don’t surround yourself with yourself Monday, Apr 28 2008

I must say: I was very successful with reading this weekend. I finished Drown by Junot Diaz and The Din in the Head by Cynthia Ozick. Both were very cool. I am done with college!!! Congratulations you! Going back to books: Junot Diaz is the man. I can’t wait until he writes more stuff. These are short stories, along the same lines as Brief, Wondrous but more autobiographical and coming of age. The stories connect loosely and are irreverent and sometimes electric. There is a lot going on about family relationships, love relationships, immigration, etc. The Din in the Head, by Cynthia Ozick was very awesome as well. This is a collection of essays written on a variety of topics. The ones I most enjoyed were about Helen Keller, Robert Atler, and John Updike. The way she writes is very inviting, even if you aren’t familiar with the subject matter. I will read everything else by her. I am also wanting to read all of Jane Austen soon, and I probably will. In the meantime, here is a passage from Proust, which I am diligently still reading…

“Two hypotheses that arise again in relation to all important questions, the questions of the reality of Art, of Reality itself, of the Eternity of the soul: we have to choose between them; and in the case of Vinteuil’s music, one was faced with the choice at every moment, in a variety of forms. For example, this music seemed to me something more true than all known books. Sometimes I thought that the reason was that the things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyse them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is the thing that causes us the specific ecstasy that we feel from time to time and which, when we say ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbor, in whom the same sun and the same weather set off quite different vibrations.”

My next three library picks are Joy Williams, Gabriel Josipovici, and Nora Jablonski. Happy trails!

Leave a Response »

 

This is TBR overload… Friday, Apr 25 2008

I have started Cynthia Ozick’s The Din in the Head, a collection of essays that are really interesting and thus have added more to my to be read list then I can handle. After finding this article…on The Millions Blog I have decided to use this process: I have put on LibraryThing all those books I want to read soon. So far, there are only 48! I will number each book and then randomly generate a number and then read that book! Soon, I will be through the list and be a super reader! Proust is going swimmingly and now I will quote from the Ozick which is spectacular

“I do not know who Patti Smith was; there was much afoot that I did not know as I sat in my room with its yellow wallpaper reading Henry James and volumes of Jewish history and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet here I was, all at once, steeped in discord and chaos: oh, the novel, the novel! Authority was demanding that I cease to trust its familiar form, that its familiar form was broken forever, and that to continue to hope for it in the old way was to be exiled to the writer’s ultima Thule; only the marginal and the mediocre and the weak would fail to recognize this. Authority had wiped me out. And where was I, after all, and what was I, while Authority and its enviable sharers and minions were exulting in the great red-hot Downtown? In my room with the yellow wallpaper, writing, in defeat, a superannuated, superseded, and moribund novel that was already fouled by the stench of its predictable death throes.”

“Contemplating the unpredictable trajectory of Tolstoy’s life puts one in mind of those quizzical Max Beerbohm caricatures, wherein an old writer confronts–with perplexity, if not with contempt–his young self. So here is Tolstoy at seventy-two, dressed like a muzhik in belted peasant tunic and rough peasant boots, with the long hoary priestly beard of a vagabond pilgrim, traveling third class on a wooden bench in a fetid train carriage crowded with the ragged poor. In the name of the equality of souls he has turned himself into a cobbler; in the name of the pristine Jesus he is estranged from the rites and beliefs of Russian Orthodoxy; in the name of Christian purity he has abandoned wife and family. He is ascetic, celibate, pacifist. To the multitude of his followers and disciples (Gandhi among them), he is a living saint.”

I will try to update my TBR list accordingly. Have a happy Friday!

Leave a Response »

 

Cross Cultural Blogging Tuesday, Apr 22 2008

Partly because this is an abandoned library in Russia, I will be quoting a passage from Derek Walcott’s Omeros about a Polish waitress (and it’s a book set in so many countries via poetic imagination, but mostly set in the Carribean), I am reading the Dominican Republic’s transplant Junot Diaz, France’s darling Proust, and I just finished an entertaining book about a second generation Korean immigrant. The fact that I actually finished a book is surprising…and at least my house doesn’t look like the picture to the left…

Here is that passage I promised before I start talking about other things…

“Acres of synonymous lights, black battery cells

and terminals coiling with traffic, winked out. Sunrise

reddened the steel lake. Downstairs, in the hotel’s

Canadian-fall window, a young Polish waitress with eyes

wet as the new coal and a pageboy haircut was pouring him

coffee, the maples in the glass as yellow as orange juice.

