The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading?

Short intro on French Revolution.

I'm about 85% through The Dispossessed. It is an interesting book to me, mostly for reasons other than what Le Guin wanted me to be interested in. It is both crammed with matter and action, while at the same time it is oddly impoverished. The plot has managed to incorporate a couple dozen themes, including (but not limited to) exile, linguistics, the physics of time, cultural norms, anarchy, dreams, capitalism, sexuality, proxy war, censorship, ecology, marriage, the role of the scientist in an economy, and class war.

Le Guin obviously was an intelligent, curious and perceptive person who investigated every academic subject she encountered and thought broadly about global current events. She has an incisive opinion on all these themes and weaves them all into a story that has a convenient hook upon which she can hang each of these incisive opinions and perspectives. But all these abundant ideas are given only brief notice before passing on to the next one. Each is a little capsule of intellect, but each contains no more than that. They're provocative hints, but stop there.

For me, this makes it a queer sort of novel. Kind of like eating a 24 course meal of intellectual tapas or dim sum. Or watching a film festival showing with 90 minutes worth of 3 minute animations. How she did this is a fascination to me, mainly because of its novelty compared to my normal reading, but I'm fairly sure that almost nothing of this book will stick with me past the moment I read the last page.

Last night I started reading The Day of the Owl, Leonardo Sciascia. It's an NYRB reissue of a Sicilian author; it was written in 1961 and concerns a mafia killing. Good so far.

Sciascia is genuinely great IMO.

Gert Hofmann, The Parable of the Blind: wonderful

Cool! Is it translated by his son, Michael Hofmann: poet, translator, critic?

Been a long time since I read The Dispossessed--early 90s, if not late 80s---but what's stayed with me is the sense of a group, which sees itself/has inherited the self-image of a principled community, now challenged by the option of taking a chance on unprecedented adaptation (true to the spirit, not the letter?), or of trying to stay the course, and maybe stagnating at best.

Present-buying question. Can anyone recommend any good travel journalism or non-fiction about Australia, that's not written from a Brit/white/outsider perspective?

Not a Michael Hofmann translation--though he does write an afterword! It's a Christopher Middleton translation.

Off the top of my head, recenti-ish Australian non-fic by Australians, would recommend
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/leviathan-9781742741628 (excellent, blackly funny history of Sydney)
http://www.nicholasjose.com.au/books/black-sheep-journey-to-borroloola/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tall_Man:_Death_and_Life_on_Palm_Island (true crime)

Travel: this is a series by novelists about their home cities. Haven't read the one on Brisbane, but be warned that the author is a nitwit.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/67917

Edouard Louis - Who Killed My Father - read this for university, I guess pop auto-fiction with a short, sharp, political message about France. It's sort of written as a letter to the author's father, personal relationships mixed with the father's industrial injury and subsequent struggles with the state.

I guess I feel like auto-fiction or creative nonfiction seems incredibly fashionable and I'm a bit suspicious of it all. Dunno if it's the Catholic in me but it sort of feels like the literary equivalent of a selfie. This was a decent personal story though.

I'm nearing the end of the collected stories of John McGahern which I think I mentioned upthread. It's been on the Kindle app on my phone for times when I don't have a papperback. A really giant collection, so much mournful Catholic regret. Like anything that comprehensive it is not without its duds. The meandering, meditative and I suppose emotionally soft nature of the stories is sometimes refreshing and other times just old-fashioned. Still, it has the same deep compassion for its characters as William Trevor or the like, I enjoy that a lot.

paperback* ffs

A history of Korea by Kyung Moon Hwang, in anticipation of visiting (South) Korea for my honeymoon.

I finished The Day of the Owl last night. It conveys what seems like a very accurate picture of how the mafia was deeply enmeshed in the fabric of rural Sicily and how it operated when the book was written in 1961, and it does so with great economy of plot and detail. The characters are beautifully drawn with a minimum of strokes, too. Very good stuff.

I'm now about 50 pp. into Vertigo, Sebald. So far it seems rather disjointed and pointless to me. He writes one sentence after another and each successive sentence tracks with the preceding one, but they never culminate in anything noteworthy. I'll keep trying, but this book may be one of my failures to thrive.

Sebald makes me feel like I'm really not getting something. It reads like dull wittering to me, like being trapped inside a boring Harper's article for all eternity.

