The girls are out flaunting their Summer plumage but you're stuck inside, reading. What?

That Thomson book on the Alien films is nuts - will be interested to hear what you make of it. Trotting along stylishly and then (SPOILERS) off we go into the world of Weaver menses fanfic.

Finished Doctor Faustus. My that's a serious novel. I liked it a lot. Also read Mann's short book on the composition of Faustus, which was nice both as part-portrait of that Pacific Weimar scene and account of how 600pp novel of ideas gets written. Am now continuing on a Mann kick: The Holy Sinner, but thinking about a re-read of The Magic Mountain. But The Man Without Qualities is tempting.

In any case, sticking with dense mid-century central Europe. I feel like I'm only really up for this stuff once every 2-3 years, and should exploit any roll I get on.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon And Seventeen Other Stories

Just read Maclaren Ross's "Of Love and Hunger", prompted by his proselytisers on ILM. A fine novel that made me think of Richard Yates as well as the more obvious Patrick Hamilton. It's not quite as fine as the very best work of those writers but it's close enough and different enough that I'm very pleased to have been made aware of it.

I'm about to read Ruiz Zafon's "The Shadow of The Wind". The first few pages are not encouraging.

Just finished The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's wonderful.

Just started The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. I get overly excited about most books, I'm an easy target, and not much of a critic, but I'm abnormally giddy about Carpentier.

Didn't know of Mann's composition bk -- sounds like a good one to track down.

In the last week or so I've some Djuna Barnes (after the hate she got on ILE), finishing Patricia Highsmith's Carol, and looking over a few essays by Milan Kundera (he loves that Central European Canon)

Frederic Spotts - 'The Shameful Peace - How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation'

'In Youth Is Pleasure' = Denton Welch

Less pleasing than A Voice Through a Cloud but the semi post aesthete attitude to detail, with barely subdued homoeroticism. Very skilful writing.

Less pleasing than A Voice Through a Cloud but the semi post aesthete attitude to detail, with barely subdued homoeroticism.

Good that i can still construct a sentence after a few beers.

Mishna Wolff: I'm Down

Memoir of a girl whose completely white father was convinced he was a funky black man, and who tried his utmost to make his nerdy white daughter a funky black girl. Entertaining without being brilliantly written. Great cover, though:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0312378556.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

nice

Just finished: David Thomson The Alien Quartet. This was really good I thought, despite a couple of odd misinterpretations. Made me go back and watch all the films again. It is a shame he didn't talk about the Director's Cuts, although possibly they weren't released when he wrote this. Are any of the other books in this series any good?

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

Just about to start: Rihcard Price, Clockers

*Richard Price, obv

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

Yeah, this is probably my favourite Ballard.

the idea of a conrad-> ballard thing is making them both more interesting to me. mb i should try them both again.

also i should dig out my copy of nightwood this week

i am in the horrible nested big book trap where i started reading dead souls and then started reading dr faustus and then started reading dhalgren, so before i read anything else i feel i have to finish dhalgren, and then finish dr faustus, and then finish dead souls

I bought Smallcreep's Day today why because it look intersting plus the title was naggingly familiar. I assumed it must've been filmed or televised or something. When I got home and Googled it I realised it was the title of a Mike Rutherford solo album lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallcreep%27s_Day

'stoned', andrew loog oldham's autobiography
'netherland'

Nathalie Sarraute - The Planetarium. Maybe a bit too similar to Do you hear Them? plot-wise. Such an in depth, rich dissection of motivation going on here tho'.

About to start on: Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience.

finished shalom auslander's foreskin's lament and another richard stark book, started arthur philips' the song is you (so far not terrible) and scarlett thomas' popco

nearly done w/ The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

Sarah Moss: Cold Earth - a bunch of grad students on an archaeological dig in remote Greenland, while the rest of the world seems to be succumbing to some horrible super-virus. Well done so far, but having the first 100 pages narrated by a convincingly drawn neurotic pain in the arse who it's difficult to want to spend time with may have been a bit of a tactical mistake.

