evelyn_b

So late that it's Thursday! Oh, well.

What I've Finished Reading

Kristin Lavransdatter! I think on the whole I loved it. ( Cut in case osprey_archer is still reading ) It was tougher than I expected, but I'm no longer sure what I expected.

I was wary of The French Lieutenant's Woman at first because the opening chapter lays it on very thick with the self-aware Victorian scene-setting. I thought, "Oh no, here comes another heaping helping of the author's cleverness." But it grew on me very quickly and so much that I was pulling it out of my bag to read at crosswalks. It is clever and so relentlessly self-aware that it was impossible (even for me, an inveterate sobber over trash) to form an emotional connection to any of the characters. At one point the author flips a coin to determine the course of the plot at a crucial moment, and in the very last chapter he steps onto the scene and turns back his watch in order to replace a guardedly happy ending with a sadder one. Still, I had a good time and resented nothing. I don't know if I'll remember anything about it in three months, but it was highly readable while it lasted. This book also features deliberately bad poetry written by the author on behalf of a protagonist, one of my favorite simple pleasures.

What I'm Reading Now

I just started Gravity's Rainbow, which arrived in the mail the other day. The mass-market paperback edition is VERY EXCITED about Gravity's Rainbow, which is "The most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer," according to the front cover. That's a lot of blurb to live up to! I'm not sure yet where it's going but there will certainly be lots of wacky details along the way (also bombs and acronyms).

What I Plan to Read Next

Still Lanark, eventually - and I don't know how I got a copy of The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, but apparently I have one, so I'll probably read it.

What I've Finished Reading

Burgess thinks The Image Men is good satire. I don't know if it is or not because I ran out of patience about 2/3 of the way through. I respect his point about how critics should relax more and not scorn to appreciate big rambling hunks of entertainment with lots of characters and side-currents, but I wound up not appreciating this one. It just keeps lurching around from one episode to the next while the Image Men bilk people but-not-really, drink giant gins, and make speeches. Did you know than in an age of images, people will believe a lot of nonsense about images? It might have made a good ninety-minute movie, but instead it was a book and I got sick of it two hundred pages from the end. This proves that literature is dead, images are the unacknowledged legislators of my brain, and I owe J.B. Priestley $5.

I also finished Giles Goat-Boy, for all the good it did me. Did the entire raised-by-goats idea come about so that John Barth could have the Goat-Boy say, while devouring a valuable religious scroll in a library for important Hero's Journey reasons, that he is "only browsing"? Probably. It's that kind of book.

Cocksure is a fast-moving, rancid, reckless piss-sprinkler of a novel flinging bile-filled condoms in every direction, which made it a welcome break from both of the above. There are a lot of pieces - a Canadian WASP whose friends are all convinced he's Jewish and trying to hide it, an immortal "Star Maker" who turns out to have literally built several stars from scratch Victor Frankenstein-style, a series of publicity-minded murders, a sexually progressive elementary school that puts on a production of "Philosophy in the Bedroom," an ingenue who obeys the rules of screenwriting in all things (in a real-life emergency, she ignores several empty phone booths in favor of the more dramatic one already in use) - all abundantly nasty or eerie or both. None of the pieces ever quite merges with the others to form the coherent shambling abomination you might be hoping for.

What I'm Reading Now

The sixties may come and the sixties may go, but arguably tolerable marriages spring eternal. Kristin Lavransdatter is still fifty acres of thorns in a twenty-acre freehold. I've just finished the second volume, The Wife, and started on the third, The Cross. Kristin and Erlend have just lost their one really good friend, Simon, and are realizing how isolated they've become since Erlend's ill-advised foray into political conspiracy. Meanwhile, time keeps turning their baby boys into teenagers and there's nothing they can do about it.

In my May 1892 issue of Harpers, I found this poem by William Sharp: ( The Three Infinities )


From a mathematical standpoint I'm pretty sure all of these things are technically finite (please correct me if I'm wrong), but that's beside the point.

Meanwhile, Will S. knows his sonnets are stale but you can't make him stop: ( That every word doth almost tell my name )

Maybe novelty is the TRUE staleness, have you thought of that?

What I Plan to Read Next

I asked my brother to send me a few books from his giant collection of slightly musty paperbacks - all 99 novels that are coming up in the sequence, including Gravity's Rainbow and The French Lieutenant's Woman - so when I actually read those will depend on his laziness instead of mine.

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.

Sketchy and sloppy, but technically on time this week!

What I've Finished Reading

Two re-reads: The Adman in the Parlor by Ellen Gruber Garvey and Doing Literary Business by Susan Coultrap-McQuin - both studies of gender and culture in the mid-to-late 19th century that I was keeping around for the details and the bibliography.

Also Tuck Everlasting, a beautiful middle-grade story about a girl who stumbles upon a family of accidental immortals - another one that I saw a bunch at the Scholastic Book Fair but never wanted to read. Unlike The Girl With the Silver Eyes, this is a book I can recommend to everyone without hesitation - it'll only take about 90 minutes to read, if that, and is worth sitting with even if you don't come to the same conclusions as Winnie.

What I'm Reading Now

I've just started Station Eleven, which I've been meaning to read since it came out - I bought it a month ago and then immediately regretted my choice, for reasons that still aren't clear to me. It's fine so far - a deadly flu has hit Toronto and we know from the back of the book that we'll be alternating between a post-apocalyptic story and a mid-or pre-apocalyptic one. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me that I didn't really want to read a post-apocalyptic story just now, but oh well, here we are.

