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What are we reading? 16th August 2021
Andy wrote: "I am very steadily working my way through Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter [bookcover:Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories|76..."
Lovely post. I have this book, but haven't read all of it. The Bloody Chamber is one of my top reads ever.
Lovely post. I have this book, but haven't read all of it. The Bloody Chamber is one of my top reads ever.
Does anyone like V.S. Pritchett's short stories? I think I've either assumed he was just a critic or I've confused him with Terry Pratchett.
Anne wrote: "I, sadly, now have finely tuned antennae (I'm knackered, are antennae tuned? haven't a clue) when it comes to this writer. Determined not to read the damn book. Two were more than enough for me."There's an article about her on the NY Times' website, "‘It Was Like I’d Never Done It Before’: How Sally Rooney Wrote Again" which makes it sound like she hasn't written anything in decades and has just emerged from 40 years in the wilderness with incredible new insights into literature
“It was with this book that I sat down and thought, wait a minute, what is a novel?” Rooney said. “I seem to be writing them, but what are they?”Nevertheless, for me, her new novel sounds essentially indistinguishable in subject and tone from her previous two.
To figure it out, she read. Mitchell S. Jackson, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was in her fellowship class at the library, said, “Sally was possibly the most disciplined person there.” When she got to their offices early in the morning, he added, “she would close her door and close the blinds and work.”
When she did emerge, she impressed the other fellows with her knowledge of, as the journalist Hua Hsu recalled, “pre-Christian systems of faith to contemporary Marxist scholarship to basic internet culture.” The research was her way of reckoning with why she writes at all.
The ethics of fiction, for Rooney, is very much tied to the ethics of living. “When you inhabit a time of enormous historic crises, and you’re concerned about it,” she said, “how do you justify to yourself that the thing to which you’ve chosen to dedicate your life is making up fake people who have fake love affairs with each other?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/bo...
I guess I rather resent the fact that every time I read the title I think of Schubert and / or Schiller and the novel seems to have nothing to do with either one, or Germany or Greece for that matter (the line is from Schiller's "Die Götter Griechenlands" and is the first line of Schubert's setting).
SydneyH wrote: "Does anyone like V.S. Pritchett's short stories? I think I've either assumed he was just a critic or I've confused him with Terry Pratchett."I haven't read him, but I confuse him with V. S. Naipaul.
Another question for the crowd, possibly for @Mach: what is Nabokov's funniest novel?
SydneyH wrote: "Another question for the crowd, possibly for @Mach: what is Nabokov's funniest novel?"I'd vote for Pnin.
Robert wrote: "I'd vote for Pnin."I was guessing that Pnin might be one of the suggestions. I'm reading Martin Amis's memoir, and his enthusiasm for Nabokov is making me consider another attempt. But at the moment I'm eyeing off King, Queen, Knave, though not for humour reasons.
Pnin is definitely funnier than Pale Fire. In fact, it's funny without comparison to other Nabokovs.
Veufveuve wrote: "Pnin is definitely funnier than Pale Fire. In fact, it's funny without comparison to other Nabokovs."sadly i have never really got into Old Vlad, i was interested in Pnin and just found the clever wordplay grating, like Vlad was using a dictionary to create the most intricate english known to any reader.
i respect old Vlad hugely and especially for creating novels in two languages but he is off my reading list and will remain so. I read Lolita many years ago and wondered what the fuss was about
AB76 wrote: "I read Lolita many years ago and wondered what the fuss was about"Same here, I found Lolita really clunky. I had a similar negative first impression of Saul Bellow, but gradually came to appreciate a few of them. I guess I feel that I shouldn't judge an author's prose based on one work, especially if they are a highly-regarded prose stylist.
I've just started Marcia Chatelain's "Franchise: the Golden Arches in Black America." Very promising so far.
SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I read Lolita many years ago and wondered what the fuss was about"Same here, I found Lolita really clunky. I had a similar negative first impression of Saul Bellow, but gradually cam..."
