2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?

I checked my mailbox today for the new Deborah Eisenberg collection. Anticipating it has given life a purpose and shape.

Going to Lisbon soon so reading Portuguese stuff:

"An Explanation of the Birds" by Antonio Lobo Antunes.
Brilliantly written but saddled with an irritating circus metaphor running thru it. I hate fucking circuses. I couldn't really believe the central character either.

"Lucio's Confession" by Mário de Sá-Carneiro.
Short novel, which I kind of ploughed through, I think I read it in three hours. It's fin de siècle Paris, it's an ingenious little novel about repressed homosexuality by an ingenious but repressed little homosexual poet - actually not sure if he was little or not. If I still had it, I'd quote from the long description of a decadent party the main character goes to, which sounds like the party scene from "Midnight Cowboy" crossed with some E'ed up rave from 1991.

"O Crime do Padre Amaro" by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz.
Not the sort of thing I'd normally read, late 19th century realism which reveals itself as sledgehammer satire/ social commentary by the end - the Catholic Church does not emerge from it unscathed, shall we say - I'm amazed it got published, to be honest. Breasts seem central, almost as much as shit is in "Blindness" by Jose Saramago, which I also read.

For a bit of light non-Lusitanian relief, I started reading "For Marx" by Louis Althusser today. Fuck knows why.

Garner - also a childhood fave, we actually read Weirdstone... at my school (Red Shift was not on the cards, and p much puzzled me when I picked up a paperback copy a little later).

I'm hoping Tim will offer more detail on the 'nu-nature-writing crowd'. I can see how The Owl Service (my top choice) especially would fit into any reasonable 'folk horror' discourse, but I don't know enough of Garner's later books to think of him as primarily a nature writer (tho he is v good on landscape among other things).

yeah i was wondering that. found “lightly worn” and “Fabery opposite” an interesting distinction.

certainly within the pastoral/uncanny crowd i find despite surface similarities and sympathies that there are some i can’t stand and some i love. and i’m interested in that response. pompous emphasis on psychogeography tactics and tropes would be my crude sideswipe.

i wonder if Tim is getting at that. tho “Fabery” are you getting at that dreadful earnest enthusiasm for the effortful sincerity of rural life. trying to think of examples now.

also curious to know why you would have been quite pleased not to enjoy it. because of that crowd?

Mostly laughing out every now and then to Helen DeWitt's Some Trick short story collection where -- for much of it, if not entirely so -- her interests in language and creativity come to the fore, both these aspects being illustrated via examples from the art world and (crucially) the world of technology and management. Her insecurities around finishing or accomplishing a work, that this work could be good, that it somehow not be interfered with by the forces outside of it (commerce, other egos impinging upon) also comes through at times. Giuseppe di Lampedusa's Two Stories & A Memory, an assortment of scraps from the author of The Leopard, has powerful recollections of the author's childhood and its really interesting to see how he translates those to not only his classic novel, but also mining them again and again in the story (The Professor and the Siren) and in the only completed chapter he managed to finish of his other novel - the other 'story' presented here. A distanced nostalgia, at times critical of the past he celebrates, but also with hints of disgust at the world and the things from it being destroyed, its artefacts rotting away. Finally, I failed to grapple with the irrationalities in Yoel Hoffmannn's The Sound of One Hand - 281 Zen Koans with Answers, but it was nice to try. I can see how doing this with a reading group could be interesting.

Really still need to check out Lampedusa and Eisenberg---that recent profile linked from Rolling Contemproary Literary Fiction is very appealing.
my father worked on its construction
he fucking did
worked on it ata a time when, with a similar promise of prosperity, it was spoken of as if it were a cathedral or a temple that was being built on that raised site above the small town of Killala

that 'he fucking did' is almost of the school yard – angry rebuttal of unspoken doubt.
--Fizzles
Also angry affirmation of the hyped hope, desperation, determination in both senses as irony and working days and other limits continue to be ground into the dirt and never (not yet) finished.

