And The Snow Fell Softly On ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

The Doomed City by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

We never worked so long and so painstakingly on any of our other works, either before or after. Three years was spent amassing, scrap by scrap, the episodes, the characters' biographies, individual phrases and turns of speech; we invented the City, its peculiarities, and the laws governing its existence, as well as a cosmography, as authentic as we could possibly make it, for this artificial world, and its history. It was genuinely delightful and fascinating work, but everything in this world ends sometime, and in June 1969 we drew up the first detailed plan and adopted the definitive title – The Doomed City. This is the title of a famous painting by Roerich that had once astounded us with its sombre beauty and the sense of hopelessness emanating from it.

The draft of the novel was completed in six sessions (in all, about seventy full working days) over a period of two and a quarter years. On May 27, 1972, we wrote in the final period, heaved a sigh of relief, and stuffed the unusually thick file into the bookcase. Into the archive. For a long time. Forever. It was perfectly obvious to us that the novel had absolutely no prospects.

The City is part of The Experiment, and filled with people from Earth who volunteered, irrevocably, for the social experiment. They keep it going, working at processes because the processes exist, and the book sort of clatters along, not concerned with anything gleaming, but garbage collection, stupidity, gloom, drunkenness. There's a sense of hidden meaning being very imperfectly and wrongly interpreted and discovered, as with Roadside Picnic – like the Sufi story about the blind people touching the elephant. The main character Andrei is a dim-witted, easily angered enthusiast for The Experiment, and gradually rises through the ranks. One of the book's main weaknesses is his imbecility. But its very good. Cynical and throwing absurdity at bureaucracy and planned societies.

Burned through The Left Hand of Darkness yesterday. Weird, sad, a thrill.

Le G.'sThe Dispossessed is pretty amazing too. Ditto the Strugatskys' Hard To A God.

Incidentally there was a Soviet propaganda poster v like that Roerich painting in the current (very good) Tate exhibition Red Star Over Russia. A vicious snake (presumably capitalism) coiled round an industrial city on a mount.

I finished Chocky by John Wyndham. It'd been a while since I'd read any straight science fiction. Probably the last one before this was The City and the City by China Mieville. That one had a more interesting conceit, but this was a bit more focused (and shorter). The prose seemed a bit workmanlike, but I guess that's par for the course. Also, considering the book is narrated by a father, it seems that the other members of the family remain kind of emotional ciphers - maybe that's just the way things were in the old days, but it seems to make the book less dramatic than it could have been.

Now I've started The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon. For a comic novel, it has one major deficiency, which is that it mostly isn't very funny, though not for lack of trying. There is a constant stream of jokes - pitched high, low, and everywhere in between - some have potential, but there is usually something off with the timing or delivery, or they're just too random and opportunistic. It fares better with scenes of lust, violence and sex, and the plot keeps moving along nicely, but primarily due to the scarcity of yuks, it still feels like a second-rate imitation of something like The Russian Debutante's Handbook.

Rereading Where Angels Fear To Tread is a sobering reminder of how little I retain from a novel a few years after I've read it - einmal ist keinmal. Case in point, I remember this novel as being about a young repressed British woman finding love in sunny Italy but that's actually just where the book starts, not at all where it ends up...

At Christmas I read Guillem Balague's book with Mauricio Pochettino, or vice versa: BRAVE NEW WORLD: INSIDE POCHETTINO'S SPURS (2017).

I am now reading Barbara Kingsolver's FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR (2012) for the second time.

It is well written and earnest though probably a deal longer than it needs to be.

I like the sound of "Geometric Regional Novel".

been reading the Judith rossner novel of looking for mr goodbar, surprising me a bit that it's p well written...has anyone read this or anything by her? search reveals shes never been mentioned on ilx

I read at least the part where she's hanging out with this Johnny Ramone type who always says that drugs are too good for hippies, and he wears army pants instead of jeans so people won't think he's a fuggin' flower Child. Think I'll go see if the library still has that. Also if they still have another Rossner I skimmed, August, about the Dog Days, when everybody's shrink goes off to the Hamptons ("You'll be fine, and you have the numbers, of course.")

