2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

I was pleased to see Henry Adams, writing in the 1880s, make such a clear and unambiguous condemnation of the treatment of native Americans by the US government and racist white settlers. His condemnation was severe, but it mainly consisted of accurately describing how they acted, which was sufficient to comprise a withering critique.

I finished Firbank's VALMOUTH - rather inconclusive ending. Much to say about race in this author I think. I didn't quite feel up to reading more Firbank immediately, so went on to ...

Stan Barstow, A KIND OF LOVING. Absolutely exemplary post-war working-class regional writing sub-genre item -- like SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING but perhaps more fun and entertaining. Very into the minutiae of clothes, workplace, bus fares, etc. The language 'racy' and actually slightly bluer than I'd have expected from a 1960 novel. Strong sense of passion for the woman the hero desires, but the idiom also rather comes unstuck around this - 'Oh, she was just such a marvellous bint', etc - losing its poise and becoming awkward.

I like reading this novel. There is also a page where the protagonist discovers ULYSSES and it's described pretty accurately.

I've read Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. It depicts girls at border schools, very minimalistic, with a sense of claustrophobia, sexuality and even insanity just below the surface. Robert Walser is namechecked on page one, Young Törless seems an obvious inspiration.

Now I don't really know what to read. Am going away for the weekend, so will get a lot of time to read, will start a couple of new books. Which ones? That will be revealed this sunday, this place. Stay tuned!

I'm intermittently reading Robert Richardson's intellectual biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire (I know it was recommended on here, but I can't remember where). Richardson's method is to take Coleridge's dictum - quantum scimus sumus - we are what we know - and see how it becomes flesh. It's pretty extraordinary - both as a feat of research and immersion in subject matter and in how it brings Emerson into the present.

Listeing to Tade Thompson's 'Rosewater' on Audible - a Nigerian sci-fi. I like it.

(oh, that's interesting - Rosewater is currently 99p as an ebook from amazon.co.uk)

I'm reading Julian Jackson's superb De Gaulle bio. I finished Conversations with Friends. I wanna reread Daniel Deronda.

Nearly finished Dostoyevsky's Demons, which I keep putting aside. I don't entirely trust the translation (Maguire), especially in contrast with the Ignat Avsey Karamazov I read earlier this year.

I also just read Germaine Brée's Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, which was great, one of the best Proust studies I've found.

Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass
Horacio Castellanos Moya - Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador
Yasunari Kawabata - The Old Capital
JM Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians
Gerald Murnane - Border Districts
Girogio Bassani - The Garden of Finzi-Continis
Italo Svevo - As a Man Grows Older

Did I mention Maigret in Society? In the middle of A Maigret Trio, after Maigret's Failure, in which he was accosted by an obnoxious childhood acquaintance, who remembered him as the smart son of the steward of the local estate of tottering aristo relics (well that's how the kids thought of them). (The "failure" was that he let his feelings affect his professionalism---he thought this, though procedure etc. seemed to go as well as possible, in my own practiced judgement). "Society" here mostly consists of other relics, in Paris, who trigger not only thoughts of those behind the gates in the sticks, but also those who emote and pose in bad French novels ca. 1901 (why that year, does he have specific reading in mind?) Yet the more he reluctantly delves into their affairs, the more he is struck by their unabashed personal mythologizing, the way the principal couple have made their own agreements, taking bits of old code, mores and maybe bad novels too. And whatever else life has presented them with (incl. possibly shady yet faithful retainers and skeevy heirs-in-waiting).
I'm not totally convinced by the revelation of the whodunnit, but in effect the point is that Maigret sees it, wants to believe it---and the epiphany of that is what the whole story has been building to, as he grapples once again with feelings and conduct, based in two kinds of experience.

I finished Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. I don't really get who the target audience for this book is. It's kind of an insular, gnomic self-consciously Kafkaesque parable (part of the story revolves around a highly speculative conspiracy theory about Kafka) built around the theme of midlife crisis and spiritual wandering. Besides Kafka, it seems to be influenced by the loose and open-ended ruminative novels of W.G. Sebald. I think it was hobbled a bit by the parallel track structure. It made you think maybe the book should have been a couple of novellas, but I guess those are even harder to sell than novels these days, not that I can imagine this sold in any kind of quantity. There were flashes of real squalid human emotion near the end, but I guess the goal was to go for a kind of passive dreamlike flow. A bit too clinical for my taste.

