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.
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.
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 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.