Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

Started Harvest by Jim Crace. The opening does not bode well for me -- really heavy on "voice" and labored "beautiful" prose imo. The narrator does not sound like a person. Opening to a random page:

"Still, there was essential work to finish yesterday, whatever our distractions. If we hoped for sufficient grain to last the year, we'd have to deserve it with some sweat. This summer's yield was not yet good enough. Plenty, here, has wed itself to Leanness. At the lower, shaded limits by the dell and on the more neglected stony slopes our plants have proven miserly." It's fine writing, and yet it's so fucking CRAFTED that I almost can't take it.

trying to figure out what kind of real life bar was the inspiration for "Rudy's"

at first it seems like a dive but then there's descriptions of it having red neon art installations and stuff

― dmr, Thursday, November 21, 2013 12:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've never actually been there, but are you sure it's not Rudy's, the famous Hell's Kitchen bar also mentioned by Steely Dan -- ("I saw you at Rudy's, you were very high")?

pynchon/murakami

I'm going to buy 3 popular fiction books with which to engage in a reading practice. it ishard for me not to just ascerrtain a vagueness about the book as a whole, without the ability to explore the ideas. i am a materialist, so that is normal for me

Wasn't Rudy's in New Haven, was it?

i loved the flamethrowers. only disappointments are that the italy stuff turned out to be a much slighter portion (and less action-packed) than i had anticipated, and that there weren't more sex scenes (the hookup with ronnie fontaine got me all het up) i loved all the stories people told, i'm a sucker for that kinda self-mythologizing, conversational anecdote. reminded me of Open City by Teju Cole in the way the narrator is revealed to you more through their own observations than their actions: you never really hear reno speak in a conversation, underlining how shy she is, the feeling of being in the company of people who don't accept you and all the subtle dismissals that she ingeniously but silently decodes. i know you're supposed to think they're jerks but i really liked sandro & ronnie, i felt their ennui relatable and their sense of humour and playfulness admirable

there def was a dive named rudys in new haven, it still sortof exists but moved spaces and is now like a gentrified sit down restaurant/bar

the flame thrower rudy's is closest to max's KC i think

i never really noticed how little reno speaks until i saw it pointed out in a review and i was like, huh

http://nplusonemag.com/world-lite

^ discussed this anywhere here? v much follows from args against university fiction/writing programs that we've seen but crosses it w/a disdain for the direction of politics post -'89.

Interesting to contrast this w/world music, which hardened into a genre years before the cold war ended.

What I really liked the most was that it wouldn't pan a writer for being this or that. Ngugi teaches; Naipul doesn't, they both have good and bad things about them (and whether they become bad or good isn't exactly because they teach or not, or it isn't always clear-cut).

Just loved the run-on discussion of writers. Probably the first article I've read where I felt like picking up a Salman Rushdie book, or Naipul. Some of the writers they talk up as displaying 'internationalist' tendencies sound good, but one or two win prizes: Girish Karnad seems to display both things...and Yan Lianke has been forced underground, it doesn't sound like he moved there for lifestyle reasons.

The only sour note was the disdain for 2666. "Appalling" I suppose that novel is a puzzle that doesn't resolve, a lot of it is there, statically sitting around, but its part of the dashed off judgement that I so like.

Their model is v much hard-left and modernist - but modernism is a complicated set of people and things coming from a left and right ideology as they know v well. Still most of the writers they list sound quite appealing so I'll try and find a few things. The plot of Lianke's Lenin's Kisses is absurdity on the level of Platonov.

It still is about the sentences.

Really into "The Blazing World" by Siri Hustvedt, though only about halfway through. Never read anything by her before. Vaguely similar to "The Flamethrowers" in that it's about a female artist and how she's perceived in the masculine art world but very different tonally, a lot more knotty and varied.

hahaha she seriously called her book that? good on her i guess

She's fantastic. Although it gets on my nerves that all her characters exist in this world where everyone is either a writer or an artist or a creative of some sort. It's a bit smug in large doses.

Until I read that New Yorker profile of Lydia Davis a couple months ago, I had no idea Siri Husvedt had written a novel about Davis's son (w/Paul Auster) and the "Party Monster" murder

Yeah, the profiler's quotes from the novel were arresting; ditto and more this Times review:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/books/review/the-blazing-world-by-siri-hustvedt.html?_r=0

And I don't usually give a shit about "the art world."

