Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?

So! A hundred pages from the end of The Vivisector and White's losing me with his gender politics. This awful painter-egoist is fussing over his relationship with...a 13-year-old child savant.

The Horse's Mouth did this sort of thing in fewer pages.

That was a good one. But I never read the others or saw the movie for that matter.

The movie's fun!

Guinness should've played more hellions.

i read the Vivisector (muffled) years ago when i was in uni

the gender stuff i remember being very uncomfortable/ offputting but also i think i passed it off as being in context. oof. i think the parallels of my having read a lot of true crime & serial killer novels that that outlook was just acceptable or went unchallenged by me?
like his sociopathy is ok because there’s an end to it (art?)

i dunno if i could read it now

Hilda Hilst - Fluxo-Floema

The Hilst is really good. She was a Brazilian writer (read a couple by her before), and fully into the modernist project (Woolf, but also De Sade, the whole shebang). This was a set of short stories written in an almost incantory way.

Ohh, I read With My Dog Eyes and it was wild. Amazing writing, so full of bitter rage. I got The Obscene Madame D recently, it's in my to-read pile and I'm hoping to get to it reasonably soon but I've got so many unread things I don't know when that will be.

I recently finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Super intense! Love his writing. Level of detail is amazing, so much research & foreknowledge obviously went into it — it becomes a whole other thing when you then layer his specific perspective. In some ways it feels like it’s own category of historical fiction .. so much more immediate. it’s pretty incredible. And I really liked how angry his tone is, it feels quite, revolutionary. or something. maybe that’s the wrong word.

Last few chapters are wild, very disorienting (with good reason) it definitely stayed with me for a long time afterwards

Am also now halfway through The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers
Another one that has really grabbed me right away. Beautifully written, captures the immediacy of a historical time & place. It’s very tactile/sensory, you can see & feel everything so clearly, it’s like you’re astral projecting into the wild 18th century Yorkshire moors. Loving it.

I loved, loved, loved The Sympathizer. He hit just the right combination of humor, cynicism and horror.

I haven't read The Committed yet, but it's on the list.

Ohh, I read With My Dog Eyes and it was wild. Amazing writing, so full of bitter rage. I got The Obscene Madame D recently, it's in my to-read pile and I'm hoping to get to it reasonably soon but I've got so many unread things I don't know when that will be.

― emil.y, Thursday, 13 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah those are the two others from her I've read. She was a poet too. Would really like a translation of it.

Still moving through two longer books, but just finished Ed Steck’s A Place Beyond Shame, which is a meditation on horror movies, childhood sexual and physical trauma, addiction, horror movies, and the rust belt. It is harrowing and brilliant, best new book I’ve read this year.

I've skipped some of Sean O'Casey's chapters on WWII, but will finish with his AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 4-6 for now. 600+ pages of O'Casey on O'Casey are enough for a while.

I commence his play PURPLE DUST, which is engaging. It depicts an old house in Ireland being refurbished on the orders of new English owners. To a degree the scenario, so far, is "wily Irish locals outfox the naive English incomers". I'm slightly reminded of CASTLE RACKRENT and of the first chapter of Ulysses. The language is much closer to Synge than any other O'Casey I've read. Which may emphasise how relatively unlike Synge O'Casey usually is.

A friend who used to be in the Irish army just passed on to me an introductory illustrated book on IRISH HISTORY. I feel like I should read it as it's a gift. On the earlier periods I have much to learn. So far Newgrange has been built.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

this has been on my list for ages and this post was the nudge i needed. thanks!

yay :)

It's good!

I finally finished Leena Krohn's Collected Fiction, Vol. 1: The Novels. I say "finally" because it was a long and challenging read, which I picked up originally on Jeff VanDerMeer's recommendation. The collection started with the weakest of the lot, Doña Quixote, but got considerably better as it went on. The last three in particular were quite strong. Her style isn't really like anyone else's, although Borges may be an obvious comparison; Lovecraft too, in some of the more dreamlike aspects. Very much worth the read.

I've been reading early novels and stories of Forster and Henry Green. What Firbank should I try, if any? Library loan has Five Novels, Valmouth and Other Stories, Complete Plays, but I might could track down some others.

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. I know it's not a novel but loads of the reviews call it a novel - so far it doesn't read at all like one, her dad sounds like a real piece of work and i'm not tickled by any of her hilarious family anecdotes. But I'll stick with it.

Is this your first experience? She was my big 2021 discovery (thanks, NYRB!).

Yeah - I was torn between this one and an actual novel.

re Firbank, there aren't many novels - I think that FIVE NOVELS will have the lot. THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT is one to try I'd say.

