Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1941

Fucking LOVE An Béal Bocht but haven’t read it in forever. Just remember it being funny as fuck. It’s a pastiche of all those misery type memoirs like Peig. I’ve only read it in English though so can’t comment on the original. Strangely, the Irish original is by Myles na gCopaleen?

xps to Daniel Black Beauty isn’t here, alas, or I would have slammed the vote button for that. 1877!

the Nabokov is the only one I've read here, I think.

my mom was a big mystery fan in the 70s and I vividly remember all the Ngaio Marsh books on her shelves

I chose the Ngaio just because that's one helluva title.

yes gyac sorry I meant the Black STALLION

Think I may have read the Stein, Heinlein and Wolfe, but the only one I really remember, overall and in some words on the page, is Colette's Julie de Carneilhan, which motivated me to type several grafs into What Are You Reading? several years ago: she's not so young yet still restless, an Indian Summer babe in the country---the worn, dusty vintage family farm--and the city, with for instance, in the passage I quote, a younger man, whose attentions she craves whose solicitude she resists, taking it as a marker of her age, though she wants to swoop down and defend him from "these bitches" all over town, other things going on, as we run around Paris: a novella, tight enough and layered and lambent and jostling too.

whose attentions she demands and craves.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is good but this has to be Hangover Square. Poor George Bone.

Not read a whole lot but this is easily 'Thomas the Obscure' by Blanchot for me. A staggering stream-of-consciousness work that is at times blissfully dreamy, at times utterly nightmarish. Catnip.

Blood On The Forge by William Attaway -- brutal little masterpiece

The G String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee -- lots of fun, no wonder Carson McCullers had a crush on her when they shared a house together

Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain -- I know I've read this and it was good but overshadowed by his other more overtly crime stuff for me

The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov -- Nobokov + chess is great, obviously

Reflections In A Golden Eye by Carson McCullers -- I really liked this, though Member of the Wedding is better

Storm by George Rippey Stewart -- fascinating book in which a massive storm in California is the main protagonist; individual humans only enter the plot briefly to be killed or to struggle

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Shulberg -- another screenwriter-flailing-in-Hollywood book, of which I could read an endless supply

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf -- wonderfully pitched social comedy , though I could have done with a fair bit less of the script of the actual performance itself

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton -- one of my favourite books, really grim and genuinely funny comedy of obsessive, hopeless love and psychosis; poor George Bone indeed

Julie de Carneilhan by Colette -- even lesser Colette is full of beautifully judged observations and pitiless exploration of people on the make

LBI otm

Evil Under the Sun is the only one I've read. It's fine. Not something I'd vote for.

The Long Ships is great

Three Swedish novels in this year btw, which is well above wikipedia average.

The G String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee -- lots of fun, no wonder Carson McCullers had a crush on her when they shared a house together Reminds me that my local library has this, think I might get it tomorrow:

Sherill Tippins, February House : The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Wartime America(2005)

Verified Purchaser Charles S. Houser describes it v. appealingly:

Sherill Tippins has done an amazing job of finding the significant narrative threads in the chaotic convergence of creative lives that occurred in the months before Pearl Harbor when Harper's Bazaar editor George Davis and British expatriate poet W.H. Auden rented a brownstone on 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights and actively recruited other creative artists to live with them. Among the co-renters were Carson McCullers who had recently published her highly acclaimed first novel, "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter," soon-to-be famous British composer Benjamin Britten and his parnter, singer Peter Pears, unpublished novelists Paul and Jane Bowles, Broadway set designer Oliver Smith, writer Richard Wright and his wife, and burlesque sensation Gypsy Rose Lee, who it turns out was the most reliable in the rent-paying department and joined the little "creative commune" on the condition that she could bring her own cook and maid. Her fiscal reliability and drive along with Auden's willingness to take on the unpleasant role of house disciplinarian (collecting rent and other "dues" and establishing and enforcing many house rules) are probably sufficient explanation for why this menage managed to last the two or three years it did.