Finished Dugresic's Ministry of Pain. Some novels based on recent real events to the writing of the book based on them -- this is from the mid-90s, dealing with the fallout from the Yugoslav civil war -- can read like a bunch of testimonials (look at the title) with little invention and reconstruction. However that wasn't much of a problem, in this particular csse. I liked how there were several unlikeable characters, making something different out of a micro-genre I don't care for (the academic novel).

Now running through Plath's Letters Home. She does tell her mother A LOT (although maybe not everything). Just about to get to the point she goes to England and meets Ted Hughes.

read christopher higgs 'as i stand living' which he describes as a "radical memoir" of a year of his life as he finishes a phd. it's radical in the sense that he writes continually about how much he hates writing, hates academia, doesn't want to get a job - seems honest in a quite stupid way, but then he's an academic now, so who knows

started robbe-grillet 'recollections of the golden triangle' - nobody writes anything like him (jonke mentioned above comes close sometimes, and claude simon, but they're still way off what robbe-grillet does with the reading experience), but what he writes about is so often completely repulsive; not sure i'll finish this one

The half dozen de Maupassant short stories I've read so far (in the Penguin Classic "Selected Short Stories" translated by Roger Colet) all revolve around sexuality, with an emphasis on prostitutes and illicit affairs. This may not be a fair reflection on the ordinary lives of nineteenth century France, but it certainly suggests something along that line.

The other feature I notice is that the social conventions in play are absolutely understood and accepted by everyone. They are accepted without demure because the most restrictive social conventions have equally conventional evasions. This contrasts greatly with current US society which is so balkanized and fluid that no one knows what conventions are in play.

Might also be about literary conventions re certain subjects, in a certain range of magazines, maybe a a certain de facto subgenre--? In The Golden Age of Short Stories, market-wise.

It's a fair reflection of the life of de Maupassant, tbh.

Somebody please tell me about the writing of Mavis Gallant.

A little non-fiction for once: "De Stijl and Dutch Modernism" by Michael White (a thesis-turned-book I assume, with the accompanying lack of zip, but v interesting, esp the chapter on architecture and town planning) and "Hold Tight -Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime" by Jeffrey Boakye, a book I'll be adding to the "good books about music" thread once I've finished it.

Boakye is a funny surname in Scots

Finished both Fire & Fury and We Were Eight Years in Power. One of those is stunningly powerful and well written. One is not. Also read a couple history things, Martin Rady's The Habsburg Empire, A Very Short Introduction, and Tadao Sato's Currents In Japanese Cinema.

Somebody please tell me about the writing of Mavis Gallant.

There was a New Yorker fiction podcast episode where someone read one of her stories and I thought it was amazing, made me buy the Collected Stories but I haven't read it yet. Not much help, sorry!

Yeah, get the brick-sized Collected Stories, so much good stuff.

Thanks. I know I've seen impressive mentions, but needed the reminder provided by this controversy (recently published Sadia Shephard story based on, "in debt to" Gallant's, for contrast-and-compare social commentary, prob should have been tagged as such in front by New Yorker)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/letters-from-the-january-22-2018-issue"> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/letters-from-the-january-22-2018-issue Also covered in The Guardian etc. natch.

I’m currently working my way through a bunch of stuff from the Verso sale.

David Neiwert’s Alt America: The Rise Of The Radical Right is not bad as a whistlestop chronicle of ‘things that have happened’, from the formation of the Tea Party to Gamergate, but it has next to no analytical value.

Anabel Hernández’ Narcoland is full of interesting information about the intersection of political corruption and the drug wars in Mexico but could probably have done with a better editor.

Finished Where Angels.... First time I read it I was surprised at how sunny it was and that there were sympathetic female characters (doesn't happen in a lot of Forster books, sadly); re-reading it turns out there's only really one, and the book's mostly interested in Philip anyway. The "sunniness" fades when thinking of the ending, the return to Kent all the more tragic after having experienced the glory of Italy.

Next up is The Longest Journey, which is the first Forster I read and supposedly my favourite, though I'll have to re-evaluate; I decided this when I was a #teen, and it was at least partially influenced by a BBC doc I saw where Forster mentioned it as his neglected favourite.

As Plath's letters rumble on I am thinking this is her best work - they are very touching, seeing someone trying to make their way in the world like this, trying to just do her best - she is so humble about her talents (which intersect with her depression), sadly cut short. Reading this in conjunction with Anner Carson's The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, who did grow old and whose talent was able to mature to something like this fusion of classical allusion and feminist tract. I am also making my way through Marlen Hauhofer's The Loft, modernism as a mother's mind is inhabited (a mode going back to Molly's Requiem in Ulysses perhaps) and fully mapped out as worries, joys and the painful past all mingle and fight.

