ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

would agree with the evaluation of bliss/the garden party above. the penguin collected km should be easy to find and has her three original volumes + some posthumous collections.

about a third of the way into ivy compton-burnett's a family & a fortune: lots of (so far) unspoken familial tension. most struck by her remarkable ability to conjure up quite vivid images with little more than dialogue.

Haven't posted in a bit since fitfully starting to a few months ago. Since my last post, I've read and would warmly recommend: Rachel Cusk's Transit, Coetzee's Scenes from Provincial Life, Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and Tim Lawrence's history of NYC nightlife/music in the early 1980s (Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor).

Up next for me: Paul Beatty's Sellout, Kamel Daouad's Merseult Investigation, and - after months on hold from my library and my forgetting about it until it arrived last week - Chris Kraus' I Love Dick (which I'd never gotten around to despite wanting to - the (pretty good) Amazon TV pilot of the adaptation renewed my interest in it)).

Anyone read Sellout and have any thoughts on it? I was initially skeptical but have since come around and am looking forward to reading it.

The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake has proved to be quite good. It is well-researched, well-structured, clearly written, level-headed, and knows just how much detail is enough for an intelligent lay reader to follow the evidence and get the point, without feeling the need to exhaustively prove its case to academic historians or specialists. The author is not a gifted stylist, such as Barbara Tuchman, but more than good enough to keep my interest at a simmer. Good stuff.

Reading Red Shift by Alan Garner. I wasn't sure at first - too dialogue heavy, too riddled with elisions - but it's grown on me. Kitchen sink landscape mysticism? It might just catch on.

This is a bit Books 101, but I read The Dead today, my first ever Joyce, without knowing anything about the story, or about Joyce really.

Anyway - so much to love - not just the ending (which I gather is famous) but the party section too, which reminded me of a showoffy long take from a Welles movie, and the tension of the cab home, and the constant dread even though the story itself seems quite joyous and full of light incident. I feel like I'll be able to read it every ten years for the rest of my life and feel something different every time.

You might like John Huston's film version too. I came to Dubliners very late, about 40 years after reading A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses in school, and was bowled over. I know some people who don't care for any of his others, but love these early stories. Not me, but---wow.
And don't worry about Books 101; several of us are still catching up. As mentioned upthread, I recently/finally enjoyed Swann's Way (Lydia Davis translation), and only in part because I realized how much Swann and I had in common, a while back---but today I was relieved to get to the end of "At Mme. Swann's", midway through In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower (James Grieve translation). To paraphrase Grieve's intro, Proust will show you some wonderful scenes, but before, during and instead of showing, he will tell and tell and tell and fucking tell some more, incl. some of the most obvious and/or boring talking points, Didn't mind in the amazing first volume, but here it can be a chore. But I do think he's left me to infer, right or wrong, that the climatic, rhapsodic odes to Odette as a genius of dress, which I found hard to swallow, given her cheesy tastes in Swann's Way, can be taken as the narrator cheering himself up after the long autopsy of "the slow painful suicide" of his earlier romantic self-image---the self that blew any chance at happiness with Gilberte, whether there really was or could have been one or not.

Although I didn't mind it all that much, mainly compared to Swann's Way: Monsieur P.'s got me spoiled, "cossetted" as Grieve says of him (lots of complaints, but you didn't get drafted, JG).

Also wondering about The Sellout.

Started Jane Rawson's 'From the Wreck', about a shipwrecked Australian man in the 1850s who is haunted for the rest of his life by a transdimensional shapesifting cephalopod, and which is really good.

I find 'The Dead' more moving than I can account for - especially the closing few paragraphs. I can access most of it from memory, and it's like a piece of music in some regards. So much great poetry and poetic truth but the 'falling faintly/faintly falling' is enough to reduce me to tears.

^^^^^

Play with Christopher Walken was good too and they sang at the end.

In other words, ^thirded

What did they sing?

The last sentence of the story, iirc

Agree with Chuck Tatum and others about 'The Dead'!

still reading Johnny Marr: SET THE BOY FREE.
They are making the first LP.

It inspired me to record an instrumental version of 'this charming man' with one take per guitar.

THE BOG OF ALLEN

I find 'The Dead' more moving than I can account for - especially the closing few paragraphs. I can access most of it from memory, and it's like a piece of music in some regards. So much great poetry and poetic truth but the 'falling faintly/faintly falling' is enough to reduce me to tears.

― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski

The Huston adaptation finds an analog with the music in Angelica Huston's monologue about the delicate boy.

Mark S did you know that one of Flann O'Brien's funniest early writings is a mock play called THE BOG OF ALLEN ?

It stars a character called ALLEN BOG.

I've been reading Malgudi Days, a set of short stories by R. K. Narayan, mostly by the light of an LED headlamp, because we've been out of power for the past 3 days. Just got electricity back about an hour ago. There was a windstorm on Friday.

Did you like it? I'm a big Narayan fan. Downloaded a whole bunch of Malgudi episodes from the Indian 1980s TV series a while back, but have never actually got around to watching them yet.

