Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023-24?

Warlock because 22 mentions in the NYRB Publishing thread cannot be wrong

"In the end, in fact, I'm not sure that you need anyone other than Beckett in this mode. Like Austen and the free indirect, he perfected the solipsistic, circling prose, both capturing the existential absurd, and a comic essence to our social and ambulatory beings."

Feels like a mode with an interesting history (starting from Proust with ppl like Blanchot) where Beckett is an end point (only refreshed by a few others, like Bernhard).

"But in general it's a mode that's extremely tolerant of slackness in the writing, and what is worse it can take you a while to realise - the words just fly by."

I am currently reading Platonov's Chevengur slowly (mostly because life reasons otherwise I would have finished it fast), it's a different mode (a satire) where it feels like words are made to matter and never fly by. If they do, the characters who utter them could be killed in 20s Russia. Here they are allowed to say it, sometimes.

I still love the old Jesuit who knew the secrets of the saints.

― Pictish in the Woods (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 15 January 2024 00:25 bookmarkflaglink

In Fifth Business, I think.

― Pictish in the Woods (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 15 January 2024 00:26 bookmarkflaglink

Yes, The Fifth Business. This character - Padre Igancio Blazon - is great. 'Oho, you nice Protestant boy! Joseph is history's most celebrated cuckold ... Padre Blazon was almost shouting by this time, and I had to hush him. People in the restaurant were staring...'. RD writes some really good one-off characters who understand or can interpret the underlying cruces of his main players.

And writing that quote makes me realise that John Parlabane - an avatar of evil in The Rebel Angels - is very similar to Padre Blazon - a guide to the Devil in The Fifth Business.

Feels like a mode with an interesting history (starting from Proust with ppl like Blanchot) where Beckett is an end point (only refreshed by a few others, like Bernhard).

Yes, this seems right to a degree. Though i would say like any mode it's a tool in the toolkit of a writer. it comes with a set of strengths and some subjects and treatments to which it's particularly suited... though as so often you'd more often like to see the mode applied to subjects to which it's completely *unsuited* or rarely used. tho when i start to come up with examples - a crime and detection story, a spy thriller, a comic novel, i feel that this must already have been done a few times!

but yes, certainly proust is the great inventor and progenitor of it all - would be my rather casual view anyway.

I think of that Padre pretty much every time I learn about the dark side or personal failings of some artist I like, as part of a way to get a handle on whatever it may bring up. Maybe once in a great while it will be so bad I can’t stand them anymore but usually it just humanizes them and I have to take most of it in stride, ultimately there’s no way to avoid knowing it sooner or later if one is a fan.

yes, i mean i think one of the main morals in RD is that it's better to be a sinner than a Laodicean. In that language it sounds fine, but of course it means 'it's better to run the risk of doing something that might be considered evil than it is to sit on the sidelines.' put like that it's less clear cut of course. still, 'adults are messy and agency, especially moral agency, is not a simple matter, so be try not to judge other people's errors, even bad ones' seems a reasonable message, especially in a highly amplified social media age that runs very quick and noisily to judgment. (communities have ofc always run to this judgment - see Mrs Dempster at the beginning of the trilogy - it's the amplification and the encouragement to mimetic sorting inherent to social media that is the problem imv, though this ofc is me editorialising and not inherent to the books).

Speaking of Beckett in this (innerverse streaming etc.) context: although it's been a long time since I've read any of his fiction, I remember liking Mercier et Camier especially because it actively acknowledges the existence of the outside and even/especially? outdoors world, seeming closest in that respect to his plays, which are never closest drama, are always written for the audiences of stage/radio/TV/ the silver screen even, though the reviews of Film that I've seen (close as I've come to viewing it) aren't so enthusiastic---still, he recruited Buster Keaton and came to NYC and directed the damn thing---he could do things like that, and the Resistance and so on, not always the professionally depresso hermit etc.---
Also, Fizzles, was wondering what you currently think of Joyce and V. Woolf (and Leonard, for that matter; I've heard he's good)?

never *closet* drama I meant, damn!

