evelyn_b | Entries tagged with saul bellow

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

OH MAN you guys. I couldn't remember a thing about why I hated Hatchet before I started reading it, but as soon as I did, it all came crashing back like a needy ghost on the ghost of a motorcycle. It's the writing style. Or, as Gary Paulsen would have it, The Style.

The Style.
( The Style. )

It's not bad. You can read it in a day. The author seems to have some bones to pick with the alienation of man from his environment by technology and civilization. I can't share in this lament because I need my glasses to read it.

I didn't love Station Eleven. In fact, I almost put it down forever when I saw the "reveal" about the identity of the boring creepy survivalist prophet heading toward me in the distance - but it was close enough to the end that I decided to keep going. I don't regret finishing it, but I also don't feel that I got much more out of seeing all the loose ribbons tied up than I would have from leaving them untied, or from spending the same amount of time re-reading an old favorite or staring at a blank wall. That doesn't make this a bad book. Sometimes when I read a book that doesn't "click" with me I put it down to being a bad reader, but I don't think that's the case here. As Marie Kondo might say, some books come into your life to teach you to read a sample before buying.

What I'm Reading Now

I took some books back to the library and picked up three. It was supposed to be just one, but I couldn't remember if Humbolt's Gift or Herzog was the other Saul Bellow book on the 99 Novels list. The third book was an unrelated title that caught my eye as I was looking for Saul Bellow.

Humbolt's Gift is an almost ludicrously easy book for me to love - being a highly digressive Troubled Artist Retrospective narrated by a successful but incredibly hapless writer about and around his dead, difficult poet friend - and I'm sorry to say that as soon as I started reading it, I started neglecting all my other books - Black Spring and The Coup and The Canterbury Tales and all the rest of them. Even Kristin Lavransdatter, to some extent.

However, I'm still making progress in Kristin Lavransdatter, though I think I missed a couple of nights through allowing myself "one more chapter" of Bellow.

( 1396 Bonnie and Clyde )

What I'm Not Reading In Favor of the Trashy TV Version

We've been trying to catch up on Game of Thrones so I can watch the finale in real time. This means Dragons Every Night for the past week or so - we've just started Season 7. I'm relived that ( Spoilers ahoy! )

I'm enjoying it a lot, is what I'm trying to say here. The writing has gotten noticeably worse in some respects, but I don't mind. I'm looking forward to catching up and to a maximally dramatic final season.

What I Plan to Read Next

Once Humbolt's Gift stops demanding all my time and attention, there's the other book I got from the library: When Found Make A Verse of by Helen Bevington. Apparently, it's poems! After that, I'm not sure. I decided to go ahead and order the missing 99 Novels from 1964, so those should be arriving soon.

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What I've Finished Reading

The Victim reached a point after which I physically couldn't put it down, or at least had so little inclination to that it made no difference. I read it while chopping onions and mushrooms, and I read the last two chapters standing up at the sink after brushing my teeth, having made a resolution to go to bed that I could not fulfill until I had finished the book in my hand. Is it as good as that makes it sound? I think so. If I'd read it when I was much younger, I think I would have been disappointed that ( Not much of a spoiler for The Victim! ) I'm happy to see there's another book by Saul Bellow on the 99 Novels.

What I'm Reading Now

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. I think Graham Greene is going to be one of those authors I can admire but don't "feel," whatever exactly that means. There are some great things here. I love the Portuguese ship captain who offers joke cigars to the English officials who have to search his ship for contraband, and who addresses his daughter as "little money spider."

Scope's relationship with his wife is making me petulant. I don't completely understand what he finds so tiresome about her and I wish I knew why they can't just separate so she can go live without him in a country she hates a little less, or why he can't say "I don't know" when she prods him to pretend he still loves her. I mean, sure, she'll make a scene, but if he's going to make such a fuss in his own head about owing her something, why can't it be honesty? I know it's supposed to be all emotionally complex or whatever, and I am being a bad reader by letting his self-serving and self-sabotaging pity annoy me instead of nodding solemnly and feeling as if I've learned something about The Human Condition, but . . . I don't know. Clemence Dane gets a mention! It's moving a lot faster than The Power and the Glory, the last book I read by Greene.

