Aquest tema està marcat com "inactiu": L'últim missatge és de fa més de 90 dies. Podeu revifar-lo enviant una resposta.
1dcozy
When a skeleton is introduced in the first chapters of a hard-boiled detective novel one can be certain that the bones will get rattled in the final chapter. The bones got rattled in The Ivory Grin, the first in my ongoing survey of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels in this, the year of the horse. It won't be the last.
2dcozy
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's Insatiability fluctuates beween being unputdownable and unreadable. For the moment the latter has come to the fore, in part because a chest cold from hell that puts a check on the energy I need when sailing the wilder shores of Eastern European literature. I needed a break, and the cool integrity, exquisite prose, and carefully crafted interiors of Frances Towers's collection of short Stories, Tea with Mr. Rochester has proven just the thing. A recurring character in these stories is the literary daughter, who stands back, observes, and records. This, of course, would describe Towers herself, but it makes her sound too minor. Though she died before this, her first collection of stories, appeared, it is hard to disagree with Angus Wilson who writes, "it appears no exaggeration to say that her death in 1948 may have robbed us of a figure of more than purely contemporary significance." These are stories to be savored, and savored again.
3dcozy
Miserableness is generally considered the hallmark of a serious artist. Artemis Cooper's fine biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, a man who was privileged to live a happy life that he enjoyed to the hilt, and while doing so managed to produce a few good books, reminds us how unnecessary and unpleasant miserableness is. Travel, books, and friendship were at the center of Patrick Leigh Fermor's life, and anyone who shares a passion for those things will enjoy reading Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure—and envy its subject just a little, too.
4LolaWalser
Agh! Missed you somehow! I hope you are well recovered! Never heard of Frances Towers, thanks for the introduction.
5tomcatMurr
Hope you're well too. Is it as cold and miserable in Japan as it is in Taipei right now? We've been getting clouds of freezing pollution from the Mainland and I wonder if that's been reaching you too. Wonder if that might be responsible for your chest cold. I've been having respiratory problems too this winter.
Thanks for the Artemis Cooper heads up. PLF has always been one of my heroes.
I've been meaning to read Insatiability for ages, but finding a copy is very hard. how did you get yours?
Thanks for the Artemis Cooper heads up. PLF has always been one of my heroes.
I've been meaning to read Insatiability for ages, but finding a copy is very hard. how did you get yours?
6dcozy
Murr: It's nice here, but cold. In fact, Tokyo had it's biggest snowfall in something like forty years last Saturday night/Sunday. I was over my cold, and it was a weekend, so I got to stay in the nice warm inside, watching the snow fall outside. That my wife and I indulged in a bottle of champagne made it all the nicer.
I got Insatiability used through Amazon. It wasn't hard to find, but a bit pricy. It cost me US$31.00 plus shipping, which seemed like a good idea at the time.
I got Insatiability used through Amazon. It wasn't hard to find, but a bit pricy. It cost me US$31.00 plus shipping, which seemed like a good idea at the time.
7dcozy
Kazushi Hosaka's Plainsong is a plain song indeed, a novel of the mundane. In offering a reader a novel with no apparent action he is taking a risk, but careful reading reveals that something significant does happen in the book, and it is perfectly foreshadowed by the appearance of a stray kitten at the novel's beginning: the friends who populate the novel turn into a family. That friends can form a family is an idea that seems a bit old in 2014—are there any sitcoms that don't have this premise these days?—but Hosaka's book, we must remember, came out in 1990, and not in the West but in Japan.
8dcozy
Lola: Do check out Frances Towers. It's a shame she didn't live to write more. She's actually a perfect NYRB author, but I guess Persephone rediscovered her first.
9LolaWalser
I got to stay in the nice warm inside, watching the snow fall outside. That my wife and I indulged in a bottle of champagne made it all the nicer.
Did you write poems on the occasion to each other?! Did you gently sway the sleeves of your kimono to release the scent of incense sachets hidden inside?! Was the sound of the snow hitting the window pane like the pitter-patter of furry feet on ice?
Did you write poems on the occasion to each other?! Did you gently sway the sleeves of your kimono to release the scent of incense sachets hidden inside?! Was the sound of the snow hitting the window pane like the pitter-patter of furry feet on ice?
10tomcatMurr
did you chop each other's head off like Lucy Liu in Kill Bill 1?
sorry, lol couldn't resist……
Glad you are over your cold.
sorry, lol couldn't resist……
Glad you are over your cold.
12dcozy
They Were Counted is the first book in a trilogy published in Hungary in the 1930s and '40s. Anyone reading this first entry will be happy that it is a trilogy, that having finished it one is not expelled from Edwardian-era Hungary, a world unfamiliar and fascinating. Miklós Bánffy has populated this world with human beings—Hungarian aristocrats for the most part—who are entirely convincing even as they live a social round that will be strange to all of us except for the glimpses we've seen of it in literature: we follow two cousins as they move from ball to hunt to duel to casino, from mountain castles to town houses in Budapest, and watch one destroy himself with debauchery, and the other try diligently to do the right thing as a large landowner and a politician. All of it is fascinating, elegantly and leisurely told.
13LolaWalser
I'm looking forward to this (projected reading date cca 2030, Allah willing). Hungarian aristocracy was a curious social order (and apparently unique), with super-complex interplays of hierarchies and privileges, and more "types" of aristocracy than anywhere else. For instance, entire villages could be certified as "noble"--unrelated to the lord of the realm, and possibly in conflict with them. I read somewhere that one in five Hungarians has claims on nobility.
14dcozy
I'm deep into the second volume of Bánffy's trilogy, Lola, and I'm happy to report that this trilogy doesn't, like so many, sag in the middle. Something that I've noticed that is quite interesting is how much agency the women have, and—not unrelated—how much extracurricular bonking goes on. It seems to be more or less expected that men will pursue married women (up to and including arranging serenades by gypsy orchestras outside their windows in the middle of the night) and that the married women will sometimes reciprocate—not with orchestras, but with something better. Yes attempts are made to keep daughters "pure," and the forms are observed (when somebody's looking), but the Hungarian aristocrats seem a lively and randy set.
15dcozy
Find a Victim, my latest foray into the Lew Archer saga, seems slightly less well-constructed than the others, but still, there are sentences, paragraphs, and pages that bring a smile. Also, further hints are dropped about Archer's past. Will we, as the series progresses, be able to assemble the pieces of Archer's life that Macdonald gives us into a coherent character?
