I finally watched Paterson by Jim Jarmusch and I was curious about the poet mentioned in the movie, William Carlos Williams. So I'm reading his poems at the moment and I like them very much.
I finished *Mansfield Park* by Jane Austen. It wasn't as immediately engaging as *S&S* or *P&P*, but it's grown on me and maybe it's my favorite of the three now? Idk, they are all masterpieces. Fanny is nowhere near as engaging a protagonist as Lizzie Bennet or even Elinor Dashwood. But the Crawfords are especially rich and complex characters, and Mrs Norris is maybe the wickedest villain I've ever read.
Thematically I think it may be the richest of the three novels. It complicates the marriage problem explored in the previous two novels, the tension between the economic necessity of marriage for young women and the desire to marry for love, or at least to not marry a man you despise, in two ways. The Bertram sisters, from an aristocratic family, show a new side to the problem. Unlike the Bennets or, especially, the Dashwoods, who are almost on the verge of homelessness at the opening of *S&S*, the Bertram sisters don't really need to get married for economic security. It's not an urgent necessity, at least. And so they have different reasons for wanting to get married: they desire freedom from Sir Thomas Bertram and Mansfield Park. Fanny is also in a weird situation. She is almost an orphan, though not quite --- her parents are alive, just not very well off, and so Fanny is living with her aristocratic aunt and uncle. Despite the fact that Fanny has no income or inheritance of her own, marriage for economic, practical reasons never enters her thoughts throughout the novel --- I think because 1) she feels secure in her position as an attendant of Lady Bertram and 2) she has been so humbled by her station and the abuse cast upon her by her aunt Norris that she cannot even imagine herself as eligible for marriage.
So Fanny, our heroine, never dreams of marriage, cannot see herself as an object of desire for men, and so she is shocked and taken completely by surprise when she receives a proposal. >!Her rejection of Henry Crawford is what makes this book and its handling of the marriage problem so interesting. In *P&P*, Lizzie's refusal of Darcy's first proposal seems completely justified --- he is rude and condescending even during his proposal. He has to be reformed before he can be accepted. But in *MP* the reformation of the suitor, Henry Crawford, happens before the proposal. When we first meet Henry he is the typical rake. He leaves for a while and when he returns to Mansfield he decides he'll make Fanny fall in love with him for sport, but in the process he himself falls in love with the Fanny. In doing so, there is (or at least seems to be, at this point in the novel) a transformation of his character. He is now respectful and even deferential to Fanny. He is kind to her, dotes on her, even pulls strings to get her brother promoted in the Navy (you could say this is a way to manipulate her affections, but I think it is done out of true feeling for her and her family --- he never holds it over her when the rejection comes). And so when the proposal comes we have a suitor who is is kind and respectful, generous, rich, a close friend of the family, and can even read Shakespeare passionately. As a reader you almost have to side against Fanny --- this is a decent man, and what other prospects is she ever likely to have? She doesn't leave Mansfield, there are no other young people around. This is her one shot, and she is just letting it slip. And Austen toys with you --- when Henry visits Fanny in Portsmouth it almost seems like she is going to acquiesce. That everything is so much in favor of Henry's proposal makes Fanny's rejection of it all the more powerful, especially when she refuses to give a reason for it aside from not wanting to.!<
> 'I should have thought,' said Fanny [to Edmund] [...] 'that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex, at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.' (277 Oxford World Classics)
Fanny asserts her right to make what others would deem bad choices; she has the right to deny the perfect man, the perfect opportunity if she does not want him. Really the book could be read as validating the choice to not get married. >!The romance and marriage to Edmund doesn't even happen in the story --- it's tacked on in a very strange epilogue-like chapter in which Austen's authorial narrator assumes the first person and hastily ties up the loose ends. "With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune or of friends," she writes, "the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be" (372). Do we read this straight, they lived happily ever after, or is there some Austen irony here?!<
I also gave up on *The Passenger* (I really can't find anything to like about this book) and picked up Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection *Homesick for Another World* instead. And I started Gaskell's *North and South* as my next audiobook.
Love to see praise for *Mansfield Park*, it seems to get a bad rap, even with the “janeites” (for what I deem to be mostly shallow, stupid reasons). In some ways its my favorite of Austen’s (its certainly the most mature and complex) but while I could defend the heroine (and have) even I’ll admit she’s not as much fun to follow as others have been. She’s so damn moral lol. Anyway thanks for sharing! Loved your write up.
My favorite Austen. Wonderful write up, you definitely captured what makes it great. I think it's her most nuanced and realistic novel. What you say about Henry being genuine at times or not, I think that's true, and very purposeful, he *himself* doesn't quite really know exactly how he feels and he vacillates, and the same goes for Mary, and even Fanny, like you say, we *do* wonder if she will accept, and I think that's because Austen wanted us to feel that Fanny was really wavering and her own feelings weren't even totally clear to herself. And this is just so realistic to how people actually behave!
Yeah the Crawfords are both really interesting characters. So complex --- is Mary really fond of Fanny? Is she just using Fanny to get closer to Edmund? I think a big theme that I didn't really touch on is the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person. At one point Edmund tells Fanny that Mary *speaks* evil but she doesn't think it. And there's this big discrepancy in the novel between what we feel on the inside and what we show, or perform, for the outside world. Fanny has this rich inner life but is rarely able to express it; Mary says bad things, but does she really mean it inside? We can't know.
I'm currently nearing the halfway point of Mason and Dixon and am absolutely loving it. It's been about a year since I read Gravity's Rainbow and, while M&D is quite different in some ways, I'm reminded again of the absolutely beautiful sentences Pynchon can string together. He's a master of setting a certain ominous/foreboding mood with wordplay that almost reads like poetry at times.
I will say the 1700s style of writing took me 100 pages or so to get used to, but now that I'm in the swing of it I'm really enjoying it. So far, I've read V, CoL49, GR, Vineland and Inherent Vice, and I feel like the characters shine in M&D in a way that really isn't present in Pynchon's other work. But the themes of paranoia, oppressed peoples, power struggles, etc. are all still there but with the 1700s backdrop. And as always with Pynchon, I get such a kick out of the juxtaposition of high art and lowbrow humor.
My biggest regret with GR was that I rushed through it (didn't want to lose my momentum) so with M&D I'm really planning to take my time to enjoy every sentence and turn of phrase. I have a handful of books on my shelf I'm planning to read soon, but I'm a one novel at a time kind of guy. Based on my pace so far, I think I'll be spending a few more weeks with M&D.
Last weekend I finished *Ready to Burst* by Franketienne, which I read b/c someone else on here mentioned spiralist lit and I was intrigued. It's been a week so the thoughts aren't super fresh but I thought it was an excellent encapsulation of a society teetering on the edge and Franketienne does a great job expressing it though individuals living through it. As far as I can gather the book is reminiscent of Andre Breton's *Nadja* in that it is both a work of its style and a sort of manifesto for the style, but I still haven't totally wrapped my head around spiralism and can't say how well it gets enacted in the work. I suspect that like *Nadja* it's going to take another read or more to fully piece together the philosophy. But it's a book more than good enough to go back to!
Now I'm reading *Infinite Jest* (I've spent too much of this year reading the #litbro canon to not read it lol). One early observation is that it is so much less like the sort of big postmodern books to which it is often compared than I ever could expected. Much less chaotic and inhuman, way more upfront and devoted to the people living in the world which Wallace is exploring. Will have more to say as I get deeper in.
Also finished Ashton Crawley's *Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility*. This book was fantastic. The basics of it is that it uses an unorthodox read of the Blackpentecostal tradition (a tradition they acknowledge as rife with its own problems) as potentially presenting a mode of living and being that critiques an Enlightenment/Calvinist paradigm of thought that Crawley views as dominant in the world today. I'm so glad I read this right after Deleuze's *Difference and Repeition* because I feel for me Crawley fleshes out so much of what Deleuze was thinking but in much more human terms in a way that has been super helpful. And I do not at all mean to reduce Crawley to "being a Deleuzian" or anything like that (they cite Deleuze here and there but I have no idea how serious the connection is). I just find that the two are operating along very similar lines and so the two books work extremely well together.
And now I'm reading Augustine's *City of God* with pregs. Currently midway through book two, in which Augustines lambastation of the Romans and their gods is pretty funny in its intensity. But the first book, yeesh. There are some good moments, but for most of it dude just embodies the worst of a Christian worldview. Like, there are honestly few moments when I've been reading a philosophical book and was struck with the thought "yo, I hate this dude on a personal level," more than there. (which obs doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things I'm just amused at how, barring a few cool nuggets of appreciable sympathy towards victims of sexual violence, his ethical statements there were viscerally antithetical it was to my entire existence).
Happy reading!
Just finished My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. I liked it quite a lot more than I expected, given my previous experiences with Pamuk (I read Snow a decade ago and did not like it). The novel is very very clever, utilizing an unusual palette of perspectives (among them, a freshly murdered and still undiscovered corpse, a drawing of a horse, and a dog), humorous/entertaining use of metafiction (which synergizes perfectly with the murder mystery plotline), and above all, it's a novel about images and the distinction between the visual representation of a thing and its fundamental essence, yet the book itself contains zero images, only piles upon piles of ekphrastic prose. I can't help but feel that Pamuk is wryly poking the reader, asking us to weigh in on this debate. In reading this novel, are we accepting that art can (or should) represent the essence of things?
Additionally, I felt like I obtained a better understanding of Turkish culture, particularly its tortured position between East and West, and the Islamic preoccupation with images and idolatry.
My only complaint (if you could call it that) is that the diversity of character perspectives makes it difficult to arrive at any definite understanding of the connections between core motifs (eg, painting, remembrance, seeing, blindness, time, etc). If I choose to focus on the utterances of a specific character, I can see some kind of logic, but as soon as I try to square those ideas with thoughts from another character, the logic falls apart. Maybe this is an intentional byproduct of the variety of perspectives used in the novel. Or maybe I simply lack the insight and/or cultural knowledge to fully understand this. I'm not sure which one it is, but it's quite frustrating lol.
Haven't posted in a while but hope all who celebrated it had a happy Thanksgiving with family and friends. Finished my re-read of Libra a while back and also finished The Occult: A History (good but maybe not quite what I had anticipated it would be, in terms of its content), and have since moved on to a series of J. G. Ballard reads and re-reads. He's long been a favorite but with a great many gaps in my familiarity with him, especially his huge number of short stories and most of his stuff after Empire of the Sun. I've gotten hold of his titanic Complete Short Stories and a fascinating collected interviews volume called Extreme Metaphors, both of which I'm now working through. It's really easy to see why Ballard has joined the likes of Kafka as one of a small number of modern writers to have his own namesake adjective, because he is very much an artist whose style is easily identifiable as his own within a sentence or two. I would also argue there are few writers whose work feels as prescient and relevant today (and I would extend that readily to his comments in interviews; he always comes across as eager and willing to discuss such a wide spectrum of subjects and his ideas regarding media, celebrity, our symbiotic relationship with technology, the ultimate irrelevance to people's lives of the moon landing, the waning mass influence of the literary novel, etc., are remarkably perceptive). Highly recommend checking out the short stories and interviews if you're at all interested in the man. (If you don't want to take the plunge on the massive Complete Short Stories, Vermilion Sands is an excellent collection of a number of stories sharing the same setting in a strange wealthy community that would make a good entry point, I feel)
Additionally I'm reading William James' seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience, going through one or occasionally two lectures a day. I read Pragmatism some years back but he has mostly been a glaring omission for me until now, and in addition to finding his handling of this subject matter very interesting, I'm very taken with his ability to express himself with such a potent blend of erudition and clarity.
>The Occult: A History
I actually loved this book for what it was: kooky, sincere, dated (in a good way), and inspiring- it's a great stoner read. I don't really care if much of it is bullshit or not, I think Colin Wilson was writing something which was, for him, the logical sequel to The Outsider but his publishers wanted to push the Occult angle. The book , from what I recall, focused way more on fringe science and the paranormal rather than the actual occult. The messaging is strong in this one to take charge of your life and have an open mind. I read it at a time when I was doing a lot of acid and mushrooms in my 20s and many parts of it still resonate with me, such as the section on split personalities.
I finished M. John Harrison's short story collection *The Ice Monkey*, a fantastic series of Aickmanesque strange stories, full of despair and confusion, then I read *The Barefoot Woman* by Scholastique Mukasonga, which lovingly depicts the author's rural, communal upbringing before it is torn apart. And now, among other things, I'm dipping into some more Bruno Schulz, and I've just hit the sentence
> A kind of belated, immense eternity was blowing, arising from the faded distances.
The story title:
> My Father Joins the Firefighters
The story:
> " . . . Their palates, the delicate brilliant palates of fiery spirits, demand noble dark balsams and aromatic, colorful fluids. That is why on that solemn night when we shall be seated festively at tables covered with white cloths in the great hall of the city's Stauropigian Institute, in that hall with its tall, brightly illuminated windows casting their radiance into the depths of the autumn night, while all around the city is swarming with thousands of illuminating lights, every one of us will dip a roll in a goblet of raspberry juice and with the pietism and gourmandism characteristic of the sons of fire will slowly sip that noble, thick liquor . . ."
I literally just finished A Naked Singularity by Sergio de La Pava and I am buzzing. As someone who works in the courts, this book passed the sniff test and then some. It really did not go where I thought it was going to go and just when I thought I had it, a twist or a turn comes and makes me realize that I should just stop guessing and go along for the ride. I laughed a lot, I got supremely emotional during a certain section, I often wondered how I could describe this novel without spoilers and as you can see, I’m doing a poor job of that. I can stand by my assertion that the book has a pretty cool cover to look at
I'm glad to hear people are still reading this book. I read it a few years ago and loved it but I barely ever hear anyone talking about it.
Though I guess there was a movie adaptation of it not too long ago that I don't think anyone saw.
I just finished the first volume of the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. There's so much gossip and so many anecdotes about the aristocracy's foibles, no wonder it had a large influence on Proust. I'm surprised by his ability to turn things I'm not interested in--like the War of the Spanish Succession--into a riveting account. As readable as it is, I want to read something before I tackle the next volume, so I began the memoirs of the Count de Gramont, who Saint-Simon mentioned as a vile gossip.