I resisted finishing xpost Ha Jin's Waiting,just because I wanted it to keep going, and also because I felt the logic leading to a black hole of sorrow---instead, it was the developmentally perfect punchline (sorrow would have to wait in the wings a little longer, though maybe not all that long), as with The Neapolitan Novels and In Search of Lost Time and not much else that I can think of at the moment (even good or good enough endings often have to glide into place or just stop, either way with the engine shut off and/or the fuel gone).

"Also angry affirmation" just on the face of it of course, having only read your quote of the book (so far!)

Roland Barthes, THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE: INTERVIEWS 1962-1980

I don't think Garner is primarily a nature writer, but "The Stone Book Quartet" is not at all folk-horrory (no figures emerging from the Old Times here, except as real-world traces left on the landscape, and a sense of there being a deep rhythm to human life through generations). I'm no kind of expert on Garner but the few other things of his I've read over the years have had more of a supernatural flavour.

So I see why the kind of people who like the kind of new nature writing touted by John Mitchison on the Backlisted podcast would like this, and the sort of writing I'm on about is Robert Macfarlane and a bunch of sub-Macfarlane writers whose tastefully-covered works (often with a woodcut of a dead tree or live badger) I see on Waterstones tables. TSBQ feels to me like a piece of fiction that's grown from a really deep connection with a place; the nature-writing tendency I'm on about often feels to me like a desperately self-serious attempt to demonstrate a connection with a place but ending up giving the feeling of a urbanites getting back to nature and feeling very pleased with themselves. "Effortful sincerity", quite. Which is cool if people enjoy it but it's not my thing and yes I quite like the idea of contrarily waving away stuff these people like.

I wonder whether I'm mischaracterising the new nature writing tendency (which I've barely read)? Quite likely, but if so I'm going to keep doing so: my perception is the writer is usually volubly present in these books, they're walking through big-n Nature and we see them watching and learning and finding out important things about the world and themselves. It does nothing for me.

Lol I just read Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler in which she goes canoeing on the Birmingham canals and [SPOILER ALERT!] discovers she is a lesbian.

I've just remembered: we read "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" at school and they made us do that thing of designing a book cover, writing a blurb etc etc. I was always dreadful at that sort of thing, everything I've ever drawn looks crap, but the boy I say next to properly went to town: watercolour, gouache, careful lettering he really worked hard at it. I was feeling that resentment one must feel towards anyone who's swottishly gone above and beyond the necessary effort in their homework, when I realised he must have been working on it in front of "The Rockford Files" - his cover had credited the book to James Garner. Imagine my delight.

If, in your own words, you've barely read something, is it reasonable to say that it does nothing for you?

It's true, though, that there are things that I have barely read, which I feel that I don't like.

I think it would be reasonable to read one of the books properly and closely and evaluate it as an individual work.

I did that with H IS FOR HAWK and was ambivalent. I think it is overrated and quite strangely naive or faux-naive at times. But it contains some decent writing also.

I would think that most of these nature writing people know more about nature, are better connected to it, and also by extension are more ecologically sound, than me. I think these are all good things. Saying that they are urbanites seems perverse as I am an urbanite and I understand nature much, much less than they do. I think that for me to attack them in general would really come down to envy and contrarianism.

Tom D, it's partially that the government in charge of Portugal at the time - a liberal, parliamentary monarchy - while not anti-clerical per se, had a somewhat fractured relationship with the church, which was still strongly influenced by the previous regime of absolutist monarchism, so I think a lot of ppl in charge would've been sympathetic to Queirós, though they wouldn't state so publicly. My fave Eça book is The Maias, a huge ol' family saga with a very bittersweet, fatalistic feel to it - tiyl Miklós Bánffy, Thomas Mann, that sorta stuff.

António Lobo Antunes is mostly known for his novels about the colonial war experience. Speaking of which, a recent big hit is The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso - the story of a family fleeing Angola and returning to post-revolution Portugal. Kind of a taboo topic in Portuguese society for decades.

xp My caveat was added precisely to note that I may be being unfair, though maybe not unreasonable (except in so far as it's hard to reason with taste). What I have read has done nothing for me.

xxp Well, I read "The Stone Book Quartet" and that is a book in which landscape is critically important; the point I was making is that I found its engagement with landscape more interesting and convincing than the bits I've read of new nature writing. It's not urbanites I have a problem with, or even urbanites getting back to nature, it's the feeling of self-satisfaction I get from (some of) those books that I find unappealing. I don't think a game of tallying who lives a "more ecologically sound" life would be a very good way of judging whether or not I find value or pleasure in those books or not.