Her porcelain wrist tilted, filling his gaze to the brim.

He hoped adoration unnerved her; the sensible shoes

skirting the bare tables, her hand aligning the service

with finical clicks. As if it had tapped her twice

on the back for her papers, she turned with that nervous

smile of the recent immigrant that borders on tears.

A Polish Sunday enclosed it. A Baroque square, its age

patrolled by young soldiers, the flag of their sagging regime

once bright as her lipstick, the consonants of a language

crunched by their boot soles. In it was the scream

of a kettle leaving a freightyard, then the soft farms

with horses and willows nodding past a train window,

the queues in the drizzle. Then the forms

where her name ran over the margin, then a passport photo

where her scared face waited when she opened its door.

She was part of that pitiless fiction so common now

that it carried her wintry beauty into Canada,

it lined her eyelashes with the snow’s blue shadow,

it made her slant cheekbones flash like the cutlery

in the hope of a newer life. At the cashier’s machine

she stood like a birch at the altar, and, very quietly,

snow draped its bridal lace over the raven’s-wing sheen.

Her name melted in mine like flakes on a river

or a black pond in which the wind shakes packets of milk.

When she stood with the cheque, I tried reading the glow

of brass letters on her blouse. Her skin, shaded in silk,

smelt fresh as a country winter before the first snow.

Snow brightening the linen, the pepper, salt domes, the gables

of the napkin, silencing Warsaw, feathering quiet Cracow;

then the raven’s wing flew again between the white tables.

There are days when, however simple the future, we do not go

towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators

divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show

exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish waitress

is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window

whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

We yank the iron-grey drapes, and the screeching pulleys

reveal in the silence not fall in Toronto

but a city whose language was seized by its police,

that other servitude Nina Something was born into,

where under gun-barrel chimneys the smoke holds its voice

till it rises with hers. Zagajewski. Herbert. Milosz.”

If you got through that and are interested, the book is called Omeros and it is a 300 page lyric poem loosely based on The Odyssey… bringing in echos of James Joyce, Africa, slavery, love, the Carribean, etc. I read it for class, so I read it quickly…but may one day go back and read it slowly and more carefully. It is the last book I had to read for my comp lit degree so in that way it is special.

I started Junot Diaz’s “Drown” on the bus this morning, but cannot read on the bus… I like it so far.

I also find it completely hilarious that the janitor lady is vacuuming the floor while people are watching movies here in the media department and asking them to get up so she can vacuum under their feet. I am giggling to myself.

All for now.

Leave a Response »

 

The Forest for the Trees Friday, Apr 18 2008

I haven’t updated in a while because of various things going on and the lack of reading (however, some would say that there hasn’t been a lack of reading). If I’m not reading 8 books at one time, I consider that a lack of reading. However, I am reading Master and Margarita….which is pretty funny and very Russian (thanks: Becky!) I am reading The Captive and the Fugitive… the fifth in the Proust series In Search of Lost Time. I love it very much and don’t know what I’m going to do when I’m done with Proust besides pick up back at number 1 and read it over again. I am also still reading Auto da Fe, but promise to finish it soon.

I am thinking about picking up another Chabon, because I am anxious to read Maps and Legends, but want to finish everything else he has written first, as Maps and Legends is an autobiography I think. I am anxious also to read tons of other things once I am done with school and can manage more. One of these is Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires and some books by Ryszard Kapucinski. I have created a LibraryThing page devoted to books I want to read someday… the covers look all pretty.

I am off to find more pretty book sites to read.

One Response »

 

this is what i want to do Sunday, Apr 13 2008

Reading…Master and Margarita

So, this is a list of the things I want to do in the next year:

1. Go to School Full Time (To get done faster, to get a job sooner)

2. Work at a Library part or full time (to Get Library experience)

3. Become a dog-walker in NYC (i’m applying! this way I don’t have to get a dog right away)

4. Join a community orchestra somewhere near my house or school.

5. Join NLA, Friends of the NYPL, SLA, SILSSA, etc.

6. Become really involved in school activities.

Leave a Response »

 

There’s too many ostriches! Friday, Apr 11 2008

I found this picture on my new favorite blog that will be listed on the left, called www.maudnewton.com/blog. It’s very interesting literary talk and things. I have finished reading Possession by A. S. Byatt and I’m glad I’m done because I couldn’t help but thinking it would end up like I thought it would and so it did. The mystery letters were recovered and alls well that ends well. Except not a whole lot of things end well and such should be represented by literature. Which is why I must be attracted to things not Victorian. I am continuing on with Auto da Fe, content to have it slow going and savoring. The whole book is like a chess game and the readers are the pawns. And so with a chess game, thus the reader can take it slow.

