2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

I didn't mention finishing Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. I found it oddly muddled in places (deliberate ambiguity of the narrative voice makes absolute sense in the circumstances, but still) but the last 100 pages, on the ice, are some of the most sublime I've read in the last few years.

Ben Myers' The Gallows Pole

Let me know how you like this - it's been sitting in my 'to-read' pile for months. I think I liked the cover?

I bought it because I really liked the cover tbh. But it's good. I haven't read George R R Martin, but it's written in a way that I would imagine is Martin-esque crossed with a folk-horror/Quietus/Ben Wheatley aesthetic. Lots of good descriptions of the Yorkshire Vales, very atmospheric. Strong characters and doses of ribald humour and creative swearing. I'm enjoying it so far. It's a surprisingly easy read too.

"I'm reading Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. It's lovely for so many reasons: how dialogue reveals character, the furnishings, the gentle (and not so gentle) sneering, the sheer depth of self-loathing. I need to read everything she has written."

It's a long time since I read it, but Angel is pretty untypical Taylor. It's a kind of pastiche (a sardonic take on a certain type of "womens' fiction)", whereas most of her work is solidly in the realist tradition. I like it less than the best of her more characteristic stuff but for some people it's her best work; if you're one of those the rest might be something of a disappointment.

I finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, volume 3 of 4 of Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Novels". I started Brideshead Revisited. The first 30 pages have totally sold me, I love Sebastian Flyte already.

the first section of BR is by far the best iirc, steep drop off after Sebastian (who, yeah)

Maigret On Holiday and so am I.

Shirley Collins All In The Downs.
She's in London and already introduced to the library at cecil Sharpe house while working as a waitress/counterstaff at the cafe upstairs at the Troubadour and doing solo spots in the folk club downstairs.
Nice book as was America Over the Water.

Maigret and the Informer: Closet crims build up lavish bourgeois overlays of custom and properties, but/and eventually just have to kill/be killed, disrupting the routines of others, incl. cops, but that's also customary, so of course we have Maigret pulled from his bed and table and even city, but I shall say no more tonight (click).

I'm about 3/4 done with Barchester Towers. It has an impressively nuanced grip on the role of communication and miscommunication in human affairs and happiness. But perhaps even more impressive is the good nature and generosity with which the author views the failings and foibles of all his characters, even those who play the role of villains. Trollope has a similar penetration into human nature as Jane Austen did, while being less acerbic, less witty, but warmer in his sympathy.

Some of his contemporaneous fans found The Way We Live Now too dark and disturbing. I thought it was great. Justice is a fairly rare form of good nature and generosity in this our life.

Justice, justice you shall pursue

I spent 2011-2016 reading a Trollope novel every semester. I never read BT -- I read every one of the Palliser books. They're shallow but deep, if that makes sense. They're Balzac novels w/out the interest in character. Boy, do they understand politics, power, and money.

TWWLN got interest in character as well as understanding p, p, and m. Haven't read any of his others yet. (They're all long as fuck apparently, and now I'm stuck in the 20th Century.)

Reading Henrik Pontoppidans Lucky Per. One of the best Danish novels I've ever read, a complete joy through and through. Very French in style. Highly recommended!

Also reading R K Narayans retelling of the Ramayana, and Octavio Paz' Labyrinth of Solitude.

It's a long time since I read it, but Angel is pretty untypical Taylor. It's a kind of pastiche (a sardonic take on a certain type of "womens' fiction)", whereas most of her work is solidly in the realist tradition. I like it less than the best of her more characteristic stuff but for some people it's her best work; if you're one of those the rest might be something of a disappointment.

It's not really a pastiche. Angel is an author of a particular kind of 'women's fiction' for sure, but her portrayal is a serious one. She's a study of embattled optimism, hiding from modernity.

Angel Deverill isn't *that* far removed from Beth in A View of the Harbour. Taylor certainly gives the impression that she found writing crushing and excruciating.

Robert Caro, The Power Broker - long, reading it slowly, savoring every page. (I bought it to prepare myself for Caro's LBJ books but it's a treat in and of itself.)

Robert Caro's The Power Broker: C/D?

This morning in the library, I read "The Guermantes Trio," Moira Hodgson's extensive, very appealing take on Caroline Weber'sProust's Duchess, studies of three lives folded into The Duchesse de G. by P.---seems like they might be more consistently interesting than his character.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81OMEOsPIkL.jpg

$35.00, but extensively researched, many many photos, and 100 pages of related material at the end, including "two newly discovered articles by Proust."
Would link the review, but it's behind the WSJ paywall (I read the print).

Amazon's got it considerably cheaper than the list price, should have checked.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to checking that out. I have it on reserve at the library. I read one of the canonical Proust bios recently, George D. Painter's from 1965. It devotes a lot of time to the originals of various characters, including several of the high-society women who influenced the Duchesse. The primary original of Charlus, the Comte de Montesquiou, is the funniest real-life character as well.

