Conversational Reading

Away for New Year's

See you all in 2010.

This should keep you busy till at least 2011.

Christmas Gifts

So Here's my haul this year:

• The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
• Diary of a Bad Year by JM Coetzee
• Practicing New Historicism, eds. Cathernie Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt
• The Culture Industry by Theodor Adorno
• The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda by Andrew Rice
• Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier
• You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon

And hopefuls for future gifting. If you'd like to give me one, go right ahead:

• The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism by Peter Gay
• Summertime: Fiction by J. M. Coetzee
• The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media by Walter Benjamin
• Mythologies by Roland Barthes
• Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
• On Late Style Edward Said
• George Mills by Stanley Elkin

Pim & Francie Review at The Quarterly Conversation

Pim & Francie, one of the strangest books we've reviewed in a while, courtesy of Scott Bryan Wilson. Here's a taste of the review:

Adding to the confusion are sequences that seem like they’re from something longer but are taken out of that context and stuck in the middle of the book. For instance, Pim and Francie, having dismembered some sort of animal (i.e., taken off his arms, legs, and penis), tease him that they’ll let him go on one condition, but we never see any event preceding this two-page sequence, nor anything after it. Additionally, these pages are zoomed in on so that some of the art and word balloons are cut off at the margins, denying us even more understanding. The entire book is fractured in this way, so that pages that seem from a sketchbook are next to pages that appear to have been ripped up and thrown away, only to be taken out of the trash and taped back together, though never finished. Many pages appear to be stained with coffee or tea.

Tests of Time

Ron Silliman:

Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this. They recall and sometimes reiterate the archaeologist’s maxim that ultimately hard copy is truth. If you can’t dig it up in 5,000 years, did it ever exist? Ian Hamilton Finlay, with his stone-carved minimal texts, may outlast us all.

El fondo del cielo Review

Moleskine Literario posts a review of El fondo del cielo by Rodrigo Fresan. Cielo, you might recall, was Enrique Vila-Matas' recommendation from The Quarterly Conversation's Translate This Book! roundtable.

It does sound interesting:

Entre la imposibilidad de verse a uno mismo fuera del Universo, y la necesidad imperiosa de ver un planeta distinto al nuestro, se forma esta novela que según el autor “quizá no sea la novela de amor más grande pero sí –seguro- la más larga” pues alcanza desde el estallido del Big Bang hasta el final de la Era de Las Cosas Extrañas, dentro de 7.590 millones de años.

And then there's this:

De manera voluntaria, Fresán ha querido hacer una novela de, con y sobre la ciencia ficción, donde diferentes dimensiones temporales y espaciales existen paralelo. Evadir esa complejidad sería darle la espalda al logro mayor del libro, como es el conseguir que todas esas dimensiones tengan sentido y se engarcen con precisión en el argumento. Sin embargo, me permito desmontar la novela en dos bloques distintos solo para poder reseñarla y admirarla. Como si fueran dos versiones de la misma novela, o dos novelas enlazadas que luego, al terminar de leerlas, formarán una sola obra espléndida sobre personajes que no pertenecen a ningún mundo escrita, al mismo tiempo, por Kurt Vonnegut, por un lado, y John Cheever por otro.

Forthcoming Titles from Open Letter

Chad unveils Open Letter's titles for summer 2010.

Some excellent stuff here. I very enthusiastically reviewed Quim Monzo's The Enormity of the Tragedy for the Philly Inquirer two years ago, so I'm thrilled to see Open Letter will be bringing out his novel Gasoline.

Also on the list is A Thousand Peaceful Cities by Jerzy Pilch, which we excerpted and discussed at The Quarterly Conversation. And I'm thrilled to see The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra since we very much liked his novella Bonsai (am I noting a tree theme here?) in TQC.

Stoner!

I've been on a bit of a Stoner crusade since I read this book back in October. It really is that good, and given that it was out of print for a good 30 years until NYRB published their edition in 2006, I figured it must be fairly overlooked.

