repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,560
Member is Online
|
Post by repulsionist on Oct 22, 2023 23:15:25 GMT -5
Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz (1977)
My first affair with Eve here, though I read her obits back in December 2021 when she passed. This writer has many deft turns of phrase, poetic couplings of words, and things left unsaid that a reader really wants said when it comes to dealings with famous people. Best pure writing is "Bakersfield". I like her self-awareness, self-possession, and excellent composition of essays with poignant callbacks. I could've done without the introduction by Matthew Specktor (former senior editor of LARB [not the Thai dish]).
The Blighted Eye: Original Comic Art from the Collection of Glenn Bray (2014)
I will invoke Schleprock here in a positive connotation by saying, "Wowzy, wowzy, woo, woo". If any of you have an interest in graphic arts of the last 100 years, this guy will show you something you haven't seen. There are some amazing works shown here that speak more than 1000 words per item. Really glad to have been able to grab this from the library. Super introduction from American Master, Robert Williams II. Incredible interviews with Bray about "what, why, and where". Left me wanting more and desiring more than spare change to cop a copy of this and other compilations he's supervised of his work
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Oct 27, 2023 5:16:13 GMT -5
Tamburlaine Must Die, Louise Welsh
Very thin novella, in all ways, looking at the last days of Christopher Marlowe.
It's his own account of his life closing in on him, the twin risks of his spying career and his trumpeted atheism conjoining to throttle him. There's a weak mystery set up over who is persecuting him like this: someone is pasting broadsides on walls against him and making not-so-veiled threats under the name of Tamburlaine, one of his greatest theatrical creations. The mystery is resolved to no great interest. Not much of a character comes through in the writing. There's some shagging, gay and straight. The whole thing stands no comparison to Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford, that's for sure.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Nov 1, 2023 6:34:39 GMT -5
Victor Hugo, Graham Robb
This book tells us that, one day during a picnic, Hugo read out a poem and a cow came over to listen. When the book was handed to someone else to read aloud, the cow lost interest and sauntered off. His barber informed the world that the Hugo bristles blunted razors three times faster than any other man's. And even into his late 70s he was enjoying a fuck a day or more.
Robb wrote the Balzac biography I read a couple of months ago, and also one on Rimbaud. He's a top class writer, with a lot of wit, but he's obviously more interested in the currents of 19th century French literature than I am, so this 500 pager had it slow portions. Luckily, Hugo's life was pretty packed and interesting, even beyond his being a kind of literary superhuman. His mismatched parents divorced when he was young. He had a brother who went mad, and also a daughter who became a mad stalker*; another daughter drowned, and both his sons died before he did. Political shenanigans saw him exiled to the Channel Islands for the best part of 20 years. He had a long-running mistress, once banging her nine times in a night, and countless other encounters with maids and prostitutes. As well as the novels, there was a steady stream of poetry, and lots of theatre-defining early plays. He was insanely quotable, and at the forefront of everything in France for almost 60 years.
I'll let him have the last word:
I have spoken out for the oppressed of all lands and of all parties. I believe I have done well. My conscience tells me I am right. And if the future proves me wrong, I feel sorry for the future.
*Truffaut made a film about her, The Story Of Adele H, starring Isabelle Adjani and a struggling young English actor by the name of Bruce Robinson. The role didn't lead to an uptick in the latter's career, so he chucked it in, turned to writing and directing, and came up with Withnail & I.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Nov 8, 2023 9:52:58 GMT -5
Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge
As ever with these kind of books, rightly or wrongly, I feel they're not aimed at me - I was woke back when it was called the loony left over here in Normal Island, so I'm well versed in this stuff. Still, it always does you good to refamiliarise yourself with it, and it was only £1.29 in a charity shop.
