2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?

took a break from Caro and studying for prelims and read Denis Johnson - The Name of the World in bed Sunday morning. i don’t think it is a good book yet it was very well written. it seemed written in one sitting and made to be read in one sitting. it’s the first novel of his ive read and i picked it essentially at random from the library, may read Fiskadoro next unless someone itt has a better rec?

TRAIN DREAMS, which is a brilliant one-sitting book

jesus' son is the quintessential denis johnson novel but i think tree of smoke is my favourite of his - way more of an investment of time involved tho and jesus' son is slim and composed of interlinked vignettes so if you're time-poor that might be a better one to go for next

reading Moonseed by Stephen Baxter and enjoying it.

That's one of his better ones, lots of groovy ideas.

tree of smoke is on the long-list, but i'm picking up jesus' son and train dreams from the library, thx james and bizzarro

Prose:
Antonio Tabucchi - Requiem
Hilda Hilst - Letters from a Seducer

That is 2nd best Tabucchi (after Pereira Mantains ofc, highly unlikely he topped that), just love this series of conversations over a day's journey - with some excellent writing on food and manners. Hilda Hilst is actually a modernist writer* from Brazil - in the sense that she engages with a particular tradition fully: Beckett, Joyce, Bataille but also De Sade. A kind of damaged erotics. Nothing in it was too compelling about the encounter (and what I want is the encounter - what is this kind of writing going to reveal/conceal. Another Brazilian - Raduan Nassar this time, in his A Cup of Rage - sets the example here), although I'll revisit (its part of a loose trilogy so it might make more sense) and I wanted to read this for quite a long-time (With My Dog Eyes is more available and pretty great imo).

*(the label of Brazilian modernist is attached to Clarice Lispector - who was more of a sort of one-off spirtiualist visionary (which does form part of that texture of the writing from that time), but the English Language discourse is often wrong)

Poetry:

113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems (tr. Richard Zenith, who also translated Pessoa's poetry and prose for Penguin)

John Banville's Mrs Osmond, a sequel to James' The Portrait of a Lady.

The readerly space that the openness of Portrait's ending opens up is one of its glories, imho - a sequel not only seems pointless, but actively against the Jamesian spirit.

I've started Austen's Emma, which I've read before, but it was roughly four decades ago and all but the faintest impressions have been erased from my mind.

One impression that immediately suggests itself within the first 50 pages is that the intricate web of relationships that Austen is weaving for the reader is heavily dependent on the realities of the English class system, which assigned every character a strictly defined place in a very rigid and hierarchical society and everyone accepts that place as completely as they accept the necessity of breathing. Austen is quite alive to these facts of life and her careful dissection of her contemporaries is essentially scientific in spirit.

Yeah, although there is an uneasiness about class in Austen as well. Much of the drama in her novels comes from the difficulty of marrying across class lines, like the central pair in Pride and Prejudice. But I don't think she's exactly denouncing the whole class system. It's more like the norm against which interesting deviations can happen for the sake of plot.

"Denouncing" seems like it would be too strong to me, too, but reading Pride and Prejudice a while ago I certainly felt like the author's loathing was discernible.

Here's this month's haul of newly read books.

I started reading "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age", indulging my inner nerd. I wish there was maybe a bit more about the technical side and maybe a bit less about nerd office politics, but I've got to hand it to Hiltzik for getting all these stories on paper.

Reading my first le Guin- The Left Hand of Darkness. I have no ide where this fits in her canon, but it's magnificent and I can already tell I need to read everything she's written. Is there a typical le Guin sentence? I've noticed a couple with a particular kind of music, almost over balancing themselves in the second half: 'The face that turned towards me, reddened and cratered by firelight and shadow, was as flat and cruel as the moon.'

Also hugely aware of Mieville as I'm reading. Something also to do with rhythm, but the names, too, the bustle of consonants.

It's pretty much at the heart of her canon: that and The Dispossessed are probably the purest expression of many of her concerns.

Yeah was gonna post that.
xp Intrigued by several of Alfred's hot takes: he even makes the Herbert Hoover bio sound exciting. I'm still wondering why To his delight, he saw the party that had uneasily accepted him as its head renounce, for the sake of electoral victory, the Progressivism it had disliked in him.

Yeah. I kind of always want to read every book Alfred posts about, he always make them sound so good.

máirtín ó cadhain, "the dirty dust"
grace paley, "collected stories"

I just read The Scarlet Letter for the first time. It's so good. More of a mythic and fantastical vibe than I was quite expecting.

I couldn’t get through that when I was supposed to read it in 11th grade; I thought it sucked. But I also didn’t have a shred of respect for that teacher.

Yeah. I kind of always want to read every book Alfred posts about, he always make them sound so good.

― Nashville #9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs),

aw thanks

Robert Chesley, Jerker
Stephen King, Joyland
Emily Mackay, Homogenic
various, All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages

"The Girl Beneath The Lion" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, which may be a valiant but flawed attempt by a male writer to do a female coming-of-age story but may be a load of old-perv nonsense.

"The Chameleon" by Samuel Fisher; I enjoyed this very much. It has a high-concept thing going on (the narrating character is a book that has the power to change itself into other books to observe the human lives around it) - there were times when I thought the novel struggled to carry the weight of the concept but in the end it was worth it, I think. There's one bit, involving a game of chess, which I thought made the whole enterprise worthwhile on its own.

