Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?

As for 'not having seen anybody but Beckett trying it' -- I think it would be fair to point to a host of derivatives, in various veins, from Pinter and Stoppard to, definitely, John Banville, who is sometimes so close as to seem like sheer pastiche. Even Eimear McBride has Beckettian traces, as Adam Mars-Jones pointed out c.10 years ago - and now I think of it she went on to write a more deliberately Beckettian book.

Try also:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/since-beckett-9780826491671/

Thanks! Come to think of it, can imagine Pinter, especially, encouraged by Beckett's approach: the playwright developing a sense of heightened aural realism, voices in his head via "street" cadence and found articulation (individualistic and received), for instance---neither writers' characters are anything like professional or classy, Educated speakers.

Of course, that can be tricky---Beckett can come off too predictably Beckettian on the page---

I started Bowen's short stories and Kawabata's Thousand Cranes.

Dow, FWIW, I think it's accurate to say that Pinter revered Beckett, and thus was hardly even embarrassed by the fact that his (early?) work so obviously resembled Beckett's. There was some slight personal contact between them.

I just happened to hear a radio production of Stoppard's play this week and was - predictably - struck by a certain cadence and rhythm that was derivative of Godot -- again, blatantly and famously so. Again the writer reveres Beckett.

One thing I will suggest is that academic reflection on 'Beckettian tradition' has probably too easily forgotten these obvious stage examples by going off into more rarefied examples in prose fiction (even, say, DeLillo!).

I must read that volume of Bowen stories (which must be about 500pp?).

Gerald Murnane - Tamarisk Row
Hermann Bruger - Tractaus Logico-Suicidalis

Murnane's first novel is dense, exhausting, at times exhilarating read. Not since Proust have I felt such power in the rendering of childhood memory -- a lot of times it feels like a writer, in doing things, is attempting to copy Proust -- and while Murnane has read him the sentences don't feel like Proust at all, he ploughs different depths - even if they can both end up exhausting. Its a hell of an effort too, for a first one.

The Bruger is more of an end of life affair, as the writer goes through 1046 pieces (from a line to a paragraph) of 'suicidology' (he would kill himself a short while after). Weirdly enough its lighter than it sounds: a lot on Kleist, Kafka, Bernhard and other German language writers make an appearance (philosophy but mostly literature). Camus. And...Houdini, his passages on him end up being some of the most moving. The escape artist, almost as if Bruger was writing to cheat death for the very briefest of moments.

Finished David Smith’s translation of César Vallejo’s Trilce, an utterly weird but moving reading experience. I had only read stray poems here and there before, and apparently the Eshleman translation is the one I should seek, but I quite enjoyed the somewhat literal element of Smith’s.

I'm reading and loving Calvino's Mr Palomar. Though I greatly enjoyed The Baron in Trees many years ago, and though should be very much up my strada, I always found Invisible Cities and If... a bit too... ethereal?... in their fabulism for me. This is wonderful though - minutely observed and ruminated episodes of everyday life, like a droll companion to Ponge or a phenomenological M Hulot. Particularly liked the horny tortoises and querelous blackbirds.

― Piedie Gimbel, Sunday, March 5, 2023

If we're still operating on a seasonal turnaround for each new WAYR thread, it's time to move to new digs. I'll happily let anyone who wishes decorate the new place with a title and a welcome mat. I'm a bit burned out atm.

Hermann Bruger

*Burger

I've started on Walter Benjamin, RADIO BENJAMIN: a large collection of his writing for radio.

xxp done.

A halo of warmth in the darkness of the year: what are you reading spring 2023?

thx gyac