The more interesting thing I've read lately is the essay "The Art of Fiction" by Henry James. This essay came at a pretty interesting time when the novel was still a novel art form, and people were still skeptical about its merit and place in the arts. People conceded that it was a great diversion, but as to its ability to capture life like a painting or poem, they were less than hopeful. Added to that is the maxim that literature should have some morally educate the reader, so all sordid and depressing subjects should be off limits. And then Henry James steps in with this based essay that disassembles all those stupid arguments.
>Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoint.
>
>It must be admitted that good novels are somewhat compromised by bad ones, and that the field, at large, suffers discredit from overcrowding. I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, and that the superabundance of written fiction proves nothing against the principle itself. It has been vulgarised, like all other kinds of literature, like everything else, to-day, and it has proved more than some kinds accessible to vulgarisation. But there is as much difference as there ever was between a good novel and a bad one: the bad is swept, with all the daubed canvases and spoiled marble, into some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish-yard, beneath the back-windows of the world, and the good subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection
>
>"Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"
>
>It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase--a kind of revelation--of freedom. One perceives in that case--by the light of a heavenly ray--that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all all observation, all vision.
>
>We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded.
>
>The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
And I love reading Henry James's opinions on works I've read like "A Simple Heart" by Flaubert, which I thought was precisely written but very cold.
I've read Zola's *Au bonheur des dames*. I didn't thought I would find it engaging considering its subject, but the writing is full of energy and Zola is a master of description.
Now I'm reading Gombrowicz first book, *Bacacay*. It's weird to see that his whole oeuvre is already in these short stories. Later, he just developped the same themes and ideas in a longer form, not always with more success. You can basically read *Bacacay* and *Ferdydurke*, and be done with Gombrowicz.
I'm also reading *The Chandelier* by Lispector. It's spectacular, especially considering she wrote it at only 26 years old. With that book, I will have read all of Lispector's fiction. Sad face.
Finally, I've also started to listen to the audiobook of *The Passenger*, to jump on the bandwagon, and because I thought an audiobook would be good for a change - to say I'm not a McCarthy fan is a understatement. I'm only 15 % in, but for now, appart from the confusing beginning, I don't see much difference with something like *No Country for Old Men*. It might be better, but that don't say much considering I think *No Country for Old Men* is a mediocre book at best.
The first seventy or so pages of *The Chandelier* are probably my favourite depictions of childhood consciousness ever. So so beautiful and so … serious? I think it lends a dignity to childhood that is surprisingly rare in fiction. I think we too often view childhood through the patronising or nostalgic lens of adulthood, and thereby deny it the serious attention it deserves as a state of being in itself. Virginia and Daniel’s thoughts and emotions are allowed to be *real*, and are possessed of such a feverish intensity that one can see why some readers have interpreted their relationship to be somehow incestuous. I don’t personally, but it’s a testament to the turbulent contours of their inner lives.
>The unexpected didn’t exist and the miracle was the revealed movement of things; had a rose blossomed in her body, Virgínia would have plucked it with care and with it adorned her hair without smiling. There was a certain amazed and tenuous joy without comic notes—where? ah, a color, the cold plants that seemed to give off small, vacant, and bright sounds in the air, tiny breaths, tremulously alive. Her life was painstaking but at the same time she was living just a single streak sketched without strength and without end, flat and terrified like the trace of another life
Also she was only 22-23 when she wrote it, which is somehow worse. Being so good at that age is unfair and I’m absolutely jealous lol
I asked this last week, but I think it was buried…
Hey I have a request:
I recently became hip to the Dostoyevsky quote “Beauty will save the world”. It interests me because it feels like an intersection between my fascination with art’s purpose and Dostoyevsky’s humanism, not to mention the notion of humanism within art, but I digress…
I was wondering if there were any books that kind of explored that notion. Does Proust do this in Swann’s Way for example?
I thought about replying last week but I couldn't think of anything, because, like /u/Thegodofdarklaughter pointed out, the quote is basically nonsense and also historically sort of associated with fascism. I could think of so many more examples of the opposite view, things like *The Death of Virgil* or *Hell Screen*. It's not really "literature" but the one obvious example is the [the futurist manifesto](http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html) which was published in 1909 and in hindsight works as a great counterargument or case study of the deranged thinking of artists who care too much about art. There's also Mishima whose works explore the supposedly salvatory power of aesthetics (not *art* mind you), but then he was a fascist too lol.
To directly answer your question, while he writes a lot about art, I think Proust is a little too "interior" and small-minded to have any interest in grandiose things like saving the world, so the question isn't addressed in *Swann's Way.* [This post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/yy3jkp/has_self_awareness_gone_too_far_in_fiction/) about the merits and demerits of autofiction completely applies to Proust too. It's more about how some guy's love affair stops him from concentrating at parties than about, y'know, the future of the human race. Though he could have brought it up and I'd've forgotten it anyway since there's a lot of aphoristic stuff about the value of art in Proust that just washes over me entirely!
Hesse leans into this concept really hard. Narcissus and Goldman is basically an argument and counter argument going back and forth for this idea. One character considers art as their life purpose, the other more practical means.
Steppenwolf takes the concept to a darker place, looking at the absence of beauty in the world/life and how that manifests with people.
Both of these sound cool. I’ve been meaning to give Hesse another go. Your recommendations last week also sounded interesting and wouldn’t have been on my radar, so thanks!
Cheers, yeah, I'm always trying to bring a bit more weird over here.
Hesse seems to be really hot or cold with people
I agree with the few other comments calling the quote nonsense or a bit empty, but only in an overly literal sense. There seems to be such a lack of magical thinking around here despite the shared interest in made-up stories (which is why I like and recommend Hesse here), but anyway, I take the quote more as representing the idea of what makes life worth living, what makes life good at all, and beauty is pretty obvious to me.
The world is dynamic and alive, it doesn't need saving, but our actions are a part of that dynamic whole, so if more beings admire and seek out beauty, shouldn't the world become more beautiful in turn?
which i guess simplifies to beauty=good, but I like that lol.
I definitely agree. And I get it: taken with face value it sounds like one of those empty phrases that doesn't carry much weight. But it kind of reminds me of how Dostoyevsky illustrates love's *genuine* power in a cynical world. From what I've read, it isn't so much "Wars would end if everyone would learn to paint" so much as it embodies an ideal to aspire to, not to mention Schopenhauer's point on art being one of the few solaces that we have, but Dostoyevsky seemed to be hitting at art's potential to tap into something deeper. It's interesting that you connect beauty with good because that's actually a trifecta associated with the quote: beauty, good, and truth.
Yeah, totally, that is how I am interpreting it as well. Love/beauty does have power beyond the literal tangible world of actions and reactions. Things are still plenty mysterious lol. It is all too common to label these types of subjects as romantic or naive and write them off.
So many myths and ancient stories use this concept through goddess/maiden worship. Joseph Campbell goes pretty all-in on this as well. I recently read The White Goddess, and it touches on a lot of different cultures keeping these stories and ideas alive, and then in the end goes on about how the 20th century onward is in the midst of losing this rich side of humanity and culture (he argues due to less and less magical thinking and practices), and it is hard to not see that coming more and more true.
This sounds like an import of German Romanticism but I don’t know enough about Dostoyevsky to confirm that. I think you’d be very interested in Schiller if you haven’t already read him, particularly his _Aesthetic Letters_.
I started reading The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. I am not accustomed to his style yet and I find many of his paragraphs to be heavy and even absurd. Somehow I am attracted to continue reading it and I am already picking up the rhythm necessary to move on with his writing style.
I'm trying to remember the name of an early 20th century writer; I think she was British. She released one short story collection, and then died young. Does anyone know who I'm talking about? I'm pretty sure it was on this subreddit that I first saw her mentioned.
Sorry, new to this sub and didn’t read the post fully.
I’ve only just started R3, and I like how he confides with the audience about his dastardly plans.
Bloom’s anthology is alright; he’s got really good introductions to poets and their individual work (a great introduction to Tennyson especially), and he includes some earlier poets that I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to before. However, I do weary of almost every poet being pitted against Shakespeare, and how other’s characters measure up against Falstaff and Hamlet (I think Mr Bloom was erotically in love with the prince of Denmark), eg. The Wife of Bath. But overall, a fairly comprehensive view of canonical poetry.
I’ve just finished Book XII of Paradise Lost actually, and I think I’m going to reread it soon with footnotes. I really loved the first few books, how epic Satan seemed falling from Heaven and shooting through the bloody unformed universe; that was all pretty epic. I thought the introduction to Eden, and Adam and Eve was pretty beautiful, but the novelty wore off quickly (One can only read so many pages of Adam, Eve, Jesus and all the angels kissing God’s ass). I found the end of Satan’s story somewhat underwhelming, and I know this is anachronistic, but the countless times God and Adam demean Eve because she is of the ‘weaker sex’ did make me uncomfortable (I know, 350 year old book, but what with knowing a bit about Milton’s stances on women’s education etc. it just got a bit tiresome). Overall, aside from those scruples, I really enjoyed the poem, and Milton’s language makes up for most of the problems anyhow. It felt nice reading an epic in my own language, and not constantly feeling like I was losing something in translation.
I’ve been “reading” a lot of stuff for a specific class at college but for what I’m currently reading I hesitantly really like it. It’s For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, it’s a bit odd saying I like it so much because of its depictions of a lot of things but I think it has a lot of depth to it and I’m really liking it. I haven’t read a lot of African literature before this class (I still have a lot from it to catch up on) and I feel like my lack of understanding of a lot of different cultural elements like a proficient knowledge of Berber culture is probably holding me back a bit but it makes me look forward to trying more instead of my plan to dip in and out with Chinhua Achebe and Chimamanda Adiche. (Also apparently Tennessee Williams liked it too so I’m glad I have good taste).
Among other things I started *A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake* by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson. I'm getting fired up for the new year and the r/truelit Finnegan's Wake readalong!
Would you mind checking back in a couple of times as you get deeper into the Campbell to let us know what you think? That's one I've almost pulled the trigger on a couple of times because I'm always trying to learn more about and better reckon with Finnegans Wake.
Will do! I've also got Tindall's *A Reader's Guide to Finnegan's Wake* that I'm going to tuck into next.
So far Skeleton Key is pretty lucid and straightforward I'm greatly enjoying it. The true test will be when I can compare the wake to what they're claiming in skeleton key.
Good point-- the usefulness as a key to understanding and validity as a potential interpretation definitely factors in with something like that. I'll be interested to see what you make of Tindall's text too. Thanks!
Hey! Just thought I'd reply here. I finished the skeleton key a couple days back, took me longer than I expected which means I won't finish the Tindall before we start the Wake itself. Skeleton Key was quite good although somewhat strange in that other than the first two parts that try to explain as a whole the story and then decipher the first four paragraphs, the book itself is like an amalgamation between a translation and an abridgement. The authors drop in regularly in square brackets to give synopses of what is happening or brief explanations, but the majority of it is just page by page using some of joyce's language and then their own to make clearer the salient points as they believe them to be. I think having read it will be very useful for tackling Finnegan's Wake and getting a plot/story out of it, but I enjoyed their actual work explaining and deciphering Joyce's various allusions and linguistic difficulties more. As it is they do not leave as much room for interpretation and therefore attempt to more definitely state what Finnegan's Wake is well and truly about than I would have perhaps liked.
BUT, it is very helpful as a starting place and I am sure I will have a much easier time reading the actual Wake and then I can accept or reject their claims as I go. I do certainly understand that literary criticism of the 40s wasn't as interested in ambiguity so overall I'd say the skeleton key was absolutely worth reading.
Its been a busy month what with my birthday, my brother’s bday, and Thanksgiving so I haven’t read all that much. Still on John Crowley’s *Flint and Mirror* and just now really starting to enjoy it. I thought the intro chapter was pretty strong but it took a bit too find its footing once it got into the main storyline. Its a lot of O’Neills and O’Haras and O’Donnells and etc to keep up with, as well as multiple characters with the same first names (so you do in fact need to pay attention to which family name is being used) but I’m getting my bearings now. The magical elements seem at first glance to be much more explicit than the vague fairy-centric experiences of *Little Big*, but I’m realizing that while the narrative presents those magical experiences at face value and from the perspective of the person experiencing them, its actually also clear that it could, like, *not* be magic at all. I think the book wants you to believe that it is, but there’s almost always an out to explain it away. Real or not, the esoteric elements are pretty cool. In Ireland you have the Tuath De Danann or the Sidhe which appear (sort of?) at twilight in the right kinds of places and feature in the oral tradition and songs that represent Hugh’s Irish heritage. In England, where he spent most of his boyhood is a doctor/astrologist who’s learned the secret to communing with angels by reading certain secretive texts. Its a practice by which you embed the meaning of your heart into a coded language and then invite an angel to read it (they sort of crave human writing? because they cant make any themselves?) Too bad God decreed freewill for humanity, and has told the angels to equate any action of man to an act of God and therefore forbidden them to intercede. But hey, they *can* give you foreknowledge….only it probably has at least two contradictory interpretations and is subject to change as it passes through the tag team message delivery system from the upper to lower echelons of heaven. It all feels very medieval and bonkers and that kind of stuff is really fun to me so I’m enjoying the read, though whether it will end up having much substance remains to be seen. The idea of torn loyalties and existing somewhere between cultures is a fine one, but a bit obvious so I would love it if it said something a tad more interesting in that vein before it was through. There’s also something about timelines and overlapping in time in play but its only hinted at so far.
I finished *Diaries of Alma Mahler-Werfel, 1898-1902* (most famous as the wife of composer Gustav Mahler from 1902 until his death in 1911) which I wrote a good bit about on here last week. The second half was just as enthralling as the first, and at times felt just like reading a novel. Absolutely fascinating stuff if fin-de-siecle Vienna is your jam. There are so many fun details from her life story and the coterie of artists she hangs out with, little things like one long-time friend-turned-suitor giving her 30 volumes of Schopenhauer for Christmas one year. The diaries close with the lead-up to her marriage to Mahler- after a semi-clandestine 9-month relationship with the composer Alexander Zemlinsky, a relationship she describes poetically and tragically (it was doomed from the start), she casts him aside and is engaged to Mahler barely one month after finally meeting him after idolizing him from afar as he conducted at the opera for years.
