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

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.

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.

I've read a lot of Roth but not this. Thanks.

xp if you read the piece I linked (by a communist historian!) he outlines that O’Casey seemed to have an uneasy relationship with his own politics

Yes, now I see the whole article, it does look important. I didn't know of Prof Greaves' book.

I have a whole book of rather dry non-fictional writings by O'Casey that I have never got through. Much of it, as I recall, is his memoirs of the Citizen Army.

I must get round to reading O'Casey's RED ROSES FOR ME.

I once did a work-experience on a stage set for a production of Juno and the Paycock at the Bradford Playhouse (which incidentally is the building where the Labour Party was born). I remember the main set was a dirty stained walls room in a slum type setting and I can't remember much else. I did read a lot of the play at the time, but can't remember anything about it other than the style of dialect tbh. It was fun though, because seeing the set completed and lit up was a good moment. And for 3 days we had some pleasant afternoon drinking sessions in the theatre bar.

I like this story.

You just managed to avoid inserting a devastating attack on Kieth in the parenthesis.

it's pretty hard to link the namesake with Kieth, the former wanted a coalition of left-wing groups, not to kill them all!

The Blacker The Berry Wallace Thompson
Harlem Renaissance era novel about the misadventures of a snobbish young lady who was born too dark skinned for her own snobbery. She's tried University in LA then moves to Harlem NYC where she becomes a maid for an actress. She disdains dark skinned people despite being one and tries to avoid their company. Winds up in an affair with a very mixed race costume presser who danced with her when the actress she works for goes to a Harlem club with her (actress) brother and takes her along. Actress is a white woman playing a mulatto in an update of Carmen.
Anyway it's very readable if you can deal with race snobbery being a central theme. I think it reflects its times, was first published in 1929. I've had it sitting around as a library loan for way too long and thought I would eventually start it, Now read about 3/4s of it in a day or 2. Good book.

Nt Without Laughter Langston Hughes
I think this is about the only novel by the Harlem Renaissance poet. Got this out middle fo last year too I think and only just getting back to it last week .
this is about a family growing up in poverty in the South. The father is a travelling blues singer who just ups and leaves at one point, leaving a mother in bad health who is being looked after by her mother who does washing for all the white folks of the area. She also has to look after the couple's young son who is at the local school where all the black kids have to sit at the back of the class.
Writing is pretty good. I have picked up a collection of short stories by Hughes too that I need to read.

23 Things they Don't Tell YOu About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang
Critique of capitalism by UK based Korean Economist.
Told in short chapters in pretty anecdotal plus explanation style.
Picked this up a while back, started into it. Got sidetracked into something else. Found it again in my toilet reading pile and now going to try to finish before starting into

Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
which I was waiting to get as an interlibrary loan for most of last year then gave up and bought at the start of the year. Then had to finish up a load of books I'd had out of the library too .

Also wanting to get into Montaigne Complete Essays which I've meant to read for years and recently found out it was in local library so got last week .Plus books on Flamenco and Blues I got from a different library locally on the same day.
& Bought the Mark Lanegan book on having Covid and a Clinton Heylin book on songwriting and plagiarism and things which I picked up in Dublin last weekend

classical mechanics: the theoretical minimum by leonard susskind and george hrabovsky

i was a math major but never took any physics, something i occasionally regret. this slim book, part of a series based on a popular online course, has been a very nice read so far

23 Things they Don't Tell YOu About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang

if you like this (or maybe even moreso if you don't...) and are still curious about the east asian growth model (industrial policy, land reform, capital controls) after reading it, i can't recommend highly enough How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

cool, thanks

Finished the scary alien book by Clark Coolidge, now have “Scattered Brains” by Darrell Gray as my morning reading, and will certainly finish Purdy’s “The Nephew” before I fall asleep in the next day or two.

I'm slowly listening through the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, narrated to perfection by Stephen Fry. Just finished the Final Problem. Next up: The Hound of the Baskervilles.

i have seen about half a dozen adaptations of H of the Bs and it has yet to click for me. is it real, or imagined? dunno. maybe i should read the actual thing.

The real prob with H of the B is that Holmes disappears from the central section of the book, and his surprise return to the narrative is not in the least surprising.

The opening section of the Hammer adaptation is Terence Fisher and the crew at their best, a riot of colour and intensity that doesn't come at all from the Conan Doyle story.