Murphy's one of the century's funniest novels and it's got characters and an urban setting.

Yeah! Thanks for the reminder.
Good concise piece on Beckett and running buddy Giacometti, an influence and colleague, who contributed design ideas to early Godot production:

Giacometti died in 1966, while Beckett lived until 1989. Throughout their careers, both artists drew freely from a broad range of mediums including design, architecture, cinema and literature. This experimental approach to working has inspired many artists, such as Gerard Byrne, Bruce Nauman, Miroslaw Balka and Doris Salcedo, to name a few.

Murphy's great. first read it as a teenager, and it's always been a favourite with lines that have just stuck - the qauntum of wantum does not vary, the great buzzing confusion (of gas molecules iirc), the rocking chair being one of the few things that keeps getting faster until it stops.

leonard... woolf? no idea i'm afraid.

ulysses is a great book, human, garrulous even, of the city (the true meaning of Aristotle's politikon zōion - that is to say a being 'of the polis', a social being) and a complete joy to read, mostly. though when i was dipping back into Time and Western Man for the post above, I'm reminded that Lewis felt Joyce-as-schoolmaster was evident in the 'general knowledge paper' aspect of reading Ulysses, not totally unfounded - Joyce iirc said that chapter was the best adverse criticism Ulysses received. Time and Western Man is worth reading sections of, because it covers this moment, in its skewed a rebarbative way, very well - the moment when people were fighting over time, in particular the appearance of Bergsonian time as a philosophy that might underpin artistic representation. Now so much in the past that we forget it was ever a battle in the first place or that there are different options here. (very much, i should stress in opposition to Lewis, *a battle that does not matter*, and like many things that simply didn't matter, Lewis constructed an entire intractable edifice of a book out of it.)

Digression to quote, as I'm flipping through TaWM here:

Almost all Tories are simpletons – the simpletons of what passes with them for 'tradition,' we could say (as is proved conclusively by the way in which they have defended themselves - how they hastily close all the stable doors long after the horses have all disappeared; also by their rare instinct for closing all the wrong doors, behind which there were never any horses).

Virgina Woolf - and I feel bad about this - I've never really warmed that much to. I should probably revisit though, as it's been over twenty years.

terry hayes - year of the locust
much delayed follow up to his debut novel thriller 'i am pilgrim' a book i really liked. the new one is 400 pages of an okay thriller that's not a patch on his original followed by 150 pages of extremely lousy sci-fi so bad you wonder if he's actually trying then 50 pages of ludicrous tie up.

This was the "Have heard he's good" re Leonard W.:

Anybody read Leonard Woolf? Leon Edel's references to and contextualization of Tales From The East and The Village In The Jungle are intriguing. Kept telling himself he was anti-Imperialist, but watched himself get deeply involved in grassroots governance of Ceylon.

― dow, Wednesday, August 1, 2018 9:29 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Very observant of self & others, it seems.

― dow, Wednesday, August 1, 2018 9:31 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf is really good, and also really makes you wonder how he put up with his horribly anti-semitic wife.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Other good stuff follows on same thread---o hell, why not sample some more:

Toook me a while to get into Damon Runyon but now I'm loving it! I think as with Wodehouse part of the trick is having this utterly self-contained world, where people agree on the same absurdities and thus can interact with each other regarding them.

"Well, I state that this sounds to me like stealing, and stealing is something that is by no means upright and honest, and Regret has to admit that it really is similar to stealing, but he says what of it, and as I do not know what of it, I discontinue the argument."

"I never know Jack O' Hearts is even mad at Louie, and I am wondering why he takes these shots at him, but I do not ask any questions, because when a guy goes around asking questions in this town people may get the idea he is such a guy as wishes to find things out."

Also the description of Alice In Wonderland as "nothing but a pack of lies, but very interesting in spots".

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, August 2, 2018 5:00 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Last night I started The Golden Spur, one of Dawn Powell's NY-centered novels, from 1962. Last year I read a much earlier novel of hers, Angels on Toast (1940), which was a bit on the grim side. The other one of hers I've read was The Locusts have No King (1948), which saw the failings of its characters in a more humane light.