Or not, or not.

I think the point is simpler -- is it OK to knock things we haven't read? (Perhaps 'barely read' contains an ambiguous range. You say that you've read some of the books, so maybe you have actually read a lot more than barely.)

I was implying that it's not really fair.

But I also immediately had to allow that this is something that we seem to do (me quite probably more than you), so perhaps we all feel that there is some validity in it after all? Perhaps the rationale is simply: you don't need to actually read a book to know enough about it to have a cogent view? For there are other ways to know what's in a book. (In fact there are whole books about this.)

Nonetheless we could probably also agree that the policy of not reading leaves the possibility of being mistaken about a book, as in: if you read it, you might feel differently about it from what you expect.

"Barely read" - I suppose that my opinion has been formed by a paltry selection of two or three books and quite a lot of excerpts in places like the Guardian and Caught by the River, laced with bits and pieces of hearing people talk about this kind of stuff on podcasts and in the world. But I'm referring to a growing genre of books and I'm generalising so I think it's important to note my relatively scant engagement with that genre. Goodness knows I wouldn't want anyone thinking I speak with any authority.

You're probably right that the reasonable thing to do in order to solidify my opinion(s) would be to read more of these books more carefully. But then again I'm not sure it's a good use of my time to spend time making sure I'm really actually not keen on this genre. It might make more sense simply to continue to caveat my ill-founded opinions with recognition of my own ignorance.

Tom D, it's partially that the government in charge of Portugal at the time - a liberal, parliamentary monarchy - while not anti-clerical per se, had a somewhat fractured relationship with the church, which was still strongly influenced by the previous regime of absolutist monarchism, so I think a lot of ppl in charge would've been sympathetic to Queirós, though they wouldn't state so publicly. My fave Eça book is The Maias, a huge ol' family saga with a very bittersweet, fatalistic feel to it - tiyl Miklós Bánffy, Thomas Mann, that sorta stuff.

António Lobo Antunes is mostly known for his novels about the colonial war experience. Speaking of which, a recent big hit is The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso - the story of a family fleeing Angola and returning to post-revolution Portugal. Kind of a taboo topic in Portuguese society for decades.

Cheers, Daniel. A Spanish woman I work with recommended I read Antonio Tabucchi next.

Declares Pereira is really good. I got to finally get around to Antunes sometime. There was a big chunk 2nd hand @ skoob last time I checked.

you don't need to actually read a book to know enough about it to have a cogent view? For there are other ways to know what's in a book. (In fact there are whole books about this.)

― the pinefox, Friday, October 5, 2018 4:01 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In this vein, I highly recommend reading How to talk about books you haven't read, which is funny if nothing else.

The Death of Woman Wang - Jonathan D Spence (1977). A brief history of a poor region of 17th century China, T'an-ch'eng, in Shantung Province (where the silk for the ties comes from presumably). It has a central observation point 'the decision of a woman named Wang, who was unwilling any longer to face an unacceptable present.' 'T'an-ch'eng county was not famous for anything; it produced no eminent men in the seventeenth century, the data on economic and social conditions are scant, and though disasters struck repeatedly the people themselves did not rebel.'

It is always hard to conjure up from the past the lives of the poor and forgotten; and the Chinese thoroughness in the spheres of state and county historiography has ironically been accompanied by the nonpreseration of most local records.

In other words it falls almost entirely outside the space of recorded history. Despite this it's consistently giving lines, images and observations that I'm finding magical. This, I should stress, is not because of some orientalist framing, but because of the nature of the endeavour.

The first of those lines is where he says 'I have mainly relied on three different sources in my attempt to penetrate a little way into the world of T'an-ch'eng'. That seems to convey history in the correct way, that it can only be a humble activity – these are the materials available, this is what can be said with those materials, and from it we are able to say a little about a world that seems entirely distant and inaccessible. The effect is almost is if observing through a scrying glass. Will future historians of our age, with the vast wealth of information, or data, be able to have the same humility, and pay attention to the gaps between the vast historic record?