The best I can make out so far is that the reader is asked to be held in a state of cumulative admiration for the calm purity of the author's prose. What I cannot figure out yet is what end all that calm purity is written to serve. Maybe that will emerge later on, but any end we might be travelling toward is obscured by a complete lack of purposeful direction.

haven't been on ILB for a while, so am a bit ring rusty:

Fireflies – Luis Sagasti trans. Fionn Petch. I did not enjoy this book, but wonder whether I missed something. There's a sort of book which contains essayistic observations on a range of often quite disparate things and in some way links them together. I struggle with these sorts of books. Eliot's phrase from The Waste Land always pops into my head

'On Margate Sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing'

Or connecting anything with nothing, or anything with anything. It feels like writing on easy mode, and the lack of constraint means nothing really emerges out of the text. I think the most successful aspect was its forced metaphysics where the mouth is a cervical passage, which can both give birth to a void and accept a void in, and the irreducible elements of the cosmos are the stars and the cold only. It's spare and weird, and yes, forced, and I liked it. The book also reminded me I should read some Bashō.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein. Very good this. Been on my pile for a while, but never got round to it because I felt it would probably cover the same ground as philosopher Ian Hacking's The Taming of Chance. And so it does, but it's got a different focus, more on the practical applications of understanding future probabilities than their philosophical implications. The chapters are nicely shaped around the various mathematicians, scientists and social thinkers who have developed this area, and Bernstein writes clearly. One big takeaway is how easy it was to troll Johann Gauss:

Gauss took special pride in his achievements in astronomy, feeling that he was following in the footsteps of Newton, his great hero. Given his admiration for Newton’s discoveries, he grew apoplectic at any reference to the story that the fall of an apple on Newton’s head had been the inspiration for discovering the law of gravity.

Journals - RF Langley. Really great. I'll update on the journals thread as there's plenty that deserves attention. A Gerard Hopkins level of attention to the natural world, especially the insects, but also a non-Hopkins of how the world around him relates to feeling, sensation, understanding and (artistic) expression – the Romantic logic in a non-Romantic age. One passage in particular struck me. Langley is driving his car along the wintry Suffolk country roads with his companion Barbara:

..I take a stretch of the road too fast, lose all control, and we twist, first into the opposite lane, on the compacted snow, then spin right round to the left and mount the verge into a drift and the hedge, where the car stalls. The only other car on the scene, following us, stops, and I see the driver agape. Complete unshaken, for some reason, I referse out of the drift onto the road, facing back towards Southwold, nod to him as he mouths 'All right?' and drive back to the entrance to the girls' school, where we turn round. .. What might have happened did not. Goldwater did not become President. A meteorite has not yet blasted the Earth. It helps to narrow down the line to what did happen, and strip the swathings of possibles away. But I don't know what happened, in any final way, as I drove off the road. Even as it happened I was blaming Barbara, blaming the tape of Russian chant we had on the recorder, both such crass miswritings that they have nothing extra to tell, because I already know that sort of cheapness in myself.

Miswritings. The use of the word here fascinates me. Not misreadings. My immediate notes (not very good, sorry), were this:

Our continual and immediate midrashic commentary on the world. The world is rich, infinitely interpretable (or containing so much it is inexhaustible - not infinite, not the same as infinity which is a sort of logical nihilism). “Or does it leak” (after RFL has iterated the minute domestic sounds and clankings as an example of the continual richness to be found at any time and in any place).

Our midrashic commentary is also inexhaustible but is separate to that which the world contains (tho as we know the world must also contain it) meaning it may catch it correctly at times, is enough to be able to get on with, at times, and can be miswritten, deliberately or otherwise.

and so the importance of poetry, see also the end of the remarkable entry in the church from August 1988:

"The image that comes unexpectedly, not illustrating a predetermined thought or mood. That poetry should be like that. To fetch the sudden, shining fish in your bill. Riskily."

later, studying an unnameable insect making its toilsome way across the railway bridge ledge (p99):

> There is nothing for it to look forward to. *It will never be seen by anyone who has words again*. (my italics)

or

> Leaves and words. A general tumbling around what is proper, what might cover the situation.