This one seems a bit more comedic than the other two. The characters are treated a bit more frivolously and there's a touch more buffoonery at work, but it is not mean-spirited in the least.

― A is for (Aimless), Friday, August 3, 2018 12:28 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

A Time to Live is one of the century's funniest novels.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, August 3, 2018 12:38 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

a time to be born? (not trying to be a dick, just checking)

― mookieproof, Friday, August 3, 2018
I finished Siege of Krishnapur. My initial impression held- it wasn't as good as Troubles but still pretty good. I still want to read The Singapore Grip. This one had more action and historical detail, but lacked a bit of the surrealism and humor. Now I'm plowing through Jonathan Mahler's Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, which is eminently readable, though at least a passing interest in baseball doesn't hurt.

― o. nate, Saturday, August 4, 2018 7:54 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

a time to be born? (not trying to be a dick, just checking)

― mookieproof, Friday, August 3, 2018 8:37 PM (ye

yep!

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, August 4, 2018

Leon Edel's references to and contextualization of Tales From The East and The Village In The Jungle are intriguing. Kept telling himself he was anti-Imperialist, but watched himself get deeply involved in grassroots governance of Ceylon.

McElroy, Plus

Takeaway, Angela Hui - memoir about growing up in a Chinese takeaway in a small village in Wales (I do mean "in" - she describes how the counter would be used for homework, birthday parties, etc when the place wasn't open). Not to be read for the prose but an interesting window into a world for sure.

Now: Kawabata's The Rainbow. Man likes his long lost siblings.

Funnily enough I heard about that book. There is a Chinese takeaway near mine where I've seen the young girl grow up at the counter over the last six years. She is often doing homework while I wait for my order.

though as so often you'd more often like to see the mode applied to subjects to which it's completely *unsuited* or rarely used. tho when i start to come up with examples - a crime and detection story, a spy thriller, a comic novel, i feel that this must already have been done a few times!

― Fizzles, Monday, 15 January 2024 bookmarkflaglink

I would say Juan Jose Saer has written a few books like this. I would start with The Witness.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Witness-Juan-Jose-Saer/dp/1846686911

thanks xyzzzz and dow!

Welcome!
Y'all: I've occasionally read Grace Paley over the years, and she keeps coming back through my head today, a little bit, persistently enough that I finally have to ask: if I were to put in a library loan request, which book(s) should I ask for?

She is a marvel. I would go with Later the Same Day.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute too.

Los pobres!

When Republicans assumed control of the House early last year after winning a narrow majority in the 2022 midterms, Representative Earl Blumenauer, a veteran Democrat from Oregon, made a bold prediction: His party had a slight chance of reclaiming power before the next election — through sheer attrition.

Republicans commanded just a thin edge over Democrats, 222 to 213, Mr. Blumenauer reasoned, and typical turnover in recent years suggested that could shrink further. Plus, a certain new Republican representative from New York by the name of George Santos did not seem likely to survive a cascade of ethics issues and criminal charges.

Still, Mr. Blumenauer’s prognosticating seemed more like liberal wish-casting given the dominoes that needed to fall to fulfill it. A year later, though still highly unlikely, it suddenly doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

Day by day, thanks to a combination of coincidence, scandal, health issues and political turmoil, the G.O.P. majority keeps getting smaller.

xpost thanks yall---think I might request The Collected Stories.

