As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

I didn't know that anyone actually read Plot as a commentary on the Bush administration - seems like a major stretch to me, even if you dislike Bush a lot. Since the only other Roth I've read is Portnoy, I was disappointed that Plot wasn't funnier, but I guess that wasn't the point. It was fun to read as alternate-history, in the same vein as Dick's Man in the High Castle.

It was definitely received as such in the UK - Homeland Security, Guantanamo, wearing the flag, and what we heard about talk radio all that raised those echoes over here, and Bush himself never got anything approaching a fair hearing in our media. It seems a bit silly now, so I'd like to reread as pure alternate history. Plus I rather like Lindbergh, I'd quite like to test that again.

Roth, to his credit, has never gone near the idea that it's a Bush administration allegory. Things like that only diminish the work, I feel, unless you really are allegorising totalitarianism.

Edward St. Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels

cover is so hideous that I'm embarrassed to read on the subway

xp I'm trying to find contemporaneous reviews, and to be fair they're not as bad as I'd feared. It's plainly there in the background ("surely the novel is topical; isn’t that what the title says? Well, this is, perhaps, what people have taken the title to mean. Two current plots against America spring immediately to mind. There is the global plot of al-Qaida against the evils of capitalism, substantively and symbolically centred in the US – the war on terror is a war against the elusive authors of this plot. And there is, settling down now as a major fear of many Americans, the plot of the Bush administration to abolish many civil liberties and concentrate autocratic powers in the hands of the president ... But the plot in the novel is neither of these, although there are times when it looks like the second") but it's mostly taken at face value. Maybe it was other stuff I was reading.

Yeah, I can see how it would resonate with the climate of fear (both of terrorism and of the government overreach in response) at the time it came out. I remember reading reviews like that too, but I think it was more people reading into it.

I just received my NYROB edition of Belchamber.

Alfred, re: Black Lamb,

You should! It's a big book, but not difficult. If you care about the subject-matter then it goes pretty quickly, and the subject-matter is some of the most interesting there is: the legacy of World War I, the rise of fascism... Mostly though I like her finicky obsessiveness with people, clothing, art, architecture, religion, food, and everything else. It's all grist for reflection.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7181/6945160803_bac14fe983.jpg This was sitting on my dad's desk when he died. It's about structural engineering, but as it's Russian it has lots of poetry quotations and stuff in it. It's a pretty easy read, will get to it when I have time. Am slowly learning Russian.

thanks, Träumerei!

The latest edition boasts a Hitchens intro, I see.

'the letter killers club', 'seeing', an anthology of comic SF (er), 'gender trouble'

i am tempted to start a rolling theory thread but i feel like it will just be me blogging things i don't understand

I think Lacan is the main reason why I dropped out of university.

― Nathalie (stevie nixed), Thursday, 13 April 2006 12:46 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

St. Aubyn really knows how to write cruelty -- painful stuff to read even though the prose is near perfect.

I'm about 3/4 through Parzival, so I haven't reached the climax of the story, but I thought I'd put in a good word for the author, Wolfram von Eschenbach. If the translation is true to the original (and Hatto seems quite a good translator) Wolfram is the best of the epic poets I've read from that era.

He drops in the obligatory descriptions of clothing and other luxurious appurtenances that his audience obviously craved (the Niebelungenlied natters on at interminable length about fabrics, jewelry, and jousting paraphernalia), but von Eschenbach hurries past these details as quickly as he decently can and gets right back to describing people and their motives.

He keeps the fabulist elements well in check, too. He keeps the portion of malevolent dwarves, dragons, giants, enchanted trees, or enchanted castles, or enchanted whatsiwhosis to a minimum, so that while the story includes a few such elements, it never elevates them to much importance. Instead, he seems to be more interested in social mores and the sorts of moral double-binds inflicted by the demands of chivalry. He defends the ladies often and well, but not as a dewy-eyed romantic idealist, but rather the contrary. I like him. He even stops from time to time to complain about the meagreness of his love life, in a humorous, mock-serious tone.

I give Parzival the high mark among its peers - at least among the half dozen or so I've read so far.

Malevolent dwarves > meagre love life.

But maybe that's just me thinking the grass is always greener.

I am moving into a new place, and thinking that one of the only books I will bring with me (at least at first) is my recently-acquired and more-or-less-untouched copy of Elias Canetti's Auto da Fe... which is about an obsessive book collector, right? hoping to gain some 'self-knowledge'...

Do you have a bookshelf (or its equivalent as measured in heaps of books) in your bathroom? If so, seek help.

Edward St. Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels

cover is so hideous that I'm embarrassed to read on the subway

haha is it the glossy black and hot pink one? i bought that edition last weekend. i dont really like it honestly, and its less exacting and precisely written than i was expecting. there are a bunch of baggy sentences and cliches and the attempts to write from 5 yo patrick's pov are p limp. idk, there are some good zingers but its p ridiculous.

