel like I understand some of what's at stake, right now, for leading players and their teams, in a wide variety of sports (which he periodically refers to as "games for children," trying to cool down himself and other sportsheadz).
Mind you, he's not above padding out horse race coverage with conversations and horse lineage, because whattayagonndo, those races are short. Indy 500 mostly interests him for the citizens very informally and somewhat massively camped out in whatever you call that green area the cars go round and round--and that's okay, cause the cars go round and round almost as briefly as horses, seems like (yeah he sufficiently profiles drivers too).
Non-sensational, unblinking coverage of a cockfight (once, not his regualr beat), while noting that such are still legal in a number of states at time of writing.
Sometimes takes his son, future international correspondent Terence Smith, in fishing trips, interviews locals and researches locales, also there's an image that's stayed with me, of a sea critter that stays noticeably dreary-ugly out in the tides, turns pink etc. in contrast to the harbor waters, perversely-bravely-perhaps mindlessly enough (mysteriously exceptional anyway).
Also lingering: his being under metal roof of a South African track star's homeland family home, with parents who are no fools, conveying enough in tone, facial expression etc.

I did not, Dow, and I greatly appreciate the recommendation! I actually have a long-standing love of/interest in horse racing so I will 100% be following this up. Thank you so much.

And, you know, all the rest, but I think it goes without saying that that’s all up my street.

You're welcome---it's more about team sports, but he seems reasonably, professionally engaged by horseracing and all or much that it entails)(get it, horses, tails) I'm told that book about Seabiscuit, maybe basis of the movie, is good.

I like to watch it on TV, but haven't read much about it (yet).

I love to watch things on TV

I continue towards the end of Bracewell's UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2023).

The novel is enjoyable. Easy to read. Elegant. You could say that MB is good at social and cultural textures, at least of certain kinds. City streets at dusk. Memories of summer evenings in suburbia (very Clientele, not that The Clientele told us much specifically about suburbia). Restaurants. Expensive wedding receptions.

However, it can also be said that MB's range as a writer and thinker has been narrow. This novel is a sequel to one from 1992. It seems a good idea to reuse those characters, not create new ones that are similar to them. But to write a sequel also, by definition, in one way shows a lack of imagination. At the same time the set-up is often very close to MB's appealing short novel PERFECT TENSE (2001): the alienated office worker remembering his past. That's literally what much of this novel is.

It makes sense that MB needs to fill in the gaps between what had happened up to c.1992 and c.2017 when this is set. But he also often goes back to earlier memories, ie: those that were already covered in the first novel. So he is almost literally repeating himself at times.

The novel tends to start from a scene - protagonist Martin Knight at his desk in the office, say - and go from that to a reverie: 'Martin thought of a dinner party, was it 15 years earlier?' - and from that, quite extensively described, to another scene earlier than that. Or he'll jump sideways and say 'At that moment, Martin's ex-wife was entering a restaurant'. The main point is that most of the novel's movement is backwards in time, not forward. You could compare MRS DALLOWAY, though that also contains a lot of present action. Or Proust, if the difference in scale weren't so great. I daresay that in his modest way (and at an in-person event on this I found him quite self-deprecating) MB is trying to effect some kind of fictional aesthetic for a C21 Proustian project.

It's a bad sign when Bracewell's sentences trail off into ellipses, and he presents snatches of remembered speech, which often aren't particularly insightful. It conveys a sense that he's running out of the energy to make the prose coherent and continuous.

MB's topic is poignant enough: a solitary man whose marriage has ended, who now spends much of time drinking alone (surely he doesn't need to drink so much) and reminiscing about better days. This has its truth. But MB could give the character more meat to chew on. He has a daughter: why wouldn't he make more effort to be with her and make that a good relationship? (He does a bit, but MB shows it only fleetingly.) He thought of himself as an 'aesthete' - OK, why doesn't he now, in the 2010s, go to art galleries, or films, or simply ... read books? The idea that exciting romance is in the past I understand; the idea that experiencing art and culture is in the past, I don't. The character is unnecessarily limited in this way.