16dcozy
Anyone who's ever paid attention to Steely Dan's lyrics knows that Donald Fagen can write. They will also know how he writes: cynically, sardonically, and with consummate style. That carries over to his prose in this book, Eminent Hipsters, the first half of which is a series of essays about the eminent hipsters--Henry Mancini, Ike Turner, Ray Charles, et al--of the title, artists who showed young Donald, when he was growing up in suburban New Jersey, "how to interpret (his) own world." (Note that the use of the word "eminent" with regard to these hipsters is a rare example of Fagen not being ironic.) The second half is a diary he kept while on a Dukes of September tour in which he makes it clear that going on tour when you're sixty-four is a very different thing than going on tour when you're twenty-four. One reviewer suggested that Fagen was channeling his crabby Uncle Morty as he bussed from venue to venue. If that's the case, Uncle Morty was very funny indeed.
17tomcatMurr
sounds kind like Uncle Monty in Withnail and I
18LolaWalser
Would anyone like a firm, young carrrrot?
19dcozy
A lot of trilogies sag in the middle. This one doesn't. Indeed, rather than seeming like a discrete entity, Miklós Bánffy's They Were Found Wanting is a seamless continuation of what has come before and is just as excellent. We continue to watch as one cousin loses himself to debauchery (and maybe loses his life--we're left uncertain), while the other tries to live up to what he sees as his responsibilities as an aristocrat and a land-owner while at the same time he continues to be involved in an affair with a married woman whose husband is fond of firearms and far from stable. As this volume proceeds it calls to mind more and more "The Grand Illusion." The aristocrats dance and play and the politicians concern themselves with trifles as Europe skates closer and closer to the disaster of World War I.
20dcozy
I've never seen Withnail and I, but boy does it come highly recommended. I'll have to remedy that.
21dcozy
Scientologists, Nazis, alien-abduction enthusiasts, rock glitterati, science fiction writers who take themselves entirely too seriously: Southern California has them all, and they all strut their stuff in Jake Arnott's novel House of Rumour, along with real-life oddities like the Ayn Randian borderline-fascist sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein, scientologist-in-chief L. Ron Hubbard, and physicist and occultist Jack Parsons. Arnott successfully choreographs this ragbag of Southern Californian eccentricity (and worse) into an engaging novel that is a successful depiction of that charged locale in the immediate aftermath of World War II, a time when the space program was just taking off, and science fiction writers and readers saw their dreams coming true (thanks in part to the conveniently de-Nazified physicists now at work in the hills above Pasadena). Lay over this an occult grid—which may be just a creation of various countries' secret services, or maybe not—and one has a picture of the times at once accurate and intriguingly bent.
22LolaWalser
Interesting. I've several books about European exiles and war refugees in California and I'm curious about the atmosphere of that place and time.
23tomcatMurr
sounds fascinating.
24dcozy
House of Rumour was good, though it focuses more on the local eccentrics than the emigrés. A significant bit of the novel takes place in England, too.
25dcozy
One can't expect a trilogy of novels that climaxes with the advent of World War I to end happily, and Bánffy's masterful trilogy, which concludes with They Were Divided, does not. He sees the war as having been avoidable, and that it was not avoided as a disaster. The political thread that forms a significant part of the novels is bleak, and so are the stories of the characters' lives. The cousin whose self-destruction we have followed comes to a sad end, as does the romance Balint, the upright and well-meaning cousin, has pursued for years. The three novels together form a fascinating ride through pivotal years in Hungarian and Central European history, a history I now wish to know better.
26LolaWalser
It is a dark and stormy night...
27tomcatMurr
I need to get this, it sounds really great.
28dcozy
I've never really warmed to the English jocular tradition, but I've just finished, with real enjoyment, a Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy Sayers: Murder Must Advertise. The mystery is . . . well, who really cares who done it . . . but the incidental observations, the jaundiced view of advertising (Wimsey is embedded at an advertising agency), and the fun with language made the novel a great deal of fun. Perhaps I'm growing up . . . or old. Maybe I'll finally get P.G. Wodehouse?
29tomcatMurr
Wodehouse is great if you're in the mood, otherwise he can be fairly irritating. Have you tried Saki?
30LolaWalser
#28
That one may be my favourite Sayers! Always the first recommendation.
Wodehouse is something else entirely and as Murr says, the mood must be right. I kept picking him up from my teens through my thirties and quickly dropping. Never made it past the first page. Then for no reason I can discern something clicked a few years ago and I snarfled through several Blandings novels within days. I count him as a mood-improver these days.
But, it is like stuffing yourself with the airiest of meringues. It can be done in vast quantities, limits are reached nevertheless.
That one may be my favourite Sayers! Always the first recommendation.
Wodehouse is something else entirely and as Murr says, the mood must be right. I kept picking him up from my teens through my thirties and quickly dropping. Never made it past the first page. Then for no reason I can discern something clicked a few years ago and I snarfled through several Blandings novels within days. I count him as a mood-improver these days.
But, it is like stuffing yourself with the airiest of meringues. It can be done in vast quantities, limits are reached nevertheless.
32dcozy
Ah, maybe I got lucky and found just the right Sayers at the Goodwill shop last time i was in the States. I tried Gaudy Night in the past, because I think that's the first in the series, but bounced off it like a rubber ball.
33LolaWalser
Oh, I love Gaudy night--it's not the first tho', in the Harriet Vane sequence Strong poison comes first. There's series info on LT if you like to read in order.
I've been meaning to tell you about reading Ross' Mishima's sword but now I can't remember what. Have you met Ross? I found the book interesting but not for reasons one might expect, as it ended up being rather thin on Mishima (or his sword).
I came across an interesting recommendation for a Mishima biography (I believe you mentioned it/read it, Persona by Naoki Inose) after reading Tezuka's The book of human insects. It's a bit difficult to explain one in the terms of another if you haven't read the latter, so I'll only say I think it's an illuminating connection. Not that I think Mishima was essentially "empty" like Tezuka's heroine--on the contrary, he might have suffered from an excess of "character".
On the commute I'm reading some nasty fifties pulp, chosen at random. I just finished a Willeford novel in which the hero has a prominent Mother problem/fixation, and now Jim Thompson in A swell-looking babe ups the same old ante. Keeps one awake, anyway.
I've been meaning to tell you about reading Ross' Mishima's sword but now I can't remember what. Have you met Ross? I found the book interesting but not for reasons one might expect, as it ended up being rather thin on Mishima (or his sword).
I came across an interesting recommendation for a Mishima biography (I believe you mentioned it/read it, Persona by Naoki Inose) after reading Tezuka's The book of human insects. It's a bit difficult to explain one in the terms of another if you haven't read the latter, so I'll only say I think it's an illuminating connection. Not that I think Mishima was essentially "empty" like Tezuka's heroine--on the contrary, he might have suffered from an excess of "character".
