Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 21, 2024 12:07:07 GMT -5
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
I first read this as a student, a vast number of years ago now, which might account for how slimly it lingers in my memory. I'd forgotten it was a novella of a mere 80 pages, for instance.
Just reread it in two sittings, and was highly impressed. (Nabokov was right to include it in his lectures.) It's well thought-through, with Jekyll being a compound of mostly good and a little bad, Hyde merely all bad - it's the slight badness in Jekyll that allows Hyde his toehold. After enough experiments with the potion, Hyde can take over at will.
Structurally, it was also nicely done. The first two thirds of the book are seen from the outside, as it were, with the lawyer Utterson (great name, given the divided selves elsewhere: he's a whole one) investigating strange goings on with Henry Jekyll and his brutish new acquaintance, Edward Hyde, who first tramples a young girl and then beats an old boy to death. Then we get to see these events again, from the inside, when we read Jekyll's written statement.
Aside from an overuse of that favoured Victorian word 'disagreeable', the writing goes down easy. He likes his fog over London, but it all adds to the proceedings. It's a shame he couldn't have been more forthright over Hyde's other night time depravities - as Nabokov points out, we may provide images that Stevenson never intended. It's a good litmus test for society's ever-shifting mores, I suppose. Where Victorian readers may have sensed a homosexual brothel, we wonder if he was as bad as a 1970s TV entertainer.
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Post by Lurky McLurk on Mar 22, 2024 9:03:02 GMT -5
The Fight, Norman Mailer
This is Mailer's account of the build up to, and the fight itself, between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali at 'The Rumble in the Jungle' in 1974. The blurb on the back refers to a meeting of two great minds, two iron wills and two monumental egos. I'm not entirely sure whether that relates to Foreman and Ali, or Norman Mailer and George Plimpton.
Key thing reading this is putting yourself back in 1974. Everyone who’s remotely interested in the subject matter already knows what happens. Ali hits Foreman with a bunch of hard straight rights in the first round, which just make Foreman angry, then the “rope-a-dope”: Ali retreats to the ropes and uses their elasticity to help absorb Foreman’s pummelling for a few rounds, until Foreman’s completely exhausted himself and Ali KO’s him in the eighth. Ali regains his titles, does a couple more fights followed by a war against Joe Frazier in Manila a year later (sadly then followed by a few more fights to diminishing returns) and transcends to iconhood. Foreman can’t get another title shot, washes out, and retires from boxing for ten years, before coming back and regaining three world heavyweight titles in 1994, twenty(!) years after the Ali fight, becoming the oldest person ever to do so. And also licences his name to a grill. But in 1974 no-one knows this. Ali is the underdog, widely seen as being past his prime, while Foreman isn’t the big cuddly guy we think of now but the champ, an absolute monster with a 40-0 record, all but three of them by knockout, and whose fights end on average within three rounds.
The parts about boxing and Ali and Foreman themselves are fascinating. Mailer is very much on Ali’s side, due to his charisma, his boxing genius and the unfairness of Ali being stripped of his titles after refusing to be drafted. But he’s not so enamoured of Ali that he overlooks his contradictions (or his bad poetry) and like nearly everyone else, Mailer doesn’t rate his chances; there’s a great bit where he captures the funereal atmosphere in Ali’s dressing room before the fight, where most of Ali’s team, in their hearts, expect to see their man get smashed. At the same time Mailer warms to Foreman as a person; his gentleness and serenity outside the ring in total contrast to what he’s like as a fighter (there’s a bit where Mailer speculates about how many normal humans Foreman could kill with his fists before he got tired, which I – a hobbyist – now think of every time I spar anyone who actually does proper fights).
The parts about Norman Mailer and his insights into Bantu philosophy, for me, are typically rather less fascinating, though he clearly has fun writing about George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson and other writers out there to cover the event. But there are some great comic scenes like the chaotic press event where two hundred plus journalists are crammed into a hall for hours to receive their tickets and instructions from Mobutu’s press officer, who doesn’t show up, and when Mailer joins Ali for a jog in the early hours of the morning while out of condition and enduring significant gastric distress (“A thick fish chowder and a pepper steak were floating down the Congo of his inner universe like pads of hyacinth in the clotted Zaire. My God, add ice cream, rum and tonic, vodka and orange juice.”)