The daughter Chloe could be a promising character. She is a lesbian and MB makes a good effort at describing her love for her partner (fiancée in fact). But why not say more about what this younger, almost Gen Z, person thinks about the world? It's set in 2017 - what does she think of the forthcoming General Election? MB leaves that stuff to Jonathan Coe.

MB is obsessed with rendering clothes - the exact details of a waistcoat, tie or skirt - and sometimes places or objects, even menus. There is potentially some virtue in this, in a Peter York way: a record of taste and time. But it would be better if it accompanied a stronger narrative, rather than taking the place of story. I reflect that MB is oddly the fulfilment of what Woolf complained about re Arnold Bennett's aesthetic: 'describe the exact number of buttons on her dress', etc, the 'materialism' that she distrusted. MB is very 'materialist' indeed.

What the novel could use is a bit more present-day drama and forward motion. In a way it gets that when the protagonist has a heart attack and a heart bypass - but even in this he is passive. I have a bit to go and I hope that MB can deliver a final element of story, rather than just more texture.

RE: "Captains of the Sands", I didn't mean to say that I don't believe gangs of street children exist or existed in Brazil, or that they function as mutual support organizations to some extent. It was more the Disneyfication of the gang in Amado's book that I was objecting to, and the way he uses it to make his political points. It borders a bit too much on propaganda for my taste. On the other hand, Amado's frankness about the sexual activity of young boys seems more psychologically realistic, and unusual for writers during that period, although the way girls and women were portrayed seems potentially troubling from a modern perspective.

I think it's certainly a fair charge to say Amado sentimentalizes his protagonists, though I wouldn't make as cruel a comparison as Disney - as I think I mentioned earlier, Dickens is imo a closer analogue, and all the sentimentality in the world hasn't turned people off him. tbc I do think it's an apples & oranges situation with Brighton Rock tho, just completely different contexts.

I finish Bracewell's novel. Certain events happen, but not in a way that's very connected. A character dies - suddenly and randomly, so it's poignant but has no meaning or causal connection to other events. The protagonist keeps drinking heavily despite having had two heart bypass operations. He leaves his job. He decides to move to a flat in the suburb where he grew up.

It's odd how blank MB has left this character. It must in some way be deliberate. He's extremely passive - but he's also totally uninterested in most things. He thinks nothing of politics - in 2017, when Brexit among other things was everywhere. He doesn't care about sport. OK, he's an 'aesthete'. But he doesn't go to galleries either, or the cinema, or read books (the only books he looks closely at, he admires their binding). He liked music in the 1970s. Fair enough that he's not into the music of today, Tom Ewing Poptimist style. But then why doesn't he care about Roxy Music reunions, or reflect on the death of Bowie a year earlier?

Bracewell said in person that he was the 'Ambassador for Suburbia'. He refers to suburbia a lot. He did write properly about it in ENGLAND IS MINE, I think. But in his fiction suburbia is more of an alibi. Suburbia is 'a memory of a summer evening, shining through on a landing, on a box of LP records, in 1974'. OK. Yes, I can identify with that aspect of suburbia. But if I were going to write a book supposedly rooting itself in suburbia, I would talk a lot more about what actually goes in suburbia. Chinese takeaways, Indian restaurants, minicabs, garden centres. People washing cars, mowing lawns and raising children. Pensioners. Busybody online groups. MB seems very uninterested in any actual _people_ who might live in suburbia.

Given the relative success (?) of this novel, it could be interesting (?) to see if he is stirred, or forced, to write another, and go a little outside the zone in which he is so comfortable.

