Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

btw the instructions is a lot of fun! n/a have you read much more? im abt 200 pages in

that's about where I am too, still really enjoying btw

things i still wish to get around to: richard yates, the instructions, witz

finished The Instructions a couple of weeks ago, it was good but, not surprisingly, got a little tiring by the end - doesn't really have enough variety or content to justify the length

The Instructions and Witz are the two novels from the last while that I'd like to have read. I'd feel quite well-informed, quite on top of things, if I'd read them. Realistically, prob won't happen, too much else to read & they look time-hungry.

Just got a copy of Jennifer Egan's Visit from the Goon Squad; most likely will read that. Manageable length, PowerPoint section.

still havent finished the instructions + yeah i think maybe it could do w/ being shorter

finished absurdistan the other day. it was odd. more and more i felt like i was reading black mischief or scoop: and then the halliburton contractors on the train out of the country in the last (?) chapter are talking about evelyn waugh. which made me think, right, that has to be deliberate -- that it's an attempt to rehabilitate that, er, mode -- which is, you know, kind of an awkward mode to try and rehabilitate. for kind of obvious reasons.

also, shteyngart doesn't have waugh's chops, i think: it seems like so much stuff takes away from the cohesion of the narrative - almost all of the russia stuff, the deeply half-hearted abusive-father business, the authorial self-insertion (though, yes, 'russian arriviste's handjob', ha ha ha ha). also waugh's mockery of banal modes of writing (the country column in the paper - "Feather-footed through the plashy fens passes the questing vole", etc) is funny to me and shteyngart doing r&b/hip-hop sendups, less so. but then that might just be a matter of what targets i'm comfortable seeing mocked, i don't know; misha's proposal for a holocaust museum late in the book was so much the funniest thing to me but i wonder if that's because i find it a more 'worthy' 'target' than i do the state of the post-9/11 middle east.

Joshua Cohen has reviewed both The Instructions and Richard Yates.

the review of the latter was what made me curious to read his (cohen's) novel, actually

Levin’s attempt to ape Wallace’s caffeinated chatter, to mimic that ferocious power, is unseemly and disastrous — an instance, almost, of a man playing God.

yeah i thought it was pretty crazy getting him to review it

Peeve of mine: book reviews written in the style of the book the reviewer is reviewing. Hate that. Didn't like the Bookforum review.

In the spirit of that joke, consider one of our books the Jewish novel you’ll never begin and the other the Jewish novel you’ll never finish.

i couldn't tell whose book was supposed to be whose here.

yeah dude talking about his own book in that review turned me off

more surprising that the editors let it go. if i turned in an academic book review that was half about my own work it would be sent back!

Peeve of mine: book reviews written in the style of the book the reviewer is reviewing. Hate that. Didn't like the Bookforum review.

Agree with your peeve. But Tao Lin's strategy is the troll's strategy: to evoke more response from the audience than the effort he put into the work. As proverb goes, the power in a relationship belongs to the one who cares least, and it's that position of power that Lin seeks aesthetically. If Cohen had approached, as a critic, from an independent point of view -- if he had begun by betraying a critical interest -- Lin would have won from the start, and Cohen knew it.

do you not believe lin when he says he spent hours upon hours chipping away at richard yates and american apparel, then?

also: while he discusses the possibility, that review isn't really written in lin's 'style', by which ppl generally mean the style of those two books, which are only ~30% of his total published wordcount

But it is in the 'style' of his 'blog'.

do you not believe lin when he says he spent hours upon hours chipping away at richard yates and american apparel, then?

Hours and hours, sure. It takes time to type.

But "effort", measured as time spent, was the wrong word. "Personal investment" is better. Lin's works (as far as I've been fooled into reading them) derive whatever life they have from the audience's attention.

Cohen's right to point out the contradiction between Lin's stance and his participation in the economy of physical books.

Ohhhh, you're talking about Tao Lin's 'Richard Yates'! For some reason I had it in my head that this was about the recent-ish biography of Yates, and couldn't work out what was going on. This is why I need to click on the links!

Yeah, the Cohen review of Tao Lin is more justifiably in the novelist's voice than the original ones that turned me off -- I've read some awful reviews of Tom Wolfe, Martin Amis, and Pynchon novels that are third-rate versions of the writers they're reviewing.

i was in a book store after work today and thought about buying richard yates but didnt. i think i feel better not having an opinion and just sort of shrugging if someone mentions it like at a party and saying 'i dont really know much about it' and then eating something.

i did buy 'the instructions' which i kept mistaking for 'the imperfectionists' which i read in the spring and 'liked' although its sloppy and kind of a cheat but has nice moments and is really funny in parts. im not really sure why i bought it since i already sort of feel disappointed by it for not being a novel about a man digging a tunnel out of his basement or study or 3rd floor walkup or w/e.

'visit from the goon squad' is one of only two really excellent new fiction books ive read this year btw

so, what good stuff is coming out this year? especially during the next few months

the only thing i already know i want to read is the pale king

Hollinghurst?

