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

John Le Carre's The Little Drummer Girl, an adaptation of which is soon to air on the BBC, directed by Park Chan Wook! First 100 pages are spent setting up all the characters involved, next 100 deal mostly with a truly exhausting interrogation scene which I'm sure forms part of what drew Chan Wook to this material. I've only read one Le Carre before - Spy Who Came In From The Cold - and by contrast this is much less sad-sack, much weirder.

Read an extended review of CT's new nonfiction Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, biographies of the fathers of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde, whose families were all acquainted with each other in the small, shopworn world of Dublin, when it had "a shapeless aura," according to the author. Mad daddies, each in his own way, but it says here that JB Yeats finally gave up on finishing his self-portrait (after a decade; apparently, none of these geezers ever finished anything), and ran off to NYC at the age of 68, reporting back that he'd found big fun as a Colorful Irish Character, and I'd like to stroll the sidewalks and saloons with him a bit more---maybe I'll get the library to order it. Seems like pretty hairy subject matter for Toibin.

― dow

About five years ago he collected about a dozen essays on mothers and mothers in fiction, including a first-rate one on the fucked-up Mann family.

I haven't (yet) read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman but I'm in the middle of The Undoing Project by Michael 'Moneyball' Lewis about Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, their research, and their relationship. Some books are like a gourmet meal, you want to consume them slowly and linger over every detail. This is like a cake you want to cram handfuls of into your mouth as fast as possible.

"A Furious Oyster" by Jessica Sequeira - in Santiago, scientists have discovered that the dead can make shadowy returns to life during storms; the rival schools of research in the field have coalesced around Neruda and de Rokha. This is another Dostoyevsky Wannabe thing and it's really very good.

"Strandloper" by Alan Garner, I wonder whether I will end up liking it very much or not at all? I'm still not sure, two thirds of the way through. The way he does speech is always enjoyable whatever.

Oh I bought a spare copy of the Osip Mandelstam volume in the Penguin Modern European Poets series because I saw it in the shop and wanted to have a read of it. If anyone needs a copy, (London preferred but not essential) let me know.

(Meant to say Pablos Neruda and de Rokha, didn't mean to erase Winett de Rokha. Apols. NB I am not well-versed in Chilean poetry, I'm sorry to say.)

I forgot for a moment that Dostoyevsky Wannabe was a publisher and was struggling to remember which of D's books was about the dead coming back to life in storms.

I spent the whole weekend laying around and reading. I'm mainly reading The Count of Monte-Cristo, which is wonderful and is going by really quickly, and I started on volume 3 of Kilmartin's Proust.

I started Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness last night. Evidently it is a comic-mythic outlier among his works. I'm curious to see what he does with a story that places so few limits on him. Developing any internal logic when your story is akin to a dream is always an interesting task.

I finished Twilight of the Superheroes, and I've started reading The End of the Past by Aldo Schiavone, sticking to my plan of alternating fiction and non-fiction. Schiavone has some interesting theories about ancient Rome.

What are his theories? Intriguing title.

I don't know if I should have used the word "theories". It's more a manner of selectively arranging and emphasizing historical facts to develop themes and patterns that (hopefully) form a more cohesive and multi-dimensional picture of Roman society. One of his main emphases is on the fact of slavery, which is often underplayed in the mostly aristocratic Roman cultural content that has come down to us through literature, sculpture, etc, but which according to Schiavone was a major factor - perhaps *the* major factor in Roman modes of production, both agriculture and manufactures. This rather ugly truth was rather vigorously repressed by Roman aristocratic society and fed into the near fetish on purely mental/spiritual activity over anything that smacked of manual labor, even forms that we would consider highly skilled. Further he sees this feeding into the stagnation of Roman productive capacity. Rome had built an engine of wealth which could only run on veritable rivers of captive slaves fed into its maw by unceasing wars of conquest. Basically once Rome ran out of wealthy provinces to conquer, the engine had to start sputtering. At least that's the impression I'm getting so far (only about a third of the way in).

I'm reading Afternoon Men thanks to thsi thread.

