Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

The Village that Died for England is also very good.

LRB 23.9.2021:

Adam Mars-Jones on William Gaddis proved to be outstanding, the best thing I can remember reading in the LRB all year.

LRB 21.10.2021:

Patrick McGuinness on Patrick Wright somewhat informative on the content, but wildly extravagant in its praise for the book, and doesn't make Uwe Johnson's own very long fiction sound good. Not very keen on this reviewer.

(I have used Wright's OLD COUNTRY many times but his later work has the feature that every book is massively long. I have THE VILLAGE ... on a shelf, it might as well be a doorstop, can't see that I'll ever actually get through it.)

Owen Hatherley on Soviet architecture very sound: not just knowledgeable but well-turned.

Lorentzen on Richard Powers: having no great investment in the author, I enjoy such a take-down. Again I note CL's boldness in doing this.

Deborah Friedell on Franzen: a good contrast: after 20 years, a great, refreshing relief to read something on Franzen that doesn't mainly sneer at his extra-curricular statements, but actually thinks about what's good and distinctive about him as a novelist.

Maggie Kilgour on Milton: serviceable review, but surely people who truly work on this stuff aren't going to get new material from a biography at this stage?

Hatherley was good. As was Milton, but I wasn't sure I learnt a lot from it.

Also really liked Emily Wilson's review of Aristophanes. Just the range of reference she brings on a very difficult comic playwright for modern audiences. It's good they are using her more despite Burrow's somewhat cautious review of her translation of Homer a year or two ago. It was actually a way in for her, she had hardly contributed before.

Maggie Kilgour on Milton: serviceable review, but surely people who truly work on this stuff aren't going to get new material from a biography at this stage?

For people who truly work on it, I guess I can imagine someone working on Milton-as-poet or Milton-in-the-Restoration not knowing the detail of the 1630s, or its recent historiography?

But as an interested amateur/ex-semi-pro, I was wondering the same - I'm not sure where the space is if it's basically the Campbell/Corns biography (2008), only longer. Might be a bit more narrative both on Milton & the 1630s - c/c is most comfortable being scholarly iirc (but this new one does not sound pop). May read it.

Ahead of its publication in the next issue, I offer this essay on Andreas Malm, climate politics, fossil fascism and direct action on today's #COP26GDA

Why not read it on the way to an action near you? https://t.co/GxxsH4hZpI

— James B (@piercepenniless) November 6, 2021

Adam Mars Jones' hatchet job on the booker winner, the book sounds pretty bad (and classic booker material) but AMJ sure has some funny ideas about what you can and can't do in novels.

Yep, I felt the same about AMJ's Gaddis review - incredibly prescriptive about what a novel can and can't do, or be, and seemingly oblivious to the idea that a writer of 'experimental' fiction like Gaddis might deliberately be frustrating certain readerly expectations about consistency of form, style etc.

Looking at the wiki. A collected short stories back in the early 80s, a novel and an unfinished trilogy (last vol in 2011), shifting then to a book on Ozu's Late Spring and memoirs of a difficult family history, which basically sounds like he has the contacts to indulge him.

There is more than a hint of frustration in the reviews that time has passed him by.

he's been a fixture in this terrain of reviewing since the mid-80s at least, i remember -- and do not forgive -- the dismissive TLS review he gave dave rimmer's like punk never happened lol

has anyone here read any of his fiction? (obviously not me)

i used to see him on the bus a lot. idk his reviews can be entertaining and good at picking out why some things 'work' but yes often the point of writing is not to work but to resist, disrupt, unmake and his approach is least interesting when unfriendly in which case it can seem uncomprehending and constipated.

Would like to see more reviews of this:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/

i just finally read sheila fitzpatrick's piece on perfume east and west and -- as i always do with SF -- came away informed and interested. i think PF is correct that the throatclearing stuff upfront is not especially deftly handled, she should just have been blunter quicker: "what is smell? you ask. i don't know and it doesn't matter bcz what's actually interesting in this story is the tale of two women in very different systems who were not as different as you'd think, and above all, WHAT DID THE WIFE OF THE SECOND LONGEST-LASTING OLD BOLSHEVIK GET UP TO?"

her basic subject-matter has always been the texture of life in the USSR as was and this is more of that

I read AMJ's contributions to the short story collection A DARKER PROOF (1988). The stories are all about AIDS and people living with, or dying from, it. AMJ's stories are sensitive, well crafted, subtle, touching. They showed me an aspect of life that it was good to be shown.

I like some of AMJ's non-fiction eg his polemic vs Amis & McEwan, VENUS ENVY (1990), which is at least at times outstanding.