Henry Miller is an unexpectedly enjoyable chatterbox. I'm not even sure what to call Black Spring, with its alternating reminisces of Brooklyn and stream-of-consciousness fugues on the sublimity of taking a nice long piss and manic dorm-room philosophy that is SUPPOSED to be hard to follow, because clearly constructed paragraphs are the opiate of the midlist, WAKE UP AMERICA. I guess it's a blog. Unlike most books, this is one I'm glad I didn't attempt to read thirty years ago; I would have been constitutionally incapable of appreciating this gabby Gus at any point before 2015.

Over the weekend I visited a very imperfectly organized, ashtray-smelling small-town bookstore and came home with books. One of them is The Coup by John Updike - since I have to wait on the next 99 Novels in sequence, I decided to give this one a try. The Coup is another tale of fictional post-independence Africa, narrated by the fictional ex-dictator of a fictional country, with loads of made-up names that are probably allusions to something. It's very different in style from A Bend in the River, very self-consciously exotic. It's too early to tell if I'll like it or not.

Since last week's post was late, there's not much new to report on Kristin Lavransdatter. Kristin is making bad choices; her parents are worried and upset but trying to be kind; Erlend quietly continues to be the worst.

What I Plan to Read Next

One of the books I bought from the ashtray-smelling bookstore was Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, a book I hated in middle school with a burning unquenchable hatred, and which I'm eager to read again. The last reread of something I hated in school was Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, and that turned out not only enjoyable in itself, but a major forgotten source of inspiration for practically everything I wrote during the period in which I was writing things. I'm curious about what Hatchet will turn out to be.

What I've Finished Reading

Last week I forgot to mention An Error of Judgment by Pamela Hansford Johnson, the last 99 Novels selection for 1962. Johnson is, as the About the Author on the back page informs me, the wife of my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow - and An Error of Judgment is constructed a lot like one of Snow's lawyer-memoirs: doggedly sensible literate narrator, loosely interwoven personal and professional concerns with a fateful choice at the center, plenty of earnest conversations and monologues. But it's significantly weirder, a little more lively, and a lot more memorable than anything in the Snowverse. I don't know if ultimately the plot "works" - there's something a little artificial about the way the doctor manuvers himself into the set-piece of his crime - but it was certainly a ride and I was glad to take it.

Just A Normal Marriage is the Harlequin novel by Leigh Michaels that I got out of the free books box down the street. I enjoyed 90% of it even though the business of getting Shauna and Rob into a marriage of convenience was pretty strained. The plot: her narcissistic socialite mother is happy to give wealthy Shauna custody of her young half-sister, but only if Shauna is married! Rob is a friendly pediatrician who is concerned about the half-sister's future. Shauna offers to pay his student loans - if he marries her for a year! I also didn't see the point of making Shauna a twenty-six-year-old virgin, or of half the misunderstandings, and Rob's reaction when he thinks Shauna has fallen into the arms of her toolish ex-fiance (when it's actually attempted rape! Rob, what good are you if you can't just ask what happened?) is unworthy of an otherwise good dude. But all of that is no harm done (and thisbluespirit, I will be sure to add the summary to Unconventional Courtship so it can be livened up with Dalek Sec and others).

There is also Faust, technically a play, by my best new genius friend J.W. Goethe. Faust is nuts. It's magnificently nuts. It starts with a heartbreaking prologue about finishing a book at eighty that you started in youth (which is what happened with Faust) and rolls right into a hilarious second prologue that is a lively discussion among a director, a clown, and an actor about what should go into a play. Then it's time for a board meeting in heaven between God and the Devil about whether the devil can go ahead and try tempting that one guy (God says go ahead because otherwise there wouldn't be a story). Then there's an Easter party in the streets of Universitytowne and the Devil sneaks into Faust's house in the shape of a poodle, and it's all downhill, and uphill, and downhill and back up again from there. The translator's note keeps comparing it to Ulysses, so I spent the whole thing thinking about how apt a comparison that is: it's an obsessively sprawling, wry, wacky, incorrigible human circus. Unlike Ulysses, it is almost entirely written in rhyme.

(It's "technically" a play because it's written as one, but I am skeptical about its stageability, though I guess stranger things have happened).

Before I read Faust, the only thing I knew about Faust (Goethe version) was that in the end, Mephisto loses track of Faust's soul because he's too busy lusting after a pack of boyish angels to drag it to hell properly. I am happy to report that I was not misled, and this is in fact what happens.

What I'm Reading Now

Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer - which hasn't aged that well and most of whose component pieces aren't that great (Mailer keeps saying things like "As you can see if you're not an idiot, this essay I wrote/freshman creative writing story/dumb joke for a friend is pure garbage and you're a sucker if you thought it was any good, but it would be criminally dishonest of me not to include it in this Advertisement for Myself since I did write it after all" and then you read it and wish you were reading a less genre-breaking iconoclastic hammerpiece where selection is made on more traditional grounds) but which I still kind of like because I can't help liking Mailer. There's this one piece that's just Mailer handing out bitchy backhanded compliments to every author of roughly his own age whom anyone ever compared him to, and my heart just goes out to him - just flaps clumsily out to him like a scruffy maternal goose. And this going-out of my heart, with attendant feeling that Mailer and I are brittle, self-protecting sisters under the skin, is its own back-handed compliment, all the sadder for being directed sixty years after the fact at someone who will never read it. Clearly one of us is rubber, and one of us is glue.

Also, Frankensten! It's great. Victor Frankenstein is an idiot. It's also much more of a Romantic travelogue than I expected. More on this next week.

( Kristin Lavransdatter )

What I Plan to Read Next

One night when I was drunkenly describing the plot of Faust to some guys, one of them said that Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain, had also written a Faust. So maybe I'll read that? There are also a couple of 99 Novels from the library, The Spire by William Golding and Late Call by Angus Wilson.