*Marlen Haushofer

I had a similar experience with Cheever's letters about twenty years ago.

Just finished Noah Cicero's new poetry book, Nature Documentary. Really funny, moving, and compelling. One of my favorite contemporary authors, very prolific & consistent. I highly recommend it.

'The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos'

man, i like this title a lot

Last night I started Magda Szabo's, The Door. I checked it out of the local library last week to see if it felt congenial. It does, although I am only a few pages in atm and have nothing useful to say beyond that. It could be stunningly great, but it's much too soon to tell.

It is pretty great!

Read The Beauty of The Husband, as described by xyzzzz above: so, so good.

The final third of The Door is when it becomes stunningly great.

paul beatty.

Two stories in to "Rhapsody" by Dorothy Edwards and I'm convinced of her brilliance.

I intend to be convinced of her genius by the end of the volume.

She is brilliant.

I read The Buddah of Suburbia - 28 years after everyone else, and, seemingly 28 years too late. Which is to say, I didn't like it much. Tonally, it was a mess, with characters obeying who-knows-what aspects of motivation, and, as such, it felt as if the whole thing was in the service of satire. Which is fine, but it meant the turn in the final third of the book - a turn towards pathos and mutability - didn't really have any weight. I did laugh out loud often, which is something.

Tom Drury's The End of Vandalism next, I think. Although, having listened to the latest Backlisted, what I really want to do is re-read Beyond Black.

I read at least the part where she's hanging out with this Johnny Ramone type who always says that drugs are too good for hippies, and he wears army pants instead of jeans so people won't think he's a fuggin' flower Child.

― dow, Monday, January 29, 2018 2:16 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

heh I just got to this part. good memory!

Tom Drury is so, so good. I hope he writes another one soon.

I finished Life A User’s Manual. Too many octagons.

Kind of embarrassing to admit, but I read How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, a self-help by Dilbert cartoonist and Trump theorist Scott Adams. As such things go, it was fairly okay. I don't think he is actually crazy. He is often charmingly self-deprecating and down-to-earth. Not sure there were any earthshaking tools of success revealed, mostly he just tries to give you more appealing ways of thinking about things you probably know that you should be doing.

Do the happy few who listen to ebooks have favorite readers? I am starting to have a handful I prefer. It is really night and day whether you like or even tolerate the reader or not.

Sean Barrett, Michael Kramer, J. D. Jackson, Coleen Marlo -- most of them have also narrated some very dodgy books, but when they are doing the good stuff they're great

I finished The Door. I found it to be excellent. The characters and story were rigorously human and real, so much so that it verged on myth and archetype, a convergence the author seemed to be well aware of. I did at times grow impatient with the obtuseness of the narrator, but her weaknesses were necessary to the story. Structurally, it was remarkably tight, but it all flowed naturally and was never forced. The few flaws I noticed were not worth my notice. Highly recommended.

Now I intend to read Tropic Moon, Georges Simenon, because my copy is checked out of the library and I wish to return it soon. And because it is probably well worth reading.

Fitzgerald's Offshore. A bit like Human Voices - it's a bit dull for a bit too long, until it's suddenly the opposite of that.

This week I gave up on Journey to Pagany by William Carlos Willians which contained some fair pages on the American in Europe experience (if you can call it that), but I usually expect more velocity from a poet's prose (comparing to Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia or Tsvetaeva or Rilke, for example). There was little to keep me going.

Wolfgang Koeppen's A Sad Affair provided some richer returns, setting the mood of place and event in 1930s Europe, crossing it with what it says on the title. Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne is also another journey - a skeletal plot is the opportunity for a set of encounters across India - Bomabay, Goa and Madras (two of those places are familiar to me) - thankfully free of the tourism although perhaps its slightly at pains to say so. Pleasing and a bittersweet read at the same time, as it reminded me of time spent with my wonderful father (time that will not be spent again).

Dennis Lim's book on David Lynch, Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster. Robert Lowell had exquisite taste in wives.

i read 'great granny webster' a year or two ago, loved it. i could read portraits of spiteful old bony scottish ladies all day