Also contains: Catholicism. It's been sort of seeping in around the edges and may end up flooding the place.

For this Victorian Lit class I'm tutoring a guy in: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A little while ago, I had the strange experience of re-reading a book I thought was hilarious when I was nine (The War With Mr. Wizzle by Gordon Korman). There were so many turns of phrase that I clearly remembered making me laugh my head off, but which I was reading now in total silence -- seeing the joke as if through glass in a joke museum. Alice is different: everything that was funny then is still funny now, maybe even more so because I'm a less sloppy reader than I used to be. Alice, how many times do the mice have to tell you they don't like your cat stories? The guy I'm tutoring doesn't like it as much as the previous readings, though; he's "not really into the dream logic thing." Well, we can't all be into the dream logic thing.

What I Plan to Read Next

Coming up in 99 Novels: Ape and Essence by A. Huxley and No Highway by Nevil Shute. Huxley's After Many A Summer Dies the Swan was one of the least thrilling of all my 99 Novels experiences, but about Nevil Shute I have no preconceptions.

I thought I brought The Man in the High Castle home from the library, but now I can't find it anywhere. :| The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for tutoring. And Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats is next on my shelf of neglected books! or should I save that one for murder monday?

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What I've Finished Reading

( It was not the bottom even now )
I'm still not sure what to say about Under the Volcano. It's about a British ex-consul who drinks himself to death in Mexico, and some of the people who can't help him. That, and the fact that a huge percentage of the dialogue is pointed malapropisms, probably makes it sound a little tedious, but I don't think it is. It's not perfect, either, I think, but it's so ambitously abject and head-hammering and terrible (I mean terrible like a volcano, not terrible like Pompeii in 3-D) that I only notice its imperfections drunkenly and at a distance, if they are imperfections at all. It captures a very strange and dangerous feeling very well: the one where you think you can already remember having done the stupid thing you are about to do, so it must be inevitable and important that you go ahead and do it. That and the feeling of being so black-hole drunk that your own impending hangover has snuck up behind you from the other side of the space-time continuum. Drink lots of water while reading Under the Volcano; that's my advice.

What I'm Reading Now

Saul Bellow's prose in The Victim is a relief after Under the Volcano, which was impressive but exhausting. The Victim is full of paragraphs that are like perfect stereoscopic rooms:

At a picnic on the Chesapeake shore one Fourth of July, he fell in love with a sister of one of his friends. She was a tall, heavy-moving, handsome girl. With his eyes, he followed her in the steady, fiery sparkle of the bay when she climbed to the dock from the excursion boat and started arm in arm with her brother toward the grove and the spicy smoke of the barbecue clouding in the trees. Later he saw her running in the women's race, her arms close to her sides. She was among the stragglers and stopped and walked off the field, laughing and wiping her face and throat with a handkerchief of the same material as her silk summer dress. Leventhal was standing near her brother. She came up to them and said, 'Well, I used to be able to run when I was smaller.' That she was still not accustomed to thinking of herself as a woman, and a beautiful woman, made Leventhal feel very tender toward her. She was in his mind when he watched the contestants in the three-legged race hobbling over the meadow. He noticed one in particular, a man with red hair who struggled forward, angry with his partner, as though the race were a pain and a humiliation which he could wipe out only by winning. 'What a difference,' Leventhal said to himself. 'What a difference in people.'

I like Leventhal and his absent wife and want the entire book to steer away from its stalker plot and turn out to be about grocery shopping in New York, or something equally hectic but wholesome. It's not going to happen. Leventhal has a stalker, who is convinced that Leventhal ruined his life by being deliberately rude to his boss years ago; the stalker keeps turning up at his apartment to demand acknowledgement and also to share all his theories about the Jews. The back cover has already assured me that Leventhal is going to "[descend] into a nightmare of paranoia and fear." NO, STOP I just want everyone to be happy (why do I even read books, I wonder sometimes). Anyway, excellent so far; Burgess' 99 have been nearly all hits as of. . . I guess I'm only at 17% after all this time, whoops.

Just started: Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, one of the books I bought a while ago that have been languishing on my shelf, and a book about the fall of the Soviet Union, same.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Man in the High Castle, from the same book group that brought you The Gods Themselves, and The Heart of the Matter, when I finish The Victim.