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What are we reading? 19th January 2022
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Georg
(last edited Jan 22, 2022 11:14AM)
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Jan 22, 2022 11:14AM
I've never seen myself as a victim of anybody or anything. Rather the opposite.
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AB76 wrote: "New books to begin, two female writers:Southern Steel by Dymphna Cusack, a 1950s Australian novel of the largest coal port in the world, Newcastle in New South Wales, set during WW2
Under The ..."
I'd be very interested in your thoughts on Susan Sontag so I'm really hoping you will review it. I have not read this particular one, but am now tempted to order it through the library. I read various articles by her when I was at art college and was impressed by her wide ranging thinking.
I had an argument (so easy to do these days) with the other half as to whether she was a cultural critic, in a sociological sense, or an art critic (of which female members were fairly thin on the ground in those days). The last book I read of hers was many years ago, and was 'The Volcano Lover' which I have to say rather surprised me, that she wrote about Lady Hamilton and Nelson's love affair in Naples.
Anyway your thoughts on 'Under the Sign of Saturn' would be most welcome to me.
Georg wrote: "To be perfectly honest: I thought it was pure kitsch."Haha - I worried I had maybe been a bit harsh, so I welcome your comments :)
Machenbach wrote: "As a piece of nature writing it's pretty good, but as a fable about our never-quite-at-home place in Nature, our one-step-from-oblivion, one-step-from-salvation, existence, I find it entirely compelling."Yes, I think I'm fairly open-minded to nature writing, but a bit sceptical of fables. So I'll happily acknowledge that it may be more about me than the text itself.
Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "New books to begin, two female writers:Southern Steel by Dymphna Cusack, a 1950s Australian novel of the largest coal port in the world, Newcastle in New South Wales, set during WW2..."
for sure i will Syd, alongside Didion and Gornick, i see her as one of the great female thinkers of the last 50 years, though sadly only one of the three is now still with us. I would say I see Sontag was a cultural critic and thinker, there are legions of male equivalents who got more accolades but dont come close to Sontag. I must read some of her fiction too
are you aware of Cusack as well, if i remember you are living Down Under yeah?
AB76 wrote: "for sure i will Syd"I think you mean Tam :)
Anastasia wrote: @Shelflife I'm so glad you enjoyed Fathers and Sons :) any plans for your next read?Good question, Anastasia - it's a very hard act to follow, isn't it? I would like to continue my explorations of Russian literature, but am undecided just now: Currently considering rereads of Oblomov or The Master and Margarita (the latter I have been thinking about for quite a while: https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...), but am also eyeing two story anthologies as first time reads: one with a selection of "Strange Stories", as the title says (Seltsame Geschichten aus Russland), the other on "Classic Stories".
Both tables of contents look very tempting, and also I am much keener on reads than rereads just now...
Hm. Still undecided. Probably, I ought to sleep on it. Or drag all four books towards the bed.
Further books I would like to read soon: The Secret Sharer and Other Stories by Joseph Conrad (thanks to LeatherCol) and Emily X.R. Pan's The Astonishing Colour of After (thanks to Alwynne) and Vasco Pratolini's Cronaca familiare (thanks to Mach - (view spoiler)), as well as bell hooks's Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, and - hello and thanks to Tam and LeatherCol - Susan Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays. (And that's just a part of the TBR sprawl...
I am also reading an engaging book on literary style which makes me want to (re)read lots of German-language authors - so I might go for something completely different, after all.)
Oops, that shelf choice monologue got a bit out of hand.
@AB: Thank you for your review of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which I have here as well. It's for later, but I am very interested.
SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "for sure i will Syd"I think you mean Tam :)"
Doh! thanks syd and sorry Tam!
Shelflife_wasBooklooker wrote: "Anastasia wrote: @Shelflife I'm so glad you enjoyed Fathers and Sons :) any plans for your next read?Good question, Anastasia - it's a very hard act to follow, isn't it? I would like to continue my..."i have shelved the political book i was going to read and will instead read a modern Latvian novel 18
published by the excellent Vagabond Voices (for more Baltic classics and modern books in translation, google the website)
Mod
That was one of my favorite Reading Group months!