There's a brief history of racism in our land, and a look at how it's structural. Most interesting to me were the chapters on how it intersects with class, and especially feminism. This was published in 2018, and she really nails the type of Guardian columnist who was just about to become a TERF. I too have reached that stage where certain weak elements of the left annoy me more than Tories.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Nov 8, 2023 10:05:27 GMT -5
Slight delays between my posts mean that I'm reading poetry or plays, which I don't bother to review. This year I've been dipping into non-Shakespeare plays from his era, and thoroughly enjoying them (I could've thoroughly enjoyed them when I was supposed to read them at Uni, but eh). Currently on The Spanish Tragedy, and have been steeped in Marlowe, John Webster, Middleton, and so on. Unfortunately, they've now mostly blurred into one panting tangle of hacked limbs and brandished skulls.
|
|
|
Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Nov 8, 2023 13:26:17 GMT -5
Slight delays between my posts mean that I'm reading poetry or plays, which I don't bother to review. This year I've been dipping into non-Shakespeare plays from his era, and thoroughly enjoying them (I could've thoroughly enjoyed them when I was supposed to read them at Uni, but eh). Currently on The Spanish Tragedy, and have been steeped in Marlowe, John Webster, Middleton, and so on. Unfortunately, they've now mostly blurred into one panting tangle of hacked limbs and brandished skulls. I’ve never read any of the other playwrights from Shakespeare’s time. How do you think they measure up to Shakespeare generally, like, do you get the feeling that if Marlowe had lived another 25-30 years he could have managed to be Shakespeare’s equal as an author, for instance?
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Nov 8, 2023 14:17:23 GMT -5
Slight delays between my posts mean that I'm reading poetry or plays, which I don't bother to review. This year I've been dipping into non-Shakespeare plays from his era, and thoroughly enjoying them (I could've thoroughly enjoyed them when I was supposed to read them at Uni, but eh). Currently on The Spanish Tragedy, and have been steeped in Marlowe, John Webster, Middleton, and so on. Unfortunately, they've now mostly blurred into one panting tangle of hacked limbs and brandished skulls. I’ve never read any of the other playwrights from Shakespeare’s time. How do you think they measure up to Shakespeare generally, like, do you get the feeling that if Marlowe had lived another 25-30 years he could have managed to be Shakespeare’s equal as an author, for instance? I believe I’ve said elsewhere that Marlowe is the great what if? and his early death possibly the greatest loss to literature there’s ever been. Shakespeare remained influenced - and I would say haunted - by him his whole career, is constantly bouncing off him (Richard III = Tamburlaine, Venus and Adonis = Hero and Leander, Shylock = The Jew of Malta, Prospero = Faustus). Marlowe’s plays compare very favourably to the earliest of Shakespeare’s, and while it stretches credulity to think he would’ve kept up with Hamlet and Macbeth, the heights they could’ve spurred each other onto doesn’t bear thinking about. The not knowing which of them would’ve been top dog must’ve killed Shakespeare at times. Like Brian Wilson if Paul McCartney had died after A Hard Day’s Night. The others, maybe not so much, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had with them. Anyway, Tamburlaine the Great parts I & II is probably my favourite thing I’ve read this year. It’s one note and a bit much, but fantastic. I would recommend giving it a go.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Nov 8, 2023 14:42:30 GMT -5
Today’s the 400th anniversary of the first folio. All hail.
|
|
repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,560
Member is Online
|
Post by repulsionist on Nov 18, 2023 15:58:50 GMT -5
Hard Rain Falling, Don Carpenter (1966) Straight-forward, clean writing describing post-WWII Portland, OR, a gang of delinquents, migratory patterns through penal institutions, and terrible acts against love. George Pelecanos, esteemed DC-area writer and producer-writer for The Wire and We Own This City, does the introduction in the NYRB edition I borrowed from library. Carpenter was Richard Brautigan's best friend, and the last to speak to him before Brautigan sucked on a large metal straw filled with bullets. Carpenter's life took the same dead-end after failing to gain favour in the literary world, Hollywood, and suffering a succession of illnesses. To read about this fellow and his milieu has been an eye-opener.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Nov 20, 2023 11:06:48 GMT -5
Roger's Version, John Updike
Despite him being Amis-approved, I've never gotten very far with this fella. I bought the novel of The Witches of Eastwick when the film was current, having no idea who he was, and certainly didn't get very far with that; I dutifully tried the Rabbit books, but gave up after the first two. This one, however, this one ... something may have clicked.