Well, looks like it may not be quite as overlooked as I thought. In addition to my own appreciation for it at The Millions' Year in Reading, we find two other partisans. Edan Lepucki:

Stoner by John Williams is not about a dude who smokes blunts all day. It’s about a man named William Stoner, and the book tells his life story in a mere 278 pages. The prose is unadorned and crisp, and it captures the true essence of its protagonist, a man who grew up on a farm, and then studied, and went onto teach, English literature at the University of Missouri. In other words, a person who isn’t particularly noteworthy in the broader scheme of things. This is a heartbreaking and beautiful novel, one of the best I have ever read, or will have the privilege to read, in my life.

And Patrick Brown:

Stoner, by John Williams, is not only the best novel I read this year, but it’s among the best I’ve ever read. It is also, I think, the sort of book that people aren’t writing right now. It’s a life, from the moment when its protagonist Bill Stoner really comes alive in a sophomore English class at the University of Missouri through his career as a professor of English there. About halfway through the novel is one of the best scenes I’ve ever encountered in a book. I don’t want to describe it too much here, as discovering it is one of the pleasures of the book, but I think they should teach it in writing classes everywhere, as it really is a perfect scene. In fact, Stoner is a perfect novel.

So one more time, with feeling: read Stoner! And feel free to join me in 2010 for Butcher's Crossing.

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer

For a while now I've cast a curious eye at my galley of Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer. There's the obligatory Kafka reference on the back copy, there's the rave from Thomas Mann, it's from Archipelago books (always a positive sign), and the title just sounds interesting. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I have a mile-long stack of books compared to classic authors, praised by titans, put out by great publishers, and screaming for my attention. So, in other words, I haven't really had that last push to take it down from the shelf.

Well, it might have just come. Michael Orthofer calls this book a classic:

A longtime Weiss fan -- and great admirer of this book -- I've long been touting this as one of the great untranslated German novels of the twentieth century -- and now it's finally here!

And he points to Joshua Cohen's enthusiastic review:

George Letham, Physician and Murderer is only the fourth book of Weiss’ to be published in English (The Eyewitness, The Aristocrat, and Franziska preceded it), but it is the longest and most characteristic. Its 500 pages tell the story of a man who, in order to end his unhappy marriage and so to immerse himself in research, injects his older, wealthier, well-insured wife with a lethal poison known as Agent Y, then proceeds to botch a cover-up: The man leaves the syringe at the crime scene, and he immediately rushes off to confess to his father, a powerful official in municipal bureaucracy. (It sometimes seems as if all fathers in Austro-Hungarian fiction are “powerful officials in municipal bureaucracies.”) Letham, after being underserved by an inept lawyer, is sentenced to a tropical penal colony ravaged by Yellow Fever, known in the book as Y.F. (Joel Rotenberg’s translation is occasionally disappointingly faithful.) There, as prisoner, he finds the professional purpose that was unavailable to him in civilian life, as he begins to search for the origins of the epidemic. Formerly an isolated technician, in the colony he’s forced to interact with patients, especially with a young beautiful Portuguese girl—in addition to convicted murderers, rapists, thieves and, what’s worse, benign homosexuals such as his cellmate, March. (Georg Letham is notable among period novels for being entirely uneuphemistic in its treatment of homosexuality.)

Books!

So, what'd you get today, and what'd you give to your book-loving friends?

Books to Read in 2010

Apropos of my Books to Watch for in 2010 post from last week, I've been receiving further suggestions (and finding more of my own picks). So I've updated the original list and will keep updating it as more suggestions roll in.

More from Jorge Volpi?

No one much seemed to like Season of Ash, but the Literary Saloon points out another book of Volpi's that sounds far better:

So while I wasn't that taken by Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash, I'm very intrigued by his new non-fiction work, El insomnio de Bolívar: Cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre América Latina en el siglo XXI, just out in Spanish.