Shelflife_wasBooklooker wrote: "@AB: Thank you for your review of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which I have here as well. It's for later, but I am very interested."Yes, I concur, very interesting review, thanks AB. My (female) postdoc is South Korean, and we had some sadly enlightening discussions on the state of things for (successful) women over there... but there seems to be evidence, at least from what I can see in the G, that women are really pushing back now.
Just finished reading "All Systems Red," a short SF novel by Martha Wells. Quite good novella about interplanetary exploration, and a not-bad mystery.Also skimmed through Sara Gay Forden's "House of Gucci." With so many theaters closed these days, I'm taking refuge in the books films were based on. This one tells me more about the fashion industry, and far more about a designer named Tom Ford, than I will ever want to know, but the tribal war within a family firm famous for its bags and shoes was quite surprising. I was rooting for one character to be tried and convicted of murder....
Hushpuppy wrote: "Shelflife_wasBooklooker wrote: "@AB: Thank you for your review of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which I have here as well. It's for later, but I am very interested."Yes, I concur, very interesting revi..."
i think the success of Nam Joo's novel should be like a torch shining into the darkened cave of the Korean patriarchy.
At Xmas my sister in law(who is chinese-malay) had touched on the plight of women in East Asia, not linked to the Nam-Joo novel interestingly and how she also found the crude sexism and objectifying of her being of asian descent when she lived in the UK. In the workplace, working for a South Asian investment bank in London, she was routinely asked to take minutes and get the coffee, though she is a graduate and was equal to her male colleagues. She started to turn the tables when the largely Indian male cohort realised in meetings with Chinese and Singaporean companies, her fluency in Mandarin meant they realised she much more than the role they had allocated her, although she was very unhappy with that experience, which was only a decade ago, ijn the UK
Last night I read a very slim volume of Carson McCullers short stories: The Haunted Boy/The Sojourner/A Domestic Dilemma. My God; she's so good: such worlds, such lives, so briefly done. Almost inexpressibly sweet and sorrowful at the same time.
Veufveuve wrote: "Last night I read a very slim volume of Carson McCullers short stories: The Haunted Boy/The Sojourner/A Domestic Dilemma. My God; she's so good: such worlds, such lives, so briefly done. Almost i..."
McCullers is a favorite of mine, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was brilliantly devastating. I have her Complete Short Stories lined up for this year
Mod
My God; she's so good: such worlds, such lives, so briefly done...."
So true.
Machenbach wrote: "AB76 wrote: "i loved "The Bachelors" and at some point in the year i will be reading "Motley Stones" which is a collection of his short fiction, including Rock Crystal.."Ta, will keep an eye out f..."
no there isnt, New York Review of Books have issued "Motley Stones", so it should be fairly easy to buy
Physiologie du Mariage – Honoré de Balzac (1829)
This was his second mature published work, after Les Chouans, and it created a scandal, asserting as it did that adultery by married women is inevitable. It is a 400-page essay by an anonymous author, its success aided no doubt by an enthusiastic notice from an anonymous reviewer, Balzac himself. He modelled it on Brillat-Savarin, thirty Meditations with a hundred or so aphorisms and scores of anecdotes mixed in. It seems to me of no use or relevance to marriage today. Yet it was just about worth the read, if only to fill out one’s idea of Balzac, and the conjugal landscape of the novels. And of course no anecdote told by Balzac lacks bite. It appeared when he was 30, by which time he had already had close and amorous liaisons with two much older ladies. He must have spent a lot of time deep sea diving in their combined memories, because it is difficult to imagine one person on his own gathering in such an enormous bagful of salty tales.
