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

After finishing An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym I have a hard time understanding what her publisher could have been thinking by rejecting it in 1963. It had to wait for posthumous publication in 1982. It was well up to her standards and made me laugh out loud several times.

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's *A Time to Keep Silence*, a short book about various monasteries Fermor visited or stayed at in the 1950s. There's something unreal about Fermor. He lived a bizarre, extraordinary life. One brief section of his Wiki page reads:

He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute, and was among a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to the occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander, Major General Heinrich Kreipe.[14]

For all that, everything carries the taint of privilege; as such, this kind of asceticism though partly born of genuine curiosity can also feel performative. There's something so luxuriant about his prose at times, that I find myself snorting - wanting to tug a forelock in admiration but also wanting to toss the book aside. I'm here for the polyglot virtuosity, the specialist vocabularies, for the lone enraptured male loose in the bowels of a monastery meditating on the transience of life, but I don't know, it feels problematic.

Then something like this happens and I'm gliding along his sentences like a supplicant.

[The monasteries] emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blackberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant had been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

more of Ed Yong's An Immense World.
got through first chapter where he talks about smell and taste and how they are experienced and differentiated.
Really enjoying this . So yeah recommend it.
Think I'll definitely be looking to read his other one after this.
But maybe I shouldn't keep adding new books to my currently reading active pile.

to which I just added
Linda Nochlin Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists.
the book which is part of the birth of feminist art criticism. & If I had been more on top of things i mjight have got as part of an anthology of her work that I've seen is in the library system. NOt as yet sure if exactly the same edit of the main essay is in that though. So may well order that once I'm through here.
Have listened to a few podcasts on her and interviews with her in the run up to this arriving. Want to know more. Seemed to be a title that should have some interesting discussion behind. I think the one complaint i saw about this was that there was very little reflection on artists of colour in here. I did hear her bring up the lack of recognition of artists of other ethnicities in the interview though.
Oh well, looking forward to this.

Started another audiobook, Lampedusa by Steven Price. I really enjoyed By Gaslight. This is completely different; it's a novel about the last years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, when he was diagnosed with emphysema and began work on the book. Price was published as a poet before he started writing novels. His prose really sings, and his storytelling is quite intricate and recursive.

A Time to Keep Silence is a great book!

heinrich von kleist - michael kohlhaas

Martin Amis, THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ (1981). I won't read or reread it all.

Love Kleist's short stories, great stuff.

You have doubtless seen it, Chinaski, but if not the Archers' Ill Met by Moonlight is a pretty funny 1957 fabulation of PLF's time bamboozling Nazis on Crete, starring Dirk Bogarde in an implausible moustache.

I finished Tanizaki's The Maids, started Amis' The Information.

Kleist is one of my favourite short story writers ever. Michael Kohlhaas is a must as far as novellas go.

The translation on Archipelago collates all of these.

A Wreath for Udomo, Peter Abrahams. A fictionalised account of an African independence movement, written in 1956 before the first tropical african country gained independence. The prose is kind of middle of the road but it's engaging and an interesting glimpse into the optimism of that era.

Killers of the flower moon

Thanks for the heads up Piedie - my Powell and Pressburger knowledge stops at the Small Back Room so will have to check this one out.

my post about xp Killers of the Flower Moon on the True Crime thread started w impression that it was a kind of slo-mo, long game, Oklahoma hill country version of the Oklahoma City Black Wall Street Massacre, but more "rational" in a way because making money from murder, with the cultural x class corruption---mostly local, but extending as far as Washington when nec., also entwined with the class-racial etc layers of curruption already there, entwined with interests in other parts of the nation and other nations---not really that rational, not nec so prudent, the longer the process, the legal ramifications, and and the author's research go on. For one example, as soon as someone thought to compare local and other death rates of that era, obvious disparities were found. And many deaths, not necessarily related to anyone's known financial gain, to any other motivation, were never investigated very thoroughly, if at all.

That's back in the day, but eventually the author meets descendants of the victims (and, in some cases, their killers), still conducting their own research.

meaning descendants of victims *and* of their killers

cultural x class corruption---mostly local, but extending as far as Washington when nec.

Although, at least in the first reading, I sometimes felt like the author's process of investigating the evil process, following the blood money and emerging madness, felt like the chain of whites, incl the notorious J. Edgar and his investigators, reliable and otherwise, could overshadow the Indians, including ones (usually "mixed")who had actually achieved some standing in the visible, ostensible means of governance beyond tribal councils. But in the concluding section, when the author gets to know xpost descendants, points of view, also questions, expand quite a bit.

I'm reading Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg. She writes about memories of her family and their circle of acquaintances, but her handling of the material is a bit peculiar. For one thing, she is usually peripheral to the incident she is relating. It feels more like a novel about how families create an internal identity, but a novel that was subjected to the discipline of only using personal memories of her own family. I'm enjoying it.