The Antonia Kerrigan Literary Agency information page has an (English) summary, and what I'm particularly curious about is this section of the book:

the third meditation tackles recent Latin American literature: the problems of the divergent expectations of the editorial market and criticism, as well as the expectations of the new Latin American writers -- all help Volpi to expose the end of a model of identity imposed from the outside. Here the figure of Roberto Bolaño, "the last Latin American writer", stands out.

I enjoyed Volpi's serialized essay on Latin American literature at Three Percent, so maybe this would be a more suitable form for him.

As Michael points out, Moleskine Literario has a Spanish-language excerpt from the book in which Volpi offers an amusing "before/after" list of Boom and post-Boom authors. Thus:

Convicciones políticas

Antes: Izquierda revolucionaria

Ahora: Indiferencia política y cierta simpatía por ese lugar indefinido llamado “centro”.

Amistades

Antes: Presidentes y caudillos latinoamericanos, estrellas de Hollywood, artistas plásticos.

Ahora: Directores y actores de cine latinoamericano, académicos gringos, edecanes de congresos literarios [un amigo geek a quien puedes llamar para que te dé el dato de un gadget o te arregle un problema con tu portátil es imprescindible

It's a little tongue-in-cheek but also fairly accurate. And this list of influences on the Boom and post-Boom authors should require no translation skills:

Escritores favoritos en otras lenguas

Antes: Faulkner, Dos Passos, Camus, Sartre, Mann, Mailer.

Ahora: Auster, Amis, Sebald, Tabucchi, Magris, Murakami [¿Cómo? ¿Y Nabokov? Estás mal, Volpí]

Escritores favoritos en español

Antes: Borges, Vallejo, Arguedas, Neruda, Rulfo, Paz.

Ahora: Borges, Bolaño, Marías, Vila-Matas, Piglia [aumentaría a Manuel Puig, Sergio Pitol y César Aira]

The Kindly Ones and The Problem of Point of View in Literature

Dan Green offers an excellent corrective to those who managed to forget that The Kindly Ones is being narrated by an unreliable narrator.

One has to assume that in creating a narrator with such extreme limitations as Dr. Aue, Littell is fully aware of building in a space for ambiguity and uncertainty, of presenting us with a character whose every utterance has to be considered potentially compromised by context. One might assume further that Littell is posing to readers an explicit challenge precisely to scrutinize the text in this way, not to take it as the author's own account of Nazism or to judge it by standards inappropriate to the kind of work it is. Thus when Laila Lalami complains that the reader of The Kindly Ones is not "drawn into the narrative by the beauty of the language, a masterful use of point of view, or an intriguing personal life against which the monstrosity of the main character could be highlighted," she implies the novel would be less objectionable as a portrait of a "monster" if instead of its "plodding style" it employed beautiful language, unified the point of view so that the narrator seemed less dissociated, or made Aue's personal life more "intriguing" and less repellent. She is asking it to be something other than itself, something less troublesome.

For a text authored by an SS bureaucrat to exhibit "beautiful" language would defy belief even more considerably than does Aue's ability to show up at every important stage of the Final Solution, which Lalami describes as "unrealistic." If ever a novel justifies a "plodding style," The Kindly Ones is it . . .

Quite correct. To paraphrase Wayne Booth, authors can get away with bloody murder (no pun intended) by invoking the first-person as a defense of "poor" writing.

Later Dan writes:

Peter Kemp further complains of the "pitiless prolixity" with which Aue tells his story and doubts "Aue's prodigious capacity to recall in profuse, minute detail all that was done and said. . . ." That a fussy bureaucrat like Maximilien Aue would remember his actions in great detail--that he might even have records of them--doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, but the question of whether Aue knows too much brings us back to Aue's status as narrator. Perhaps he does too conveniently recall the details of his wartime experiences. As far as I know, no one has questioned the accuracy of the historical details in which Aue's fictionalized story is embedded, but of course there is no way to "verify" the details of the fictional story. Ultimately, it really makes no difference: these are the things that were "done and said" that Aue wants us to know, and the impression they leave about him is presumably the impression he wants to leave.