The Roger of the title is our narrator, a middle-aged divinity professor in whom the tide of belief has long since ebbed (he used to be a preacher; marital troubles put paid to that). At the start of the book he is approached by Dale, a young computer nerd who is of the belief that the Universe is so freakishly finely balanced that it can't be happenstance. He wants a grant from Roger's college to use his computer to prove the existence of God. (This book hails from 1986 and is set in 1984, the year of Reagan's re-election and Cyndi Lauper's brief ascension; I don't know how persuasive some of this would be nowadays.) Roger is running along mostly on empty with his second wife, Esther. Dale has been brought into his orbit via Verna, his (Roger's) half-sister's wayward teenage daughter: living in the projects, the single mum of a mixed race baby. Roger begins imagining Dale having an affair with his wife, while he inches closer to Verna, thus providing the relentless sex scenes that Updike couldn't do without. Discussions of theology and physics are had at regular intervals: while they left me behind, they weren't a chore to read, though the thought of all the research he must've submitted himself to gave me a sympathetic headache.
The prose was excellent, first class. If I've likened Philip Roth to a barrelhouse piano, this is like a footballer keeping the ball up for half a dozen touches and then hoofing it into the net from the halfway line. Descriptions of nature and cities and faces are bracingly exact, and Roger's voice - sour and tired on a soul level - is never lost sight of. I'll be back with this gent in short order.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 5, 2023 9:55:09 GMT -5
Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, Paul Auster
When I was looking for Paul Auster books I might have missed, I came across this 700 page mix of biography and lit crit. Because I'm nothing if not a completist when it comes to certain Brooklyn-based fellas, I got it, although I had my doubts I needed 700 pages on this particular author.
Crane doesn't have the same heft over here as a Twain or a Steinbeck; I've never read his most famous book, and only vaguely know him as a stepping stone in Hemingway's development. It seems his reputation rests on The Red Badge of Courage, a couple of novellas, and a bunch of short stories and journalism; plus he died at 29. So this is baggy as all get-out, and in its way as eccentric as anything Auster has written, despite him playing it dead straight. I did a fair amount of skipping once I was past the halfway point, though only on the lit crit stuff. Auster goes exhaustively into a lot of that. The life was a lot more interesting. Crane was stepped in poverty and debt, like all good writers, so much so that schemes to get himself out of it usually ended up plunging him even deeper in. He was more or less chased out of New York by Roosevelt for defending a prostitute on a charge of wrongful arrest. A boat he was on sank, leaving him and a few others bobbing about the ocean for a few days. He was reckless when it came to covering wars, also a Hemingway stepping stone. He liked the company of prostitutes and madames, shacking up with one of the latter towards the end of his life. He lived for a few years in England, where he was friendly with Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and HG Wells. TB got him coughing up blood at the end, his constitution no doubt weakened by all those New York winters when he couldn't afford much in the way of clothes or food.
Still not sure what to make of it. Auster says he only intended to write a short book, but it grew on him. 300 pages would've been a lot more palatable, and while he's always nicely readable, this hasn't had the effect of making me want to read anything by Crane himself. Which probably defeats the purpose of the exercise a little.
|
|
|
Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Dec 7, 2023 17:00:04 GMT -5
Hit Parade of tears, the new compilation of stories by the late Japanese science fiction-actress-model-author Izumi Suzuki doesn’t quite hit as hard as the previous collection Terminal Boredom, but it’s still quite good. One thing I really enjoy about her stories is that, while Suzuki’s background’s about as far from your typical American science fiction short story writer as you can get, she’s still writing in essentially the same mode (apart from a melancholy streak) with brisk stories and clear concepts (and without the sort of literary conceits that are usually used by authors to erect a wall between themselves and genre writing). It’s classic science fiction, only coming from the perspective a woman who’s and much cooler (with good taste in music—in one time travel story the signposts for different points in time are different women’s fashion trends and music—in one of my favorite examples of this Suzuki’s narrator—probably speaking for Suzuki— said she couldn’t stand YMO despite finding Ryuichi Sakamoto “gorgeous”).
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 11, 2023 8:32:41 GMT -5
The Wind Through The Keyhole, Stephen King
A slight return to the Dark Tower series that I abandoned at the start of the year. This addition, or sidebar, was published in 2012, years after the whole shebang was complete, and - according to King's introduction - can be slotted in between volumes 4 and 5. In other words, just before an already fragile proposition turned to absolute shit.
