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

I've only read a few Devries books, but my favorite, The Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Tit lampooned faddish existentialist thought and literature (and pop psychology? - can't remember) while at the same time really effectively and poignantly describing an existential crisis. It was not like reading Wodehouse or something - more like Beerbohm.

I think I'll try those two next, bamcquern, cheers.

Also xpost, I hadn't heard that 'Tripish' comment before. Good stuff. I prefer Lewis as being less of a bore - there's a very good three-way conversation between K Amis, Brian Aldiss and him on science fiction at the beginning of one of the Spectrum collections - but much as I loved both the Narnia books and the Lord of the Rings as a child, I feel very little attachment to them now. I re-read all the Narnia books recently while convalescing, and while some of them are quite charming and magical, (I have soft spot for the Horse and his Boy) something like The Last Battle is just really weird, patrician and dull.

As for The Lord of the Rings, vast tracts of Teutonic tedium interspersed with the tiniest elements of human emotion and excitement. HOW long does it take for Sam and Frodo to get from just outside Mordor to actually throwing the damn thing in the Pit of Doom? And how long does it take just to get to Rivendell for fuxache? I can make an exception for the still thrilling Mines of Moria. In fact The Fellowship of the Ring is by a long chalk the strongest of the three for me.

So Tripish and Not Another Fucking Elf get the thumbs up for me - the mystery is how they could sit round as adults listening to this nonsense. (But Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus are really good - That Hideous Strength though is [makes circular motion at forehead with forefinger] but enjoyable enough I suppose.)

Christ, rambling.

'voyage to venus'?? my copy is 'perelandra'. which is so much better. that one is weird in a similar set of ways to 'the last battle' though. (er, have you by any chance read 'the case of conscience' by james blish? it's a more science fiction-y science fiction novel about life on another planet and church heresy. it makes kind of an interesting comparison. probably.) TLB is actually my favourite lewis, though i find it quite horrifying, which was admittedly probably not the goal.

LOTR is sooo tedious. there was this horrible period while i was in sixth form when everyone was reading it because of the movies and it was just — that's MY thing, you jocks, get away! and it's not even any good! trust me! i know! — also, later misprision by various parties means i can only read the exciting bits by visualising them with lead figures on a grid and six different sorts of die lying around.

That's a fair summary xp. The Shire and the other early bits have stuck (with a faintly sticky tweeness) but the later books haven't at all other than the odd detail (even with the help of the films). I was going to posit that Tolkien did not do epic well, but then does anyone do epic fiction well? I've been noticing that all the stuff I've been enjoying recently is above all a tangle of minutiae. The book just kind of explodes upwards out of sight after the Mines, except for the bit in the marshes.

I spent a significant part of my early teenage life reading into the back story - the Silmarillion, Lost Tales and all that - not a jot of which I even remotely remember now, other than a scene where two of the most significant historical figures stumble upon each other in a forest clearing, and just stare at each other then run away, that being the only time they ever met. I thought that was nice.

It was Perelandra in the states, which as you say is much better (although I quite like the B-movie tone of Voyage to Venus. I didn't mind all the weird quasi-religious stuff in it, I have to admit.

I haven't read any James Blish, although I have heard of The Case of Conscience. I'll put it on my reading list. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller is another religion, heresy, science fiction one. It's pretty good.

My favourite bit in the films is in The Return of the King where there's that absurd hobbit pr0n slo-mo bit where they all bounce around on the bed and Gandalf stands there smiling on benevolently like an elderly p a e d o groomer. That took ages to finish as well, after the actual finish had happened. Didn't even have that bit where the hobbits return home and find Saruman has turned the Shire into a light industrial development.

The Hobbit is ok. Why am I talking about this? Gah.

The Balrog inflicts d20 damage and kills you with his ball of fire. You die.

xpost, yep, completely agree about the lack of detail IK. Mystifyingly empty.

just finished:

Daniel Dennett "Consciousness Explained" (huge tome, took me all summer, really fantastic though- highly recommended to anyone interested in philosophy of mind and neuroscience)

Samuel Johnson "Rasselas" (fun and silly, always meant to read this and now I have)

currently reading:

Walter Abish "Alphabetical Africa"

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

dope collected tales imo

Abish's Alphabetical Africa? Ace!

Whizzing through In the Land of Invented Languages. The author is a babe.

but actually alphabetical africa's basically boring. can't be bothered. don't.

re: gogol: read through the diaryofamadman+others last week. might have mentioned that. don't know. i'm on a computer with a really small screen so it's kind of a pain to check. also dead souls. though i stopped after part one. dunno if the er gogol worldview is quite expansive enough for me to want to live in. if that makes sense. might get a collected tales though. i did see like eight dozen copies of 'the government collector' at work though. might get one of those first.

re: musil: trying to find to read + have opinions; failing

I've been reading The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson. I love walking. I do it daily. It is my meat and drink.

Sadly, this book is a pastiche with nothing much to say. It looks like the author submitted a proposal that named every possible angle on walking that he could think of: historic figures, obsessive walkers, psychogeography, walking streets in L.A., London and N.Y., street photographers, and so on. It must have looked like one hell of an impressive proposal.

When it came time to write the book, he had almost nothing to say about any of these subjects. The only reason I will most likely finish it is that it is such a quick, easy read that it is easier to finish than to summon the will to toss it aside.

Don't bother starting it. That would be even easier than reading it.

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.