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

Spark = certainty
Murdoch = doubt

(In truth, they don't really have a lot in common but I can see why the opening pages of The Bell might lead you to think that they do. And yes, Iris could usefully have learnt from Muriel's concision - but then, what author couldn't?)

Murdoch popped up a lot in At The Existentialist Café as the person who brought the philosophy to the UK.

Though I guess those guys are all heading towards "not read anymore" territory too.

There is an obtrusive moral (as well as a vividly mad collie dog): we are but shadows, and our desires for particularised individuals are both illusory and predatory. In a sentence that might be labelled in the margin with ‘WAKE UP AND LISTEN’, Charles asks the rhetorical question ‘Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear?’ The answer to that question for Murdoch was a resounding ‘no’. The reason for that answer does not lie in the nature of human beings or of the universe. It lies in her strange mixture of beliefs. She combined an implausibly unconstrained conception of human freedom ultimately drawn from Sartre with an implausibly depersonalising view of love drawn from Plato. Fusing those two things with the conventions of the realist novel was a profoundly interesting thing to have done, and for having attempted that fusion she certainly will always be thought to deserve a major part in the history of 20th-century fiction in Britain. But it made for plots in which people try to be free and find they are trapped in master-slave relationships, and in which being in love means being cruelly disloyal to more or less any particular person. Behind that recurrent dynamic in her fiction is a deep kind of sadness: she never quite recognised that it might be possible and even pleasurable just messily to get on with loving one person.

Q: what if she hadn't had John Bayley there at the end?

just started

Lee Server "Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care"
Lavie Tidhar, "Central Station"

That Mitchum bio is fucking great, a mindblowing anecdote every other page. It made me buy some more stuff by the author, he has an Asian Pop Cinema primer that's really interesting.

10 pages in and yeah, does not disappoint!

There's an epic (not just long, but more eventful than many movies and novels) feature re Mitchum in Splendor In The Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader, a collection of journalism, fiction, poetry etc. I mentioned at some length on a previous What Are You Reading: this is from the set of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (and the office of Friends author-prosecutor George V. Higgins), Mitchum holding forth as expected, but also motormouth virtuosity from Peter Boyle, and the trusting lucidity of Mitchum's daughter Trina, then twenty, and making as much sense of her family life as she can, for the moment.

Machado De Assis, said to be forerunner of Borges, Marquez etc, also “funny as hell", says Harold Bloom---not the blurbmeister I expect such a line from---this might a be a good place to start, but I noticed one Verified Purchase complaint about perplexing typos (also want to check others in Oxford’s Library of South America):
https://www.amazon.com/Posthumous-Memoirs-Cubas-Library-America/dp/0195101707/ref=pd_sim_14_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=A6DSE6Q2N4FRKR86WW4J

Any other suggestions? Would rather not start with the one about the Unreliable Narrator who's freaked out about being cuckolded, given the amount of time I recently spent with Proust's narrator.

I'm reading A Severed Head, thanks to Ward.

Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto, v much my shit:

A dead moneky, still whole, still undecomposed, drifted back and forth with a certain precision upon those ripples and eddies without exit. All his life at forest's edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey's corpse. The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decreipt wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going. And there we were.

Ready to go and not going.

I'm reading A Severed Head, thanks to Ward.

I hope it's one of the good ones, Alfred! In his entertainingly gossipy book about Murdoch, A N Wilson suggests that she wrote a good one then a bad one, a good one, a bad one etc etc. I haven't delved sufficiently deeply into the IM oeuvre to judge the accuracy of this, but if The Bell is one of the good ones then A Severed Head wld be one of the bad ones. The opening precis in the wiki summary def reads like a parody:

Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilised and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle-class people who are lucky to be free of real problems.

Any other suggestions? Would rather not start with the one about the Unreliable Narrator who's freaked out about being cuckolded, given the amount of time I recently spent with Proust's narrator.

I read the one you linked, remember enjoying it, though the "Brazilian Tristram Shandy" pitch I had gotten oversold it. People really like Dom Casmurro, but I'm guessing that's the cukold one you mention.

lol, i was once describing an intricate situation in my social circle to my mum, and she said it sounded like a iris murdoch novel

a severed head was the only iris murdoch novel in the house

I picked up Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country. It boldly and directly addresses issues of a woman's place in society that others were too timid to face in 1913. But I am not yet sure that this fact will be sufficient to keep my interest in 2017.

Was mildly curious about Murdoch's Letters published a couple of years ago, which that summary on wiki reminded me of. xps

I picked up Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country. It boldly and directly addresses issues of a woman's place in society that others were too timid to face in 1913. But I am not yet sure that this fact will be sufficient to keep my interest in 2017.

― A is for (Aimless),

It's hilarious. She wrote her breeziest, most devastating prose to date for it.

