Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?

finished Colm Toibin, ON ELIZABETH BISHOP. Not brilliant, mainly adequate to quite good. Just a couple of daft clangers. A bit too much Toibin. But quite a good sense of a world of the poetry and life, and it picks up human interest when he really goes into the Bishop-Lowell relations. The book also ends very well indeed.

Now I start his novel NORA WEBSTER.

thanks pf - will check out the thread.

I'm on the final stretch of A Brief History of Seven Killings, and it's really picking up in the last 150 or so pages. The middle was a slog, which sort of fits the mood and subject matter.

Does ILB like Ali Smith? I bought The Accidental and How to Be Both on a recommendation, just started digging into the former.

Agree about Seven Killings being a bit of a slog but in the end the effort was well worth it.

Finished Zacahary Leader's The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 and while I sympathize with the criticism that it was too long, I gobbled it up. Even the early days were fascinating and I usually get bored by childhood tales, as important as they are in the developmental scheme. Russian village life in the late 19th century is so far removed from 20th century America that it's amazing to contemplate those immigrants' experience. (This is my wife's family background too, so that helps. Thought about my late father-in-law and his parents while reading about the Bellow clan). It also helps that I'm a fan of Bellow's novels though I sympathize with anybody who finds him windy and self-involved. Per Leader, Saul really struggled to make his mark pre: Augie March and developed a king-size chip on his shoulder in the process. Utter lack of support, emotional and otherwise, from his family didn't help. Leader resists the urge to simplistically treat the novels as directly sourced from Bellow's life yet deftly explicates the complex autobiographical roots of virtually everything he wrote. Two concluding thoughts: Saul was cruelly demanding of his wives yet maintained a flexible let's say concept of monogamy. It's a 50's guy thing I guess? And not only was he thin-skinned to a fault, a critic-baiter and academic-hater (and later a teacher!), Bellow also surrounded himself with sycophantic sidekicks and seemed pretty delusional about them until he got fucked over. File under fiction writer not necessarily the best judge of character (including his own) in real life.

only lol-ish anecdote comes from Gore Vidal: entering a party of literary types, he overhears Bellow "merrily" welcome the Trillings: "Still peddling the same old horseshit, Lionel?"

Not fifteen minutes ago I finished The Bostonians. It definitely did not shimmer with revelations. It ended grotesquely, as befit the grotesque nature of the main characters. I feel a bit resentful, tbh, at my having trusted Mr. James to have been in possession of some insights worth the expenditure of so many words, which trust he thoroughly failed to justify.

lol this is a bizarre reading

I've read the novel a couple of times and am moved by how James navigates pity and irony. I felt horrible for Olive and worse for Verena. At no point is Ransom sympathetic. At the end of the novel he's reenacting the rape of Europa or something.

finished Colm Toibin, ON ELIZABETH BISHOP. Not brilliant, mainly adequate to quite good. Just a couple of daft clangers. A bit too much Toibin. But quite a good sense of a world of the poetry and life, and it picks up human interest when he really goes into the Bishop-Lowell relations. The book also ends very well indeed.

Now I start his novel NORA WEBSTER.

― the pinefox,

he's one of my favorite novelists. Try The Master and a collection of short stories called Mothers and Sons.

Nora Webster is like 3rd or 4th on my pile of new books to read atm. I haven't read the two Alfred mentioned yet, but I can't recommend Brooklyn high enough.

My difficulty with the characters, which led me to call them grotesque, is that in order for the plot to evolve as it does both Olive and Verena must be firmly established at the far extremity of their type and held there throughout.

Olive is not merely averse to men and committed to her feminist cause, but she is (to use James' own word) extremely morbid, so sensitive at times as to barely stand human contact, underlaid with an extreme righteousness equally incapable of self-doubt or of charity. Her relations with Verena do not contain a trace of real friendship as I understand the word, but rather she ruthlessly uses Verena to fill a void in her life, while blindly rationalizing it as a series of noble deeds and renunciations. She is a kind of monster. I am using this word in its 19th century sense of a terribly misshapen and disproportioned creature; it is a descriptor I am sure James would agree with.

Verena on the other hand is made to be a prodigy of equally extreme proportions. She is an agreeable young woman, but not in any ordinary or proportionate way. She has a will so obliging that it always moves in the same direction as that of whoever is her companion of the moment, and yet she never strikes anyone as being passive or empty, but rather everyone is irresistibly drawn to her and her 'genius'. Except her genius is paradoxically shapeless and vague, apart from her having a pretty face and a lovely speaking voice, and an agreeable nature. She gets along perfectly well with everyone until she becomes the object that two strong personalities, Olive and Ransom, fight over, like two dogs fighting over a bone. Then she can please neither and she falls apart.