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by matthew campbell and kit chellel sounded appealing when it was reviewed in the LRB a couple of months back and indeed it was. vaguelly le carre esque in themes and settings, but non-fiction and more plodding in style. perhaps could have been a long new yorker article (or, presumably as it will be, a movie) rather than an entire book, but if you like this kind of stuff then it works at book length.

American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I'm not in any way looking forward to the nolan oppenheimer movie, but i do drive past a huge billboard every day and it finally prompted me to read the canonical doorstop biography of him. pretty good! at the risk of stating the obvious, the guy who built the atom bomb was an interesting and in many ways awful person. if a book about that sounds interesting then you will like this.

i started reading the new cormac mccarthy duology right after this without knowing that it's (afaict) a fictional retelling (?) of the (incredibly fucked up irl) life of oppenheimer's kids (daughter took her own life, son ended up a carpenter in NM). i need a break from oppenheimer though, so i'll read those another time.

In the almost ultimate case of "finally reading books I've owned for many years", I at last start on John Braine's ROOM AT THE TOP.

It's surprisingly well-written and moves along quite fast.

I read Amy Key's ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE - an essay-memoir, sparked by her love of Joni Mitchell's Blue, exploring how to live a life without romantic love (AK is in her 40s and hasn't had a partner since her early 20s). Really timely, powerful book, and, among other things, a great work of experiential music criticism - managing to talk about how songs and albums linger in our lives as models, goals, goads to frame our desires and regrets, without ever seeming to reduce them to the kind of prosaic lists-as-autobiography endemic to a lot of blokeish music writing. At the heart of the book is her relationship with the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden - he adored her, but they became friends with benefits (the benefits being cooking, drinking and reading together). It describes quite graphically RL's messy demise and how alcohol-related illness ravaged him mentally and physically. I knew RL a little, and this bit made me feel uncomfortable and wonder how legitimate it is to write this way about friends who have died, can't consent etc. AK is full of awe and praise for RL as a poet, teacher, mentor and friend but also describes the awful squalor of his final months. Personally think I might have been too squeamish to include...

Now reading I'M A FAN by Sheena Patel - really gripping, novel about a woman spiralling into paranoid obsession via stalking a bloke she's sleeping with, his wife and his other gf, via their Instagram stories. Maps the psychodynamics of fandom onto broader social/cultural/post-colonial relations in a way that feels really provocative and suggestive rather than didactic. Feel like I need to go for a long walk without my phone after every chapter though.

Gregor von Rezzori - The Death of my Brother Abel. Stopped this halfway through, just didn't want another 300 pages of a 'failed' novel.

I liked the span of it (from end of Austro-Hungary, to the annexation of Austria, to the polo playing set of the late 60s), but the narrator who writes screenplays but wanted to be a proper novelist gets a bit tiresome. He should've embraced it, and written for TV.

Recently read:

Philip Roth - American Pastoral - really enjoyed this. The frame narrative is interesting, it just glides into the main portion of the book being imagined by the narrator (Zuckerman) based on very little "real" information about the Swede, and then never returns to the frame.

Kelly Link - White Cat, Black Dog - very enjoyable and well-exected folk tale rewrites.

Nick Harkaway - Titanium Noir - tight and pulpy sci-fi detective story set in a world where some rich people have access to an immortality drug that also makes them physically larger and less human with every dose.

Michael Broers - Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled

Philip Roth - American Pastoral - really enjoyed this. The frame narrative is interesting, it just glides into the main portion of the book being imagined by the narrator (Zuckerman) based on very little "real" information about the Swede, and then never returns to the frame.

― Random Restaurateur (Jordan), Wednesday, May 31, 2023

I really loved this book. It starts out like a modern retelling of The Book of Job, about a successful unwavering man who loses everything but who still doesn't lose his faith

except that by the end of this story he concludes that everyone he knows may have a veneer of respectability but that they engage in subversive behaviors, and that he cannot understand the truth about anyone based upon their conduct.

Just finished Mixed Up Files of Basil Frankweiler, which was fun but no Harriet the Spy.

And I’m about 150 pages into Lonesome Dove, which I’m loving even while the length (800 more pages to go!) gives me the jitters

it's been 30 years since i read lonesome dove and the first thing i remember about it is that everybody wants a 'poke'

last month was

stone blind - Medusa's story

women of Troy - modern retelling of life after the second fall of troy

two different translations of Seneca's version of the above

Stephen Fry's Troy, which is the story of troy up to the second sacking. which i enjoyed more than i thought i would given the writer. it's obviously a favourite subject of his.

this month (and probably next) is about 10 sf books from the todo list, all about 250 pages long, picked at random. first up, and the last one i bought, rendezvous with rama

Local library is down to two Roths, counting Everyman, in their discards/donations shop--last one in the stacks: Exit Ghost. Are those good? Kind of attracted/repulsed by skimming, but more the former so far.

how was stone blind? i liked a thousand ships.

Troy is Fry's 3rd book on the Greek myths preceded by Mytho9s and Heroes

yeah. i bought those 2 for a friend's kids and didn't like the chapter i read, hence my trepidation.

i wanted to like stone blind more than i did. for a book about Medusa she seemed very under used and it seemed more about Perseus than her. but then, given the facts, it has to be.