T.H.O.M.P. - what did u think of 'letter killers'???

I got over it and am reading it on the subway anyway. I do really like it, although I agree that his writing sometimes gets overly weighed down with simile -- curious to see if it gets a little tighter in the later novels. His prose passes my most important test, i.e. the writing basically *reads itself* to me.

lamp i read it in a terrible mood when i was reading because i didn't want to go to sleep so i can't really say, i sort of want to read it again -- it is definitely the only thing i have read that made me think both of stanislaus lem and jerome k. jerome if that helps? er

god, i suppose i finished 'gender trouble' today, that felt exhausting. and immediately i started reading gerard genette. lol grad school

also deborah eisenberg and alice monro, to stay sane

& bolano's 'amulet', which mainly just made me want to read his other stuff again

haha bolano and munro its like i mean ok

bought at the thrift store today: penguin classics 'road to wigan pier' a book about herbal remedies for cats called 'cats - naturally' 'the immoralist' by andré gide also in the grey penguin modern classics and a taschen book of illustrated vegetables

I'm attempting Seven Pillars of Wisdom, hoping it will be as far-out as reputed.

immediately i started reading gerard genette

YES

Dyer's Out Of Sheer Rage, which I'm finding really excellent piecemeal and tedious when attempted straight-ahead.

I never found The Seven Pillars of Wisdom "far-out" at all. 700 pages of tedious backward-and-forwarding over the desert blowing up railway lines. There's no way I'd be able to finish it if I was reading it now, but I was abroad at the time and had little else to read. Lawrence struck me as a fraud and a bore. Not that I want to put a dampener on your reading or anything, Traumerei.

http://ia700804.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/21/items/olcovers42/olcovers42-L.zip&file=428266-L.jpg

And, erm, looking at the Amazon reviews I certainly seem to be in a minority of one, or at best two or three. So maybe I'm clueless about literature.

I've only dipped Zuleika but p much everything I've heard and read about it, plus the small sections I idly went thru suggests you are otm.

the fraudulence & fragility of lawrence's endless self-construction is the most interesting thing about him (makes noise in throat, strokes incipient beard)

genette is, surprisingly, funny: this goes a long way

haha bolano and munro its like i mean ok

well the bolano was following on by the marias and the saramago (somehow)? i have developed this awful tic where if stuff i am reading falls into some made-up narrative or logical order i can't reshelve books x and y until i finish book z. i.e. i couldn't put 'twilight of the superheroes' back in its jacket and back on the shelf until i finished 'hateship, friendship'. but with the other pile-o'-stuff i had all of your face tomorrow and the two oxford books and blindness and seeing out and i couldn't allow myself to move them until i read amulet. mainly my feeling on finishing amulet was 'thank god, i can use my desk again'

Break from Capital (I think i did mention it up thread somewhere thomp, but yes, god, that fucking title - because it's both London, that's the CAPITAL of England, and AVAILABLE MONEY do you see? But do you see tho? That'd be a great title! Clever!). Read Game of Thrones instead. This is a much better book. It's better written, it has characters I was interested in, and who said or tried to say or think interesting things.

Back on Capital now. I might just use this thread to record where he gets his casual yet awkward inventory of quotdian modernity and general stuff subtly yet dreadfully RONG.

Sitting on Roger's desk were three computer screens, one of them tracking departmental activity in real time, another being Roger's own PC, given over to email and IM and video-conferencing and his diary, another tracking trades in the foreign exchange department over the year

IM! (Of course, once you start unraveling that the whole thing comes undone, as so often in this book, with his separate PCs and separate screens and just dedicated to email and IM and video-conferencing and his diary? What about his My Documents folder and his powerpoint presentation viewer and.... ah fuck it, right?)

Zbigniew and Piotr leaned against the wall of Uprising, their favourite bar..

No they didn't. Uprising!

The pub had no Polish beers so both men were drinking Budvar, in their view the only good thing to come out of the former Czechoslovakia

yah wdn't be Budvar that they'd select out of Czech beers imo, but willing to give him a pass on this one. Does also indicated JL's handy way with character cliche (Poles don't like Czechs? True enough much of the time, enough to make such things the template of a character's internal monologue? He does this all the time! See also JL's casually racist happy black African teenage footballer who watermelon smiles a lot and whose internal monologue consists of ever so slightly truncated sentences.)

Tomorrow would be a day off; (...) she would watch a movie on the DVD player

wtf is she an alien. why is she speaking like this?

This is how to liveblog a book imo. I was thumbing a copy in Waterstone's last week and not immediately put off - your review and the store blurb ('You'll be rooting for the little guy as the banker gets his comeuppance!') may have saved me from some unpleasantness I feel.