I remember being stunned and completely enthralled by Lolita - it was a long time ago. I could see it stood at the pinnacle of writing.
Julian wrote: "SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I read Lolita many years ago and wondered what the fuss was about"Same here, I found Lolita really clunky. I had a similar negative first impression of Saul Bellow, b..."
Interesting, i am more sympathetic to Bellow and thought his debut novel was superb. I must read one of his big novels....
AB76 wrote: " must read one of his big novels."Augie March was the one that I had the negative impression of. I liked Humboldt's Gift, which is the other long one.
Machenbach wrote: "Pnin is the most difficult to dislike, and is probably the most LOL funny. [book..."Ta. Missing that like feature. Have you read King, Queen, Knave?
Shelflife_wasBooklooker wrote(413): "AB wrote (#402): not bringing down the mood at all, you have supplied useful context about the images. I wondered who Sobotta was, makes sense now.Ta, AB!@ Bill & Fran: Ha, I had the same impuls..."
Thanks for the Leseproben, bl! Reclam provided one for Michael von Albrecht's prose translation, which speaks more to me than the verse translations, so I've made up my mind.
Loosely related find: as he was awarded the Johann-Heinrich-Voss Prize For Translation by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in 2004 I googled a bit about this prize:
Between 1958 and 2001 22% of the prizes went to women.
Between 2002 and 2021 55% did.
SydneyH wrote: "Does anyone like V.S. Pritchett's short stories?..."
I read a collection of his short stories maybe ten years ago. I remember very little, except that I felt a pervasive chilliness, a lack of engagement with any one of the stories, and a mystification as to why he was rated. Sorry to be so off-putting.
On the other hand, he wrote an introduction to a volume of Turgenev’s stories for Everyman (First Love) which I thought was brilliant.
I read a collection of his short stories maybe ten years ago. I remember very little, except that I felt a pervasive chilliness, a lack of engagement with any one of the stories, and a mystification as to why he was rated. Sorry to be so off-putting.
On the other hand, he wrote an introduction to a volume of Turgenev’s stories for Everyman (First Love) which I thought was brilliant.
Machenbach wrote: "Bill wrote: "Shelflife_wasBooklooker wrote: "Maybe we could add as one further aspect that readers might tend to recognize the beginning really well if it encapsulates or at least foreshadows what ..."The opening of the Brophy you quote reminds me of the marvellous opening paragraph of Bowen's "The Death of the Heart."
"THAT MORNING’S ICE, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The islands stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees round the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun – but the swans, the rims of the ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight."
I have never felt inclined to read Lolita. I do not care about the accolades that have been heaped on it on account of Nabokovs sublime/outstanding writing. I am just not interested. Might have to do something with being a woman...I did like Pnin. The only Nabokov I ever read.
My alternative/complementary take on the Guardians review of
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Warning: slight spoiler ahead
Read this some weeks ago. Looked like escapist fun.
I really enjoyed the first ~120 pages. The quirky characters were, of course, caricatures, but they were lovingly developped and described. There were original ideas, there was original writing.
That was the part told by the 1st person narrator, Luise, when she was ten.
Then the whole thing went into a nose-dive.
Luise, now 20, falls in love with a visiting German Buddhist monk who lives in a Buddhist monastery(?) in Japan. A long-distance epistolary "love story" ensues. She writes about the village, he writes about the moss he has removed from the bloody temple-or-whatever. That goes on for over eight years. They should (and will, in the end) make a good match because they are equals as far as insipidity goes.
There are still glimpses of of Leky's originality and humour in the last two thirds of the book. But they are drowned out by repetitivenes and the descend into full blown kitsch.
The German blurb said: "This is a wonderful, wise, amusing and profound book". Wise and profound? Well, if you like Paulo Coelho "light" you will love it.