On the commute I'm reading some nasty fifties pulp, chosen at random. I just finished a Willeford novel in which the hero has a prominent Mother problem/fixation, and now Jim Thompson in A swell-looking babe ups the same old ante. Keeps one awake, anyway.
34dcozy
Cats. If you spend any time at all on the Internet, and you're not a cat person yourself, you've had enough of them, even when they're riding on Roombas. It would be a shame, though, if the same impulse--quite a healthy impulse--that makes you scroll past the cat pics on Facebook caused you to miss novels like Mieko Kanai's Oh, Tama!.
Tama is a cat, but the novel is not about cats, and indeed Tama, gravid when when we first meet her, seldom emerges from the closet where she nurses the kittens she soon has after being dumped on our protagonist, a sporadically employed free-lance photographer called Noriyuki. She is in the novel for a reason, though. It is unlikely she could identify the father of her kittens, and Oh, Tama! has much to do with parents, or rather paternity, and children. We see, as the novel unfolds, how several characters who lack strong family ties form a family of sorts for themselves, a family with all the ambivalence of a biological family.
If that sounds trite--isn't this the premise of several popular TV shows now?--it isn't. The odd bits of life that Kanai captures in the interactions of these characters draw us in even as they are never exactly important. This novel is one in a series of "Mejiro" (a Tokyo neighborhood) novels that Kanai has produced. Upon finishing this one I immediately ordered the only other entry that's been translated into English. One character who I'm sure will recur is the "lady novelist" who falls asleep at parties.
Tama is a cat, but the novel is not about cats, and indeed Tama, gravid when when we first meet her, seldom emerges from the closet where she nurses the kittens she soon has after being dumped on our protagonist, a sporadically employed free-lance photographer called Noriyuki. She is in the novel for a reason, though. It is unlikely she could identify the father of her kittens, and Oh, Tama! has much to do with parents, or rather paternity, and children. We see, as the novel unfolds, how several characters who lack strong family ties form a family of sorts for themselves, a family with all the ambivalence of a biological family.
If that sounds trite--isn't this the premise of several popular TV shows now?--it isn't. The odd bits of life that Kanai captures in the interactions of these characters draw us in even as they are never exactly important. This novel is one in a series of "Mejiro" (a Tokyo neighborhood) novels that Kanai has produced. Upon finishing this one I immediately ordered the only other entry that's been translated into English. One character who I'm sure will recur is the "lady novelist" who falls asleep at parties.
35dcozy
This is the third Japanese novel I've read in a row in which cats play an important part. None of these books, though, are what might be called cat books, though the cat in Takashi Hiraide's The Guest Cat, Chibi, has a larger role than the felines in the other novels. Chibi, though he actually belongs to their neighbors, enters the lives of a couple, both free-lance writers, living in a leafy Tokyo neighborhood. As the couple become more involved with the cat, they also seem to become more engaged with life and with each other. In a simpler novel, that would be the story: an animal friend helps its people wake up to the beauty of life. Cats die, though, and cottages in leafy Tokyo neighborhoods with rents that free-lancers can afford are just as transitory. The narrative becomes complicated, and also the manner in which it is told: we learn that the novel we are reading is, in part, an account of its own creation, an act which may not, without Chibi, have taken place.
36LolaWalser
I got a Japanese book involving a cat too! (The Shadow of a blue cat, Ii Naoyuki) It's all your fault.
Maybe it's something about the cats' imputed interiority meshing with the Japanese... mentality, style, aesthetics? the best?
Maybe it's something about the cats' imputed interiority meshing with the Japanese... mentality, style, aesthetics? the best?
37dcozy
The Detachment is a satisfying installment in Barry Eisler's John Rain series. Rain continues to grow in complexity as a character, but I fear that in an effort to make each book a bit more sensational than the last Eisler may have written himself into a corner (actually, there are probably books subsequent to this one, but I haven't checked). The Detachment gives us not Rain against a few sleazy bad buys, or even a formidable underworld empire. In this one he's busy thwarting a coup in the United States. What next? Space aliens?
38tomcatMurr
zombies!
39dcozy
Ever since cities began to become the place we live now they have been a source of anxiety. The anxiety seems to have been born of first, the anonymity that cities afford--no one knows who you are--and the way in which this threatens our identity, and second, the promiscuous mixing that city life involves with strangers of different genders and of all races and classes.
Though one would think we would have grown comfortable with the anonymity and promiscuity of city-life by now, novels such as Hisaki Matsuura's Triangle suggest that cities still make some of us nervous, perhaps because cities, particularly those as multifarious as Tokyo, are rich with possibility and peril: anything can happen.
We might, for example, when walking at dusk, "known as omagatoki, 'the time of evil encounters'" run into, as Matsuura's protagonist does, an old acquaintance who, wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts, appears to be waiting for us, and our encounter with him might just propel us into a gothic nightmare that will include hidden gardens containing steamy conservatories in which sinister philosopher-pornographers hold forth on the cyclical nature of time, and whose machinations will eventually lead us into rivers that run deep under Tokyo.
We will, opening Matsuura's Triangle, be propelled into a psycho-geographically informed version of city life, one whose gothic darkness is unresolved at novel's end.
Though one would think we would have grown comfortable with the anonymity and promiscuity of city-life by now, novels such as Hisaki Matsuura's Triangle suggest that cities still make some of us nervous, perhaps because cities, particularly those as multifarious as Tokyo, are rich with possibility and peril: anything can happen.
We might, for example, when walking at dusk, "known as omagatoki, 'the time of evil encounters'" run into, as Matsuura's protagonist does, an old acquaintance who, wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts, appears to be waiting for us, and our encounter with him might just propel us into a gothic nightmare that will include hidden gardens containing steamy conservatories in which sinister philosopher-pornographers hold forth on the cyclical nature of time, and whose machinations will eventually lead us into rivers that run deep under Tokyo.
We will, opening Matsuura's Triangle, be propelled into a psycho-geographically informed version of city life, one whose gothic darkness is unresolved at novel's end.
40dcozy
So much did I enjoy Mieko Kanai's Oh, Tama! that I quickly got my hands on the only other book in her Mejiro series that's been translated into English, Indian Summer. This first-person account of a young woman newly arrived in Tokyo to attend university is filled with wit and pleasantly acerbic takes on city life, movies, literature, and human beings. "Chick lit" is often used as a derogatory term, and surely a lot of the books that fly that banner deserve all the derogation they get (in this they're no different than dick-lit--Tom Clancy, et al), but as with every other genre (including literary fiction) mixed in with the lumps of coal there are some real gems. This is one of them.
41tomcatMurr
Hisaki Matsuura's Triangle sounds extremely interesting!