The same is true of the plot developments that place Aue at so many of the crucial events of the war's waning years. Perhaps Aue is manipulating the historical record in order to give himself a role in all of these events, but again it doesn't really matter. The self-portrayal that emerges is the one Aue must intend. That this portrayal is a damning one suggests either that Aue is (consciously or subconsciously) submitting himself for judgment or that his particular involvement in the Final Solution is to be taken at face value. The former is not impossible, especially given his willingness to reveal all of his psychosexual problems as well. However, accepting that Aue happened to be in a position to witness so much of Nazi Germany's dissolution, at least for the purposes of the novel his fictional existence makes possible, doesn't seem to me such a difficult concession. His presence at the decisive stages of this process could just be, in fact, the reason he decided to write his memoir, following up on the less comprehensive accounts of other ex-Nazi colleagues. . . .

Most Popular Amazon Purchases Q4 2009

As I do every three months here, I'm now going to run down popular Amazon purchases made through links on this site. As a reminder to everyone, purchases made through Amazon links on this site kick back a donation to me and help fund both this blog and The Quarterly Conversation.

1. The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature by JC Hallman

The Story About the Story was the most popular seller for last quarter, as well. This is the book that we at The Quarterly Conversation got behind as one of the more exciting works of criticism to be published in 2009. To briefly review, it's an anthology that JC Hallman put together of lit crit that is done right. To see precisely what he means by that, have a look at this essay of his we published in the fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

2. Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations

This attests to the continuing popularity of Roberto Bolano for readers of this website. I only mentioned and linked to Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations at the end of November, but it proved to be a very popular title. Clearly people are interested in knowing more about the man behind the books, and as time passes I think we'll be learning more and more about him, probably at the expense of the Bolano myth.

3. The Land of Green Plums by Herta Mueller

This is obviously a direct consequence of Herta Mueller winning the Nobel Prize. I like to think that Marcel Inhoff's incisive take on Mueller's writing (especially for this novel) contributed to her popularity via this blog.

4. (tie) Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez

The sales of Kamby Bolongo Mean River are pretty much traceable to this review in The Quarterly Conversation. Indeed, I have no problem seeing why people were eager to read this one. The review makes it sound like one of the most interesting works of fiction to cross my eyes in the last three months:

In Kamby Bolongo Mean River our protagonist is confined in an observation cell containing only a bed and a telephone. Behind the two-way glass, white coated doctors observe the incarcerated narrator as he chooses to answer or not answer incoming calls. The sudden ringing of the phone occasionally terrorizes the man whose frequent masturbation spells may or may not be a subject of interest to whoever these observational authorities are.

4. (tie) The Tanners by Robert Walser

This would seem to be attributable to my own enthusiasm for The Tanners, a book that I've periodically remarked on over the last three months and which I reviewed extremely favorably in The Quarterly Conversation.

6. Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Interest for Memories of the Future was clearly stoked by this review I linked to. In part, the review said:

The subject of the story "Quadraturin" is a Soviet city dweller, Sutulin, who lives in an apartment so tiny that when he hears a knock on his door one evening, he doesn't need to get out of bed to open it: he merely "threaded a toe through the door handle, and pulled." The stranger at the door persuades Sutulin to take a free sample of an experimental substance that is supposed to make rooms bigger. Sutulin begins to apply the Quadraturin to his walls as the instructions on the tube advise, but he accidentally spills the entire contents of the tube on his floor. He wakes up the next morning in a "faintly familiar, large, but ungainly room," where his furniture looks awkward and the angles of the walls are uneven. He enjoys the novel pleasure of strolling from one end of his room to the other, but he must enjoy it in secret, for like other citizens he is legally allotted only ninety-seven square feet of living space, and owning more than his share could mean losing his apartment. Sutulin is, like Akaky Akakievich, Raskolnikov and Joseph K, a bachelor whose quarters contain a secret -- something at least obscurely embarrassing, perhaps criminal. As usual, there is a talkative landlady and neighbors to be avoided. Sutulin realizes he has to buy curtains to hide his apartment from the eyes of passers-by.