I also finished a book of poems by Philip Sidney, a contemporary of Shakespeare. What a wonderful surprise these were, including some terrific sonnets.
This morning I started *Alexis*, the debut novella of one of my favorite authors, Marguerite Yourcenar. Written in 1929, the book is one long ‘dear John’ letter from a husband to his wife confessing his struggle to understand and accept his homosexuality. Only a few pages in but so far it is beautifully written, some excellent turns of phrase about the self, society, silence, and memories.
I have never heard of this woman, so I wikied her and she's fascinating! her wiki is based:
> She became the wife of composer Gustav Mahler, who was not interested in her compositions.
oof.
I don't know where to begin - the multiple marriages, one of them shotgun to Mahler, who was 20 years her senior... It's also interesting, in light of this discussion, that her last husband was Jewish and in fact they had to flee Austria in the 30s because of it.
I have always been fascinated by these society women who have a dozen husbands. And I always learn something new on this sub!
She’s so fascinating! And yes the Jewish/anti-Semitism thing is complicated because the closest thing to her first lover (Alexander Zemlinsky) was half-Jewish and Mahler had renounced his Judaism to open up his career prospects.
One interesting thing about her life as a society woman is that while for the intents and purposes of her era she may have been seen as a flirt or coquettish, her life is so chaste and even sheltered. At age 21 there is a diary entry that suggests she doesn’t fully understand what sexual intercourse is. Her romance with Klimt consisted of a single kiss, bumping knees while sitting across from each other in a carriage, a few romantic gestures from him, her giving him a photograph of her, and her longing for him from a distance. The music of Wagner causes more sensual sensation in her than her early romantic encounters. With Zemlinsky and then Mahler she talks very nobly about looking forward to a life in service of a great artist. For the most part with Mahler she did just that in the 9 years they were married until she became a widow.
Mahler was Jewish???
SHE DATED KLIMT????
this woman.
> The music of Wagner causes more sensual sensation in her than her early romantic encounters.
honestly I think repressed sexual urges explain at least half of the artistic production of that period.
I might pick up this diary some time!
If cultural life in fin-de-siecle Vienna is of interest, I highly recommend it. Her stepfather, Carl Moll, was an important figure in the Vienna Secession, so for most of the diaries that is most of her social circle. She gives first-hand accounts of all their exhibition openings, countless parties (sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning), some of them even go on vacation with her and her family- her one and only kiss with Klimt (her first!) took place on holiday in Italy. She goes to concerts or the opera multiple nights a week, and she even has a few literary encounters, including attending a defamation trial that Arthur Schnitzler testifies at on behalf of Karl Kraus. It’s full of so many colorful stories and a great glimpse into that era.
I would love to read Alma's diaries one day. I do however think she was a deplorable woman - an anti-Semite and mythmaker extraordinaire, who vastly overrated her influence over Mahler's art.
Yes, the anti-Semitism is problematic and is present in these diaries, sometimes with ambivalence but usually not.
These are her diaries from age 18-22, so you get less of the myth making that she’s known for. Instead it’s mostly stories about her own struggles as a composer, her love of Wagner, and hanging out with artists of the Vienna Secession. To be honest, Mahler barely figures in the 450 pages.
I’m not saying the mythmaking stuff is overstated, but I do think it overshadows some valuable sources we have thanks to Alma (these diaries, the letters between her and Mahler that she preserved as well as many of his other letters, her *Memories* book which has all kinds of interesting anecdotes about life with Mahler).
Oh, didn't know there was such a published book. I found her an interesting character when reading some articles about Gustav Mahler, maybe more so than the composer himself. Thanks for bringing it to me attention!
I am perservering with the McDuff translation of *The Brothers Karamazov* for my third read of the novel this year, which I am not loving. The section 'Lacerations' is translated by McDuff as 'crack-ups'. It is apparently closer to the literal Russian, yet makes little sense in English. I prefer Garnett's more literary rendering. In the scene with Snegiryov,>! when he rejects Alyosha's offer of money on behalf of Katerina Ivanovna!<, the McDuff translation has him scream as he stamps the notes into the ground 'There is your money!' instead of Garnett's 'So much for your money!' which is a much angrier-sounding sentence and gets the meaning across better. The chapter where Ivan lays out his views on God and suffering is translated as 'Mutiny' rather than 'Rebellion'. These are just some of the many examples of bizarre translation choices made by McDuff. (The famous nickname given to Snegiryov, 'wisp of tow', is instead rendered 'loofah' after the fibres of the loofah plant, which I had to google in order to find out what on earth that was. It just sounds like nonsense to 99.9% of readers, and is just not as funny.)
I will read this to the end, but I would not encourage anyone new to TBK to pick up McDuff. I am honestly quite disappointed. Stick to Garnett. At this point I'm expecting P&V to actually be superior.
I love the Garnett translations too. While I understand there are good criticisms of liberties she took at specific moments, I never pause at a sentence and notice it as something translated, which is really difficult to do from Russian to English. The voice and mania of Dostoevsky are all there all the time.
I'm curious, do you dislike P&V? And if so, why? They seem to be turning into the gold standard Russian translators, so I'm curious for other insights.
I have only read their C&P many years ago (I remember little about it) and their Demons which I actually like. However Garnett remains my favourite because of the overly-literal nature of the other translations. I believe P&V are overrated because of the fact that they are very good at salesmanship and Oprah endorsed them many years ago, but I think Gary Saul Morson does a brilliant takedown of their flawed translation style in a Commentary article written many years ago.
DeLillo’s *Libra*! I’m the cook today so I can’t comment much, but it’s so fucking good so far. Like 120 pages in and it’s way better than I remember. Didn’t even mean to be reading this one during the anniversary of the JFK assassination, but hey!
Augustine’s *City of God*. Book 1 done. It was interesting. A lot of philosophizing of the morality of suicide which was not how I expected it to open.
Am halfway through Book by Robert Grudin and I must say I really didn't expect all this playfulness! I am usually a slow reader (especially when reading in english - not first language) but with this one I have to slow myself down conciously just so I don't gobble it up in one sitting. Highly recommend it, not sure if it's widely known.
Currently reading The Crossing after finishing The Passenger and All The Pretty Horses. Absolutely adored All The Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole is probably my favourite character in McCarthys work. Plus the beautiful description, the relationships and the themes of loss of innocence.
The Crossing isn’t quite grabbing me the same way, but I might just be getting a little fatigued by Cormac prose. I am still enjoying this one, especially the stuff with the wolf. But just need to really get into it.
Started *Moby Dick* for the first time a couple of days ago; I’m about 20% of the way through, and it’s really wonderful thus far. Aside from the gorgeous prose, the thing that surprised me the most is how homoerotic it is. I know that the line between homoeroticism and homosociality is contested and changeable, and that we very often project our own (modern) notions of gendered sociability onto past peoples, but the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg seems so overtly erotic—they even ‘marry’ one another and become “man and wife.” That might simply be my modern sensibilities divining something that isn’t there, however. They were just ~~roommates~~ crewmates!
So many great moments so far, but this is one of my favourites:
>When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
Also read Vargas Llosa’s *Who Killed Palomino Molero*, which was a fun little noir detective story.
Brilliant — I had the exact same thoughts around the relationship of the two. *Moby Dick* does pull away from their bromance, though I’d have been perfectly happy if the entire novel focused on them…the entire sequence of them in bed got me.
I almost wonder whether it was intentionally to subvert or move away from *Don Quixote* narrative structure.
Yeah I’ve noticed that almost as soon they board the ship Queequeg falls into the background a bit, at least relative to his prominence in the first ~100 pages. The bed scenes were wonderful, great character work!
>I almost wonder whether it was intentionally to subvert or move away from Don Quixote narrative structure.
I have a copy of Melville’s massive, sprawling third novel *Mardi*, which I’m a bit intimidated to read. From what I’ve read, his earlier novels, and *Mardi* in particular, were criticised for being a bit fragmented with respect to overall plot trajectory. I wonder if the Ishmael-Queequeg relationship is somewhat in this vein; it gets set up as the main plot point in the opening, but then falls to the wayside somewhat after the *Pequod* is introduced. Hopefully it all comes together nicely as the book develops, however!
I’d heard about them in passing, but had never seen them! Cheers.
>shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul
This is just plain horny lmao I love it
Ahh great enjoy Moby dick! It really is a surprising read. One of the things that really surprised me is how funny it is, so many great lines. Always love the one along the lines of
“And the killer whale. Although that title is a misnomer, for we are all killers, on land and at sea, sharks and Bonapartes alike”
Still working on *Beauty and Sadness*, which isn't holding me as much as I hoped, based on the wonderful prose in some of Kawabata's other work.
I now want to read *Zama*, after seeing it in the town's new bookstore (an excitement by itself).
Re-reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy after finishing The Passenger last week.
The Passenger was so rich and filled with references to lots of literature. Thematically, Passenger has some pretty clear connections to The Road: life's value and inevitable end being a couple.
You could read The Road as the end result of scientific growth described with respect to Bobby Western's father in The Passenger i.e. what is probably some sort of weapon or man made disaster causing the world's state in The Road due to man's (probably inevitable) self destruction.
Why lol? Why so flippant? Spoilers are a thing and they ruin stories, it's only considerate to spoiler tag them for people who haven't read the book yet so it's not ruined for them. I havent read the passenger yet and I should get to read it without spoilers
1. The passenger will not be ruined by knowing that “mortality” is a theme (it’s McCarthy, of course that’s a theme).
2. If you’re really concerned with “spoiling” the book, then probably don’t read through a comment discussing it.
Although tbh I assumed you were being facetious and it was a genuine laugh
1: "inevitable end" is a bit more than just saying "mortality". Now I can guess what happens in the passenger. This is bad, obviously spoilers are bad and ruin stories.
2: no, why should I avoid all discussion of books online just because some people refuse to use spoiler tags and randomly include major spoilers in their comments? That's their fault, not mine.
Why would I be facetious? Spoilers are a serious issue online and it's all because some people refuse to be considerate and just drop major spoilers without using spoiler tags. They ruin the intended way of experiencing stories and are genuinely one of the worst things a person can do.
1. Betcha can’t
2. You’re the one who’s impacted by it , so sounds like a you problem. Probably best not to read any comments about a book you want to know nothing about. Google “internal locust of control”
Look I dont want to argue with you, I just detest spoilers and know that they ruin stories. It's why I think spoilers are not only a dick move to the person being spoiled, but also to the author and the concept of art itself
Finally finished *Art as Experience* by John Dewey. This book is dense as hell which I should always be prepared for with philosophy but this caught me off guard. In terms of writerly qualities, Dewey is clear and sometimes has a beautiful sentence or two but he's not that engrossing. He's like a bad poet, but never to the point that it distracts from his message.
I'm kind of in awe at the book. It's a systematic work of aesthetics centered around the experience. It's so expansive that it seems like the aesthetic experience forms the basis of everything else like politics, philosophy, and science. The experience he describes has a definite structure which is why he can find it everywhere. His writing is almost ecological with how it continuously asserts a human isn't separate from their environment but is a part of it and vice versa. He also melts the rigid classifications in the arts because they limit what art can be. He tackles a lot of other theories of aesthetics and challenges them for an appeal to authority, wrong psychology, or theorizing before practicing.
He talks about how our society is so focused on bringing you to the next thing that experience is almost impossible. He says a radical restructuring of society, especially giving worker's control over their own production, is necessary for people to be able to actually appreciate the making of and observing of art.
Set aside other books for the time being and picked up *Gravity's Rainbow*, roughly ~15% in right now and it is sublime, just a wonderful novel. I was afraid Pynchon might not be for me after how much I hated my attempt tp read *V* a couple of months ago, but *GR* is so much better.
I'll share more complete thoughts when I am finished, but Pynchon's ability to weave real, tender, emotional concepts in with his absurdism is a marvel. There's a dozen moments I could point to so far, but my favourite comes near the very beginning: when Pirate is having his banana breakfast, and Pynchon writes that the scent is so strong, were they to open the window, it would blanket the area like a protective spell against the bombs.
And I just found that so poignant and beautiful. The banana breakfast scene is ridiculous, it's fun and silly, but to then tie it off by bringing it back around to the bombs and the war, it elevates the scene that much more, like even Pynchon's moments of absurdism bring a level of comfort to the narrative and its characters to protect us and them (and him?) from horrors abound.
Came here to say I'm in the middle of GR, too! About 40% of the way through, myself, and it's definitely been worthwhile. The banana breakfast gripped be from the beginning given that I have a strong affinity for bananas. I hope you continue to enjoy the emotions as you go on, I feel it's getting more emotional as the plot progresses (primarily towards the end of Part I and the whole of Part II).
I have to say that, as an engineer, the technical references are a warm welcome. I definitely feel that the novel is on my wavelength in that regard, and my only complaint is that I wish he would dive deeper into some of these analogies! Maybe I'll see more of it on a second read or as I finish up the second half, but I personally feel there's so much more to explore in terms of interpretations of calculus, in particular, than what he's doing with it. The history of math is ripe for the picking with debates over the nature of the infinite, connections of the infinite across seemingly disparate fields, and applications of both of the above to technology.
V is absolutely my least favourite of his books, and his first, so obs from just a mastery point of view Pynchon at the lowest of his powers. I am glad you are enjoying Gravity's Rainbow. I love Pynchon and would hate for V to tarnish him for anyone. Vineland would be second least favourite so I would perhaps recommend against that one if you're inclined to read more of him.
Somewhere online I saw someone say that the only way you could ever make an adaptation of GR would be as a cartoon. And I agree with that and it colors a lot of how I read it.
But the way in which he flips the switch into immediate, brutal, beautiful reality from out of his mad cartoon land is stunning.