You're quite right to compare Ransom's final capture of Verena to the rape of Europa, but you seem to miss the fact that she was just as much abducted from her parents by Olive, who accomplishes this not by grabbing her arm and rushing her off, but by handing them a large sum of money and telling them to get lost.

Ransom is the least monstrous of the three main characters, in that he is merely an egoist who has been misshapen by the peculiar ideas of Mississippian chivalry. This does not make him sympathetic or pleasant, but at least he typifies a personality you might encounter in his day.

Lastly, the reason I say that James had no particular insights to share is that he appears to believe that he was writing a story about "the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, and the agitation on their behalf" (as quoted on the book's cover) and yet this story reveals nothing worthwhile about these larger, more general subjects, because his main characters are so extreme and peculiar that they shed far more light on the psychology of monsters than the ideals of the suffrage movement or the position of women.

Call it bizarre if you like, but I think my reading is quite defensible.

Olive is not merely averse to men and committed to her feminist cause, but she is (to use James' own word) extremely morbid, so sensitive at times as to barely stand human contact, underlaid with an extreme righteousness equally incapable of self-doubt or of charity. Her relations with Verena do not contain a trace of real friendship as I understand the word, but rather she ruthlessly uses Verena to fill a void in her life, while blindly rationalizing it as a series of noble deeds and renunciations. She is a kind of monster. I am using this word in its 19th century sense of a terribly misshapen and disproportioned creature; it is a descriptor I am sure James would agree with.

Verena on the other hand is made to be a prodigy of equally extreme proportions. She is an agreeable young woman, but not in any ordinary or proportionate way. She has a will so obliging that it always moves in the same direction as that of whoever is her companion of the moment, and yet she never strikes anyone as being passive or empty, but rather everyone is irresistibly drawn to her and her 'genius'. Except her genius is paradoxically shapeless and vague, apart from her having a pretty face and a lovely speaking voice, and an agreeable nature. She gets along perfectly well with everyone until she becomes the object that two strong personalities, Olive and Ransom, fight over, like two dogs fighting over a bone. Then she can please neither and she falls apart.

These are insights.

You're quite right to compare Ransom's final capture of Verena to the rape of Europa, but you seem to miss the fact that she was just as much abducted from her parents by Olive, who accomplishes this not by grabbing her arm and rushing her off, but by handing them a large sum of money and telling them to get lost.

Yeah! That's fascinating! It makes her situation more pathetic. I couldn't imagine the novel without it. Why is this worth mentioning other than to show how James sets up how Verena, in the eyes of her parents, Olive, and Ransom is a pawn? But she there's a sense in which she likes playing these forces against each other.

Also: the novel's expert at shifting points of view; we never know how exactly we're supposed to react to characters in a scene. The first few chapters are told almost exclusively iirc from Ransom's point of view, so of course Olive would look like a trembling hysteric. The triumph of the novel is how our first impressions aren't wrong but get complicated anyway.

this does not make him sympathetic or pleasant, but at least he typifies a personality you might encounter in his day.

that's how I view Dr. Prance, Ms. Birdseye, Olive, and Verena. Readers of Howells' fiction would've recognized them too.

Lastly, the reason I say that James had no particular insights to share is that he appears to believe that he was writing a story about "the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, and the agitation on their behalf" (as quoted on the book's cover) a

You're castigating an author or novel for its intentions and what a blurb says?

idk it sounds like you're recoiling from how unpleasant and adult this novel is.

You're castigating an author or novel for its intentions and what a blurb says?

To be clear, the cover blurb was quoting Henry James speaking about this book and his view of it. Since my edition did not contain James' preface, I don't know if that was the origin of the quote or not.

it sounds like you're recoiling from how unpleasant and adult this novel is.

hmmm. I'm 60 years old, Alfred, and I can assure you my life has contained decades filled with unpleasantness and adult responsibilities which I daresay I have not shrunk from at any time, however oppressive they were. Why you think I would recoil from a mere novel is beyond me and for you to think that "adult" material is too much for me to face is kind of insulting, although I expect you did not actually intend it as meanly as that.