I find him to be one of the greatest, most entertaining fiction reviewers of our time, though I'm not sure I could say he was even my favourite LRB fiction reviewer, as Michael Wood is my favourite living critic and for that matter Christopher Tayler is very good at this job.

I had to scroll back to read the earlier review of the SF piece, I read it during the summer and liked it a lot.

Sheila Fitzpatrick on perfume: maybe the concept of the book (Chanel No 5 and a Soviet perfume) is actually coherent, but if so, she doesn't make it sound that way. She spends much of the review talking about how different and unrelated the two relevant individuals are. Worse, she goes out of her way to tell us that descriptions of perfume are, to her, 'gobbledygook'. Is this a good thing to say when you've agreed to review a book about ... perfume?

Worse still, she digresses into whatever irrelevant things she can think of, bizarrely trying to fill space - 'and of course there is Proust's madeleine in the related area of taste'. Unbelievable. Possibly even worse is the opening: a whole paragraph about her own memories of various smells, utterly unrelated to the book. It's something of a curse of LRB style, as I just noted above. The book isn't really about you.

There was, in fact, ample evidence of Chanel’s collaboration, not only through the Dincklage connection but also because she had taken the opportunity to settle scores with the firm of Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, Jews whom she considered had swindled her out of profits from Chanel No. 5. It was the intercession of an old society friend, Winston Churchill, that got her off the hook in 1944 and enabled her to retreat to Lausanne.

Quality post; welcome back comrade gyac.

LRB 7.10.2021.

Colin Burrow on Christopher Ricks: blokeish Burrow is almost always unbearable, yet his review does have the virtue of not just saluting Ricks but actually getting to grips with the limits of, and doubts about, his project. Burrow's not very wrong about these. It's classic LRB-insider territory that one of the areas where he engages with Ricks is ... Ricks's comments on Burrow's own edition of Shakespeare.

Thomas Jones on Milman Parry: the 'big idea' seems to be that Homer was from oral or musical tradition - but was that new? This doesn't really come across to me.

Miriam Dobson on Maria Stepanova: the book sounds boring, generic and self-indulgent.

Paul Mendez on David Keenan: I expected this to be laudatory and, though I don't approve of every line, I'm impressed by how much it turns into a rejection by the end. Good to see such tough-mindedness especially re: a current writer.

Adam Shatz on Richard Wright: this looks authoritative but it's really full of corner-cutting, bland words, over-easy formulations. Quite interesting, still, to realise how much RW was taken on as a European intellectual later in life.

pf sez: "the 'big idea' seems to be that Homer was from oral or musical tradition"

hmmm but setting aside the LRB-ish greed for the biographical quirks of minor scholars (which i have to admit i too lap up) the 'big idea' that the review wrestles is not so much "what our theory of homer shd be!" and more "why this theory now (ie then when it was being explored and debated)?" -- viz was this shift towards an oral and a collective theory caused by the technological shift in documentation that it evidently coincides with -- viz from the written to the recorded (cue pic of gigantic phonograph horn)?

(naturally this overlaps with my own interests = the cultural effects of the arrival of various modern technologies)

plus echoing piedie on user gyac's post! i had not intended my intervention to feel as dismissive of the actual discussion of the science of perfume as it is, more that for force of argument's sake fitzgerald shd have owned her own territories of interest more firmly: "this is probably all very fascinating but i don't get it and don 't care to" is a tricky move to make -- bcz potentially alienating -- and i don't think SF makes it tidily and hence somewhat miscues a piece that is in the event readable and useful

No I didn’t think you were being dismissive, I was responding to the pinefox saying that the gobbledegook comment to him felt that way. Agree on the approach she should have taken. Thanks to you and PG, very kind.

But in another sense, a phonograph cylinder or a captain’s log or a flight recorder are also versions of the vampire’s coffin: through them the dead are revived and speak again.

With its interest in the logistics of moving goods and money from one place to another, and in the minutiae of the count’s investments in London property, Dracula is in many ways a novel about capitalism.

The coffin, a writing surface close to death, is the only object to survive the Pequod’s wreck. It serves as a lifeboat to convey Ishmael to safety – which, given that Ishmael is our narrator, makes it a device that delivers to us the entire content of the novel. It’s a literal narrative vehicle.

Would like to see more reviews of this:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything🕸/

i have to say contra a lot of people i like and admire i am wary of graeber. wary, no more, but encounter him cautiously and with my pen out for marginal commentary.

this tom mccarthy essay is v by numbers: tintin, moby dick, dracula, victorian technology etc. makes you wonder what he’s been doing for the last x years.

Gilbreth is a fascinating figure: a lifelong Republican who flirted with eugenics, she is also credited with vastly improving shop-floor conditions and with allowing workers to participate in those improvements. Lenin saw her methods as revolutionary, and rolled them out across the Soviet Union.

bit

tbf her MA thesis being on Bartholomew Fair is unexpected.

