Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

Other than some re-reads, there was a big book/writing conference in town this past weekend and I was given or traded for a bunch of books...I think I'm going to ignore the new stuff on the stack, tho, and read Dodie Bellamy's "When The Sick Rule the World" next. Just in a Dodie mood.

Still on my way through THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS, which has now talked about postboxes.

Like so many fine critics, Geoffrey Fletcher has a basic structure of nostalgia, attachment to things from the past, disdain for new ones, though this isn't universal in his or anyone's work. I wonder about this structure, how far it simply reproduces itself every generation, so that the people who loved old music halls (and hated brutalist tower blocks) in 1960 are the people who love ... old brutalist tower blocks (and hate colourful 2000s buildings) now? Or is there something more complex to be discerned?

"are the people"

- meaning: are directly analogous to the people

Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi - Told from the perspectives of various mythological spirits within a young woman, born in Nigeria but (at this part of the book) studying in the US. So both a coming of age story and something darker (the spirits are not entirely benevolent). Good stuff.

I recently finished The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen. I remember reading praise of his earlier doorstop of a novel Witz when it came out, but this seems like a more digestible introduction to his work. My main quibble is that for a comic novel it's only occasionally funny. The Netanyahus themselves are interesting characters, and the book comes alive when they show up, but the Blum family never really came to life for me, and the opening subplot seems kind of a rote depiction of well-worn themes of assimilation. Now I'm reading Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino, an author who himself had a controversial real-life role in 20th century history, as a minister in the Vichy French government.

― o. nate

Thanks. I put the book down at the bookstore last week.

Halfway through Herodotus and Xerxes hasn't even put i his debut appearance.

I finished THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS. Rather aimless by the end, a table-talk manner. Sometimes the personal fancies fly a long way, as in an extraordinary fantasy about what he would like his office and secretary to look like (p.77).

The emphasis that 'London was good, now it's going to the dogs and you should see it before it's gone' is plain. As I said, what I wonder about is how far this is a recurring attitude that almost never goes away. So eg: the London that Iain Sinclair is brusquely sentimental about is a London *after* Fletcher's, isn't it? And there are people now who are aghast when concrete buildings are pulled down, which Fletcher evidently would have abhorred in the first place.

But is that just one cycle, or was there a similar turnover of valuations, say 150 years earlier? Did people in 1840 bemoan the loss of 1790s London?

And does Fletcher, despite all this, have a point -- is it possible that much that he sees disappearing really *is* good and shouldn't have been replaced?

As I've tried to imply, you can repeat the whole cycle for other art forms to an extent. Except that buildings disappear in a particular way that other art doesn't.

I think nostalgia for a bygone age/lost youth has always been a thing but perhaps the turnover in buildings and cultures disappearing accelerated in the 20th century? This is received wisdom on my part, and as such probably wrong.

> Did people in 1840 bemoan the loss of 1790s London?

have you read the londony bits of Sketches By Boz? that's 1836

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sketches_by_Boz
specifically the "Scenes" section

and some of Selected Journalism details night time walks with police, and visits to hospitals and prisons.

from here for the next 4 or 5 chapters https://www.gutenberg.org/files/872/872-h/872-h.htm#page406

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L4aR-Kr3xs

One other element, an extra cog in the wheels if not spanner in the works, in this system is: the nostalgic person very often expresses approval of a few new things, in a way that surprises you - and is perhaps supposed to; a gimmick.

David Thomson saying Bruce Willis was one of the greatest actors ever (I paraphrase) would be an example. Several other such instances across DT's late career.

Jonathan Meades declaring that he liked a new hip café (if not a PPI Blair-era hospital) would be too, if it happened.

Etc.

in the last thread gyac was kind enough to give me an idea of what Again Rachel was like. I have finally got round to starting it and am about 100 pages in and my god I think I could quite happily read 1000 pages of the Walsh sisters plus mother chatting shit to each other, organising parties and dissecting each others lives. I have no idea if the family scenes are realistic though they seem that way to me. I'm an only child and I find the way she writes the family fascinating equal parts seductive and terrifying and so so alien to anything I have ever experienced.

I am from an Irish family and have several sisters and it is absolutely dead on ime. I’m really happy you’re enjoying it!

Yesterday I took Margery Allingham, THE WHITE COTTAGE MYSTERY (1928), from the library, started reading it at teatime, and finished it before midnight.

I can hardly remember the last time I read a novel in a day, let alone about 6 hours.