Don't think there's much exciting in UK - I looked over the schedules in autumn, things might have changed a bit since then, but it was mostly the usual names (Hensher, Justin Cartwright, Mars Jones, Barnes stories).

Debut hype for When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman, Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, and that Ours are the Streets book by Sunjeev Sahota that's just out. Tea Obreht too, but followers of US fiction could fill us in there - she was one of the New Yorker 20 under 40.

shes like 24 and i refuse to read her books and stories on principle

i for one appreciate a principled stand on these things

has anyone read/can recommend any of these? http://www.believermag.com/issues/201103/?read=believer_book_award

i remember the reason i read 'remainder' was cuz it won their book of the year award 1 year

the orange eats creeps is a total mess iirc and although i feel like i have read S P R A W L i cant remember anything about it so maybe im thinking of something else

yeah i should prob have said that i didnt actually like remainder anyway so its kind of weird i care abt their award

haha reading that list i am not very inspired but then it clearly speaks to the NOVELS ARE EXPIREMENTS IN LANGUAGE crowd more than to me

Skippy Dies is just alright. I was surprised at the level of praise it received but it's fun.

It's definitely not a NOVELS ARE EXPIREMENTS IN LANGUAGE book though

I am very much a 'novels are experiments in language' type person and am not very inspired. Obviously the write-up of the Henehan looked great, but after reading the first page in Google Books it seems like the same-old same-old surface posturing. In fact, I didn't see anything that looked like an experiment in language at all. Don't build my hopes up, man.

haha i was basing my opinion on the one book i remember + half-reading the blurbs, really. although theres nothing to say they arent simply doing a bad job of pandering to that crowd.

'orange eats creeps' wld (i guess hackishly) fit 'experimental', sorta. shes doing that associative, inward-curling thing that is mb more about 'conciousness' than it is 'language' (um) but drifts around the margins of 'thought-fiction'. idk i h8 this stuff mostly.

i liked remainder a lot

a LOT

The book’s final section is one of the most daring and hyper-realistic endings in recent contemporary fiction.

Can somebody explain this please?

This is new in English translation: Khirbet Khizeh.

Looks promising.

Here is the best translated book award long list -- only one I knew about was To the End of the Land, which was trashed in the LRB.

* The Literary Conference by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
* The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive)
* The Rest Is Jungle & Other Stories by Mario Benedetti, translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales (Host Publications)
* A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer)
* A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex, translated from the French by Donald Wilson (Bitter Lemon)
* A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery, translated from the French by Alyson Waters (New Directions)
* The Jokers by Albert Cossery, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis (New York Review Books)
* Eline Vere by Louis Couperus, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke (Archipelago)
* Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)
* The Blindness of the Heart by Julia Franck, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (Grove)
* Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar), translated from the French by David Bellos (Yale University Press)
* To the End of the Land by David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen (Knopf)
* The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books)
* The Clash of Images by Abdelfattah Kilito, translated from the French by Robyn Creswell (New Directions)
* Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (New Directions)
* Cyclops by Ranko Marinković, translated from the Croatian by Vlada Stojiljković, edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać (Yale University Press)
* Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions)
* I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund and the author (Graywolf Press)
* A Thousand Peaceful Cities by Jerzy Pilch, translated from the Polish by David Frick (Open Letter)
* Touch by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar (Clockroot)
* The Black Minutes by Martín Solares, translated from the Spanish by Aura Estrada and John Pluecker (Grove/Black Cat)
* On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui, translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey (Dalkey Archive)
* Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Tin House)
* Microscripts by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions/Christine Burgin)
* Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (Archipelago)

'From that list 'The True Deceiver' is excellent, and 'The Jokers' was both flawed and fascinating. 'A Jew Must Die' by a bit too simple and straightforward, I thought. It was basically about some Nazis who decide a Jew must die, and so they kill him, and that's about it.

'visitation' is tremendous, started a thread on it actually, v worthwhile. the per petterson is ok, 'nice', i guess, sort of bland and uninteresting, 'the black minutes' is a lot of fun but maybe too exuberant & chaotic its a mexican noir w/ mostly unnecessary time-shifting structure, sorta james ellroy-esque. i have a copy of 'the golden age' but i havent read it

Blimey, you think "I Curse The River Of Time" is "nice"? I was really affected by it, found it grindingly sad.

oh haha i mean 'nice' as in 'nicely done' or 'fine', i didnt like the book v much but i didnt want to call it 'bad', yknow? its just i was immune to its pull its movements felt secondhand and tiresome

on elegance while sleeping is pretty immense, highly recommended, a quick read too

Thank you for the best translated book award list. I have read the first chapter of The Jokers and it promises ... diversion, escape, perspective. I am wondering about the translation of "bum."

'a visit from the goon squad' = p good

i liked remainder a lot

― max, Wednesday, March 2, 2011 3:48 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a LOT

― max, Wednesday, March 2, 2011 3:48 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

glad you said this, its been sitting on my shelf and i've been lacking the motivation to read it, kinda out of some fear of it being overly-conceptual/cold/whatever.