I'm still plowing through Rising Up, Rising Down and enjoying it, as far as such a book can be enjoyed.

Also just started How Fiction Works because I need to read it before it's due back at the library. I've never ready any of Wood's book-length criticism before and I like him.

just finished "Jaka's Story" by Dave Sim. Was really good.

reading through the Inner Worlds of Mental Illness anthology again (first person accounts of various mental disorders)...about up to the place where I left off last time...thought it was really interesting before but couldnt quite hang with it at that particular moment...

I just returned from an extended road/camping trip that took my wife and I south to Mt Shasta, Mt Lassen, Yosemite Park and the eastern Sierras, then back north via the Redwoods and the Oregon coast.

Along the way I read:

An obscure book called One Man's West, David Lavender, first published in 1943 and republished in 1956 with an additional chapter. Mainly a memoir that covers his life as a cowboy (and a brief stint as a hardrock gold miner) in Colorado in the 1930s. It was quite interesting and well written, with many well-observed anecdotes and a lot of shop-talk about what cowboys really did and how they thought. My copy was a withdrawn xlib copy that showed up in a local thrift shop. Not too likely any ILB member will run across it. A most likeable book, but destined to disappear, like most good books.

Fast Food Nation, a best seller from 2000. Told me things I knew and many things I didn't. I stopped eating fast food around 1978, but as the book points out, the ramifications of fast food extend far beyond the restaurants to affect food production from top to bottom. I'm glad I read it; it is a worthy tome in the best muckraking tradition.

Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow. I am currently 70% through this and it has taken an unfortunate turn to tedious didacticism and specious philosophizing. After assembling a cast of somewhat interesting characters, Bellow has spent the past 25 pages sitting them down in a room together so he can use them as mouthpieces for his own questionable intellectual offgassing. Sad stuff, really. Too bad. I do not recommend it.

Bugger--I've got Sammler in the teetering to-read pile. Oh well. 'Fast Food Nation' was really good, though I can't imagine how it was turned into a movie.

Lou Jagz, I am loving the Jerome! The party where they laugh at German's tragic song had me in stitches. If only I wasn't in frantic panic mode and had more time to read.

Finished The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin. It's remarkably bad. The author's idea of explicating WB is sometimes to quote him, then in the commentary repeat WB's own phrases, outside of quotation marks, as though they explain what WB has just said.

john buchan's the power house and jim thompson's pop 1980. still being afraid of the big books. v annoying.

the buchan is about a two-fisted tory mp defeating an anarchist conspiracy, by the way.

Ha ha. Good old Buchan. As the Hannay ones go on, they have more and more the unpalatable racial flavour
of the age so there are at least two or three very big winces per book. Almost Sapper levels of suspicion
of the swarthy.

Must venture outside the Hannay ones at some point - is The Power House any good, thomp?

Currently reading The Man Without Qualities, like everyone else it seems. Been meaning to read it for a while, it being one of Anthony Powell's favourites (more of an influence than Proust, he said somewhere),
but I found it lying around the house the other day, so the time seemed propitious.

A friend of mine who read it ultimately got fed up with it not going anywhere, but this isn't feeling like a problem at the moment for me.

Enjoying its cool and wry philosophical cynicism - although I wonder whether this slightly cynical flexibility
will begin to feel a little unrewarding after a while. It's certainly not feeling that way tho,
and there is enough of a feeling of transcendence behind it all to suggest that it will be rewarding rather than reductive. Very much initial impressions. Really liking the tone.

i think 'greenmantle' is fantastic - the second hannay, right? the fact that hannay spends the whole thing scurrying around trying to avoid direction and not understanding that his acquaintance further east is the actual motor of the plot. it's sort of avant-la-lettre le carre mb? (i don't particularly like le carre, but i mean: the feeling that espionage is nine-tenths not getting caught and maybe once in a very long while accomplishing something.) also the loz of arabia stuff.

actually i'd be very glad to read more authors who operate around the same locuses as buchan - i guess kipling's great game stuff is the closest i've read to the hannay novels - i have a feeling 'the riddle of the sands' might be along the same lines?

the power house is silly and doesn't make a lot of sense and is only about a hundred pages long. if you see it for like a quid and have an hour to spare go ahead. i'm surprised to find it's in print. and online, if you're an e-reader owning type.