Europe at Dawn - the last of Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe trilogy, which I've enjoyed less and less as it's gone on. Thought 1&2 were great. Struggled to keep up with the cast of 3&4, and found some of the writing a bit painful. The conceit was less interesting once it was fully uncovered I think. Also, on an editing note, how do you get two passages like this within a page of each other?

Amsterdam was a quiet, haunted place. The Low Countries had been hit hard by the Xian Flu and for a long time, even after the pandemic had burned itself out, very few tourists had come here. The trade still hadn’t recovered in any meaningful way;

The place was half empty. The Netherlands had borne the brunt of the Xian Flu, and unlike, say, England, they had somehow not quite bounced back. Alice couldn’t remember how many people they had lost but she knew it was a large percentage of the fifty million or so who had died in Europe during the pandemic. There was a reflective, slightly haunted feeling about Amsterdam which grew even worse once you were out in the countryside.

Territory of Light – Yūko Tsushima. Loved this. In a sense its a sort of micro-genre with which we're very familiar now. A young woman with a child, managing a break up which is like much else opaque and confusing to her. The immediate thing I was reminded of when reading was Elena Ferrante. But of course this was published in 1979, in Japan. An observation I didn't make until quite late, and felt it applies to Ferrante as well, tho haven't gone back to check, is that the way the material of the emnotional crisis is managed is in an extremely *sensory* way, that is the content of the book. Sensory confusions, breakdowns, and interpretations, moments of relief and intense oppression. That's separating out the elements too much: this is an emotional-sensory experience. The crisis of sensation and emotion that is a young child.

Some other points of note: this was serialised in chapters, and remembering that when you're reading gives each chapter the sense of a pearl on a necklace. Independent of, but belonging to, the 'novel'. The chapters will often be centred round a dream – that sensory presentation allows for a wonderful interpenetration of the dream and quotidian world. Psychic fear appears in incongruous places.

There are shadowy figures of oppression around here (representative you feel of the sexual politics of Japan at the time, a subject I know nothing about). But there are also strange allies. An immobile drunk, a passive student, oddly sexualised dream figures. These allies are characterised by physical *presence*. They may be or seem unpleasant or unhelpful in themselves, but the solidity of their bodies helps the mother and daughter through the book.

This is not, as far as I am aware, an autobiographical book, yet an extraordinary passage towards the end seems to contain the force of the novel, and acquires its force from the knowledge that Tsushima's father, the writer Osamu Dazai, committed suicide when she was one. This passage seems in some ways to provide the key to what the book has at its heart and emphasises why the need for physical bodies is expressed in the book.

I guess I feel like auto-fiction or creative nonfiction seems incredibly fashionable and I'm a bit suspicious of it all. Dunno if it's the Catholic in me but it sort of feels like the literary equivalent of a selfie. This was a decent personal story though.

i’d add zin

Sebald makes me feel like I'm really not getting something. It reads like dull wittering to me, like being trapped inside a boring Harper's article for all eternity.

After reading another ~50 pp. of Vertigo last night, I decided to lay it aside for something else. My second notable 'fail' this year. Some day I might try another of his books to see what he has to offer, but not this one.

@wins I understood auto-fiction to be a term which is quite old, that's the context in which I heard of it. I think it's hard to deny writing about the self, creative non-fiction, call it what you will, is in fashion though. It is huge in academia and there are a lot of best sellers.

I don't know if that quote sheds much light for me, of course all fiction draws on the self and at some point the two blend into each other, but some of the non-fiction that's popular at the moment is pretty deeply about the self in a way that goes beyond the smoke and mirrors or fiction.

As for the selfie thing, I mean I don't generally dismiss the selfie either but I cited them generally as I think at worst they can be symptomatic of an age or narcissism. Sometimes in creative non-fiction I find myself thinking I am bored by the writer's determination to aggrandise their own life. It's not quite the same as disliking a character in a work of fiction, to me.

*of - both times

I know the term’s been around awhile, just suggesting the concept is older (Proust et al as Laing cites), also didn’t mean to suggest it isn’t a thing that’s au courant with varying levels of success. I guess I’m wondering if there’s an objection to the premise itself as opposed to the examples you’ve read, and do you have the same issues (“the writer's determination to aggrandise their own life”) with “straight” memoir?

they can be symptomatic of an age of narcissism

My sense is that public life has grown so disconnected from the wellsprings of meaningful action that people are turning inward to a degree that was not common back when communities were smaller and more isolated. People are feeling that the power to effect change has drifted away from them, flowing upward to concentrate in ever more remote and 'elite' centers they feel no connection to and have no influence upon. I would guess that this trend is not due to narcissism so much as social fragmentation.