For school, I am reading Omeros, by Derek Walcott and it’s also slow going but pretty interesting and I’ll be glad to finish the last book I will ever have to read for my undergraduate degree. I will be set free. Today I would like to start The Master and the Margarita, all things considered and go on from there. I have not been reading on the same rate as I was last year and I’m not sure why. With Andrew gone to New Jersey I should have more alone time to sit with a book, be that good or bad. I will also probably cook a lot. Becky is home this week thanks to large amounts of narcotics, not hers, of course and for that I am glad. What a rogue world!

I am know shamelessly bogarting recommendations from other blogs for my own enjoyment and reference. And after that almost horrific bout of Victorian romance and bad poetry, I need a little concrete postmodern and sanity–and I want to be sure to say that it’s not that I didn’t like the book Possession or that I won’t read the author again, but goodness: I need a new genre and quick!

“In the meantime here are five novels of ideas (3 classic and 2 that seem destined to become canonical), each revolutionary or anti-revolutionary in a way that describes their respective ages as well as anything else. They deserve to be read, or read again, on different terms: in light of their relationship to the novel itself.

1. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. When Tony Buddenbrooks, a beautiful, divorced, woman of dwindling prospects dismisses a wealthy suitor because, “Er sagt mich stadt mir” (He says who <.em>instead of whom), and it’s not the beginning of a morality tale then you know you’re in a world of the sublime. In this case it’s the fluid, intellectually sophisticated, milieu of the early 20th-century haute bourgeoisie (Bildungsburghertum), with the shadow of aristocracy on one hand, and the tenuous nature of their own position on the other.

Mann, of course, was the last European master who could act with the underlying assumption that the intellectual, political and material wants of the society he was born into shared more than physical space — that his project and the values of his culture were one — without drawing suspicion of naïveté or worse.

He continued to believe this until he was living in exile. Claiming until the last that the betrayal of the rest of the society by its political custodians was an aberration. Historians might make other claims, however, as the arcs of the 20th century played out at different paces in the European capitals, the case can still be made for Mann as the last of the great realists, trusting unmediated literary representation and inquiry to make deep sense of the world. Never mind that it was already a modernist one.

2. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Ellison might be the single most important American writer of the last hundred years. Where others traded on well-established schools of thought he combined the protean modernist sensibility of Toomer with the formal perfection of the European novel to create an Erfahrungsroman for the 20th century. He is the fork in the road of American literature, one path leading to the well-behaved world of mannerism and craftsmanship, and the other diving down the rabbit hole into the gleeful madman lands of Reed and, only slightly less directly, Pynchon. Besides having a share to the claim Great American Novel, this book does even more than invent the jazz novel. This is funk before funk had a name.

3. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. This is the epitome of a book whose failures show as much its triumphs. Durrell lays bear his ambition with the claim: “Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete [a novel] whose form is based on relativity. Three sides of space and one of time. … I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes…” Post-modernism avant la letter. And that’s just the hand he reveals. Among a great many other things this is a project that also happens to be Cosmopolitan, devious (Sadian, Lawrencian, that is to say before the pill) and sexy as hell.

If his worldly gaze strikes the contemporary reader as chauvinistic, or as sharing a border of Empire with Kipling, well nothing can transcend its age entirely. Here is a writer whose meridional creativity grasps with a beautiful ease of intelligence the relationship between the fleeting and the permanent in a single sentence. Between the body, language and the fragile invisible they may sometimes express, or summon into being.

4. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews. Latin American artists tend to look further afield for inspiration and models than their northern counterparts. Certainly they tend to be more Europe-facing. So much so it might be argued that between the anxieties of whiteness and so-called Magic Realism the following generation had a hard time taking shape. It turns out, in the best of cases, it’s because they were out wrasslin’ with the biggest problems they could find.

For Roberto Bolaño the essential, atlas-like question is the nature of creation and the genesis of evil itself, both its personal and historical manifestations on a global scale. As might be imagined ambition like that needs a language of its own, and Bolaño creates a startling poetry to carry his meaning over.