It is addressed, nominally, to husbands of the comfortable classes, who are warned at the outset of the never-absent threat from other men to the virtue and honesty of their wives. It is thus presented as a manual for how such husbands should manage their wives. Never let them take a walk on their own. Never leave them alone at the country house. Beware migraines, the universal excuse for not doing what they should. For long passages he makes you think he is serious! Nevertheless I would guess that his readership was mainly women, since here at last was a writer, a disciple of Jean-Jacques, who so thoroughly examines the interstices of contemporary married life – and who so helpfully alerts a wife to the signs of a husband setting out to manage her. Later on it does switch to the other side and he tells stories of wives managing husbands. What it is not, given all the attention to dissimulation and finesse, is a book on how to form a loving and trusting marriage.
This was for me the very last of the 40-plus volumes of Balzac put out by Folio classique. It has been a famous journey. I aim to re-read much of it, starting with novellas like La Duchesse de Langeais and La fille aux yeux d’or which I read early on, when my reading French was no better than halting.
The Newcomes – William Makepeace Thackeray (1854)
A lesser-known Thackeray, which, if not quite the wicked fun and poignancy of Vanity Fair, still deserves to be read today - two leisurely volumes of wonderfully urbane writing, and more of a plot than I remember in Pendennis. It joins the very short list of 19C English novels with an artist as a principal character, drawing on Thackeray’s own time as a student of art. Otherwise, it is full of love and marriage, or rather the marriage market of the late 1820s. For example, here is poor Lady Clara, timid daughter of an impecunious Earl. She, the family has determined, must be married to the odious son of a banking firm, instead of the penniless Guards officer whom she adores. After some oragious scenes (good word, WMT), the fuming captain is seen off, and now the only call on the poor little fish is “to do her duty, and to ask à quelle sauce elle serait mangée.”
Was Thackeray, who spent time in Paris as a young man, also a student of Balzac? At one point he has the narrator call himself a physiologist, and the physiologist considers the many ways in which virtuous women may manage unsuspecting men. But the novel is not limited to artful conduct. It ranges widely from the viciousness in one marriage to the happy confiding in another.
Thank you to @Berkley for the recommendation.
Also finished The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull (1934), one of the British Library Crime Classics. While it did not have as big a twist at the end as I was expecting, the story itself, told by a young man who thinks he is a cool cat, was quite amusing in a grumpy sort of way.
“It all started at lunch. I had finished reading La Grotte du Sphinx in the morning, and was wondering what on earth to read in the afternoon. Of course my aunt has nothing in the house to read. It’s full of Surtees and Dickens and Thackeray and Kipling, and dreadful hearty people like that whom no one reads now, while my aunt’s taste in modern novels runs to the Good Companions, If Winter Comes, or that interminable man Hugh Walpole.”
Now for something different. My copy of Mathematician’s Delight by WW Sawyer (1943) has arrived. At school I loved the elegance of angles and logs and equations, and I am hoping to recapture some of that excitement.
This was his second mature published work, after Les Chouans, and it created a scandal, asserting as it did that adultery by married women is inevitable. It is a 400-page essay by an anonymous author, its success aided no doubt by an enthusiastic notice from an anonymous reviewer, Balzac himself. He modelled it on Brillat-Savarin, thirty Meditations with a hundred or so aphorisms and scores of anecdotes mixed in. It seems to me of no use or relevance to marriage today. Yet it was just about worth the read, if only to fill out one’s idea of Balzac, and the conjugal landscape of the novels. And of course no anecdote told by Balzac lacks bite. It appeared when he was 30, by which time he had already had close and amorous liaisons with two much older ladies. He must have spent a lot of time deep sea diving in their combined memories, because it is difficult to imagine one person on his own gathering in such an enormous bagful of salty tales.