'locuses'? ugh.

which translation of mwq did everyone read / is everyone reading?

https://www.cyberread.com/files/09/72/12/large_97212.jpeg

awesome

Greenmantle is my favourite as well. There's a great sense of geographical scope and political urgency to it all.
Not sure about the Le Carre comparison - obviously there's the espionage angle, but Le Carre always seemed to me to be coming out of detective stories (which a couple of the Smiley novels actually are)rather than spy stories - very little dynamic action as such. Ambler I suppose is the midway point between Buchan and later spy stuff.

I haven't read much late Le Carre though.

Also, plenty of lolz in Buchan with the rather shaky theory that people are totally unrecognisable out of context. It's okay when he gets dressed up as a postman, but I seem to remember a couple of occasions when anyone seeing him would have had to have been a purblind imbecile not to recognise him. Oh yes, I remember the worst offender, it's when the chap with the forever hooded eyes impersonates a Lord of the Admiralty at a high-powered meeting of international affairs policy makers. And although the know the person he is impersonating, nobody realises. 39 Steps I think.

They are very solemn about it afterwards.

I'm reading the Wilkins and Kaiser translation, having a general prejudice towards older translations and it also being the one that Powell said was 'excellent' although I have absolutely no idea whether this is true or not. It seems to read well enough.

actually i'd be very glad to read more authors who operate around the same locuses as buchan - i guess kipling's great game stuff is the closest i've read to the hannay novels - i have a feeling 'the riddle of the sands' might be along the same lines?

Riddle Of The Sands is more of a fish out of water story, the protagonist (if memory serves me right) not being any sort of professional spy. I remember it having reaaally long digressions into the ins & outs of sailing, which I seemed to read happily without either making the effort to understand what they're on about or getting frustrated with them; the passages just felt soothing, somehow. A great Summer book.

Liked it a lot more than the only Buchan I've read, 39 Steps, which despite being very short just felt cringingly repetitive.

actually i'd be very glad to read more authors who operate around the same locuses as buchan - i guess kipling's great game stuff is the closest i've read to the hannay novels - i have a feeling 'the riddle of the sands' might be along the same lines?

for more buchan-y ish you want e. phillips oppenheim and william le queux, or so im led to believe.

'the power house' was the first buchan espionager iirc -- think he is a terser writer than the two i mentioned but they were his predecessors and equally popular.

Ambler's (great) books are very much often fish out of water stories too, says he with the wisdom of having read five of them in the last month. Journos and businessmen and academics who accidentally end up becoming spies and criminals.

Just read Henry James's 'The Reverberator', a novella about a hack gossip journalist playing hell with the lives of a bunch of Americans in Paris, which was fun, and am now reading Ross Macdonald's 'The Way Some People Die', which is great.

finished 'the forever war' by dexter filkins (excellent), finished 'the kingdom of this world' by carpentier (ditto), halfway through 'the girls of slender means' (highly enjoyable).

dividing time between

alex ross - the rest is noise: listening to the 20th century
david welky - the moguls and the dictators: hollywood and the coming of WWII
george eliot - middlemarch (yeah, we'll see if i get through this before summer's end)

The Labyrinth of Solitude - Octavio Paz.

Quite enjoying it, have never read any of his poetry.

