Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

Love the Amazon summary of 'On Elegance While SLeeping' : "On Elegance While Sleeping is the deliciously macabre novel, part Maldoror and part Dorian Gray, that established its author’s reputation as a renegade hero of Argentine literature. It tells the story, in the form of a surreal diary, of a lonely, syphilitic French soldier, who—after too many brothels and disappointments—returns from Africa longing for a world with more elegance. He promptly falls in love with a goat, and recalls the time, after a childhood illness, when his hair fell out and grew back orange—a phenomenon his doctor attributed to the cultivation of carrots in a neighboring town."

I think I'm sold.

this is sort of the thread where i read things people were reading six months ago

i wasn't sure about how the egan novel wound up. the powerpoint presentation chapter (yup) was a tour de force, but the last chapter was pretty annoying

also it's so NICE. nice nice nice. NICE things happen to everyone, in the end; i feel like somewhere, elif batuman is complaining about this book right now. all the collapsed marriages are nice. the recovering addicts are nice. even the suicide is nice. the near-victim of a sexual assault sends a letter: "I am sorry for whatever part I played in your mental breakdown, and also for stabbing you."

i thought i'd escaped with only one reference to the world trade centre and then the last chapter kind of rocks up. and it goes LOOK here are IDEAS ABOUT MUSIC AND AUTHENTICITY and i was more okay with those being background noise, to be honest; it does do all the stuff the shteyngart novel does a lot better and in thirty pages, though.

also new york novelists sure do like the williamsburg bridge.

Here is more on The Best Translated Book Award. I actually found out about it from a wiki page (past list in that link), probably while googling some author or other. xp

Having read a bit about Egan now I am afraid that its notions about music/communication/technology and the like will sound really lame.

it's not really about that stuff

& while i'm annoyed by it, it is at least taking place in a version of the world i recognise, & by someone who is up to speed on how things work

the music stuff does pretty much all center around 'the industry', though; there's no room for outsider or oppositional models of art -- not a flaw, i think, just not in the book's purview

oh ok seem to remember but there was a review somewhere that mentions that stuff - probably imagining it.

there probably is! it's the milieu of a lot of the novel, and there is a sporadic argument about authenticity, which only jumps to the center in that last chapter. but i don't think it's the novel's motive cause and true centre; if that were the case, i'd probably have not liked the book at all

also it's so NICE. nice nice nice. NICE things happen to everyone, in the end; i feel like somewhere, elif batuman is complaining about this book right now. all the collapsed marriages are nice. the recovering addicts are nice. even the suicide is nice. the near-victim of a sexual assault sends a letter: "I am sorry for whatever part I played in your mental breakdown, and also for stabbing you."

― thomp, Sunday, March 20, 2011 6:21 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well, there's scotty. and jocelyn. and rolph. and rob. i'll admit that i found this book comforting just because it was willing to imagine people's lives beyond the point at which they seemed tragic. life goes on, you know?

i sort of lost interest a little at the very end, too, though

horseshoe, i got 'look at me' but i can't decide if i should devour it now bc i am on an egan roll, or savour it bc there are no more for me to read after this one :(

that is a conundrum! i love that book so much that i have reread it several times, if that helps at all. omg i am so excited for you!!!

also it's so NICE. nice nice nice. NICE things happen to everyone, in the end

she has a lot of empathy for her characters i think but idk if id conflate that w/ 'niceness' (or 'weakness') shes just trying to find a way of balancing the ~essential goodness~ of ppl with the way things & ppl falter & fail. i mean i guess i like that shes thinking abt ~the future~ and ~connectedness~ in a less rigidly cynical & hobbesian way even if it means being 'nice'...

also the more i thought about it the more i liked the end of the book - the idea of a paradigm shift to particle physics as a foundational way of ~talking about the world~

my big problem w/ the novel was that it tried to be too neat, tie up too many loose ends, follow every thematic notion through

ugh @ paradigm shift, im the worst

but i mean i do get the 'nice' thing its something that bothered me about the keep her urge to humanize & sympathize w/characters and situations to the point where it betrays the novel

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

― just sayin, Wednesday, 2 March 2011 19:48 (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

next by james hynes was the winner fwiw

I'm intrigued by the description of "Next" so I put a hold on it at my library. I live in Austin, so I want to see how he portrays it (although I usually hate (and love to hate) evocations of "Austin-ness").

just came here to bump this

can't even remember the last novel i read -- pathetic

has anything else been getting really hyped recently besides the pale king?

