London Review of Books

Michael Orthofer's Complete Review is a blog, not a magazine, and it doesn't have interviews, but it has many good reviews of current and older world literature. Don't let the mid-1990s Geocities look of the site turn you off, because the quality of the content is really good.

^^^ good one. Though be aware he pretty much hates short fiction, poetry, most non-fiction, and book covers that aren't pure white with a little bit of text.

thanks for the input! went with a sub to World Literature Today, but will keep the Complete Review in mind for reference

I recently had my subscription renewed as a gift and I'm busy building up a new stack of articles I'll get around to at some point. Recent highlights have been Colm Toibin on Diane Arbus, Rivka Galchen on Kafka's last (read: earliest) letters and dear, creaky old Iain Sinclair on London (what else). I've missed it.

Curiously I've found it below-par recently ... including for instance Runciman on Theresa May.

Agreed on that article. Very flat. Evidence of a torpor in the opposition?

wasn't impressed with the sinclair, his concerns might be legit but it just read like old man yells at cloud.

i find him at quite a basic level unreadable. that first set of sentences!

So: the last London. It has to be said with a climbing inflection at the end. Every statement is provisional here. Nothing is fixed or grounded. Come back tomorrow and the British Museum will be an ice rink, a boutique hotel, a fashion hub. The familiar streets outside will have vanished into walls of curved glass and progressive holes in the ground. The darkened showroom of the Brick Lane monumental mason with the Jewish headstones will be an art gallery. So?

I saw Sinclair give that lecture in person. He was mostly just improvising with eloquence. It's odd that it has now become a piece of ... writing.

I can imagine it being transcribed by a computer from the recording. Which would helpfully explain Fizzles' bemusement.

I used to love his prose, thought it sparked off the page. That certainly doesn't. Also that bit about the BM, I know it's lol hyperbole but my first thought was "no it won't".

I think it's been diminishing returns for a while with Sinclair - almost like he's written himself to a standstill inside ever-decreasing circles.

it's a bit like he's writing the voice-over for a documentary. which would be fine, if the documentary existed, and there were images to hang the scraps from.

i get both lrb and nyrb but i think i am going to jettison the first. so much of it feels sealed off in its own world.

friend of mine who had to work w iain sinclair told a story about him where he came off as a pompous, defensive, bitter misogynist which has put me off getting more familiar

I have always found his writing rather hard to follow. Is this worse than his previous writing? I mean both worse for that trait and worse in general.

The bit about the British Museum is obviously a joke and, yes, perhaps it does all seem like 'old man yells at cloud' but I do know exactly what he means. I took a walk through the West End recently and was astonished at the amount of demolition and construction going on. A great many familiar (or kind of familiar) buildings are disappearing. On one corner of Leicester Square, something large has gone (a cinema, I think). I believe they are going to extend the hotel next door (the former Leicester Square Dental Hospital). Then, in Soho, Walker's Court is in the process of being torn apart. The Raymond Revue Bar building was being demolished even as I walked past. And it was the same on a number of other blocks around there. (Also, I recently noticed that the Odeon Marble Arch has gone.) Perhaps it is just age. It's only because these things have been around in my lifetime that it seems strange to see them go. If I was young and had only recently come to London, probably none of it would be particularly remarkable.

I think he has been a very very good writer, in his own way. Maybe one of the greats of his generation.

Maybe he is past his prime but that will come to all of us. If we're lucky. Enough to have a prime.

But it's true, this particular London lecture, in person, was not great work. Rambling, semi-reactionary, etc, and only occasionally insightful. He oddly connected London to Donald Trump; can't recall if there was any substance to that.

Liked Downriver quite a bit at the time and have much time for his film crit. Sinclair's BFI book on Crash is good.

His LRB work though is rough-going to say the least.

As to the LRB itself that "Women in Power" issue had a risible cover and concept. That aside it was pretty good. Loved the pieces on Spinoza, Claretta Mussolini, Kafka and they actually got me interested in a work of fiction (The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus) which happens once every 3/6 months. LRBs coverage of fiction is so bad.

I wanted to pick up the latest issue to read Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay on the centenary of the Russian Revolution/review of recent books on it but haven't yet.

I also let my sub lapse and have been tempted to renew again, but have been waiting for an issue with enough to really win me back. So far, no luck.

I know it's not really the thread for it, but any thoughts on who may take over the reins of the NYRB?

to read Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay on the centenary of the Russian Revolution/

iirc SPs conclusions that there isn't much enthusiasm for the Russian revolution or its ideas was kinda...off to me, especially given what has been happening post-Latin America, then onto Sanders/Corbyn and some of the fierce counters from the right (and er Bannon being a fan of Lenin, although that's probably a troll, even so..)

Iain Sinclair is a pain in the hole. Only stuff of his I have enjoyed were the book-scout bits in White Chapel Scarlet Tracings or whatever it was. Psychogeography has produced a vast amount of bad writing, probably second only to the Beats.

simplicius simplicissimus is very good!

I really like Iain Sinclair but I think his window, by design, due to the nature of his obsessions, was relatively narrow - from Lights Out to Edge of the Orison (the fiction is a different beast). I think I'm also fine with thinking him a bit of a charlatan.