>>> Henry James's 'The Reverberator', a novella about a hack gossip journalist playing hell with the lives of a bunch of Americans in Paris

The REVERBERATOR? For real?

or is it really REVERBARATOR

no, it must be the first one

The doing of the thing, the very reverberating matter of the thing to be done, turned out in all candidness to be the vieux jeu that was, however, one now very considerably expected to learn, not yet concluded or 'in the bag' - pas du tout!

THE REVERBERATOR is the title of the newspaper that the hack works for, non?

am also reading THE REST IS NOISE by Alex Ross and am finding it pretty boring/safe, so far - don't really get the hype

Yes, it's the somewhat unlikely name of the paper, as well as of the book. Fortunately, it's pretty low on sentences like Pinefox's sample!

Just finished Elaine Dundy's 'The Old Man and Me' and have just ventured into 'Summer Will Show' by Silvia Townsend Warner.

The Reverberator is solid minor James. I should reread it.

Just finished Colm Toîbin's lovely new Brooklyn – a respite from Ford Madox Ford's interminable No More Parades.

I did finish Mr. Sammler's Planet. I owed it that much. It ended better than the worst bit, spoken of above, but no better than the average - which was pretty damned average.

The whole novel gave off a strong impression of how much this was written by an old man, who felt an innate kinship with other old men and how they viewed the dwindling stub ends of their lives. Which turned out to be a real weakness, since it reduced every character but the protagonist to an old man's caricature of those younger than himself. Bellow not only stepped into that bear trap, but did so eagerly and by design.

Now I am reading randomly in a book of essays by Graham Greene, until I settle on a real book.

Thomp: I wish I had not a single opinion on Musil when I finished (especially as mine weren't a lot more than 'this is great omg!'), so I think you're on the right track.

Abish: How German Is it is brilliant, but can't say Alphabetical Africa appeals to me, nor any kind of epic Oulipian adventures. Has anyone read his other fictions and poems?

Reading: Hasek - The Good Soldier Schweik.

Good Soldier Schweik! I read that when I was quite young, at the recommendation of my dad. It took me a while to get into it, but I was sad when it ended, it felt like something that could go on forever and never stop being fun.

Read recently:

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book
Cormac McCarthy - No Country For Old Men
Leonard Sciascia - To Each His Own

Currently in the middle of:

Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night a Traveler
Rene Daumal - A Night of Serious Drinking

Re-reading:

Tove Jansson - The Summer Book

I'm reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It took a while to get up much enthusiasm because it's quite a dull opening - a rather unattractive old couple moaning about old people things - but the rest of the family appear soon enough and I'm drawn right in.

I've had a good run of books set on fault lines of generational, ideological or ethnic divides - how dull, initially, the Midwest seems in comparison! Had I not been softened up by Updike I'm not sure I'd've got over the hump, but it's been worth it. The human conflicts are still there, you just have to burrow deeper to find them. The Rabbit books are vastly superior to this, of course, but it's still good.

reading a copy of anthony powell's 'venusberg', which is reissued in green integer, which is kind of wtf

couple things it brings to mind: there's this thing i note, more in american literature, but in english as well, of the past couple decades, where at some point a central character gets sent off to a developing-world country where REAL THINGS HAPPEN and PEOPLE LIVE IN DANGER to accentuate a point about how er devalued mb modern life is? but i've been reading a lot of pre-ww2 british fiction lately where people get sent off to the developing world where real things happen and ppl live in danger mainly to point out how dull and uncivilised it all is. i'm not sure whether i prefer the pre- or the post- colonial cliche.

also powell's relation to musil might be kind of interesting to dwell on, at some point. (though i have found powell, here and in 'a dance ...' [i really can't call it 'the dance', i sound silly to myself even typing], less of a slog than musil)(not a slog exactly, i just wonder whether pushing through it is the right way to go.) i have forgotten what i was going to say. something about their different approaches to time and musil saying 'such and such was of the bourgeois lower middle class' and powell saying 'his father sold coal but he was editing a Communist periodical'

also powell's idea of the tedium of pre-war europe vs evelyn waugh's apocalyptic fatalism about it, which latter seems a lot sillier to me now than it did at 19-20

I think Venusberg is my favourite of his. There's a strong feeling of melancholy throughout it and some extremely funny sections.