Slavery supplied almost all of the labor force for Roman society, from about 100 BCE onward. It took them a while to find a workable equilibrium that created an economic space for non-noble Roman citizens, but they did eventually cobble one together. It included several kinds of public dole, much private patronage, & the professionalization of the army and its pay base. Because the children of slaves were also slaves, the need for vast numbers of new captives eased.

One thing not widely understood about Roman society is how often it went through major political and social upheavals. But through it all, the wealthy and aristocratic families made sure that when the dust settled, they stayed on top, giving the misleading impression of it being a stable system. It was anything but stable. Even Octavian-Augustus ruled through spies, terror, and the constant purging of his enemies.

Also, I should mention that apart from his main thesis, and despite being a rather compact book, Schiavone's writing is filled with interesting asides for the student of history, such as:

Nothing reveals the intensity of long-distance trade in the centuries of the imperial expansion like underwater archeology. The coastal depths of the Mediterranean are an extraordinary involuntary museum of the material civilization of Europe: ships from the days of Augustus or Hadrian lie close to Venetian or Spanish galleys, medieval furnishings, and airplanes (Spitfires or Savoia-Marchettis) from World War II. Sand and rocks a few dozen meters underwater still preserve an incalculable number of Roman relics: hulls, often well preserved, nautical equipment, amphorae, a great variety of objects.

This is into 'cool story bro' territory but what the hell.

It's probably the time of year, but after reading Kathleen Jamie's Findings I needed something even more fey so went for Richard Mabey's Nature Cure. It's the story of his recovering from depression, moving to Norfolk and how place kind of saved him - a change of place and how that influenced his ability to see, to watch narrowly again.

I started the book about 8 years ago and took it on a trip to The Gambia, that, long story short, partly meant I was on a birding tour with Chris Packham - a tour populated by almost entirely old couples, most of whom were led by strong wives, barely hiding their lust for dear old Chris. While I was there, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy - not the ideal choice when I was 2000 miles away from my newly-born son. It destroyed me. Anyway, coming in one evening, having read it that afternoon, I sort of seized on Packham saying I needed someone to talk to fancy a beer? It turned out McCarthy was his favourite writer and we sat out for most the evening talking about books and music and whatever.

Naturally, we got to talking about nature writing and it turned out he explicitly hated it - particularly the confessional style. Part of his love for McCarthy is how he writes about place and landscape as part of a larger picture, not as a thing in and of itself, which is a view. Anyway, he lighted on Mabey's Nature Cure as his bete noire, his exemplar of the particular style, saying it was embarrassing to wash one's clothes in public etc (I think he might have said 'shit oneself in public' but I could be misremembering). Being a mixture of starstruck and suggestible, I mentally put the book behind my back and claimed ignorance of its existence. It's taken until now to take it back out.

All of this is more enlightening given Packham's recent autobiography (which I've not read but know a bit about from radio coverage and conversations) and his own, now very public struggles with depression and Aspergers. I wonder if it was a case of hating that thing that is closer to home than you want to admit or if it was a simple timing thing? Either way, I'd be intrigued to hear what he'd make of Nature Cure now. I think it's honest and fiercely attentive and more than worth a read.

I like this story.

Dag Solstad - T Singer
Juan Rulfo - The Plain in Flames
Ilse Aichinger - The Bound Man

I loved T Singer - at times it was almost annoying how much control over people and events there was on the page. I can see why Solstad said this novel was a high point for him. Like other Euro novelists - thinking of Thomas Bernhard and Peter Stamm - you see a particular kind of life, a post-60s/70s politics reaching some kind of conclusion. Life before the apocalypse. Aichinger's stories start out as Kafka-like but more direct (she starts writing just after the end of WWII), less ambiguous, and there are as many ghosts as the dead in Rulfo's somewhat hard-boiled stories. They were more difficult to get into so I'll need another read through sometime.

Taking Jonathan Swift's Major Works, Natalia Ginzburg's All Our Yesterdays and Violette Leduc's La Batarde on my week off.