So what got me thinking about Paley again was Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, written in the 50s, with an unexpectedly acerbic, elbow quality---in that sense reminding me of GP's first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man---as the 26-year-old single comes back to her South Alabama smalltown for a visit, on vacation from NYC job ("I hated it 'til one day somebody pushed me on the bus, and I pushed back. I realized we were enjoying ourselves, and that's when I knew I was a New Yorker.")
As you've probably long since read, so no crying about spoilers she discovers that the heretofore Perfect Atticus, who still has all the best lines, is a racist! And involved, in his ever-seemingly-laidback-village-lawyer way, with the citizens council(in this place, not even "White," and no need to bother with caps either); He patiently explains it all, of course.
She freaks out, then freaks out more when she realizes that he's set her up to freak out, to not know how to deal, by being so freaking perfect all her life! (Flashbacks to her childhood, when Jean Louise was the tomboy Scout and Atticus bravely defended a Negro boy accused of rape, are very readable and even get satirical, but then she realizes they're becoming nostalgically tormenting procrastination.)
Good, except the realistic striving of the novel before that doesn't go with the idea of a perfect ('til now) person---is she delusional, did she block out all previous glimpses (at least) of imperfection? I think the freak-outs could still be in there, if she realizes this about herself, or the blessedly third-person narrator does---self-discovery is already part of the social commentary----but can also see that potential publishers of this complete unknown female mouth from the South (who also has things to say about gender roles) may have found her MS. a bit hot to handle at the end of the Fifties
---so now I'm starting To Kill A Mockingbird, with the same straight-ahead narration (now by the former Scout herself), and Atticus already just like Gregory Peck.

Watchman is certainly no masterpiece, but it's a presentable achievement with potential. I enjoyed the read and pretend-edit.

cho nam-joo - kim jiyoung, born 1982
thought this was fabulous

sayaka murata - life ceremony
short stories from the author of convenience store woman and earthlings particularly liked 'a first rate material' where human remains are used for soft furnishings, jewellery and clothing. also 'body magic' which was extraordinary.

yoko ogawa - the housekeeper and the professor
good but some of the maths was beyond me

shion miura - the easy life in kamusari
enjoyable fish out of water tale about forestry with people mainly being nice to each other which is often p much all I want out of a novel tbh

Just a bit further into Mockingbird, and already I'm starting to wonder about Flannery O'Connor's verdict---"It did alright for a children's book": maybe the ending will be reassuring, but did children's books of 1960 typically have child abuse, child classism (in and out of school), child fights, and the recognizable effects of boondocks poverty, still trickling down and spreading?
One thing she's left out: true that village lawyer Atticus, and the village doctor, other professionals, had to expect some clients to pay with, say, a stack of stove wood, a bag of turnips, whatever could be mananged---but also, if the pros could manage it, they (incl. some in my family and their colleagues) had to keep a cow in the garage, a vegetable garden, chickens, a seasonal turkey, a hog (slaughtered off-premises if necessry x affordable)---the iceman's rounds were still necessary, and a few trips to the store, ---so far I'm not seeing any of that in the book, but no frills either.
Unless you count those on the very young teacher reduced to tears by her first encounter with hardened first graders, incl.some getting on up there in years, held back by family situations in several cases, routinely enough: "She was a pretty little thing."

Also thinking I should have re-read some of the Portis before returning it to library loan--wanting to try more of his---

Read Ernesto by Umberto Saba on a whim, NYRB edition. I was expecting something slightly different but I still found the book rather lovely in its way, almost akin to “Paul’s Case” if it were longer and took place in fin-de-siècle Trieste.

Stack of things as per usual

But Masalha Palestine 4000 Years History
History of the area going back a few thousand years. Seems to be detailed for the last 3000 odd.
& citing work using a variation on the name Palestine for most of that. Egyptian, Greek and Roman texts all have a related name. Also seem to view the area as a recognised population area and a very fertile one for agriculture.

Oein DeBharduin Twiggy Woman
Ghostly folktale collection based on Irish traveller tradition. 2nd set of his I've read. Will read more.

Michael Heller Loft Jazz
I think this may be more sociological than about the music. But interesting read even if heavily dotted with endnotes reference numbers. I think numbers may be less significant than in some books I've seen that in. Messes things up when it's being used as a bathroom book.
But interesting book.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Book on black presence in Britain going back to a Roman battalion at Hadrian's wall.

During our recent two day power outage I took a detour from the history of the civil rights into something less dense and difficult, a Barbara Pym novel she wrote in 1936 at age 23 which was published posthumously in 1987, Civil to Strangers. Her full skill set as a writer was already apparent at that age, even in so slight a novel. Now I'm back into Pillar of Fire.