The three sources are a highly competent and assiduous scholar-official magistrate for the two years being examined, Huang Liu-hung, a former (not very competent) magistrate and editor of a Local History, compiled relatively soon after the events described, Feng K'o-ts'an, who 'seems to have been content to compile an authentically bleak record, not touched up with the brush of nostalgia or propriety.' The final source is an essayist and short story writer, P'u Sung-ling, whose vision Spence uses to supplement the administrative and historical sources.

For though Feng and Huang take us surprisingly far into the zones of private anger and misery that were so much a part of their community, they were not concerned with penetrating into the realms of loneliness, sensuality and dreams that were also a part of T'an-ch'eng. Whereas it was just those realms that obsessed P'u Sung-ling.

Again, the clarity and imagination of the approach, and how you might view these lives, even in private, internal spaces and dream realms, had my attention. (After all, the immediate appeal of a small county in 17th century China isn't necessarily obvious – these things are usually very dry and uninteresting).

He describes a savage and quite common cycle of tragedy – earthquakes, floods, famine, and bandits, and the proverbial folk wisdom that emerges from these circumstances (the second set of images that really made me sit up):

"To have the bodies of one's close relations eaten by someone else is not as good as eating them oneself, so as to prolong one's own life for a few days." Or, "It makes more sense to eat one's father, elder brother, or husband so as to preserve one's own life, rather than have the whole family die." Out in the countryside, says the Local History, the closest friends no longer dared walk out to the fields together.

The riverbanks flood, so that a newly appointed magistrate has to sail across the sodden land to arrive for his new job (an image that has stuck with me – the landscape deranged and incoherent, your job to apply the structure of the state and administrate order, what must he have thought as he gazed out from the boat?)

It will surprising you to know inhabitants considered their lives had no meaning and that they were utterly without worth, so that Huang Liu-hung issued a harsh proclamation to stem a spate of suicides:

"Those men who commit suicide, hanging themselves from the rafters or throwing themselves into the water, will an eternity as ghosts, crammed in the eaves or drifting on the waters. Who is there to pity them if the officials refuse to collect their bodies and leave them as food for the flies and maggots? Those women who kill themselves, dangling from ropes or hanging from their kerchiefs, will haunt deserted alleys and inner rooms. Why should anyone feel shame if we delay holding an inquest on their corpses and leave their bare bodies exposed for all to see? You bodies were bequeathed to you by your mothers and fathers who gave birth to you, but you go so far as to destroy those bodies. Only once in ten thousand cosmic cycles can you expect to be reincarnated into human form, yet you treat your bodies as if they were the bodies of pigs and dogs – that is something I hate and detest. If you have no pity on the bodies bequeathed to you, then why should I have pity on the bodies bequeathed to you? If you think of yourselves as pigs and dogs, then why should I not also look upon you as pigs and dogs?"

The overall potent force of this book is in the images and landscape of decline and ruin. Huang obsessively keeps account of the mortality rate in comparison to other similar areas and finds that it's always higher in disaster, he records the amount of taxable land and sees that it's declining faster in his county than anywhere the same around it. It portrays a place that always co-exists with the one we live in, is always there in potential, a persistent other place, that the world we live in could dissolve into. The way such a world changes and contorts perceptions of life and death (state Confucianism is seen to be of little relevance and surrounded by superstition and magic).