It's a nesting doll structure, a series of opening and closing brackets, suggesting that King had read Cloud Atlas and thought he'd give it a go. Roland and his merry band of ebonics speakers and ex-junkies have to hide out from a 'starkblast', a killer wind. During the long cold night, he tells them a story from his youth, when he was entrusted to travel to a small village to deal with a shape-shifting murderer massacring the population (easily the best bit). And within this story, Roland tells a young boy, bereaved by said murderer, a long fairy tale about wicked stepfathers and quests and wizards (good enough, but too long, and not spending enough time on the important bits).
In some ways, this is - for me - the most palatable this series gets, mainly because it's pure storytelling, not bogged down by the clutter and eccentricities that accrued to the main strand of the series. It shows that the setting - a world where Arthurian legend meets the wild west in a civilisation falling away from technology and back into magic - is a persuasive one, and Roland a decent character to carve through it. It's also good there's no time travelling, world hopping, giant mechanical bears, and no sign of King writing himself into the story.
|
|
repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,560
Member is Online
|
Post by repulsionist on Dec 11, 2023 18:47:39 GMT -5
Loving, Henry Green (1945)
Just starting this after reading the foreword by Sebastian Faulks. Read up on the posh fellow in some The New Yorker article from 7 years ago before finishing the first few pages. Prior to putting myself into the hold queue for this, it was Terry Southern's ardent apotheosising and pursuit that initially led me to reading this author. I will see how it goes; because this library volume is a compilation of Loving, Living, and Party Going.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 14, 2023 7:43:12 GMT -5
The Fiction of Martin Amis, ed. Nicholas Tredell
A scholarly little book, detailing the long form critical response to the novels and a couple of short story collections. This gets as far as 1998; it might've been interesting to see the fusillade unleashed on 2003's Yellow Dog. But then again, maybe not. I started skimming this when we got to London Fields (1989), and gave up on it altogether soon after. I should probably be more interested than I am, but really deep lit crit doesn't do much for me; plus the reactions of seething British journalists to Amis can only be borne for so long. That's not to say I didn't pick up on loads of things I'd never noticed, specifically that Rachel in The Rachel Papers is surnamed Noyes because she rejects Charles at first and then acquiesces.
|
|
|
Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Dec 14, 2023 7:52:06 GMT -5
The Fiction of Martin Amis, ed. Nicholas TredellA scholarly little book, detailing the long form critical response to the novels and a couple of short story collections. This gets as far as 1998; it might've been interesting to see the fusillade unleashed on 2003's Yellow Dog. But then again, maybe not. I started skimming this when we got to London Fields (1989), and gave up on it altogether soon after. I should probably be more interested than I am, but really deep lit crit doesn't do much for me; plus the reactions of seething British journalists to Amis can only be borne for so long. That's not to say I didn't pick up on loads of things I'd never noticed, specifically that Rachel in The Rachel Papers is surnamed Noyes because she rejects Charles at first and then acquiesces. Only very tangentially related, but have you ever read Kingsley Amis’ science fiction criticism?
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 14, 2023 8:50:20 GMT -5
The Fiction of Martin Amis, ed. Nicholas TredellA scholarly little book, detailing the long form critical response to the novels and a couple of short story collections. This gets as far as 1998; it might've been interesting to see the fusillade unleashed on 2003's Yellow Dog. But then again, maybe not. I started skimming this when we got to London Fields (1989), and gave up on it altogether soon after. I should probably be more interested than I am, but really deep lit crit doesn't do much for me; plus the reactions of seething British journalists to Amis can only be borne for so long. That's not to say I didn't pick up on loads of things I'd never noticed, specifically that Rachel in The Rachel Papers is surnamed Noyes because she rejects Charles at first and then acquiesces. Only very tangentially related, but have you ever read Kingsley Amis’ science fiction criticism? I've read a lot of his essays/journalism, but not that specifically. He was keen on the genre, though, at least up to a point (see also: jazz), and friendly with JG Ballard.
|
|
|
Post by Celebith on Dec 18, 2023 1:42:19 GMT -5
Mona Lisa Overdrive - in an attempt to fix my sleeping routines, I bought a Kindle and started downloading books through library apps (as documented elsewhere on this site). Figure I'll get back to reading books until I drift off, instead of endless google news and facebook.