Finished the Henry Cow biography by Benjamin Piekut a couple of weeks ago. Enjoyed it and it filled out my knowledge of a band I've liked for the last 30 odd years since discovering the Concerts lp (at the time it was a toss up between taht and What A Bunch Of Sweeties by the PInk Fairies in the same record shop at the same time.)
Have been reading a book on Cartoon Music by Daniel Goldmark

want to read Caliban and the Witch cos it was brought up as reading material for an art festival that is happening locally.
& maybe reread Religion and the Death of Magic which I've been reminded of by the same festival.

I've put aside Henry Adams' history of the Madison administrations for the duration of a brief beach vacation, during which I am reading Doting, Henry Green. If I run through it quickly I have At Freddie's, Penelope Fitzgerald, as a back up.

Meanwhile, back in the Madison history, after ~450 pp. of excruciatingly pointless diplomacy, the War of 1812 may soon be declared underway. As I recall, it starts badly for my side, but turned out OK in the end. I expect confirmation of these impressions somewhere within the next 800 pp. (the entire book is just shy of 1400 pp.)

I finished Doting, which was quite funny, though not in a belly laugh kind of way. It's more a comedy of manners, so loaded with dialogue that it could be adapted to a screenplay with minimal effort, but with a plot so lacking in resolution that the resulting film would leave its audience highly amused, but vaguely dissatisfied. That's less of a problem for a novel.

As noted in the 2019 Poetry Competition thread, I have also been reading Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese, a third of which consists of poems by Tu Fu. Rexroth captures the highly condensed and suggestive nature of Chinese poetry, where terse concrete imagery, mostly of nature, provides an objective narrative, often coupled with an unstated symbolic one in parallel.

I haven't read a Green novel that didn't compel me to stop for a minute, return to the start of the chapter, and take notes on lacunae.

I started my third reading of Daniel Deronda and will pick up my copy of Corey Robin's Clarence Thomas book in a bit.

Green leaves little doubt about how we are to view his five primary characters. There is no subtlety in the frequency with which he quotes them directly and then describes their words as having been "wailed" at one another. Lacunae aside, they seem transparently rationalizing, selfish and manipulative.

I am nearly finished with At Freddie's and will resume reading the Henry Adams history after I am done with this short novel.

My impression is that it has all of Fitzgerald's customary strengths of concision, acute observation, and dry wit. Its major weakness is that it revolves around the lives and characters of theatrical people, whose oddities make them appear interesting at first, but when carefully probed, even by Fitzgerald's generous eye, they become rather empty and tedious. It seems wise of Penelope to have confined the book to 160 pages.

I'm reading Younghill Kang's East Goes West, a pre-WWII picaresque about an educated Korean youth trying to make it in North America, in a Penguin Classics edition from this year that came out together with three other novels by Asian-American writers. It's funny, observant, and a stylistic marvel.

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Monday, October 28, 2019 9:32 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

have that, must read that

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, October 29, 2019 12:16 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

finished this today finally, after a run of evenings devoted mostly to video games, and indeed you must. Recommended if you like idylls about wanting to read everything, novelistic evidence that people are always the same, lamentations of selling, notes on the Machine Age.

donald antrim - elect mister robinson for a better world

it's a riot

Yeah all of Antrim is great. The Hundred Brothers especially and the memoir about his mother...

His father taught an Eliot course I took in my undergrad years.

I'm about halfway through Middle England by Jonathan Coe. Not sure it will help me understand Brexit any better but so far it is an enjoyably droll domestic comedy that seeks to take a cross-section of society.

i've only read his stories in the emerald light in the air and was totally unprepared for how flat-out bonkers and surreal elect mister robinson is. the combination of over-the-top violence and his measured, beautifully constructed sentences is hysterical

Don’t want to stop reading. started reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and knocked out the first quarter of it already.

That's a coincidence, Silby, I saw a documentary on her last night and also wanted to read this novel!

I would also like to read MIDDLE ENGLAND some time.

I am still reading A KIND OF LOVING. It's very enjoyable. I have my next two novels after lined up already.

Enjoying The Flamethrowers, though the early 20th century Italy bits fascinate me more than the 1970's NYC bits, which as a time and setting feels a bit overexplored. That being said I did read some of that during breakfast yesterday and the place I was at played "Street Fightin' Man" and "Pale Blue Eyes", it was pretty lol.