Altogether: I started with a glass of sparkling bubbly, the bubbles vanished quickly, in the end it was as stale as it could get.
Shelflife_wasBooklooker wrote: "THINGS have a lot to answer for."Indeed they do.
I just read Pnin earlier this month and agree that it was one of the funniest and most likeable of the Nabokovs I've read, the title character one of his most sympathetic creations - and treated sympathetically by the narrator, which isn't always the case with Nabokov. I'd meant to talk about it earlier but the conversation here went on to other topics. For one thing, I'm curious as to where Bill ranks it amongst his Campus Novels.
Lolita I've always steered away from and will probably continue to do so until I've read just about everything else, as I find the premise so unappealing. Next Nabokov for me will most likely be a re-read of Pale Fire, but that's a few months away yet.
Berkley wrote: "I'm curious as to where Bill ranks it amongst his Campus Novels."I put Pnin among my campus novels because the title character teaches at an American university, but I consider it more of a character study, whereas most of the novels I tend to think of as campus novels use the college / university setting as a kind of microcosm by means of which politics, the larger society, and human interactions are examined and, usually, satirized. Though I wouldn’t hold it up as a good example of a campus novel, I enjoyed Pnin very much, in my review I described him as
… Chaplin-like: a figure of fun whose presence adds humor – at least for the disinterested observer, such as the reader –and an element of the unpredictable to everyday life, but capable of modulating quickly into pathos …
Yes, I can see what you mean about it being more of a character study than an example of the campus as microcosm. As far as the title character is concerned, by the end I was left wondering whether the possibly unreliable narrator might not have painted Pnin as just slightly more bumbling and comical than he would have appeared otherwise. Regardless, he remains a sympathetic eccentric.
Mod
https://www.powells.com/featured/50-b...
Lljones wrote: "Raise your hand (and then duck) if you're interested in Franzen's latest:Crossroads"
Why are they not featuring the Casaubon-inspired series name on the cover? I thought that would be a real selling point.
Lljones wrote: ""Our 50 Books for 50 Years list comes from this place of self-reflection, and is inspired by Powell's 50th anniversary year."https://www.powells.com/featured/50-b..."
I've read 2 (maybe I should say 3, as I've read most of the Calvin & Hobbes collections, though not specifically "The Essential"), which I suspect may be the lowest number among TL&S'ers.
Mod
Fifteen for me.
It's a strange list, I'd say.
A school chum and I spent weeks seeking parental permission to travel ~18 miles by bus from our homes in (now suburban) West Linn to downtown Portland the week Powell's opened. I remember well the feverish delight we felt during our shopping spree. I wish I could remember one or two books either of us may have bought. I have a feeling Hermann Hesse was involved.
Lljones wrote: "I have a feeling Hermann Hesse was involved."Steppenwolf? Very popular back in the day - I must have read nearly all his books in English, including (yes, indeed!) The Glass Bead Game.
Lljones wrote: ""Our 50 Books for 50 Years list comes from this place of self-reflection, and is inspired by Powell's 50th anniversary year."https://www.powells.com/featured/50-b..."
As far as I remember, I haven't read any of these - rarely venturing into non-fiction eliminates quite a few, and not being American disposes of several others. There are a couple of authors I've sampled - Rushdie and Ishiguro - but not those books - and a couple of others that interest me (probably).
In the meantime, I look forward (defiantly/definitely?) to the new Franzen, who has yet to bore me in writing (I have never seen his interviews).
(Have you noticed how often people type 'defiantly' when the mean 'definitely'? For some reason, it makes me laugh.)
I've read only Rushdie's Satanic Verses and King's The Stand. There are about ten others on the list that I'm pretty sure I'll get to one of these days. Not Calvin and Hobbes, though: something about that cartoon has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Mod
I was beginning to think I wouldn't find any I'd read, but in fact there are 7.
Bill wrote: "Lljones wrote: ""Our 50 Books for 50 Years list comes from this place of self-reflection, and is inspired by Powell's 50th anniversary year."https://www.powells.com/featured/50-b......"