"A Furious Oyster" by Jessica Sequeira - in Santiago, scientists have discovered that the dead can make shadowy returns to life during storms; the rival schools of research in the field have coalesced around Neruda and de Rokha. This is another Dostoyevsky Wannabe thing and it's really very good.

this sounds interesting.

my grandfather had a mysterious friendship with De Rokha. they were from the same area of Chile, Licantén commune in the Maule Region. and about a generation apart. they didn't have much in common. my grandfather, a civil engineer, wasn't literary at all, and while De Rokha was a communist my grandfather was a conservative. my grandfather would go and visit him from time to time.

there is no paper record of my grandfather's father in any of the local archives that an uncle of mine with a hobby for genealogy could discover, and while my grandfather's mother was an illiterate washerwoman, one of my grandfather's uncles was named Rabelais.

tl;dr am i the illegitimate great-grandson of chile's 4th most esteemed poet?

answer: probably not

Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire.
Finally got my hands on a book that's an interlibrary loan that I was waiting for for the last couple of weeks.
Interesting stuff, I heard his ideas were taken aboard by the Brazilian education system but were under threat if the Right Wing candidate who just won came in.
Well book is interesting

Rankin: Dead Souls
Gogol: Dead Souls

(too much of a coincidence not to read them both together seeing as the rankin was next in the list anyway)

there are several others on amazon, a couple of which look good (Elsebeth Egholm anyone?), a whole series of which look like sub-mills-and-boon potboilers with bare-chested hunks on the covers

Tim's posts here prompted me to pick up some Alan Garner. Went to The Moon of Gomrath first, and had forgotten that it was a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (which reminded me that I had liked them both very much when I was about ten or eleven I think it would have been... possibly younger? Both set in the Peaks I think. The opening to Gomrath has some elves, which I had forgotten about. I guess my prior assumptions or vague attempts to plug my juvenile reading into my adult understanding was that Garner was part of the 60s/70s dive into British myth – I guess most people itt know my touchstones for that: Penda's Fen, the last Quatermass (oh and Quatermass and the Pit), Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliff – well there's a mass of stuff there. So I was surprised by those elves, and it made me wonder how much he could be said to be part of a Tolkein strand, which I guess would include more Norse elements.

I turned to The Owl Service which I remember reading, but not anything else about. Reading it now that staggers me. It's an extraordinary book. Extremely compressed – the reader is left to infer the various relations of the main characters (three children, a small handful of adults, all staying in a house in a valley in Wales). The relations between these characters are brittle and often acrimonious and the book exudes a sort of malignant bitterness and barely suppressed violence, often pubescent or sexed, which all the characters express and feel in some way. Even as an adult I have felt very tense and frightened at certain points, as various of the characters verge or stray into a sort of violent lunacy. Everyone's pulling in a different direction yet forced into collision with each other.

The landscape is so deranged by magic and ancient, malign enchantment that it feels at times metaphorical – that is to say it's very cut off from the world and feels like it depicts a psychological state as much as anything else.

The relationships between the Welsh and English characters are bitter and often framed in political terms. The English adults are seen to be class snobs, feeding into and off Welsh resentment. (Of the smart Welsh boy Gwyn the English father says 'In the RAF we called them barrack-room lawyers'.) Weirdly, the mother isn't present at all so far (half way through) so that I'm wondering if there's some sort of delusion at work. You get quite presented with quite sophisticated class symbols/shibboleths too, well here's the full quote to show what I mean, between Roger the English boy, and his father, of Gwyn, the Welsh son of the housekeeper:

'Gwyn seems pretty smart.'
'Ah yes: well that's the trouble: barrack-room lawyers we called them in the RAF. They're the worst. But brains aren't everything, by a long chalk. You must have the background.'
'Is that why Margaret's gone so County with Alison?'
'Tricky,' said Clive. 'Very, very tricky – um, you know?'

to which my immediate reaction was er wtf.

Oh and the spoken language is often heavy with slang and mannered phrases, which can read a little oddly.

Some aspects of the writing make me think that a lot of this – both the flinty, chopped up nature of scene descriptions and events, and the elliptical style or reliance on inference – is the result of deliberately savage editing.