West of the Revolution Claudio Saunt
Book on what else is happening in North America as the American army under Washington is trying to fight off British rule.
I've just been reading about a Spanish religious expedition trying to link Santa Fe with Monterey that was unsuccessful since it turned back halfway and did a circuit including the Grand canyon. They mapped the route but managed to get 2 rivers 100 miles apart combined.
Previous chapters have looked at Russian expeditions into what would become Alaska.
I think I came across the book in a couple of bibliographies, possibly of books on Native America. It is really interesting to see what was happening outside of the colonies you hear most about. What became America was and is a vast space.

Animal Land Margaret Blount
Been reading blount while listening to Blount since I been listening to Sun Ra quite a bit recently.
Book from the mid 70s about fictional animals in books especially Children's books. IT seems pretty knowing in some of its turns of phrase.
Doesn't frown on the Song of the South collection as much as later books would thanks to the way the stories were collected . But does touch on things like agency and nods to feminism though I don't think it says so explicitly.
I'm quite enjoying this, though not sure where I got the recommendation from as to its existence. Had to order it as an interlibrary loan anyway.

Patti Smith Year of the Monkey
Anecdotal tale of a time that Patti Smith was in California between San Francisco and LA. Spends a lot of time talking about dreams and everyday conversations. Again quite enjoying it. Quite readable, not sure what I'm going to come away with unlike Just Kids where you get a better understanding of an influential part of her history , maybe a better understanding of her psyche.
Anyway, go it over Xmas from a local library thinking I'd get through it rapidly. Instead wound up with it sitting around the bed for teh last few weeks as i got through some books I'd had out much longer. Glad i have got to it now though.
I would like to get a chance to read some of her 70s rock journalism though. I guess the writing style here is quite readable anyway which not everything is.

W.E.B. du Bois The Souls of Black Folks
Finally getting to read the great black thinker. Odd writing style possibly, maybe reflecting the times since this came out right at the start of the last century. May also be trying to sound biblical.
Quite anecdotal as he covers various subjects related to the black experience of teh time. I think I will be trying to read some more of his stuff.

The Big Blue Book Calvin Jones
Mystery about how a wheeled contraption works. Something I should have read a few months ago.
Written by porn mustachioed mechanic Calvin Jones.
Somehow over the next few weeks i shall get to the very bottom of this or fail or something.
If I do I can fix bikes, if I don't I won't be able to as much. Ho hum

I"m chugging on with Kristin Lavrandsdatter, just into the third and last book. I think it could be described as ultra realist - compared to this Middlemarch seems like a riot of larger than life characters and events. I'd say it's maybe 10% political intrigue, 30% christian guilt and 60% just people getting on with their lives, regrets, loveless marriages, etc. It's very good on family life, both the mediaeval aspect and more universally/timelessly.

Darryl Pinckney - Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan
Zora Neale Hurston - Dust Tracks on a Road
Barbara Comyns - The Juniper Tree

Two weeks and two thirds into Life and Fate. I'm glad I've spent zero time trying to keep track of which characters belong to the large family, whose far-flung experiences in WWII provide the device that attempts to tie the narrative together. The connections between all the people, places and experiences Grossman describes all run strongly through Stalin, the Party, the Soviet bureaucracy, the Holocaust, and the war itself. The family narrative is mostly incidental and only provides a slender emotional thread to connect a dozen disparate milieus.

The Chandler (NYRB) translation seems very readable, neither overly literal nor flattened out. The introduction points out that Grossman spent much of WWII functioning as a journalist and that experience is very evident in the novel. The structure of the book is very reportorial, worked over to give the descriptions greater resonance. The characters are all sketches, but Grossman is quite good at sketching them.