It's an English detective story, of Golden Age kind - though half of it is set in France. It managed to keep the solution to the mystery from me till near the end. The author was only about 23 when writing it, and the apprentice element shows a bit in the writing.

I hope to go on to read more detective novels like this. I've started EIGHT DETECTIVES (2020) by Alex Pavesi which is a recent, I think meta-, take on the genre. It's already intricate after 30 pages or so.

Heartbeat of Wounded knee David Treuer
Book on Indians in the Americas in reaction to Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. Treuer talks about Brown leaving it seeming taht the Indian appears to only exist in the past tense which is something Thomas King also addresses. So Treuer looks at the history and current status of the indian population. So far I've just finished the section on the history of the various populations of Indians up to 1890.
I'm finding thsi to be an easy read taht makes me want to look into some further reading on the various groups. Treuer also accentuates teh extent to which these various groups reacted to new developments thanks to European contact, Picking up on various new technologies and relocations caused by them . So their history did not stand still as Western tradition would like things to be seen. Prior to European contact there was already continual change of course. But that doesn't fit well with how the west wanted to use the narrative.
I had this book recommended in a few different places a couple of years back and have had it out for a couple of months. I'm hoping I'm going to get through it before i has to be returned. Just having to deal with teh library system having been resoprted so hoping that the return date i had before that is going to stick. Cos yeah do definitely want to get through this. & jheffrey Ostler's Surviving Genocide which i got for Xmas and haven't started.

Beginning Theory Paul barry
apparently part of a larger series of introductory books this one is on critical theory. I'm finding it pretty fascinating . Wish I could permanently osmose it into my cerebellum or something. GOt some critical processes that I hadn't really thought of. Things like Freudian analysis as a textual tool and stuff.
Anyway really enjoying it so hope i can remember its ins and outs. Also wonder to what extent content from earlier editions gets repalced and what just gets updated.

John Le Carre's last novel Silverview
Edwin Williamson's Borges: A Life

Joan is Okay by Weike Wang
Recommended from pandemic reading: An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good by Helene Tursten
The only other book I have checked out is a book by Thomas Piketty that I've had for a year. I must read it before I return it.

Hi pinefox, since you're getting into detective stories, this is good: Crime Fiction, S/D

Also maybe this, which I'm not as familiar with: british and american crime fiction

Robert Gottlieb's Garbo makes a persuasive case that his love object's most consistently (yet relatively) fathomable artistry was in The Art of The Deal---yes, she would have totally gotten Donald Trump, also Fred, if she bothered to be aware of them (we're told she "favored junk TV," so maybe)--but her deal was: if you played by her rules (or, much more rarely, by yours, maybe, but either way--the rules, baby!), she'd give you something, or let you have it, pick it up, while she was on her way.
You might get a movie, yes, or more likely, a really good still, even without a telephoto lens---known as a "hermit about town" in Hollywood and Manhattan and the Med, especially, she could be found until she couldn't, her choice. (Sure, other people have tried to run the gauntlet of zombies, but you gotta somehow know to pick just the right running buddies and drivers, not like poor Princess Di: more artistry.)
You might, however she treated you, get something to write about, as so many did (Gottlieb's dedicated, never solemn throughline of biography x critical/fanboy study, personal x professional and post-professional phases has no prob citing sources, incl. coming up with some startling quotes from previous bios, memoirs, and press coverage, both features and reviews). You might even get to do some
or all of your best writing ever, as evidenced by A Garbo Reader, the section after the biography proper.
But you might not have to bother with any of that: you might just get some attention, and let somebody else do the work. Like the reporters who started coming around the old neighborhood pretty early, and o hell yes people there remembered the beautiful little girl, often dressed like a boy, greeting them with a smile and an open hand, ready for the coin she would take straight to the show, marching past the candy butcher. Putting on her own shows with other kids--if nothing else, she'd grab her big brother, Sven, as he recalled it: "You are the father." And the middle sib, their sister, Alva---also beautiful, a promising actress, who would die in early adulthood: "You are the mother. And I am your child who has drowned."
Sven said she always had that dark side, enough to seem like the oldest, not the youngest, in the family, which may have had to do with why she was the one who took their slowly dying father around to charity hospitals---he known for his own beauty, and charm, and love of the arts, though he could never afford to go anywhere for fun, even when he could still work. She called it a scarring experience,, because of the way they were treated and the way she saw his suffering, up close and often, when they were alone together. )Long after, she finally managed to persuade her mother, brother, and and his family out of Europe, just before WWII might have made flight impossible, but she kept them on the East Coast, rarely if ever visiting even after she moved there, not 'til the coast was clear of the older generations, and she could be the fun greataunt, albeit with rules, of course.)
The experience with her father, however, may have had something to do with the times she submitted to the rules of older men: usually thought to be gay, but with some kind of furious macho passion for her. The brilliant Swedish director broke her down and built her up, rewarding her with Germany, where she had a more thoughtful following, even got her to work with the gentler GW Pabst, who offered more roles---but Stiller was furious, and hustled her off to Hollywood dammit.
Louie G. Mayer took over as her desert god, casting out the impractical Stiller, though Mayer was increasingly balanced by Thalberg, who guided and was guided by her---"She can do that? Let's see if she can do this, then"--until his sudden death, which may well have had to do with her quitting the biz.
More King ov Garbo Gays: George Schlee, Cecil Beaton. Other noted gay guys, the ones quoted by Gottlieb, couldn't figure it out. Marlene Dietrich, archenemy in her own mind: "She rapes men." Garbo: "Who is Marlene Dietrich?" Boom, drop the mic.
The compulsive skating along the surface of pleasure, the rules of the game between the cobwebs of self-knowledge. rang a bell when mentioned by James Harvey during his A Garbo Reader guided tour of Camille, re the relationship of the courtesan and her sugar daddy---she even acts the pet daughter to him at times, but they also, increasingly, have a sour running joke about each other and themselves, almost implicit, just under or a little further into the surface. Maybe Garbo's own self-knowledge, encountering this creative opportunity, released something in her, that made its way to the screen like it never had before.
But what? That pop psych really doesn't explain all the results of her artistry here, and Harvey doesn't try to, he just watches and learns what he can, makes notes, makes a narrative of it he can watch in his head, like Thalberg and Gottleib and others.