I finished reading Sean O'Casey's PURPLE DUST. It becomes rather a farce as the old house crashes down around the ignorant English interlopers. The Anglo / Irish clash of the plot is probably too crude, ie: the English are too readily sterotyped as fools; oddly, as O'Casey in his non-fiction makes plain his admiration for lots of aspects of England, where he lived for many years. The Syngean language actually increases near the end, followed by a great storm that reminded me of MOONRISE KINGDOM.

I then read O'Casey's play HALL OF HEALING, a one-act play in a Dublin doctor's waiting room. Mostly farce again, but with classic O'Casey tragedy at the end as well. A lot going on, many characters, and somewhat interesting on medicine and our ideas of what it can do. But not a major or deeply impressive work.

I've now read about 1400 pages of O'Casey in 2 or 3 months so will take a break from him.

I commence reading Beverly Cleary's FIFTEEN, a teen romance / angst novel from 1956. It's very mild; I don't think that the worst that can happen here is going to be very bad. I'd thought it might be 1970s or 1960s; the 1956 date intrigues me and makes me feel that this novel was written amid the 'birth of the teenager', was an early literary witness to this now storied era.

xposts: think it was the five novels collection that i read which included all his "bigger" works.

recently been reading a number of late fifties/early sixties era green penguin thrillers by people i'd never heard of. last one was john welcome's run for cover: sort of buchan meets bond with a bit of ambler. one scene with the hero held prisoner in an enemy lair features a dialogue comparing pre-war fiction (proust, waugh, the above mentioned green) to the contemporary angry young man brigade of amis & wain, the latter of whom i'd coincidentally been planning on reading next in the form of hurry on down.

reading THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST, re: climate change, and while it’s interesting and scary, the author is just not a good writer of sentences. i can’t remember the last non-fiction book in which i found the writing so off-putting (and the guy is a journalist, not a scientist)

"one scene with the hero held prisoner in an enemy lair features a dialogue comparing pre-war fiction (proust, waugh, the above mentioned green) to the contemporary angry young man brigade"

Love this kind of thing!

Isn't there a discussion of T.S. Eliot and Hemingway in FAREWELL, MY LOVELY?

HURRY ON DOWN is very rewarding, hope you enjoy.

I commence reading Beverly Cleary's FIFTEEN, a teen romance / angst novel from 1956.

I'm most glad to know that anyone would have an opinion on the top ten writers I wouldn't read.

(I've read one King story but not more - I don't like horror in general, unfortunately. But I can see his ingenuity and productivity, from a respectful distance.)

I share your experience with the Ramona books - read them at around the same time in my life. And I think I shared your sense of an American world disclosed by those books.

Pinefox, I say this in utmost sincerity: I would like nothing better in my life than to hear your opinions of the Ramona books

I mentioned King btw cos my other half and his brother are both incredibly well read, and both of them constantly gang up on me for liking King.

At a distance of decades, I can only say that I loved them, and they were possibly my favourite books at that time - say, the age of 7?

I recall RAMONA THE BRAVE, BEEZUS AND RAMONA, RAMONA AND HER FATHER, at least. I probably read each one more than once.

I would think that the things I liked most about them were a) their American quality, speaking of a particular culture; b) the peculiar truth to life that I found in many of the situations and phrases, which were also c) very memorable and repeatable.

I believe I still own them, hidden on a shelf. Maybe this should be encouragement to reread them. It's been a very long time.

Please!!!

I had Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and Ramona Forever. I read a couple of the others from the library but I knew those two best cos I owned them and reread a lot. I’m actually going home today, seriously tempted to do a bit of digging and see if I can’t find them.

The detail that sticks with me most from the books is her learning to write her name in cursive - wtf is cursive, we did not learn that shit in Ireland - and her describing the starting Q of her surname as resembling a big loopy number 2.

Oh and I should say - her family had a lot of money problems and her parents were often stressed and overworked and she spent a lot of time at the neighbours and with her aunt. That definitely struck a chord with me, both because some of it resembled my own life (it felt like you’d never read many kids books where the characters would spend time with extended family) and just because it was unusual to see full stop. There’s a scene on one of the books where they go out for burgers and Ramona is looking at her parents anxiously, like, “Can we afford this?” And the parents are like, “yes come on let’s enjoy this,” and it just felt very real in terms of how kids pick up and worry about their parents problems.

This Perfect Day - Ira Levin

What a load of shit? Honestly. The only reason I finished this was because I was on a flight that was delayed an hour.

I really like the Ira Levin I’ve read previously. I’ve read The Stepford Wives with its creeping horror and subtle but inescapable darkness about fifty times. I read Rosemary’s Baby and loved the similar themes and how visceral Rosemary’s horror feels. All good stuff.