I read Neuromancer and Count Zero in High School, when they were originally published, and re-read them sometime in th '90s, but not since then, and never read Mona Lisa, the final book of the trilogy. Given the in-universe decades between the first and third books, my lack of recollection didn't affect my enjoyment as much as it might have with something more connected with the earlier books. I enjoyed it more than Count Zero, although with 4 plotlines alternating by chapter, each thread would have fit in as a stand-alone long story in Analog of F&SF back in the day. A bit meandering, with some hints of where everything was going, but even by the end there was a bit of a shaggy-dog feel to it. 300 pages and this is the punchline? I'm glad I read it, as it mostly ties up all of his Sprawl related stories, but it doesn't seem essential at this point. And although I've read some of his Bridge and Blue Ant books, I'm pretty sure I read them out of order, and don't know whether they connect with each other or his Sprawl stuff.
Someone should write something along the lines of The Gernsback Continuum, but for Gibson/Sterling and Cyberpunk. We're about as far from them as they were from 50s sci-fi at this point. Further, even.
ETA: I also checked out Nick Hornby's Songbook / 31 Songs, but only to read the Thunder Road and Late For the Sky essays. I'd read Thunder Road before. I enjoyed them both. I ought to find a cheap, used copy somewhere to put in the guest bedroom - I've probably read the whole book twice, but never more than an eassay essay or two each time.
How much would people pay me to not do 'Take It Essay - a song by song exploration of The Eagles'?
|
|
|
Post by Celebith on Dec 18, 2023 2:12:13 GMT -5
The Wind Through The Keyhole, Stephen KingA slight return to the Dark Tower series that I abandoned at the start of the year. ... In some ways, this is - for me - the most palatable this series gets, mainly because it's pure storytelling, not bogged down by the clutter and eccentricities that accrued to the main strand of the series. It shows that the setting - a world where Arthurian legend meets the wild west in a civilisation falling away from technology and back into magic - is a persuasive one, and Roland a decent character to carve through it. It's also good there's no time travelling, world hopping, giant mechanical bears, and no sign of King writing himself into the story. This was published just as I finished up my read-through of the series, or I would have read it after Wizard and Glass. The Gunslinger + Little Sisters of Eluria is the best of the bunch, then 2, and then this. His heart was probably in the right place, but 2 and 3 suffered a bit with Odetta/Detta and his ham-handed slangy writing. 5&6 moved things along after a long lag, although I hate all the high speech slang he throws in. Even 7 was interesting, if anti-climatic. But Wizard and Glass is among my least favorite books - perhaps it's realistic that Roland's epic romance is actually him just remembering being a horny teenager, but it still sucked. ETA: Springsteen was obviously an influence on '70s King, and I always wondered if the bit about "They're breakin' beams and crosses / With a spastic's reelin' perfection" in Lost in the Flood fed into the beams and breakers stuff with the Dark Tower related works. It seems a bit cryptic in the song. Breakin' rocks in the / hot sun? Sure. But who's out there breaking beams or crosses?
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 18, 2023 4:44:54 GMT -5
The Wind Through The Keyhole, Stephen KingA slight return to the Dark Tower series that I abandoned at the start of the year. ... In some ways, this is - for me - the most palatable this series gets, mainly because it's pure storytelling, not bogged down by the clutter and eccentricities that accrued to the main strand of the series. It shows that the setting - a world where Arthurian legend meets the wild west in a civilisation falling away from technology and back into magic - is a persuasive one, and Roland a decent character to carve through it. It's also good there's no time travelling, world hopping, giant mechanical bears, and no sign of King writing himself into the story. This was published just as I finished up my read-through of the series, or I would have read it after Wizard and Glass. The Gunslinger + Little Sisters of Eluria is the best of the bunch, then 2, and then this. His heart was probably in the right place, but 2 and 3 suffered a bit with Odetta/Detta and his ham-handed slangy writing. 5&6 moved things along after a long lag, although I hate all the high speech slang he throws in. Even 7 was interesting, if anti-climatic. But Wizard and Glass is among my least favorite books - perhaps it's realistic that Roland's epic romance is actually him just remembering being a horny teenager, but it still sucked. ETA: Springsteen was obviously an influence on '70s King, and I always wondered if the bit about "They're breakin' beams and crosses / With a spastic's reelin' perfection" in Lost in the Flood fed into the beams and breakers stuff with the Dark Tower related works. It seems a bit cryptic in the song. Breakin' rocks in the / hot sun? Sure. But who's out there breaking beams or crosses? There was talk, a while ago, of King rewriting the whole thing - treating what we've got as a first draft, and getting rid of some of the wrong turns. It doesn't look like that's happening now, which is a shame. I always thought it could do with a lot of taming.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 23, 2023 5:01:58 GMT -5
Collected Ghost Stories, MR James
This is a volume I've only ever previously dipped into, but I thought I'd try reading the whole thing from start to finish. It fits the solstitial nights, after all.
