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

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

manhattan beach - very trad, very enjoyable. a holiday book. more predictable than goon squad, but waaay more consistent

Now I'm reading The Hobbit for the first time because I guess I should

it's good imo

I finished The Stalin Front. The level of realism made it far grimmer than any war movie ever made. It was more relentless than All Quiet on the Western Front and conscientiously stripped the war of any trace of romance or glory. But the people involved are allowed their humanity, which makes the ceaseless violence all the more powerful.

If I have a lick of sense, I'll read some Wodehouse now. But I currently have a very wide selection on my shelves, so I'll think over my next choice a bit before I land on one.

ledig's Payback is also super grim, told from the POV of Allied bombers on a revenge raid against a German city. Good, though.

The bit in Stalin Front that most stuck with me was somebody's thoughts as they're trapped helplessly under rubble, never to be rescued.

Mr. Morrison, your comprehensive acquaintance with books of all persuasions continues to impress the hell out of me, even though impressing anyone seems to be the furthest thing from your mind. I salute you.

*blushes*

FWIW, this list is pretty good overall: https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/100-must-reads/s-43415865
I can claim 33, so a way to go still

That link being 100 German Must-Reads in English Translation

I've read about a quarter of the writers if not the exact books. Gotta say I wasn't taken with it. Having one book by certain authors here is wrong for a start but if you are going to do that then its the wrong choice for Mann, Musil, Kafka, Roth, Bernhard, Keun (surely its Child of All Nations), Stamm. There are far too many titles from the last 25 years. Also there ought to be some poets (I mean inlcuding Brecht's poetry instead of one of his plays might have been better too). Josef Winkler is an omission.

Having said that I've spent a while googling a few bits. I'll chase that Tucholsky, and Ilse Aichinger's The Greater Hope sounds amazing.

Bah. Am supposed to be learning that language, and know incredibly little of the list. The Trial has got to be the <i> right </i/> Kafka, though? Unless the problem is the listmakers not believing in short stories. Or do they? I'm too ignorant to recognise any collections there.

I would've gone for a story collection (there is a volume that collects all the stories published in his lifetime) or Letters to Felice.

finished Solar Bones and have to say I pretty much unreservedly loved it.

being the idea that
my entire existence is these same thoughts, that each rolling idea, as it occurs now is wholly responsible for my
being here
like
something lost, a revenant who has returned to his house at some grey hour to find the place boarded up and abandoned

it is a review of the main character Marcus' life, of his place in the wider systems of family, of county, of civic structures, as political animal. an individual’s positioning in those structures. the latter part of the book is overtaken by an outbreak of a water born virus in what I assume is Galway, from which his wife becomes seriously ill (and as an image becomes one of patient suffering).

this is my wit's end
my post mortem aria
my engineer's lament

an attempt to divine (the word is correct, this is a religious book) the structures of existence and the universe (the 'solar bones' and damned if i can now find the point fairly early on where he uses the phrase). outwith this order and structure there is chaos and the void.

the Skype calls he makes with his children always conclude with a description of the break of the digital connection:

I will, ok
bye
bye
after which he seemed to reach towards me with his palm outstretched, fingers filling the screen for a darkening moment before it switched off and the line which connected us across the globe dissolved to a black portal, leaving me adrift for a moment, my mind still locked into the conversation we’d just had before I closed down the laptop, the sound of which drew the sitting room with its walls and pictures in around me in the darkness

a representation of the void behind another kind of infrastructure.

That void is also perceptible behind the engineering of physical structures. The inexplicable virus, which is couched in apocalyptic and Biblical terms by Marcus’ children, is a failure of engineering which seems to have no cause. It is implicitly related to a moment when in his role as county engineer Marcus refuses to sign off the foundations of a school which have been poured with three different types of concrete, as they will expand and contract at different rates in the fluctuation between hot and cold weather resulting in the structural failure of the school. He gets political pressure to change his mind and sign it off, which he withstands, but the inference is clear that minor political corruption has structural consequences.

There is a joke halfway through, told by his son, about which the oldest profession in the world is - the engineer claims it is his, as God hands over to him after His act of engineering heaven and earth out of the chaos, saying ‘there you go lads, you take over now’ and the politician says ‘who do you think caused the chaos?’

as I say, i pretty much enjoyed the book without reserve. on occasions the freewheeling biographical review can perhaps seem a little attenuated, so that you find yourself asking ‘to what end is this being put down' but it's the matter no matter how mundane is rarely if ever left unredeemed into the wider context of the book. and although i've emphasised the spiritual this is also very much a book that takes care to describe the every day and does it very well.

and in that depiction of the every day, it’s also about loss. His depictions of his love for and history with his family and his location are a description of what his absence will mean to those people. And by leaving it an absence – those people are never seen in their grief – it is more potent and powerful to consider the structures of love that we engineer, and which are critical fractured by the absence that death brings.

He’s great at momentary descriptions of the shifting light and moods of days spent in a house. That there is something wrong with the day he recognises but it’s never described in terms other than those days we all have where we can’t quite settle into them right. The grey light of thinly clouded days with watery sunshine behind the perfect light for a momentary return:

the light is awash with ghouls and ghosts and the meaning between this world and the next is so blurred we might easily find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the dead, the world fuller than at any other time of year

Generally his ability to span from the cosmic to the quotidian with stretching the tone or language, by using Mayo and this man’s loved, lived life as the space that thinking operates in one of the book's great successes.

Though I’m not sure if what I didn’t enjoy most were the descriptions of his life as a county engineer.

I'm in the final 13th book of Confessions. Books 10-12 were a bit of rough sledding. The autobiography proper takes up the first 9 books, ending shortly after Augustine's conversion, as he's preparing to sail back to North Africa, when his mother - the mother who's faithful prayers on behalf of Augustine's soul have finally received their happy reward - suddenly takes ill and dies. Book 10 turns in a more metaphysical direction, as Augustine interrogates the nature of mind and memory. He carefully deduces how the mind is unlike a physical/material object. He's clearly pretty well-read in philosophy, and his reasoning requires careful parsing at times to follow his train of thought. This mode continues into Book 11 as the preoccupation with memory transitions into an exploration of the nature of time itself. Reading this chapter I had the distinct impression that we don't have any more idea of what time essentially is than Augustine did in his day. He's interesting on how neither the future or the past could be said to exist, and how the present, when we zero in on it, must be vanishingly evanescent. Book 12 turns in a more hermeneutical direction with an exploration of how to understand the first few verses of Genesis, about the moment of creation, and the mystery of the Trinity. This is all rather heady stuff, and in Book 13 Augustine finally turns in a more common devotional mode of prayer and supplication, humbly acknowledging his human limitations and looking forward to the day when he (and all believers) will see God face to face and know directly what is now only dimly perceived. That sort of anti-intellectual move is familiar in Christian literature, the idea that reason can only take you so far and faith needs to make the final leap, but it feels like less of a cop-out after having wrestled with difficult questions over the past hundred plus pages.

the Confessions is probably my favorite book, but I rarely venture beyond Book 9.

I am reading The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald. It is non-violent. So far.

christina stead's the people with the dogs

After a bunch of false starts with various things, I have settled into The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson as a good shocktober read.

still plugging my way through moby dick. i think i'm gonna start reading something else in the meantime, as I still have hundreds of pages left, and those pages are DENSE.

Moby-Dick is good imo

yeah, i don't plan on dropping it, i like it a lot. i'm just thinking about reading something concurrently as a counter-weight, perhaps something non-fiction

tbh i feel the counterweight to moby dick is fiction rather’n non fiction.

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.