The brilliant Swedish director *Mauritz Stiller*---actually Finnish (and Jewish, AKA Moishe), but mostly known as a key early Swedish director, who cast greenhorn Greta Gustaffson (and may have renamed her)in and into Gösta Berlings saga, based on Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf's 1891 novel of the same name, which, long before the movie came out in 1924, was a stone cold classic, and it was a patriotic duty to give Stiller all the time and money he needed to make it (this did not work in Hollywood, natch.)
Gottlieb says Swedish coverage was mostly concerned with how faithful to the novel, but Stiller saw that the Germans were more appreciative of him and Greta as artists, so he took her there.

PS: she long outlived relationships with Stiller, Schlee, Beaton, also the men themselves, and a lot of other people in this book.

John Gilbert, still sweet and young, boyish, even, yet a veteran star, took her under his wing and into his heart, then gradually turned their life together into A Star Is Born, for a while.

(More interesting, especially the way it turned with him, out than the movie[s].)

I loved the book.

EIGHT DETECTIVES after 70pp is going well. It seems to contain of detective stories nested within a meta-story. So far a great concept, very intriguing, prompting thought about genre and narration.

Wolfgang Hilbig - The Interim
William Shakespeare - Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare - Othello

The Interim is the latest of a series of works, all translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and (mostly, if not all) published on Two Lines Press. Probably one of the main achievements of that whole ecology of translated lit to come out over the last ten years. In this particular work, the narrator is recounting his trips between East and West Germany, from his humble beginnings working in a manual labour role in the East to fame as a published writer in the West. Not that this makes him much happier in his life...but also not exactly sadder either, in fact its a life in this sorta permanent 'Interim' (there are some wonderful descriptions of train trips and looking at stations and shopping malls). Its a bit like how I'd imagine (not having read) Solzhenitsyn's work post fall of communism, without the chauvinism and nationalism that a lot of people accuse him of (and I've been reminded of recently). Hilbig's writing on sex and relationships was a highlight. I read it with this recent ILB thread in mind (male authors writing female POVs & vice versa: possibly ilb’s worst thread title) it feels really well drawn, how the narrator goes from being this virile man to a lump of decayed flesh and nerves. There is a sensitivity and honesty present.

I followed this with a couple of Shakespeare's tragedies. Its my first read of them.

A&C is fun! Enobarbus is my favorite of Shakespeare's weary James Mason characters. But, god, so many bit parts with one lines.

Had a look through A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry pratchett his collectiion of non fictiion essays etc. Now hoping i didn't already get this cos I picked up this copy on Saturday.
Interesting stuff.

Had a look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited hi slook back at some of the ideas he had used during Brave New World to show how they compared to the real world.