Glad to see Powell's Books staff flapping back to life. Of the books they list, I've read and enjoyed "Lonesome Dove," read a number of Calvin and Hobbes collections, and once skimmed the bloated collector's edition of "The Stand." Most of the rest I've never even heard of.
Finished The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction, a very well put together edition by Barnes and Noble classicsI feel i have lived among the dark pines, rocky shores and azure skies of summer in Maine for the last two weeks. The style and use of Maine dialect was beautifully recreated.
For anyone interested in the civil war, i think Jewetts short story Decoration Day(1893) is well worth a read, the idea that only 28 years after the war, veterans are fading fast, shows how life was much shorter in those days....
My next classic fiction will be She by H Rider Haggard, i had meant to read it over 15 years ago but was less interested in colonial fiction from the masters pen, so to speak, then i am now.The cover is a brooding Von Stuck artwork, very different to OUP who use the Ursula Andress image from the movie that i havent seen
AB76 wrote: "My next classic fiction will be She by H Rider Haggard, i had meant to read it over 15 years ago but was less interested in colonial fiction from the masters pen, so to speak, then i am now."The Ursula Andress film was OK but nothing special... I am not sure if I ever read 'She', but definitely read a version of 'King Solomon's Mines' as a youngster - quite possibly an abridged version. I would not have been aware enough or sensitised to any racist attitudes in that book - if they're there (they probably are!) - at the age I read it. The scary Gagool and the stone door which closed on people and crushed them certainly made an impression on my young mind.
AB76 wrote: "My next classic fiction will be She by H Rider Haggard, i had meant to read it over 15 years ago but was less interested in colonial fiction from the masters pen, so to speak, then i am now.The ..."
I think it's a real masterpiece of adventure writing that deserves to be more famous than it now is. Ayesha/She is a creation that can stand with other 19th-century icons of genre-fiction such as Dracula or Frankenstei and his Creature. One of those things that can be read equally well as a straight adventure novel and on the symbolic level - Freud or Jung, forget which (perhaps both?) thought it was full of deep meaning.
Haven't seen the movie either, though as AB76 says, I understand it isn't especially memorable. I'll probably watch it one of these days, if only for the sake of Ursula Andress.
Julian wrote (#422): My review of -- The Wanderers/ Richard Price.It's good to see you back on these pages. You write beautiful reviews.
As natural and unforced as breathing, Price's book about underprivileged teenagers in sixties New York crackles with smart dialogue (a rich vernacular), and is so well structured, conjuring the interplay of the teenage gangs as their lives come gradually into focus through startling debacles, familial conflicts and rites of passage. The author knows these kids and their parents inside out. He knows their neighbourhoods, the architecture of their lives. He writes a kind of camerawork over the scenes such that echoes of American Graffiti and Amarcord tremble across the page. A great debut back in the seventies.
Georg (#443): You're welcome! And I am convinced by that prose translation now, too... another one for the list! (Aargh.)
Berkley wrote: "AB76 wrote: "My next classic fiction will be She by H Rider Haggard, i had meant to read it over 15 years ago but was less interested in colonial fiction from the masters pen, so to speak, then i a..."your comments have made me look foward to reading it even more Berkley!
I agree about the attractions of Ursula Andress too!
Mod
I've been pursuing my revisiting of Hydra (#276) with Charmian Clift's Peel Me a Lotus.
The Australians Charmian Clift and George Johnston moved to Greece from London in the mid 1950s for about 10 years and after first going to the island of Kalymnos (described in Mermaid Singing), moved to Hydra where they bought a house. Peel Me a Lotus vividly describes the beginning of their time on Hydra, the hard aspects as well as the wonderful ones, so is set earlier than Polly Sansom's A Theatre for Dreamers. Artists and tourists were already finding their way to Hydra but not in such numbers as later.
