'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

I love his short fiction.

Don't miss Jane Bowles!
Pinefox, who is TE?
More pre-Kafka: been a long long time since I read it, but got that vibe from William Godwin's Caleb Williams: a guy takes obscure offense at a younger guy, and takes legal action so the y.g. can't leave the island of England, Scotland, and Wales, which gradually starts to seem like this sweaty little boarding house. The younger guy wants to make amends, wants to be faithful to the system, incl the squirearchy, but is baffled.
Godwin is not a man of few words, but it's not that long a book, and, as in his daughter's best-known novel, the degree of verbosity adds to the sense of feverish struggle, of suspense---like I said, it's been a while, but it seemed really good at the time.

TE=Terry Eagleton, no?

I'll second dow's praise of Jane Bowles. Paul's work receives more attention, but Jane's Two Serious Ladies is just staggering.

Like, as unsettling as Bataille's fiction in a much quieter way, but also very archly funny.

The Bookshop, Human Voices, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. I don't get the fuss about the last; I preferred the first two titles.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 1, 2014 5:05 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

All of my Fitzgerald reading was confined to the semester in college when I took a course on her, so they all sorta blur together in my mind, but I kinda remember At Freddie's being particularly great.

J Redd / dow -- yes, that is TE in this instance.

Two Serious Ladies sounds really up my alley. Thankfully its been reissued so my library has it.

That's often considered her masterpiece, but once you're hooked, can often find a good used trade paperback copy of My Sister's Hand in Mine: An Expanded Edition of the Collected Works of Jane Bowles online for a nice price. She didn't publish that much, alas. Letters have also been collected, but I haven't read them. Really an unusual voice, urgent and distanced, sometimes too distant, but more often compelling, though she should've written more, should've been less paranoid, shouldn't have drunk that potion, whattayagonnado.

I've never gotten very far with Paul, esp. since reading ahead in The Sheltering Sky makes it seem like a violent revenge fantasy about an inconvenient wife, in what was supposed to be a marriage of convenience.

Don't do online buying of books but if I see it I'll have a look.

Elena Ferrante - Those who Leave and Those who Stay.

I laid Rabelais aside temporarily and inserted two other books into the hiatus.

Ranch Under the Rimrock is a memoir published in 1968 mainly covering the years from 1910 to 1940 and was written by the mother of Tom McCall, who grew up to be governor of Oregon. She and her husband were New Englanders who grew up in wealthy families and moved to central Oregon soon after they married, where they took up ranching. The country was still pretty rough, but their parents bought the land, built a mansion for them and gave them livestock and machinery, so it was not exactly hardscrabble homesteading.

The Montefeltro Conspiracy is a history of Italian Renaissance politics leading up to the assassination attempt on Lorenzo de Medici and his brother, when they were young men. The brother was stabbed to death, but Lorenzo survived. It then follows the war that was the aftermath. The author struggles valiantly to make the intrigues and personalities exciting, while also keeping the narrative clear, but those two impulses do not mesh well and it's a bit of a mess. But then, so was Renaissance Italy.

I recently finished Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, which was slow going for a while and then devastating. I need to think more about the relationship between the "unknown woman" narrator and her partner and ambiguous male double Malina, and I feel like I should know more about Viennese history beyond the broad strokes, but the novel was really haunting in the way its evocation of everyday longing and asymmetrical desire splintered into fantastical images of historical trauma and patriarchal violence. I'll probably get more out of the novel on a second reading, and after having read Bachmann's poetry, but in some ways my reading experience might have been more powerful for having been approached with few expectations. I do wish the translation had kept the text originally intended for the German cover, since it seems like a pretty crucial paratext in the way it sets up the final sentence of the novel, as Karen Achberger pointed out:

Murder or suicide?
There are no witnesses.
A woman between two men.
A last great passion.
The wall in the room, with an imperceptible crack.
A corpse that is not found.
The last will and testament missing.
A pair of glasses, broken to bits, a missing coffee cup.
The wastepaper basket, unnoticed,
not searched through by anyone.
Covered tracks, footsteps.
Someone then who still paces back and forth,
in this apartment--for hours on end:
MALINA.

I recently finished Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, which was slow going for a while and then devastating.

I had a similar experience with it. You may want to chase her correspodance with Paul Celan as well. I'll certainly chase a copy of Malina for a re-read.

Thanks, xyzzzz__! I've been meaning to read that correspondence (and will when I don't have to worry about accumulating books before a cross-country move); Bachmann's relationship with Celan was one of the few things I knew about her when I started her novel, although I tried not to assume that Ivan was meant as a Celan-figure in any simple way.