It is addressed, nominally, to husbands of the comfortable classes, who are warned at the outset of the never-absent threat from other men to the virtue and honesty of their wives. It is thus presented as a manual for how such husbands should manage their wives. Never let them take a walk on their own. Never leave them alone at the country house. Beware migraines, the universal excuse for not doing what they should. For long passages he makes you think he is serious! Nevertheless I would guess that his readership was mainly women, since here at last was a writer, a disciple of Jean-Jacques, who so thoroughly examines the interstices of contemporary married life – and who so helpfully alerts a wife to the signs of a husband setting out to manage her. Later on it does switch to the other side and he tells stories of wives managing husbands. What it is not, given all the attention to dissimulation and finesse, is a book on how to form a loving and trusting marriage.
This was for me the very last of the 40-plus volumes of Balzac put out by Folio classique. It has been a famous journey. I aim to re-read much of it, starting with novellas like La Duchesse de Langeais and La fille aux yeux d’or which I read early on, when my reading French was no better than halting.
The Newcomes – William Makepeace Thackeray (1854)
A lesser-known Thackeray, which, if not quite the wicked fun and poignancy of Vanity Fair, still deserves to be read today - two leisurely volumes of wonderfully urbane writing, and more of a plot than I remember in Pendennis. It joins the very short list of 19C English novels with an artist as a principal character, drawing on Thackeray’s own time as a student of art. Otherwise, it is full of love and marriage, or rather the marriage market of the late 1820s. For example, here is poor Lady Clara, timid daughter of an impecunious Earl. She, the family has determined, must be married to the odious son of a banking firm, instead of the penniless Guards officer whom she adores. After some oragious scenes (good word, WMT), the fuming captain is seen off, and now the only call on the poor little fish is “to do her duty, and to ask à quelle sauce elle serait mangée.”
Was Thackeray, who spent time in Paris as a young man, also a student of Balzac? At one point he has the narrator call himself a physiologist, and the physiologist considers the many ways in which virtuous women may manage unsuspecting men. But the novel is not limited to artful conduct. It ranges widely from the viciousness in one marriage to the happy confiding in another.
Thank you to @Berkley for the recommendation.
Also finished The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull (1934), one of the British Library Crime Classics. While it did not have as big a twist at the end as I was expecting, the story itself, told by a young man who thinks he is a cool cat, was quite amusing in a grumpy sort of way.
“It all started at lunch. I had finished reading La Grotte du Sphinx in the morning, and was wondering what on earth to read in the afternoon. Of course my aunt has nothing in the house to read. It’s full of Surtees and Dickens and Thackeray and Kipling, and dreadful hearty people like that whom no one reads now, while my aunt’s taste in modern novels runs to the Good Companions, If Winter Comes, or that interminable man Hugh Walpole.”
Now for something different. My copy of Mathematician’s Delight by WW Sawyer (1943) has arrived. At school I loved the elegance of angles and logs and equations, and I am hoping to recapture some of that excitement.
Russell wrote: "Physiologie du Mariage – Honoré de Balzac (1829)...What it is not, given all the attention to dissimulation and finesse, is a book on how to form a loving and trusting marriage."
Haha! Well, as some of us might attest - the 'loving and trusting marriage' is definitely worth living... but is it worth reading about? Too little melodrama, methinks!
Russell wrote: "Physiologie du Mariage – Honoré de Balzac (1829)This was his second mature published work, after Les Chouans, and it created a scandal, asserting as it did that adultery by married women is inevi..."
Mathematicians Delight
That seemingly slim book is jam packed with goodies.
If you wish to learn more I would recommend KA Stroud’s Engineering Mathematics Which are very expensive but can be had secondhand. I
scarletnoir wrote: "Russell wrote: "Physiologie du Mariage – Honoré de Balzac (1829)...What it is not, given all the attention to dissimulation and finesse, is a book on how to form a loving and trusting marriage."
..."
Scarlet, I just discovered a 90 min documentary on Dostoyevsky on arte. It is also on the French channel:
"Roulette russe
Dostoïevski et les tentations de l’Occident"
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/098847-...
Thought you might be interested.