Actually, Aimless, that description more accurately describes The Reef or The House of Mirth than TCOTC, which centers on the hotel culture populated by rapacious American nouveau riche.

Her heroine, so far, seems like a distant forerunner to the Kardashians.

yep!

fuck i gotta hurry up and read a book

the hotel culture populated by rapacious American nouveau riche. Reminds me that somewhere I've got The Buccaneers, which revolves around five wealthy and ambitious American girls, their guardians and the titled, landed but impoverished Englishmen who marry them as the girls participate in the London Season. Thanks, Wiki! I haven't read it, but this also says it was unfinished at her death, endings tacked on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buccaneers Seems like it might be good enough anyway, since most things don't end well.

I've recently read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time which is extraordinary and should be on school curricula, and Rosamond Lehmann's Invitation to the Waltz, which I loved, loved. Dumb prejudice has kept from so much brilliant literature, that I don't why I'm still surprised when things defy my expectations. This was minor in all the right ways, and rapturous at the same time - particularly Olivia Curtis's perception of the natural world. Can't wait to read more.

Funnily enough I'm reading "The Weather In The Streets", the next Olivia Curtis novel, just now. I haven't read ITTW, and I'm both enjoying TWITS and finding it rather slow going (this latter more to do with me than the book I suspect).

https://drawrite.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/01.jpg

You read my mind.

Rosamond Lehmann's novels that don't involve psychic nonsense are great

Though I always have incredible trouble remembering which one was called what

read the news about the closure of the Buenos Aires Herald which led me to pick up Andrew Graham-Yooll's A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina's Nightmare. It's a series of extended anecdotes, effectively, covering the experiences of a journalist in the ten-year period between 1973 and 1983 from guerrilla violence, the return of Perón,, junta, los desaparecidos (the disappeared), exile and return, and is very good. He's a good writer in the journalistic style for a start, but it's also his depiction of where political violence sits in society, how it infects it and the mirroring of state and revolutionary violence that gives the books chapters a cumulative power.

It contains disgusting ironies for those who have accustomed themselves to the British national media:

.. the government was ridiculed in every headline, the bravado of the press an undignified retaliation for its toadying to a Perónism capable of instilling fear in the newsrooms just weeks before. There was an unabashed crowing at every stumble of a preposterous administration.

The disgusting irony being that yes, this is v reminiscent of the jackal mentality of the UK press, but of course that 'toadying' had been instilled by a fear as a journalist or editor of bombs in your desk, imprisonment serious death threats and warnings from the military and police, let alone running the other risk of being seen to favour the government by revolutionary groups. The toadying of our press is of course born of no such fear, but greed for proximity to power and laziness.

The best piece is The Hangover, which frames experiences of the extreme pre-junta violence (1100 dead from political violence in 1975, 60 in January 1976) with a heavy evening of beach-side drinking with his revolutionary friend Diego Muñíz Barreto:

He winced slightly as he passed on the description of the youth dropping, hit by the bullet. 'I've seen it before; people just drop or fall back in a small pile, like a shirt or a pair of trousers. There is no more convincing sign of death or serious damage than that drop. Death is not an athletic pirouette as in the cinema.'

On the return of Perón:

That was the day when everybody one had ever known seemed to have gone to the Ezeiza airport; old schoolfriends met there, carrying a pistol in each pocket, their own memory of their real name confused by the use of so many aliases. That was the day when some people went to watch, some to commit murder; a few men went to commit adultery; provincial aunts arrived on the free train service - special for that day - to look for lost nieces; and hundreds of citizens of all ages went in the belief that this was the day when all their problems would be solved.

That's a great piece of writing, I think.

on how violence infests and infects society:

During Mrs Perón's government, her secretary made kidnapping fashionable. it had previously been a reprehensible part of guerrilla fund-raising - which by the end of 1973 had totalled 170 million people abducted and released, in exchange for a ransom of 43 million US dollars. The police found kidnapping to be an effective form of retaliation. The secretary [described elsewhere as a 'man ridden with a fear of dying, an impotent diabetic, devoted to parapsychology'] set an example, using his own ministry as headquarters for a private army into which retired and active police officers were recruited ...

The fashion went all the way down the social line. In Munro, a working-class suburb, a woman with a babe in arms had the child snatched from her as she entered a grocery. Until she emptied her purse of her scant shopping money on the pavement, the infant was not returned.

Buenos Aires became a city roamed by unmarked cars, usually Ford Falcons, supplied on a fleet order to the police, but preferred by all for reliability at high speed and relatively low running cost...

Inside these cars sat men in dark glass and half open shirts, holding machine guns, wearing half a dozen chains around their necks, with St Christophers, crucifixes and Virgin Marys. They would sometimes travel home on the same train as I, or on the bus to the islands, late at night.. If there was a hint of recognition, their reaction was always the same; a glance over their dark glasses, a wink and a shake of the head was an order that greetings were not possible because recognition did not exist, and neither did casual acquaintance.