Ilb is normally waaaaaAy more civilised than the rest of ilx, but not surprised it was henry james who got the fisticuffs going

literary ronaldinho bottle opener

I'm sorry, Aimless -- I shouldn't have written that sentence. But your character descriptions are precisely what make the book for me an uneven triumph. It's an erratic, batty book. Unlike Dickens or Eliot, James doesn't side with anybody. Every time I read it and think James has contempt for feminists like Olive, I remember that his narrator is in and out of Ransom's consciousness. Ransom condescends to Dr. Prance and Ms. Birdseye but it's clear he also respects their industry and humorlessness. But it's also clear that James condescends to Ransom too. Our sympathies shift. Like I said yesterday, the book is weirdly structured, and not to its advantage in some places (a problem that afflicts The Tragic Muse[i] and [i]The Princess Cassamassima too, the other novels from this period); but he's got so many zingers and bon mots and bits of psychology that I laugh out loud every time I look at it again.

It comes down to my liking what you'd call its repulsiveness, I suppose.

Yes, I don't have a problem with a novel about repulsive people (especially a comic novel, which the Bostonians is in part) - but I actually don't think Olive is that repulsive, just a difficult, awkward, morally compromised person (ie human like the rest of us), someone trying to establish an identity for herself in an age where her gender and sexuality are constantly opposed, belittled, negated. James, obviously like lots of authors, frequently sprinkled parts of his own personality over his characters, and I think there's much more of him in Olive than there is Ransom - James clearly mistrusts easy charm and vapid bonhomie, both of which Basil has in abundance.

Alongside the comic, the monstrous is never really that far away in James-world; the battle over Verena, the corruption - or acquisition - of her 'innocence' is reconfigured as Quint's possession of the children in Turn of the Screw, or the way that Isobel is cruelly manipulated in Portrait of a Lady. It's a horrible world out there.

otm

Because his publisher didn't have the dough to include The Bostonians in the New York edition, James never revised it to fit his (clearer) intentions like he did the earlier books, we should note.

Yeah, the financial fine print of the history of literature is so insidious---Rampersand's notes for this Library of America omnibus edition of Richard Wright, with the restored edition of Native Son, also include the lousy changes the author made at the behest of the Book Of The Month Club, which was a huge deal in 1940, if you wanted your book to have a decent amount of distribution. Also, the bowdlerized version got him launched abroad, via Gollancz, for instance. The results were still potent enough to get him denounced in Congress and elsewhere. Maybe he would have restored it if he'd outlived a few more politicians, but he died (at 52) in 1960, and all the changes stayed in for another 30 years, according to Rampersand (good thing I didn't read it when I was supposed to).

*Rampersad*, that is. Sorry!

I finished H is for Hawk. Pretty good - I can see why it got a lot of raves. The emotional core of the book (grieving for her father) is not overplayed, instead it is kind of kept in the background and allowed to burst through occasionally, to more powerful effect. I enjoyed all the stuff about falconry, which I didn't know anything about before reading this. I wasn't quite so keen on the parts about T.H. White. Those sections kind of reminded me of Iain Sinclair's chapters in Rodinsky's Room, in the way they interrupted a more linear narrative with highly worked up literary impressions that seemed kind of irrelevant after a while.

T.H. White wrote The Goshawk about his experiences training a goshawk. I read it back in 2008. It was a brief, odd, rather meandering book, but well worth the small amount of time required to read it.

Yes, the T.H. White passages in Macdonald's book are largely about his experiences recounted in The Goshawk, though she reads it through the eyes of an experienced falconer, so the emphasis tends to be more on how he's screwing things rather than the merits of the book itself.

how he's screwing things up, rather

uhm is this thread reserved for fiction? anyway, I read Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of Islamic State yesterday, and it was very informative - I recommend it for anyone who, like me, needs an overview of what happened in Iraq last summer. Cockburn is clearly very knowledgeable and to me he seemed credible.

Now I'm back to My Struggle part 6 where I'm in the middle of a never ending Celan-essay which is a bit boring and I hope Knausgaard will soon revert to descriptions of changing diapers, shopping, preparing shrimp and other thrilling activities. (I know the Hitler-essay is yet to come, but really it can't be as boring as the Celan-reading)

It is absolutely not reserved for anything other than what you are reading now. Excluding ilx to avoid universe-destroying recursion.

i am enjoying "to the lighthouse" but the technicalities of the style are a bit irritating at times - like just a lack of clarity about who is speaking to who, or whether they're speaking. i guess this is a conscious decision?

It'll become less of a problem as you progress.

started Brendon's "Decline and Fall of the British Empire" yesterday, which I can already tell is going to be awesome

Just finished reading Ascent, Jed Mercurio, as mentioned in the DSKY-DSKY Him Sad (aka Space Flight) thread. It was good in the vein of 'summer reading'. If I comment further on it, I'll do it over in DSKY-DSKY.