I didn't quite make it - 30 stories in a row, all in a fairly narrow corridor was a bit much to ask, and it doesn't help that it's heavily front-loaded - but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. While they're, of course, fairly mild and genteel compared to, say, Lovecraft, there's still an occasional savagery in them, some unexpected violence, even if it does tend to happen off stage or be a tale from the past. The Mezzotint was genuinely creepy and nasty. What this bookish lifelong celibate was repressing, God only knows.
Of course, there's lots to arraign him on: working class characters will have comical accents; women only exist if they're truculent landladies, speechless maids, or great aunts with bequests and exposition to pass on. But in a good half dozen tales, he rings a particular bell as well as its ever been rung.
|
|
repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,560
Member is Online
|
Post by repulsionist on Dec 26, 2023 15:02:35 GMT -5
Willeford, Don Herron (1997)
A bit of clunk to this funky biography of an excellent author. Herron's digging and interactions with Willeford himself reveal a great deal of undercoat in the author's shaggy bibliography. That Willeford had a filming journal during his time on set for Cockfighter (1974) gave some worthy insights into why he had written the work in the first place.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 27, 2023 8:58:49 GMT -5
Jack, Marilynne Robinson
Fourth, and supposedly final, book in the Gilead series (our author is in her 80s now, after all). This is set in Missouri in the early 40s, before the action of the previous novels, and features young Jack Broughten, wayward son of one of the Iowan preachers we've met elsewhere: a drifter, an alcoholic, and a petty thief well-versed in irresponsibility and self-destruction. Robinson is very good on the smallness of this knockabout lifestyle, with all the endless self-inflicted humiliations; on the other hand, as with all her characters, she does put Jack on an elevated spiritual plane that probably isn't quite true of many people like this. She pulls it off, of course. Whether he's dousing a stray cat in aftershave so he'll know it when it comes back, or skipping his mother's funeral despite being sent money for a train ticket and a suit, he remains likeable, and you find yourself rooting for him. He meets the nicely named Della, a young black schoolteacher, and the two fall in love. The societal hurdles are quite something, but nothing compared to those Jack puts in front of her (on their first date, he has to flee the restaurant ahead of loan sharks, leaving her to pick up the bill), and he's well aware of this: his whole tussle is whether she'll offer him some salvation, or whether he'll ruin her life like he's ruined his own. We see her through his eyes, and she seems a delightful type. Maybe she sees him on that spiritual plane, what with his liking for poetry and all, or maybe he's a big fixer-upper.
While I got through this quite smoothly, I wouldn't say it was an easy read: there's a patience annihilating 70 page scene early on, and the religious stuff might not be to everyone's taste. But her prose is excellent, and Jack and Della are two of the most vivid characters I've come across this year.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 30, 2023 12:46:20 GMT -5
Baumgartner, Paul Auster
The latest novel from Brooklyn's favourite son. As with Marilynne Robinson, he's getting up there in years now (76), so you have to wonder how many more there are to come. A good few, I hope. I've liked his stuff since Uni days, when we were given The New York Trilogy; actually I didn't like it at first, but I didn't throw it out, and went back to it a couple of years later wondering how I could've been so blind.
I say his latest novel - it's more a novella. That might be why it's a sprightly read, with lots of fizz, even though he drops his usual invigorating postmodern games (for the most part: we eventually find out that our main character's mother is named Ruth Auster). Baumgartner is in his early 70s, and has been a widower for 10 years. He's about ready to step back out into the world, while at the same time has a lot of past to rake over with his deceased poet wife. We get some examples of her prose writing, scenes from her life before him and their early life together. In the present, he asks an acquaintance if she wants to make their relationship more permanent, and gets ready to meet a young student who wants to make a study of his wife's unreleased poetry. It all ends nicely on a cliffhanger.