That's a good statement Chinaski!

re: fiction: my sense is that he isn't really cut out for it. He is good at writing 'fact that becomes fictional', but bad when he does 'fiction based on fact'.

Opened the new issue, ie with Sinclair. Seems surprisingly uninteresting.

i have done a 180 on the lrb. the last few issues have been excellent. so many highlights! michael wood on fritz lang. peter green on ancient greece.

nyrb on the other hand. does anybody actually read those tomasky articles on trump? maybe it's the change in editorship, but the quality feels wildly variable all of a sudden.

I saw Wood give that lecture at the British Museum. It felt like very below-par Wood, worryingly wayward by his standards. But I think it comes across a bit better in print. The same was true of Sinclair's 'Last London'.

it could have been better. he never really ties together the big heat and mabuse the way he says he wants to. but it was fascinating to me all the same.

The long article on the Cadbury's Somerville plant was excellent - both incredibly sad and worrying but with these occasional flashes of unintentional comedy. "We watched the last Crunchie come off the production line" or whatever.

I didn't get much out of that piece on Lang. Like Wood synthesized a lot of readings to...I'm not sure what point. Did remind me that I must read someting by Kraucauer.

I loved Jenny Turner's piece on Elsa Morante - great literary journalism on a writer whose work I love.

krakauer generally a let-down in my experience -- tho i do remember liking his piece on the tiller girls

i think LRB has had some terrific stuff this year, I was going to do a giant post on all the good stuff (and then remembered i have an actual large writing project which is already three months past deadline)

The long article on the Cadbury's Somerville plant was excellent - both incredibly sad and worrying but with these occasional flashes of unintentional comedy. "We watched the last Crunchie come off the production line" or whatever.

― Matt DC, Saturday, 29 April 2017 09:02 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

James Meeks is the lrb writer I will always make sure to read. The long article about social housing from about three years ago was his best I think.

krakauer generally a let-down in my experience -- tho i do remember liking his piece on the tiller girls

Thought you liked him - maybe I'm mis-remembering you talking him up a couple of years ago (?)

They're doing the free subscription thing again, so the first person who wants one can have one: just let me know. it says you can't have been a subscriber before to qualify.

Haven't finished yet, but this is quite powerful so far.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague

I don't know that we need another trawl through the horror of Plath's life, but there's no doubting this was luridly compelling:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/joanna-biggs/im-an-intelligence

I was reading that yesterday - and I would've avoided it because I know of the new details this is providing (namely Ted's physical assault, and Sylvia's discovery of letters to Assia and her reaction - think this one is new), but then again I wanted to see how this read after I engaged with Plath's work this year (went on a run of Letters Home, Bell Jar and of course the Complete Poems). Also the writer did input details of her own life in it, which (post-Janet Malcolm) every commentator of Plath should do now. A law should be passed.

I found the autobiographical elements (almost intentionally?) clumsy - an unnecessary, first-draft, framework that could easily have been removed. Malcolm's is still the definitive account for me.

Awful article!

James Wolcott on Saul Bellow

:( :( >:( >:(

(i haven't read it yet)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward

tag yrselves, i'm sister jane

(the bit where bellow hard-slaps a girlfriend at a meal lots of ppl are at? i want to do this to wolcott for his adjectives)

single good line is alfred kazin's, lol at the trio of ghastly literary fail/fakesons bellow accrued: james fkn wood, leon fkn wieseltier, martin fkn amis

We're all sister Jane.

Loved the Nobel dinner!

i think it's the basis of the film festen :0

I never got around to seeing this film about a wife who is married to a recipient of the Nobel in lit. Has some echoes though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wife_(2017_film)

reading the bellow article now - didn’t realise it was for the second volume of the zachary leader biog. his biog of k amis was monumentally tedious and long-winded and it sounds like james wolcott suffered similarly here.

feels like he aims for academic exhaustiveness which does not aid or prioritise insight (his amis insight was at best leaden at worst just tone deaf and rong). but it’s not clear which market he’s going for - the bookshop window or the academic $$$, either in price or style.

the perfect opposite example of this being chesterton’s wonderful short biog of browning. not much use as an academic aid to triangulating the exact social, career and geographical grid reference of the subject at any given time tho i guess.

oh god it’s all coming back reading this. his use of biographical detail to explain fictional context, not in itself an unreasonable thing to do, is incredibly hamfisted. almost denudes the notion of imaginative fiction of any worth whatsoever.

since almost any brief acquaintance with bellow and those round him makes you think "these are bad ppl and they shd feel bad", this seems a v unhelpful approach

disclaimer: i have read no bellow and judge him entirely thru the lens of the self-promotional stanning of martin amis

wow, he went to agent andrew wylie (“the jackal”), jilting his former female agent. this is interesting ofc because Mamis did the same thing to Pat Kavanagh triggering that split with her husband Julian Barnes. what a tedious shitshow.

as wolcott says “what was it with this guys?”

since almost any brief acquaintance with bellow and those round him makes you think "these are bad ppl and they shd feel bad", this seems a v unhelpful approach

disclaimer: i have read no bellow

^
This is entertaining.

I think I have to agree with it.

(I have read one Bellow - DANGLING MAN)