Saw this on Kindle store for £1 and thought, incredible, let’s go. How wrong I was.

In This Perfect Day everyone lives in a utopia where there’s no war, no hate, everyone looks basically the same. Children are planned via licenses. Everyone is subjected to “treatments” which keep them medically healthy and emotionally calm and satisfied. All people have names with numbers after the four founding fathers of the system that rules the world, Uni: Marx, Christ, Wood and Wei. The latter two are fictional, I think Wood was meant to be a rough Kant analogy, but honestly? I didn’t give a fuck about looking this up.

Our hero is named Li Abigstringofnumbers (this is not an exaggeration). However, his eccentric grandfather calls him “Chip” in defiance of the naming order where everyone has one of the four approved names. Chip is special because unlike everyone else who has light brown skin, dark brown eyes and dark hair, one of his eyes is green. Yeah, this is how careful the system is about uniformity. Also? Secondary sexual characteristics don’t exist. Yeah.

Anyway at this point I started thinking of Chip as my favourite heterochromiac, Max Scherzer, so I’m going to refer to him as Max from here in out, because I cannot take an adult man named Chip seriously.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zdiPb7q92DPCpCA6SmHMAYvGl3A=/0x117:2615x1860/1400x1400/filters:focal(0x117:2615x1860):format(jpeg)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/14768285/20130219_jla_sv7_240.0.jpg

Anyway our boy Max has to say goodbye to his granddad soon after granddad shows him the true path to Uni on the tour of the building, because granddad happens to have reached 62 years old which is the prescribed age for life to end.

Anyway he’s not really that bothered by it considering. He goes off to adult life, I don’t remember much about this part except they get allotted partners for sex which is ten minutes of prescribed pleasure every Saturday.

At some point he gets recruited into a group who see his potential for difference (he does have heterochromia after all) and he gets inducted into a secret group of like minded souls. The most important of these is his girlfriend Lilac, who is repeatedly described as very attractive to him, like so:

He could smell her – it wasn’t his imagination; she actually smelled of flowers – and he could look at her dark cheek and neck and the chest of her coveralls pushed taut by two mobile round protrusions. They were breasts. They were definitely breasts.

Epic review.

wow

I started writing this on a bus leaving Dublin airport. At time of posting this message I am still in Dublin, I bet they don’t have traffic in Yankee Stadium but I still wouldn’t want to live there. 😎

This Cleary novel is charming in that the stakes are so low and so little goes wrong.

Almost the worst thing so far was when the new bf came to drive the protagonist to their date in a truck from work, rather than a car.

It's refreshing to read a story where problems are tiny.

The prose is clear, ingenuous. It all seems less cunning and cheeky than the Cleary I remember in the Ramona books.

Started A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White yesterday. Primarily reading it for dissertation background, but I'm surprised I'd never gotten to this one before.

It's um stiff in places.

I finish Cleary's TEENAGER. It's quite conservative at the end, literally concluding 'She was Stan's girl. That was all that mattered'. I had an idea that Cleary was more liberal and sceptical than that (from my reading of RAMONA et al? - very long ago). Stan gives Jane his 'identification bracelet' as a major token of 'going steady', a new concept to me. I had never heard of such bracelets.

In terms of life lessons the book is not bad, though. It implicitly tells you to be patient, not to wait for the telephone to ring but to get on with your life, not to overreact to incidents, and above all to be yourself - then people will like and respect you.

The novel reads like a pastiche of 1950s or early 1960s teen life - 'Mom, can I go to the dance with Stan on Friday?' 'I don't know, Jane, I'd rather you just went to the malt shop' - etc - which is all familiar, from GREASE, BACK TO THE FUTURE and beyond. The crazy thing is, this book is from 1956 so all that stuff is ... real. It's not a pastiche, it's actually how someone wrote about teenagers in the 1950s. Unless Cleary was already, in some way, pasticheing an emergent understanding of such life?

I commence reading Sally Rooney's CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS (2017).

I've given up on Family Lexicon. After 100 pages there's zero narrative drive, there's scarcely anything even rising to the level of anecdote and certainly nothing amusing or moving. This feels a bit harsh, like a review of her life and her family rather than just a book, but I'm just not interested in these people at all.

It's kind of what I like about that book, it's cool and off about family and event.

Anagrams by Lorrie Moore - each generation responds in a way that is characteristic (through a range of forms and cultural and critical trends) and pays tribute to an ongoing struggle to make sense of being alive (which may take the form of jazz pianists in hotel bars for business travelers)

Family Lexicon is on my checkout list. You can't give up!