I liked it a lot. While Baumgartner is hurting for a lot of the book, there's almost a comic distance from him at times, as if we know not to get too carried away in the scheme of things. And while Auster has never been the hardest-working prose stylist, he still exerts an enviable grip.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Dec 30, 2023 13:02:38 GMT -5
That's it for 2023. I read 62 books, give or take, and a dozen plays.
Best New To Me Fiction: Victory City, Salman Rushdie. Honourable Mentions: Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs was probably the most powerful thing I'm in no hurry to read again. I was also nicely surprised by Stephen King's Holly, given I don't really like the character much, and I thoroughly enjoyed The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis.
Best Non-Fiction: hmm ... probably Victor Hugo, the biography by Graham Robb. Honourable Mentions: Hamlet In Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt. Looking over it, though, there wasn't much non-fiction that really grabbed me this year, for whatever reason.
Best Reread: Les Miserables, Victor Hugo. Titanic, Shakespearean levels of greatness. Honourable Mentions: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer and Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.
Best Thing Overall: I'm going for a couple of plays - Tamburlaine The Great parts 1 & 2 by Christopher Marlowe. Why I waited so long to tackle this is beyond me.
I'll round things off by saying, once again, RIP to Martin Amis and Cormac McCarthy.
|
|
|
Post by Celebith on Jan 1, 2024 7:26:04 GMT -5
Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch. Jackie Brown is a pretty faithful adaptation, so if you've seen it, you have a pretty good idea of what's in the book. Jackie Burke is a tall blonde, but other than that, it's fairly close, as far as I remember. With so many adaptations of Leonard's work, it's difficult to picture anyone other than the actors as the characters.
I didn't realize that Rum Punch is something of a sequel to The Switch, which covers the botched kidnapping that Jackson and Pacino's characters took part in 15 years prior. Between that, Keaton's character is in this and Out of Sight, and Raylan Givens in a bunch of other stuff (but not this), Leonard's universe is almost as connected as King's or the MCU.
Reading this on the Kindle was a bit of a trip, since it shows you what percentage of the book you've completed. But it doesn't tell you that the last 25% are extras, so I thought I had a bunch more to go when everything wrapped up, and was a bit surprised at how abruptly everything came to a stop.
|
|
|
Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Jan 1, 2024 15:52:27 GMT -5
Although it’s been a while since I ran the preceding entry in the series From Russia with Love, Fleming’s Dr. No is a real departure. FRwL is grounded while we start on real flights of fancy with Dr. No. Although there are direct lifts from the book in the film, it’s also very different. The space-age plot of the film, both allows for a less out-there action climax (nuclear reactor vs. giant squid) despite being repeated in countless ways since then. Plus movie-No’s motivations are more interesting than his relatively flat motivation in the book, to extending on Nazi experiments with pain exposure. He’s happy to have Bond and Rider since he can finally do more experiments on white people. Also, Dr. No got his medical degree at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, incidentally the alma mater of my pediatrician grandfather.
Quarrel and Rider are more interesting in the book, too. While Quarrel’s language is unfortunately written in dialogue, and while not a nice character (Bond even says the equivalent of “jeez, Quarrel, that’s a an awful comment about women even by my standards”) he is a real character with real capability, far more his own man and a partner to Bond than his movie equivalent. Rider’s an extremely odd character, but she’s also not Ursula Andress. She’s also highly capable in the environment f Crab Key, but also more clearly precarious, naïve in the broader world in kind of a dark way; Rider also decidedly does not look like Ursula Andress, with a prominent broken nose.
The book’s is a strange product of someone whose love of Jamaica pushed against, but couldn’t break, his British box. It’s more interesting, but definitely a step down.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Jan 7, 2024 10:41:56 GMT -5
Midcentury, John Dos Passos
I think I've mentioned more than once that Dos Passos's trilogy USA is one of my favourite books. This, one of his later efforts, is a return to that style and subject matter, thirty years on. That's a lot to ask. Does it stack up, I hear you clamouring to find out? Just about, I think.