I've pretty much admitted defeat with Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's partly my state of mind, partly having left large gaps between reading and partly my being unable to deal with books that basically require me to construct a family tree. I've fallen through the elisions and can find it in me to care what happens to anyone.

Don’t want to stop reading. started reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and knocked out the first quarter of it already.

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Sunday, November 17, 2019 9:41 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

perfect book

the kindness of her spirit inhabits her work in a way that really moves me.

I've pretty much admitted defeat with Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's partly my state of mind, partly having left large gaps between reading and partly my being unable to deal with books that basically require me to construct a family tree. I've fallen through the elisions and can find it in me to care what happens to anyone.

― Life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering...save string (Chinaski),

When I recorded my experiences about four years ago here, I was so disappointed with my first Fitzgerald that I kept away until I gave The Bookshop and Offshore a try. I'm glad I did.

It never surprises me when a book I loved fails to connect with another reader. I've often enough been on the other end of that event, eagerly seeking out a book that was praised by a trusted source and finding no joy in it. Reading is very personal and personal conditions vary almost as much within individuals and between them. Maybe try again later, but only if your curiosity has revived.

"The Fall and the Rise and The Fall" Brix Smith Start
"My First Summer in the Sierras" John Muir
"The Great God Pan and Other Stories of Horror" Arthur Machen

I'll definitely try more Fitzgerald. I'll have a break and maybe give this another go. I've been reading lots about Kant and Coleridge so it's a good fit in terms of subject matter if nothing else.

The Great God Pan is fantastic.

there were certain parts that were particularly great but idk, not sold on him tbh. It was almost comical how deeply misogynistic the first two stories were, uptight British men quailing before the unutterable evil that is femininity wot wot. Just ridiculous.

I also don't find the Wicker Man scary... as a theme, "civilized" Brits recoiling at paganism more often strikes me as deeply silly than as horrific.

I assume Anglo-Paganism as a theme for horror is some sort of cultural working-out of the cultural loss from Christianity's ascendancy. Same with heavy metal.

Machen is certainly ridiculous and reprehensible in places but he does access something to do with the unrepresentable and the uncanny. And I'd agree that this particular brand of landscape horror isn't (only) about class but about loss.

I do like his Arabian Nights-nested narration structures and there are passages that are just fantastic so I'll probably finish it. It's a good follow-on from "Voyage to Arcturus" (which was admittedly even more phantasmagorical and insane)

I've been looking at a Machen volume that was presumably brought into the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop for Halloween. Think it might be that one, have been meaning to pick an anthology up by him for a while. Think I have an illustrated thing by him somewhere that came out about 20 odd years ago.

Looks like it might be The White People and other stories.

I do enjoy this picture of turn of the century London that he paints, where it's just full of unemployed dandies bumping into each other and trading salacious gossip over endless bottles of chianti

The new Julian Barnes, 'The Man in the Red Coat', is a sort of biography but a very achronological and expansive and meandering one. Really beautifully done, actually: an elegant and witty wander through Belle Époque Paris. Barnes is the only one of those Best Young Writers of 1983 or whatever it was that I would still make strong claims for. And this includes a lot of writing about art and artists, which he's very strong on.

I just ordered that one on the basis of some great reviews I read. Looking forward to it.

It's impressive how Barnes has kept writing books - so many book, so regularly. He's never given up or run out of ideas. I'm glad if this new one is doing well.

It’s odd: he’s not one of my favourite authors, but he takes up a lot of shelf space.

Finished A KIND OF LOVING at last.

Very good: dense, down to earth, droll, thoughtful. Surely one of the best works of its particular genre / movement / era.

Just read Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley. Wonderful. Written in a slightly clipped arcane 1930s vernacular without seeming forced, and dealing with contemporary issues of English identity in a slyly murderous way. FFO The Falling, Ben Wheatley and the gothic pastoral in general. May contain scenes of harvesting.

Half way through and loving it, the evocation of time and place and customs and atmosphere is just incredible.

Been dipping into the book on Cartoon Music which is various essays by different people on various aspects of teh subject from the beginning of film adaptation to the current day of when the book was published.
Pretty interesting.

Found a cheap copy of Viv Albertine's 2nd book To Return Unopened which I read about the 1st chapter of.
Really enjoyed her 1st book with the repetitive title which covered her punk etc years.