Powell was a big admirer of Musil's.

I'm not sure how far I'd go along with your thoughts, thomp. Venusberg isn't actually a developing world place though, is it? And Waugh's travel writing on Ethiopa is very amusing, but his descriptions are no less cynical than his descriptions of home. In fact I'd say something that both Waugh and Powell have in common is that danger and death and violence are almost arbitrary independent of so-called civilisation - the England of Decline and Fall or From a View to a Death is downright lethal. People popping their clogs all over the place.

yeah, i haven't thought any of this through. 'developing country' is the wrong word, i guess. venusberg (not actually named thus - the best and most obnoxious gag in the book is that lushington is presented to you departing for a Baltic state, "the name of which he could never remember"; this state of course remains unnamed throughout.) is newly ex-russian and apparently based on powell's time in estonia. the narrative becomes a lot less blasé about it all when people lushington actually knows gets shot.

powell's admiration of musil i'd come across before. it makes sense, sort of. i wonder if he read him in translation or the original.

i don't remember the deaths in decline and fall at all. or any of scoop except the outline, which i recall being vaguely similar to venusberg. oh, and "up to a point, lord copper." i should go back to waugh maybe. always meant to read the travel writing.

google result (nsfw, one imagines):

http://www.venusberg.de/

Since 1998! The First Virtual Erotic-Art-Museum Since 1998!

"TO THE HAPPY FEW !"

We will present you one of the biggest and most beautiful collections of European EROTIC ART from the 17th to the 20th century!

Meanwhile - September 2009 - we present you more than 3.600 Erotic-Art- Pictures!! (But with each update we will remove older series).

These watercolors, drawings and prints are an invaluable documentation of social mores and cultural history. They also trace the history of taboo, secrecy and prohibition.

We also have a GALLERY-ROOM, where we will show pictures from contemporary artists.

But first of all let these pictures be a pleasure for your eyes!

Ha ha. I wonder what Lushington would have made of that. Probably wouldn't have been that put out. I was just chuckling to myself remembering when Lushington is woken up by that valet who has been foisted upon him.

I'd never noticed that about Venusberg never being mentioned! Nice.

Powell read it in translation, I'm pretty certain. In fact he praises the Kaiser and Wilkins translation very highly. And now I need to find where he did this - almost certainly in one of his volumes of essays and reviews, I'll check later - because I see that the first volume of this translation didn't appear until the first two books of DTTMOT had appeared.

Will report back.

The description of a Mediterranean cruise and the famous account of the coronation of Haile Selassie by Waugh are amazing. I've got an old Penguin with them in, entitled I think 'When the Going Was Good'.

The First Virtual Erotic-Art-Museum Since 1998!

Hmmm. This immediately got me to thinking what an anti-erotic art museum might be like. I quickly realized that such a thing is probably impossible. No doubt there's someone out there who would find any object, person or situation you exhibited to be erotic.

Good Soldier Schweik! I read that when I was quite young, at the recommendation of my dad. It took me a while to get into it, but I was sad when it ended, it felt like something that could go on forever and never stop being fun.

Yes this mirrors my initial experience with the book. I found VERY funny but also extremely sad at points, an ugly harshness behind the gags.

Following this with Hrabal's I served the King of England

The Black Arrow - RL Stevenson. A Romance set in War of Roses period. Worst bit of dialogue so far -

'Where goeth me this track?'
'Let us even try,' said Matcham.

Prithee up your bum, good sirras.

I'm quite enjoying it, even though it's totally confusing, hectic without covering a lot of ground, and stitched together even worse than one of the leather jerkins everyone goes round wearing.