Working away at David Treuer's heartbeat of Wounded Knee which I'm enjoying though it is pretty depressing in its depiction of the betrayal of indigenous population's faith etc.

David Toop Flutter Echo
Memoir by avant garde multiinstrumentalist. Pretty good so far.
JUst got this through as an interlibrary loan after the Irish system has just been reshuffled. You can now see book covers on the website .
So that's like cool like.

Also just picked up Ron Nagel's book on Islams Black Slaves which si a sequel to his Black Diaspora which I got last year but have not read yet. Thought I'd have a look to see if i could find Gramsci's prison diaries which I had a go at a couple of years ago but didn't get very far into. But that was out and this was on the shelf in roughly the same area.

EIGHT DETECTIVES reaches a chapter called 'An Inferno in Theatre Land'. A burning building down the street, while quite separately, it seems, a civilian woman is enlisted to manage a murder scene above a restaurant. Remarkable, as the dialogue gathers strangeness. One of this novel's appealing features is how far most of its inset stories are set back in the past - the 1950s? earlier? - with a gentle sense of pastiche, and characters in a different setting from ours (technologically, etc). But the actual era is not always clear. It's puzzling for instance if this story is set in the 1930s but begins in an East Asian restaurant in central London - I admit I didn't know that any had existed then.

"Casanova's Chinese Restaurant", the fifth(?) part of A Dance to the Music of Time, is set in the thirties IIRC and the titular restaurant its in the theatre land neck of the woods.

"Eight Detectives" sounds good!

Thanks Tim, an excellent fact.

Got me wondering whether if Eight Detectives is, as you say, pastichey, it might actually use the Powell as source material.

The 33 1/3 on ABBA Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli already feels like an artifact from a bygone era, both in its discussion of the technology (compilations might soon become obsolete because ppl can pick their fave songs...and burn them onto a CD!) and in its positioning within the discourse, which laments that praise of the group always has to be defensive while failing to break out of that mode herself. Difficult to imagine that level of baggage now when ABBA's return was greeted with pretty much universal fondness. As it is the author makes things a bit too easy for herself, pointing out the obvious sexism and homophobia that's part of critic's rejection of ABBA while failing to engage with the fact that a lot of the animosity also stemmed from a perceived lack of Afro-American influences (Vincentelli includes an admitidely offensive Xgau quote that mentions this but doesn't respond to it); it is to my mind both questionable whether that's actually true and, if true, not automatically a reason for dismissal, but I don't like that she doesn't talk about it at all; if you're gonna tackle the isms you can't cherry pick. Likewise her final conclusion that ABBA allows you to be a weirdo is kinda willfully ignoring that the vast majority of their fanbase were anything but - if anything you could say ABBA make it ok to be normal.

Choosing a compilation is an interesting move, and it's def their Classic Album, but while the creation of the compilation itself was a pretty engaging read obv it's not enough for an entire book, so the author then goes song by song ordered around the albums they appeared on, which is ultimately unsatisfying as well.

>>> her final conclusion that ABBA allows you to be a weirdo is kinda willfully ignoring that the vast majority of their fanbase were anything but

Yes - a preposterous claim.

Next week: "Being a fan of Simply Red's STARS made me stand out from the crowd - but I learned to love the fact that I'm not like anybody else".

Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle. This was a book in my book club several years ago and I missed out that month. I've finally got around to reading it. It's a pretty compelling narrative. It seems to me to be a meditation, or maybe a thought experiment, that asks the question, What if the outcasts that often end up taking out their angst on others, usually violently, turn that violence on themselves--and survive? How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape? A worthy read.

I finished Herodotus. It picks up considerably in the final third, but he still runs after every digression, giving equal weight to world-shaking battles and trivia. My overall impression is that if one can suspend the desire to know which details are factual, which are rumor-mongering and which are pure folktales, he gives the fullest possible picture of greek culture of his era. He was the chronicler of greek normcore.

I've started reading The Flâneur, Edmund White, one of those books where the author just writes about whatever comes to mind, as a sort of monologue version of 'table talk'. It's pleasant and convivial.

How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape? Central to his books that I've read (which are all except the first, Master of Reality), and many of his best songs. Question before that also often pertains. I'll have to read MoR, his first (in the xpost 33 1/3 series, so a response to the album of same title), and re-read the two since WIWV, but that one's a genius consolidation, if there is such a thing.

I owe Edmund White for introducing me to the term xpost

How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape?

This is a great distillation and pretty much sums up Master of Reality too - a book which didn't add up to much when I read it but which I think about often.