42LolaWalser
Indeed. I'm intrigued by Kanai too. Sounds like it could serve as a neat comparison to Amélie Nothomb's Japanese books.
43dcozy
Hisaki Matsuura's Triangle: my Japan Times review: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/05/17/books/book-reviews/decadence-time...
44LolaWalser
Interesting. Again that discomfort about women. Reminds me of a movie, Miike's Audition.
45dcozy
Native Americans: a culture destroyed, relegated to dusty reservations, alcoholic and hopeless. Native Americans: wise stewards of the Earth who remain dignified in spite of the indignities they have suffered. These are the images that spring all too readily to the minds of many of us who are not Native Americans. It takes a writer like Gerald Vizenor, "citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota," to show us that these images are insufficient, to de-exoticize the native cultures that have been viewed through lenses that distort. In Blue Ravens he tells us the story of two Anishinaabe brothers who, as we follow them from the reservation on which they grow up, through the trenches of World War I, back to the reservation, and back to Paris where, writer and artist, they enter the Bohemian artistic world of that place and time. Vizenor teaches us much, though the characters he creates, about our history, our present, and our relation with those we've been taught to consider "other," and he does it in a fashion that does credit to the trickster tales that have inspired him.
46dcozy
With Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway Sara Gran gives us a worthy follow-up to City of the Dead, the novel in which we were introduced to her sleuth. Gran skillfully weaves together two investigations, one in the past and mostly set in New York's East Village, and one in the present and mostly set in Northern California. For the detective DeWitt, detection continues to be a mystical calling fueled by lots of drugs. She does a line of coke about as often as the protagonists of Hemingway novels have a drink, and like Hemingway's drinkers, she is still mostly able to function . . . until she isn't. We'll find out more about that, I expect, in the next installment.
47LolaWalser
Whoa, that's a curious characteristic to give a female sleuth. I've never known any who weren't insufferable Goody Two-Shoeses.
48dcozy
That is an interesting point. The main character, while fairly interesting to read about, is certainly not someone you'd particularly want to know (and I would say the same thing if she were male). The book definitely does pass the Bechdel Test in spades (as do Mieko Kanai's novels, particularly Indian Summer, which I wrote about above.
49LolaWalser
I'm not fussed about the Bechdel test when it comes to my own reading. It's useful statistically, but I already know I've been bent and corrupted beyond repair by dead white men.
Trying to recall ANY female character that's depicted in the fashion of the many male "grey" characters--you know the sort, neither virtuous nor downright vicious, louche, lots of faults, bad habits, but still functions, blends in with lowlife but can act honourably... nobody writes women like that.
Trying to recall ANY female character that's depicted in the fashion of the many male "grey" characters--you know the sort, neither virtuous nor downright vicious, louche, lots of faults, bad habits, but still functions, blends in with lowlife but can act honourably... nobody writes women like that.
50dcozy
The mix of gritty, urban, all too believable,near-future anomie in Sarah Pinborough's A Matter of Blood and fantasy of a kind that has nothing to do with swords or lords, intrigued me enough to start the book. As I moved through it, though, I often found myself thinking that it really wasn't gripping enough to keep on with. Until it was, and I'm now I'm thinking I'll probably continue through the trilogy.
51dcozy
Veronica Gonzalez Peña quotes the photographer Francesca Goldman quoting Proust: "A person, scattered in space and time, is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble problems."
In this account of a family of women whose lives bear the imprint placed on them by the insane mother Peña employs their varied voices to shed light on just these insoluble problems. The Sad Passions is another fascinating and challenging text from Semiotext(e), one of our most interesting publishers.
In this account of a family of women whose lives bear the imprint placed on them by the insane mother Peña employs their varied voices to shed light on just these insoluble problems. The Sad Passions is another fascinating and challenging text from Semiotext(e), one of our most interesting publishers.
52dcozy
Qiu Miaojin includes André Gide’s description of the book he wrote about his marriage, “What’s unique about our story is that it has no obvious contours,” in Last Words from Montmartre, a novel that, she tells us, features “a plot that has long since disappeared.” That these reflections on narrative are part of Last Words, the novel they serve to elucidate, and that they are apt, places Qiu’s novel squarely at the avant-garde end of the literary spectrum. As such, it will not be for everyone. It will, however, be very much for those who are avid for the enduring pleasure a novelist gives when she offers something more than a book with which to kill a couple hours.
Last Words from Montmartre is not a book with which to kill time; it is a book about how love, passion, and life can lead one to kill oneself, as Qiu’s protagonist seems likely to do at novel’s end, as Qiu herself did a year after she moved from her birthplace, Taiwan, to Paris to do graduate work. It is not clear whether Qiu’s life and death can be mapped onto that of the woman who writes the letters of which the novel is composed, but it is refreshing that, though Qiu’s protagonist is, like herself, a lesbian, it is not lesbianism and society’s sometimes less than welcoming reaction to those who love their own sex that leads to the protagonist’s suicide, but rather passion unrequited, frustration at not being loved by the object of desire, of not being lovable enough. Qiu, in Ari Larissa Heinrich’s fluent translation, makes this agony art.
Last Words from Montmartre is not a book with which to kill time; it is a book about how love, passion, and life can lead one to kill oneself, as Qiu’s protagonist seems likely to do at novel’s end, as Qiu herself did a year after she moved from her birthplace, Taiwan, to Paris to do graduate work. It is not clear whether Qiu’s life and death can be mapped onto that of the woman who writes the letters of which the novel is composed, but it is refreshing that, though Qiu’s protagonist is, like herself, a lesbian, it is not lesbianism and society’s sometimes less than welcoming reaction to those who love their own sex that leads to the protagonist’s suicide, but rather passion unrequited, frustration at not being loved by the object of desire, of not being lovable enough. Qiu, in Ari Larissa Heinrich’s fluent translation, makes this agony art.
53dcozy
Steve Martin, a very funny man, says Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is the funniest book he ever read. I'm not sure it beats out Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my personal pantheon of funny books, but Dyer's Rage has certainly entered that pantheon.
The book is an account of how Dyer sets out to write a sober academic study of D.H. Lawrence and how he fails to do so. It does contain insights into Lawrence, but those are eclipsed by accounts of Dyer's procrastination, neuroticism, hypochondria, and, in a way that is almost Nicholson Bakeresque, the minutiae of his life. This is a must-read for those of us who like to think of ourselves as writers but (unlike Dyer) don't actually write much.