Who were these men? How did they wake up? With whom? Did they love? How? There did not have to be anything logical about them; there was no need to explain them; but it would be interesting just to know the full story of twenty-four hours of their lives.

The last quarter of the third bottle of wine was emptied into the tuco pan. Diego decided to put the tallarines on to cook and give his children supper.

So, yes, really good book. And for followers of the Is the Guardian worse than it used to be? thread:

I went to work at The Guardian, where liberals are conservatives who counsel readers to vote Labour

Am currently reading the autobiography of Michael Powell (of Powell and Pressburger), excitingly titled A Life in Movies. He's got a vivid sense of place- a good early section describes hopping time at his father's hop farm in Kent. The writing is both slightly stagey, and chatty and informal, and generally full of good cheer, a mix recognisable from his films, though it can be a little erratic in tone, slightly elderly in places. There's a recognisable 'Powell tone' (though of course Pressburger was really the writer) in bits like this:

The next day we had only a twenty-mile ride to Bournemouth from "The Sign of the Trusty Servant". He's a bit rare now but the sign is still there. He has deer's feet to run fast with messages, and a pig's head, because a pig will eat anything, and a padlock on his snout, because he can keep his mouth shut; and - I don't remember the rest but take the day off!

I can almost hear it as a line of dialogue or an opening narrative monologue to one of their films. But there's also the slightly brexity mix of good cheer and sentimental feudalism - i think we talked a bit about that on the P&P thread wrt A Canterbury Tale. It's not quite right as an observation - certainly the brexity thing is unfair, he loved France as a second home - but a love of age, and of childhood, of striking landscapes, and of vivacious, strong-headed women and sexual relations with them gives an odd, certainly not unpleasing but also slightly uneasy tone to some of his films, especially his early ones.

as i'm nearing the end of old goriot i started the ballad of peckham rye

xpost Hadn't heard of that one, will have to check it out. Reminds me, have you read Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number? I haven't, but it was well-received in the US, except by junta fans like Buckley and Buchanan and Jesse Helms and maybe Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who made the Reagan Administration distinction between Authoritarian and Totalitarian.

i haven't read it, dow. but seeing you post does remind me i owe you a post on la vida es sueño! (haven't really been around ilb much recently, but have generally been reading a *lot* more, so lurking in the corner a bit more).

Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife, Mary Roach. Got this ages ago as a perk of donating to a podcast network, thought I should give it a shot.

So James Atlas has a new book about being a biographer. Does this mean his excellent Delmore Schwartz bio will come back into print?

Of course the book seems like it might be largely about writing the Delmore Schwartz bio, with the Saul Bellow bio of course getting into the act as well.

Okay, having read a few pages, this thing is right in my wheelhouse.

Apparently Richard Ellmann was his mentor, so this book has something for everybody, well everybody on ILB, well teh pinefox, at least.

Just finished chandler's the long goodbye - it's no surprise but what a beautiful book.

read william gerhardie's futility which is an exquisite little novel: look forward to checking out his later work

now reading lady into fox by david garnett (bloomsbury hanger-on & recipient of admonishing letters from dh lawrence)

gerhardie's DOOM is fun

Elizabeth Taylor's A View of the Harbour. This is despairing, funny and exquisitely observed. Turns out paranoia and smalltown rage are just what the doctor ordered for an end of summer fit of the vapours. Who knew.

Finished Greene's The Power and the Glory. For some reason, I had it in my mind that this was a much more whimsical, almost comic novel with a lovable rogue as the central character - so the novel's bleakness and pessimism, the savagery of its observations, took me wholly by surprise - he's definitely from the 'tough love' school of Catholicism! Less surprising - the beautifully economical way that Greene conjures atmosphere, a sense of place, a feeling of foreboding, hellhounds on the trail.

Now reading: Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

I read Jane Eyre and loved it, every shocking twist and dumb coincidence.

Just finished "Inferno" and "Alone" by Strindberg. Really liked the latter, the former is completely insane.

doris lessing: briefing for a descent into hell

Now reading The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark, which is about beautiful people who aren't wearing clothes. Damn fascinating subject.

I found this, on a similar-ish theme, pretty interesting too:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1858940842.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Well its been one and half memoirs from me, depending on how you see Enrique Vilas-Matas account -- translated as Any Way in Paris -- of his attempts to become a writer in 70s Paris by following on Hemingway's footsteps (zzz) and by also renting a room from Margerite Duras (no ordinary landlady) (v good, tick). I've begun to read Simone De Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance (one of the four vols of her properly dictated to the reader memoirs) and the new translation of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet which is something far stranger than any of this.

Intriguing re FP and new translation in recent New Yorker.

Simone de Beauvoir invented the Blade Runner speech:

"I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn't much she didn't see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness - the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken - there is no place where it will all live again."