AB76 wrote: "I have cautiously purchasd a contempary political book about the UK, am not keen on reading anything about our PM and his tories, which excludes many of the political books currently publishedSeb..."
AB - I hope you will report back on this read. I looked at the GR comments, and many are in the 'love it or hate it' groupings.
And - where is or was the Red Wall? The maps I've looked at are not clear. I ask because a couple of trips to England ago (I hope that make sense!) I spent a few days in the Potteries which seemed really downtrodden. However, it appears that the Midlands are not part of the Red Wall.
After scrolling down, I see that I shan't be answered. Darn.
MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I have cautiously purchasd a contempary political book about the UK, am not keen on reading anything about our PM and his tories, which excludes many of the political books currently p..."i decided to shelve it for now, the idea of boris worship made me think....leave it
On the "Red Wall" it is basically a collection of solid labour voting working class northern constituencies that turned Conservative during the appalling 2019 election. Less geographically a "wall" and more clusters of seats across former industrial heartlands from the midlands to the north east
scarletnoir wrote: "Russell wrote: "Physiologie du Mariage – Honoré de Balzac (1829)...What it is not, given all the attention to dissimulation and finesse, is a book on how to form a loving and trusting marriage."
..."
I wrote a book about a loving and trusting marriage. Little melodrama, true, but it gave me a lot of pleasure and some, I think, to the few people who read it.
@Shelflife I was just about to recommend Oblomov, but seeing that you've picked The Master and Margarita all I can say is: enjoy that reread, it's even more fun on the second go :)
@Mach so it was more or less in line with your expectations, but you were hoping for more?
Currently finding James Gardner’s The Louvre informative. Eileen Atkins’ memoir, Will She Do? was a relaxing read, her”voice” came through very easily, recalling, amongst so much else, the documentary (Nothing Like a Dame) she, Dames Judi, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith, delighted so many of us with a few years ago. Working class life, and her early challenges in the theatre are well presented. The 2021 Bedside Guardian has much to jog the memory, and will join previous volumes on my shelves. Looking forward to Rachel Holmes’s Sylvia Pankhurst biog, but may have a breather before I embark upon nigh on 1000 pages!
Well, that lot was non fiction, but am looking forward to Louise Erdrich’s latest, The Sentence. Have always enjoyed her novels, still have a few, and met her at a signing, many years ago. She was a gentle, interesting, and interested soul. I believe Anne Tyler is due to publish her latest this year. I’m sure I’m not the only one awaiting that.
Mod
Would you recommend any particular one of her books to start with?
AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I have cautiously purchasd a contempary political book about the UK, am not keen on reading anything about our PM and his tories, which excludes many of the political books ..."So it's not something one can see in a map. Shoot! I suppose though that Bennett's 5 (really 6) Towns are part of the Wall.
I was dismayed at what few amenities there were unless you were interested/employed in a museum. Too many shuttered/boarded up shops. (This of course may be disingenuous as we have our Rust Belt.)
Anastasia wrote: "@Shelflife I was just about to recommend Oblomov, but seeing that you've picked The Master and Margarita all I can say is: enjoy that reread, it's even more fun on the second go :)"I have read some of the basic classic tomes of Russian authors, but many years ago. Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and Anna Akhmatova's poetry. As well as various Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and my favourite, Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' but I have some glaring omissions, having read no Dostoevsky or numerous 'others', but I feel a desire coming on to read some more Russian novels. (My son has a Russian partner so I kind of find that I would like to understand, a bit more, the culture that she is coming from, our tastes in books don't overlap that much, it seems!...)
I'm not much of a fan of Chekov, so far. I have read a few more modern Russian novels, there was one who's title escapes me about a man and his penguin, which sounded intriguing but really was not in reality. What would you recommend?
I'm a fan of Eisenstein and some Tarkovsky (film-wise), There is a lovely short film, by a film student I think (seen many years ago), of The Odessa Steps somewhere, which is a loving 'homage' to the original which if you can ever track it down is worth a look... Anyway your advice, if you feel like giving it, would be much appreciated...
MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I have cautiously purchasd a contempary political book about the UK, am not keen on reading anything about our PM and his tories, which excludes many of the pol..."Boarded up and shuttered shops, in towns, are rather endemic across the UK these days. It is not just in the north. I was in Milton Keynes (60 miles north of London) shopping centre on Friday and was rather surprised as to how many large shops had closed down since the last time I was there (a year or so ago), but little 'pop-up' enterprises had filled in the large open spaces in the central hall.
It struck me that we were going back to a more old-fashioned 'market place' kind of economy, with temporary or small 'stalls' taking the place of the grand department stores. I found myself wondering if we were on a trajectory where in many ways we were going back to a more middle-ages, and possibly often 'black' sort of economy. Of course combined with more people shopping on the internet I think that the trend would have happened anyway, but over a much longer time, but the combined effects of Brexit and Covid have accelerated the process somewhat. It is not at all surprising to me that the huge shopping centre in West London is looking to build tower-block residential buildings at the edge of its shopping centre, as there is now seen to be more money to be made in providing housing for people, than there is in providing them with 'goods'...
I rather liked Stoke, when I visited it a good few years ago, but I have an interest in pottery/ceramics so it is an interesting industrial place to me. It was quite run down then. Maybe time I went back to have a look at what it is like these days. I think the belief, by the 'Red Wall' voters, that the Tories will somehow rescue/regenerate these places is somewhat misplaced, but that is just my personal opinion...
MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I have cautiously purchasd a contempary political book about the UK, am not keen on reading anything about our PM and his tories, which excludes many of the pol..."yes, i think that Bennetts Pottery region is in the Red Wall, the area where the labour vote used to get stronger and stronger, though now every seat in Staffordshire is Tory. (Two Stoke seats turning Conservative along with Newcastle Under Lyme in 2019)
Tam wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I have cautiously purchasd a contempary political book about the UK, am not keen on reading anything about our PM and his tories, which excludes many..."i have no faith in the Tories ever rewarding their voters, these place dont look or speak to Tory values and will be suffering for another decade or so. The PM aka Chancer in Chief, is vaguely promising somebody elses money in his latest unicorn moment, the feeble "levelling up" but its likely the Tories will just bank on the extra seats in the commons in the short term and then get a shock in 2024
some of the elected MPs from these seats are deeply odd, offensive and seem to have wandered in from watered down BNP rallies. Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield, is one of the worst.
@gpfr. Re Louise Erdrich. Love Medicine was her first novel, and the first of her trilogy, following a Chippewa family, which is her own heritage.
Southern Steel by Dymphna Cusack(1953) has started well, set in the Australian coal town of Newcastle, it is a study of class, society and the place of women in wartime AustraliaDarwin has just been bombed and a steel executive returns home, to his birthplace from business abroad, his wife awaits his return, determined to cast off his working class relatives and forge a world away from Newcastle...
Machenbach wrote: "... you deserve a drink...."
Excellent notion. Appropriate too, as for several years it was like a thirst - I'd finish one and after a moment's pause go straight on to another. Just had a fine local porter ale.
Excellent notion. Appropriate too, as for several years it was like a thirst - I'd finish one and after a moment's pause go straight on to another. Just had a fine local porter ale.
scarletnoir wrote: "Russell wrote: "Physiologie du Mariage..."
Scarlet/Veufveuve - Sounds like there are at least three of us here very much of the same uxorious tendency.
Scarlet/Veufveuve - Sounds like there are at least three of us here very much of the same uxorious tendency.
Georg wrote: "Scarlet, I just discovered a 90 min documentary on Dostoyevsky on arte. It is also on the French channel:"Roulette russe
Dostoïevski et les tentations de l’Occident"
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/098847-....."
Thanks for that - I'll check it out!