A mate of mine has been reading Sebastian Faulks' A Day In December (or something like that), over which Faulks made a similar tit of himself a couple of years back. Why does this happen? It seems a particular hazard of attempts at satirical zeitgeist.

Uprising!

Did I say nothing has happened yet? NOTHING. Third of the way in.

Oh, I tell a lie, the old woman, Petunia Howe *if that is your real name*, fainted in a corner shop run by Ahmed. This is the only event.

Bogdan the Builder!

Ouch. I'm writing something at the moment and I've become conscious of how it's incredibly difficult to make things happen. Nearly 20,000 words and there have been a few rows, some colour, incipient conflict with a few characters, and a setup for a course of events to take place - but no events as such. Someone's got a job, but we don't know what it is yet.

I might throw a gun into my next 500 words, just to see what it brings.

so it's called uprising, and poles drink there, but it isn't a polish bar with polish beer? Is it intended as a minor realistic incongruity?

I keep seeing roaring reviews. I guess it looks like what broadsheet journalism likes to believe novels are or should be.

Have there been many/any novels that have competently done modern London Polish life?

xp oh, I'm doing better than that at least

a minor realistic incongruity

does this all the time as well. makes his weird 'everyday experience acquired second-hand' descriptions more realistic. obv.

gun ftw, IK. Chandler style.

The roaring reviews I put down to reviewers being people similar to Lanchester, whose general experience of everyday life leads them to believe they know about it and are in touch with everyday people, but who in fact, aren't.

This doesn't matter of course unless it is the material of your novel, in which case your lack of easy familiarity makes the whole thing sound like a language course. 'Go into an English 'pub' and order a beer', 'What do you like? I like to watch movies on my DVD player, on Tuesdays I go to the local swimming pool. I swim for twenty minutes and then go to the cafe for a cup of tea.'

Also, the whole novel absolutely stinks of interview research.

And I don't know any books about modern London Polish life , but I'd very much like to read a good version of this (not just London really, but anywhere in this country). Kinda touches on IK's question about books similar to Englischer Fussball upthread.

Just got the new Thomas Mallon novel Watergate.

private eye gave captial a stinky review, fwiw

x-post

lol 'captial'

"When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand"

Thanks a ton for this! Lord knows when I read it - at a guess fifteen years ago - but it's obviously stuck. (I've been toying with trying to start an ILB writing group btw, and now I've got a name for it.)

http://www.faber.co.uk/site-media/onix-images/thumbs/4693_jpg_280x450_q85.jpg

xps

yeah, I'd definitely be interested too. suspect the book we want is going to be translated from the polish.

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Read 'Ripley Under Water'!

― Do you know what the secret of comity is? (Michael White), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 2:06 PM (1 month ago)

Ripley Under Water is properly creepy. I'm ever impressed with the ways that Highsmith completely, precisely details the peril Ripley faces, and how his chain of psychopathic logic/reasoning kind of ... makes perfect sense? His perspective so saturates and colors the narrative style that it's impossible not to sympathize with him, to realize the efficacy of premeditated murder as a solution to his (not exactly) quotidian woes. It's a real testament to his character, and the overall construction of Ripley Under Water that you (reader) really root for Tom to kill the Prichards, and grow increasingly frustrated when he stays his hand. Without spoilering, the final solution to their thread is ... basically perfect. It's vehemently anti-cathartic, and continues the line of tension even beyond the end of the book.

I also adore Tom's intellectual/cultural pretensions, and the way PH incorporates them so fluidly. In the last two books, Tom reads and reflects on Isherwood's diaries, Ellman's bio on Oscar Wilde, listens to Transformer, soothes himself with some Brahms, deadheads roses and make a bouquet of orange and pink dahlias (one orange, two pink).

fzzls: does capital really include a corner shop run by an ahmed? that's something. i'm piqued by the idea of yr reading george r.r. martin, though, that i did not expect to be a thing that happened.

It's been a long time since I read Seven Pillars of Wisdom and much a shorter time since my last viewing of Lawrence of Arabia with Peter O'Toole, which is a grebt movie, but has a very different pov than SPW. SPW is a curious and interesting book that just gets more interesting when you have more context from outside the book.

The apparent purpose of the book is to bestow upon the world a true history of the accomplishments of the arabs during WWI and promote a better understanding of arab culture in Britain. But Lawrence is working so many angles at once, and he has so many political and personal interests at play, that the book acquires a lot of tension from how all these strands interact, often at cross-purposes.

It's probably no exaggeration to say that the attempt to contain all these internal and external conflicts finally drove Lawrence to try to blow himself up and try to start over from scratch. He failed, but it is a pretty amazing, if painful story and SPW is at the center of it.