I finished James Shapiro's 1599, which like 1606: The Year of Lear wears its considerable learning lightly and which has sent me back to Hamlet and Henry V, looking for new things.

Not really sure what to read over Easter. I have A Place of Greater Safety, Priestdaddy and, uh, a Reacher book lined up.

Interestingly, Darnielle claims to have written the last chapter of WIWV first.

"I just started typing it up and it ended with a guy shooting himself and I said, 'Well, that’s not a good story.' So then I wrote a bunch of other chapters with no direction at all."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_in_White_Van#:~:text=The%20title%20Wolf%20In%20White%20Van%20is%20a,song%20Six%2C%20Sixty%2C%20Six%20is%20played%20in%20reverse.

My only complaint about The Flâneur so far is that it explains flâneurie quite well, but engages in it metaphorically far more than literally. I had hopes for more street-wandering and crowd-gazing. As disappointments go, I'd say that's a trivial one.

I've just realised I've read the Wilson book - as part of the 'Writer and the City' collection. I'm going to be honest and say I don't remember a huge amount about it but I do recall thinking I'd read it again next time I went to Paris (whenever that might be). I loved Peter Carey's addition to that series, 30 Days in Sydney.

Greatly enjoyed

To The Finland Station.

EIGHT DETECTIVES approaches its end. A basic fact about this ingenious, compelling novel remains that the frame story seems less well crafted and compelling than the embedded stories, which often have terrific ingenuity; as well as, again, being fine exercises in pastiche.

I'm also oddly unsure when the frame story is actually set - the early 1970s? Strange for it to be so unspecified.

a visit from the goon squad
everyone remembers their formative years
why are they so compelling
detective stories are for ingenuity in plot devices and as a challenge to the reader in interpreting c(l)ues
i imagine they are for the reader who likes to solve puzzles and problems of a certain kind
but has the nature of the problem to solve been thoroughly explored by the genre

still reading war & peace, hoping to finish before I leave for a 3-week work engagement but that's looking decreasingly likely. it's utterly fantastic.

which translation are you reading?

March 28, 1972 pic.twitter.com/MvKCBEAkSb

— Peanuts On This Day (@Peanuts50YrsAgo) March 30, 2022

W&P was my first pandemic novel and I gobbled it up in eight blissful days.

I have definitely never seen that line attributed to HJ. Whether he said it or not, it doesn't sound like him.

Turns out I learned this via a post by user Eazy on the thread Chicago's Greatest Hits: 1982-1989

Looked into where I'd read this, and it turns out Martin Amis attributed "Tell a dream, lose a reader" to Henry James in a number of essays and interviews. More recently in Inside Story he amended it:

Tell a dream, lose a reader’ is a dictum usually attributed to Henry James (though I and others have failed to track it down). Dreams are all right as long as they exhaust themselves in about half a sentence; once they’re allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stodge or for very thin gruel. Why is this? Any dream that lasts a paragraph, let alone a page, is already closing in on another very solid proscription, Nothing odd will do long (Samuel Johnson). But it’s even more basic than that. Dreams are too individualised. We all dream, but dreams are not part of our shared experience.

Amis full of shit shocker

Ugh. Gave up in him long ago. Will still stan for Money, maybe.

On him. Maybe in him works too, somehow.

My tom-tom ticker gave out.

That Amis quotation is very poor.

He says something is "usually attributed to HJ", but admits that there is no evidence for it (and the rest of us haven't seen it thus attributed except by Amis), and doesn't observe that it doesn't particularly sound like HJ.

He then says that writers shouldn't write dreams. But aren't there actually good dreams in literature, including ones that aren't immediately presented as dreams?

Even "nothing odd will do long" is a very inapt quotation as it's usually quoted to show how wrong Johnson was.

lol yes, the complete johnson quote is "nothing odd will do long. tristram shandy did not last"

finnegans wake is a dream tho possibly amis and pinefox are as one in feeling this proves the dreams-are-bad-lit argt

B-but listening to someone recount a dream for more than a minute or two can be excruciating. And in fiction and especially drama, I think of the whole thing as a dream state, so a dream within the dream can break the spell rather than enhance it. (Saying all of that having rewatched Eyes Wide Shut this week, which is all about whether a dream of infidelity is the same as a confession of infidelity or an act of it.)

Anyway, and off topic from HJ, but the line resonated with me more than where I read it.

I mostly adopted it because it's pithy and fun to burst out when someone's doing a bad dream scene, but yeah I think there's obv differences between having someone tell you their dream and having a talented writer make one up!