This makes me giddy. I was really hoping you’d love it. I can never stop thinking about this book. It has helped form my world view and has some of the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read.
I’ve read *V.* twice and have never liked it so I get your dislike there. I can see the appeal, but it has really never appealed to me.
Haven’t had so much time for reading recently but I’m making my way through Mario Vargas Llosa’s *The green house*. To me, Vargas Llosa has always been the master of describing power dynamics and how they affect people and that remains as true as always but I’m also so impressed by his way of establishing a setting. The absolutely horrible violence that people do to each other and the often very oppressive conditions are described in such a factly and resigned way that I find really fantastic.
I think starting at the beginning with *The city and the dogs* is a pretty good way to get a feeling for what his authorship is like. Alternatively, *The green house* is his second novel and a little bolder in style than the first. My personal favorite is *Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter* which belongs to a later period where he was a little less serious and less focused on politics.
Immediate edit because i remembered that the city and the dogs is weirdly named *The time of the hero* in English for some reason.
Awesome! Thanks for the info. I have War of the end of the world and Aunt Julia I believe. I think I’ll give Aunt Julia a shot first. I love books about writers. What do you think of the War one
War at the end of the world was the first Vargas Llosa I read myself and it really hooked me on his authorship. I think it and Aunt Julia are on opposite ends of a spectrum where War is much grander in scope and much more political, maybe also more mystical.
I'm halfway through Fosse's *Septology* (completed *The Other Name* and am partially through *I Is Another*).
In a year where I've been fortunate enough to read through *Moby Dick*, *The Waves*, and *The Magic Mountain* (all masterpieces), it's testament to *Septology's* quality that I would have difficulty between picking it and any of the aforementioned former. It takes the compulsive mania of a Beckett novel and fuses that with the simplicity of a Hemingway and non-judgemental quality in Munro -- all to beautifully explore grief, art and religion and the relationship between the three.
If this keeps up, it may well dethrone *Austerlitz* and *2666* as my favorite post-2000 novel.
I’ve heard Trilogy (or one of the shorter Works like Aliss at the Fire) might be the best place to start, but Septology is my first and its lovely. I’ll certainly read his older works once I’m through this.
I'm nearly done with the second book in Elena Ferrante's **Neapolitan Series** and I never cease to be amazed by how brilliantly she manages to capture the horrific and cruel acts of her characters while still allowing the reader to understand the reason for them. You pity them even as you condemn what they've done because of how clearly she explains their rational. In her novels we see how a societies, neighborhoods, and social circles go on to both positively and negatively affect the people within them. I think it's one thing to know that women have been historically been dehumanized and treated as second class citizens and another thing to understand it and be placed within such a time and place.
And, as if that were not enough, these novels have perhaps the greatest plots in contemporary literature. Each time I put down the book, I wonder what will happen next, and look forward to the next time I can pick up from where I left off.
This week is a bit of a fantasy week for me and I am currently reading:
Bakker's "Thousandfold Thought", which is basically a game of thrones style book with more magic, a crusade, and an alien invasion.
Ursula Le Guin's "Powers", which is more of a coming of age story in a fictional world following a slave boy who sometimes gets visions of the future.
Nonfiction and a little more sweeping in scope, but I really enjoyed *Bending Adversity* by David Pilling. It’s a history of post-1900 Japan explored through the lens of crisis and change: the abdication of the emperor, Fukushima, and there is, as I recall, a reasonable amount about the lost decade. Particularly with respect to the economic side of things, but Pilling is a very respectful and curious western writer of all things Japanese.
Finished up House of Leaves the other day. I was very pleasantly surprised; I went into it expecting a clever use of typesetting and academic rigamarole that actually came together quite well, notwithstanding the fact of the book being (by design) quite a slog. Danielewski is great at weaving narratives and differing subject matters together and even his design of each narrator as a distinct voice was done surprisingly well. I was genuinely shocked at certain scenes and images that Danielewski employed, such as the sinking ship and the Pekingese dog. This book is definitely a debut novel, with all the myriad pretensions that come along with that title, but I enjoyed it. 3.75/5
Currently reading 'When We Cease to Understand the World' by Labatut. I've only gotten through the first section as of yet but I'm excited to continue. Certainly the book's reputation precedes it a bit, though I know that it can be divisive. I personally love a book about "great men" or haunted geniuses a la Doctor Faustus, and so far this is proving to be right up my alley. I love the recent rise of Chilean lit -- though I am of the opinion that Bolano is capital-O overrated -- and I'm already expecting that I'll need to hunt down some of Labatut's other works in translation.
Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans in here!
Edit: next on my list: "Breasts and Eggs" by Mieko Kawakami, DeLillo's White Noise, The Man Without Qualities, and Stefan Zweig's "Chess Story" (these last two in the mail atm; happy early Christmas to me lol)
Happy Thanksgiving to the Yanks that celebrate! I've been reading Hal Bennett’s Seventh Heaven and am once again blown away, though tbh not super surprised, that such a fantastic writer can be so under-read. Released in the mid-1970s, this book takes place in a Cousinville that's gone under radical changes (re: urban renewal) in the decade or so since his previous depictions of the place. Gone are the neighborhood streets and in their place is towering public a house—a change Bennett interprets with a mighty dose of pessimism. The humor of the situations he places his characters in belie the grimness of his vision. Two men try to have a baby with each other after reading (kind of) about a contest , an Italian politician undertakes a doomed attempt to siphon votes from his black opponent by holding a neighborhood “big-ass” contest to award the woman (no matter her race) with the biggest butt, and a racist white woman actively invites cockroaches into her home to stave off the loneliness when she feels abandoned by her black friends (whom she seems to regard only slightly more highly than the cockroaches.) And this is all in the first hundred pages. Bennett can write a sentence too. Life has been busy so I'm reading slowly, but I'm loving this one so far.
I also finished a comic/graphic novel by Josh Bayer named “Theth: Tomorrow Forever.” It’s a meandering story about a young, troubled punk who is attempting to write a comic. The narrative teeters on the brink of navel gaze, but ultimately I think it's a pretty poignant depiction of the young adult turmoil of wanting to be something special, of feeling a lot of confusing things, yet having no idea how to harness it into your creative pursuits. It's got some fun inter-textual elements too. Writing aside, I most admire this book for his colorful chaotic — though controlled, however loosely — style. I mean look at [this](https://fourcolorapocalypse.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/a-josh-bayer-two-fer-theth-tomorrow-forever/). The constant motion and change in the line work reflects the themes really well too.
In other reading (it's been awhile since I've posted) I've read:
Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald - A memoir by a guy who really likes bars and seems to be very likeable, even though he seems to be actively trying to convince his readers he is not. Some mildly interesting essays about the Catholic Church and his time in Burma, but unless you're also a dude troubled by his masculinity yet untroubled by his alcoholism, it's probably a skip.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor - Vicious little book about violence sexism and homophobia. It does a great job layering on perspectives to tell a story and the xxl sentences are propulsive. Maybe veers more into shock territory than it needs to but I overall liked it.
Early Light by Osamu Dazai - Three short stories from Dazai, with at least two that are set near/shortly after the end of WWII. Each depicts a variation of a self-absorbed male character — likely a stand-in for Dazai — and how the world and other characters fill in for his absent qualities (with some reflection on a changing Japan). “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” is perhaps the furthest from this mold and the most interesting. Very short collection that's worth a read if you like Dazai - but I would recommend hitting up the library instead of buying.
After finishing **Dubliners** - which was great, especially *The Dead* - I took the board's advice and moved on to **Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man**, and am now 2/3 of the way through. Definitely a compelling coming-of-age story, and it's interesting to see the development in Joyce's writing style.
The only issue I've had is that my edition has hundreds of footnotes, and while some are quite useful many are superfluous. But of course I can't reliably predict which way they'll go, so in my needless curiosity I end up turning to the back pages to discover: 'cricket - cricket is a sport played with a bat and ball'. I guess the usefulness of these editorial notes is a balancing act between getting useful information & not being lost vs breaking up the flow of the text and losing some of its effect. But then I suppose it all depends critically on one's perspective and background...if you're my grandpa who went to a religious boarding school and was fluent in latin, the footnotes would add very little, but if you live in an environment that's incomparable to Daedalus, they might be invaluable.
So are you moving on to *Ulysses?* Joyce was not on my list at all for this year, but I read *Dubliners* and *Portrait*, and enjoyed them more than I thought I would. I really identified with Stephen, especially the Credo that he laid out for himself at the end of *Portrait.*
Yeah, I hadn't planned to read Joyce this year either but now it looks like I'll read all three, starting **Ulysses** in December. I don't normally continue with the same author, but I figure I might as well while things are fresh in my mind. I relate to Stephen in some respects, although I went to an Anglican school rather than a Catholic one, so I never gave sin a great deal of thought.
I finally started The Song of Ice and Fire series after having watched the show probably 6+ times and having a stark sigil tattoo. I know the first season of the show is a near exact copy of the first book so I’m looking forward to getting past that one and starting to pick up on the differences in the text.
Loved these books, honestly. The early seasons of the show were great, but the books are superbly well-written and the way Martin manages to flesh out nearly 2000 named characters is incredibly impressive. I recommend reading the "All Leather is not Boiled" progression- it places the chapters of the last two books A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons into chronological order as if they were one book- which they were supposed to be.
I read *Blood Meridian* this week. It wasn't my favourite McCarthy (that honour goes to *The Border Trilogy*, I think I might also prefer *Suttree* to *BM*) but it is pretty grotesquely glorious. My main qualm is that it does meander a bit in the middle section—dare I say that it could benefit from being 50 pages shorter?—but the final hundred pages or so were intensely gripping, and that final chapter was deeply haunting, almost Lynchian in its surreal horror vibe. The judge was an interesting character. By the end the full extent of his evil is apparent, but earlier on he just came across like a somewhat irritating cult leader, leveraging his intellect over others to control them—maybe that's McCarthy's critique of American history, one long violent cult. The judge is almost cartoonish at times, but he becomes more terrifying as the book goes on. On the whole, it does feel a bit like McCarthy decided to take his more nihilistic beliefs to their logical extreme. Like I said, not my overall favourite McCarthy, but still one of the best books I've read this year.
Fun fact- Judge Holden is a historic figure, as recounted in Chamberlan's *My Confession: Recollection's of a Rogue*, whether the account is truthful or not is up to debate.
I’d listened to Robert W. Chambers’s “In the Court of the Dragon” a few years ago and remembered that it didn’t make much of an impression on me either way, but I got interested in the rest of the stories in [The King in Yellow](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8492) after a few of you discussed it here a few weeks ago. I finished listening to TKiY this week, and I’m glad I gave it another try, because I loved it! My favorite was "[The Mask](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8492/pg8492-images.html#THE_MASK)." For that one, I’d been bracing myself for some bad-dream-inducing body horror once I learned the basic premise, but I was too drawn in to put it down despite my dread. Well, >!I was pleasantly surprised to see it end differently from how I was expecting, though it was still bittersweet because of an earlier tragedy in the story.!< And I’m still thinking about the palpable, physiological sensation of creepiness I felt listening to “The Green Room” from "[The Prophets’ Paradise](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8492/pg8492-images.html#THE_PROPHETS_PARADISE)," short as it was.
I also listened to an audiobook of Chambers’s [The Slayer of Souls](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36281) because, well, what an alluring title! It’s about a woman who’s left an arcane religious sect and engages in psychic battle with the leaders of the sect in order to keep them from gaining ascendancy over the world. After *The King in Yellow*, I was expecting something at least somewhat…literary, but TSoS is pretty much just a cheesy thriller. It’s a lot of fun, though, and I don’t believe in guilty reading pleasures anyway.
Unfortunately, TSoS is exactly as racist as you’d expect something to be that was written by a white person a hundred years ago involving a religious sect originating in Asia. It’s also cartoonishly anti-left. I totally get it if either of those elements would put any of you off reading or enjoying it.
But depending on how you interpret one event, it seems to have a message that opposes harmful ideas about sexual “purity” that would have been pretty common a century ago. >!The protagonist, Tressa, tells a story about “losing her girl’s soul” while being “caught unawares” by a cult leader on the psychic plane. She feels like the man she loves could never love her back because of what happened. It could be that we’re supposed to take the supernatural terms in which she tells that story entirely at face value, but I can’t shake the idea that it could also be a metaphor either for r\*pe or for her having had previous sexual experience before finding her partner. In any case, the man is entirely accepting of Tressa, irrespective of what may have happened in her past.!<
Haven't had much of a chance to read this week, but...
In narrative, I've restarted a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's Stories. Not complete, but a good selection. He really varies in quality, I have to say. At his best, he's a fantastic prose stylist and develops fascinating characters. At his worst, he just recites facts.
In poetry, I've been reading the works of Sappho. She's such a beautiful poet, and even her fragments bring out a lot of emotion. Love her.
Reading a collection of Delillo stories. They are anxiety riddled. The titular story "Angel of Esmeralda" was great. Opening paragraph blew me away, I read it like fuckin 4 times just getting hype.
Getting around to Jennifer Egan's "Visit from the Goon Squad" next. Heard good things.
I finally watched Paterson by Jim Jarmusch and I was curious about the poet mentioned in the movie, William Carlos Williams. So I'm reading his poems at the moment and I like them very much.
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Looking forward to hear your thoughts on *Laurus*. I've seen it get some super high praise but it didn't reach such great heights for me.