Very appealing, esp. your second graf, thanks.
Alfred please check back in some time(s) re:

Darryl Pinckney - Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan
Zora Neale Hurston - Dust Tracks on a Road
Barbara Comyns - The Juniper Tree

I've started N.K. Jemisin, THE FIFTH SEASON (2015), the first of a trilogy of fantasy novels set on a continent that seems to be subject to earthquakes. Can't quite tell what the technological level of the world is - low, I think, as a character rides a horse for transport. The novel puts you in the world without explaining its coinages and usages ('absent paradigm'?), which is quite wearying, but then again it does have a Glossary - maybe that's not a bad way to do it. The novel seems to be focused on certain telepathic children who have special powers and are feared by the community. The writing is clear but not otherwise especially good yet.

Alfred please check back in some time(s) re:

The Pickney was thrilling and obnoxious. On one hand I'm sick of Cal 'n' Lizzie and the letters and Harriet and even more impatient with their generation's petty wars, i.e. that liar Lillian Hellman. Robert Lowell refuses to stay dead. Written in hiccupy paragraphs, the narrative took me a while to get a hold of. But on the other hand Pinckney is a splendid tour guide and alert to Hardwick's old-Southern-dame casual racism (which to her credit she acknowledges and works on). Many, many book recommendations I jotted down, you might expect.

You're sick of Harriet? Can you imagine having those parents? She might well be a handful too, but also think it might be like when you meet Pete's parents in the "New Amsterdam" episode (also follow-ups) of Mad Men, and read what Evelyn Waugh's Maw and Paw really were, beyond his own mentions in A Litte Learning, I might be inclined to make allowances for the offspring.
Will take a look at the book if I come across it; thanks for your plausibly mixed take.

I read Barbara Comyns' *The Vet's Daughter* a few years back. A profoundly strange book, that, now I come to think of it, is quite close in tone to *The Ice Palace* by Tarjei Vesaas, which I finished this morning.

It's hard to put a finger on *what* Vesaas's subject is in the book. The intensity of childhood relationships, yes, but there's a numinous secret at the heart of the book, only hinted at in a conversation between the central child characters, that remains just out of reach, almost as if it's pre- or extra-linguistic. The titular ice palace is a beautiful, ephemeral free-floating metaphor for this unknowable quality but that is a clumsy explanation and doesn't really do justice to Vesaas' strangeness.

I've been puzzling over where I'd place Vesaas (not that he needs placing anywhere). I've read that Joyce was an influence and I can hear echoes of *Dubliners*. Bits of Kafka. The thing it reminded me of most was Angela Carter's *The Bloody Chamber* but that might be a stretch.

There's a good Backlisted episode on Vesaas. Worth it to hear Karl Ove Knausgård read in the original Norwegian. https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/175-tarjei-vesaas-the-ice-palace

I’ve loved all the Vesaas I’ve read, but The Ice Palace is particularly special I think.

I feel really guilty that I haven't been able to get through Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, especially since it was a Christmas gift from my wife and it's so short, but I'm just too burned out with work to keep track of shifting narrators and characters who are alternately alive and dead. Will have to revisit it sometime when I'm in a better headspace.

Having better luck listening to the audiobook of Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. Really fascinating stuff.

I read 'The Ice Palace' a couple of years ago thanks to a recommendation on one of these threads. A very good book.

Not being able to search previous opinions and realising you sound like a berk before posting your own, is one of the (very mild) issues that comes with rebirthing this thread with every new season.

I started Nick Hayes's *Trespass* today. It was a book born when Hayes was challenged while walking his dog one day by an oaf on a quad bike who told him to 'get orf my land'. It traces what should by now, be a familiar history of enclosure and the creation of private property but with the difference that Hayes is pretty provocative and trespasses as often as he can - relying on politeness and plausible deniability to get him off the hook. Hayes has a tendency to meander but it's engaging and is in places, as it should be, utterly enraging. I'm off to poach some pheasants.

(to be clear, I wasn't suggesting your opinions would be berk-ish, ArchCarrier! More that I worry I sound like a chump when posting about established (if niche) classics like *The Ice Palace* without any discourse to glom onto.)