The book is an account of how Dyer sets out to write a sober academic study of D.H. Lawrence and how he fails to do so. It does contain insights into Lawrence, but those are eclipsed by accounts of Dyer's procrastination, neuroticism, hypochondria, and, in a way that is almost Nicholson Bakeresque, the minutiae of his life. This is a must-read for those of us who like to think of ourselves as writers but (unlike Dyer) don't actually write much.
54LolaWalser
>52 dcozy:
Sold in two short paragraphs!
Sounds like it would be interesting to compare with something I've read recently, Edouard Levé 's Suicide and Autoportrait (he actually went and killed himself, poor thing--but it was basically a given, he was suicidal all his life).
I'm not sure what the medical consensus is (whether there is one), but one thing that struck me reading Night falls fast was the apparent rejection of any possibility that there could be suicide without depression, without a definite and probably long-standing organic problem. The doctors don't seem to believe anyone kills themselves because of unrequited love.
Sold in two short paragraphs!
Sounds like it would be interesting to compare with something I've read recently, Edouard Levé 's Suicide and Autoportrait (he actually went and killed himself, poor thing--but it was basically a given, he was suicidal all his life).
I'm not sure what the medical consensus is (whether there is one), but one thing that struck me reading Night falls fast was the apparent rejection of any possibility that there could be suicide without depression, without a definite and probably long-standing organic problem. The doctors don't seem to believe anyone kills themselves because of unrequited love.
55tomcatMurr
>52 dcozy:, yes indeed sounds wonderful. Qiu is something of a queer icon here, but I have never read anything by her. Great that she is translated and published by NYRB.
56dcozy
In China's major cities there is an elite one percent or so that drives nice cars, eats in nice restaurants, and generally lives pleasant lives, thanks in large part to the ninety-nine percent, the migrants from the country who've moved to those big cities looking for big breaks, willing to work two, three, or four, jobs to survive. Of course some of them turn to petty crime: the hawking of pirated DVDs and fake IDs, prostitution.
Xu Zechen's novel, Running Through Beijing, features characters from this hustling underclass, and follows one of them, Dunhuang, on his adventures in Beijing selling DVDs, dodging cops, and navigating relationships with women who are similarly engaged. The novel, like its protagonist, runs though Beijing, leaving us with a tale that can only be called picaresque, and that makes us wonder why that fictional template is not more often used.
Xu Zechen's novel, Running Through Beijing, features characters from this hustling underclass, and follows one of them, Dunhuang, on his adventures in Beijing selling DVDs, dodging cops, and navigating relationships with women who are similarly engaged. The novel, like its protagonist, runs though Beijing, leaving us with a tale that can only be called picaresque, and that makes us wonder why that fictional template is not more often used.
57dcozy
In Never Any End to Paris Enrique Vila-Matas has given us a novel about a lecture about his time as a young in Paris trying to write a novel while living in a garret owned by Marguerite Duras. He manages to be at once formally interesting, funny, and penetrating about living in Paris in particular, and living as an expatriate in general, about the Parisian literary and bohemian demimonde, and about what writing is and can be. He is an avant-garde writer for those who like to smile while they are amazed.
58dcozy
Ross Macdonald was a perceptive, witty, and cynical observer of that odd piece of the world, Southern California. That being the case, it was inevitable that he would, from time to time, turn his attention to Hollywood. Much of The Barbarous Coast takes place in Malibu, up the coast from that provincial neighborhood, but as Malibu is largely a playground for the denizens of Hollywood, The Barbarous Coast can still be counted as a Hollywood novel, perhaps not one of the great ones, but still, a worthy consideration of that provincial scene and an excellent further installment in the investigations of, and the investigation of, Macdonald's detective, Lew Archer.
59dcozy
"There seems to be no prospect," writes Ian Patterson near the end of Guernica and Total War, "of a let-up in the use of bombing, all over the world." Gaza is only the most recent confirmation of this grim vision.
Patterson's book is an excellent primer in how we, and especially the artists and writers among us, attempt to come to terms with life that "still takes place under a sky that may one day fall on all our heads."
I have long understood that there's no such thing as tactical bombing (aka: surgical strikes). I have long reminded friends who support this sort of intervention that all bombing strikes are strategic, designed to create chaos and sew terror in the population.
Patterson has convinced me that I was only half-right about this. He points out, that the term "'strategic bombing," or rather the indiscriminate bombing of civilians . . . was no more than a propaganda tool. The wild inaccuracy of most bombing meant that most of the damage it caused could not be described as intentional. But the claim that it was strategic seemed to make the bombing part of a plan, gave it a higher purpose, so that the civilian deaths it necessarily entailed were somehow also excused."
I agree with Vera Britain that "obliteration bombing" is a more accurate term.
What a wonderful world.
Patterson's book is an excellent primer in how we, and especially the artists and writers among us, attempt to come to terms with life that "still takes place under a sky that may one day fall on all our heads."
I have long understood that there's no such thing as tactical bombing (aka: surgical strikes). I have long reminded friends who support this sort of intervention that all bombing strikes are strategic, designed to create chaos and sew terror in the population.
Patterson has convinced me that I was only half-right about this. He points out, that the term "'strategic bombing," or rather the indiscriminate bombing of civilians . . . was no more than a propaganda tool. The wild inaccuracy of most bombing meant that most of the damage it caused could not be described as intentional. But the claim that it was strategic seemed to make the bombing part of a plan, gave it a higher purpose, so that the civilian deaths it necessarily entailed were somehow also excused."
I agree with Vera Britain that "obliteration bombing" is a more accurate term.
What a wonderful world.
60LolaWalser
Not to worry, it's all good, Jesus loves us, and God has a plan.
I just finished Paul Fussell's The Great War and modern memory (a mixed bag of striking insight and speciousness) and it's no fun to realise that not only have we not stopped lying about war, we're lying about it more than ever.
I just finished Paul Fussell's The Great War and modern memory (a mixed bag of striking insight and speciousness) and it's no fun to realise that not only have we not stopped lying about war, we're lying about it more than ever.
61dcozy
It's been years since I've read the other great American novel, Moby Dick, and I'm glad I did set out again, because this voyage was even more rewarding than the first. I had forgotten so much: how engaging a narrator Ishmael (let's call him that) is, how Shakespearean especially the second half of the book is, how the novel is perhaps among the first entries in a strand of American fiction that I'll call the encyclopedic (though the whale's also present in Ezra Pound's approach to poetry), and also how insightful the book remains about humanity. They don't call them classics for nothing.