Someone telling you their life story in the manner of a typical novel would also be considerably excruciating.

I have problems with FW, as I'm sure does Amis (I suspect that unlike me, he hasn't read it, but I'm not sure of that now) -- but the argument that "FW is (or depicts) a dream" is contestable, according to good Wake scholars.

Which might be a pity, as "FW is a dream" probably makes more sense of FW than one might otherwise.

I think it's plain that there can be good dreams in fiction. One: at the start of an episode in THE LINE OF BEAUTY, where it doesn't seem like a dream, is taken as real ... but strange ... then gets stranger ... then he wakes up. Lasts probably less than a page.

A book that is much more dreamlike than FW is Ishiguro's THE UNCONSOLED, though it's not presented as a dream. The dream quality of the whole is implicit.

Dreams are boring to talk about, because people who talk about their dreams tend to focus on the surreal details of the dreams rather than the raw emotional insights they provide, which makes for very one-dimensional conversation.

But we're also bad listeners, and listening to someone else's narcissistic fantasies is hard work, which is why it's probably more productive to talk to your therapist about a dream than your partner.

Martin Amis is a grandiloquent twerp who speaks like he writes and hates being interrupted, so it makes sense that he'd confuse speaking with writing.

There’s a whole list of these things that boring cw maintains should/can never be represented in prose: dreams, music, sex, insanity… even without all the counterexamples that leap to mind it always just sounds to me like repping ur own lack of imagination

A notable example is Lydia Davis who has written fiction that not only represents dreams but is in fact based on specific real dreams she has had!

the phrase "finnegans wake is not a dream" seems to lead to some interesting discussions i don't have time right now to explore

however all of them immediately also concede that it is dreamlike or brings to bear the technics of dreamwork or whatever: even the guy who says we should pay more attenton to the psychotic episodes of his beloved daughter and the way schizophrenics use language also immediately compares this use to dreams

iirc correctly Colm Tóibín's iffy novel about Henry James, The Master, begins with HJ awakening from a bad dream

Finnegans Wake is not a dream in the same way as Ceci n'est pas une pipe? (onethread)

in a sense there is nothing that is not a pi(p)e

A book that is much more dreamlike than FW is Ishiguro's THE UNCONSOLED, though it's not presented as a dream. The dream quality of the whole is implicit.

amis is on thin ice (or as he might write it "exceedingly low temperature h20 arrayed in the manner that one spreads marmite on a morning slice of toasted comestible") talking about stodge and thin gruel tbh

some good dreams in bolaño

"It's not so easy writin' about nothin'." The ole cowpoke settin' at Patti Smith's kitchen table and talkin' while he's writin' (and, come to think of it, sounding and looking like Seinfeld meets one of Smith's ol' buddy Sam Shepherd's plays)(She does mention watching TV, though so far all detective shows) is ignoring her, and she doesn't like that, so she wakes up and goes to the Cafe 'Ito (black coffee, toast, olive oil, table, chair, notebook, pen: all she needs for quite a while) and writes about him, briefly, then goes on to next item. She gives the occasional arresting image its due, but then back to what the hell, dreams? They're not allowed to crowd her waking life, the things that happen as she keeps writing. (The ol' cowpoke does poke his oblivious head back in occasionally.

Sorry, that's Station M, my current bedtime buzz.

Dreamlike Vs a depiction of a dream seems to be the error here.

(M Train, that is) she's good at both, more into the former, and only as these things come by the intent, fairly careful traveler.

In Homeland Elegies, Ayad Ahktar's somewhat autobiographical novel, the Pakistani-American narrator has himself set (with pen tied to hand, I think) to record dreams as soon as he wakes, for a while. Mainly, he manages to write down a sequence about going up into the hills in the old country, near the town where he still has a lot of relatives, a place he used to visit occasionally. Now he's reminded of things he saw and how they and the new-seeming dream images relate to thoughts about his family and their situations that had faded into the background, as given, at best, as he'd become more self-absorbed.
It's not that long a passage, but all the parts about his family, in Pakistan and America, give the book most of its strength (and taking dream lessons, then reverse-engineering the results, is completely in character).

I liked that book

The Housing Lark, Sam Selvon - More straightahead comedic than I remember The Lonely Londoners being. A great Dudes Rock novel (and thus unsurprisingly not great on gender), love the poetry of the language and the liveliness of a London long gone. Selvon should have much higher standing in popular British literature imo.

ah wrong thread