Mod
I'd read and enjoyed Booth's Cooper and Fry series thanks to giveusaclue. This is a standalone - I'm not very far along but am enjoying it too.
While I was away, I read several Bill Slider crime novels (by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles). Thanks to CCC and MK.
Gpfr wrote: "I've just read the Observer article about people living and trading on canals. The book I'm reading at the moment is a murder mystery linked to canals, Steven Booth's Drowned Lives...."Some of my absolute favourite Maigret mysteries by Simenon take place near canals... he does a magnificent job of taking the reader into the atmosphere of canal life back in the 1930s, when they were busy thoroughfares for goods traffic. They include Lock No. 1, The Carter of 'La Providence', The Flemish House... there may be others. Those set in ports are equally fascinating.
Edit: also Maigret and the Headless Corpse
Mod
Back in my mystery-reading days, I enjoyed the books of Dutch author Janwillem van de Wetering. Plenty of dikes and canals, with a dash of Zen Buddhism.
Gpfr wrote: "I've just read the Observer article about people living and trading on canals. The book I'm reading at the moment is a murder mystery linked to canals, Steven Booth's Drowned Lives...."every year from about age 9-15, my family had an autumn canal holiday and i became fascinated by thesw waterways snaking through industrial Birmingham, Georgian Bath, the Oxford countryside or the north welsh rolling hills.
Lljones wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "I've just read the Observer article about people living and trading on canals. The book I'm reading at the moment is a murder mystery linked to canals..."Back in my mystery-reading d..."
i enjoyed outsider in amsterdam by De Wetering
I wonder if any of the bookworms here already know the 100-page novella The House of Paper by Carlos María Domínguez?
It certainly is a story for bookworms, as becomes clear from the fatal (indeed) love of reading in its opening passage:
One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a second-hand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.* Allow me an eyebrow raise on the cookbooks!
Books change people’s destinies. Some have read The Tiger of Malaysia and become professors of literature in remote universities. Demian converted tens of thousands of young men to Eastern philosophy, Hemingway made sportsmen of them, Alexander Dumas complicated the lives of thousands of women, quite a few of whom were saved from suicide by cookbooks.*
Bluma was their victim.
On reading Domínguez’ book, you might feel both amused and discomforted – I did! In the descriptions of the various bibliophiles and their greater or smaller obsessions, I felt that I might well be looking at my own s(h)elf.
It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again.Granted, I was relieved to learn that the truly addicted have skin like pergament, yellowish and thin… so, not addicted yet (phew!), and neither would I feel troubled, like one of the protagonists, to position books of authors who disliked one another next to each other. This poor variety of bookworm loses night’s sleep to complicated calculations in order to balance everything out, in consequence never easily finding any of his books again!
The truth is that in the end the size of a library does matter.
"How many books do you have?" I asked.
"To tell the truth, I've given up counting. But I think there must be around eighteen thousand. I've been buying books here and there ever since I can remember. To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books."
But the overflowing shelves and problems of space do ring a bell. Yep.
In addition, there are some insightful observations on reading accompanied by music (“You can improve bad prose by a high degree when listening to a good concert […] a harmonious counterpoint between your inner reading voice and the sounds from the loudspeakers.”), typography (missing nosuchzone, still), and not least, the novella takes up the notion of books as dangerous materials to be hidden during Argentina’s military dictatorship.
If I have not written anything about the plot so far, it’s that it is not that important, nor the most convincing part of the book. At its heart lies a quest, triggered by a copy of Joseph Conrad’s
that has gritty traces of cement on its cover and back.I think it is a lovely book, though it is strongest in its insights into bibliophilia. What Mach wrote on promising opening passages (#438) applies here, too, to a degree:
The problem with great first lines is that it is too often the case that everything's downhill after that.Not everything downhill in that case, though: The novella certainly feeds my thirst for more books (mentioning, amongst many others, a beautifully illustrated of Yeats’s Fairy Tales, and making me determined to read Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, which I hope I will be able to acquire free of cement!