'swamplandia!' got a lot of good press & is i think the big 'must read' that isnt dfw. although i wasnt a huge fan. jean thompson's 'the year we left home' has also been really well reviewed & i think its fantastic. chris adrian's new book is a modern retelling of a midsummer's night dream & its... idk, not 'great' but i kind of loved it? teju cole's 'open city' has a lot of buzz amongst ppl i know/read but im not sure how widely read/acclaimed its been? it got a review in the newyorker. in translation new directions has a couple of interesting contemp titles - jenny erpenbeck's 'visitation' and lászló krasznahorkai's 'animalinside'. i think the latter has some good press the former is just the best thing ive read all year.

can you slow down a bit Lamp, please? I can't even note down the titles quick enough let alone read the damn things. Resistance of Melancholy has been staring reproachfully at me from my desk for the last couple of weeks. Soon it will be time to take it back to the library.

xpost yeah i read karen russell's book of short stories + wasnt really into it. i havent heard of that jean thompson book! i enjoyed 'the childrens hospital' so will be looking for that new chris adrian. 'visitation' still sitting on the shelf.

i got visitation on yr rec, lamp, but i just couldn't get into it - i think i got maybe halfway through and then i bought a bunch of other books and started reading those instead.

sorry :/

i thought it was good, if that helps

haha it's ok - i don't think it's a bad book by any means, it just isn't my kind of book.

Well my library got a hold of Books Burn Badly by Manuel Rivas. It has had some rave reviews (I didn't have to fill out a ILL card for this!) - more importantly, it seems to be the kind of book about a topic that I'm drawn to: namely the hijacking of literature/culture by surrounding political forces in a time and place where abosolutely everything is about to fall apart (see Bolano).

Yes I do have a life, just not a too interesting one OKAY!

About to start.

Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel is getting a reissue. A novel I have wanted to read for quite a while.

i really dug the excerpt of swamplandia in the new yorker. at least i think it was an excerpt. might have to check that out.

i read shane jones' light boxes today. i think it was the worst thing i have read all year.

been wondering abt that... i remember mr que stanning for it + i added it to my amazon wish list but have never clicked buy

Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel is getting a reissue. A novel I have wanted to read for quite a while.

I dug this quite a bit.

there was a piece on el pais on him on account of his centenary that made me think of him again. i've never read him, but he wrote very few novels so not exactly hard to get through them. my main problem is getting to spanish language books in britain, but i expect this can be overcame just by paying a price.

also, he sounds grim.

haha for a minute my mind went to the gass novel

sorry i led anyone astray with light boxes. i dug it a lot. i dig this guy, too, he's a new discovery for me:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Hoffman-t.html

mr. que have read/heard much about jesse ball's 'the curfew'? im interested in purchasing it but reviews have been mixed & no one i know has read it

yeah, i just read a thing in the new yorker that sealed the deal for me, something about "an inverted skyscarper plunging hundreds of feet underground" sounds pretty rad. there's a cool interview on the millions with the dude, too

not to mention this

http://www.themillions.com/2011/07/most-anticipated-the-great-second-half-2011-book-preview.html

skyscraper, not skyscarper

haha skimming that im reminded of how fantastic (wordplay!) i thought stephen millhauser's 'dangerous laughter' was. its also making me feel bad about how dismissive ive been of contemp writing this year, theres so much stuff i havent bothered to read or even think of reading. i was however vaguely aware there was a new ann patchett novel out

yeah the only real new thing i've read in a while is "The Pale King" and it was really really boring, terrible, awful, sad (not in a good way sad.)

ty for that link que -- i love kate christensen & didnt know she had a new book out!

other than the big names (baker, stephenson maybe, eugenides) im interested in the dana spiotta book

hey mr que sorry to be overly dismissive of the shane jones book

i was sort of on-the-fence about it until we got to february as writer-figure, it was then stuck for me both as generically like something i'd read before and very specifically like i. the people of paper (and i didn't even like that book much) ii. someone trying to 'do' ben marcus ?? which anyway i then started rereading notable american women and i like it way less than i remembered liking it, so either i'm not really in the mood for this stuff or my tastes have shifted away from it, oh well

I like César Aira a lot, though How I Became a Nun was my least favorite of everything I've read by him (which is everything in English translation, or 1% of his overall writing I think).

a year later and i'm still not reading fiction -- is there a literary fiction Book of the Summer? (or Book of 2011?) :-/

i want to get back to reading fiction but it's all non-fiction over here

still haven't read the pale king, although i want to -- i read that interview book twice though

i want to read that tea obreht book too

bump for the not 12:13 am at night crowd :)

mr. que have read/heard much about jesse ball's 'the curfew'? im interested in purchasing it but reviews have been mixed & no one i know has read it

just read this over the weekend, it was just okay, nothing special. read like a long short story. not very memorable, sorry.

that's handy, i was pondering whether to get or not, but i'll save the money

i ended up really liking dana spiotta's 'stone arabia' although i think its the sort of book thats too slight to really sustain scrutiny or mass affection, if that makes any sense

i also really enjoyed denis johnson's 'train dreams' which i think is mb the most lucid and thoughtful book of his ive read, certainly since 'fiskadoro'