"tintin, moby dick, dracula, victorian technology": ok but this sounds good not bad

well it is but it’s v much tom mccarthy territory and has been in most of his writing. the informational content isn’t bad tbh, but his “it is, in the full technological sense, vampiric” manner is. there is no full technological sense in which things are vampiric.

we live, one could say, inside a giant black box

in many ways we are all stealing king ottakhar's sceptre

you’ve read the essay then?

Great comments Fizzles.

TM is dire at this stuff.

graeber-world (including on ilx!!) is very much torn between ppl who throw the entire book at the wall bcz he is super-careless with facts he doesn't need to be careless with (his stans shout "mere pedantry" but the other side can point to a mounting pile) and ppl who greatly enjoy the energy with which he seems to be dismantling a larger orthodoxy, and align with the implied politics (they argue that the mounting pile of wrong facts doesn't really affect the bigger picture)

when the debt book came out he had a guest spot at crooked timber which went famously badly: like a sequence of essays from CT's regulars and invited guests from different disciplines picking at various elements -- the overall tone was "we're broadly pretty excited by this book, here's some elements we'd like to explore more plus this on page xx seems wonky" and he flounced away from this in a tremendously silly thin-skinned rage very early on

(CT has many many enraging faults and he possibly had a point, or was just still too close to the material, but he did not cover himself in thoughtful glory)

i also slightly know someone who roomed with him at college, who was quite sardonic abt him and his politics given his background (but tbh they hate literally everyone so)

LRB 7.10.2021

Michael Wood on Proust: back on form! I don't like Proust but MW can make even Proust fairly worthwhile. I also note, again, how good MW can be at simply conveying facts - an underrated activity.

Christopher Tayler on Jenny Erpenbeck: felt to me that Tayler, usually an excellent and interesting reviewer, was struggling to find something interesting to say about this writer, who sounds dull, even though East Germany is not a dull topic.

John Whitfield on scientific publication: excellent: one of the clearest things to appear in the LRB for a long time (again, information is good), and relatively rare for them to go into this area, which can actually be an interesting one.

i am halfway thru the mccarthy and so far i summarise it thus: "if everything is writing and everything is machines and everything is capitalism then in conclusion everything is everything else! also in this tintin book one time tintin used a wireless or something, just like moby-dick if radios were harpoons"

That sounds very accurate, and a good demonstration of why TM is bad, which is what I understood Fizzles to be showing.

yes

this writer, who sounds dull

(re: Erpenbeck) fwiw I've only read Visitation by her but it wasn't dull.

Somehow I reach LRB 18.11.2021.

Tom McCarthy, black box: Fizzles' critique of this was entirely accurate. But Fizzles is generous. He was too polite to add that this article is shockingly, shamefully bad.

The first two paragraphs alone should make anyone doubtful about publishing McCarthy - as a human being, never mind an intellectual. The whole article makes you wonder how he keeps getting published. Someone ought to say: no more of this. Time's up.

lol. the poverty of the essay and the fact that he hasn’t moved on *at all* did make me wonder if it was some sort of LRB dole for old time’s sake and because he needs it.

oh wait he has a novel out how did i miss this.

wapo review written by a good friend, oh god.

a favourable review that makes it sound awful lol.

will read obv even tho satin island was dreck.

mccarthy had somehow entirely passed me by till now -- presumably bcz i dont read or think abt present-day novels that much and maybe also bcz his earlier LRB pieces are mainly reviews of same? so i've just skipped em?

what's so maddening abt this *particular* piece for me is that it's full of things i'm otherwise interested in (writing! technology! the technology of writing! vampires! whalers! tintin AND derrida, together at last!), all yok'd by violence together except it's not violence so much as a kind of slack-jawed attention drift with nothing at all behind it. i've had the same abreaction in the past against erik davies and friedrich kittler, who he quotes here several times…

also i used the search engine to see what ppl had said abt him and found this, miss u nilmar

tom mccarthy should write a roman a clef about the period of research lanchester undertakes prior to the writing of this book

― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Monday, 10 June 2013 20:41 (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mark S: to my recollection, his earlier LRB articles are not reviews, but pontifications like this one. They're dire.

From Fizzles' link:

In McCarthy’s telling, it seems she may have found it — but her archive at Purdue lacks the crucial jigsaw piece (it is “perdu,” or “lost,” as McCarthy punningly observes).

yes. i think i physically winced and made a slight retching sound at that.

xpost to mark - yeah it’s that everything=everything attenuation (that is to say no tautness or direction between the composite elements) or drift that really grinds.