Read Prynne’s “Pearls That Were,” a small book that has sold 50,000 copies in its Chinese translation, but several thousands of degrees fewer in its original English. It’s a strange book, seeming to be referencing forms of social control and linguistic violence. Of course, many of the poems rhyme, so there’s an added texture of the poet being cheeky in utilizing formal structures while damning such rigidities in the poems’ content. References to Puritan writings, Shakespeare, and Hawthorne are frequent. Neat book!

About finished Coolidge’s long prose book on alien abductions, and started Purdy’s The Nephew as my bedtime snoozer. Despite that characterization, I am really enjoying it— he really is quite a stylist, inimitable in some ways.

I'm seeing two listings for The Ice Palace: Penguin Classic, 2018, translator not named, and ‎ Peter Owen Publishers; Second Edition, Second (December 15, 2020), Peter Owen Cased Classic, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan. I'll take whatever I can get via library loan, but which should I ask for first? Translation is my main concern.

Both translated by Elizabeth Rokkan as far as I can see, so they’re probably the same.

The amount of love for THE ICE PALACE here makes me think I should read it also, at least when I've finished with the boring massive fantasy novel and Bono's engaging but massive memoir.

Same

I think I might even have a copy somewhere.

You'll read it ... after the pinefox ?

I can get a library loan, I'm in.

Pinefox! James Wood got to Gwendolyn Riley.

Elizabeth Hardwick - The Collected Essays.

Making my way through. The prose is superb, the judgements are pretty much in line with accepted canon (nothing surprising so far), she can rely far too much on biography for my liking.

I'm rereading Sean O'Casey's play THE PLOUGH & THE STARS (1926) for the first time in many years.

Elizabeth Hardwick - The Collected Essays.

Making my way through. The prose is superb, the judgements are pretty much in line with accepted canon (nothing surprising so far), she can rely far too much on biography for my liking.

― xyzzzz__

I've been wrestling with her for about five years. The Stein, William James, Wharton, Edmund Wilson, and Selma essays are clean, almost whittled; then she offers a sentence that knocks me flat with its perception.

Poster Alfred, thanks for the Wood on Riley link - must read. Looks like the novels he discusses are the ones I haven't read. And may well be better than the ones I have.

Will read if New Yorker checkpoint stops distracting me---meanwhile, Wood's opening mention of Helen Garner, whose books I still mean to check, reminds me of his essay on her:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/helen-garners-savage-self-scrutiny

The novels discussed in the Wood piece are her best by some distance.

Wood makes an error in the print version (he describes First Love and My Phantoms as her first and second novels) which I notice has been removed from the online version. Do you get a no-prize for finding a factual error in a New Yorker piece?

That's a very poor error for a professional critic to make!

What did he think she'd been doing in all those previous years?

O'Casey's PLOUGH AND THE STARS is a 4-act play, longer I think than the rest of the Dublin Trilogy, which veers between comedy and tragedy in its representation of the Rising and previous events.

An oddity of the play is that the couple who seem, from the dramatis personae, central - Jack and Nora Clitheroe - don't actually seem to be on stage much, especially Jack. Most of the actual stage time and talk is taken up by more comic, supposedly minor characters - Fluther, Peter, The Covey, plus Ms Gogan and Bessie Burgess.

Politically you could say that the play is pacifist. It presents war and fighting as a bad idea into which men are dragged by rhetoric, pride and bravado, while women are left to pick up the pieces. Declan Kiberd in his eloquent chapter on it repeatedly says that O'Casey counters nationalism with socialism. But if the play wants to speak for socialism, why make its spokesperson for socialism, The Covey, so ridiculous? His repeated desire to introduce other characters to a hefty work of theory by Jenersky is, I come to see, a strong running gag.