Tippins wisely focuses her attention on the leading figures (without neglecting to name the many others who partied but did not reside at 7 Middagh--Salvador and Gala Dali, Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine, Erika Mann and her brothers Klaus and Golo, to name a few). One passer-through, Anais Nin, christened the dwelling "February House" because so many of the residents had February birthdays. Tippins has a good knowledge of the works of these creative people and is able to see how one of the artists intentionally or inadvertantly influenced a subsequent work of one of his or her co-residents. For example, McCullers was struggling with the novel that would later become "The Member of the Wedding" when she was able to appropriate an experience from Chester Kallman's childhood to explain her heroine's profound sense of alienation and abandonment (Kallman was Auden's lover).

Tippins other great achievement here was her ability to slice through history and palpably recreate the political atmosphere in pre-war New York and to do so in a way that reflects on both British and US perspectives. She takes a good hard look at the criticism expatriates like Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Britten, and Pears faced from the British press and fellow artists who chose to remain in Great Britian during the war. She is similarly insightful in her analysis of the role the Mann family had in trying to get an apathetic America to respond to the European crisis. A lesser writer might not have bothered with these issues and chosen to report only the salacious and saleable anecdotes about the goings-on of the February House residents.

I highly recommend this book to anyone even passingly interested in one of the artists who lived at 7 Middagh Street (you're sure to learn something new), to anyone who ever wondered how great works of art come about, or to anyone interested in knowing how history and art intersect...

Yeah, February House is very entertaining

blanchot

Think I've read Mildred Pierce certainly seen the film and heard the SY toon.

Also think I've read obrien cos I think I've read the main ones. Not read his Hard Life yet which I should correct.

& otherwise seem to have read too little from this year.

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Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1942

I loved studying Blanchot's criticism and had never read Thomas The Obscure, so I gave it a go. It is exactly the sort of book I usually love, but I found it lacking. A lot of the time I was drumming my fingers going "yeah yeah, everything contains its own negation, every self contains the other, get on with it". I thought that the death chapter and the final chapter had a bit more meat to them, but overall the writing wasn't beautiful enough to carry such a labouring of the point. I certainly didn't hate it, and I was reading on PDF which I dislike doing and that might have soured my mood, but my overall reaction is disappointment.

I hate reading Blanchot in translation, so I can't say I blame you. His writing is a balancing act – it threatens to vanish into its own putative neutrality at every step of the way yet somehow does not, so I certainly don't expect that effect to carry over well into another language. This is especially true of his fiction btw. That said, you might like Death Sentence more, it's less Lautréamont-esque than Thomas the Obscure, which I think of as a work of prose poetry first and foremost.

I did wonder if it might be an issue with translation as well, though I imagine a lot of the people who expressed admiration for it here read the same translation. Would definitely be up for trying more, or hell, even trying again with Thomas in actual book form (my attention does wander when I read things online).

I haven't even so much as skimmed the English translation of Thomas l'Obscur, so for all I know it's a stunning technical feat and my criticism is moot. It's best to take what I say with a grain of salt, since I tend to come down hard on translations in general ('traduttore, traditore' is 100% true as far as I'm concerned despite the superhuman efforts of critical theorists to argue their way around it).

Well, I agree that translations will never have the same meaning as the original. But I also believe that no reading will have the same meaning as the original either (yes, I am a crit theorist, how do you do?).

no reading will have the same meaning as the original

Oh of course, that goes without saying. You could even take it a step further and state – dons sunglasses – that there is no original either. :)

I mean, most things I read and literally everything I write have, at their core, the impossibility of true communication with any other. We do our best with the tools at our disposal, translation included.

xpost lol, YES.

Silly crit theory jokes aside, yeah, that's spot on, and Blanchot himself obviously agreed (see his essay on Benjamin's 'Task of the Translator', reprinted in Friendship). If anything, it's a hang-up of mine since I've done a fair amount of translation over the years and it's always a tremendously frustrating experience that requires you to own up to your inevitable failure (then again, when is that ever not true? Beckett knew a thing or two about this, incidentally).