In terms of style, what we get (and got with USA), is a jumble of sections. There's the 'Newsreel/Documentary' stuff, headlines and adverts and snippets of news stories from the time. There are potted, poetically rendered biographies of luminaries, this time round including McArthur, Oppenheimer, Jimmy Hoffa, and James Dean. Best of all, and thankfully taking up 80% of the pages, we have the fictional narrative sweeps. This is realism/naturalism at its highest. I struggle to think of another writer who has captured the flat grittiness of the movements of working class life the way he does.
The focus of this one is unions, before and after WWII: the violent founding of them, the violent carrying out of strikes (and strikebusting), and the inevitable corruption of a high ideal in the consumer age. While it might not have quite the scope and energy of the trilogy, and there aren't quite characters to match Mac and Joe Williams and Mary French, there are still stretches of 20, 30 pages at a time where the prose just takes off and is a pleasure to get lost in. A good start to the year.
|
|
|
Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jan 7, 2024 14:24:44 GMT -5
Midcentury, John Dos PassosI think I've mentioned more than once that Dos Passos's trilogy USA is one of my favourite books. This, one of his later efforts, is a return to that style and subject matter, thirty years on. That's a lot to ask. Does it stack up, I hear you clamouring to find out? Just about, I think. In terms of style, what we get (and got with USA), is a jumble of sections. There's the 'Newsreel/Documentary' stuff, headlines and adverts and snippets of news stories from the time. There are potted, poetically rendered biographies of luminaries, this time round including McArthur, Oppenheimer, Jimmy Hoffa, and James Dean. Best of all, and thankfully taking up 80% of the pages, we have the fictional narrative sweeps. This is realism/naturalism at its highest. I struggle to think of another writer who has captured the flat grittiness of the movements of working class life the way he does. The focus of this one is unions, before and after WWII: the violent founding of them, the violent carrying out of strikes (and strikebusting), and the inevitable corruption of a high ideal in the consumer age. While it might not have quite the scope and energy of the trilogy, and there aren't quite characters to match Mac and Joe Williams and Mary French, there are still stretches of 20, 30 pages at a time where the prose just takes off and is a pleasure to get lost in. A good start to the year. Does Dos Passos’ conversion to conservativism shine through? I’ve wondered what his books were like after he abandoned the left, but the USA Trilogy and Manhattan Transfer are the only ones that seem to be widely read nowadays.
|
|
Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
Member is Online
|
Post by Dellarigg on Jan 7, 2024 14:48:40 GMT -5
Midcentury, John Dos PassosI think I've mentioned more than once that Dos Passos's trilogy USA is one of my favourite books. This, one of his later efforts, is a return to that style and subject matter, thirty years on. That's a lot to ask. Does it stack up, I hear you clamouring to find out? Just about, I think. In terms of style, what we get (and got with USA), is a jumble of sections. There's the 'Newsreel/Documentary' stuff, headlines and adverts and snippets of news stories from the time. There are potted, poetically rendered biographies of luminaries, this time round including McArthur, Oppenheimer, Jimmy Hoffa, and James Dean. Best of all, and thankfully taking up 80% of the pages, we have the fictional narrative sweeps. This is realism/naturalism at its highest. I struggle to think of another writer who has captured the flat grittiness of the movements of working class life the way he does. The focus of this one is unions, before and after WWII: the violent founding of them, the violent carrying out of strikes (and strikebusting), and the inevitable corruption of a high ideal in the consumer age. While it might not have quite the scope and energy of the trilogy, and there aren't quite characters to match Mac and Joe Williams and Mary French, there are still stretches of 20, 30 pages at a time where the prose just takes off and is a pleasure to get lost in. A good start to the year. Does Dos Passos’ conversion to conservativism shine through? I’ve wondered what his books were like after he abandoned the left, but the USA Trilogy and Manhattan Transfer are the only ones that seem to be widely read nowadays. I was braced for that rightward slant, but no, it’s not really apparent. At least, his compassion and feel for the down on his luck working man still feels intact. He paints a jaundiced picture of unions, it’s true, but only in the sense of worthy ideals betrayed, just as he did with socialist movements in USA. There’s some impatience with the modern world of Freudian analysis and teen idols, I suppose.
|
|