62dcozy
Teju Cole's first novel, Every Day is for the Thief, is similar to his second novel (the first one published outside of Nigeria), the justly lauded Open City in that both feature a protagonist exploring a city. In Open City the metropolis is New York; in Every Day it is Lagos, and in each case the protagonist is a young and cultured Nigerian not unlike Teju Cole, who due to his upbringing as well as personal predilections is an outsider--or feels himself to be one--in the city through which he wanders. The prose is quiet but exquisite; the form straddles the line between essay and fiction; and the revelations, such as they are, are subtle, with those threatening to poke their head through in Every Day being even less obvious than those in the slightly more dramatic Open City. Cities are where we live now, are the way we live, now. Teju Cole, working in the tradition invented by Sebald, is preeminent among artists now devoted to painting for us our lives, now, in those places.
63dcozy
A woman is raped and a man who is not the rapist pays for the crime in ways other, and perhaps more severe, than judicially. He comes to understand that the people who lead to his paying this severe price also paid a price, that his pain, their pain, the pain of the woman who is raped and later murdered are linked like the network of Kanto trains that forms the frontispiece of the (Chip Kidd designed) book. Haruki Murakami in his least fantastic mode has given us, in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, a moving novel about the connections human beings form, break, and cannot break.
64tomcatMurr
interesting reading as always David. Teju Cole sounds very intriguing. I'd kind of given up on Murakami: he seems to repeat himself a lot, but perhaps his latest shows him going in a new direction?
Moby Dick, a classic indeed, and one of my all time faves.
Moby Dick, a classic indeed, and one of my all time faves.
65dcozy
Marilyn the Wild is a manic police procedural that could, I think, only have been written in the '70s. While Roth and Bellow were advancing the cause of Jewish-American literature, Jerome Charyn was creating the Jewish-American thriller. Charyn's book shares with the work of those literary lions a love of language and an eye for the absurd, particularly the absurdity of the community of which he was a part. Marilyn the Wild is the first of a quartet; I look forward to the remaining three.
66dcozy
Murr: I strongly recommend Teju Cole. He's certainly among my favorite novelists now writing. Start with Open City.
All the criticism one hears about Murakami, particularly of the repetitiveness of his books, seems to me just . . . and yet, I keep going back for more. I guess it's a sort of literary comfort food, and I did enjoy Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. It's more realist than anything he's written for a while.
All the criticism one hears about Murakami, particularly of the repetitiveness of his books, seems to me just . . . and yet, I keep going back for more. I guess it's a sort of literary comfort food, and I did enjoy Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. It's more realist than anything he's written for a while.
67dcozy
Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael is a work of literary criticism that falls squarely into what it's hard not to think of as the American eccentric school. Think: Edward Dahlberg, Guy Davenport, D.H. Lawrence (Lawrence, of course, was English, but it was in his Studies in Classic American Literature that his critical eccentricity emerged). Since these are the kinds of critics one wants to read and reread, this is entirely a good thing.
When Olson is talking about Melville's work most explicitly as in the long chapter on Shakespeare's influence, he seems correct and scholarly. In the more speculative chapters, like the one where he blames Melville's post-Moby Dick fixation on Christ for the enervation (in Olson's view) of his later work he is exciting and convincing. The compression and pop of Olson's prose throughout is exemplary, and the juxtaposition of the FACT sections of the book with Olson's more essayistic chapters jars readers into thought.
When Olson is talking about Melville's work most explicitly as in the long chapter on Shakespeare's influence, he seems correct and scholarly. In the more speculative chapters, like the one where he blames Melville's post-Moby Dick fixation on Christ for the enervation (in Olson's view) of his later work he is exciting and convincing. The compression and pop of Olson's prose throughout is exemplary, and the juxtaposition of the FACT sections of the book with Olson's more essayistic chapters jars readers into thought.
68LolaWalser
Hi again, Dave! Have you seen the appropriately epic multi-thread-part discussion of Moby Dick in the Salon a few years back? I'll go harpoon a link if you're interested.
>67 dcozy:
Lawrence, of course, was English, but it was in his Studies in Classic American Literature that his critical eccentricity emerged
Oh, I read this recently! Slightly frightening, but much more hilarious.
Speaking of Murakami, do you have any info on how he's treated in English translation? It's been brought to my attention that at least two of his books have been abridged and/or edited for the Anglo market (The wind-up bird chronicle and I forget what). I've heard he supervises these edits but it's maddening they are not explicitly mentioned on the books.
>67 dcozy:
Lawrence, of course, was English, but it was in his Studies in Classic American Literature that his critical eccentricity emerged
Oh, I read this recently! Slightly frightening, but much more hilarious.
Speaking of Murakami, do you have any info on how he's treated in English translation? It's been brought to my attention that at least two of his books have been abridged and/or edited for the Anglo market (The wind-up bird chronicle and I forget what). I've heard he supervises these edits but it's maddening they are not explicitly mentioned on the books.
69dcozy
Hi Lola:
Might be fun to read through the Moby Dick thread. I'll try to track it down, but if I fail, I'll call on you.
I think your description of how Murakami gets translated is accurate. I know that was the case with Wind-Up Bird, and it may be true of other of his books as well. Murakami's English is good enough that he's published translations of Salinger, Carver, and others in Japanese, so I don't doubt that he knows exactly what's being cut, but yeah, there should be full disclosure that the cuts are being made.
Murakami fans, of which I sort of am one, seem to be rabid enough that they would be happy to read every word of the books, so it's hard to imagine what the point of making the cuts is. No Murakami fan is going to say: "I'm not going to buy and read this book. It's too long."
Might be fun to read through the Moby Dick thread. I'll try to track it down, but if I fail, I'll call on you.
I think your description of how Murakami gets translated is accurate. I know that was the case with Wind-Up Bird, and it may be true of other of his books as well. Murakami's English is good enough that he's published translations of Salinger, Carver, and others in Japanese, so I don't doubt that he knows exactly what's being cut, but yeah, there should be full disclosure that the cuts are being made.
Murakami fans, of which I sort of am one, seem to be rabid enough that they would be happy to read every word of the books, so it's hard to imagine what the point of making the cuts is. No Murakami fan is going to say: "I'm not going to buy and read this book. It's too long."
70dcozy
Thomas Pynchon is one of our most reliable novelists. I can't think of one of his books that isn't full of fun, from the snap and crackle of his sentences to the wacky humor to the serious look (in a fun house mirror) at the world. Bleeding Edge is no exception. In it Pynchon takes us to New York City and back to the early days of the Internet. He creates a wonderful and entirely convincing Jewish fraud investigator, Maxine, to guide us through it, and Maxine's cynical take on the world--tempered, always, by Pynchon's nostalgic humanism--provides the perfect ride through the world of wonders we may never have known New York was in the early days of this century.
