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

I'm reading Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. I like the first one, "Crooner," especially this bit:
We went through that song, full of travelling and goodbye. An American man leaving his woman. He keeps thinking of her as he passes through the towns one by one, verse by verse, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma, driving down a long road, the way my mother never could. If only we could leave things behind like that---I guess that's what my mother would have thought. If only sadness could be like that.

The second one, "Come Rain Or Come Shine," immediately and for most of it seems even better, or different: a wild/precise dark comedy, going toward farce, then more poignant---but ending up too The Big Chill for me, off-putting and retrospectively reductive in some ways. But I def. get his range and depth, to some extent---other Ishiguro I should read---?

No clear objections to the actual The Big Chill, far as I can recall, but subsequent arts reminders of it seem too auto-generational re middle-ageing etc. (not nec. Boomer).

I finished A Nervous Splendor, Frederic Morton. Maybe it's because I spent 1600 pages living inside The Man Without Qualities last year, but my enjoyment of this was not as keen as that of other ILB'ers who've praised it in the past.

The larger point of the book was that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was faltering due to its habitually burying problems beneath impressive ritual, and distracting itself with superficialities, giving it a seductive gaiety that papered over its stasis, emptiness and futility. Ironically, it felt like the author's style mirrored the style he attributed to Viennese in general. It was just a bit too flashy, a bit too concerned with building up heroes while dismissively pointing at their feet of clay. In a way, this was the perfect style to deftly mirror his subject matter, but for me it embraced too much of the superficiality and emptiness he was trying to convey and it was oddly unsatisfying.

other Ishiguro I should read---?

I totally loved When We Were Orphans, which I don't hear anyone talk about much; I think I strongly identified with the narrator's status as an immigrant who thinks he's assimilated much more than he actually has. Remains Of The Day is good too, as you may have heard. Both feature sad unreliable narrators.

Tired of unreliable narrators, esp. sad, but whaddayagonnado, sigh. Will check, thanks. Also curious about his allegorical fantasy novel or straight-up fantasy novel or whatever it is.

the three body problem

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a fantasy novel

I am also reading that, and enjoying it immensely, despite some reservations about weird dialogue, but there had best be some good explanations, even if they are handwavy, in the 100p I have left.

i thought its pacing and general appeal slipped quite badly towards the end unfortunately. still think the first half / two thirds was excellent.

reading the second in the trilogy, the dark forest, now. it’s a bit hard going and is more about the grind of preparing for an alien encounter 4.25 light years and multiple generations away, with modelled social implications. i quite like the way liu cixin (劉慈欣) is happy to let societal models play out almost as if they were characters an author allows to make their own decisions rather than forcing them down preconceived plotlines. but it’s not *really* a compelling basis for a novel.

also *lots* of characters who in strugglijg to distinguish.

on the advanced technology / fantasy point thomp, i think i agree. but the retention of scientistic language provides framework linking current day science and plausible future science to “fantasy science”. i’d also ask whether you’d include something that uses a scientific paradigm jump as its basic principle - like teleportation in The Stars My Destination - in that category.

there’s also a consideration, which is also too dull to consider, that much actual physics can feel fantastic, or requiring of a certain amount of faith, if you don’t properly understand the mechanics (as i don’t). tho as i say it’s a pub bore point.

oh different translator too. noticeable i think. and not in a good way. i liked the manner of ken liu’s translation.

Tired of unreliable narrators, esp. sad, but whaddayagonnado, sigh. Will check, thanks. Also curious about his allegorical fantasy novel or straight-up fantasy novel or whatever it is.

I fear unreliable narrators are kinda Ishiguro's thing? I read his fantasy novel - The Buried Giant - recently and thought it was just ok. Reminded me a lot of T.H. White.

Here's my book news:

Glass shelf failure! They’d been good for 15 years... pic.twitter.com/VQlwFcHL1f

— The Half Pint Press (@halfpintpress) March 16, 2018

bleurgh

Jesus Tim I'm sorry.

In my early twenties I had some cheap shelves that I didn't secure too properly and I threw a big party. They collapsed in the middle of a SingStar karaoke session, dozens and dozens of CDs and books flying directly at us.

Calamity! Quite a graceful failure though. Were you home, was it loud?

I keep on meaning to write on the Ishiguro thread about why the Buried Giant is conceptually hugely flawed and bad, and The Unconsoled is a bona fide masterpiece. But not today.

amazing photo!

We weren't home; I wish I'd heard it. It was remarkably civilised of the books to fall downwards rather than outwards. The glass mostly broke very cleanly also, thank goodness.

Not sure what material to use to replace, it's gotta be thin and v strong and not v bendy. Reinforced glass would be perfect but is I think rather expensive.

I'm reading Robert Remini's doorstop bio of Daniel Webster cuz why not. I finished John Kenneth Galbraith's rather forgotten novel A Tenured Professor and hope to start Alan Hollinghurst's latest and Under the Udala Trees, both recommendations after posting my list of my favorite queer fiction.