The anecdotes of how humanity persists in such a place are also wonderful:

P'u Sung-ling heard the roar of the 1668 earthquake moving up from the direction of T'an-ch'eng as he was drinking wine with his cousin, by the light of a lamp:

"The table began to rock and the wine cups pitched over; we could hear the sounds of the roof beams and the pillars as they began to snap The color drained from our faces as we looked at each other. After a few moments we realized it was an earthquake and rushed out of the house. We saw the buildings and homes collapse and, as it were ,rise up again, heard the sounds of the walls crashing down, the screams of men and women, a blurred roar as if a caldron were coming to the boil. People were dizzy and could not stay on their feet; they sat on the ground and swayed in unison with the earth. The waters of the river rose up ten feet or more; the cries of roosters, the din of dogs barking filled the city. After an hour or so, calm began to return; and then one could see, out in the streets, undressed men and women standing groups, excitedly telling of their own experiences, having quite forgotten that they were wearing no clothes."

picked it up cos of this tweet:

a truly amazing book that packs a huge amount into a monograph on rural misery in 17th century Shandong. Feminism, literature, concubinage, banditry, legal codes, taxation, power structures, famine, natural disaster and scorched earth warfare. https://t.co/eBmcJCyi0Z

— jamie k (@jkbloodtreasure) October 3, 2018

So I see why the kind of people who like the kind of new nature writing touted by John Mitchison on the Backlisted podcast would like this, and the sort of writing I'm on about is Robert Macfarlane and a bunch of sub-Macfarlane writers whose tastefully-covered works (often with a woodcut of a dead tree or live badger) I see on Waterstones tables. TSBQ feels to me like a piece of fiction that's grown from a really deep connection with a place; the nature-writing tendency I'm on about often feels to me like a desperately self-serious attempt to demonstrate a connection with a place but ending up giving the feeling of a urbanites getting back to nature and feeling very pleased with themselves. "Effortful sincerity", quite. Which is cool if people enjoy it but it's not my thing and yes I quite like the idea of contrarily waving away stuff these people like.

Yes, ok, this is exactly a thing for me as well. I just about to start thinking about specific shibboleths that separate the two – I have an immediate and quite visceral dislike for one (the Rob Macfarlane crowd), and a deep, resonating love for the other, and yet they exist in the same space for many people so it's interesting to me to work out what's different.

Instead my brane said 'those fucks who go on about collective nouns like murmurations of starlings are as bad as pub name etymologists'.

By which I *think* my brain was indicating that language is one place this division resides – the perceived folk wisdom of exotic (and often bogus) rural terms as having the pseudo-magical force of 'true naming' is indicative of the tourist, rather than a deep sense of lived-in place. Which is only a more roundabout way of saying what Tim was saying, but does bring in some of the mechanisms that crowd use, which could be generally summed up as 'ironically deployed magic'. ie ley lines, existence of history as a thing *always* giving contemporary meaning to a place (it doesn't).

Perhaps another way of looking at this is that it is an asymmetric relationship: mysticism coming out of an understanding of nature v mysticism and magic revealing the nature of nature. It is not a reversible jacket. The second will produce a heavily reduced, constructed version of pastoral, the former may have elements of that, but will understand observed location.

Tim, although I seem inadvertently to have said something that chimes with you in that 'sincerity', I think I was more aiming for... well, what exactly? I guess I was thinking of the Cowper-Powys world, but that's not right. And maybe in fact they exist on the same vector after all.

Sorry my thinking's messier than usual this morning.

You're probably right that the reasonable thing to do in order to solidify my opinion(s) would be to read more of these books more carefully. But then again I'm not sure it's a good use of my time to spend time making sure I'm really actually not keen on this genre. It might make more sense simply to continue to caveat my ill-founded opinions with recognition of my own ignorance.

I think you and the pinefox and both being too considered and thoughtful here. 1) yes it is ok to knock things you've barely read – it's that visceral 'Oh God ffs' moment you get at certain cadences and expressions. Reading RMcF who writes in an area I like and to which I feel drawn my immediate response is 'no, that's *not* it, you're doing it *rong*'. I know it's seen as bad to let that go unexamined, and it probably is, but equally, a push away from a place or set of things is as useful as a desire towards. I'll let the serendipity of time and happenstance overcome it if necessary (someone on ilx saying 'no, i know x looks like they're doing this, but in fact' or at some point in the future deciding I do actually want to go back and give it another go, for instance).

Also stuff like the McFarlane (now this ad hominem really *is* unfair) feels so latent in the air that I feel I have a tacit understanding of it without engaging with it further (that is an argument for understanding it more, rather than deliberately disengaging I suppose).

I realise these impulses are bad not good.