The language is often highly elliptical. As a reader you're really made to work for meaning, and there's a constantly reiterated set of statements that have a cryptic poetry 'She wanted to be flowers but they made her owls (or variously 'claws')'.

It won a lot of awards, and it says a lot about the reading intelligence of its intended young audience. It's powerful and like the claws and talons that pervade it, has a potent sense of cruelty.

It's good stuff.

Images of the owl service that apparently inspired the book here:

https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/images/OwlService_2009_03_28_006_detail_edit_c_small.jpg
https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/images/OwlService_2009_03_28_012_detail_edit_c_small.jpg

i just jotted down a few additional thoughts:

> The heavy editing in Alan Garner's 'Owl Service' creates what is almost a collage of violent events, or the collage is itself violent. Emotions run high in most scenes. There is an emphasis on showing emotional interplay at the point of conflict, or rather the events that are shown in the book are those that create or exist at that point of high emotional conflict and stress. That the 'magic' at work also seems to contribute to and materialised by emotional stress is complementary to (integral to?) this. Each scene has force to it, even where the emotions are not high. For instance, a scene in a local shop (one of the few to take place outside a nexus of quite discrete-seeming but connected locations) has two women speaking in Welsh of their foreboding about what is coming. Roger, the English boy, is in the shop and cannot understand what is going on, Gwyn, who can speak some Welsh and is learning (to the disgust of his Welsh mother who doesn't want him speaking like 'a labourer') is not in the shop. This short scene manages to creates paranoia, foreboding, a sense that these things have happened before, with dramatic irony at play via the reader having the Welsh translated, but also partly occluded by the opaque references the women make.

> The text prickles with threat like this throughout.

I bought the DVD of the (late 60s? early 70s?) TV series of The Owl Service last year, which is worth a look.

I finished Strandloper - as with the Stone Book Quartet there's a whiff of magic about the book but it's mostly a deep folk connection with place; where TSBQ is one place over the course of several generations, Strandloper's one life spent in two radically different places: Cheshire and Australia in the very early nineteenth century (the dude is transported for folk ritualling in the local church, nearly dies on the run from the colony, is saved and adopted by an Aboriginal people. True story apparently.)

I'm interested in your observation about emotions running high - in Strandloper the events are tumultuous but the emotional pitch is restrained through death, terror and heartbreak. Which is something to do with the whole of nature and human life being part of a dream, and a dance. It's very good. The opacity in the Cheshire dialect and the Australian language again help to obscure but (I think) also deepen - there's something going on here that the reader won't understand and has to take on trust.

Your description of The Owl Service triggers memories of Ivy Compton-Burnett's imploded lamplight family scenes, aieeee (truly, while most YAF-oriented fiction I've tried tends to overexplain. to reassure).

The Owl Service is great and ripe will allusion and cruelty as you - as the best children's literature often is. Red Shift is even more allusive and elusive - to the point where it feels deliberately, puckishly edited. Landscape and time coalesce and human forces are joined across time and space. I want to read them all again.

This is incidental but I love how Garner's own house is like a living version of his stories: https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/aboutus_medicinehouse.php

Red Shift is the one that, to even understand what happens, you have to work out a letter written in code, isn't it?
Garner's retellings of English folktales is a very good and rich guide to his influences:
https://d1a37ygoufymvg.cloudfront.net/resized/width-298/path-assets/covers/v1/9780007445974.jpg

Am just partway through the frankly bonkers LOGBOOK, a novella by Geza Ottlik, about two retired navy officers living in a Maori-conquered Denmark where people are forced to walk on all fours, the sailors watching athletics on TV and complaining a lot. It's in a collection called HUNGARIAN QUARTET, 4 novellas by different writers, although the Peter Esterhazy entry is only 19p long, making it not a novella.