If Bolaño is one of the great artists of his generation (and his core achievement seems to me on a level with Achebe — Sui generis), he has found in Chris Andrews the ideal translator. Where other interpreters seem to miss a beat, Andrews displays an intensity and lightness that get to the poetic and metaphysical reaches without losing, or attempting to sweep away, the spaces and silences of what cannot be translated.

5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Post-modernism taken seriously has become the province of the grand old men, playing out the bittersweet end of what was the game of their times. It is not equal to the codes or experiences of our moment. While Coetzee — viewed with mutual suspicion by most black African writers, who suffer a different double-blind — tries to balance the equation while describing magnificently and, in the end quite revealingly, the noble and tortured last wall of the old school, several writers have already scrambled over to the other side. Among the many conceivable solutions none is quite so sly as the one offered by Kazuo Isiguruo (who shares many concerns with Coetzee, but feints to the zeitgeist as often as the canon). His deceptively simple sentences contain whole other worlds, vast unspoken epistemologies, beneath their surface. Among other things Never Let Me Go is a haunting disquisition on whether love or art can explain our world, or save us from inhuman fates.

The most frequent complaint against this book is: Why don’t they make a run for it? Opening onto the larger: Why don’t we all?”

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/

This is where these particular recommendations come from and I think that it’s a new treasure trove of things to read! I really need more things to read. Update: I gave up on Against the Day for now. Maybe forever. We’ll see how the rest of the year pans out. I still have not received the 5th Proust and I’m not sure if I ever will. Hopefully, NYC has a copy of it floating around it’s hallowed library halls.

Leave a Response »

 

Possession Tuesday, Apr 8 2008

I am not sure how I feel about the new set up here at wordpress, I think I might grow to like it. That’s really neither here nor there. (I love that saying in writing). I found this de Kooning painting on a website and also this quote:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts it size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter– the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last– the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

- E.B. White, “Here is New York”

Apparently this is a neat little essay written by E. B. White in a hotel room in New York City, and I want to get my hands on the whole thing. I could start a whole shelf devoted to these musings on my future home.

Something weird is going on when I don’t want to do anything but listen to Pandora and while away the minutes until I get to go home. I don’t want to read or think about my responsibilities right now. I think it’s called a mixture of Spring Fever (the trees have turned and I must be under them!) and Graduation-itis (a rare form of ‘I don’t give a shit-fever’ coupled with an amnesia like sensation of not knowing who you are or where you are or who those people are who are telling you to write them papers.) I’m not sure if I will survive. But The Mountain Goats guy is singing me through it.

I’m still reading, don’t worry, just not as much as usual. Trying to get through Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti. and Possession by A. S. Byatt. Both are excellent and pair together well. I’m pretty annoyed with Interlibrary loan for this major disruption in Proust reading, but there’s not much to be done about that. I am wanting a book from the Science library which is not on North Campus so I have no idea where it is or how to get there, how I’m going to find time to get there, etc. I’m also really excited about the next few months worth of new releases that I won’t be able to afford to buy myself and they are:

Chuck Palahniuk-Snuff

Louise Erdrich-The Plague of Doves

Maureen Freely-Enlightenment

Salman Rushdie-The Enchantress of Florence

David Sedaris-When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Haruki Murakami-What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Just to name a few. Also going now to research Sanford Berman, a radical librarian.

Love, Jessica

Leave a Response »

 

Author Spotlight–Orhan Pamuk! Sunday, Apr 6 2008

It is very exciting to present an author spotlight on my favorite author: Orhan Pamuk. If you’re not in the know, Pamuk hails from Istanbul, Turkey and has won the Nobel prize for literature in 2006. He currently teaches comp lit at Columbia. He has written many many fabulous books and continues to write in his native Turkish. It is recommended to read the translations from Maureen Freely whenever possible. I first became knowledgeable about Pamuk from a Comp Lit class in which the professor assigned My Name is Red:

This was a tough book. A murder mystery told by many witnesses, including the corpse and some animals; some mysterious characters, a mother, and 3 miniaturists. Each chapter is told from these points of view. Since it is about the murder of a miniaturist, the style follows suit. Some of the details get lost in the mix. It’s been a few years since I’ve read this one, but I recommend it as part of the total package. Here’s more: from Booklist:

“A dead man, a dog, a murderer, a coin, two lovers, and a tree take turns narrating this tale. … Set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, the novel is equal parts mystery, love story, and a philosophical discussion on the nature of art and artistic vision. Two men have been killed: Elegant, a miniaturist engaged (with others) on a book project glorifying the life of the sultan, and Enishte, the man who hired the artists to do the book. During a trip to Venice, Enishte became particularly entranced with the new Italian painting, particularly its use of perspective and figurative art. He urged his employees to adapt the new art form in their illustrations of the grand book they are producing. Black, Enishte’s nephew, wants to win the hand of Enishte’s daughter, Shekure, which he can only do by solving the murders. …”–excerpts.