Also stuff like the McFarlane (now this ad hominem really *is* unfair) feels so latent in the air that I feel I have a tacit understanding of it without engaging with it further

surely we all do this sort of thing and it's the only way to get anything done

^^^

Right but I remain inclined to note my lack of serious engagement when I'm ventilating my easy-won opinions on a genre.

Right, "not interested" is a good position to take, "I have a full breakdown on why this is bad" when you haven't done the reading isn't (though sometimes it feels good!).

Fairly confident about my Harry Potter dislike, despite having read zero Rowling books.

With FIzzles all the way on this. Not that interested in the current bunch, tho' my interests overlap in places.
(I was wondering how they come at the chemicals-and-Brexit present, and imagined a nature book I would read: deeply researched study of ancient ways, mystic landscape, ancestral magic that treats it all with utter contempt, just sheer hatred of the whole history of the countryside from the cannibal neolithic to the tyre-burning now; all these useless ancient words in the service of abuse and peonage.)

Would read.

Or not read and still praise to the skies from a position of ignorance. One or the other.

Currently reading:

Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success - not sure what I think yet. He sure does love a dumb protagonist.

Karin Tidbeck, Amatka - halfway through and it's starting to heat up (first half is a very slow burn). Dystopian communist sci-fi.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States - my friend's first essay collection (out today!). Really great pieces on evangelical Christianity and how it operates in the U.S., the Midwest, etc.

Might be unnecessary to unlurk to defend a writer nobody cares about, but R.McFarlane's book about 'wild places' is really quite good on (and neutral on the moral side of) how people have transformed the landscape over time and is also quite a lot about the practicalities of camping on hills rather than just waffling via evocative nouns. I have another subsequently published book by him which is in fact overdesigned and slight on content. Possibly what's wrong here isn't the original thing that made him write but just that he then tried to make a longer career out of it and wound up stretched thin.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States - my friend's first essay collection (out today!). Really great pieces on evangelical Christianity and how it operates in the U.S., the Midwest, etc.

― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, October 9, 2018 10:15 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ooh, gonna order this now.

<3 <3 <3

It's good to see you Brand Slipper! and if ilb can't be a place where people pop out to defend writers no one else cares about, then what's the point of it. that's interesting to know about his 'wild places' - i should dig it out. I am fascinated by the construction of landscape over time (well 'landscape' itself being a late construction) – nature is extraordinarily pliant to projections. and those projections are mainly bogus, often mendacious.

makes me v sympathetic to woof's suggested work of hate.

i did do a *very* controlled post on a piece of MacFarlane writing on the nature thread here. I seem to remember thinking 'i will try and be reasonable and even-handed here' despite going BOLLOCKS! internally when reading the article itself.

Just realised I have been confusing/conflating Robert McFarlane and Robert McCrum for years, and avoiding the former based on a dislike of a book by the latter.
Currently reading CHARLES BOVARY, COUNTRY DOCTOR, by Jean Amery, a NYRB rediscovery novel/essay defense of being a loyal loving loser.

Jordan, Elliot Bay Books pulled a copy for me right away so they must’ve been getting it in even without me asking, good luck to your friend.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk: short stories, historical vignettes, anecdotes, musings, loosely gathered around the two main themes of travel and, curiously, the effective preservation of body parts after death. From the quietly crushing true story of Angelo Soliman, the ex slave who rose to prominence in Austrian society - friend of the emperor and grand master of the masonic lodge - only to be stuffed and mounted in a museum on his death; to the somewhat flippant theory that English speakers are impoverished because they have no private language, everyone can understand them wherever they go. Reminded me a bit of WG Sebald. Maybe a bit long at 700 pages but easy to dip in and out of.

to the somewhat flippant theory that English speakers are impoverished because they have no private language, everyone can understand them wherever they go.

This is true! But then in London it doesn't matter what language you speak, someone on the bus will know what you're saying.