I finished Us Conductors a few days ago and really liked it. Now I'm trying to decide between The Luminaries (I'm a bad kiwi, haven't read it yet) and starting My Struggle.

nm I decided to start the Patrick St Aubyn series instead

Er, Edward.

Halfway through Dostoevsky's Demons. Love the scaffolding of various levels of anxiety and madness building up. A comment here, conversation there, random punch elsewhere, bizarre duel. Everyone suffocating.

I was reading this in a retreat-like place in Italy for the last week, just totally weird contrast - like I needed an injection of noise and intensity in my life.

xpost I once started To The Lighthouse but could not figure out the language at all - makes sense that it becomes easier along the way (that's my experience with any novel/artist/etc - once you "understand" the style everything flows) but at the time I couldn't see why I should fight my way through something that should be "pleasurable"

highly recommend My Struggle for summer reading, apart from part 6 where I'm now halfway through the apparently +200 pages Hitler-essay, it's pretty action packed

🗻

If I'm understanding correctly, this is a new bear falling from a tree in Boulder, CO today (or recently). Details from fb friend are sketchy.

Halfway through Dostoevsky's /Demons/. Love the scaffolding of various levels of anxiety and madness building up. A comment here, conversation there, random punch elsewhere, bizarre duel. Everyone suffocating.

great description of it. really like demons - character as hysteria.

Cool. Which translation?

it seems i am reading A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

it is fun

but hella technical, i never realized last time i was reading it intensively, > 10 years back, that most of its difficulty is not the weirdoness, it's that the entire thing proceeds in this mysteriously rigorous-sounding framework most of whose terms are constantly opaque to you, apart from that it's starting to seem pretty systematic

I picked up the 440pp abridgement of Outlaws of the Marsh that I bought a few months ago and started it. It is episodic and rambling like a picaresque novel, and is both direct and vivid in its storytelling, without much clutter. No lengthy descriptions of scenery or fine gradations of motive. The action is driven by greed, lust and sheer animals spirits.

One large source of pleasure and fascination for me comes from its setting in Sung Dynasty China, a complex society with a highly developed infrastructure and social hierarchy; it has a flavor that's distinctly different from any western society, but also perfectly familiar in its way.

dow - its the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.

Thanks! Also considering Magarshack, having enjoyed his version of The Idiot.

read devils in whoever did the recent oxford worlds classic edition and liked it. p/v crime and punishment was much better than the translation i'd read before that (forgotten who that was by).

This one? Looks good

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512sIUyvkWL._SX310_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

(if image is removed: "a new translation by Michael R. Katz"---published 2-24-2000)

that's the one. only issue i had with it was the insertion of the censored "stavrogin's confession" chapter into the main text. not sure if other editions do the same, but seemed to me it would have better as an appendix.

censored by whom?!

his publisher, i think. was considered lost for a long time but then rediscovered in the twenties or thereabouts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_%28Dostoyevsky_novel%29#Censored_chapter

Think I'd like it better in the main text, as Dusty meant it to be, thanks will check it out

Read The Bostonians on holiday, and although I'm already a James convert I have to side with Aimless on this one. Overall, and especially with regards to the central dilemma (which took an age to make itself apparent), it struck me less as an adult novel and more a teenage melodrama. That we are constantly told and not shown Verena's 'genius' didn't bother me so much, but when it's finally revealed her particular talent is merely a superlative inconsistency and suggestibility it makes everything we were told previously seem ridiculous, and the climax and her fate more like farce than tragedy. Of his other novels that I've read (Washington Square, The American, Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton), all but the latter have agonies just as acute but rendered with far more subtlety and dignity, and far more plausible. Sure it has its share of bon mots but the only time for me it approached classic James, his exquisite and sympathetic way of rendering a character on the horns of a true dilemma, wrestling both with their conscience and with the vicissitudes of an almost wilfully cruel world, was when Olive had to seriously consider the proposal of the Burrages in order to save Verena from Ransom.

On the other hand it was historically interesting; James I think was not unsympathetic to the cause (inasmuch as he makes it clear where his sympathies lie, Ransom is surely irredeemably repulsive throughout), but uncharitable in his treatment of it. Ransom, though, could almost be a model for a modern fedora-topped men's right's advocate, with his (even then) quaint notions of chivalry and firm belief that "there is a great deal too much [feminism]. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been." Even the name of the periodical that finally champions him is The Rational Review!

Also read H is For Hawk and enjoyed it, thought it was very analytical - of herself, of the hawk, of TH White - and that was just fine. Having read and enjoyed The Once and Future King may have enhanced my appreciation somewhat, especially when she considers White's Merlin as a rather tragically hopeful self portrait.