2019 Winter: The What Are You Reading thread that came in from the cold

yeah it’s a rum one. right at the beginning he talks about the descriptive opportunities fiction can afford, which he makes use of, but will also lean periodically on the presence of documentary research, without that doing much more than assuring you that such documents exist. eg its reference to Schischnigg’s memoirs means it’s quite difficult to discern what is directly taken from the memoirs and what is fictional imagination.

his moral judgments are straight out of the certainty of the high gallic style, of which i’m quite fond - shriving off the necessary caveats and sketched alternatives of historical uncertainty and leaving your main judgment forcefully asserted.

i’m happy with the blurrings. i think the selection of depicted events and the overall force and brevity make it feel like a highly insightful dream.

I finished All for Nothing by Kempowski. Overall I thought it was quite effective. Hopefully not to give away any spoilers, but it felt like one of those novels where 80% of the action happens in the last 20% of the pages. Despite the omnipresent air of menace, the stately atmospheric pace of the first part doesn't prepare you for the swift descent into brutality. As the carnage piles up, you almost feel like you've been ejected from a sophisticated art-house period piece and landed in some kind of Coen brothers' black comedy. However, even in the beginning sections, when the story seems to be drifting on revery (though it's never quite clear whose revery), the story does make steady progress in its sideways, crab-like fashion. It does leave you with plenty of food for thought, which is usually a mark of a good read. After that I read my self-help book for the year, Mindset by Carol Dweck. The book does have the advantage of having something worthwhile to say, but it just keeps saying it and saying it, though it is mercifully not a long book.

I couldn't handle anything serious, so I just read Why Not Catch-21?, Gary Dexter, a collection of 50 newspaper columns that discuss why different books were given their titles. It's literary trivia, but moderately interesting and of a suitably low-wattage that it could be read in a doctor's waiting room. Just what I wanted.

Currently reading second Boileau book, after the excellent She Who Was No More, namely Vertigo. Both have been turned into movies.

Still only 2/3 through rereading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

I can revere Woolf and trust that she is a magnificent artist, and what she tries to do in this novel is remarkable; eg spending pages in going beyond the human and trying to show how space and nature subsist over time without people in the picture.

BUT I am still doubtful about her tendency, often when doing that very thing, to go for a 'grand style' which is, maybe one could say, too 'Victorian' or 'Romantic'. She falls back a lot into dodgy (especially personifying) metaphors of eg 'And now night donned his cloak and swept all about him', which seem below the level of the best of what she is trying to do.

completed the complete saki & now onto hg well's tono-bungay which (thus far) promises to be a victorian era lower middle class bildungsroman

Finished TO THE LIGHTHOUSE again.

Yes, I have had my vision.

I'm now reading an old Penguin Classics title, Lives of Saints. The specific saints are St. Brendan, St. Cuthbert, and St. Wilfred. Miracles abound. The glory of the Lord shines in all things. The usual stuff.

Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (1808)
Bill Konigsberg, Openly Straight (2013)
Bill Konigsberg, Honestly Ben (2017)

Gregory Benford: The Berlin Project -- very weird unsatisfying alternative-history novel about the Manhattan Project in which Benford's Mary Sue hero, his real-life father-in-law Karl Cohen, gets to save the world, minimises geniuses like Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi, gets to tell off and outsmart Heisenberg and Groves, etc, and is fawned over by people like Rommel. Very odd. Like an incredibly ambitious present for his wife that somehow got published for a wide audience by mistake.

I tell you, reading Benford writing sex scenes between his father- and mother-in-law is very peculiar. Did not need soixante-neuf introduced in that context.

On book two of the Neapolitan Novels, at lunch my bartender asked me what it was about and I said it was a bildungsroman about two women in Naples. She said if I came in next week she would bring me a copy of her favorite book to read, and showed me the tattoo associated with it. The cheering of Saints fans made her inaudible so I don't know what book it is. I suppose I should bring her a book too?

Once I finish the Ferrante novels (which are a pleasure to read) I am going to find more Barbara Comyns to read, she is great.

recommend who was changed and who was dead

Not that it isn't brilliant, but I did think there were a lot of unnecessarily bad sentences in To The Lighthouse, or parts where a slight lack of clarity made me have to stop and check who was being referred to. I dunno if that's intentional but I remember thinking that along the way as a general impression. I loved it though.

Reading John McGahern's Collected Stories at the moment. I've read some dour Irish stories in my time but the world he paints really is grim. V good stories though. Just finished Wendy Erskine's Sweet Home - also short stories. All set in Belfast, one of the better modern collections I've read of late.

For the Eric Vuillard readers, he responded to criticism in the NYRB about his approach to writing history--I uploaded it here:
https://www.scribd.com/document/397893674/Pages-From-2019-02-07-the-New-York-Review-of-Books

Looking at the Wikipedia list of Comyns novels, it appears I've read the four dating from before the sixties and the four dating from after the sixties but none of the four from the sixties. I have enjoyed them all, I think maybe I liked The Vet's Daughter best.

completed the complete saki

Does that include, like, his jingoistic novel about Germany invading the UK? Always wondered how he fared outside of the comical short story mold (in which he's awesome).