Good to hear, silby! We had a little party for her last night with the cover on a cake. :)

To the extent I am reading anything atm, I am reading The Stalin Front, Gert Ledig. It is a deep excursion into hell, as found in one small piece of the war between Stalin's and Hitler's armies, busily chewing one another to pieces with artillery, tanks, rockets and machine guns, as told through the intimate details of a few soldiers' experience, including the intimate experiences of a few corpses after their death.

being a loyal loving loser

Charles Bovary, c'est moi.

My reading is mostly for the other thread, but I did read the most recent Le Carre novel (in which Smiley is unmasked as a secret Remainer), and the wonderful Parts of a World.

Some Richard Matheson short stories, the effect overall being slightly blunted as you wait for each inevitable twist to drop in the last paragraph

I finished O Pioneers last night. That something sad would happen in the last third was obvious, but it made me sad anyway.

oh shit i just picked up o pioneers after trying and failing to get into gold fame citrus for the third time

cool I recommend it if you like Stardew Valley

Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success - not sure what I think yet. He sure does love a dumb protagonist.

his self hate is strong

Thanks, guys!

Wodehouse might be an interesting avenue to explore. I'm trying to walk that tightrope between not being too solemn but also not giving the impression that I'm treating the whole thing like a joke.

I'm pulling up to the 'end' of Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. The scare quotes are because Mann apparently projected this as the first book of a trilogy he didn't live to finish. My enjoyment of it has been mixed. It did coax audible laughter out of me several times when I read a particularly witty and well-formed phrase. Several of the set pieces, like the Krull's military induction medical exam were engaging and entertaining. That's very much on the plus side of the ledger.

On the minus side, the book (and perhaps the author) began to run out of steam in the latter third of the book. Felix, as the narrator, is allowed to chatter on about costumery, drapery, aristocracy, heraldry, paleontology, cosmology and love, all in a very ornate and oratorical style. All this does is establish him as a very tiresome popinjay. Under the guise of expanding his hero's education in the world, Mann just succeeds in making him shallower and more voluble, to the point where now I just want him to shut up and go away. Luckily, he will in another 20 pages.

When I close this book and set it down I won't regret having read it, but I won't pine for the two further books that were never written.

I'm now reading Fair Play, Tove Jansson, a very short book (100 pp.) consisting of many short vignettes, held together by the fact that all of the vignettes feature the same two women characters. Both are artists, but strangely money seems not to be an issue for either of them. The author is Swedish and everything so far seems very Scandinavian. All the emotional content of their lives is sublimated into a kind of amorphous, highly aestheticized approach to life. The prose is attenuated to the point of near-disappearance.

This book could hardly be further from Felix Krull, even though that wasn't my intent when I chose this book. It caught my eye at the public library because it is a NYRB reissue and those are usually worth investigating.

I love that book and will brook no criticism of it. Fwiw it's autobiographical, they were lovers, and money was no issue because Jansson was author of the hugely internationally successful Moomin books.

Then I shall be careful not to criticize it. However, I may describe it in terms that do not match your own perceptions, which are those of a lover and therefore nothing is likely to satisfy you short of an effusion I may be unable to supply. Be assured my intent is not hurtful.

thumbs_up.jpg

It's such a short book I finished it last night and had some time to ponder on it.

It is a peculiar book. Almost all of its content is not in what the author writes about, so much as how the author writes about it. I would have to re-read it with very close attention to get at the bottom of its style and even then I'm not sure I would capture it.

The best I could do last night was to compare it to a visual artist's control over 'negative space'. There's a very large amount of metaphoric space in the book surrounding a very small amount of description, action and dialogue. That space dominates the book and indirectly provides it with a much larger significance than any of the content provided directly in the words. Which I must say is a weird trick and I don't see yet how it was done.

Anyway, I can see how it is a book worthy of being loved, even if it is a book I don't exactly understand.

Have you read anything else by Jansson? I think Fair Play may benefit from some familiarity with her, her life story, her other work - not that it isn’t a well-written, successful book but I understand being a bit puzzled by it. She was a visual artist as well, by the time she wrote Fair Play I think she had really transitioned away from her identity as an author first and foremost.

