evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

Humbolt's Gift is easy to summarize in a sentence (washed-up ex-wunderkind bequeaths to his embarrassingly successful but rapidly money-hemorrhaging friend the nutty movie scenario they cooked up together one drunken night when they were both still young and golden), but hard to describe. The reasons why Charlie Citrine, the embarassingly successful writer-narrator, is hemorrhaging money form several tide pools of comically demoralizing drama, each with its own thriving drama ecosystem. Bellow combines beautifully sturdy paragraphs, the elite athletes of the paragraph world, with meandering, unwieldy plots - a perfect combination if you're me.

Black Spring continues to be a weird-ass book of uncertain category (Wikipedia calls it a novel, which I guess is fair enough), with lots of quasi-Joycean stand-up-comic logic and an eccentric blend of Real Gross Nasty True Life Grittiness and pure fantasy. Sometimes he hits a splendid ranty stride, and for a moment you're nodding along as if to music, and then suddenly he'll skid off in another direction about the true nature of mankind or something, and you can almost hear the record scratch inside your head.

If you want to listen to Henry Miller reading HIS OWN WORDS in exactly the voice you would expect him to have (a pleasantly crusty midcentury New Yorker with some distinctive vocal tics,) there's loads of audio over on Ubuweb Sound: http://www.ubu.com/sound/miller.html - also thanks to Wikipedia.

What I'm Reading Now

I really can't tell if The Coup is a failed experiment that's slowly growing on me or a successful one I'm not keen on. Updike's put on the extra-florid costume of a fictional African dictator (who once studied in Wisconsin) in order to make Updikean jabs at American consumerism and cultural imperialism from a fresh angle, and giving himself an excuse to be maximally indulgent in his prose style, with more decorative curlicues than suburban Pennsylvania allows. It's lushly satirical but seldom actually funny, at least for me, as the work of macheteing through the metaphors is too tiring. Do I like it? I still don't know.

In Kristin Lavransdattar I've just finished Chapter 5 of Book II (The Wife), and. . . Erlend did something considerate! Can you believe it? Of course he did plenty of inconsiderate things before then and probably after, but check it out:

( Erlend's Big Moment )
This book keeps getting better, but I suspect the marriage of Kristin and Erlend will get a little worse.


What I Plan to Read Next

I've given myself too much of a backlog, so beyond the 99 Novels, I'm not sure. The two that I ordered haven't arrived yet, but I have a couple more from the library: Man of the People by Chinua Achebe and The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark.

What I've Finished Reading

Late Call by Angus Wilson. I was a little worried about this 99 Novels selection because Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo was one of the few 99 Novels that left me cold - but I liked this one a lot. The satire is much more down to earth, and kinder - it's about an old woman retiring to live with her son in a postwar New Town, with her difficult, charming, poisonously bitter old husband and his resentments, and her son's resentments and his grown-up children's, and all her own memories crowded together in a modern house with intimidatingly self-sufficient stove and washing machine.

I mentioned Frankenstein last week, and my thoughts on it are not deep nor have they changed much: Victor Frankenstein is a world-class idiot who can bring life to lifeless matter through science! and decides that the best use of this incredible new technology is OBVIOUSLY "build a guy from scratch!" but apparently never counted on having to make any other decisions with regard to his shambling emo teen creation. As soon as the creature opens his earnest, innocent, love-seeking eyes, Victor runs off to have a nervous breakdown about how (totally unexpectedly!) hideous his creature turned out to be. Victor, maybe you should have prepared for this moment by building a slightly larger than average frog first? Or something? He also can't figure out that "see you on your wedding night, sucker!!" might constitute a threat to anyone but himself, even though the monster has just painstakingly explained that his vengeance M.O. is "kill everyone Victor cares about." He decides that this threat means that the creature is going to kill him on his wedding night, and then it'll all be over! So obviously he has to get married as soon as possible so his fiance will be safe forever! Victor is the stupidest mad scientist.

Victor's creature is an instant classic and I love him. He gets carelessly knocked into life by a total doofus and has to fend for himself, a stranger and afraid in a world he never made, and damn it, he does the best he can. Anyone whose introduction to human emotion is The Sorrows of Young Werther is bound to experience some social difficulties, even setting aside the whole "giant reanimated corpse patchwork" aspect of things. Ok, so you shouldn't kill innocent people, even if you have a legitimate beef with your creator and are feeling legitimately betrayed by humanity. But it's hard not to feel for him just the same. Is he the grandfather of all sad monsters? I don't know enough about sad monster history to be sure, but he's a memorable one.

I feel like I must have read Frankenstein at some point, possibly in high school when I read a lot of things I forgot immediately after. At least, I experienced a lot of deja vu while reading - which might just be free-floating Frankenstein cultural osmosis. I wasn't keeping a reading log back then so there's no way to know for sure.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm in the middle of U.P. by R.A. Riekki, which is a fantastic book about scrubby angry-bored inchoate-longing-addled teenage boys in the late-eighties Upper Penninsula of Michigan, and just picked up Black Spring by Henry Miller (a used bookstore acquisition driven by my pledge to finally read Henry Miller) whose first chapter about growing up in Brooklyn dovetails perfectly with the concerns of U.P. in spite of vast distances in time and space and degree of urbanization:

The boys you worshipped when you first came down into the street remain with you all your life. They are the only real heroes. Napoleon, Lenin, Capone -- all fiction. Napoleon is nothing to me in comparison with Eddie Carney, who gave me my first black eye [. . . ] All these boys of the Fourteenth Ward have a flavor about them still. They were not invented or imagined: they were real. Their names ring out like gold coins -- Tom Fowler, Jim Buckley, Matt Owen, Rob Ramsay, Harry Martin, Johnny Dunne, to say nothing of Eddie Carney or the great Lester Reardon. Why, even now when I say Johnny Paul the names of the saints leave a bad taste in my mouth. Johnny Paul was the living Odyssey of the Fourteenth Ward; that he later became a truck driver is an irrelevant fact.

I'm also reading The Spire by William Golding, about a bunch of medieval sinners building a cathedral to no avail - actually re-reading, because William Golding is too damn subtle for me; I got halfway through and realized I had missed 9/10 of the innuendos.

Also, Kristin Lavransdatter! ( under the cut )

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm going out of town this weekend, and as usual when I go out of town I get ambitious and pack a lot of books, thinking I'll have more free time than I do. This time I've got ten. One of them is Kristin Lavransdatter. Tuck Everlasting and Light in August are in the pile along with some reference-y books about the past, and The Canterbury Tales. We'll see what I end up reading.

Sadly, neither The Defence by V. Nabokov nor Heartland by Wilson Harris are available at the local library, so I'll either have to buy them or ILL it if I want to continue my 99 Novels in chronological order.