Susan Rogers This Is What It Sounds Like
Sound engineer going into scientific background of what reaction to various musics mean. Pretty interesting .

Travellers and the Settled Community John Heneghan, Mary (Warde), Moriarty, Michael O haodha
Short essays on various aspects and points of contact. Very interesting book so shame I keep backburnering it should have had it read months ago.

Therese Smith (ed) Ancestral Imprints : histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance
I picked this up because it had an article on Captain O'Neill one of the main people to start recording ex pat Irish players in police and fire brigade etc bands playing Irish music in the early 20th century. It's another book i keep meaning to finish and not doing eo. Getting there now.

Just read
Paint My Name In Black and Gold by Mark Andrews
The Sisters of Mercy biography. A tale of self destruction and some delusion. But does have me wanting to listen to their early stuff. Just not sure where my Some Girls Wander By Mistake is.

Joe Sacco Palestine 2
Reread it but realised what I'd read before was the complete run of the comics not the 1st Volume this paired with. Pretty moving anyway. Think I'll read some of his other work so have some ordered.

Flann O'Brien - The Hard Life
Gerard Stern - This Time: New and Selected Poems

I finished "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges. It was surprisingly readable for a book by a 19th-century academic. On how ancient religion and politics are intertwined in Greece and Rome. Currently reading "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" by Samuel Florman.

Swami And Friends, R.K. Narayan - Good case of "is this a kid's book or no?". Very much centered on the main character's childhood routines, but did kids use to know what denoument means? Also several instances of ejaculate used in the archaic sense, which is always fun. Best evocation of youth is Swami finishing an exam early and getting progressively more nervous as everyone else continues scribbling - I remember this sensation well but hadn't thought about it for decades! Also the adult world starting to intrude, Swami caught up in a protest as a political activist has been imprisoned by the English.

I have been slowly working through The Tale of Genji this month. I'm about a third of the way through. I find I need to read every footnote to be able to follow the text. It is wonderful: a lavish, intimate, poetic world, while also being basically a story of messy affairs and palace intrigue. Very funny too.

Finished Mockingbird and yeah I see what Flannery O'Connor might have meant in calling it a children's book, despite the ugly truths inside, and some thriller filler: all of it leading to attempted reassurance---somewhat labored at times, required at so many times----as readers and moviegoers of all ages might have responded to in 1960,looking at a story set in the mid-30s: reassurance about race-craziness resurfacing among fellow white people, incl. friends, neighbors, relatives---becoming less predictable among the ones that you knew/were being taught were bad.

(And so I see why it still gets banned.)

Andrei Platonov - Chevengur.

This is a translation of a book I have been waiting for about ten years. It finally arrived late last year and I picked it up as soon as I could, and the high expectations were met, if you like. In the introduction the translator (Robert, with Elisabeth Chadler) talks about how they have been working it at this book for decades, and anyone who has read the numerous books by Platonov over the years can get a sense of the utterly strange way he puts things. In Chevengur (named after the town where communism has been 'achieved') there is an example or several on almost every page of its near five hundred or so. It is about the way in which Platonov writes (as distinctive as any writer like Proust or Musil, whom I would easily compare him to), but also about the way he has come up with a language that has been transformed beyond recognition as the politics of the time has transformed humanity -- whether for the worse or better -- and communism has enlarged humanity's capacity to see, feel, relate to one another as well nature, whether animals or plants (he writes about grass as if it was a cathedral), and of course, to think, whether well or badly (there is no novel which follows to te nth degree what it is to think along collective lines of thought laid down by a theory of some sort).