It only gets worse from there: every time Sutulin leaves the room, he returns to find that his apartment has grown still bigger . . .

7. (tie) Pornografia: A Novel by Witold Gombrowicz

I read Pornografia: A Novel over the summer and it made such a large, positive impact on me that I was moved to serialize a chapter from it in the fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Interest in the likely stemmed from there and my occasional favorable remarks about it since then.

7. (tie) American Tabloid: A Novel by James Ellroy

I'm guessing the popularity of American Tabloid: A Novel goes back to this post, where I enthused over Norman Rush's very engaging review in the NYRB. In part, Rush said:

But before looking more fully at the book, I want to say something about the genuinely remarkable manner in which this series is written. For a time, the tag Avant-Pop was attached to a certain kind of avant-garde writing, but that's not right for Ellroy. Nor is Avant-Pulp. Whatever it should be called, the literary experience it provides is unique.

James Ellroy's brand of extreme writing is fun to read. At its best, it could be addictive. The stories are told in a uniform, crazed, modern American vernacular, and with such breakneck speed, hairpin plot turns, compression, and telescoping of events that the reader needs to stop and rest from time to time.

The Lyric Essay

Appropos of the fact that I'm reading (& very much enjoying) Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I'll link to this appreciation of Bluets, a book I think David Shields would very much approve of. From the appreciation:

If I could come to everyone’s house and hand them a copy of Bluets, I would. It’s a slim book of two hundred and forty short, numbered paragraphs, “propositions.” It may be an extended lyric essay; it might be safe to say it is a meditation on the color blue, but that probably wouldn’t prepare you; it concerns loneliness, fucking, is haunted by blue tarps, discusses bowerbirds, touches down on Goethe and Wittgenstein, Novalis and Isaac Newton (I think even Derrida is mentioned—does this sound pretentious? It’s far from pretentious; it’s the opposite of pretentious; it’s the most straight human thing I’ve read.).

It’s an impossible book to describe without simply handing it to you . . .

Derridian Philosophy By Poetic Means

Interesting essay here on the poetry of Dan Beachy-Quick:

Beachy-Quick is adept at the classic Derridean move: identifying the simultaneity of irreconcilable contraries that, upon analysis, depend upon and collapse into one another. His book, a collection of lyrical prose meditations on Melville’s Moby-Dick, redounds with collapsed binaries and aporetic splits, contradictions that reciprocally create themselves, terms that imply and give rise to their opposites: interior/exterior, circumference/center, poison/antidote; “Queequeg is illiterate but he reads”; “the wound completes us with our imperfection.” . . .

The book takes its place in a tradition of studies of the American sublime with Melville as their centerpiece. Beachy-Quick’s precursor is Charles Olson, whose 1947 Call Me Ishmael, like Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985) after it, pays homage to a beloved book by creating a citational collage-text that is by turns personal, critical, and lyrical. Olson dissected Melville’s marginalia to interpret Moby-Dick through Shakespeare’s King Lear, but his opening sally identifies his preoccupation as more metaphysical than literary-historical: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America . . . . I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.” For Olson, Melville’s book becomes an “American Shiloh,” a sacred sanctuary, a source of “HEIGHT and CAVE, with the CROSS between.” Beachy-Quick likewise reads the American masterpiece as an ur text for spiritual quest and secular epiphany, quoting early the image of Ahab as a man with “a crucifixion in his face.” In this regard, both Beachy-Quick and Olson owe a debt to another great commentator on the Melvillean sublime, D. H. Lawrence: “If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?” Beachy-Quick sets about offering an up-to-date answer, circling obsessively around subjects of awe and terror, exaltation and debasement, testing the sublime as the limit to the mind that proves its capacity.