Since this book takes place in the ancient Ottoman empire, one doesn’t get the feel of Istanbul quite like one does in this next book: the next one I read (also for class)… Istanbul (Memories of the City).

This is a lovely autobiographical book. Pamuk uses the backdrop of his native city to explain who he is as a person. Istanbul is as much a part of his character as anything else. Reading this book will make you want to go to Istanbul right away! I wrote a paper taking this book and relating it to Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Here’s more:

“Turkish novelist Pamuk (Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a meditation on life’s complicated intimacies. The author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman Empire. Pamuk sees the slow collapse of the once powerful empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens. Central to many Istanbul residents’ character is the concept of hüzün (melancholy). Istanbul’s hüzün, Pamuk writes, “is a way of looking at life that… is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating.” His world apparently in permanent decline, Pamuk revels in the darkness and decay manifest around him. He minutely describes horrific accidents on the Bosphorus Strait and his own recurring fantasies of murder and mayhem. Throughout, Pamuk details the breakdown of his family: elders die, his parents fight and grow apart, and he must find his way in the world. This is a powerful, sometimes disturbing literary journey through the soul of a great city told by one of its great writers.”

Moving along to the next installment of fiction that I read from Pamuk is the melancholy Snow:

This novel stays true to its title and is about the poet Ka. Because of its elegiac quality, this may be a more difficult novel to connect with. It is very strong, however, in its ability to put the reader in the place of the protagonist and whirl them into the intrigue of the streets of frozen Kars. The winter and the search seem as though they will never end. Here’s more:

“A Turkish poet who spent 12 years as a political exile in Germany witnesses firsthand the clash between radical Islam and Western ideals in this enigmatically beautiful novel. Ka’s reasons for visiting the small Turkish town of Kars are twofold: curiosity about the rash of suicides by young girls in the town and a hope to reconnect with “the beautiful Ipek,” whom he knew as a youth. But Kars is a tangle of poverty-stricken families, Kurdish separatists, political Islamists (including Ipek’s spirited sister Kadife) and Ka finds himself making compromises with all in a desperate play for his own happiness. Ka encounters government officials, idealistic students, leftist theater groups and the charismatic and perhaps terroristic Blue while trying to convince Ipek to return to Germany with him; each conversation pits warring ideologies against each other and against Ka’s own weary melancholy. Pamuk himself becomes an important character, as he describes his attempts to piece together “what really happened” in the few days his friend Ka spent in Kars, during which snow cuts off the town from the rest of the world and a bloody coup from an unexpected source hurtles toward a startling climax. Pamuk’s sometimes exhaustive conversations and descriptions create a stark picture of a too-little-known part of the world, where politics, religion and even happiness can seem alternately all-consuming and irrelevant. A detached tone and some dogmatic abstractions make for tough reading, but Ka’s rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel’s sadness profound and moving.”

This next book is the one that must be the translator Maureen Freely’s edition. Apparently Turkish is a very hard language to make sound intelligible in English. This is the masterpiece and the culmination of everything that I read before. It’s majorly cool. It’s called: The Black Book…

This book marries it all…intrigue, lost love, murder, mystery, Istanbul, doubles, everything. This is my favorite novel so far. I don’t even want to tell you what it is about, just read it! But just in case, here’s more:

“Turkish novelist Pamuk’s inventive, digressive new novel is a dazzling arabesque stuffed with fantastic tales, metaphysical thought experiments, dreams, symbolic fables, absurdist humor, childhood memories, social and political satire and excursions into history. Galip, an Istanbul lawyer, is alarmed when his wife, Ruya, and her half-brother, newspaper columnist Jelal Bey, vanish. To ferret out leads, Galip assumes Jelal’s identity and pseudonymously takes over his popular columns. A former classmate of Galip’s turns up, confessing that for years she obsessively fantasized that she was Ruya. A mysterious caller phones, threatening to kill Jelal, who had tried to instigate a military coup in the early 1960s but allegedy betrayed the revolutionary cause. Galip’s feverish research, which climaxes in two assassinations, is strewn with red herrings, allusions to Turkish and American films and digressions on the Messiah, Sufi mysticism, human faces and the art of making mannequins. As Pamuk (The White Castle) erects a dazzling hall-of-mirrors meditation on identity, memory and reality, he elliptically condemns a society that uses informers and secret police to enforce obedience.”

