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

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.

finished "If the Sun Dies", man that's a classic. her deliberately repetitive style wears thin here and there but the subject matter and her eye for detail and emotional rollercoaster throughout is so well conveyed. I admit I kinda choked up when I got to the "every day is a war" thing cuz man ain't that the fuckin truth.

Just found a copy of If The Sun Dies - can't wait to dig into it.

i similarly have a copy from the LAPL here now, going to dig into it after i finish some others:

- a pair of Dan Epstein baseball books clemenza mentioned on ILBaseball

- The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth by Elizabeth Tasker

- If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb (occasionally amusing musings on the theories of why we've never encountered or found evidence of extraterrestrial life. The first solution in the book is "They are already here, and they are Hungarians"

I just read a John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, that offered that Hungarians/aliens thesis based on the experiences of people who worked on the Manhattan Project with seriously odd, seriously brilliant Magyars.

I'm reading Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet - an odd book so far, occasionally funny, somewhat interesting as a panorama of mid-19th century scientific doctrines.

I've started on The Sicilian Vespers, Steven Runciman. Medieval politics are like an overly complicated board game played by hundreds of petty aristocrats and scheming clergy, all throwing their own pairs of dice at once, but Runciman seems determined to explain all the moves, which seems both admirable and delusional.

Simon Garfield: In Miniature -- an interesting and entertaining look at the appeal of small versions of bigger things, but it really stints on the illustrations, which is a shame

Natalia Ginzburg - All Our Yesterdays. Her writing is so...flat (which is almost my only observation from all my time reading her, its a very hard to sensibility to expand upon), but here it feels even more like it - as events and how they impact a group of friends in Italy before, during and after WWII seem just like another slight drama. Its not exactly 'Italian'. I need to check some of her other novels and stories but in this early one there is one page of actual dialogue (a lot of he said, she said, he asked, etc.), which is her own voice sorta coming through (rather than an application of a formal experiment) although later she would distill things a bit more. Worth a read if you lke her already.

I'm still slowly making my way through Proust. Getting into the latter stages of Sodom. May take a break after that.

As what I hoped might be some light relief but turned out not to be, I read The Last Samurai. This seems to be an ILB favourite but I did not care for it.

I'm now reading Kudos, the last of Rachel Cusk's trilogy. I thought the first two were brilliant, particularly the second one. So far this one is a falling off.

Andre Breton's anthology of black humour.

I finished The Sicilian Vespers. The "vespers" themselves, an uprising against and a massacre of the French in Sicily, were mainly carried out over the space of a week, but the history roves all about the Mediterranean and covers the half century from 1250 CE to 1300 CE. What struck me most was how rapidly the cast of characters turned over due to their habit of dying soon after they showed up, even the youngsters in their twenties. The popes especially kicked off within a year or two of their ascension.

Now I really should move directly to reading Dante's Divine Comedy, while all this is moderately fresh in my mind, since large numbers of the people I've just read about show up in Dante, most of them in hell. Instead, I've picked up one of Alfred's perennial recommendations, A Time to Be Born, Dawn Powell.

I finished Bouvard and Pecuchet, at least as much as one can finish an unfinished novel. It's a very odd book, somewhat relentlessly one-note in some ways with masses of undigested information presented to the reader, but at the same time oddly charming. Somehow it also feels quite modern, with the bumbling main pair as antiheroes in the Pynchon/Vonnegut mode, though the book feels ultimately less cynical than Vonnegut at least. There's something genuinely admirable, almost superhuman really, about their boundless curiosity, drive, and idealism. It also works pretty well as a time capsule of the late 19th century.

Finally found a copy of Forgotten Armies by CA Bayly and Tim Harper, and so far it's pretty amazing. It's about WW2 from the perspective of South East Asia, and the way it ties everything into a story told from a different perspective completely changes the way you'll look at that war. There's a sequel, Forgotten Wars, which follows the wars of indepence in the region over the next decades, and apparently does the same to for instance the Vietnam War. Must read for anyone interested in global history and adjusting for eurocentrism.

That sounds interesting - thanks!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51d0kSa43hL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71HAgtzMKbL.jpg

These are both very, very good fictional approaches to what Fred B is talking about--the first about Indian soldiers in WW1, the second about a West African soldier in WW2.

I've started reading Helen C. Epstein's Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror. A readable, interesting narrative about a history (the modern history of Uganda) that I knew next to thing about going in. I'm also interleaving with bits from Maeve Brennan's The Long-Winded Lady.

Struggling a bit with that André Breton collection. He's good at introducing the authors, but the actual content...transgression for transgression's sake, as discussed on ILX elswhere recently? Different times, I know.

Surrealists are terrible at literature. I am not 22 anymore so not allowed to re-think this.

otm

Ballard took surrealism to extraordinary places, but I wouldn't call him a surrealist, per se.

No, not quite.

Breton's Nadja works, but it's short.

"Surrealists are terrible at literature" is one of those statement which, while wrong, is truthy enough to count as good challoping.

This is Breton selected but not Breton written, tho - no actual surrealists in the stories I've read so far. And as I said, his insights on the writers in question are sometimes interesting, the texts he chooses to highlight not so much.