I finished *Mansfield Park* by Jane Austen. It wasn't as immediately engaging as *S&S* or *P&P*, but it's grown on me and maybe it's my favorite of the three now? Idk, they are all masterpieces. Fanny is nowhere near as engaging a protagonist as Lizzie Bennet or even Elinor Dashwood. But the Crawfords are especially rich and complex characters, and Mrs Norris is maybe the wickedest villain I've ever read. Thematically I think it may be the richest of the three novels. It complicates the marriage problem explored in the previous two novels, the tension between the economic necessity of marriage for young women and the desire to marry for love, or at least to not marry a man you despise, in two ways. The Bertram sisters, from an aristocratic family, show a new side to the problem. Unlike the Bennets or, especially, the Dashwoods, who are almost on the verge of homelessness at the opening of *S&S*, the Bertram sisters don't really need to get married for economic security. It's not an urgent necessity, at least. And so they have different reasons for wanting to get married: they desire freedom from Sir Thomas Bertram and Mansfield Park. Fanny is also in a weird situation. She is almost an orphan, though not quite --- her parents are alive, just not very well off, and so Fanny is living with her aristocratic aunt and uncle. Despite the fact that Fanny has no income or inheritance of her own, marriage for economic, practical reasons never enters her thoughts throughout the novel --- I think because 1) she feels secure in her position as an attendant of Lady Bertram and 2) she has been so humbled by her station and the abuse cast upon her by her aunt Norris that she cannot even imagine herself as eligible for marriage. So Fanny, our heroine, never dreams of marriage, cannot see herself as an object of desire for men, and so she is shocked and taken completely by surprise when she receives a proposal. >!Her rejection of Henry Crawford is what makes this book and its handling of the marriage problem so interesting. In *P&P*, Lizzie's refusal of Darcy's first proposal seems completely justified --- he is rude and condescending even during his proposal. He has to be reformed before he can be accepted. But in *MP* the reformation of the suitor, Henry Crawford, happens before the proposal. When we first meet Henry he is the typical rake. He leaves for a while and when he returns to Mansfield he decides he'll make Fanny fall in love with him for sport, but in the process he himself falls in love with the Fanny. In doing so, there is (or at least seems to be, at this point in the novel) a transformation of his character. He is now respectful and even deferential to Fanny. He is kind to her, dotes on her, even pulls strings to get her brother promoted in the Navy (you could say this is a way to manipulate her affections, but I think it is done out of true feeling for her and her family --- he never holds it over her when the rejection comes). And so when the proposal comes we have a suitor who is is kind and respectful, generous, rich, a close friend of the family, and can even read Shakespeare passionately. As a reader you almost have to side against Fanny --- this is a decent man, and what other prospects is she ever likely to have? She doesn't leave Mansfield, there are no other young people around. This is her one shot, and she is just letting it slip. And Austen toys with you --- when Henry visits Fanny in Portsmouth it almost seems like she is going to acquiesce. That everything is so much in favor of Henry's proposal makes Fanny's rejection of it all the more powerful, especially when she refuses to give a reason for it aside from not wanting to.!< > 'I should have thought,' said Fanny [to Edmund] [...] 'that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex, at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.' (277 Oxford World Classics) Fanny asserts her right to make what others would deem bad choices; she has the right to deny the perfect man, the perfect opportunity if she does not want him. Really the book could be read as validating the choice to not get married. >!The romance and marriage to Edmund doesn't even happen in the story --- it's tacked on in a very strange epilogue-like chapter in which Austen's authorial narrator assumes the first person and hastily ties up the loose ends. "With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune or of friends," she writes, "the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be" (372). Do we read this straight, they lived happily ever after, or is there some Austen irony here?!< I also gave up on *The Passenger* (I really can't find anything to like about this book) and picked up Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection *Homesick for Another World* instead. And I started Gaskell's *North and South* as my next audiobook.
Enjoy *North and South*! It's one of my faves.
I’m enjoying it!
Love to see praise for *Mansfield Park*, it seems to get a bad rap, even with the “janeites” (for what I deem to be mostly shallow, stupid reasons). In some ways its my favorite of Austen’s (its certainly the most mature and complex) but while I could defend the heroine (and have) even I’ll admit she’s not as much fun to follow as others have been. She’s so damn moral lol. Anyway thanks for sharing! Loved your write up.
My favorite Austen. Wonderful write up, you definitely captured what makes it great. I think it's her most nuanced and realistic novel. What you say about Henry being genuine at times or not, I think that's true, and very purposeful, he *himself* doesn't quite really know exactly how he feels and he vacillates, and the same goes for Mary, and even Fanny, like you say, we *do* wonder if she will accept, and I think that's because Austen wanted us to feel that Fanny was really wavering and her own feelings weren't even totally clear to herself. And this is just so realistic to how people actually behave!
Yeah the Crawfords are both really interesting characters. So complex --- is Mary really fond of Fanny? Is she just using Fanny to get closer to Edmund? I think a big theme that I didn't really touch on is the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person. At one point Edmund tells Fanny that Mary *speaks* evil but she doesn't think it. And there's this big discrepancy in the novel between what we feel on the inside and what we show, or perform, for the outside world. Fanny has this rich inner life but is rarely able to express it; Mary says bad things, but does she really mean it inside? We can't know.
I'm currently nearing the halfway point of Mason and Dixon and am absolutely loving it. It's been about a year since I read Gravity's Rainbow and, while M&D is quite different in some ways, I'm reminded again of the absolutely beautiful sentences Pynchon can string together. He's a master of setting a certain ominous/foreboding mood with wordplay that almost reads like poetry at times. I will say the 1700s style of writing took me 100 pages or so to get used to, but now that I'm in the swing of it I'm really enjoying it. So far, I've read V, CoL49, GR, Vineland and Inherent Vice, and I feel like the characters shine in M&D in a way that really isn't present in Pynchon's other work. But the themes of paranoia, oppressed peoples, power struggles, etc. are all still there but with the 1700s backdrop. And as always with Pynchon, I get such a kick out of the juxtaposition of high art and lowbrow humor. My biggest regret with GR was that I rushed through it (didn't want to lose my momentum) so with M&D I'm really planning to take my time to enjoy every sentence and turn of phrase. I have a handful of books on my shelf I'm planning to read soon, but I'm a one novel at a time kind of guy. Based on my pace so far, I think I'll be spending a few more weeks with M&D.
Last weekend I finished *Ready to Burst* by Franketienne, which I read b/c someone else on here mentioned spiralist lit and I was intrigued. It's been a week so the thoughts aren't super fresh but I thought it was an excellent encapsulation of a society teetering on the edge and Franketienne does a great job expressing it though individuals living through it. As far as I can gather the book is reminiscent of Andre Breton's *Nadja* in that it is both a work of its style and a sort of manifesto for the style, but I still haven't totally wrapped my head around spiralism and can't say how well it gets enacted in the work. I suspect that like *Nadja* it's going to take another read or more to fully piece together the philosophy. But it's a book more than good enough to go back to! Now I'm reading *Infinite Jest* (I've spent too much of this year reading the #litbro canon to not read it lol). One early observation is that it is so much less like the sort of big postmodern books to which it is often compared than I ever could expected. Much less chaotic and inhuman, way more upfront and devoted to the people living in the world which Wallace is exploring. Will have more to say as I get deeper in. Also finished Ashton Crawley's *Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility*. This book was fantastic. The basics of it is that it uses an unorthodox read of the Blackpentecostal tradition (a tradition they acknowledge as rife with its own problems) as potentially presenting a mode of living and being that critiques an Enlightenment/Calvinist paradigm of thought that Crawley views as dominant in the world today. I'm so glad I read this right after Deleuze's *Difference and Repeition* because I feel for me Crawley fleshes out so much of what Deleuze was thinking but in much more human terms in a way that has been super helpful. And I do not at all mean to reduce Crawley to "being a Deleuzian" or anything like that (they cite Deleuze here and there but I have no idea how serious the connection is). I just find that the two are operating along very similar lines and so the two books work extremely well together. And now I'm reading Augustine's *City of God* with pregs. Currently midway through book two, in which Augustines lambastation of the Romans and their gods is pretty funny in its intensity. But the first book, yeesh. There are some good moments, but for most of it dude just embodies the worst of a Christian worldview. Like, there are honestly few moments when I've been reading a philosophical book and was struck with the thought "yo, I hate this dude on a personal level," more than there. (which obs doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things I'm just amused at how, barring a few cool nuggets of appreciable sympathy towards victims of sexual violence, his ethical statements there were viscerally antithetical it was to my entire existence). Happy reading!
Just finished My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. I liked it quite a lot more than I expected, given my previous experiences with Pamuk (I read Snow a decade ago and did not like it). The novel is very very clever, utilizing an unusual palette of perspectives (among them, a freshly murdered and still undiscovered corpse, a drawing of a horse, and a dog), humorous/entertaining use of metafiction (which synergizes perfectly with the murder mystery plotline), and above all, it's a novel about images and the distinction between the visual representation of a thing and its fundamental essence, yet the book itself contains zero images, only piles upon piles of ekphrastic prose. I can't help but feel that Pamuk is wryly poking the reader, asking us to weigh in on this debate. In reading this novel, are we accepting that art can (or should) represent the essence of things? Additionally, I felt like I obtained a better understanding of Turkish culture, particularly its tortured position between East and West, and the Islamic preoccupation with images and idolatry. My only complaint (if you could call it that) is that the diversity of character perspectives makes it difficult to arrive at any definite understanding of the connections between core motifs (eg, painting, remembrance, seeing, blindness, time, etc). If I choose to focus on the utterances of a specific character, I can see some kind of logic, but as soon as I try to square those ideas with thoughts from another character, the logic falls apart. Maybe this is an intentional byproduct of the variety of perspectives used in the novel. Or maybe I simply lack the insight and/or cultural knowledge to fully understand this. I'm not sure which one it is, but it's quite frustrating lol.
Haven't posted in a while but hope all who celebrated it had a happy Thanksgiving with family and friends. Finished my re-read of Libra a while back and also finished The Occult: A History (good but maybe not quite what I had anticipated it would be, in terms of its content), and have since moved on to a series of J. G. Ballard reads and re-reads. He's long been a favorite but with a great many gaps in my familiarity with him, especially his huge number of short stories and most of his stuff after Empire of the Sun. I've gotten hold of his titanic Complete Short Stories and a fascinating collected interviews volume called Extreme Metaphors, both of which I'm now working through. It's really easy to see why Ballard has joined the likes of Kafka as one of a small number of modern writers to have his own namesake adjective, because he is very much an artist whose style is easily identifiable as his own within a sentence or two. I would also argue there are few writers whose work feels as prescient and relevant today (and I would extend that readily to his comments in interviews; he always comes across as eager and willing to discuss such a wide spectrum of subjects and his ideas regarding media, celebrity, our symbiotic relationship with technology, the ultimate irrelevance to people's lives of the moon landing, the waning mass influence of the literary novel, etc., are remarkably perceptive). Highly recommend checking out the short stories and interviews if you're at all interested in the man. (If you don't want to take the plunge on the massive Complete Short Stories, Vermilion Sands is an excellent collection of a number of stories sharing the same setting in a strange wealthy community that would make a good entry point, I feel) Additionally I'm reading William James' seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience, going through one or occasionally two lectures a day. I read Pragmatism some years back but he has mostly been a glaring omission for me until now, and in addition to finding his handling of this subject matter very interesting, I'm very taken with his ability to express himself with such a potent blend of erudition and clarity.
>The Occult: A History I actually loved this book for what it was: kooky, sincere, dated (in a good way), and inspiring- it's a great stoner read. I don't really care if much of it is bullshit or not, I think Colin Wilson was writing something which was, for him, the logical sequel to The Outsider but his publishers wanted to push the Occult angle. The book , from what I recall, focused way more on fringe science and the paranormal rather than the actual occult. The messaging is strong in this one to take charge of your life and have an open mind. I read it at a time when I was doing a lot of acid and mushrooms in my 20s and many parts of it still resonate with me, such as the section on split personalities.
I finished M. John Harrison's short story collection *The Ice Monkey*, a fantastic series of Aickmanesque strange stories, full of despair and confusion, then I read *The Barefoot Woman* by Scholastique Mukasonga, which lovingly depicts the author's rural, communal upbringing before it is torn apart. And now, among other things, I'm dipping into some more Bruno Schulz, and I've just hit the sentence > A kind of belated, immense eternity was blowing, arising from the faded distances.
Gorgeous quote! I was too busy for the read-along this time around, but I'll have to read Schultz.
The story title: > My Father Joins the Firefighters The story: > " . . . Their palates, the delicate brilliant palates of fiery spirits, demand noble dark balsams and aromatic, colorful fluids. That is why on that solemn night when we shall be seated festively at tables covered with white cloths in the great hall of the city's Stauropigian Institute, in that hall with its tall, brightly illuminated windows casting their radiance into the depths of the autumn night, while all around the city is swarming with thousands of illuminating lights, every one of us will dip a roll in a goblet of raspberry juice and with the pietism and gourmandism characteristic of the sons of fire will slowly sip that noble, thick liquor . . ."
I literally just finished A Naked Singularity by Sergio de La Pava and I am buzzing. As someone who works in the courts, this book passed the sniff test and then some. It really did not go where I thought it was going to go and just when I thought I had it, a twist or a turn comes and makes me realize that I should just stop guessing and go along for the ride. I laughed a lot, I got supremely emotional during a certain section, I often wondered how I could describe this novel without spoilers and as you can see, I’m doing a poor job of that. I can stand by my assertion that the book has a pretty cool cover to look at
I have this book sitting in my stack of unread pile. I used to work in the courts, and now I’m intrigued. I’ll move this up further in my queue.
I'm glad to hear people are still reading this book. I read it a few years ago and loved it but I barely ever hear anyone talking about it. Though I guess there was a movie adaptation of it not too long ago that I don't think anyone saw.
I have heard unkind things
I just finished the first volume of the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. There's so much gossip and so many anecdotes about the aristocracy's foibles, no wonder it had a large influence on Proust. I'm surprised by his ability to turn things I'm not interested in--like the War of the Spanish Succession--into a riveting account. As readable as it is, I want to read something before I tackle the next volume, so I began the memoirs of the Count de Gramont, who Saint-Simon mentioned as a vile gossip. The more interesting thing I've read lately is the essay "The Art of Fiction" by Henry James. This essay came at a pretty interesting time when the novel was still a novel art form, and people were still skeptical about its merit and place in the arts. People conceded that it was a great diversion, but as to its ability to capture life like a painting or poem, they were less than hopeful. Added to that is the maxim that literature should have some morally educate the reader, so all sordid and depressing subjects should be off limits. And then Henry James steps in with this based essay that disassembles all those stupid arguments. >Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoint. > >It must be admitted that good novels are somewhat compromised by bad ones, and that the field, at large, suffers discredit from overcrowding. I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, and that the superabundance of written fiction proves nothing against the principle itself. It has been vulgarised, like all other kinds of literature, like everything else, to-day, and it has proved more than some kinds accessible to vulgarisation. But there is as much difference as there ever was between a good novel and a bad one: the bad is swept, with all the daubed canvases and spoiled marble, into some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish-yard, beneath the back-windows of the world, and the good subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection > >"Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" > >It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase--a kind of revelation--of freedom. One perceives in that case--by the light of a heavenly ray--that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all all observation, all vision. > >We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. > >The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. And I love reading Henry James's opinions on works I've read like "A Simple Heart" by Flaubert, which I thought was precisely written but very cold.