The Painter bio is very interesting (it's the only I've read so far), but it gets a bit hilariously dated whenever it comes to psychoanalyzing Proust's sexuality. On his reported fetish for torturing rats: "No doubt his victims represented many things; for rats are among the most powerful, universal, and complex symbols in the inferno of the unconscious, and are regarded with special libido and dread by homosexuals as emblems of anal aggression and anal birth."

One of the subjects was considered by many aristos, including herself, to be the most beautiful woman on Paris. Her brazenly philandering husband forbid her to go out and about with non-family members, so she ran around with her uncle--Montesquiou!

Holiday reads: Chateaubriand - Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (NYRB) was great, especially the early sections dealing with childhood. I ended up wanting more of those early volumes. The later ones have fine section on America, England and his wanderings though I was looking for more concentration. Some killer sentences (as documented in Fizzles' thread on the book although iirc he is drawing on those early editions).

I am halfway through The Penguin Book of Yoga. This is a compilation of writing on yoga from all eras. Covers all aspects. For people who don't practice the early sections on place to practice and diet has some beautiful lists and would be good on any classical/medieval era literature. Asanas and pranayama are too technical.

Doubt I'll finish I don't like reading the detail wrt yoga. Its a practice which you learn from others in a mimetic way.

I've been reading Bellevue by David Oshinsky: well-researched and it includes lots of interesting facts and stories I hadn't heard before.

Really enjoying this Maigret. The Maigrets vacation in a seaside town, but his wife comes down with something and has to be hospitalized - so, without his wife and without a case, Maigret just wanders around aimlessly, getting drunk in various bistros. Of course the crime element soon sets in but I wouldn't have minded a whole novel of that tbf!

Yeah, same in Maigret and the Informer: he has to go to the highly publicized, massively attended funeral of a bourgeois ex(?)-criminal in the ritzy South, and everybody seems to know he's going, which irritates him more and more, that they know, and because he feels like he's taking an unauthorized holiday, and he's hot and the sun burns his skin instantly and constantly and he drinks and he drinks on his way through the spectacle to do his duty dammit.

Working my way through all the Maigrets as they get republished (I'm about 12 months behind atm), and enjoying them so much.

I'm halfway through the Simenon biography The Man Who Wasn't Maigret by Patrick Marnham and it's a great read, even if Simenon comes off as a monumental prick (metaphorically and literally). It took him 7 to 8 days to write a book, which means there are Simenon books that have taken me longer to read than Simenon took to write!

Have read plenty of Simenon's "romans durs" but none of the Maigrets as police procedural isn't really my thing, but maybe I should give one a shot

I'm pretty certain that every chapter in a Simenon book is a discrete day's work.

Yep I think that was the case. He did a chapter a day, and a day's revision at the end and he was done. I guess if you get the "spare" style down pat (he deliberately limited himself to a 2000 word vocabulary) then maybe it's doable but he still must have been some kind of novelistic savant.

Question:

I want to read THE RADETZSKY MARCH - can anyone recommend a preferred translation?

Annoying they both to seem to have good and points: the Penguin translation is terser and funnier, but drowning in adjectives; the Hoffman translation for Granta is much easier to parse but a little less vivid.

Any thoughts?

I read the Hofmann translation several years ago.

And recommend?

Hello readers. Popping in to ask what Laurie Colwin I should read?

I'm reading the Penguin translation of Radetzky-march, and it's quite readable. And yeah, funny.

Henry Roth: CALL IT SLEEP

Terry Eagleton: RADICAL SACRIFICE

the Penguin translation is terser and funnier, but drowning in adjectives; the Hoffman translation for Granta is much easier to parse but a little less vivid. Judging by that, I'd go w the Penguin. Snipping adjectives as I read is a lot easier than squinting it terser and funnier and more vivid.

I started reading The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. I like it so far - it's terse and funny, no sci-fi elements yet.

Ge Fei's A Flock of Brown Birds is very magical realist, for better or worse

Still Brideshead, also cracked open Nixonland.

I'm reading The Underground Railroad. Halfway through a book isn't the time to make such calls, but there are issues with structure and pacing, I think. It's my first Whitehead, so no frame of reference, but he seems to be a relatively comma-free writer. Which is a thing.

Re: Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time was my favorite. Likable characters, nice resolution. Enjoyed Home Cooking, too. Was sad, discovering and waiting for her next, when she passed.

Just finished The Evenings by Gerard Reve. The hardcover has a classy art deco promise, but found the book very tedious. Strange to read reviews calling it a masterpiece. The main character reads like Holden Caulfield crossed with Freddie Threepwood, with little to no humor or insight surviving.

Now reading Andrew Sean Greer's Less, and feeling relief that I'm enjoying it.

I partly agree although The Evenings had a bit of Celine to it - and I liked how it didn't mention the war even though it was written during that time. I reckon he got more interesting later on though!