On book 2 of Wolfhound Empire trilogy, which retains its excellence. People who like Alan Furst or Dave Hutchinson and who can handle a bit of fantasy will like this, i think.

I love Narayan, have a bunch of his stuff. His American tour diary is v interesting.

The first 2/3 of Malgudi Days is excerpted from two early short story collections. These stories all tend to be quite short, about 5 pages each, could more accurately be described as brief tales or vignettes than fully-developed stories. Their interest for me lay chiefly in their capturing some small slice of Indian life drawn almost exclusively from the poor or petty middle class, which a contemporary Indian would have instinctively associated with particular castes, but I am not versed enough in the culture to make such distinctions. The latter third seems to contain longer stories of a dozen of more pages, but I haven't read these, yet.

imo, Narayan's great strength is his ability to capture India's bewildering diversity of people and folkways in extremely simple and convincing microcosms. These stories display that strength. It's like a slide show but in full color and 3-D, full of lively detail.

Should I read Mistry's Such a Long Journey?

Reading a trashy paperback I picked up ages ago: Forbbiden Lovers, about lesbianism during the classic Hollywood era. It's a total mess, making no real distinctions between relationships that have actual documentation backing them up, shady rumor based stuff and stars who happened to have a strong gay following (an interesting topic in its own right, of course). It's padded out with lists of gay women on Broadway and 1920's Paris, and chapters on stuff more unrelated still - Fatty Arbuckle's scandal, for one. Also jumps back and forth in time to a frustrating degree - the "Garbo talks!" moment is mentioned after, like, chapters on her talkie career. Still, the first few chapters, which get very detailed about the love triangle between Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and screenwriter/author Mercedes De Acosta, are written with empathy and avoid trying to make things seem sleazy or lurid - could make for a good episode of You Must Remember This.

and - after months on hold from my library and my forgetting about it until it arrived last week - Chris Kraus' I Love Dick

Interested to hear what you think! I read that recently and found it both fascinating and irritating - reading GoodReads reviews of it made me more puzzled still.

Reading Red Shift by Alan Garner. I wasn't sure at first - too dialogue heavy, too riddled with elisions - but it's grown on me. Kitchen sink landscape mysticism? It might just catch on.

I got the BFI DVD of the TV version of this and it comes with an extra on Garner that makes him seem hyper-pretentious in a not entirely unlikeable way.

Ah yes, I've been meaning to ask: anyone have any particular Mathews recommendations?

There is a thread btw.

Oh! Thanks!

Thanks for the Mansfield tips upthread. Has anybody read any Melvin B. Tolson? I randomly found an excerpt of his Libretto for the Republic of Liberia and it looks SO MY THING.

I haven't, really, but I came across him via this book about canonization which is really good and readable.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/916704.Marginal_Forces_Cultural_Centers

^
It explores the idea that 'Tolson urgently needs to be brought into the canon' contradicts 'Pynchon is depoliticized by being canonized', ie divergent ideas of canon relating to writers from different backgrounds / literary spheres.

= "the canon" shd in fact be an argument abt what canons shd be?

"The Death of the Heart", Elizabeth Bowen. I've read a short story or two by her in anthologies but this was my first novel. She's a heavyweight and an original and there's some really wonderful stuff in this but also stuff that must have looked a bit dated even in 1938: a Henry James type preoccupation with subtle moral failings of the cultivated classes, and a wodge of observations of a philosophical and/or psychological sort by an omniscient authorial voice - some perceptive and interesting but others just portentous.

As a complete change I'm reading Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers". I've avoided this for ages thinking it might not be my thing at all, all macho intellectual display, but I'm about 120 pages in and it's been great fun so far.

mark s I agree - a lot of discussion of "the canon" treats it as though it were a fixed thing, but I think of it more as a dynamic system constantly re-evaluating itself; also as an aggregation of sub canons, all jockeying for position.

Re: Earthly Powers. Hand it to a Catholic to do a proper job of taking the piss out of the church.

Picked up The Evenings by Gerard Reve. Its a kind of ALWAYS angry and alienated young man novel, pretty witty and at-times fucked for the lolz. Reminded me of Mishima, a novel someone writes in their 20s except the person writing it won't grow out of, a phase that won't pass, its just there for some reason and won't go, and they are bringing the flavour of THAT on the page. Written in '46 so there is no respite from the torment just because a war is over.

As the sun turns up I went back to pre-war middle Europe (where else?) for an account by Gershom Schoelem in Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, a nice enough trawl through the memory of the scholar's time with Benjamin in the intellectual humanist hothouse, and his attempt to claim Benjamin as a superior metaphysical thinker instead of merely a materialist cultural critic that he went on to be painted as. His attempts to get Benjamin to Palestine well ahead of time are tragic although he writes with much distance (actual or otherwise, this book is from '75). Kafka hangs very deeply through much of this. Went back to fiction, firstly via a bunch of micro-stories by Peter Altenberg as collected in Telegrams of the Soul where the translator doesn't mention Walser which is really odd as this is surely the sensibility its tapping up, and went onto more Viennese stories by Joseph Roth in his novella Weights and Measures where it seems to directly draw from his drinking problem and marital disaffections on the one hand. On the other the guy does mood, the pages describing the outbreak of cholera in the town - and where that takes the story - are expertly done in an A+ performance.