"The Girl Beneath The Lion" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues

Ha, I just spent five minutes googling to find out whether this is 'Le lis de mer', which it is. Odd English title. Doesn't help that the Dutch title is 'The Love Night of Vanina', the edition I read first.

I'd say it's more a valiant but flawed attempt instead of old-perv nonsense, but my judgement can be clouded by the fact that he's a favorite of mine. I can't help but admire his languid, dreamy style, which hits all my right buttons.

I'm willing to bet someone like David Hamilton took a lot clues from and aspired to film like Pieyre de Mandiargues writes, but took it too far: all corny pervy stuff, no substance. Would love to hear what you think of the book!

Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich's mammoth oral history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Utterly compelling, totally devastating (one especially grim narrative at the centre of the book, wherein a young Jewish boy crawls out alive from a mass grave of incinerated bodies, instantly brought to mind Klimov's Come and See). Feel like reading some Wodehouse straight afterwards.

I wholly judged it by its cover when I first encountered it in a thrift store. Love this one:

https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1339059518l/15227442.jpg

xp

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/418DuX9k6PL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

This is what my copy looks like. Phwoar!

"The Se Lily", "Vanina's Night of Love", "The Girl Beneath The Lion". WTF?

I enjoyed it, I think for the same textural reasons as you, but couldn't help feeling like it was a bit of an old man's fantasy fest by the end. I'd have trouble recommending it to anyone without significant caveats.

Agreed. It's very much "of its time", to put it mildly.

Finished Maurice, and with that my project of going through E.M. Forster's novels. Might tackle the short stories, literary theory, biographies etc. later on. Reading Jeeves In The Offing while I decide.

https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388197724l/22448.jpg

The Neutral - Barthe, late lecture notes.

“Perhaps my reasons, just alibis?” <- i feel like this a lot.

Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich's mammoth oral history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Utterly compelling, totally devastating (one especially grim narrative at the centre of the book, wherein a young Jewish boy crawls out alive from a mass grave of incinerated bodies, instantly brought to mind Klimov's Come and See). Feel like reading some Wodehouse straight afterwards.

Yes, in this book many of the different interview subjects frequently break down in tears (so we're told - one of the things Alexievich does really well is to use just a few discrete textual interventions to convey the whole emotional terrain of the interview).

i read the michael finkel hermit book while on vacation ~ p good, knights general indifference to finkel is solid, i enjoy & relate to that 1 of the only? things he asks finkel for is for a video of finkel's bkshelves maybe i shd move into the woods idk

Read some Francoise Sagan short stories, which was a mistake. She's trying to hard to land on both "world-weary libertine" and "gosh, isn't this SHOCKING?!!" that she lands between the two with a loudly audible thud.

Was she any good at all after the first book?

Not on this evidence.

i love bonjour tristesse but i got the sense it was best to stop reading there

Ingeborg Bachmann - Malina.

blold meridian

That title would have made it more fun.

I started reading "Skylark" by Kosztolanyi. Very low-key, but a colorful depiction of small-town Hungarian life around the beginning of the 20th century.

Belated lol at blold meridian

I'm nearing the finish line with Emma. I will be glad to leave Emma Woodhouse and all her friends and enemies behind me. They are somewhat overstaying their welcome, so that their mental ticks and crochets are becoming both predictable and rather tedious.

I had thought that Austen would run through the entire book reserving the privilege of our knowing a character's interior thoughts solely to Emma, while showing the interior of all other characters solely through words and actions, but she's recently stepped outside that convention to rope in Mr. Knightley, Emma's beau ideal (a fact every alert reader figured out 300 pages ago, but Emma remains unaware of as yet at my currently attained stage in her progress toward the ultimate happiness of marriage. That end is so obviously unavoidable that it may as well be an accomplished fact even before she sees it coming.

Anyway, Austen's great strength is not concealing where the plot is trending, but her ability to frame the perfect phrase to describe her precise ideas down to the smallest fraction of a degree, and doing it as regularly as McDonald's spits out burgers. She's a perfect wonder in her ability to sustain that particular perfection over hundreds of pages. I can't think of another author who does it better, perhaps because I cannot read Flaubert in French.

Kosztolanyi is fucking awesome and there's one book by him in English I can't afford because no bugger will reprint it.

Which one's that, James?

I am reading Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebre - it's a tangled internal monologue and I'm finding it really slow going; when I remember to read it really fast and let my eyes skate over the sentences I'm enjoying it very much, when I slow down I'm getting tangled up and not achieving any greater understanding from the additional attention. But I keep forgetting to speed up!

wiki only lists three more books, one of which is available (Kornel Est which I own a copy of). That leaves:

Anna Edes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anna-Edes-Revived-Modern-Classic/dp/0811212556
Darker Muses: The Poet Nero: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darker-Muses-Poet-Dezso-Kosztolanyi/dp/9631328414

Yeah I have a copy of Anna Edes ( nice Quartet Encounters edition obv) and it’s great.

I'm fifty pages into The Pursuit of Love and finding it a little slight, or at least slighter than I expected. Quit or soldier on? It's short, I guess.