One thing I forgot to mention about The Owl Service was its epigraph, which along with a quote from an RS Thomas poem, and a traditional song, has this runic utterance:

Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.
Radio Times: 15 September 1965

Finally getting round to something that always seems to get mentioned: Diego Gambatta's Codes of the Underworld. It's extremely good and clear on the nature and mechanics of signalling, signs, and mimicry, and the specifics of how these apply in societies and environments characterised by a lack of trust and necessary concealment.

Although I've dipped into The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard, I don't think I've ever read all of its contents. I'm picking through it again, mainly for the medical and surgical stuff in there.

Got a flight to Sydney this evening, and another one back on Thursday, so I've loaded my kindle up with more easy reading – looking forward to Strandloper (it felt appropriate for this journey from Tim's description, and the first two Garners, which I remember reading as a child. Also Liquid by Mark Miodownik, which is apparently a treatise on liquids from the view of a transatlantic flight – so fuel, taste in the wines, the sea-water beneath, the effect of pressure on bodily liquid etc.

I've also got in my list of books to read City of Devils but I've no idea where I picked this up. I'm assuming it's this 'Shanghai Noir' by Paul French. I will give it a go.

the fantastic tales of fitz-james o'brien... irish writer of proto-sf/horror/orientalist fantasy & supernatural tales resident in america in the the mid-nineteenth century. somewhat derivative (most obviously poe, brockden brown, hoffmann) magazine fiction but entertaining nonetheless.

have now read, Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Liquid. Liquid, soft science, but a fun range around materials and their properties - i learned a lot to bore the next person i’m on a flight with. As mentioned author uses the frame of a transatlantic flight to talk about them - fine - and has this slightly weird, crepey persona to go along with it - obsesses about impression he’s making in other people on the flight, refers to relationship breakdown one too many times.

WoB is v much a children’s novel. i mean i know it is, but The Owl Service wasn’t really. Dwarves and elves etc. Also feels like a juvenile work (tho don’t know if it is). Got a sinister way about it despite. Embedded in the local pennine countryside. Enjoys painting the sinister and unpleasant. Also just *ends* immediately after mass spectral plane carnage.

Things Codes of the Underworld keeps reminding me of:
The excellent Korean Infernal Affairs trilogy
Late Philip K Dick ie A Scanner Darkly

they did these things v well.

this is quite nice on writing Warhammer 40000 fiction.

So From a View to a Death >>> Afternoon Men. The former's like Wodehouse with literary ambitions while not as scabrous as Waugh.

I read Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, which among other things seems to be about how men can't understand women's art, or, worse, doggedly refuse to.

I have been a terrible reader this past month, in that my mood has been almost intolerant of any books at all, but I have slowly pecked away at Under the Glacier and it is finally winning me over. I hasten to add that I blame myself, not the book, for my reticence. It's been a hell of a stressful month.

It is one of those weird books which do not conform to any of the accepted norms of novel-writing, but is more of a throwback to pure story-telling of a much older type. The characters do not conform to any reality outside the confines of the tale and the tale happily yokes together whatever incongruities suit the purpose of the teller. All such books are intensely personal and idiosyncratic to their authors and more or less uncategorizable. I'll try to say a bit more after I've finished it.

I read Chris Kraus' I Love Dick, which among other things seems to be about how men can't understand women's art, or, worse, doggedly refuse to.

I liked this book a lot. Did have trouble identifying with the protagonist's obsession - dude really doesn't seem very appealing - but maybe that's part of the point, the irrationality of passion?

The ending really twists the knife, too (SPOILERS):

After all of her obsessing about the dude, he doesn't even acknowledge her enough to write to her, just sends her a copy of what he wrote to the other man involved.

"The Age of Wonders" by Aharon Appelfeld, the best of his I've read I think. It's brilliant on the banality and powerful nonsense/senselessness of popular racism, and of the disorientation afterwards.

Also "Cassette 86", a Dostoyevsky Wannabe sampler which is a very enjoyable half hour but maybe not the place I'd advise people to start with DW.

Tim, have you read Appelfeld's "Badenheim 1939"? Really beautifully done book that somehow miraculously manages not to overplay the temporal irony card (as in what we the readers know about happens in 1939 and beyond)

Partway into Dave Hutchinson's "Europe at Dawn", the deeply enjoyable and clever 4th book in his Fractured Europe series about political shenanigans in a near-future Europe broken up into numerous micro-states.

oh i don’t think i realised there was a fourth. going on the list.