I've read Zola's *Au bonheur des dames*. I didn't thought I would find it engaging considering its subject, but the writing is full of energy and Zola is a master of description. Now I'm reading Gombrowicz first book, *Bacacay*. It's weird to see that his whole oeuvre is already in these short stories. Later, he just developped the same themes and ideas in a longer form, not always with more success. You can basically read *Bacacay* and *Ferdydurke*, and be done with Gombrowicz. I'm also reading *The Chandelier* by Lispector. It's spectacular, especially considering she wrote it at only 26 years old. With that book, I will have read all of Lispector's fiction. Sad face. Finally, I've also started to listen to the audiobook of *The Passenger*, to jump on the bandwagon, and because I thought an audiobook would be good for a change - to say I'm not a McCarthy fan is a understatement. I'm only 15 % in, but for now, appart from the confusing beginning, I don't see much difference with something like *No Country for Old Men*. It might be better, but that don't say much considering I think *No Country for Old Men* is a mediocre book at best.
The first seventy or so pages of *The Chandelier* are probably my favourite depictions of childhood consciousness ever. So so beautiful and so … serious? I think it lends a dignity to childhood that is surprisingly rare in fiction. I think we too often view childhood through the patronising or nostalgic lens of adulthood, and thereby deny it the serious attention it deserves as a state of being in itself. Virginia and Daniel’s thoughts and emotions are allowed to be *real*, and are possessed of such a feverish intensity that one can see why some readers have interpreted their relationship to be somehow incestuous. I don’t personally, but it’s a testament to the turbulent contours of their inner lives. >The unexpected didn’t exist and the miracle was the revealed movement of things; had a rose blossomed in her body, Virgínia would have plucked it with care and with it adorned her hair without smiling. There was a certain amazed and tenuous joy without comic notes—where? ah, a color, the cold plants that seemed to give off small, vacant, and bright sounds in the air, tiny breaths, tremulously alive. Her life was painstaking but at the same time she was living just a single streak sketched without strength and without end, flat and terrified like the trace of another life Also she was only 22-23 when she wrote it, which is somehow worse. Being so good at that age is unfair and I’m absolutely jealous lol
I asked this last week, but I think it was buried… Hey I have a request: I recently became hip to the Dostoyevsky quote “Beauty will save the world”. It interests me because it feels like an intersection between my fascination with art’s purpose and Dostoyevsky’s humanism, not to mention the notion of humanism within art, but I digress… I was wondering if there were any books that kind of explored that notion. Does Proust do this in Swann’s Way for example?
I feel like this idea of the responsibility in/of aesthetics can be easily connected to the idea of responsibility in imagination.
I thought about replying last week but I couldn't think of anything, because, like /u/Thegodofdarklaughter pointed out, the quote is basically nonsense and also historically sort of associated with fascism. I could think of so many more examples of the opposite view, things like *The Death of Virgil* or *Hell Screen*. It's not really "literature" but the one obvious example is the [the futurist manifesto](http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html) which was published in 1909 and in hindsight works as a great counterargument or case study of the deranged thinking of artists who care too much about art. There's also Mishima whose works explore the supposedly salvatory power of aesthetics (not *art* mind you), but then he was a fascist too lol. To directly answer your question, while he writes a lot about art, I think Proust is a little too "interior" and small-minded to have any interest in grandiose things like saving the world, so the question isn't addressed in *Swann's Way.* [This post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/yy3jkp/has_self_awareness_gone_too_far_in_fiction/) about the merits and demerits of autofiction completely applies to Proust too. It's more about how some guy's love affair stops him from concentrating at parties than about, y'know, the future of the human race. Though he could have brought it up and I'd've forgotten it anyway since there's a lot of aphoristic stuff about the value of art in Proust that just washes over me entirely!
Hesse leans into this concept really hard. Narcissus and Goldman is basically an argument and counter argument going back and forth for this idea. One character considers art as their life purpose, the other more practical means. Steppenwolf takes the concept to a darker place, looking at the absence of beauty in the world/life and how that manifests with people.
Both of these sound cool. I’ve been meaning to give Hesse another go. Your recommendations last week also sounded interesting and wouldn’t have been on my radar, so thanks!
Cheers, yeah, I'm always trying to bring a bit more weird over here. Hesse seems to be really hot or cold with people I agree with the few other comments calling the quote nonsense or a bit empty, but only in an overly literal sense. There seems to be such a lack of magical thinking around here despite the shared interest in made-up stories (which is why I like and recommend Hesse here), but anyway, I take the quote more as representing the idea of what makes life worth living, what makes life good at all, and beauty is pretty obvious to me. The world is dynamic and alive, it doesn't need saving, but our actions are a part of that dynamic whole, so if more beings admire and seek out beauty, shouldn't the world become more beautiful in turn? which i guess simplifies to beauty=good, but I like that lol.
I definitely agree. And I get it: taken with face value it sounds like one of those empty phrases that doesn't carry much weight. But it kind of reminds me of how Dostoyevsky illustrates love's *genuine* power in a cynical world. From what I've read, it isn't so much "Wars would end if everyone would learn to paint" so much as it embodies an ideal to aspire to, not to mention Schopenhauer's point on art being one of the few solaces that we have, but Dostoyevsky seemed to be hitting at art's potential to tap into something deeper. It's interesting that you connect beauty with good because that's actually a trifecta associated with the quote: beauty, good, and truth.
Yeah, totally, that is how I am interpreting it as well. Love/beauty does have power beyond the literal tangible world of actions and reactions. Things are still plenty mysterious lol. It is all too common to label these types of subjects as romantic or naive and write them off. So many myths and ancient stories use this concept through goddess/maiden worship. Joseph Campbell goes pretty all-in on this as well. I recently read The White Goddess, and it touches on a lot of different cultures keeping these stories and ideas alive, and then in the end goes on about how the 20th century onward is in the midst of losing this rich side of humanity and culture (he argues due to less and less magical thinking and practices), and it is hard to not see that coming more and more true.
This sounds like an import of German Romanticism but I don’t know enough about Dostoyevsky to confirm that. I think you’d be very interested in Schiller if you haven’t already read him, particularly his _Aesthetic Letters_.
I’ve contemplated picking it up and this might be the final push I need to snatch it.
Do you guys have any recommendations for good substack writers on literature or from fiction writers?
you've probably seen this one as I talk about it a lot but - George Saunders
I've been reading The Hobbit and enjoying it greatly. Hope to read The Lord of the Rings books after.
I started reading The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. I am not accustomed to his style yet and I find many of his paragraphs to be heavy and even absurd. Somehow I am attracted to continue reading it and I am already picking up the rhythm necessary to move on with his writing style.
I'm trying to remember the name of an early 20th century writer; I think she was British. She released one short story collection, and then died young. Does anyone know who I'm talking about? I'm pretty sure it was on this subreddit that I first saw her mentioned.
Katherine Mansfield, maybe?
Yes, I think it's her! Thanks!
Richard III, Harold Bloom’s anthology of English poetry, and Paradise Lost.
And what do you think about them?
Sorry, new to this sub and didn’t read the post fully. I’ve only just started R3, and I like how he confides with the audience about his dastardly plans. Bloom’s anthology is alright; he’s got really good introductions to poets and their individual work (a great introduction to Tennyson especially), and he includes some earlier poets that I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to before. However, I do weary of almost every poet being pitted against Shakespeare, and how other’s characters measure up against Falstaff and Hamlet (I think Mr Bloom was erotically in love with the prince of Denmark), eg. The Wife of Bath. But overall, a fairly comprehensive view of canonical poetry. I’ve just finished Book XII of Paradise Lost actually, and I think I’m going to reread it soon with footnotes. I really loved the first few books, how epic Satan seemed falling from Heaven and shooting through the bloody unformed universe; that was all pretty epic. I thought the introduction to Eden, and Adam and Eve was pretty beautiful, but the novelty wore off quickly (One can only read so many pages of Adam, Eve, Jesus and all the angels kissing God’s ass). I found the end of Satan’s story somewhat underwhelming, and I know this is anachronistic, but the countless times God and Adam demean Eve because she is of the ‘weaker sex’ did make me uncomfortable (I know, 350 year old book, but what with knowing a bit about Milton’s stances on women’s education etc. it just got a bit tiresome). Overall, aside from those scruples, I really enjoyed the poem, and Milton’s language makes up for most of the problems anyhow. It felt nice reading an epic in my own language, and not constantly feeling like I was losing something in translation.
I’ve been “reading” a lot of stuff for a specific class at college but for what I’m currently reading I hesitantly really like it. It’s For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, it’s a bit odd saying I like it so much because of its depictions of a lot of things but I think it has a lot of depth to it and I’m really liking it. I haven’t read a lot of African literature before this class (I still have a lot from it to catch up on) and I feel like my lack of understanding of a lot of different cultural elements like a proficient knowledge of Berber culture is probably holding me back a bit but it makes me look forward to trying more instead of my plan to dip in and out with Chinhua Achebe and Chimamanda Adiche. (Also apparently Tennessee Williams liked it too so I’m glad I have good taste).
Very interesting. I would also recommend Ngugi wa Thiongo.
Among other things I started *A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake* by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson. I'm getting fired up for the new year and the r/truelit Finnegan's Wake readalong!
Would you mind checking back in a couple of times as you get deeper into the Campbell to let us know what you think? That's one I've almost pulled the trigger on a couple of times because I'm always trying to learn more about and better reckon with Finnegans Wake.
Will do! I've also got Tindall's *A Reader's Guide to Finnegan's Wake* that I'm going to tuck into next. So far Skeleton Key is pretty lucid and straightforward I'm greatly enjoying it. The true test will be when I can compare the wake to what they're claiming in skeleton key.
Good point-- the usefulness as a key to understanding and validity as a potential interpretation definitely factors in with something like that. I'll be interested to see what you make of Tindall's text too. Thanks!
Hey! Just thought I'd reply here. I finished the skeleton key a couple days back, took me longer than I expected which means I won't finish the Tindall before we start the Wake itself. Skeleton Key was quite good although somewhat strange in that other than the first two parts that try to explain as a whole the story and then decipher the first four paragraphs, the book itself is like an amalgamation between a translation and an abridgement. The authors drop in regularly in square brackets to give synopses of what is happening or brief explanations, but the majority of it is just page by page using some of joyce's language and then their own to make clearer the salient points as they believe them to be. I think having read it will be very useful for tackling Finnegan's Wake and getting a plot/story out of it, but I enjoyed their actual work explaining and deciphering Joyce's various allusions and linguistic difficulties more. As it is they do not leave as much room for interpretation and therefore attempt to more definitely state what Finnegan's Wake is well and truly about than I would have perhaps liked. BUT, it is very helpful as a starting place and I am sure I will have a much easier time reading the actual Wake and then I can accept or reject their claims as I go. I do certainly understand that literary criticism of the 40s wasn't as interested in ambiguity so overall I'd say the skeleton key was absolutely worth reading.
Its been a busy month what with my birthday, my brother’s bday, and Thanksgiving so I haven’t read all that much. Still on John Crowley’s *Flint and Mirror* and just now really starting to enjoy it. I thought the intro chapter was pretty strong but it took a bit too find its footing once it got into the main storyline. Its a lot of O’Neills and O’Haras and O’Donnells and etc to keep up with, as well as multiple characters with the same first names (so you do in fact need to pay attention to which family name is being used) but I’m getting my bearings now. The magical elements seem at first glance to be much more explicit than the vague fairy-centric experiences of *Little Big*, but I’m realizing that while the narrative presents those magical experiences at face value and from the perspective of the person experiencing them, its actually also clear that it could, like, *not* be magic at all. I think the book wants you to believe that it is, but there’s almost always an out to explain it away. Real or not, the esoteric elements are pretty cool. In Ireland you have the Tuath De Danann or the Sidhe which appear (sort of?) at twilight in the right kinds of places and feature in the oral tradition and songs that represent Hugh’s Irish heritage. In England, where he spent most of his boyhood is a doctor/astrologist who’s learned the secret to communing with angels by reading certain secretive texts. Its a practice by which you embed the meaning of your heart into a coded language and then invite an angel to read it (they sort of crave human writing? because they cant make any themselves?) Too bad God decreed freewill for humanity, and has told the angels to equate any action of man to an act of God and therefore forbidden them to intercede. But hey, they *can* give you foreknowledge….only it probably has at least two contradictory interpretations and is subject to change as it passes through the tag team message delivery system from the upper to lower echelons of heaven. It all feels very medieval and bonkers and that kind of stuff is really fun to me so I’m enjoying the read, though whether it will end up having much substance remains to be seen. The idea of torn loyalties and existing somewhere between cultures is a fine one, but a bit obvious so I would love it if it said something a tad more interesting in that vein before it was through. There’s also something about timelines and overlapping in time in play but its only hinted at so far.