71dcozy
As one continues through Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer books one stumbles across hints about the events in Archer's life that have made him who he is. He has been, we learn, an abused child, a juvenile delinquent and young hood running the streets of Long Beach, California, a cop, and a husband. He is none of these things any more, and in this book, The Doomsters, more than any of its predecessors, he is morose about some of the turns his life has taken. He is coming to understand, as he roots through the rot that characterizes a California town called, with no small irony, Purisima, that a black-and-white good-and-evil view of the world is insufficient, and also with the notion that he may be neither as good or bad a man as he feared. Freud, as always, is the presiding genius in Macdonald's novels, but existentialism seems to have entered the picture as well.
72LolaWalser
Interesting, Freud also figures big in the pulps I read not too long ago, by Willeford and Jim Thompson. Those were his times, I suppose. And what could fit better the atmosphere of pulps than "sex as hidden iceberg"? Often not that hidden at all, either. I flinch every time a mother is introduced as a character. ;)
Have not read any Macdonald yet. I prefer them older, more removed in time, and the books of his I saw seemed 1960s-70s...
Have not read any Macdonald yet. I prefer them older, more removed in time, and the books of his I saw seemed 1960s-70s...
73dcozy
Cid Corman, Gregory Dunne's excellent Quiet Accomplishment: Remembering Cid Corman makes clear, valued poetry in part for the way it brings people together. Thus Dunne's strategy, to write about Corman and his work, but also about people, and not least himself and how we was affected by the man and the work, is wise. Dunne's analysis of Corman's work is strong, but is made stronger by the human element around it, the same element that helped make Corman's work the wonder that it is.
74dcozy
The most surprising thing about Naoyuki Ii's pleasant, but very conventional, novel, The Shadow of a Blue Cat, is that Dalkey Archive--known for their adventurous list--chose to publish it. It examines the life of a middle-aged man leading the not terribly exciting life that most middle-aged men live (and as I am one myself, I will say it is accurate).
To bring the mundane life into focus, Ii surrounds his protagonist with an uncle who is a bit of a Bohemian, and with a daughter who's begun to move with a fast crowd and ends up pregnant, briefly married, and divorced. There's the odd reference to writers like Oe and Sade, marijuana, and '70s radicalism, but none of these are developed in any depth. There are also philosophical musings about love--both eros and agape--and our responsibilities as members of society, but all of this seems tacked on. It is, instead, the skillful realism of the depiction of the late '90s in Japan that keeps one turning pages.
To bring the mundane life into focus, Ii surrounds his protagonist with an uncle who is a bit of a Bohemian, and with a daughter who's begun to move with a fast crowd and ends up pregnant, briefly married, and divorced. There's the odd reference to writers like Oe and Sade, marijuana, and '70s radicalism, but none of these are developed in any depth. There are also philosophical musings about love--both eros and agape--and our responsibilities as members of society, but all of this seems tacked on. It is, instead, the skillful realism of the depiction of the late '90s in Japan that keeps one turning pages.
75tomcatMurr
kind of ambivalent response there, David.
76dcozy
Ross Macdonald's The Galton Case could be one of the best in the Lew Archer series. It's the story of an impostor who is not an impostor, of a past that will not remained repressed. Freud, as always, is the presiding deity.
77dcozy
Murr: Yes, it is. I didn't hate the book, but neither did I love it. If anything, it was mildly enjoyable. So excellent and mind-blowing are most of Dalkey Archive's offerings, though, that I expected more--which probably isn't fair to Ii and his book.
I think Lola read this, too. I'd be interested to hear what she thought.
I think Lola read this, too. I'd be interested to hear what she thought.
78LolaWalser
Uh, bought the book, buried it under couple thousand other, due to read it in, going by current rate... in the summer of 2318? :)
I AM A SLACKER
sorry, all
I AM A SLACKER
sorry, all
79tomcatMurr
SLACKER!
80LolaWalser
*overcome with guilt* *slacks off more to feel better*
Where are you hiding your shining beauty and 'lectric fur, Murr????
Where are you hiding your shining beauty and 'lectric fur, Murr????
81tomcatMurr
I'm under the sofa as usual, dear.
82LolaWalser
Kinkeeee!
83dcozy
I've been spending too much time on facebook. I know that's the case, because reading the above remarks, I found myself wanting to click the "like" button
84tomcatMurr
lol
85dcozy
Tefuga is by Peter Dickinson, a novelist who is both prolific and difficult to pigeonhole. Thus he has never received as much attention as he deserves. He is, after all, the author of science fiction, mysteries, and children's books in addition to his "serious novels." An artist so promiscuous cannot be taken seriously.
Tefuga, however, is evidence that he should be. It is set in Africa—Dickinson was born in Zambia to a father in the colonial service—and though it was published nearly thirty years ago, this tale of a woman and her husband in colonial Nigeria still sparkles with perceptiveness about colonialism, and its evil twin, the patriarchal world that delimited "a woman's place." Dickson's version is brilliantly constructed. As we learn the story through the diaries of the woman at its center, and also through the film being made about her life years after the events by her son, there is a sense of mirrors in mirrors: the reflections are the same as "reality," but not quite. Perhaps Dickinson's neatest trick is making his colonial couple sympathetic without saddling them with anachronistic attitudes about the role of the British in Africa, or about the Africans over whom the British ruled. Some of their attitudes are naive, and some downright repugnant, but they all seem accurate to the milieu.
Tefuga, however, is evidence that he should be. It is set in Africa—Dickinson was born in Zambia to a father in the colonial service—and though it was published nearly thirty years ago, this tale of a woman and her husband in colonial Nigeria still sparkles with perceptiveness about colonialism, and its evil twin, the patriarchal world that delimited "a woman's place." Dickson's version is brilliantly constructed. As we learn the story through the diaries of the woman at its center, and also through the film being made about her life years after the events by her son, there is a sense of mirrors in mirrors: the reflections are the same as "reality," but not quite. Perhaps Dickinson's neatest trick is making his colonial couple sympathetic without saddling them with anachronistic attitudes about the role of the British in Africa, or about the Africans over whom the British ruled. Some of their attitudes are naive, and some downright repugnant, but they all seem accurate to the milieu.
86dcozy
This is not a review of the Stephen King blockbuster called Under the Dome, but rather of a poetic mediation of the same name--Under the Dome--by the French poet Jean Daive on his relationship, spanning several decades, with Paul Celan. A lot of Daive's time with Celan was spent walking the streets of Paris and talking or, as seems often to have been the case, walking the streets of Paris and not talking. Daive, interspersing fragments of his life apart from Celan into his account of his encounters with Celan has arrived at the perfect form with which to memorialize one of the essential poets of the last century, a poet who remains essential now.
87LolaWalser
Sounds a must.