In his works of the 20s and 30s -- in his many books and stories -- Platonov is fully embedded into the Soviet project, he writes about its results. As we know some of these are violent, they lead to famine, death, sufferin (it all comes with multiple, dense allusions to Russia literature (esp Gogol and Dostoevsky) and the bible). Platonov doesn't shy away from that, but there is also a sense that if humanity is to survive that something fundamental must change, in our souls and our thoughts (Musil similarly wrote about our souls, but at the end of the Hapsburg empire). Mistakes made? Hopefully we can work on making less of them, maybe we have fucked up, but everything put down here is how these lives are now being lived, how we have arrived at this, what roads we can take, or not. The bread and butter of literature is ambiguity about what has occured, there is no place for the final judgment that you or I could easily make about the blood spilled and millions dead.

There are many wonderful passages translated in the notes sections, too. In one of them Platonov writes how the sun's power must be harnessed to do our work. This is someone thinking about 'Communism', what it could do and didn't. Can we feel it? What is it anyway? It is a Science Fiction book like no other at points, an utopia written by someone who has nearly tasted it before melting away in violence (what else?). I can only think of Victor Serge or maybe a few pages of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (where there is a similar sense that we are near something transformative for us all, and yet...) that get to similar matter.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the inner workings of Platonov's writing (and I cannot do justice to how he writes), which is really like no one else, and cannot be replicated. In Chevengur, more than his other books (but you must read them all) you can see the reasons why that is the case.

Picked that one up from a secret NYRB discount code I had, very excited to dig into it later in the spring, when I will have a little more time.

Finally a really good review of Chevengur.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-real-unrealists-on-andrey-platonovs-chevengur/

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Chain-Gang All-Stars and can highly recommend it. It's a pretty great examination of the carceral state, the overrepresentation of African-Americans in it, and its tendency to brutalize the entire culture, which adapts cruelty as a business model. I'll definitely check out his short story collection afterwards.

Tokyo Express, Seicho Matsumoto - Postwar Japanese mystery novel. Def a fun read, heavy on the procedural as I like it. Mind you the protagonist's hunches always seem very forced, and the suspect's innocence so obvious, that it gets eyebrow raising how long he gets to keep working at it. Case is part of a larger puzzle involving govt corruption - like so much media of its era, postwar Japan in this is a country without honour or humanity.

I finished Isaac Butler's addictive The Method and started Denis Johnson's Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.

I tried reading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, loved the first couple of chapters, but found it maddeningly whimsical thereafter. So I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson instead. I think I still slightly prefer The Haunting of Hill House but it was a lovely and creepy read.

have an entire pile of books i'm working through but this is the current one.

The Underworld -- Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, by Susan Casey

i heard about her via a very incisive and appropriately fuming piece she wrote for Vanity Fair about the Titan submerisible disaster (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/titan-submersible-implosion-warnings), and this book covers the world of undersea exploration, via private adventurers. What's notable to me is these people are all well-aware of the dangers and just incredibly cautious, they get all the certifications and make sure their submersibles are completely safe (i.e. they're made of titanium and not carbon fiber.) It's a good read. The most illuminating part is the chapter devoted to focusing on companies which would like to dredge the bottom of the ocean for minerals and metals, which would likely be catastrophic for the ocean environment and therefore the world, considering it's the one area of the planet which has remained largely pure and untouched.

I finished Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965. As with the first volume, Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch gets much deeper into the weeds of the civil rights movement than you'll ever learn about by watching the many documentaries and 'based on a true story' films on that era, and consequently paints a picture that contains far more truth. Even then, he's forced to merely hint at a tremendous amount of that history which was less directly connected to MLK, Jr. If you can stand the emotional punishment of reading 1200+ pages of detailed and often brutally horrific history, I can't recommend these two volumes highly enough.

Now I'm reading a novella, The Nonexistent Knight, Italo Calvino.

I'm reading *Doppelganger* by Naomi Klein (and yes, I very nearly typed the other name). It's terrifying.

I'm taking a break to re-read *The Handmaid's Tale* for a work thing. It might as well be a first-time read, in honesty. I get ghost-glimpses of the version of me that read this 25 years ago and worry at what I would have missed, what I might have sneered at. God, Atwood. The dizzying helical structure of it; the dread, the dread; the precision of each rendered detail screaming 'there is no time, there is no time'.