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

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.

I'm assuming you're referring to something upthread, as The Boys on the Rock is only two of those things.

The Soul of an Octopus is very good; 'Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life' by Peter Godfrey-Smith is probably even better--more hard science, much of it both boggling and beguiling

I finished The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. I would definitely seek out more work by him. For some reason I thought it was going to be science fiction, but it wasn't at all. Sort of dreamlike neo-noir, in a Murakami-esque mode.

Can second the Godfrey-Smith book. A really fascinating account of the octopus as a kind of alternative experiment in intelligent life, since its common ancestor with mammals/reptiles is probably a sightless almost brainless worm living 750 million years ago.

currently averaging < word a day at the moment.

Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything by Graham Harman. One of the attractive new Pelican series, got waved in front of my nose by an ilxor. Extension and significant variation of Bruno Latour's actor network theory. Appealing in many ways, as it encourages the common sense appeal to the existence of things (including fictional and theoretical entities) rather than hard empiricism, and having attributes are more than the sum of their parts, and not defined entirely on their impact on the human observer.

As always I approach these things with a very wary scepticism (no not that kind). Harman lets himself down quite badly with his choice of terminology for approaches to objects that are elemental or atomic, and do not allow for higher order emergent properties - this he calls 'undermining' an 'object'. 'Overmining' he terms the definition of an object entirely through that which is available to us as perceivers. Because he's dealing with new abstract terminology, the use of 'undermining' throws forward its military/siege warfare meaning, in the absence of anything else, something then further confused by the use of 'overmining' for its opposite.

I'm not convinced - as in I'm still working through - by his application of the mechanics of metaphor to allow for objects to retain, effectively, an imperceptible, impossible to conceive, interiority, or, i guess, noumena (forgive me - my philosophy, he's very sick). This is a general wariness around the application of aesthetic philosophy to artistic method, where that application feels like a constraint - or i guess in his terms, 'undermining'.

He then looks at some practical applications of what I suppose he's right in insisting is abbreviated as OOO, but that is also distracting. Great! I thought, let's see what use this approach can have. He then applies it to what i assume is an area of expertise - the US Civil War.

Using the magic of OOO to identify truths otherwise hidden, he discovers that the start date of the war (or the beginning of the existence of the object) is the same as historians have generally identified, and the end is... about the same as historians have generally identified. Going through a few more twists and turns, it wasn't at all clear that OOO was bringing anything new to the US Civil War party other than making things slightly more difficult by insisting they all get re-interpreted by OOO.

Fortunately, I have also picked up David Edgerton's really brilliant The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History. Now, i don't know for certain that this is a specific application of object oriented ontology, but it might as well be, as it is the project of the book to understand the hidden notion of the British nation to make sense of the 20th Century (and beyond). Any of you who've read his very good The Shock of the Old will know how careful he to meticulously, and with documentary evidence, unravel received wisdom and assumptions, many of them academic, many of them popular or political, to try and get a clearer image of the matter in hand.

Adam Tooze, who is a close ally and also a very good historian, gave an example of this recently in an excellent podcast, where he points out that though the Third Reich is often characterised as a 'war machine' - exemplifying heavily mechanised and inhuman warfare - in fact this characterises Britain better prior to the second world war (an argument Edgerton reiterates) and that the third reich war effort was still reliant to a surprising degree on for example horses. (Edgerton remarks that things like conscription in the UK were disparagingly seen as 'Prussianisms' and it was only after the second world war that Britain aligned with the European standard of peacetime conscription).

The wider project of the book is to understand 'Britain' better in terms of the economic, political and ideological forces at play: his project is to bring the workings of capital and the theories of political economy at play in the 20th century into the light, and to essentially identify (as an object) the ideology of a 'British nationalism' realised on both the right and the left, and within a context of a response to Free Trade Liberalism and the project (more project than actuality until the Second World War DE argues) of Imperialism.

Clearly with such a high-wire act, he has to be bloody careful and rigorous, and for the most part he passes (to this non-expert). There are a couple of flabbier bits where you feel slightly less easy, but on the whole this is a fantastic book. So much in there that can be applied to our current situation fruitfully.

I've read.. largely read.. The Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang HIlbig but that will have to wait another day. And I've been slightly harsh on Graham Harman - it's an interesting introduction to a modern concept in philosophy and has interest as such, and as a set of ideas that are v thought provoking to explore.

It's a thrilling read – I hesitate to say that on the K Amis rule that you should only really say that of writing which doesn't include 'a gunshot rang out' somewhere in it – but to see so much so brilliantly reworked, with new concepts and narratives in place on every page, produces a real rush.

er, well, good to see not having posted for a while i haven't lost any knack for sentences missing vital words, or indeed general direction, also clanging GCSE repetition and that last para refers to the Edgerton history not to the Object Oriented Ontology book.

Library's got The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy, Norton 2013, intro by John Waters, blurbists incl. Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes---good? Better at novels? (Says here he wrote 19, not to mention plays and other.)

Having finished The Soul of an Octopus, I found it both pleasurable and suitably lightweight for summer reading. soda's description of it as a rambling and 'scientish' memoir fits the book better than to call it popularized science. There are plentiful anecdotes about various people she met and interacted with and many ornate descriptions of her feelings about particular octopuses she met and played with at the Boston aquarium. It does convey a fair bit of information about marine life alongside this, but the personal far outdistances the scientific.

Based on that Murakami/neo-noir description, have The Invisibility Cloak at the library for pick-up. Will fit nicely into the time waiting for new Daniel Silva.

Thanks to Alfred, I am now reading Democracy Reborn, Garrett Epps, about the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

The Maigret detour (?) unexpectedly continues into A Maigret Trio(Harcourt, '73), billed as "three novels published in the United States for the first time": Maigret's Failure, Maigret In Society, and Maigret and the Lazy Burglar.
Failure is set in the middle of the wettest, rottenest March in modern memory, when an obnoxious childhood classmate appears in Maigret's office, now a devouring sack of meat, wealthy and in with the Minister of the Interior, M.'s boss. He promptly announces that he's the target of anonymous threats, demands and promptly receives protection, is promptly murdered. M. wonders if his attitude to this deliberately repellent, obviously (to always-watchful old "chum" M.)fearful butcher shop baron has influenced the Superintendant's professionalism and sense of duty, that it's to some degree his own fault that the guy is killed, at least so promptly (lots of enemies, trophies of his success). All this and much more in the first few pages.

Those Maigrets sound great, I need to read more.

Started and finished Jean Rhy's Voyage In The Dark on a flight. Depression, homesickness, London as a total dump, sex used only as a desperate measure that'll leave you feeling exploited anyway. Really grim stuff, and (as the blurbs bleat) "surprisingly modern". Man, there's a lot of great English novels about hating England (though obviously this author's colonial roots play a large part, too).

Next up: Girls & Dolls And Other Stories", Damon Runyon.

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.