It is hard for me to distinguish it from memoir at this point - I'm coming to the end of a creative writing MA and there were two separate modules for this type of writing, "creative non-fiction" and "writing the self". I didn't take either of them but I've read a lot of work of that type as a result of swapping stuff or seeing people's work in the wild. A lot of it was like memoir, a bit.

Except my feeling is that memoir or eg the sort of non-fiction I probably read via the Longform website every day tend to be very concerned with representing the facts as far as possible, whereas maybe these more modern forms seem to fictionalise factual stories freely, or even disregard facts.

Yet they're still putting themselves as characters in the story, it just feels sort of disingenuous to me.

I guess something like Knausgaard felt so boring, deliberately and otherwise, that my only concerns about the "truth" were the ethical side of things as regards his family etc, which I don't really have to think about I suppose. But it's still bad if I do.

Louis's book felt very true to me, though for all I know it isn't. In parts I guess I felt like a person insisting to me that I be concerned with minute details of their life and their suffering but with no sense of trust that they're not lying to me. And yes I could just run with it regardless, I sort of can.

But when I read this style and it's classmates or people I know, it can be more difficult to allow them the leeway and easier to guess what's fabricated, that sort of makes it all feel a bit like a house of cards.

I suppose I think at heart most people's lives aren't interesting enough to merit being made into auto-fiction. I definitely think that about my own life, even the parts I know I'd be encouraged to write about if I took an auto-fiction class.

It feels sort of egotistical whereas I've found writing fiction to be a process that strips away a lot of that. It is very hard to extricate from two years of a lot of change in how I think about books and stories though, so apologies if none of that makes sense.

xpost

TLDR I sometimes feel emotionally manipulated by it

Read and enjoyed Dave Weigel's prog history. Now working my way through Grand Hotel Abyss, was tough going for the first 60 pages, but really opens up after that. Great introduction to the work and personalities of the Frankfurt School, putting them in much needed historical context.

Which of these doorstoppers should I try to tackle next?

2666
The Pale King
The Silmarillion
1919 (Pt 2 of USA trilogy)
Gravity's Rainbow

I "enjoyed" 2666 and can recommend it as a highly worthwhile book. But it can be harrowing at times. I found The Pale King to be uneven and fitfully interesting. I could not finish Gravity's Rainbow. The others, I can't say.

That makes perfect sense fh. I think I’d need to read more of the stuff that’s lumped in with this (have read like 10 pages of knausgaard) but I have a feeling the things that bother you wouldn’t bother me if I thought the writing had merit otherwise

I see that, like in a way they are sort of technicalities. I feel like this shouldn't matter in art but maybe my MA gives me a sort of warped sense of this, plus it makes me speculate about "what if I personally knew this writer" - again a technicality.

I saw Julian Barnes speak a year ago (never read any of his books) and he said "fiction is telling hard exact truths through beautiful elaborate lies" and it's one of my favourite quotes about writing, but to me maybe auto-fiction etc is that inverted.

gravity's rainbow is extremely rewarding but takes a lot of effort

which reminds me that if i ever finish doctor faustus i really want to read mason & dixon next

I have started Doctor Faustus four times. Yet I read Joseph and His Brothers blissfully, wishing it were 16 volumes.

As for Sebald, Aimless, Vertigo is his least interesting "novel." The Emigrants, which at least presents itself as a story collection, has a couple of gems. His best work is Austerlitz, which also presents itself as a meditation on post-Napoleonic Europe.

Finally, I don't wish to connect them other than they write a fiction that's purportedly autobiographical but I doubt is, I vastly prefer Elena Ferrante to Knausgaard. She has a relish for basic narrative besides a curiosity about other people that makes Knausgaard look insufferable.

I’m the kind of degenerate who loves and agrees with every good “fiction is <x>” quote while absently gathering up counterexamples in my mind

xp Ferrante I have read (the first Neapolitan novel) but was unsure if that even purports to be autobiographical

I never assume anything is autobiographical, despite the artist's best efforts to promote it as such. I know how it works.

at the moment:

- re-reading Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse, which remains one of the most harrowing poems I've ever read.