The Iran-Iraq War, Pierre Razoux

At the risk of being down on interesting indie publisher DW, I bought A Hypocritical Reader and was really disappointed. I would have been up for a more developed version of the choose your own adventure closed loop, but once that was done the actual content of the book was torture.

I finished Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE.

His most entertaining since CHRONIC CITY at the least. In some ways excellent, yet curiously inconclusive; maybe a lot of loose ends - more than in his earlier detective fiction.

James, I haven't read that one, sounds good. TAOW also deeply deft with 'temporal irony'; one of the ways I think he does it in TAOW is by having various ironies all at play - in the first half of TAOW the kid narrator half-gets what's going on in the adult relationships around him. In the second half of the book - the "after" it moves from the first person to the third and that that distance is reduced, maybe removed.

Brand - sorry you didn't like that one, I thought it was brilliant almost - though not quite - throughout. Of course it might be that I simply like that kind of torture.

David Stubbs mars By 1980
just read half of the Miles/Sun ra section and found it really clunky.
I thought the future Days book was quite good but not so up on this.

@Tim - maybe it's an academic background question, because stuff like the reference to Barthes on the blurb kind of convinced me that it was being written in some code I'm not inclined to crack. Writers writing about writers and the meaning of writing. The angel story is OK and the repetitive Victoriana was nice (too short?), but stuff like the hipster-bashing segment I'm not sure if it's just stale jokes or a heavy parody of anti-hipster comic novels which as far as I know don't even exist.

It's hard to keep up with what people are talking about but I see this -

https://dostoyevskywannabe.com/sampler/cassette_86

- that Tim mentioned: a compilation of work by this publisher's current writers?

I don't know the writers. Tim can tell us if Mario Kempes is the 1978 Mario Kempes.

According to a note in the back of the book, Mario Kempes is neither the footballer Mario Kempes nor Argentinian, nor even called Mario Kempes in real life.

Aside from the two people who run DW, I don't get the impression that they have "current writers" in the way I think you mean - the anthologies tend to contain a bit of work by people who have "full-length" (ie usually very short) books out on the press but much more by other like-minded souls. "Cassette 85" (which I haven't read) is the most recent of these anthologies. They're doing a "Cities" series collecting groups of writers based in various cities or suburbs, which I imagine will feature even fewer already-DW writers.

I am half-way through "A Slip of a Fish" by Amy Arnold, which I'm enjoying well enough in a "wonder if this would have been published if it weren't for the success of "A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing"" kind of way, which is not to say it's *like* AGIAHFT but it shares a dense interior voice narrative. Anyway I'm halfway through that but the Aharon Appelfeld hasn't quite let me go, I am still thinking about the narrator's father being the world number 1 Kafka fan and seeing him react to the world's bewildering viciousness by working harder, being more honest. Another of the ironies I was talking about, I suppose.

I realise that I have read two novels consecutively by authors with the initials AA. It wasn't deliberate.

Your next book:

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300102734/jazz-modernism

I finished Under the Glacier. Susan Sontag wrote an Introduction in which she called it "one of the funniest books ever written." I beg to differ. It doesn't even rate as one of the thousand funniest books ever written, imo. It was a playful book and it had a humorous streak to it, but it was not especially funny, in the sense that I wished to laugh out loud or even emit a quiet chuckle, as I often do when reading Wodehouse. Perhaps it is funnier in the original Icelandic, or Ms. Sontag has a far different sense of humor than I do.

What the book did do well was to create a timeless, mythic atmosphere, using just the everyday materials one might find laying about fifty years ago in Iceland. As myths go, it was not grim, as for example the myth of Prometheus, but rather was a myth addressing our humanness, not the travails of the gods and heroes. As for giving any better idea of what it was "about", that would require more analysis than the book can hold up under. Myths need to be swallowed and swigged, not nibbled and sipped.