I won't give up on her - I'll try a novel at some point.

She wrote a lot of good novels. Try another one!

I had heard one or two negative reports on Sally Rooney's writing. In that context, I find her book slightly better than I'd hoped.

I have heard that the writing is plain and undistinguished. Yes, in a way. But this is a first-person novel. So the voice is that of a character. What matters is not whether it's elaborate or plain, but whether it coheres as this character's narrating voice - as with any other first-person narrative. I'd like to think that this voice is one that Rooney has fashioned, as such, rather than it just being what she has written because she can't write any other way.

I don't mind plainness. Slackness is worse. The voice has some of that. It rises very occasionally to higher formulations and figurative language. More notably, it holds shrewdness in enumerating and describing feelings:

'I could heard that Bobbi said this with an ironic smile, because she was aware that she was showing off. I was jealous, but I also felt that because I had seen the play I was party to something Bobbi didn't know about. She still saw Nick as a background figure, with no significance other than as Melissa's husband. If I told her that I had just sent him an email thanking him for the tickets, she wouldn't understand that I was showing off too, because to her Nick was just a function of Melissa's unhappiness, and uninteresting in his own right' (32).

The awareness about feelings and the readiness to elaborate them reminds me slightly of Éric Rohmer's characters, who do this to an absurd extent. I sense that the greatest distinction of this novel may turn out to be the detail with which it describes and explains such tesselations and shifts of feeling. I quite like the way that, so far, it isn't boringly saying 'I didn't know how I felt' or 'I wasn't sure of anything', but rather is content to name feelings and their causes exactly.

The funniest line in the book thus far is: 'I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed' (28-9).

For a while I didn't think this line was going well. I thought it was going to overreach and say something pretentious that would put me off. But it does the opposite. The admission of not having read Baudrillard is one thing. The ready statement that the perception was probably unrelated to his thought is something else. It makes the whole proposition marvellously collapse.

A point that I distrust about Rooney is that she posits some characters (the narrator here and the fellow in NORMAL PEOPLE) as 'very talented writers'. I am not convinced that they are. Or, I think Rooney believes that they are, but I don't think I would agree with her assessment, if we could actually assess them. I think this is one respect in which she may be naive. I note that the narrator here mostly does not narrate the novel in a stylistic impressive way (see above). This is OK (see above), but doesn't help with the proposition that she is a great writer. Not does this sentence:

'I sat in bed in the morning writing poetry, hitting the return key whenever I wanted' (11).

200pp through the 321 of CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS. It feels as though the book may be too long; longer than what Rooney had to say.

The protagonist has an on-off affair. The novel drifts through much inconsequential banality. The stakes seem quite trivial. The dialogue is banal. Characters don't offer interesting ideas or insights.

All the characters decamp to France. You might think that intelligent or sensitive people would then respond to this environment and have thoughts and perceptions about France. The characters don't. It's as if they haven't gone anywhere.

The novel does contain some other elements that surface occasionally, such as an interest in physical pain and a family back story that indicates another social world from the main story. I don't yet know how far these will be integrated into that story.

Most of the characters are supposed to have artistic talents and strong political views. They don't talk about these issues much. These things do appear sketchily, as part of a conversation that will go on for a few lines then stop. But the 'conversations with friends' may have had the potential to be much more diverse and substantial than the inconsequential conversations that actually dominate the novel.

Thought this piece tackled the often opaque politics of Rooney works pretty well

Political flimsiness is not, for one, unique to Rooney’s sharp millennial protagonists. Frances’s mother is “a kind of social democrat.” Connell’s is vague about who she’ll vote for, but is “interested in Cuba and the cause of Palestinian liberation.” Nick doesn’t really talk politics but at one point concedes he is “‘basically’ a Marxist.” The Republic of Ireland is almost unique as a Western European country in that it has a small and fractured organized left that has never held major power. In the last decade, the Republic has seen a sea-change of social progress, from episodic referendums on abortion rights and equal marriage, to issue-based movements around water charges and housing and a surge in votes for Sinn Féin, a left-wing party whose central project is opposing the border which splits Ireland into two.

But it remains a place in which left-wing sentiments do not find easy institutional expression. It’s a place where, as Rooney put it in 2017, “the deterioration of the power of the Catholic Church was replaced pretty much wholesale with the power of the free market,” a chronology leaving scant space for the development of strong left-wing institutions. These characters aren’t (only) sanctimonious millennials: they are people of all ages searching for political answers, trying to place their progressive values in an historically conservative country. Simon’s half-formed answer is to work as a parliamentary adviser for a small leftist grouping in the Dáil, perhaps as much an article of faith as his deep Catholicism.