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

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'.

danielle evans - the office for historical corrections. short story collection a couple of which were v good indeed.

Read Christie's The Big Four during a delayed flight last night. Imho the most ambitious and least successful of the Poirot books.

Miguel Angel Asturias - Mr.President. A somewhat-based-on-fact fiction around a Latin American dictatorship. This was written in the late 20s and, though I'd have to recheck I found quite different from some of the Lat Am 'dictator' novels from the 60s where the focus is on the personality of the leader, whereas here its on the people around him whom he has to remove so he can gain power.

There is a real pleasure in the scenes where it feels like the world is falling to pieces, or just setting very dark moods, with the nod to that being a window into a perhaps better world, before this is all shut down violently.

I'm halfway through that Mavis Gallant doorstop - she writes exclusively about expats and immigrants but it's amazing what range she manages to display within that in terms of class, nationality, background. Latest one I read was about a couple of German immigrants in Paris, one Jewish one gentile, who make a living as extras and bit players in films and tv shows about the occupation - the gentile one as a German officer, the Jewish one as the guy who gets killed in the first episode to show the evil of the nazis. at the story's end it's the late 70's and they start to worry that by 1982 the French general public might be sick of hearing about the occupation. good stuff.

The Nonexistent Knight feels like Calvino had no clue what he was going to write when he started on the first chapter. He just plunged in and improvised everything as he went like a parent telling a bedtime story. The resulting story is a pleasant diversion, somewhat whimsical, mildly philosophical and more than a little slapdash. What saves it is his innate ability to improvise in interesting directions.

Will have to check that---I enjoyed Mr Palomar in something of the same way last year, although I thought he did have a clue to start with, one I won't spoil, but anybody who gets to the end will get what I mean---some dizzy moments on the high wire and the patio w Mr. P. (His little daughter knows when to yank him through the crowd, "C'mon.")

the auctioneer by joan samson! it good 🧡 70s small town new england suspense novel where the monster is neoliberalism. less gonzo batshit trash than is my usual preference, but the creeping dread/powerlessness really hits the spot, leavened by the sour lols of the old new england matriarch moaning about her family getting chased off their own land as if they was no more than a bunch of indians & the titular auctioneer selling off a baby who turns out, gasp! to have been his own progeny! in the time-honored american tradition (<- slavery reference, sorry)

Turns out I remembered how to read again!

Grown Ups - Marian Keyes

I had the hardback of this since it came out but never read it until this week. I went on an MK reread the past fortnight - Last Chance Saloon, Rachel’s Holiday, The Other Side of the Story, Sushi for Beginners. Grown Ups is about a big messy entangled family, centred around three brothers:

Johnny - the charming, handsome gobshite
Ed - kind botanist
Liam - a class-A prick

and their lives, wives and work and relationship dramas. The wives get as much time. I was very taken by insecure, slightly overwhelmed Jessie. Nell I didn’t really like that much - too gen Z in the worst ways, but Cara…

Oh, Cara. Cara is a bulimic and there is no detail spared on the humiliations, the rituals, the pain, the secrecy. I felt incredibly seen by this character. Keyes is a former alcoholic with a history of disordered eating and she gets it. It hurts to read some of these scenes. This, of course, is what made Rachel’s Holiday such compelling reading too.

Anyway the book starts with a big dramatic dinner scene where everyone’s dark secrets get spilled in front of everyone else, and then rewinds back to the previous year where everything unspools. It’s a pretty long book (600~ pages?) and there’s slow build on some of the threads but like someone managing multiple pans on a cooker, she keeps it all going.

Is it classic? It’s not quite up there with Last Chance Saloon or The Mystery of Mercy Close for me, but it’s very good. I found most of the characters, even the pricks, to be compelling and nuanced. There are many lives and there are threads of tragedy, births, celebrations and betrayals binding them all together.

There’s a minor character who is an asylum seeker and to be honest, I didn’t really expect direct provision* to be covered in a book like this. But then again, why wouldn’t it? Previous Keyes books have covered such cheery topics as drug addiction and overdoses, bereavement and denial, rape and nervous breakdowns. Her books have always engaged with the world we live in.

So. Very very solid, probably my favourite of hers since The Mystery of Mercy Close.

From the authors notes:

You’ll have seen the term ‘Direct Provision’ mentioned in the book. This refers to how the Irish state treats people who are seeking asylum in Ireland, having escaped war or trauma in their country of origin. While they wait for their application for asylum to be processed, they are provided for ‘directly’, as in their food and shelter is provided for, in one of thirty-six centres around the country. Their lives are subject to a variety of restrictions and indignities, from being ineligible to work, being unable to cook their own food, sharing sleeping space with people from many different countries and cultures and not being permitted to have visitors.

Many asylum seekers live like this for several years. It’s a terrible way to treat people who are already traumatized and I suspect that one day Ireland will feel great shame that we let this happen.

Finished Laura Henriksen’s Laura’s Desires, a two-part, rather long essay-poem that dwells within the poet’s sexual, political, and aesthetic commitments. Much of this is done via a reading and poetic analysis of Bette Gordon’s Variety, a film I haven’t seen in many years but remember rather well. A transformative and generous read, to be honest— very much in the tradition of Bernadette Mayer, which is an excellent thing.

gyac - I haven't read 'mystery of mercy close' but I will now if you regard it as top tier keyes.

have to finish patricia highsmith - 'deep water' first. halfway thru and I get the feeling that the husband isn't going to get away with it and I kinda want him to.

Omg I would love your thoughts on it, it’s up there with her very best!

Andrei Platonov - Chevengur.

This is a translation of a book I have been waiting for about ten years(...)

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, January 24, 2024 1:40 PM (two weeks ago)

Holy shit, thank you for the heads-up - have been out of the loop and had no idea they'd finally completed this (the NYRB Soul has haunted me for the past fifteen years or so). Let's see if anywhere in NZ is stocking it.

I've started a short semi-autobiographical novel by Barbara Comyns, Mr. Fox. One of the jacket blurbs tries hard to sell its comedic qualities, but I can't see it. The poverty of the narrator has pushed her life into a sad state of squalor. However, she just muddles ahead, skating along like a waterbug, rather than sinking into desperation or despair.

That last sentence sounds promising, also that the whole thing's short, and semi-autobio, so still some room to skate. Let us know how it goes.

I'm reading "Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons" by Jeremy Denk, about learning to play the piano.

Jeremy Taylor - Four Sermons. English language at it's most beautifully expressed. Good luck to today's writers.

I first read Crime and Punishment when I was 14 and the only reaction to it that I can recall is that it seemed to have come from another planet, one so unfamiliar that I was continually lost and bewildered. Since then I've read at least five other Dostoevsky novels and I'd describe my relationship with him as queasy and contentious.

For no reason I can articulate I recently bought two different (cheap, used) translations of C&P. Last night I did a brief side-by-side comparison and chose the Peavar & Volokhonsky as the easier one to assimilate. I will take a run at reading it for the second time, but it won't surprise me if I lay it aside. I guess I'll find out.

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: Curiosities from the History of Medicine, by Thomas Morris. I bought this years ago from Kobo for about .99, and it's a good, light read. Very funny at times, but I cannot tell you how many times already the descriptions have made my butt pucker.

I finished a re-read of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, which was as astonishing as I remembered, and particularly clarifying in our current epoch.

Reading Don Carlenter’s Hard Rain Falling and a Prynne chap at the bedside, and Olúfémi Táíwò’s Elite Capture in the mornings with coffee.