Veufveuve wrote: "I wrote a book about a loving and trusting marriage. Little melodrama, true, but it gave me a lot of pleasure and some, I think, to the few people who read it..."Not bestseller material, then? You probably need some blood on the carpet for that! ;-)
The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf is a Swiss novella, in my copy translated by Susan Bernofsky. It is another fable-like text, but with quite a bit more drama than Stifter’s Rock Crystal. A tyrannical knight persecutes his serfs, until the Devil offers to help them out – in exchange for a single unbaptized child. My favourite part is easily when a small boy is an eyewitness to the Devil’s work:“he saw the beeches flying up from the ground there, each drawn by two flaming squirrels, and beside them he saw a green man riding a black billy goat, a fiery scourge in his hand, a flaming beard on his face, and, swaying atop his hat, a feather red as glowing embers. The procession flew through the air high over hill and knoll as quick as a wink. This the boy saw, and no harm befell him.”
Presumably the Devil wanted the serfs to all know about the flaming squirrels. This was quite a silly book, but I found it pleasant enough. I don’t think I would recommend it, except maybe to people who are interested in Swiss literature from the period.
Now turning to Athena by John Banville, which has been on my list since nineteen-dickety-two. I was under the impression that this would be a short novel, but my copy has turned out to be quite a bit taller than I had anticipated. Well played Banville…
Lass wrote: "I believe Anne Tyler is due to publish her latest this year. I’m sure I’m not the only one awaiting that."Count me in.
I know nothing about Erdrich... is she witty like Tyler or Pym?
Tam wrote: "I'm not much of a fan of Chekov, so far. I have read a few more modern Russian novels, there was one who's title escapes me about a man and his penguin, which sounded intriguing but really was not in reality..."I very much like Chekhov's plays when performed, but tried reading them once and didn't care for the experience - seeing them on stage or screen is the best way to enjoy that author, I think.
The 'penguin' book is Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov - like you, I found this a let-down. I don't have any recent Russian books to recommend, but if you don't mind going back to the 19th. C then the recently discussed Fathers and Sons by Turgenev is excellent, as is Herzen's Childhood, Youth and Exile.
If you want to give Dostoyevsky a shot, maybe start with some of the shorter ones - The House of the Dead is a somewhat fictionalised account of his time in a Siberian prison camp where he spent four years, and Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead... the 'Notes' contain many of FD's philosophical ideas, but put in the mouth of a retired civil servant.
(This title was unwisely changed to 'Notes from the Underground' by the fashionable husband and wife team of Pevear and Volhokonsky, which to UK readers makes it sound as if it's a diary written by someone travelling on the tube. I have never read their translations, but have strong doubts about their method - I could be wrong, of course. This is a selection of comments about them:
https://welovetranslations.com/2020/0...
FWIW, I'd stick to Constance Garnett, Andrew R. Macandrew or David Magarshack...)
Russell wrote: "Sounds like there are at least three of us here very much of the same uxorious tendency."'uxorious' - tricky word... if you are using the meaning of "having or showing a great or excessive fondness for one's wife", then if we delete 'excessive', then fair enough. (How can love for one's wife be 'excessive'? Surely, that's the way it ought to be...)
However: excessively fond of or submissive to a wife(Merriam-Webster)? Most definitely not!
It seems to be a word invented by the unhappily married to be used as an envious insult - or maybe by the uncommitted players away...
Hushpuppy wrote: "Georg wrote: "Since then numerous people in numerous countries have fought for that right. And I'm prepared to fight tooth and nail before I give it up to reactionary puritans. ."Casting yourself..."
Actually, Hush, you rather drove me away from this forum. I had expressed sympathy to a poster and P of C who had fled an arranged marriage several decades ago and was then offended by 2 white women who asked her as a young woman if she was married yet. The poster then named these two individuals and made sexist, mysogonist remarks about them. I then objected to the public naming of these individuals and these remarks. The remarks are still sexist and mysogonist, regardless who makes them and such offensive language against women should not be normalised.