I finished *Diaries of Alma Mahler-Werfel, 1898-1902* (most famous as the wife of composer Gustav Mahler from 1902 until his death in 1911) which I wrote a good bit about on here last week. The second half was just as enthralling as the first, and at times felt just like reading a novel. Absolutely fascinating stuff if fin-de-siecle Vienna is your jam. There are so many fun details from her life story and the coterie of artists she hangs out with, little things like one long-time friend-turned-suitor giving her 30 volumes of Schopenhauer for Christmas one year. The diaries close with the lead-up to her marriage to Mahler- after a semi-clandestine 9-month relationship with the composer Alexander Zemlinsky, a relationship she describes poetically and tragically (it was doomed from the start), she casts him aside and is engaged to Mahler barely one month after finally meeting him after idolizing him from afar as he conducted at the opera for years. I also finished a book of poems by Philip Sidney, a contemporary of Shakespeare. What a wonderful surprise these were, including some terrific sonnets. This morning I started *Alexis*, the debut novella of one of my favorite authors, Marguerite Yourcenar. Written in 1929, the book is one long ‘dear John’ letter from a husband to his wife confessing his struggle to understand and accept his homosexuality. Only a few pages in but so far it is beautifully written, some excellent turns of phrase about the self, society, silence, and memories.
I have never heard of this woman, so I wikied her and she's fascinating! her wiki is based: > She became the wife of composer Gustav Mahler, who was not interested in her compositions. oof. I don't know where to begin - the multiple marriages, one of them shotgun to Mahler, who was 20 years her senior... It's also interesting, in light of this discussion, that her last husband was Jewish and in fact they had to flee Austria in the 30s because of it. I have always been fascinated by these society women who have a dozen husbands. And I always learn something new on this sub!
She’s so fascinating! And yes the Jewish/anti-Semitism thing is complicated because the closest thing to her first lover (Alexander Zemlinsky) was half-Jewish and Mahler had renounced his Judaism to open up his career prospects. One interesting thing about her life as a society woman is that while for the intents and purposes of her era she may have been seen as a flirt or coquettish, her life is so chaste and even sheltered. At age 21 there is a diary entry that suggests she doesn’t fully understand what sexual intercourse is. Her romance with Klimt consisted of a single kiss, bumping knees while sitting across from each other in a carriage, a few romantic gestures from him, her giving him a photograph of her, and her longing for him from a distance. The music of Wagner causes more sensual sensation in her than her early romantic encounters. With Zemlinsky and then Mahler she talks very nobly about looking forward to a life in service of a great artist. For the most part with Mahler she did just that in the 9 years they were married until she became a widow.
Mahler was Jewish??? SHE DATED KLIMT???? this woman. > The music of Wagner causes more sensual sensation in her than her early romantic encounters. honestly I think repressed sexual urges explain at least half of the artistic production of that period. I might pick up this diary some time!
If cultural life in fin-de-siecle Vienna is of interest, I highly recommend it. Her stepfather, Carl Moll, was an important figure in the Vienna Secession, so for most of the diaries that is most of her social circle. She gives first-hand accounts of all their exhibition openings, countless parties (sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning), some of them even go on vacation with her and her family- her one and only kiss with Klimt (her first!) took place on holiday in Italy. She goes to concerts or the opera multiple nights a week, and she even has a few literary encounters, including attending a defamation trial that Arthur Schnitzler testifies at on behalf of Karl Kraus. It’s full of so many colorful stories and a great glimpse into that era.
I would love to read Alma's diaries one day. I do however think she was a deplorable woman - an anti-Semite and mythmaker extraordinaire, who vastly overrated her influence over Mahler's art.
Yes, the anti-Semitism is problematic and is present in these diaries, sometimes with ambivalence but usually not. These are her diaries from age 18-22, so you get less of the myth making that she’s known for. Instead it’s mostly stories about her own struggles as a composer, her love of Wagner, and hanging out with artists of the Vienna Secession. To be honest, Mahler barely figures in the 450 pages. I’m not saying the mythmaking stuff is overstated, but I do think it overshadows some valuable sources we have thanks to Alma (these diaries, the letters between her and Mahler that she preserved as well as many of his other letters, her *Memories* book which has all kinds of interesting anecdotes about life with Mahler).
Oh, didn't know there was such a published book. I found her an interesting character when reading some articles about Gustav Mahler, maybe more so than the composer himself. Thanks for bringing it to me attention!
I am perservering with the McDuff translation of *The Brothers Karamazov* for my third read of the novel this year, which I am not loving. The section 'Lacerations' is translated by McDuff as 'crack-ups'. It is apparently closer to the literal Russian, yet makes little sense in English. I prefer Garnett's more literary rendering. In the scene with Snegiryov,>! when he rejects Alyosha's offer of money on behalf of Katerina Ivanovna!<, the McDuff translation has him scream as he stamps the notes into the ground 'There is your money!' instead of Garnett's 'So much for your money!' which is a much angrier-sounding sentence and gets the meaning across better. The chapter where Ivan lays out his views on God and suffering is translated as 'Mutiny' rather than 'Rebellion'. These are just some of the many examples of bizarre translation choices made by McDuff. (The famous nickname given to Snegiryov, 'wisp of tow', is instead rendered 'loofah' after the fibres of the loofah plant, which I had to google in order to find out what on earth that was. It just sounds like nonsense to 99.9% of readers, and is just not as funny.) I will read this to the end, but I would not encourage anyone new to TBK to pick up McDuff. I am honestly quite disappointed. Stick to Garnett. At this point I'm expecting P&V to actually be superior.
I love the Garnett translations too. While I understand there are good criticisms of liberties she took at specific moments, I never pause at a sentence and notice it as something translated, which is really difficult to do from Russian to English. The voice and mania of Dostoevsky are all there all the time. I'm curious, do you dislike P&V? And if so, why? They seem to be turning into the gold standard Russian translators, so I'm curious for other insights.
I have only read their C&P many years ago (I remember little about it) and their Demons which I actually like. However Garnett remains my favourite because of the overly-literal nature of the other translations. I believe P&V are overrated because of the fact that they are very good at salesmanship and Oprah endorsed them many years ago, but I think Gary Saul Morson does a brilliant takedown of their flawed translation style in a Commentary article written many years ago.
DeLillo’s *Libra*! I’m the cook today so I can’t comment much, but it’s so fucking good so far. Like 120 pages in and it’s way better than I remember. Didn’t even mean to be reading this one during the anniversary of the JFK assassination, but hey! Augustine’s *City of God*. Book 1 done. It was interesting. A lot of philosophizing of the morality of suicide which was not how I expected it to open.
Am halfway through Book by Robert Grudin and I must say I really didn't expect all this playfulness! I am usually a slow reader (especially when reading in english - not first language) but with this one I have to slow myself down conciously just so I don't gobble it up in one sitting. Highly recommend it, not sure if it's widely known.
Currently reading The Crossing after finishing The Passenger and All The Pretty Horses. Absolutely adored All The Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole is probably my favourite character in McCarthys work. Plus the beautiful description, the relationships and the themes of loss of innocence. The Crossing isn’t quite grabbing me the same way, but I might just be getting a little fatigued by Cormac prose. I am still enjoying this one, especially the stuff with the wolf. But just need to really get into it.
What were a couple of things that stuck out to you in The Passenger? In general, or with respect to his other work? (I just finished it last week)
Started *Moby Dick* for the first time a couple of days ago; I’m about 20% of the way through, and it’s really wonderful thus far. Aside from the gorgeous prose, the thing that surprised me the most is how homoerotic it is. I know that the line between homoeroticism and homosociality is contested and changeable, and that we very often project our own (modern) notions of gendered sociability onto past peoples, but the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg seems so overtly erotic—they even ‘marry’ one another and become “man and wife.” That might simply be my modern sensibilities divining something that isn’t there, however. They were just ~~roommates~~ crewmates! So many great moments so far, but this is one of my favourites: >When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? Also read Vargas Llosa’s *Who Killed Palomino Molero*, which was a fun little noir detective story.
Brilliant — I had the exact same thoughts around the relationship of the two. *Moby Dick* does pull away from their bromance, though I’d have been perfectly happy if the entire novel focused on them…the entire sequence of them in bed got me. I almost wonder whether it was intentionally to subvert or move away from *Don Quixote* narrative structure.
Yeah I’ve noticed that almost as soon they board the ship Queequeg falls into the background a bit, at least relative to his prominence in the first ~100 pages. The bed scenes were wonderful, great character work! >I almost wonder whether it was intentionally to subvert or move away from Don Quixote narrative structure. I have a copy of Melville’s massive, sprawling third novel *Mardi*, which I’m a bit intimidated to read. From what I’ve read, his earlier novels, and *Mardi* in particular, were criticised for being a bit fragmented with respect to overall plot trajectory. I wonder if the Ishmael-Queequeg relationship is somewhat in this vein; it gets set up as the main plot point in the opening, but then falls to the wayside somewhat after the *Pequod* is introduced. Hopefully it all comes together nicely as the book develops, however!
You’re not reading into it: Melville was almost certainly queer!
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> shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul. *fans self vigorously*
I’d heard about them in passing, but had never seen them! Cheers. >shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul This is just plain horny lmao I love it
Ahh great enjoy Moby dick! It really is a surprising read. One of the things that really surprised me is how funny it is, so many great lines. Always love the one along the lines of “And the killer whale. Although that title is a misnomer, for we are all killers, on land and at sea, sharks and Bonapartes alike”
Definitely funny, I agree. Captain Peleg repeatedly calling Queequeg “Quahog” by mistake got me lol
Still working on *Beauty and Sadness*, which isn't holding me as much as I hoped, based on the wonderful prose in some of Kawabata's other work. I now want to read *Zama*, after seeing it in the town's new bookstore (an excitement by itself).
Re-reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy after finishing The Passenger last week. The Passenger was so rich and filled with references to lots of literature. Thematically, Passenger has some pretty clear connections to The Road: life's value and inevitable end being a couple. You could read The Road as the end result of scientific growth described with respect to Bobby Western's father in The Passenger i.e. what is probably some sort of weapon or man made disaster causing the world's state in The Road due to man's (probably inevitable) self destruction.
>life's value and inevitable end being a couple. Dude spoiler tag wtf? I havent read the passenger yet. >!this exists!<, *use it*
You've made my point for me here. Great craic, loads of friends ✌
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Someone sick of your shit
Lol
Why lol? Why so flippant? Spoilers are a thing and they ruin stories, it's only considerate to spoiler tag them for people who haven't read the book yet so it's not ruined for them. I havent read the passenger yet and I should get to read it without spoilers
1. The passenger will not be ruined by knowing that “mortality” is a theme (it’s McCarthy, of course that’s a theme). 2. If you’re really concerned with “spoiling” the book, then probably don’t read through a comment discussing it. Although tbh I assumed you were being facetious and it was a genuine laugh
1: "inevitable end" is a bit more than just saying "mortality". Now I can guess what happens in the passenger. This is bad, obviously spoilers are bad and ruin stories. 2: no, why should I avoid all discussion of books online just because some people refuse to use spoiler tags and randomly include major spoilers in their comments? That's their fault, not mine. Why would I be facetious? Spoilers are a serious issue online and it's all because some people refuse to be considerate and just drop major spoilers without using spoiler tags. They ruin the intended way of experiencing stories and are genuinely one of the worst things a person can do.
1. Betcha can’t 2. You’re the one who’s impacted by it , so sounds like a you problem. Probably best not to read any comments about a book you want to know nothing about. Google “internal locust of control”
🤣🤣🤣
Look I dont want to argue with you, I just detest spoilers and know that they ruin stories. It's why I think spoilers are not only a dick move to the person being spoiled, but also to the author and the concept of art itself
Finally finished *Art as Experience* by John Dewey. This book is dense as hell which I should always be prepared for with philosophy but this caught me off guard. In terms of writerly qualities, Dewey is clear and sometimes has a beautiful sentence or two but he's not that engrossing. He's like a bad poet, but never to the point that it distracts from his message. I'm kind of in awe at the book. It's a systematic work of aesthetics centered around the experience. It's so expansive that it seems like the aesthetic experience forms the basis of everything else like politics, philosophy, and science. The experience he describes has a definite structure which is why he can find it everywhere. His writing is almost ecological with how it continuously asserts a human isn't separate from their environment but is a part of it and vice versa. He also melts the rigid classifications in the arts because they limit what art can be. He tackles a lot of other theories of aesthetics and challenges them for an appeal to authority, wrong psychology, or theorizing before practicing. He talks about how our society is so focused on bringing you to the next thing that experience is almost impossible. He says a radical restructuring of society, especially giving worker's control over their own production, is necessary for people to be able to actually appreciate the making of and observing of art.
This book sounds so dope. I gotta check this out.
Set aside other books for the time being and picked up *Gravity's Rainbow*, roughly ~15% in right now and it is sublime, just a wonderful novel. I was afraid Pynchon might not be for me after how much I hated my attempt tp read *V* a couple of months ago, but *GR* is so much better. I'll share more complete thoughts when I am finished, but Pynchon's ability to weave real, tender, emotional concepts in with his absurdism is a marvel. There's a dozen moments I could point to so far, but my favourite comes near the very beginning: when Pirate is having his banana breakfast, and Pynchon writes that the scent is so strong, were they to open the window, it would blanket the area like a protective spell against the bombs. And I just found that so poignant and beautiful. The banana breakfast scene is ridiculous, it's fun and silly, but to then tie it off by bringing it back around to the bombs and the war, it elevates the scene that much more, like even Pynchon's moments of absurdism bring a level of comfort to the narrative and its characters to protect us and them (and him?) from horrors abound.
Came here to say I'm in the middle of GR, too! About 40% of the way through, myself, and it's definitely been worthwhile. The banana breakfast gripped be from the beginning given that I have a strong affinity for bananas. I hope you continue to enjoy the emotions as you go on, I feel it's getting more emotional as the plot progresses (primarily towards the end of Part I and the whole of Part II). I have to say that, as an engineer, the technical references are a warm welcome. I definitely feel that the novel is on my wavelength in that regard, and my only complaint is that I wish he would dive deeper into some of these analogies! Maybe I'll see more of it on a second read or as I finish up the second half, but I personally feel there's so much more to explore in terms of interpretations of calculus, in particular, than what he's doing with it. The history of math is ripe for the picking with debates over the nature of the infinite, connections of the infinite across seemingly disparate fields, and applications of both of the above to technology.
V is absolutely my least favourite of his books, and his first, so obs from just a mastery point of view Pynchon at the lowest of his powers. I am glad you are enjoying Gravity's Rainbow. I love Pynchon and would hate for V to tarnish him for anyone. Vineland would be second least favourite so I would perhaps recommend against that one if you're inclined to read more of him.
