Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

A book that is much more dreamlike than FW is Ishiguro's THE UNCONSOLED, though it's not presented as a dream. The dream quality of the whole is implicit.

amis is on thin ice (or as he might write it "exceedingly low temperature h20 arrayed in the manner that one spreads marmite on a morning slice of toasted comestible") talking about stodge and thin gruel tbh

some good dreams in bolaño

"It's not so easy writin' about nothin'." The ole cowpoke settin' at Patti Smith's kitchen table and talkin' while he's writin' (and, come to think of it, sounding and looking like Seinfeld meets one of Smith's ol' buddy Sam Shepherd's plays)(She does mention watching TV, though so far all detective shows) is ignoring her, and she doesn't like that, so she wakes up and goes to the Cafe 'Ito (black coffee, toast, olive oil, table, chair, notebook, pen: all she needs for quite a while) and writes about him, briefly, then goes on to next item. She gives the occasional arresting image its due, but then back to what the hell, dreams? They're not allowed to crowd her waking life, the things that happen as she keeps writing. (The ol' cowpoke does poke his oblivious head back in occasionally.

Sorry, that's Station M, my current bedtime buzz.

Dreamlike Vs a depiction of a dream seems to be the error here.

(M Train, that is) she's good at both, more into the former, and only as these things come by the intent, fairly careful traveler.

In Homeland Elegies, Ayad Ahktar's somewhat autobiographical novel, the Pakistani-American narrator has himself set (with pen tied to hand, I think) to record dreams as soon as he wakes, for a while. Mainly, he manages to write down a sequence about going up into the hills in the old country, near the town where he still has a lot of relatives, a place he used to visit occasionally. Now he's reminded of things he saw and how they and the new-seeming dream images relate to thoughts about his family and their situations that had faded into the background, as given, at best, as he'd become more self-absorbed.
It's not that long a passage, but all the parts about his family, in Pakistan and America, give the book most of its strength (and taking dream lessons, then reverse-engineering the results, is completely in character).

I liked that book

The Housing Lark, Sam Selvon - More straightahead comedic than I remember The Lonely Londoners being. A great Dudes Rock novel (and thus unsurprisingly not great on gender), love the poetry of the language and the liveliness of a London long gone. Selvon should have much higher standing in popular British literature imo.

ah wrong thread