You then attacked me, Hush, stating you were not going to let my remarks pass you by, that they said a lot about me to you and you would refrain from making assumptions about my ethnicity and gender, although I did note that the poster and P of C did not respond to my remarks.
Before you or anyone else makes any further assumptions about me,
I am happy to let you know that I am an older white woman. Perhaps one reason I found the poster 's sexist and mysogonist remarks so objectionable is because I have recently been subjected to similar sexist, mysogonist and ageist remarks when I requested a young non- mask white male not to stand so close to me in a local shop, when I asked a young white woman and two young men who were cycling abreast on our local footpath to cycle in single file so I would not have to step onto the road way and finally, and this one always gets a laugh, 2 young white men called me an old f***y when I had the temerity to walk in front of their van when it was stopped at the traffic lights.
The behaviour of all these young people was cowardly but it did unnerve me and I changed my movements for several days thereafter.
In a similar but less threatening way, Hushpuppy, you unnerved me and as a result, I have avoided the forum at times.
And Georg, it may not have been your intention, but it was offensive to repeat YO's racist and sexist lyrics.
What this forum really needs is a moderator!
Started yesterday with The Master and Margarita, not least swayed by Lisa’s (#281): That was one of my favorite Reading Group months!Really looking forward to reading up on these posts. Bulgakov's novel is so enjoyable I deferred, yesterday, one or two things which I really wanted to do this (long) weekend... @ Anastasia (#300): This is where Oblomov comes in, which I will definitely get back to. And yes, you are right, it is even more fun on the second go!
AB wrote (#280):
published by the excellent Vagabond Voices (for more Baltic classics and modern books in translation, google the website)Oh, I love these kinds of publishers. Here is the website with translations into English: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/chan...
Many thanks, AB.
Russell (# 292): What a brilliant post. I enjoy reading your reviews very much. Many congratulations on your complete Balzac! Opting out of Mathematician’s Delight, though – but that’s not you, it’s me.
Mach (#298): So very pleased you are writing reviews again – thanks for this. (e)TL&S has the effect that some new (to me) authors’ names start to seep in by being mentioned regularly, and – whoops – you start reading their books! Carson McCullers and Ivy Compton-Burnett (also due to the great quote in #310) may well be coming up next.
Veufveuve (#299) wrote:
I wrote a book about a loving and trusting marriage. Little melodrama, true, but it gave me a lot of pleasure and some, I think, to the few people who read it.Together with your name here, I find this quite moving.
Tam wrote: (#306):
Anna Karenina and War and Peace […] As well as various Pasternak,Ha, you have just added to (reminded me of) the mental list list, as you have, scarletnoir #320.
So much to explore!
@scarlet. Louise Erdrich’s main focus is the modern lives and challenges of Native Americans (if that is now the correct designation) in the present day so I wouldn’t describe her like Tyler etc, other than her understanding of, and sympathy with,her characters
@scarlet. The designation may be First Nation, but not sure.
Should have said, review of L Erdrich’s “The Sentence” in Saturday’s Graun.
Cold and grey in the Shires and the following reading is under way:Southern Steel by Dymphna Cusack(1953)- Wartime Australia, class conflict and the position of women in Newcastle, New South Wales
Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston (1938)- the great writer visits Jamaica and Haiti searching for voodoo rituals and studying the people of the islands
18 by Paul Bankovskis (2014)- a latvian novel concerned with memory and the seminal year of Latvian independence in 1918
Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin (1831)- the journal of the great naturalist as he travels around South America
Sontag's essays will be read later in the year, shelved for now as Hurston was beckoning me!
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Ersatz TLS
Books mentioned in this topic
The Private Life of Helen of Troy (other topics)Alban Berg: letters to his wife; (other topics)
The Making of Middlebrow Culture (other topics)
The Private Life of Helen of Troy (other topics)
Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007 (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Andrey Kurkov (other topics)Alban Berg (other topics)
Alban Berg (other topics)
Elisa Victoria (other topics)
Raymond Queneau (other topics)
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