- a catalog of Dana Claxton's first major retrospective

- the introductory pages to a massive and rare Lakota/English dictionary that my friend gave to me

- Christa Wolf's Accident: A Day's News, which i purchased for a dollar at the local sidewalk sale today

i should probably really get on reading more to prepare for my classes this fall, but oh well.

the rings of saturn is my favorite book, vertigo is a very early draft of what he ends up achieving there

re: sebald, which i feel like i end up in a sebald conversation on ilx at least once a month

an addendum to the auto-fiction piece - although it didn’t have the name at the time Jocelyn Brooke writes in this mode and i wrote fairly extensively about the opportunities and problems it presents here.

It helps that Brooke is an exceptional writer. But there are some specifics that i think led him to this mode. he cites his shyness, and also wanting to avoid “the laws of libel”, and between the two seems to sit Brooke’s only partially successfully expressed sexuality, which is of a part with a habitual self-effacement and irony.

the autobiographical mode appears to be chosen because he had a strong sense of the places he inhabits, and the people who he has encountered. the self-effacement and laws of libel, the imperative of art and aesthetic means he sifts the elements into fiction.

it works very well, for me.

it is i think as Alfred said - it can be unclear even when an author states a thing to be one or the other, whether that is in fact the case. both involve emphasis and selection.

Brooke quotes Thomas Browne in relation to this very matter:

Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths; Wherein Falsehood and Truth seem almost aequilibriously stated, and but a few grains of distinction to bear down the balance... Besides, many things are known, as some are seen, that is by Parallaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper beings, the superficial regard of things having a different aspect from their true and central Natures.

I tried to re-read Austerlitz a year or so ago and found it too much. It has a kind of structural melancholy that seeps into your bones. Like all Sebald's first-person narrators the story the narrator is really telling - beneath the still surface of his tightly controlled sentences - is of actual and deferred silence. All of his work seems to orbit this absence and I think that's why it possible to find him directionless or not providing nourishment.

I need to think about Fizzles' post about Langley. He's a magician.

I need to think about Fizzles' post about Langley. He's a magician.

I looked it up! I can totally see how Langley is a kind of mystic, reading nature as a holy text (without the attendant naffness that that implies - eg like Iain Sinclair at his worst).

Finally, I don't wish to connect them other than they write a fiction that's purportedly autobiographical but I doubt is, I vastly prefer Elena Ferrante to Knausgaard. She has a relish for basic narrative besides a curiosity about other people that makes Knausgaard look insufferable.

Jumping into this, if you put craft to one side (which you can't ofc) I think part of my enjoyment of Ferrante is that to me it is inherently fascinating to hear about what it was like growing up poor in 1950's Naples, and I'm more than willing to take some embellishments along with that (assume most ppl talking about "the old days" irl are embellishing to make their narratives more interesting too, besides memory being an unreliable narrator anyway). Hiero's fellow student's experiences will probably be fascinating on that level too, in some future and for people in different places, tho I see that this doesn't make them any more interesting here and now.

Semi-related: I sometimes feel like proto-reality tv - Chronicle Of A Summer, Place De La Repúblique, the Up series, as well as oral histories, Studs Terkel's stuff - is my favourite genre in any medium, tho i don't care much about reality TV itself.

I'm reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, translated by Bernard Scudder. I've read nearly one Icelandic saga per year for about a decade now. It's been a good run, but this may be about the last one I'm interested in.

180pp into Empson, after a digression back into Finnegans Wake with HOW JOYCE WROTE 'FINNEGANS WAKE' and Burgess's SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE.

This last does seem a real way that one could read the book (I have read the book) but even with the clarifying frames every few pages there is still often a sense of hypnotic drift among the sounds. But then, line by line it is often clear enough. So perhaps the drift is a version of what happens with so much reading, not just FW.

Burgess's introduction is admirable but tends to confirm my long-held view that the frame / story of the book is not good and doesn't do justice to its texture.

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is not rewarding and takes a lot of effort.

About to start Roadside Picnic. Hurrah. I really want to read russian lit. Only book I read is bulgakov’ master n marg.