A binge of fun recently...

Richard Stark: Lemons Never Lie
Henry James: The Coxon Fund (a novella--I love the quote from the text on the back: 'The greater the windbag, the greater the calamity.')
William Dean Howells: A Sleep and a Forgetting (another novella, about how much YOU remain YOU if your memory vanishes)
Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic
Eric Ambler: Dirty Story (overweight con man gets involved with making porn movie, becomes inadvertent mercenary "liberating" African territory for a mining corporation)
Somerset Maugham: Christmas Holiday

Evelyn Waugh: Helena
John Gray: Black Mass
Pynchon: Inherent Vice
Henry Green: Party Going
Old 18th-century habits coming back, so slightly scattershot reading of Hume and Burke.

theodore white: the making of the american president, 1960
peter hennessy: the prime minister: the office & its holders since 1945
more cordwainer smith
tony harrison's 'collected film poetry'

glancing in a lot of other poetry - james fenton, paul muldoon. also a cheap collected andrew motion, which is pretty dreadful.

finished the first volume of the man without qualities. finally.

Recently The Spoils of Poynton (James), The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst, reread), The Little Stranger (Waters, a bit disappointing, maybe I'm tiring of her take old genre fiction and bulk it out with my terrific eye for period detail trick), Sorrows of An American (Hustvedt - very disappointing, one of those regrettable books that makes you wonder if your admiration for a writer's earlier work wasn't a lapse in judgement). Started Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.

I finished 'The Corrections' last night. It was really good, had me hooked like few books have in the last year or two. I was really looking forward to every opportunity to escape into that world, which was even more impressive because most of it was so ordinary. It didn't even need the Lithuanian bits, I don't think, Denise's story would have carried the action on its own.

I have a bathroom full of books to choose from now (we're recarpeting and they've been rehoused there temporarily). I'm thinking either 'The Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, or the recent Lennon biography by I think Philip Norman. Not quite ready for the Austria-Hungarian stuff yet.

Maiden Voyage - Denton Welch (much prefer it to In Youth Is Pleasure, although IYIP does have a lovely lyric at the beginning of it. MV is an account of DW's school days, then a voyage to Shanghai. Paradoxically perhaps, it doesn't really go anywhere - that feature woof described in A Voice Through A Cloud - but I find his peculiar form of psychic description powerful enough for this not to matter, without him being at all likable. He is unsparing of himself.)

A Last Sheaf - Denton Welch. (Short stories, including an excellent one called 'Ghosts', poetry and black and white reproductions of some of his late paintings, which share the features of his writing - morbidly detailed, with oppressive sense of deathly life)

Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Attractive if slightly trite-feeling lyrics, imitations and satires, which are occasionally vivid, occasionally cluttered, with that renaissance feeling of classical reference packed with English detail and description.)

Sorry that was a shit description of Wyatt, but I had to leave work for a train, which I didn't get, because I thought maybe I should cycle, but I didn't because I didn't have my mudguards, so I got a BUS, which got stuck in TRAFFIC. And when I got off the BUS, I landed ankle deep in a PUDDLE. And then all the TRAINS were delayed because of FLOODING, and then I got another BUS after standing in the pissing RAIN for an AGE.

Which is all by way of saying, isn't it time for a new thread? I was in Brompton Cemetary the other day and I swear the leaves were turning...

Yes, someone should - not me though, I haven't even got my first train delay through the 'leaves on the line' excuse yet.

Raymond Radiguet - The Devil in the Flesh. Short and intense early 20s French novel from a man who knew way too much too soon. Or so the cliche goes. Living really is hell.

Over the weekend:

Henry De Montherlant - Chaos and Night. I really liked parts of this once everyone goes into Spain - the bullfight was incredibly vivid, and I suspect that the more I'd re-read the more terrifying it could get. I like it that Montherlant makes it hard for you to engage with the man's utter sense of loneliness and the way he works at a blankness to everything.