'nobody is ever missing' was really good but felt almost too perfectly situated in 'contemporary literary fiction' like i couldnt shake a feeling of idk displacement while reading it i was thinking about trollopes parody of 'bleak house' in 'the warden' - books that are sick with themselves

i also really liked the new lorrie moore collection but i want to read something that is new but i had the same sort of problem although less so probably because i already 'know' lorrie moore and am habituated to her voice.

I can't wait to read nobody is ever missing

that sheila heti sucked

Ben Lerner's new novel is coming out September 2nd. I got a hold of a review copy some months ago, and it's pretty amazing.

Similar to his last one but structured more interestingly, and more provocatively autobiographical and political. Less funny though, unfortunately.

the shelia heti book that i am assuming your talking about was just like man, i cant even, ok w/e. sometimes i like to think i am unique or meaningful or particularly alive and then this person writes a book that so overlaps my own experiences and it seemed to trivialize everything, the insights and emotions didnt all match-up but enough did or to an extent that seemed overwhelming especially because her novel is not the shape that i would have given to my own insights or emotions

it was so boring and just like ugh

hey lamp do u rate trollope? i read the wards a couple weeks ago, i was actually kind of disappointed in the dickens bit, I have opened barchester towers and looked at the first page and slowly closed it again thinking 'not today' six or seven times since then

'can you forgive her?' is really good i think. i like the palliser novels better than the barchester ones.

The ILB fave Trollope is prob The Way We Live Now. more scathing than Dickens, in part because no tear-jerking; his characters are already fucked up enough by their times, themselves and each other. The author is fair-minded though: even (most of) the worst characters can be sympathized with to a degree (but having real grievances can make them that much more dangerous. I was startled by the steady focus on female psychology times or divided by their available/perceptible options; also the generational clashes.
Good overview here, from Frederick Mount in the WSJ:

The Way We Live Now
By Anthony Trollope (1875)
Augustus Melmotte is a big, flamboyant man of mysterious foreign origin, "with an expression of mental power in a harsh vulgar face." The amazing thing about him is that, right from the start of Trollope's irresistible novel, he has the reputation of a gigantic swindler who has already ruined those who trusted him. Yet respectable types still come running to the door of his office in Abchurch Lane. His prize speculation in Central American railroads is revealed as a cynical scam, and, like Mr. Merdle, he does himself in. "The Way We Live Now" offers another marvelous panorama of mid-Victorian London, but the difference is that most of Melmotte's victims aren't innocent dupes but greedy chancers well aware of the sort of man they are dealing with. Melmotte is based on George Hudson, "the Railway King," whose swindles bankrupted Trollope's father-in-law, but his whole career is a dead ringer for that of the newspaper baron Capt. Robert Maxwell, MC, MP, who was discredited time and again but always bobbed up until, in 1991, he went down for the third time off his yacht.

I read somewhere that this 'un dismayed some of his fans, who found it too dark.

(It's tons of fun; make room for an epic read.)

putting the 'contemporary' in 'contemporary literary fiction'

well we can go back to how waterface doesn't like sheila heti i guess

Any opinions here on Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew smith ? Just about to start that one...

If you're a fan of John Green, Michael Grant, Stephen King or David Levithan, get your pincers stuck into this. In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby have accidentally unleashed an unstoppable army. An army of horny, hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises that only want to do two things. This is the truth. This is history. It's the end of the world. And nobody knows anything about it. Funny, intense, complex and brave, Grasshopper Jungle is a groundbreaking, genre-bending, coming-of-age stunner.

Anyone read Josef Winkler?

http://contramundum.net/catalog/current/natura-morta-a-roman-novella/

http://quarterlyconversation.com/reading-prae

idk...idk

sounds scary...

I like me some Hungarians, but that looks pretty daunting

I liked Marginalia on Casanova quite a lot when I read it last year.

Plenty of books with non-existent plots and carnivalesques (which the thing sorta says so I'm not sure as to what Prae is meant to be bringing here). Its interesting why this has taken so long to be translated. Surprised Musil wasn't mentioned, reminders of him w/out as much control (although I haven't of course spent as much time w/Szentkuthy).

