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

I mean, they're not HELPFUL readings, but the guests will enjoy themselves.

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.

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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.