As a complete change I'm reading Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers". I've avoided this for ages thinking it might not be my thing at all, all macho intellectual display, but I'm about 120 pages in and it's been great fun so far.

It boasts one of the two or three best opening sentences I've ever read in a novel.

I am reading "The Wager" by Machado de Assis.

I really wish that there was more Peter Altenberg in English: that collection (Archipelago-published) is very good

Sueurs Froides by Boileau and Narcejac; the material Vertigo is based on. They also did the original novel of Les Diaboliques.

Both those have been republished in english in the last couple of years, by Pushkin Press

Just started Lanark.

Cool. Are you listening to Belle & Sebastian as you read it?

Hahaha, no, but I could dig some out.

Because I think I know someone who did just that.

*raises hand*

Of course, this was during the Sinister days.

Not that I was on Sinister or knew of its existence, but I must have sensed its presence across the Atlantic.

What's the connection? I don't know b&s too well

I started in on Lanark v skeptical and still think the second part drags a bit but the back half is so so great.

No connection other than being Scottish, as far as I know.

I did read The Locusts Have No King about two years ago. Enjoyed it. Not enough to ignite an ardent fandom in me.

Turns out I read it back in 2012.

Reading a battered copy of Huysmans "against nature"

Finished Middlemarch which I loved and happy to note that I made good on my post upthread about revisiting Bolano (Last Evenings on Earth and Distant Star). I hope to turn to The Savage Detectives soon and am also interested in reading Enrique Vila-Matas as well. Has anyone read Bartleby & Co.?

It's really good. Very congenial and clever and bookish.

Seconded

All I remember is finding it enjoyable rather than mind-blowing but I kept it (rather than reading it and moving it on); that's a good sign.

I am reading "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews.

I've started The Seven Storey Mountain. It is most definitely the work of a new convert, a young man hugely grateful to have found his vocation in monasticism. He is almost painfully careful to frame his entire life story as a justification of Catholic doctrine and to emphasize the perfect sincerity of his new found faith.

Having read other, later works by Merton, it is interesting to see how much he deepened his approach to spirituality as he passed more decades as a cloistered monk. His abbott must have been a fine man, who understood how Merton differed from most of the monks he oversaw, and who allowed Merton to flourish as a scholar of the contemplative traditions, including Buddhism and Taoism.

Miriam Toews: Her 1st, 3rd, and every odd-numbered book seem to be really good, her even-numbered books all seem to be duds. Very odd.

David M. Friedman - Wilde in America
Colm Toibin - House of Names

How is the Toibin? The reviews make it sound nothing like Brooklyn or Nora Webster.

Based on thr Oresteia!

Thought that was posted on the wrong thread for a second

I could never bring myself to read a Colm Toibin book. They sound so dreary

Ha, me neither. Couldn't even read the one(s) he wrote under a pseudonym.

Oh sorry. Mixing him up with John Banville.

I think this new Toibin will indeed be dreary.

He is not the most exciting writer, in any way.

I started SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY, after all these years owning it.

I understand why people love eccentric amusing Empson, but so far this book is giving me very little of that. It seems technical in an I.A. Richards sense. I am finding it very dense and not entertaining, not always really comprehensible.

I have an idea that later Empson is easier. I read some of SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL years ago - didn't really get it but it does seem less technical.

But I think my big problem with Empson is -- though he offers lots of local insights and fun, I just don't understand his main ideas. His sense of 'pastoral' has never intuitively made any sense to me, and his senses of ambiguity don't seem to click for me either.

Toibin is one of my favorite writers, particularly when he writes short fiction.

Banville is dreary, yeah.

> John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

Kazuo Ishiguro likes it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/08/hot-books-summer-reads-holiday-writers-recommend

Ishiguro OTM.

Terry Pratchett Pyramids
not sure if first 11 pages of this are missing or not. Library copy that I've had out for months and am only just getting around to reading.
Events in the Assassins guild college.

Memoirs of A Geezer Jah Wobble
think I mainly picked this up because of teh p.I.L. connections but am getting interested in his solo stuff, probably should have been already.

The Philosopher's Stone Peter Marshall
picked this up from a sale years ago. Got about 100 pages into it then started reading something else.
Thought I'd give it another shot.
History of the transforming object, starts with an ancient Chinese tomb being opened and the lady inside still being perfectly preserved. he then looks at similar beliefs across the globe and across history ancient to modern going through alchemy etc etc.
Should be really interesting.

Wholly without warrant or authorization, I have initiated a new WAYR thread: Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?.

I am hoping ILB will soon occupy it, like a hermit crab seeking a new shell, and adorn it with our usual literate observations.

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?🕸