As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

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.

that's what i meant to say, honest

On this first read-through, I'm treating Seven Pillars as a deliberate attempt at epic romance. Lawrence writes in one of his letters:

Do you remember my telling you once that I collected a shelf of 'Titanic' books (those distinguished by greatness of spirit, 'sublimity' as Longinus would call it): and that they were The Karamazovs, Zarathustra, and Moby Dick. Well, my ambition was to make an English fourth.

I'm interested in the history and context, too, but I'll save those for later. Right now, I intend to enjoy it as literature.

I'm not far in yet, but my favourite passage so far is this vivid description:

The armament of the Turks made them so superior at long range that the Arabs never got to grips. For this reason most of the hand-to-hand fighting had taken place at night, when the guns were blinded. To my ears they sounded oddly primitive battles, with torrents of words on both sides in a preliminary match of wits. After the foulest insults of the languages they knew would come the climax, when the Turks in frenzy called the Arabs 'English', and the Arabs screamed back 'German' at them. There were, of course, no Germans in the Hejaz, and I was the first Englishman; but each party loved cursing, and any epithet would sting on the tongues of such artists.

LOL

About to start 'The Post-Office Girl' - Stefan Zweig

Träumerei: think I'm going to enjoy any excerpts you post of SPoW more than actually reading it.

thomp, I quite like fantasy! In fact I used to consume by the bucket-load as a child/teenager, to the extent that I feel permanently affected by fantasy's motifs and manner (a natural avenue of trees, or a grassy track, heavy slanting rain, a tower on a hill, all evoke a sense of unrealistic expectation, of the possibility of transformative magic) . When I first started more realistic works it was almost a test of how good I thought they were by how much they lacked things I liked or disappointed my desires. Even now, works which manage in some way to indicate that there are moments of complicated magic to be had in the course of life are appealing to me - NOT magic realism, but Borges, say, and I just bought Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb for a girl at work. I guess I'd been more put off by the sheer extent of George RR Martin's Fire and Ice novels. Also elves kinda irritate me these days, piously self-satisfied buggers, so it was probably watching the TV series that eventually sent me to the books: no elves! Enjoyed the series v much, but left with the inevitable irritation that I have coloured my discovery of the characters and how my imagination fills them by watching it.

Lanchester and I have entered an uneasy truce. He hasn't dropped any real bollocks for a while (some slightly wonky textspeak 'cn i cu?' 'ok bt hu r u?') and there's a slight sign that things might be about to happen. Although there's a massive change of tone at the end of Part 1 where he goes in for a very C- humorous set piece. It's very weak, but it's not actively bad, and the humour, such as it is, helps break up the dreadful toiling labour of his writing so far. But I don't want to let him off the hook, so I thought I'd collect the first lines of each chapter so far:

At first light on a late summer morning, a man in a hooded sweatshirt moved softly and slowly along an ordinary looking street in South London. He was doing something, though a bystander would have been hard put to guess what.

Hooded sweatshirt! Only a writer would use that phrase, or an unusually stilted police description. No one has ever moved softly and slowly down a street and if they did they would immediately be the most conspicuous thing on it. Even an ordinary looking street. (It turns out to be actually ordinary as well as ordinary looking despite the promise of a den of criminal masterminds, false fronts, a secret cave that the phrase 'ordinary looking'). A bystander! What would a bystander be doing on a street? Watching someone move softly and slowly? You don't get bystanders on streets unless there's been an accident or incident, John: wrong word/idea/image w/e.

On a rainy morning in early December, an 82-year-old woman sat in her front room at 42 Pepys Road, looking out at the street through a lace curtain. Her name was Petunia Howe...

Don't be absurd! Also, reader wonders whether she is distantly or even closely related to Geoffrey.

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I hope you're already getting a sense of fatigue at the toiling rhythm and progress of his sentences, the way he leaves nothing to chance.

It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office,

Stop telling me the time of day.

Ahmed Kamal, who owned the shop (sorry thomp) at the end of Pepys Road, number 68, came awake 3.59 in the morning, one minute before his alarm was set to go off.

Please stop telling me the time of day. Also - came awake?

Shahid Kamal, who was due to work a shift at the family shop between eight o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the evening, walked down the street at a brisk clip.

ffs

At number 51 Pepys Road, Mrs Arabella Yount...

At ten o'clock Shahid was stacking...

Two weeks before Christmas, Petunia sat...

I've reached Part 2. Things are going to start happening! I hope he doesn't do too much more humour.

It's very weak, but it's not actively bad, and the humour, such as it is,

This may be the faintest praise I have ever seen.

pepys rd, isn't that just gelid with something or other

nice of him to put the apology in though

Lanchester appears to believe that numbers and proper names lendan air of factual authenticity to his writing.

lol

First line of Part 2

Spring was coming. At number 42...

Ismael, it doesn't really deserve much else. A father not used to looking after his two children has to look after them... with hilarious consequences! The humour is v childish - one of the children shits on the cream carpet after accidentally hitting the father in the head: 'The shit was liquid and hot. It smelt very bad. Then the front door rang.' That sort of thing. 'it was found by trial and error that scrambled eggs were the ones Conrad would eat. The confusion came about because he had said he liked the one which was eggy.' Yup ok. Sub lukewarm dinner party but better than telling me it's late afternoon on an early winter's day at 5pm at 54 Pepys (ffs) Road.

Aimless otm, along with having very authentic characters that vary not at all from exactly what you'd expect them to be. I think he might actually try to be doing something with that time and place thing, something conscious I mean but you just greet each chapter with 'not again'. To emphasise the point I left a few first lines out, but I see now that they include:

On Friday the 21st at five o'clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque

and

Usman came into the shop at quarter past four on Friday, a little out of breath

But also, tbf, that one about Uprising(!), which doesn't tell you the time of day, and this one

Bogdan the buidler, whose name was not really Bogdan, sat at the kitchen table.

'Bogdan' turns out to be a nickname he acquired by being confused with someone else (Bogdan) at his first building job. Interesting nickname, no? Bogdan the Builder! Named after Bogdan the Builder! His actual name is Zbigniew and he's one of the Poles leaning against the bar in Uprising(!).

On Friday the 21st at five o'clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque

you are making this book up

i'm assuming the copies i saw in waterstones were some britain-wide conspiracy