Musil - Young Torless

Now: Joseph Roth - The Radetzky March

Not me either - I done it last time, and have regretted going full stop-capital letter, rather than ellipsis, ever since.

'The Devil in the Flesh' is great. His 'Count D'Orgels's Ball' is pretty good, too.

And then he died.

i just read that hustvedt book too, frankiemachine - i enjoyed it! i dunno, i really like the she writes, i find her style incredibly engaging and i like the way she builds this really sinister vibe that turns out to be quite marginal to the story (same thing in all her other novels). i've got yonder to read next.

Okay, rather reluctantly I have ushered in the autumnal equinox. Tell us what you're reading here -

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

Hope that works. I'm new to this.

Yeah, well done Gamaliel.

Yeah Dan the Hustvedt was generally well-reviewed and I really enjoyed "What I Loved" so I was looking forward to it. But I found I had massive problems with it.

They started with the epigraph by Rumi. "Don't turn away/Keep looking at the bandaged place./That's where the light enters you."

I didn't much care for this -- does light really enter a wound? Even a bandaged one? Even if it did, would you learn much from looking? It became a kind of metaphor for what I didn't like about the book. If you're going to be as relentlessly gloomy as Hustvedt is in this book, you'd better have some real insight to compensate. She certainly kept looking at the bandaged place, remorselessly so in fact, but for me not much light entered. Intelligence, sensitivity and truth to life are not enough - your book has to enrich the reader's life. I felt this one rubbed my nose in a lot of unpleasant stuff about life that I already knew, and mistook that for seriousness of purpose and unflinching integrity.

My second problem was what seemed a lot of undigested autobiography. Obviously you can't split the autobiographical from the fictional easily, but the starry New York intellectual lifestyle, the neurotic, beautiful, cerebral woman married to a famous novelist, the recently deceased father all point one way. I'm not objecting to fictionalised autbiography per se, but I started to read Inga particularly and some strands of other characters as versions of the author, and found myself increasingly turned off by the self absorption implied. For example, I'm sure the prying of prurient journalists into the lives of celebrity authors (and their wives) is pretty damn unpleasant, but the weight given to it by Hustvedt seems disproportionate in a novel that takes itself so very, very seriously.

Similarly Inga's near psychological collapse at the fear that her book might be published and pass without public notice is passed off as the justifiable fear of a hyper-intelligent woman that she won't receive due recognition in a male-dominated world. But it comes across as something much weirder - a sense of entitlement to the status of celebrity intellectual. This jars because, although we don't doubt her abilities, the number of people who become famous (or even semi-famous) for producing intellectual work will always be a vanishingly small fraction of the number of people who produce outstanding work. To hope for due recognition, the approbation of your professional peers and so on is natural and healthy. To believe that you'd have a legitimate grievance against the world if it denied you celebrity, even the somewhat rarified kind Inga aspires to, seems more than slightly loopy. Which would be fine if she was pure fiction, offered up for judgement as she is. But in a character who's manifestly a version of an author who has achieved some celebrity partly as a consequence of having a famous husband, and whose stock in trade is self awareness, it comes across as a curious and unattractive mixture of self-justification and self-pity.

This post has grown unexpectedly long and self-indulgent, so I won't lengthen it by going into detail about what seem to me egregious faults of structure (a mess IMO) and style. Generally Hustvedt writes well but there is a generous sprinkling of jaw-droppingly ugly or pretentious sentences. Some of the negative reviews on Amazon nail a few of these with more more perception than you might expect from Amazon reviewers.

This is highly subjective stuff - how gloomy is too gloomy, how can you be sure this is autobiographical - and plenty of reviewers liked the book. But it's damaged my romance with Hustvedt, probably beyond repair.

Still, as I say, the book was well reviewed and plenty of sensitive and perceptive readers seemed to like it.