Immediately following reading The Black Book, I jumped into The New Life:

This has already been written about in depth on this blog. This is favorite Number 2. Mistaken identities and bus wrecks, obsession and yes, more intrigue…

Next, last, and not lease is a collection of essays. Once you’ve gotten this far… this is sweet icing on the cake of Pamuk…

This book of essays is called “Other Colors” This includes musings on the Bosphorus (of course) and Istanbul and interviews and the Nobel Prize lecture (which will make you cry). Very fun.

Going a little back in time, I read the last book available in English translation called: “The White Castle”

This turned out to be a fun, quick read. Not taking place in Istanbul, but instead far back in time and with different subject matter. Except of course, the topic of doubles. That is back and in good form. Also, highly recommended…

“One of Turkey’s foremost novelists explores the ambivalent relationship between master and slave in this elegant, postmodernist twist on the theme of the doppelganger. During the 17th century, a young Italian is captured by the Turkish fleet and brought to Istanbul, where he becomes the slave of an erudite man who could pass for his twin. The Hoja , or master, is convinced that the Italian youth’s European education is superior to his own and he becomes the young man’s pupil. Once the Hoja perceives the superficiality of the young man’s knowledge, however, he insists that the slave tell him more, demanding details of his double’s upbringing. When this, too, becomes tiresome, the slave confesses to real and imagined sins for which he is beaten. As their relationship changes over the years, with each alternating domination, the author deftly plays the mirror-image characters against each other. To aid the Ottoman sultan in his war against the Poles, the two develop a fantastical war machine. Its disastrous failure in battle proves their undoing. The reader is left guessing at the ultimate fate of the Hoya and the slave, while at the same time admiring Pamuk’s skillfully constructed paradoxes.”

After all of this, there’s no more. But not to worry…there is another novel on the way. It may be a while to wait for the translation…but we will all be waiting. It is called The Museum of Innocence… we’ll see.

To find out more about Pamuk, read this article from the guardian uk at Guardian article.

Hope you enjoyed reading about my favorite author!

One Response »

 

Auto da-Fe Friday, Apr 4 2008

http://greenlavender@wordpress.com I really like this painting I randomly found on a blog by typing in painting in google images. I wanted to let you all know that I am reading a book Becky got for me at City Lights called Auto da-Fe and this is what wiki says about the title:

“The phrase auto de fe refers to the ritual of public penance of condemned heretics and apostates that took place when the Spanish Inquisition or the Portuguese Inquisition had decided their punishment (that is, after the trial). Auto de fé in medieval Spanish means ‘act of faith’.”

The actual book is pretty frightening, I think especially because it was published in 1935. So far, I love it. There is a chess-obsessed dwarf involved. The author, Elias Canetti, won the Nobel Prize for literature.

I would like to do another author spotlight soon, I think on either Pamuk or Kundera. I am also going to try to update more on what I’m reading, as soon as I get into some more things. It’s slow going with work and other responsibilities these days. Good thing I’m going to library school soon!

One Response »

 

Omeros…say it…Omeros Wednesday, Apr 2 2008

I know I’m not a librarian yet, but this dino is cute! I can’t wait to learn things like information systems and junk. I can’t wait to do a lot of things up there in ‘ol NYC. I can’t wait to not bowl 2 times a week, etc. Oh, but wait! This is supposed to be a book update not a can’t wait list. Ok:

I started Omeros for school. It’s by Derek Walcott and is very nice. It’s a modern poem based on The Odyssey and set in the Caribbean. Otherwise, I’m not sure what’s going on yet except for beautiful language and flowing stanzas, etc. Love it. One scene: they are cutting down a tree to build a canoe:

“Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot!”

Another:

“Homer and Virg are New England farmers, and the winged horse guards the gas-station, you’re right.”

And:

“who set out to found no cities; they were the found,

who were bound for no victories, they were the bound,

who levelled nothing before them; they were the ground.”

Anyway, it’s a pretty awesome way to end college. Other books I am reading right now include A Heart So White, the book Becky got me by Elias Canetti, Against the Day (sort of), Possession: which will be blogged about soon, and I still haven’t gotten the 5th Proust.  But I will and will start it. I need to go get NYC guidebooks to study and I need to write one paper to finish up. More later!

Leave a Response »