Indeed,
For me the greatest joy is to be able to submerge myself for a few hours every day in a human time that otherwise would be alien to me. A lifetime is not enough.
Machenbach wrote:Yep. It's been a while, but I remember enjoying it, whilst not being distraught that it was so short.In a nutshell. Glad you enjoyed it, too.
Here's another quote from the book, for other "secret calendar keepers" - there should be quite a few here.
Lending? That can be a sore point, as cats might attest. I like the last sentence on retaining memories of books, and I think you just proved it once more.
I'd best stop quoting now - otherwise I will get close to posting the whole book here!
Edit: Needed to fiddle a bit with the size of the photo.
#20. The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton. Antonia FraserI first came across Caroline Norton (1809-1877) in my late teens, reading about the struggle to improve the status of women in Britain. This new biography by Antonia Fraser (I have a signed copy!) is well worth reading. Mrs. Norton kicked off a century of improvement in the status of British women, which was not only worse than in Europe but considerably more limited legally than the status of Muslim women. Married women in Britain were legally “femme couverte”-their existence swallowed up in that of the husband. Since they had no legal existence, they could not, for example, be represented by a lawyer in a court of law. Any money they earned or otherwise brought into a marriage belonged to the husband and they had no rights over their children.
Caroline Sheridan was the granddaughter of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. One of 3 sisters, all great beauties and brilliantly intelligent. Unfortunately, she made a terrible marriage, to George Norton, brother to Lord Grantley, who beat her, abused her, once kicking her when pregnant, causing a miscarriage, and was generally a Beast. At a certain point Norton took custody of their 3 sons, as he was legally entitled to do. However, Caroline wasn’t about to put up with this without a fight. She took her case to the PM himself, Lord Melbourne, and after a struggle got the law changed to allow married but separated women access to their children while they needed a mother’s care. Not soon enough to avoid losing her third son William to Norton’s negligence-the poor child died aged 9 after a fall from a horse, being left to servants despite Caroline’s protests, and dying of septicaemia.
During her separation from Norton, Caroline supported herself with journalism, novel writing, and publishing political pamphlets. She was extremely successful and made a great deal more money than Norton did as a barrister. However, Norton, again as he was legally entitled to do, claimed every penny she made. Here too, she campaigned successfully to allow married women to keep their earnings, and to gain the right to hold money and estate revenues in their own right. The Married Women’s Property Act was the direct result of her campaign. Norton finally died and she was free to marry again, to Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. They were happy for barely 2 years when she herself died.
Two things struck me. What a rough time she had, her appalling marriage, losing 2 of her 3 sons, with the third dying months after she did. But also the breadth of her sympathy-campaigning for ALL women, not just wealthy ones, of ALL colors, NOT just WHITE, feeling sympathy for and writing about the problems of mixed-race children, a truly universal benevolence devoid of racism. I already knew a lot about her, but it was nice to see a wide collection of family portraits including a daguerrotype carte-de-visite of Caroline, still dashing at 55! It was also fun to read about her interactions with the slightly older Mary Shelley (author of “Frankenstein”) who supported her, and her own comments on Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”, which she admired. I have always been interested in the so-called “Devonshire House Circle” and Mrs Norton could be viewed as a member from a younger generation. She deserves to be remembered and acknowledged for what she accomplished at such great personal cost.
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Ersatz TLS
Books mentioned in this topic
Night Boat to Tangier (other topics)The Long Arm of the Law: Classic Police Stories (other topics)
Drowned Lives (other topics)
The Invention of Morel (other topics)
The Artificial Silk Girl (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Carlos María Domínguez (other topics)Carlos María Domínguez (other topics)
Janwillem van de Wetering (other topics)
Angela Carter (other topics)
Lion Feuchtwanger (other topics)
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I bought this a few weeks back.