I’d highly recommend The True Deceiver and The Summer Book, both of which have more in the way of narrative arcs. They work as mirrors of each other, both about the relationships between two female characters who are many decades apart in age, but where The Summer Book is warm and touching The True Deceiver is harsh and ruthless in the way that it examines its protagonists. (It also reads as the author splitting herself in two and interrogating the different parts of her personality.)

re. Krull, I also think the Portuguese stuff is the weakest section, mainly because the setting is no longer inherently interesting. I think you get the theorising because there's less to say on that side of things. It's also one of those jokes where he talks himself up more and more and more though you know he's going to do something caddish any second, so it just depends how much you're willing to wait for that punchline.

Also, Fair Play is lame, The Summer Book is the real magic.

In all honesty, Aimless, you have written very interestingly and perceptively about it, even if it's not yr thing. You are a very good egg.

Oh hey it’s winter in some jurisdictions

It is, but we ILBers like to assert the year as well as the season in the WAYR thread title and that always makes for a slippery transition into the winter digs. We often consider Dec. 22-31 as an interregnum and just let the autumn thread act as regent until January.

Very good, as ye were

Even in the one-volume abridgment, I think that 800 pages of The Golden Bough is a bit too much for me to do in one go. Since I'm at the halfway point, I'm going to set it aside and read some other things. Next up is All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. James Wood had it in his "Four Books That Deserved More Attention in 2018" list for the New Yorker, and it was already lying around the house, so it seemed a propitious coincidence. I'm enjoying it so far. The theme reminds me of Troubles. The genteel manor, stuck in a time warp, somewhat absurdly persisting against a darkening cloud of violence and chaos. The suspense of how long can it last, but limned with a lightness of touch that is almost gallows humor.

Re Golden Bough, has anyone read The White Goddess, and is it as mad as it sounds?

That kempowski looks good. One of Anthea Bells' last translations

Even in the one-volume abridgment, I think that 800 pages of The Golden Bough is a bit too much for me to do in one go. Since I'm at the halfway point, I'm going to set it aside and read some other things.

i did this, and never went back. then tried again from the beginning a few years later and did exactly the same! i wish you better luck.

I'm reading Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay. The first notable fact about it is that she wrote it in her mid-70s, but the first person narrative voice is that of a much younger woman - and she carries it off believably and with ease. Second notable fact it that the narrator is very droll while giving the impression that this is second nature to her, coming so easily it is rather unconscious. So, a very pleasant read so far.

Whoa I had no idea she wrote it that late in life.

The otherwise immaculately detailed Ferrante book knocked me out of it briefly last night when the narration alluded to AIDS being a topic of conversation in 1980, which is very unlikely, even avant la lettre.

I made a fairly serious attempt to read The White Goddess many years ago, mainly because it was a big thing for Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and I was very interested in them at that time. I maybe managed about a third of it. It was unreadable tosh. Putting it mildly, Graves's gifts did not include a capacity for logical argument or the marshalling of evidence.

I've recently finished Cassandra at the Wedding, which on the whole I enjoyed even though it turned out to be a bit weirder and less good than it promised in the early pages.

Now reading The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann.

Aimless, not to be a pedant but Jansson was Finnish, not Swedish (though she did write in Swedish). Seconding The True Deceiver, that's an amazing novel, but of course it's also very weird for me to imagine someone coming to her work without first having read the moomins books.

After My Brilliant Friend I'm switching to a different epic series and the second volume of Miklo Banffy's Transsylvanian Trilogy. Was quite worried I wouldn't remember enough from the 500 page first volume which I read more than a year ago but it only took a few pages for the characters to feel like old friends. These books are so good you guys.

Seconding the Banffys here.

I seem to be ending the year on a Simenon/Maigret binge, catching up before the last year of new translations starts.

I got <i>My Friend Maigret</i> for x-mas! Also watched the first of the Jean Gabin adaptations, a story I had previously seen acted out by Mr.Bean.

There's a late 50s version of The Man Who Watched the Trains go by with Herbert Lom.
Think it's quite good but it is a long time since I saw it.
That's Simenon but not Maigret.

It is time for the Winter 2019 WAYR thread to arrive. If there is not such a thing already in place later today I'll try to spawn one.

Here it is: 2019 Winter: The What Are You Reading thread that came in from the cold. Have at it.