Friedrich Holderlin - Hyms and Fragments is just a masterful rendering by Richard Sieburth. So many incredible lines. If translation is loss..

I have just started reading Gyula Krudy's Kinight of the Cordon Bleu with an account of horse racing and high society at the end of the Hapsburgs. Good 1930s pulp!

I just read Aucassin & Nicolette and Other Tales, tr. Pauline Matarasso, a Penguin Classics compilation of five medieval tales. The occasion was a short backpacking trip and the impetus was that this slender collection was a mere150 pages and weighed under 3 oz. making it easy to carry up and down mountainsides.

The tales themselves were entertaining, but very much in the vein of medieval tales, they were full of formulaic elements, unbelievable plots, and stiff underdeveloped characters. You have to overlook these factors and enter into the spirit in which they were written. The translations seemed thoughtful and strove to communicate what the translator most loved and admired about the works, across what must seem an unbridgeable abyss of cultural strangeness.

Xp funnily enough I am reading krúdy’s sunflower atm, it’s 12 years shy of the 30s and I wouldn’t have thought to call it pulp but I’m really into how torrid and unashamedly high-flown it is

Based on ILB enthusiasm, I checked out a copy of The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery, and started it last night. Seems like a sound choice for summer reading.

John Fox's The Boys on the Rock, which has been haunting me ever since I finished it last night.

It’s my favorite kind of memoir - meandering, personal, and sciencish.

started hugo wilcken's the reflection and hoping it becomes a bit more than wow this narrator is *really* unreliable

In the home stretch of Ha Jin's Waiting, but slowing down my reading, resisting the tide, even though I know it's time, it's time---so much quiet momentum, the characters are so fluid within their constraints, their circumstances, their logic: lightning in a bottle, across the decades, that is.

During my short beach vacation, I started reading Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson (Freeman Dyson's son). Now I am halfway through it and must decide whether to set it down and pick up Crashed where I left off, or finish the Dyson before I return to Tooze's book.

Is it bad, or just overwhelming?

I'm reading the Confessions of Augustine in the new Sarah Ruden translation. The translation is great: jazzy, punchy, and thoroughly unstuffy. The work itself can be repetitive at times and elusive at others, rather like a stream of consciousness, despite the overt devotional character of the work, I do picture Augustine indulging in a tipple while leisurely dictating this to an amanuensis, but at times it snaps into focus and you feel like a bit of historical vertigo as you catch a personal glimpse down through the centuries.

The Unforeseen by Dorothy Macardle. A woman, Virgilia, staying in isolation in a cottage in the Wicklow mountains, realises she's developing second sight. Her daughter, Nan, is trying to decide whether she's in love with Perry, a dick, or should be dedicating herself to her art. There's a combination of building dread, confined hysteria, and uncertainty, within a lovingly depicted Wicklow countryside and its bird life, which is striking. In fact one of the successes of this book is how Virgilia's visions and the nature surrounding her are seen to participate in each other.

As the main characters attempt to come to decisions about their futures you are shown them probing the future in different ways, whether it is the predictive force of hereditary traits, a sense of unease, being able to visualise yourself in alternative futures successfully or common sense. The way these interact and compare with the dangerous certainty of second sight is well done.

It has a terribly glib resolution though, which squanders the building unease. The scientific seriousness with which the male characters take everything makes this feel, as an introduction also suggests, that this is doubling up as an assault on scepticism about second sight and paranormal things generally. The overall lingering message – that which is unforeseen is sometimes the most important thing, in our previsions and attempts to make decisions based on a perception of the future – is a decent one.

And the shadow of the war sits within this book (published 1945, set summer 1938), with so that the decisions the characters are trying to make are laced with a presentiment of death:

'And, you see, for our generation, life is not going to be a summer holiday. What we've got to find out is whether we shall want one another when things are frightening and terrible.'

It's written in what I would call an Edwardian fashion - that is to say it's pretty stately, but i quite like that mode of writing, which is well done here at least, and which made this perfect reading while convalescing, and the descriptions of Wicklow and Dublin Bay made me wish I were there rather than blowing my nose in London.

also started forbidden line by paul stanbridge. in many ways it looks like the sort of thing i should like - a mixed plate of history, pseudo-religion and the arcane, - but it’s written in that facetious, garrulous style that seems like its intended to be described as pynchonian but which also seems to be the congenital style of a category of well-educated young male tyro, and to be lacking in any sort of constraint that might make it interesting.

am ambivalent. will continue with it for a bit.

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Same.

Robert Harris's enjoyably sprightly SELLING HITLER, about the fake Hitler diaries, is lots of fun

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Hey, it’s fall

so it is.

Oh yeah, basis of the Ray Milland movie The Uninvited (made during WWII, I think). Never watched the whole thing, but have seen it compared to Val Lewton signature films re (post-Turn of the Screw?) supernatural as lens/prism of character development.

I just started 2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?. Feel free to commandeer the throw pillows and stretch out on the sofa.