I didn't know anything about their affair actually so that led me to investigate the letters and the poetry from both. (I was interested in her by watching Malina by Werner Schroeter, its a bit annoying in some of its art-house mannerisms (Schroeter was capable of so much more) but it has Isabelle Huppert as Bachmann which is p/good)

The letters are mostly about their relationship but there is lots of interesting bits on Heidegger, the German literary scene of the time.

That's cool--I'm interested to see what they wrote about the latter topics, especially since Bachmann studied Heidegger, and Heidegger's fascism made Celan's dialogue with his thinking so painful and complicated. Since much of what makes Malina compelling is bound up with the narrator's voice, the novel seems unfilmable in important ways, so I'm curious to see what choices Schroeter made.

Do Walter Scott's Waverley novels need to be read in a particular order? They seem to jump all over the place in history.

Herman Melville - The Confidence Man. This is simply great.

Although I am not sure whether I will finish. Got a lot on this week, could easily get knocked off course and even a bit of that could be disastrous. Hope not.

How good is Galsworthy? Yo Ornamental Cabbage, or somebody around here must have read him. Also, my local library has Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, with good blurb by Evelyn Waugh (something you or at least I don't see everyday).

I totally love The Confidence Man, which reminds me oddly of Gravity's Rainbow at times: the dizzying accumulation of minor characters, the sense of the duplicity of official language and the hollow places in the vernacular, the way hilarity vies with gathering dread.

I've been splitting time between Rabelais and other books. I'm now as far as the start of Book 4 of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The first three books had a boatload of misogyny in them, which made them rather uncompelling at times. Book 4 supposedly is more soberly philosophical than the first three books, so I will test that assertion by continuing on with it. Book 5 is now considered to be by another hand than Rabelais.

In the meantime, I read The Archimedes Codex, a 2007 non-fic about the restoration of a palimpsest which is the oldest surviving copy of Archimedean material and which contains the only extant copies of several Archimedean manuscripts. After a somewhat breezy opening chapter, it was actually quite informative and interesting.

Deleuze : The Clamor of Being - Alain Badiou. huh, i'm actually following this.

one way street - I have the Dalkey edition of this book and the intro talks this up as a kind of proto-postmodern. I picked it up because of the ilx thread on it.

How good is Galsworthy? Yo Ornamental Cabbage, or somebody around here must have read him. Also, my local library has Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, with good blurb by Evelyn Waugh (something you or at least I don't see everyday).

Only read the very first galsworthy forsyte book, plus some shorts. It was quite good, and i intended to go on, but other thongs got in the way, and now its been so long i,d have to ewad vol one again to remember who everyone was. Classy potboiler level as i remember it.

Never read sinister street, but other - shorter - mackenzies are good. Thin Ice is about spies and their moral problems, Whiskey Galore is lightweight but fun. Read some gay-themed short stories by him in some anthology, though i cant remembervwhat it was.

Other THINGS ffa

Ffs ffs

xposts: the confidence man was definitely a highlight of my reading this year. that along with the recognitions. the oxford worlds classic intro uses the proto-pynchon/pomo angle too, also quite a bit of detail about its satirical intent with regard to emerson, thoreau, hawthorne & co.

just finished hardy's life's little ironies collection. other than jude think this is the first hardy fiction i've read with late nineteenth century settings (some of them anyway) also features urban environments, 'the new woman' & class conflict. almost into gissing territory!

now reading a collection of tales by some of the pre-raphaelites and associates.

Really enjoyed this, esp. after recently reading James Wood and others on the Penelope Fitzgerald bio and skimming her own bio of her father and uncles, didn't catch that one of them worked with (and tried to supervise/aid) Turing. This gets to their literary inspirations (talk about quality over quantity)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/18/inigo-thomas/unreliable-people/

As the author says, the real-life material was so rich, don't get why the moviemakers had to fuck with it so.

Thanks for teh link. Think I met the author once. Believe his father is the historian Hugh Thomas.

BLEEDING EDGE !

more readable than I sometimes find TP
amiable, garrulous, sort of friendly narration
strikes me what a conventional novelist TP is - you could hardly guess from this that he was considered formally groundbreaking.
remarkably close to CL49 at times - to the point where it seems deliberate
also a ton of Neuromancer hip-hacker cobblers - a bit painful in adolescent tone

Been reading Isaac Babel collected stories. Think I prefer the autobiographical and early stories to the Red Cavalry stuff, since it's not as disturbing.

ai, d.