Carlo Emilio Gadda's The Experience of Pain will be one of the best reads of the year. It's akin to Kafka's America (this pure invention of a place) (which is of course not solely confined to that book, although they were possibly written around at the same time) and, in its misanthropy and general auto-fictional framework brings to mind Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. Its not really written like either and seems like a hodgepodge of styles for its first part, then settles to something more stable and addictive in the second (I do need to go back to part I) and some very powerful pages.

Carrying on the undercover modernism theme I am now giving Tsvetaeva's diaries Earthly Signs - Moscow Diaries: 1917-1922 a once over. I love her prose (Russian prose by poets was a thing) so I am glad to have more of it.

Many xps but the hearing trumpet does indeed take a bit of a swerve toward the end

Starting to notice what could be called a musical effect/approach in some of the xpost Nocturnes: "Crooner"'s (apparently reliable and not too sad)narrator is a young-seeming guitarist from an unnamed, formerly "communist country," as he and other Euros ( def.incl. the trash-talking two-faced gondolier) always refer to it, culturally deprived category being more important than name. He's regarded as an anachronistic but necessary evil by anxious cafe etc. owners around the Venetian plaza: they're afraid the tourists won't see a guitar as traditional enough, even though it's antique-y as possible and the various little folk etc. ensembles sound better with it judging by wine sales etc. One day he spots an American crooner, the one his sad Mom loved from afar, wearing out his records way back in that communist country.

In "Malvern Hills," the narrator is also a young guitarist, who has left school with his little old acoustic, is unable to find work with London band, none of whom want anyone without equipment and pref. transport, especially "one of those wankers who go 'round writing songs, " which he is. He goes to stay with his sister and brother-in-law in their Malvern Hills cafe--they live upstairs, it's actually in the hills, mostly serving locals, they can't afford to pay him, but the idea is he's working for his room and board, the brother-in-law, especially, seems torn between reproaching him for not working harder and feeling guilty for expecting/depending on him to work at all (hey, he's a guest, he's a volunteer, he's family, he's working on songs dammit). Then he meets an older couple from the Continent, who are travelling musicians---pref. experimenting with Swiss folk music, but very often expected by cafe etc.owners to play and dress trad., also to play the Beatles, Carpenters, ABBA (the often loudly positive hubbie looks like Bjorn or Benny might in later middle age). They came after seeing a documentary about Elgar riding these hills on his bicycle (hub loves the look, more mercurial wife later says the area is like a little park).

So the ?musical" part I meant is the way he repeats, varies, recombines elements of characterization and setting and plotting.

Also the phrasing, pacing etc. are fluid enough without every getting gushy.

Finished The Crucible of War, which was an interesting look at a period of history that I haven't read much about since high school. Looking for something a bit lighter now, so I think I'll try Alan Furst's Night Soldiers, which has been lying around the house since my wife bought it, and since I've read some positive things about him on the board.

We went through that song, full of travelling and goodbye. An American man leaving his woman. He keeps thinking of her as he passes through the towns one by one, verse by verse, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma, driving down a long road, the way my mother never could. If only we could leave things behind like that---I guess that's what my mother would have thought. If only sadness could be like that.

I hate when novelists do this

"that song"

All night long
We would sing that stupid song

"that song" in reference to a title he had just mentioned, had mentioned several times.
I like the way his narrators never tell me too much. Why, for instance, after the security guard flips the lights on in the hotel ballroom about 3 a.m. to see what the ruckus is, does the LAPD cop not more extensively question the man and woman standing on stage? They tell him they've been looking for munchies, and he does wonder aloud why room service isn't good enough for them, judging by his own experience---he's a guest too; maybe he's off duty and on vacation, just wearing a suit and carrying his badge when the guard calls, but wanting to get back to his plush room (how can a cop afford this ritzy place?) The lady he's interviewing is wearing a very fine bathrobe, the fact that she and the gentleman are wearing bandages that cover their whole heads, except for mouths and eyes, evidently working in there somewhere, are further indications of status, which he may take into account (LAPD prob knows about the context). Better to back off, for now anyway.
And maybe the guy who sees them on another night, and comes up with his own tentative explanation in the form of a question, also knows when to go about his business, in this town of endless business permutations. The co-stars of "Nocturne" mean to stay on point too, but they just have to take the scenic route, especially when they get to the "go back to cover our tracks" fallacy (not so far from "spend money to make money," a given here). But there's much more to it---not too much, just typically spare and graceful and energetically generating textured details all along, for the right number of pages, although I hope the last story won't go to a downtempo ending, as usual----its titled "Cellists," so not expecting fireworks finale.

