Whorled Without Aimed Wednesday
Feb. 7th, 2018 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished "Reading"
Finnegans Wake, at long last. My 99 Novels list now has an unbroken stretch of read books from 1939 through - what is this? '53?
Was it worth it? Who knows? I'm now reading A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake by William York Tindall and suspect Joyce of having created a hilariously successful trap for earnest lit critics. I'm looking forward to encountering some totally serious footnotes to Joyce's mock-footnotes.
Anyway, whatever it is, I applaud it. I was successfully trapped, and I laughed a lot (it's more like a very allusive stand-up comedy routine than anything else) despite never having a single inkling of the "plot" Tindall and Burroughs claim is detectable, until about three pages from the end. Even then it's not so much a plot as "Nora shows up." But I was happier to see her than I had any right to be.
What I've Finished Reading
The Bell is a very different reading experience. it's lucid and funny, and perfectly economical. Everyone's good and bad choices, with maybe one or two exceptions, are so lit up with inevitability that I barely had the energy to say "No, stop" - which might taste like smug fatalism in a different book but here is (almost always) just the consequence of a specific kind of good writing.
I'm not sure how I feel about one particular plot development, or rather two related ones involving tandem tragic ends, but otherwise my only beef with this book is that Dora's pompous asshole husband never gets the chance to be sympathetic (or, as Toby would say, a little less rebarbative). This probably isn't a flaw so much as a disappointed personal expectation. Henry Williamson's Dickie Maddison is making me crave assholes to sympathize with.
What I'm Reading Now
Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon. This is an official biography and so far nothing special, but it has a nice comfortable momentum from being enormous, and I enjoy reading about Mailer, who reminds me a little of Harriet Vane's story idea about the novelist who married for material and cheerfully murdered each new husband once the books were done. Luckily, divorce is reasonably easy to obtain in the US by the time Mailer is of age, so murder is off the table, though his Quest for Experience is still a little hard on the kids.
What I genuinely like about Mailer: his ambition, especially his ambition to write a great novel about shit, his tendency to put his foot in his mouth just when he needs his mouth the most, and his tremendous, painful loathing of plastic, which no one seems to have taken seriously enough to suit him. The latter didn't prevent him from co-designing and building a seven-foot lego model of a City of Tomorrow, which stayed in his house until his death (being "hell to dust," according to his sixth wife) though the hours of pressing tiny plastic pieces together made him "feel flat and dead." I would like to petition to rename the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the Norman Mailer Memorial Garbage Patch.
Henry Williamson and C. P. Snow are back! The Golden Virgin is a lot more Phil and the Great War, and a little more of Phil's parents, who for my money are the real heartbreakers in this 15-novel sequence (this is Book 6, for anyone keeping track). If there were nothing else to like about this series, I would read it just for Dickie Maddison, the bitterly unhappy suburban martinet, reading the atrocity reports in his favorite yellow paper half for their pornographic potential and half to see his own discontent and disillusionment mirrored in a rotten world. I've made him sound like a caricature, but that's because I'm not as good a writer as Henry Williamson. He's not. Hetty, Phillip's mother, is as thwarted and unhappy as her husband, but she can still laugh and be kind, and so is less pitiable.
Like Doctor Who's Craig with Paris, I have a hard time seeing the point of C. P. Snow - but the first long section of Homecoming, dealing with Lewis' unhappy marriage, is genuinely compelling in a low-key Snowish way. Sheila claws her way out of her social isolation to support a publishing project she thinks will give her a sense of purpose, only to be betrayed by her casually sociopathic beneficiary.
Then the situation is resolved in a not particularly satisfying way (SPOILER: [Shelia commits suicide]), and it's back to Standard Operating Snowcedure, minus the only character I particularly cared about. But I'm trying to pay more attention this time around - I haven't really given Snow a fair shake due to unspecified generalized boredom.
What I Plan to Read Next
My sci-fi anthology, more C. P. Snow, whatever else is lying around.