BLEEDING EDGE !

more readable than I sometimes find TP
amiable, garrulous, sort of friendly narration
strikes me what a conventional novelist TP is - you could hardly guess from this that he was considered formally groundbreaking.
remarkably close to CL49 at times - to the point where it seems deliberate
also a ton of Neuromancer hip-hacker cobblers - a bit painful in adolescent tone

PF otm. i think the main TP characteristic these days isn't formal experimentation but writing books that create nebulous spaces where whimsical connections, psychic comprehension and colourful juxtapositions of language can meaningfully, sort of meaningfully, exist.

here it's the deep net which isn't really understood in any way as a technical thing - "Neuromancer hh cobblers" :) - but as an imaginary space for him to conduct his really quite enjoyable writing jam session.

not sure what that ai, d is doing there. think it was a discarded post where I was saying hello to deems perhaps.

The Confidence Man is good but I have only read 50 pages. I need a few hours of concentration and no worries to break the back of it.

Meantime I have finished:

Jane Bowles - Two Serious Ladies

About to finish:

Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Gripsholm. This is a good find. Like Robert Walser he seems to have written short stories for Feuilletons of the day and this begins like a bunch of those stories expertly put together. Starts with a back-and-forth between the author and publisher on the stories he is looking to buy (love stories, natch) and royalties that he'll get. Then we dive in: a couple, train journey, holiday. Then they come across a girl, she is crying and in distress and run away from a boarding school because the headmistress is up to no good. Because this was written in '32 as the Nazis were to take over this takes on those tones. You read the author has committed suicide a few years after this. It wears its lightness darkly and all but I wonder whether the biography surrounding this will take over. It is funny, and slight on purpose too and that is more than ok.

enjoyable writing jam session. Fans of this approach should def check Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace, which works a time-space groove like no other, but does remind me of TP's more enjoyable transitions, minus the murk (says me, but there were some complaints from some fans, as there always are, no matter what he does). NY recently produced a second memoir and announced that he's working on a science fiction novel.
My local library's only copy of The Brothers Karamazov is the Constance Garnett translation, but I finally picked it up and went right through the first 30 pages, then had to peel it way because Xmas chores. But soon and very soon, the rest will be another gift to self.
Recently finished My Brilliant Friend and need to cool off a little lest I babble "spoilers," but---do believe the hype.

Cool. Are you going to start the second one?

"Deejay activities alternate with live local bachata groups, a bright, twangly mandolin / bottleneck sound, an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"
-- BLEEDING EDGE

"an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"

"why, my six year old could talk gooder than that..."

just read Merritt Tierce's debut novel, Love Me Back, and immediately wanted to read the whole thing over again from the beginning. it's horrifying and excellent.

Susan Fast, Dangerous - A new entry in the 33 1/3 series, every bit as good, I think, as the justifiably acclaimed Carl Wilson and John Darnielle volumes.

Having done with Rabelais, I have just picked up Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer's book about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon. The writing style is ferociously overwritten and grossly self-involved, but this is offered to the reader as if it were all a sly joke.

It actually works as humor for a while, but after 50 or so relentless pages of this the humor is wearing thin and the self-aggrandizing poses begin to seem far too threadbare not to be Mailer's normal state of mind. Unless something happens soon that is not grotesquely Mailer-centric, I will throw this book at the wall.

ha i love that book!

Welp---Robert Lowell, William Sloane Coffin, Doctor & Mrs. Spock, Ed Sanders, Paul Goodman, a Nazi, a Capitol cop, and a lot of people trying to levitate the Pentagon are among those who show up, and he's interested---he's also Mailer of course, but when he gets interested, can be a pretty good describer (though more in his reportage from conventions).

Colm Toibin - Nora Webster

He might be, quietly and persistently, our best conventional realist novelist.

Oh yeah, heard interesting Fresh Air interview re the one about Mary, not too thrilled about being boosted from mother to Mother. Thought about reading that one (& NM). Is it good?

I think THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT is really good!

I think Toibin as a journalist is an incredibly slack writer. I was not very impressed by BROOKLYN. But perhaps his other novels are better.

BLEEDING EDGE seems to be the second best Pynchon novel I have read yet.

Brooklyn was one novel I didn't finish this year. There may have been others. I read the first half of Howard Jacobson's J, skimmed the second out of bored curiosity.

David Lodge's novel about Henry James is far superior to Toibin's