On vacation I read:

The Witch Elm by Tana French. Both a departure and not from the procedural mode of the Dublin Murder Squad books. As ever, she is spectacular at texturing environments and characters, and writing dreadfully plausible stories around what should really be somewhat cockamamie crimes.

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. Much less serious and somewhat metafictional Sherlock Holmes fanfic with the author himself as Watson. I preferred Magpie Murders, but this still made me giggle in parts. Some bits of trite post-2016 liberal handwringing over something or other injected into the narration, for some reason.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Everyone on earth (including Hugo and Nebula voters) has been saying this is good for ages and they're right. Search: political maneuvering, Roman Empire in space, premisey bits about AI spaceships, views into assorted made-up cultures including the genderless one at its center.

Since I got home I started reading Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, which is about how to say things with buildings.

"Surrealists are terrible at literature" is one of those statement which, while wrong, is truthy enough to count as good challoping.

― Tim, Monday, 26 November 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thank you sir, my challops are all I have left for the year

Tho Leonora Carrington can be very very good

There are lots of literary genres, such as ghost stories, some experimental narratives, science fiction, or myths, that contain surreal elements, but do not identify themselves as surrealism. Self-identified surrealism in literature is often too preoccupied with producing surreal effects and not enough occupied with creating an interesting story.

Brian McHale, POSTMODERNIST FICTION.

Properly reading this many years after buying it.

Thoughts:

1: I always felt that it looked dense and dull, but actually I admire the clarity of the writing and thought.

2: PoMo might sound a dreary topic, but what I like about the book is that it's a kind of 'introduction to the poetics of fiction' that goes beyond PoMo - it has a transferrable quality.

3: I like some of the relevant PoMo authors - Vonnegut, Alasdair Gray, for instance - but a lot of them seem quite dull, in their avant-garde way.

4: He tends to come back often to saying 'and the most exemplary case of all is Thomas Pynchon', even though TP seems a lot less extreme and exemplary than his other cases. It makes me think that he just can't get enough of Gravity's Rainbow.

5: One thing that runs through it, unnoticed by McHale but uncomfortable to me - and something I have long tended to suspect. A lot of the PoMo narratives he quotes seem very sexist in some way; or seem to revolve around promiscuity, or the sexual availability of women, sometimes sexualized violence and even murder of women, by men. Every time I have encountered Robert Coover's work it has given me this impression, and parts of TP's GR for instance also echo elements of it. But in McHale, case after case does it. There is plainly a kind of subconscious / cultural / psychological subtext that he doesn't seem able to perceive. I would say reasons for it:

a) it's a period matter: this kind of thing was more normative anyway, in some ways - cf James Bond

b) more damagingly, there is some kind of connection between the sexual and literary 'transgression' - for these, almost all male, writers, writing 'experimentally' also implies having an 'adventurous' attitude to sex (sometimes including violence). So there's a kind of 'dark side of the counter-culture' element.

The curious thing about it is how this repeatedly shows through despite McHale going out of his way to write a formalist book where such issues aren't really up for discussion. Even though almost ruled out of court from the start, the sexual politics keeps insisting on being noticeable.

Despite this, in case of doubt, I find POSTMODERNIST FICTION an admirably clear, inclusive, ambitious, useful book.

I guess if Surrealist lit is limited to those with some connection to the original movement, then I haven’t read much at all, apart from some Artaud. Its influence however probably extends to lots of other writers I like, even though it’s probably stronger in film, having the visual dimension, and poetry.

Someone like Borges for instance seems to have a little Surrealism in him. According to Wikipedia he was involved in the Spanish Ultraist movement which seems to have been a close cousin.

Sure I mean that is part of where Borges came from but his reading is way wider than any surrealist.

I am mildly interested in Carrington but I bet its merely ok, off-focus bunch of stories. The discourse that I've seen is one of a neglected female writer. Fine, but I need more than that. Might try some if I see it.

xps. Alasdair Grey's opus is about an incel who murders a young woman who spurns his affections

so fits in with your thesis on sexism in pomo

having finished fitz hugh ludlow's the hasheesh eater: being passages from the life of a pythagorean (& continuing with mid-nineteenth century american metaphysical speculation) i'm making a reattempt on melville's mardi which i put down about a fifth of the way in close to twenty years ago... feel morally obliged to get it out of the way before starting on m-d.

Seconding pinefox re Brian McHale. Used that book a lot at university. Should reread, see if it's still good.

I finished A Time to Be Born a short time ago. Whether or not it was based upon the characters of Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce (as is often said to be the case), what stood out for me was that Dawn Powell sank her incisors deep into those characters, along with the many social climbers and sycophants who populate this book, and drew blood repeatedly and voraciously. This was in contrast to every other book of hers I have read, where she reserves some human sympathy for the failings of her characters, even as she exposes them nakedly to the reader. Powell must have truly despised that piece of the NY scene with a depth of scorn unusual for her.

It also had some of her wittiest take downs. For example, (paraphrasing from memory) one character 'attacked her squab with a ferocity that made you think it had pulled a gun on her first.'