Finnegans Wake, at long last. My 99 Novels list now has an unbroken stretch of read books from 1939 through - what is this? '53?
Was it worth it? Who knows? I'm now reading A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake by William York Tindall and suspect Joyce of having created a hilariously successful trap for earnest lit critics. I'm looking forward to encountering some totally serious footnotes to Joyce's mock-footnotes.
Anyway, whatever it is, I applaud it. I was successfully trapped, and I laughed a lot (it's more like a very allusive stand-up comedy routine than anything else) despite never having a single inkling of the "plot" Tindall and Burroughs claim is detectable, until about three pages from the end. Even then it's not so much a plot as "Nora shows up." But I was happier to see her than I had any right to be.
What I've Finished Reading
The Bell is a very different reading experience. it's lucid and funny, and perfectly economical. Everyone's good and bad choices, with maybe one or two exceptions, are so lit up with inevitability that I barely had the energy to say "No, stop" - which might taste like smug fatalism in a different book but here is (almost always) just the consequence of a specific kind of good writing.
I'm not sure how I feel about one particular plot development, or rather two related ones involving tandem tragic ends, but otherwise my only beef with this book is that Dora's pompous asshole husband never gets the chance to be sympathetic (or, as Toby would say, a little less rebarbative). This probably isn't a flaw so much as a disappointed personal expectation. Henry Williamson's Dickie Maddison is making me crave assholes to sympathize with.
What I'm Reading Now
Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon. This is an official biography and so far nothing special, but it has a nice comfortable momentum from being enormous, and I enjoy reading about Mailer, who reminds me a little of Harriet Vane's story idea about the novelist who married for material and cheerfully murdered each new husband once the books were done. Luckily, divorce is reasonably easy to obtain in the US by the time Mailer is of age, so murder is off the table, though his Quest for Experience is still a little hard on the kids.
What I genuinely like about Mailer: his ambition, especially his ambition to write a great novel about shit, his tendency to put his foot in his mouth just when he needs his mouth the most, and his tremendous, painful loathing of plastic, which no one seems to have taken seriously enough to suit him. The latter didn't prevent him from co-designing and building a seven-foot lego model of a City of Tomorrow, which stayed in his house until his death (being "hell to dust," according to his sixth wife) though the hours of pressing tiny plastic pieces together made him "feel flat and dead." I would like to petition to rename the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the Norman Mailer Memorial Garbage Patch.
Henry Williamson and C. P. Snow are back! The Golden Virgin is a lot more Phil and the Great War, and a little more of Phil's parents, who for my money are the real heartbreakers in this 15-novel sequence (this is Book 6, for anyone keeping track). If there were nothing else to like about this series, I would read it just for Dickie Maddison, the bitterly unhappy suburban martinet, reading the atrocity reports in his favorite yellow paper half for their pornographic potential and half to see his own discontent and disillusionment mirrored in a rotten world. I've made him sound like a caricature, but that's because I'm not as good a writer as Henry Williamson. He's not. Hetty, Phillip's mother, is as thwarted and unhappy as her husband, but she can still laugh and be kind, and so is less pitiable.
Like Doctor Who's Craig with Paris, I have a hard time seeing the point of C. P. Snow - but the first long section of Homecoming, dealing with Lewis' unhappy marriage, is genuinely compelling in a low-key Snowish way. Sheila claws her way out of her social isolation to support a publishing project she thinks will give her a sense of purpose, only to be betrayed by her casually sociopathic beneficiary.
Then the situation is resolved in a not particularly satisfying way (SPOILER: [Shelia commits suicide]), and it's back to Standard Operating Snowcedure, minus the only character I particularly cared about. But I'm trying to pay more attention this time around - I haven't really given Snow a fair shake due to unspecified generalized boredom.
What I Plan to Read Next
My sci-fi anthology, more C. P. Snow, whatever else is lying around.