His what now? I had never heard of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_William_Came

ooh, that's available on project gutenberg. will add it to my todo list.

it did indeed include it... totally bizarre mix of social comedy & pre-wwi invasion anxiety! his other novel the unbearable bassington was much more readable, though that doesn't come close to the sharpness of the stories. less said about the plays the better.

recommend who was changed and who was dead

yes! I want to read that and/or the Veterinarian's Daughter next... I've read Sisters by a River, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, and the Juniper Tree. Have you read any of her four books from the 60s?

(I'm in the same boat as Tim it seems, mostly because the pre/post 60s Comyns books seem to be the ones that are reprinted)

Started Devil's Advocates book on The Shining.

Finished Susan Orlean, The Library Book, which is a warm blanket of a read, highly recommend it. Started Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers, which is starting off like a knife trick.

The Veterinarian's Daughter sort of passed through me when I read it but it's grown in my imagination. It's like a perfect Gothic doll's house of a book. I totally twin it with We Have Always Lived in the Castle in that respect.

Against my better judgement I bought John Lanchester's 'The Wall', mostly because I used to dig utopian/dystopian literature. So I just finished the Decipherment of Linear B, which I enjoyed a lot, and I'll get to the Wall after Sartre's 'the Ghost of Stalin'.

Toni Morrison, PARADISE.

If anything, it seemed better than ever on this ... 3rd reading? Probably one of her strongest novels. The late sequence where the women all reappear is quite mysterious and touching.

(Accidentally, I appear to have started 2019 reading only female authors, a change from 2018.)

nora ephron, HEARTBURN. it's a trip so far

Love that book.

I finished Lives of the Saints last night. ftr, St. Brendan's life was so phantasmagoric as to be unconnected to any recognizable reality, St. Cuthbert came across as a fairly good-hearted ascetic, and St. Wilfred came across as a calculating and self-enriching church politician. Chateaubriand's memoir might be the perfect foil with which to follow this crew, but I haven't really decided what to read next.

Maybe this one?
https://oneworld-publications.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/650x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/9/7/9781786074416_14_1_1.jpg

Aargh sorry big pic

Finished Human Voices by Penelope Fitzerald. Perhaps the most purely enjoyable of the 5 or so books of hers that I've read, but still I'm left feeling I'm not quite the right reader for her and that I enjoy her work less than I should given that it's the kind of thing I tend to like and obviously brilliant. I keep hoping things will click into place with her but it hasn't quite happened yet.

Giorgio Bassani: Within the Walls -- first of the Ferrara books, but the 4th I've read, because they were retranslated into English out of order -- 5 long stories/novellas

xpost

I get that! Offshore was a very "nothing quite clicks" book for me, but like every other book of hers it's haunted me for reasons I can't explain, in a pleasurable way

Having read two (maybe three) of Bassani's novels over the years, and enjoyed them, it hadn't occurred to me that he thought of them as a single work. Excited to read the rest by and by.

I read "Normal People" by Sally Rooney and "Dusty Answer" by Rosamund Lehmann - it wasn't deliberate but they're an interesting pair, ninetyish years apart stories of progress through adolescence (and university) to a messed-up adulthood of sorts. Both VG, don't think either will make it to an ongoing home on the shelves.

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN

I heard that starts great and then deteriorates

As do we all

Still only 2/3 through rereading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.

I can revere Woolf and trust that she is a magnificent artist, and what she tries to do in this novel is remarkable; eg spending pages in going beyond the human and trying to show how space and nature subsist over time without people in the picture.

BUT I am still doubtful about her tendency, often when doing that very thing, to go for a 'grand style' which is, maybe one could say, too 'Victorian' or 'Romantic'. She falls back a lot into dodgy (especially personifying) metaphors of eg 'And now night donned his cloak and swept all about him', which seem below the level of the best of what she is trying to do.

― the pinefox, Saturday, January 19, 2019 3:03 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that middle section might be interesting to reread in the light of the recent turn towards ecofiction or whatever we're calling it: the mission it perhaps shares with the powers novel from last year

Some of us start bad and then deteriorate. xp

James Morrison: fair observations on both counts.

PS I had not seen Tim's important addendum. Also accurate.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

I've started Robert Saviano's Gomorrah - partly because I've always wanted to know more about Naples and partly for some background for the Ferrante novels (of which I've read the first). It's gripping enough, so far.

Back on Iris Murdoch, UNDER THE NET. Going very slowly with this, though. Coincidentally and rather randomly Michael Wood recently reviewed it for the LRB.

Outline by Rachel cusk

a couple John Scalzi novels: The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire

Giorgio Scerbanenco's 1966 Milan-based noir novel A Private Venus, which was very simple in its story but pretty exceptional I thought.

Read Harry Martinssons epic poem 'Ainara' about a spaceship that gets thrown off course and hurtles towards infinity. It's been adapted to the big screen. It's good.

Currently reading Homer's The Iliad in the Robert Fagles translation.