Szentkuthy translations might be what the Bolano translations were a few years ago. Its a massive project.

And in terms of the thinking of what Euro-lit was like in the 20s and 30s its on par with the Musil revival, The Book of Disquiet, the Platonov translations, etc.

I think Josep Pla also might do something in that direction.

Sounds fascinating, not to mention intimidating, and really I would probably be better off, as always, actually reading some of the classics on which books like this build. Either way, there's an excerpt of the first 100 pages here :

http://contramundum.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/CMP_Prae_book_sample.pdf

reading this old interview with richard yates and this here:

Q. Who among your contemporaries do you feel have been seriously neglected? What about the work of Edward Lewis Wallant?
Y. A fine writer; and yes, seriously neglected today, though he was by no means overlooked or unappreciated when his books first came out. Wallant worked with tremendous energy and tremendous speed. He didn't even start writing until he was over thirty; then he managed to produce four novels in five years before he died very suddenly of a stroke at the age of thirty-six, ten years ago. He and I were pretty good friends, though we used to argue a lot about working methods: I thought he ought to take more time over his books; he'd disagree. It was almost as if he knew he didn't have much time. If he'd lived, God only knows how much good work he might have accomplished by now. Anyway, the four books are there, and I do believe they'll last.

makes me curious...

also nice to see them mention ILB favorites Brian Moore and Evan Connell.

Q. Who do you consider some other good, neglected writers?
Y. Read the four spendid books by Gina Berriault, if you can find them, and if you want to discover an absolutely first-class talent who has somehow been left almost entirely out of the mainstream. She hasn't quit writing yet, either, and I hope she never will.

And read almost anything by R.V. Cassill, a brilliant and enormously productive man who's been turning out novels and stories for twenty-five years or more, all the while building and sustaining a large influence on other writers as a teacher and critic. Oh, he's always been well-known in what I guess you'd call literary circles, but he had to wait a long, long time before his most recent novel, Doctor Cobb's Game, did bring him some widespread readership at last.

And George Garrett. I haven't read very much of his work, but that's at least partly because there's so very much of it - and he too has remained largely unknown except among other writers. I guess his latest book, like Cassill's, did make something of a public splash at last, but that too was long overdue. And Seymour Epstein - ever heard of him? I have read all of his work to date - five novels and a book of stories, all expertly crafted and immensely readable - yet he too seems to have been largely ignored so far.

But hell, this list could go on and on. This country's loaded with good, badly neglected writers. Fred Chappel. Calvin Kentfield. Herbert Wilner. Helen Hudson. Edward Hoagland. George Cuomo. Arthur J. Roth - those are only a few. My God, if I'd produced as much good work as most of those people, with as little reward, I'd really feel qualified to rant and rail against the Literary Establishment.

i gotta write these down! other than hoagland never read any of them.

one more:

"Another excellent, underrated writer is Thomas Williams..."

http://www.richardyates.org/bib_pshares.html

When did Connell get promoted to ILB favorite? Always felt like it was only a few of us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Berriault

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Williams_%28writer%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lewis_Wallant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Verlin_Cassill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Garrett_%28poet%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Chappell

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-17/news/vw-947_1_open-heart-surgery

http://www.thewessexcollective.com/the_wessexcollective/Hudson.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Michael_Cuomo

http://www.goodreads.com/author/list/75857.Arthur_J_Roth

it was probably just me and you. but that qualifies when there are only like five people on a message board.

some more!

Q. Who among the newer first novelists are you interested in?
Y. I thought Leonard Gardner's Fat City, which came out a couple of years ago, was an excellent first novel, and I was glad to see it win such immediate and general acclaim. Apart from that book, I guess the first novelists I've paid the most attention to are those I've known personally at Iowa over the years. Quite a number of them have been breaking into the field recently, getting their first books published with greater or lesser degrees of success, and I can't say I've liked all of those books. The best of them so far, in my opinion, are those by Andre Dubus, James Crumley, James Whitehead, Mark Dintenfass. Nolan Porterfield, and Theodore Weesner. They're all fine writers - modern writers in the best sense, traditional writers in the best sense. So, by the way, are some five or six other young writers I've known at Iowa who haven't published their first books yet, but who will soon.