It's natural and common to see O'Casey in continuity with Synge. But rereading him, I felt more the difference between them. Synge's people speak a heightened, rhythmic language that often finds its poetry (which presumably he thought peasant speech did, though he also heightened and exaggerated it), and sometimes - Christy's entreaties of love to Pegeen, some of Martin Doul's speeches - feels as exquisite as any English written for the stage in that century. O'Casey offers much talk but, really, little poetry. His figures can often be called caricatures - maybe not quite of a recognised type, but still, exaggerated, comic versions of themselves. In O'Casey, there seems to be a lot of laughing *at* a character, in a way not really present in Synge. In effect, Synge the outsider treats his people with romantic respect; O'Casey the insider is happy enough to mock his.

O'Casey, I suppose, wrote as if for the music hall and melodrama. His play contains several songs. It's curious to realise that no play of Synge's contains a song. O'Casey was a major figure, with a remarkable political career, but I suppose he wasn't the subtlest artist. Yet I still must get round to his later work, which I've never done.

So I haven’t read this but knowing a little bit about O’Casey, I wonder if the Covey is a bit of self-mockery/critique? O’Casey was initially born into a relatively comfortable house but the family was thrown into poverty when his dad died and he went to work at a young age. He quite famously taught himself to read and write. He was very much an autodidact and read prodigiously despite having an eye condition that made this difficult for him. I wonder if writing such a character was him poking fun at that old socialist stereotype we all know and love, the theory guy who’s shiting on and on about some obscure text while people are struggling to pay the bills?

I also googled because I had this idea in my mind it might have been linked to his views on nationalism (I studied The Shadow of a Gunman, which I hated) and I found this post which perhaps provides you with more context?

The general state of Ireland and the Labour Movement, the plunges from the loftiest optmism into the depths of confusion and despair, must be taken into account when considering O’Casey’s Dublin plays. These seem to indicate a disillusionment if not with the principle of Labour, at any rate with the practice. Jack, the Trade Union activist in the Harvest Festival, is a hero. That was the mood in 1918-19. There is no socialist in the Gunman. That was written in 1922. Jerry Devine, the Trade Unionist in Juno, is depicted as a hypocrite.That was 1923. In the Plough the Covey is a mouther of meaningless revolutionary phrases. That was completed in 1925 in the depth of the Cosgrave reaction.

There was good reason for disenchantment. The strange transformation of the fiery revolutionary William O’Brien (by some thought ”the Lenin of Ireland”) into autocratic bumbledom as his union declined to a fifth of its membership in a decade, was the indignant amazement of Larkin’s supporters, and it was in this political circle that O’Casey moved.

By the way…

In effect, Synge the outsider treats his people with romantic respect; O'Casey the insider is happy enough to mock his.

Finished Something Close to Music by John Ashbery over the weekend - a nicely packaged collection of his later art writing and poems and a few playlists for good measure. I like the image of Ashbery sitting down to enjoy some Gavin Bryars Xenakis. Was published by David Zwirner so it looks nice too.

Now starting What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 by Jospeh Roth, translated by Michael Hoffman. Have never read any Roth before but this looks like it'll be a nice introduction.

That book by Roth is fantastic. Good to contrast his observational powers to the majestic fiction he was writing.

I've been wrestling with her for about five years. The Stein, William James, Wharton, Edmund Wilson, and Selma essays are clean, almost whittled; then she offers a sentence that knocks me flat with its perception.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 19 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I am very much enjoying. I guess I wasn't expecting Hardwick to rely on biography as much.

vineland
much more accessible than I assumed it would be

Gyac, I have always felt that there is some kind of 'protesting too much', or 'deliberate overcompensation' quality about the Covey character - a caricature of a doctrinaire socialist, in a play (allegedly socialist) by a socialist playwright; as though he is trying to re-balance the work by inserting a damaging caricature of the position with which he himself is associated.

I suppose as if I were to write a story featuring a dogmatic 'Corbynista' who went around singing 'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn' and attacking 'Kieth'.

Which I'm afraid I couldn't bring myself to do, even if I had the talent to write a story.

But there could, as you say, be other, more specific reasons for it.