Too many things at the same time again just added

Arlie Russell Hochschild The Managed Heart
The book that coined the term emotional labour. Study of effects of public contact jobs where one has to take jollity all the time.

Sara Ahmed the Feminist Killjoy Handbook
New book on how to be a feminist killjoy

Linda Nochlin Women Artists
Reader of her work

I near the end of ROOM AT THE TOP. A very lively novel. I sense that for 50+ years it's been discussed routinely in terms of big ideas like class, sex, money, maybe the North - which are indeed basic to it, but the big words don't convey the quiddity of the novel. Braine was a better writer, more detailed and ambitious, than you might imagine. He conveys particular places and scenes. He shows feelings ebbing and flowing. When he writes of a fufilling sexual relationship, he heads for Lawrentian ground. He doesn't mind being intense.

I suspect that Braine never matched this novel, but it does have quality, not just as an emblem of an era. Indeed, as for the era: 1957, film a year or two later, it's thought of as a late-1950s text. But it's actually set in the 1940s - as early as 1946 or 1947. Attlee is in power, a businessman says 'Winnie was right, we're ruled by a Gestapo'. The protagonist has what would now be called a traumatic WWII past, in a POW camp and having seen his family's house razed by a bomb. Little of this, either, is well known in the public image of the book.

I'm here for every reference to Harriet the Spy.

Local library is down to two Roths, counting Everyman, in their discards/donations shop--last one in the stacks: Exit Ghost. Are those good?

Everyman is extraordinary and Exit Ghost isn't bad in the horny-aging-writer genre. I loved those years when there was a Roth novella each year or so. Nemesis is the other great one, and The Humbling and Indignation are fine/worth reading.

I just finished the audiobook of The Ape's Wife and Other Stories, by Caitlin Kiernan. Highly entertaining reimaginings of well-worn tropes, as well as some more original ideas. The cast of readers is solid, including Bronson Pinchot, who is one of my favorites.

Just FYI, I got this and most of the other audiobooks I've been listening to from Chirp, which has the oddest assortment of titles I'd never ever consider but end up buying because they are priced like cutouts.

Has anyone read The Dying Animal? It’s another of the late novellas. The plot line is so parodically horny-aging writer, I wonder in retrospect if it wasn’t a comedy and I missed the point entirely.

Thanks! I've already started reading Exit Ghost, which so far has room for some reading as comedy, which may or may not be deliberate, and I like that, also that it's npt overtly joeky. It is implicitly amusing to yours truly that the very accomplished novelist- narrator describes the way that several other (mostly male, all younger) characters have to have things just so, when he himself is that way, also as carefully described, of course!

At the same time, I'm a little put off by the way Roth himself has to set everything in place, especially with the rattling machinery of coincidence---but so far, he's a good enough yarnspinner to keep me going along.

And old Zuckerman needs to shut up a little with some of his oh-so-self-aware motivations--not shut up altogether, but some are more plausible than (more elaborately detailed) others---and as a lifer novelist, an observer and dealer in plausibility, he should be more wary of detailing motivations like cars, of being that kind of confident.

But that can turn out to be part of Roth's leaving room for reading as good comedy. Not there yet, but we'll soon see, I hope (yeah, it is a novella, or close to it).

And thinking back on it just a little more, I see I'm being somewhat unfair to Z. and his creator: whatever his actual range of reasons for a decade of self-imposed isolation in the boondocks, it is entirely plausible that he (specifically) comes back to NYC, now recently post-9/11, to get an operation because he's tired of peeing so much, and he the proud artistic monad now wants to be like and with everybody--he almost lets himself put it in just those terms---also, more generally, despite having triumphed over loneliness for years, still enjoying the memory of that he's just fallen off the wagon, lost his "sobriety" of solitude---and, motivations aside, he's watching himself make wtf impulsive decisions, more and more.

I guess this is a spoiler regarding American Pastoral, so

the moment where Zuckerman finally reaches his daughter Merry in a tenement in New Jersey, and learns that she has been responsible for bombings resulting in many deaths, and sees that she has decided to starve herself to death as a Jain in atonement, is powerful

I could be getting this wrong, it's been years since I've read it, but that is my memory of it

I finished Rachel Heng's The Great Reclamation, about the history of Singapore under British colonial rule and the Japanese invasion in WWII, about its quest for independence and the dredging of sand and reclamation of land around its shores. It centers on a single family.

I skipped Le Carre's first two novellas and have started in chronological order, reading The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965), and am planning to read A Small Town In Germany (1968) and The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) before resuming the Smiley novels

I am tempted by The Honourable Schoolboy

I will do you the courtesy of not posting to ilx quoted out of context

I finished Alan Hollinghurst's *The Line of Beauty*. It took me a week and it was an absolute pleasure to be part of.

'To be a part of' is a weird construction but absolutely fits the novel's Jamesian palpable present-intimate feel. It's an astonishing feat of close writing.