88dcozy
We've had more than our share of novels about foreigners adrift in Japan, but the foreigners, at least in books that make it into English, are almost always Americans or Europeans, and not just any Americans or Europeans. Rather they're North Americans or Europeans from, roughly speaking, Paris or points North. One reason that Rafael Reyes-Ruiz's The Ruins is a pleasure to read is that the protagonist is not one of those.
Rather, he is a South American with roots extending to Portugal. The book is largely about this Japan-based historian coming to terms both with his past--a woman he loved and lost and who decades later he believes he sees again, though, impossibly, she hasn't aged--and also with the colonial past of Portugal. India and Timor come into it, and also slavery and its modern incarnation, human trafficking, and the sex trade in Tokyo. Although the book does seem, in the end, like a tangle of loose threads--none of the above, or the sub-plot on academic politics are ever quite resolved--that's not really a problem. We enjoy watching our somewhat befuddled scholar make his way through Tokyo, through his past, and into the larger past of which his life is piece.
Rather, he is a South American with roots extending to Portugal. The book is largely about this Japan-based historian coming to terms both with his past--a woman he loved and lost and who decades later he believes he sees again, though, impossibly, she hasn't aged--and also with the colonial past of Portugal. India and Timor come into it, and also slavery and its modern incarnation, human trafficking, and the sex trade in Tokyo. Although the book does seem, in the end, like a tangle of loose threads--none of the above, or the sub-plot on academic politics are ever quite resolved--that's not really a problem. We enjoy watching our somewhat befuddled scholar make his way through Tokyo, through his past, and into the larger past of which his life is piece.
89dcozy
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad," especially when uncle, who was having an affair with mum, kills mum, and then you, the daughter, are forced to gain weight and die your hair blonde, so you can masquerade as mum, and the masquerade is so convincing that it almost convinces your now remorseful uncle--he throws his arms around you--that your mum survived his attempt to kill her. The Wycherly Woman provides us with another compelling look at Ross Macdonald's grim California.
90LolaWalser
>89 dcozy:
Whaaa...? I'll have my California with oranges and lemons, tyvm. ;)
I'll be looking for that one, of course.
>88 dcozy:
Amélie Nothomb has several books about being a Franco-Belgian foreigner in Japan... There's a Croatian mathematician and Japanophile who published several books about Japan in the seventies and eighties, but I doubt those will ever be translated.
Nicolas Bouvier and Fosco Maraini, a Swiss and Italian respectively, wrote books about Japan (not fiction, though).
And I think there's a ton of German-interest literature on Japan--Russian too.
Whaaa...? I'll have my California with oranges and lemons, tyvm. ;)
I'll be looking for that one, of course.
>88 dcozy:
Amélie Nothomb has several books about being a Franco-Belgian foreigner in Japan... There's a Croatian mathematician and Japanophile who published several books about Japan in the seventies and eighties, but I doubt those will ever be translated.
Nicolas Bouvier and Fosco Maraini, a Swiss and Italian respectively, wrote books about Japan (not fiction, though).
And I think there's a ton of German-interest literature on Japan--Russian too.
91dcozy
I've read some Nothomb, and found them . . . just okay. Bouvier seems more substantial. For some reason I put his Japan book down, but I will get back to it.
92dcozy
"The Strange Library" is a short story, not a novel. So why, one might wonder, has it been published as a single volume. The answer would be that, of course, short stories are designed to stand alone, and that the force of even prime examples of the form can be diluted when tossed into the mix of a collected or a selected, by the many other tales surrounding them. That alone would be enough to justify publishing "The Strange Library" as a stand-alone, but add to that Chip Kidd's design for the volume--the pictures are as crucial as the text--and it is clear that The Strange Library has assumed an appropriate form. Although it's tiny compared to the behemoths Haruki Murakami has released in recent years, even those who have relished every page of those behemoths won't be disappointed. All the elements that one loves in Murakami--up to and including a sheep man--are here, and the economy with which they are deployed makes the tale dissatisfying in only one way. One doesn't want it to end--even as one is entirely satisfied with the ending Murakami gives it. It's only fair to warn book lovers, particularly the kind given to carrying "I'm a Reader!" bags, that Murakami's library is not the warm and fuzzy place for which they might have hoped. Rather, darkness runs through it, and mystery, and wonder. It is, in its few pages, as satisfying is Murakami's more substantial works.
93dcozy
Paul Celan is relentless in the demands he makes upon his readers, just as life--in the form of the Nazis--was relentless in its treatment of him and those he loved. Even in Michael Hamburger's skillfully translated Paul Celan: Selected Poems (Hamburger's introduction, in which he discusses some of the many difficulties of translating a poet like Celan, is fascinating) much of Celan's work will be opaque to all but a few readers--and maybe to all readers. Still, so powerful are Celan's words, so searing the flashes of meaning that emerge, that we continue to want to live with these poems, and that is what it will to extract all that we never doubt is there.
94dcozy
Louise Penny's Still Life is a skillfully done mystery that some people might call a "cozy," but I don't because that word is not in my active vocabulary. It takes place in a bucolic, if somewhat yuppified, village outside of Montreal. The cast of characters are all likable, the twist being, of course, that one of them is a murderer. Penny kept me guessing until the end, but as with all the best mysteries, it wasn't wondering who done it that kept me turning pages, but the evocation of a place and the people who live there.
95LolaWalser
Happy new year, David!
Murder in Montreal, eh? I hear they are real fiends up there. A couple of French friends of mine actually preferred to move to Ontario rather than joust with the Québécois.
Murder in Montreal, eh? I hear they are real fiends up there. A couple of French friends of mine actually preferred to move to Ontario rather than joust with the Québécois.
96dcozy
In her introduction to Walter Scott's The Antiquary, Nicola J. Watson notes that this novel has "perhaps been the most underestimated work of (since the end of the nineteenth century) our most persistently underestimated major writer." Since I had bought into the underestimation, I had never read Scott until picking up The Antiquary, and though I enjoyed this novel a great deal, because it is apparently atypical, I can't say for sure that Scott's underestimation is undeserved. What is, according to Watson, atypical about The Antiquary, is the lack of action, the absence for most of the novel of its hero, and the mishmash of genre, which she's right to say are just the sort of thing that certain modern readers (me included) find attractive. That one can, all within the space of a few hundred pages, get a bit of not terribly fustian history, a bit of gothic, a bit of social comedy, and some lovely landscapes seems recommendation enough for readers in our time. Now, to decide whether I want to read any or the other, perhaps more typical novels, in Scott's Waverly series.
97LolaWalser
I'm afraid I'd have to live another four centuries minimum before I found the time to read Scott again... Thanks for signalling this "atypical" Scott, though, oddities are always interesting.