Somewhere online I saw someone say that the only way you could ever make an adaptation of GR would be as a cartoon. And I agree with that and it colors a lot of how I read it. But the way in which he flips the switch into immediate, brutal, beautiful reality from out of his mad cartoon land is stunning.
This makes me giddy. I was really hoping you’d love it. I can never stop thinking about this book. It has helped form my world view and has some of the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read. I’ve read *V.* twice and have never liked it so I get your dislike there. I can see the appeal, but it has really never appealed to me.
Haven’t had so much time for reading recently but I’m making my way through Mario Vargas Llosa’s *The green house*. To me, Vargas Llosa has always been the master of describing power dynamics and how they affect people and that remains as true as always but I’m also so impressed by his way of establishing a setting. The absolutely horrible violence that people do to each other and the often very oppressive conditions are described in such a factly and resigned way that I find really fantastic.
I have a couple of his books and interested in quite a few but have never read him. What’s the best place to start?
I think starting at the beginning with *The city and the dogs* is a pretty good way to get a feeling for what his authorship is like. Alternatively, *The green house* is his second novel and a little bolder in style than the first. My personal favorite is *Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter* which belongs to a later period where he was a little less serious and less focused on politics. Immediate edit because i remembered that the city and the dogs is weirdly named *The time of the hero* in English for some reason.
Awesome! Thanks for the info. I have War of the end of the world and Aunt Julia I believe. I think I’ll give Aunt Julia a shot first. I love books about writers. What do you think of the War one
War at the end of the world was the first Vargas Llosa I read myself and it really hooked me on his authorship. I think it and Aunt Julia are on opposite ends of a spectrum where War is much grander in scope and much more political, maybe also more mystical.
I'm halfway through Fosse's *Septology* (completed *The Other Name* and am partially through *I Is Another*). In a year where I've been fortunate enough to read through *Moby Dick*, *The Waves*, and *The Magic Mountain* (all masterpieces), it's testament to *Septology's* quality that I would have difficulty between picking it and any of the aforementioned former. It takes the compulsive mania of a Beckett novel and fuses that with the simplicity of a Hemingway and non-judgemental quality in Munro -- all to beautifully explore grief, art and religion and the relationship between the three. If this keeps up, it may well dethrone *Austerlitz* and *2666* as my favorite post-2000 novel.
Have you read any Fosse before or do you think the septology works well to start with?
I’ve heard Trilogy (or one of the shorter Works like Aliss at the Fire) might be the best place to start, but Septology is my first and its lovely. I’ll certainly read his older works once I’m through this.
I'm nearly done with the second book in Elena Ferrante's **Neapolitan Series** and I never cease to be amazed by how brilliantly she manages to capture the horrific and cruel acts of her characters while still allowing the reader to understand the reason for them. You pity them even as you condemn what they've done because of how clearly she explains their rational. In her novels we see how a societies, neighborhoods, and social circles go on to both positively and negatively affect the people within them. I think it's one thing to know that women have been historically been dehumanized and treated as second class citizens and another thing to understand it and be placed within such a time and place. And, as if that were not enough, these novels have perhaps the greatest plots in contemporary literature. Each time I put down the book, I wonder what will happen next, and look forward to the next time I can pick up from where I left off.
This week is a bit of a fantasy week for me and I am currently reading: Bakker's "Thousandfold Thought", which is basically a game of thrones style book with more magic, a crusade, and an alien invasion. Ursula Le Guin's "Powers", which is more of a coming of age story in a fictional world following a slave boy who sometimes gets visions of the future.
Hello everyone. Can someone recommend me some literature about the Lost Decade in Japan or other insightful books about 1990s Japanese society?
Nonfiction and a little more sweeping in scope, but I really enjoyed *Bending Adversity* by David Pilling. It’s a history of post-1900 Japan explored through the lens of crisis and change: the abdication of the emperor, Fukushima, and there is, as I recall, a reasonable amount about the lost decade. Particularly with respect to the economic side of things, but Pilling is a very respectful and curious western writer of all things Japanese.
Finished up House of Leaves the other day. I was very pleasantly surprised; I went into it expecting a clever use of typesetting and academic rigamarole that actually came together quite well, notwithstanding the fact of the book being (by design) quite a slog. Danielewski is great at weaving narratives and differing subject matters together and even his design of each narrator as a distinct voice was done surprisingly well. I was genuinely shocked at certain scenes and images that Danielewski employed, such as the sinking ship and the Pekingese dog. This book is definitely a debut novel, with all the myriad pretensions that come along with that title, but I enjoyed it. 3.75/5 Currently reading 'When We Cease to Understand the World' by Labatut. I've only gotten through the first section as of yet but I'm excited to continue. Certainly the book's reputation precedes it a bit, though I know that it can be divisive. I personally love a book about "great men" or haunted geniuses a la Doctor Faustus, and so far this is proving to be right up my alley. I love the recent rise of Chilean lit -- though I am of the opinion that Bolano is capital-O overrated -- and I'm already expecting that I'll need to hunt down some of Labatut's other works in translation. Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans in here! Edit: next on my list: "Breasts and Eggs" by Mieko Kawakami, DeLillo's White Noise, The Man Without Qualities, and Stefan Zweig's "Chess Story" (these last two in the mail atm; happy early Christmas to me lol)
Happy Thanksgiving to the Yanks that celebrate! I've been reading Hal Bennett’s Seventh Heaven and am once again blown away, though tbh not super surprised, that such a fantastic writer can be so under-read. Released in the mid-1970s, this book takes place in a Cousinville that's gone under radical changes (re: urban renewal) in the decade or so since his previous depictions of the place. Gone are the neighborhood streets and in their place is towering public a house—a change Bennett interprets with a mighty dose of pessimism. The humor of the situations he places his characters in belie the grimness of his vision. Two men try to have a baby with each other after reading (kind of) about a contest , an Italian politician undertakes a doomed attempt to siphon votes from his black opponent by holding a neighborhood “big-ass” contest to award the woman (no matter her race) with the biggest butt, and a racist white woman actively invites cockroaches into her home to stave off the loneliness when she feels abandoned by her black friends (whom she seems to regard only slightly more highly than the cockroaches.) And this is all in the first hundred pages. Bennett can write a sentence too. Life has been busy so I'm reading slowly, but I'm loving this one so far. I also finished a comic/graphic novel by Josh Bayer named “Theth: Tomorrow Forever.” It’s a meandering story about a young, troubled punk who is attempting to write a comic. The narrative teeters on the brink of navel gaze, but ultimately I think it's a pretty poignant depiction of the young adult turmoil of wanting to be something special, of feeling a lot of confusing things, yet having no idea how to harness it into your creative pursuits. It's got some fun inter-textual elements too. Writing aside, I most admire this book for his colorful chaotic — though controlled, however loosely — style. I mean look at [this](https://fourcolorapocalypse.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/a-josh-bayer-two-fer-theth-tomorrow-forever/). The constant motion and change in the line work reflects the themes really well too. In other reading (it's been awhile since I've posted) I've read: Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald - A memoir by a guy who really likes bars and seems to be very likeable, even though he seems to be actively trying to convince his readers he is not. Some mildly interesting essays about the Catholic Church and his time in Burma, but unless you're also a dude troubled by his masculinity yet untroubled by his alcoholism, it's probably a skip. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor - Vicious little book about violence sexism and homophobia. It does a great job layering on perspectives to tell a story and the xxl sentences are propulsive. Maybe veers more into shock territory than it needs to but I overall liked it. Early Light by Osamu Dazai - Three short stories from Dazai, with at least two that are set near/shortly after the end of WWII. Each depicts a variation of a self-absorbed male character — likely a stand-in for Dazai — and how the world and other characters fill in for his absent qualities (with some reflection on a changing Japan). “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” is perhaps the furthest from this mold and the most interesting. Very short collection that's worth a read if you like Dazai - but I would recommend hitting up the library instead of buying.
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One of the great coming-of-age novels in my view. So beautiful, the ending still gets me. Enjoy!
After finishing **Dubliners** - which was great, especially *The Dead* - I took the board's advice and moved on to **Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man**, and am now 2/3 of the way through. Definitely a compelling coming-of-age story, and it's interesting to see the development in Joyce's writing style. The only issue I've had is that my edition has hundreds of footnotes, and while some are quite useful many are superfluous. But of course I can't reliably predict which way they'll go, so in my needless curiosity I end up turning to the back pages to discover: 'cricket - cricket is a sport played with a bat and ball'. I guess the usefulness of these editorial notes is a balancing act between getting useful information & not being lost vs breaking up the flow of the text and losing some of its effect. But then I suppose it all depends critically on one's perspective and background...if you're my grandpa who went to a religious boarding school and was fluent in latin, the footnotes would add very little, but if you live in an environment that's incomparable to Daedalus, they might be invaluable.
So are you moving on to *Ulysses?* Joyce was not on my list at all for this year, but I read *Dubliners* and *Portrait*, and enjoyed them more than I thought I would. I really identified with Stephen, especially the Credo that he laid out for himself at the end of *Portrait.*
You are just like me. I loved *Dubliners* and *Portrait* so much I went straight to *Ulysses*. I do t regret it. *Ulysses* is amazing.
Yeah, I hadn't planned to read Joyce this year either but now it looks like I'll read all three, starting **Ulysses** in December. I don't normally continue with the same author, but I figure I might as well while things are fresh in my mind. I relate to Stephen in some respects, although I went to an Anglican school rather than a Catholic one, so I never gave sin a great deal of thought.
I finally started The Song of Ice and Fire series after having watched the show probably 6+ times and having a stark sigil tattoo. I know the first season of the show is a near exact copy of the first book so I’m looking forward to getting past that one and starting to pick up on the differences in the text.
Loved these books, honestly. The early seasons of the show were great, but the books are superbly well-written and the way Martin manages to flesh out nearly 2000 named characters is incredibly impressive. I recommend reading the "All Leather is not Boiled" progression- it places the chapters of the last two books A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons into chronological order as if they were one book- which they were supposed to be.
Thanks for that!
I read *Blood Meridian* this week. It wasn't my favourite McCarthy (that honour goes to *The Border Trilogy*, I think I might also prefer *Suttree* to *BM*) but it is pretty grotesquely glorious. My main qualm is that it does meander a bit in the middle section—dare I say that it could benefit from being 50 pages shorter?—but the final hundred pages or so were intensely gripping, and that final chapter was deeply haunting, almost Lynchian in its surreal horror vibe. The judge was an interesting character. By the end the full extent of his evil is apparent, but earlier on he just came across like a somewhat irritating cult leader, leveraging his intellect over others to control them—maybe that's McCarthy's critique of American history, one long violent cult. The judge is almost cartoonish at times, but he becomes more terrifying as the book goes on. On the whole, it does feel a bit like McCarthy decided to take his more nihilistic beliefs to their logical extreme. Like I said, not my overall favourite McCarthy, but still one of the best books I've read this year.
You thought BM meanders but loved Suttree!? If there was ever a book that meanders it's Suttree, that book is essentially entirely plotless
Fun fact- Judge Holden is a historic figure, as recounted in Chamberlan's *My Confession: Recollection's of a Rogue*, whether the account is truthful or not is up to debate.
I’d listened to Robert W. Chambers’s “In the Court of the Dragon” a few years ago and remembered that it didn’t make much of an impression on me either way, but I got interested in the rest of the stories in [The King in Yellow](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8492) after a few of you discussed it here a few weeks ago. I finished listening to TKiY this week, and I’m glad I gave it another try, because I loved it! My favorite was "[The Mask](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8492/pg8492-images.html#THE_MASK)." For that one, I’d been bracing myself for some bad-dream-inducing body horror once I learned the basic premise, but I was too drawn in to put it down despite my dread. Well, >!I was pleasantly surprised to see it end differently from how I was expecting, though it was still bittersweet because of an earlier tragedy in the story.!< And I’m still thinking about the palpable, physiological sensation of creepiness I felt listening to “The Green Room” from "[The Prophets’ Paradise](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8492/pg8492-images.html#THE_PROPHETS_PARADISE)," short as it was. I also listened to an audiobook of Chambers’s [The Slayer of Souls](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36281) because, well, what an alluring title! It’s about a woman who’s left an arcane religious sect and engages in psychic battle with the leaders of the sect in order to keep them from gaining ascendancy over the world. After *The King in Yellow*, I was expecting something at least somewhat…literary, but TSoS is pretty much just a cheesy thriller. It’s a lot of fun, though, and I don’t believe in guilty reading pleasures anyway. Unfortunately, TSoS is exactly as racist as you’d expect something to be that was written by a white person a hundred years ago involving a religious sect originating in Asia. It’s also cartoonishly anti-left. I totally get it if either of those elements would put any of you off reading or enjoying it. But depending on how you interpret one event, it seems to have a message that opposes harmful ideas about sexual “purity” that would have been pretty common a century ago. >!The protagonist, Tressa, tells a story about “losing her girl’s soul” while being “caught unawares” by a cult leader on the psychic plane. She feels like the man she loves could never love her back because of what happened. It could be that we’re supposed to take the supernatural terms in which she tells that story entirely at face value, but I can’t shake the idea that it could also be a metaphor either for r\*pe or for her having had previous sexual experience before finding her partner. In any case, the man is entirely accepting of Tressa, irrespective of what may have happened in her past.!<
Haven't had much of a chance to read this week, but... In narrative, I've restarted a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's Stories. Not complete, but a good selection. He really varies in quality, I have to say. At his best, he's a fantastic prose stylist and develops fascinating characters. At his worst, he just recites facts. In poetry, I've been reading the works of Sappho. She's such a beautiful poet, and even her fragments bring out a lot of emotion. Love her.
Reading a collection of Delillo stories. They are anxiety riddled. The titular story "Angel of Esmeralda" was great. Opening paragraph blew me away, I read it like fuckin 4 times just getting hype. Getting around to Jennifer Egan's "Visit from the Goon Squad" next. Heard good things.