Finished A Room With A View. It does indeed feature a stronger positive female character than anything in Forster so far; it's also interesting that the book is actually quite affectionate towards the deadly Suburbs that Forster so despised in his previous two novels (all three written more or less at the same time, to be sure); Cecil, with his disdain for the family and high aspirations towards Art, is almost a dark version of Ansel from The Longest Journey. I repped for that book so long that now it's creaking a bit under the weight - and the breezy feeling of A Room With A View feels superior, which I guess lands me back into conventional wisdom. Howards End and A Passage To India should arrive at my local bookshop Monday. My first new purchases - I'd not read Room With A View before but had it laying around for years.

I just read the Life of Alfred the Great by the contemporary monk named Asser. It was hardly scintillating narrative prose, really very flat, barren even, but it has the virtue of brevity and does throw some light on a very unfamiliar period of English history, when the Vikings were about as powerful as the Saxons and ruled a good swath of now-English territory. I read a translation by Simon Keynes that was in a larger Penguin Classics volume about Alfred.

It's hard to commission this shit when you're still alive, and I worried about kids reading it.

Tore through a handful of books the last couple of weeks: lidia yuknavitch the book of Joan, Jennifer Egan look at me, chris petit the butchers of Berlin, trey ellis platitudes - all diverting and interesting and I might work up something half intelligent to say about some of them at some point but not today (I will say that platitudes has some of the funniest bits I've read in awhile); and now I'm on page 8 of correction and I feel like I'm wading through tar

So "Cellists," the last story in xpost Nocturnes, turns out to be a strong finish. Continuing the recombinant flow, we go back to the opening "Crooner"'s setting, the Venetian Piazza San Marco, with the hopeful cafe managers and tourists and pigeons and musos. "The big Czech guy with the alto sax," mentioned by the "Crooner" guitarist-narrator, tells this one, and an American lady appears, with a secret, a talent, a calling, none of them quite the same, keep thinking she's also from a story by Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, even, vibe-wise, Jane Bowen---but mainly she's another driving, veering, purposeful, impulsive, compulsive, improvising self-projecting muse-agents in the winter of discontent, racing the clock or feeling it, at least, one of the ones in all these stories (one's in two).
Good stuff. Could be quite different from the novels in some ways, at least judging by descriptions in the endpages of this Vintage International trade pb: grafs re An Artist of the Floating World, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills,The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, and When We Were Orphans.

Jane Bowles, not Bowen, of course! Sorry, Jane!

Just to confuse things further - there's an English photographer named Jane Bown. Here's a picture Bown took of Bowen:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/15/elizabeth-bowen-author-fiction

After dipping into James Baldwin's essays on Sunday night, last night I switched over to start one of his novels, Another Country, Lord Alfred's relative estimations of Baldwin as a great essayist and mediocre novelist notwithstanding.

Ooof. That's harsh - Another Country may not cohere, precisely, but goddamn the constituent parts are extraordinary.

Gillian Rose - Love's Work. Reflections on death, medicine (western or otherwise), love, relationships and philosophy as the author approaches the end game in her battle with cancer. I loved the last 10 pages (they were a strange experience - how is she going to end this? It felt like the middle of the book), in the manner which she turned the density of philosophical reflection into an 'ending' that was one and yet didn't feel like one - of life and learning, with the willingness to learn and live and love - and to the last second. You are sure it carried on until the last breath, beyond the last page of the book in which you are holding.

Now more love - onto The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

You'll find the letters are rather more chaste and philosophical than ardent. The infamous consequence of their relationship for Peter Abelard doesn't get much play in the letters. Or at least, it used to be infamous. Lots of these old iconic stories are getting buried under the onslaught of contemporary media.

I know about it cos it was in The Sopranos :)

the sexy version is rousseau's julie

Eudora Welty: The Ponder Heart -- objectively this is pretty good, but not sure that my own tolerance for the endless blather of a folksy racist hasn't been exceeded by p35

I felt the same way - I pressed on and was pleased I did but I haven’t gone back to Welty.

Haven't read the novels or novellas, but much enjoyed what I've read in The Collected Stories(1982 edition); reliable sources have encouraged me to read One Writer's Beginnings and On Writing, also
collection of correspondence w William Maxwell, ditto Kenneth Millar AKA Ross MacDonald (reliables have also endorsed the longer fiction, but I may not get to any that, or any more of hers). Oh and I liked a collection of her photography and an exhibition of same, with some pix not in the book, but related to stories, views of the Natchez Trace etc.

Her short stories and photos are definitely great. I think I just have an allergy to the sort of Southern whimsy 'Ponder Heart' is strong in.

I love this photo she took of Katherine Anne Porter, who i also read some of and loved recently

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/1c/1b/181c1b769f2ccd3beaf658448bea8660.jpg

Wow. Reminds me: where should I start with her writing?

'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' is a set of 3 novellas you can't go wrong with. The last one is set during the outbreak of the 1918 'Spanish' flu.

New thread: 2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?