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Mar 26, 2024 14:43:41 GMT -5
Lurky McLurk Reminds me a bit of my experience with Fire on the Moon: the documentary stuff was great, the broader reflections on Apollo and society were perhaps best left in 1970.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 26, 2024 17:21:52 GMT -5
A student of mine once said of Mailer that ‘he gets a bit carried away with himself’. Can’t deny the justice of that, though when he was on top form, he was undeniably great. My reread of The Executioner’s Song was one of last year’s highlights.
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Post by Lurky McLurk on Mar 27, 2024 4:13:07 GMT -5
A student of mine once said of Mailer that ‘he gets a bit carried away with himself’. Can’t deny the justice of that, though when he was on top form, he was undeniably great. My reread of The Executioner’s Song was one of last year’s highlights. Yes, getting carried away with himself is exactly right. As it goes on (maybe it's just as I get used to him) it's less of an issue, but the early chapters can be a bit of a drag. (It's a drag for Mailer too, as he's in Kinshasa - again in gastric distress - when the fight is put back because Foreman gets a cut in sparring). 'The Executioner's Song' is also a chapter title in The Fight, and I think I read somewhere that Mailer wrote a poem of the same name. It's the chapter covering the last couple of rounds of the fight, where Ali - having clearly defeated Foreman - sets about trying to finish the match rather than let it drag on for the whole distance. I've never read any other Mailer, though I have a copy of The Naked and the Dead knocking about somewhere that I should get around to.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 28, 2024 5:02:02 GMT -5
Think, Write, Speak, Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd
A more expansive companion to the non-fiction round-up Strong Opinions, which we're told by Boyd was a bit of a rush job on Nabokov's part, concentrating mainly on the decade prior to its publication. This one here stretches all the way back to Cambridge student Nabokov in his 20s writing an essay on Rupert Brook, through to the last interviews he gave before his death in his late 70s, stopping by at obituaries and peevish letters to the editors of periodicals along the way.
Now, even for me, that's a lot of VN. All the furniture is presented multiple times: the butterflies, the lectern and the index cards, the hostility to Freud and the Soviets, the veneration of Pushkin and Shakespeare, the dismissal of just about everyone else (he didn't think Portnoy's Complaint was funny), life in America, life in a hotel in Switzerland, where the idea for Lolita came from. It would be remiss of me to say that anything he said or wrote could be counted as 'filler', but Boyd could probably have done some pruning of these 500 pages. Still, nice to have it.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 30, 2024 8:30:31 GMT -5
Manon Lescaut, Abbe Prevost
If RL Stevenson got stuck on the word 'disagreeable', the word for this book is 'perfidious'. We are left in no doubt of the perfidy of one of the characters.
It's a tale - you know the kind - of a young man falling for a beautiful woman who keeps him dangling and does him dirty. There are always better, richer options out there, you see, and nothing his friends or family say can dissuade him from knocking his fledgling life off course. Puccini made an opera out of it, which should give you an idea that it ends tragically.
It's more or less fine, and nicely short at about 150 pages. It does have the air of something written in a hurry, though. The young man tells his story to our narrator, who is dropped from the book long before the ending, for one thing. Maybe that's how it was, maybe you could get away with being this ramshackle, in 1731.
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Dellarigg
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This is a public service announcement - with guitars
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Post by Dellarigg on Apr 9, 2024 4:16:52 GMT -5
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, Nikolai Gogol
Digging through the memories of my Eng Lit degree, I can think of only one story that everyone loved and talked about the way you would a film you'd just seen or an album you'd just heard - The Overcoat by this fella. It's in here, and it remains one of the greats. The title track, and The Nose, are also top notch; another is promising but ends too abruptly, even if it's a deliberate ploy, and there's one more, but I got distracted and couldn't get back into it.
You could say all of them, in one way or another, read proto-surreal, paving the way for Kafka and Bulgakov. It could also be that Gogol's eventual crack-up (he burned all his work and starved himself to death) shows up quite early. It's not only the plots, it's the badgering, fevered quality of the prose, at least in this translation. Excellent stuff. I should get to Dead Souls at some point.
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Apr 10, 2024 23:27:00 GMT -5
Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints, Teffi (collected translations published 2021)
I'll start with this quote beginning the foreword from an unknown-to-me early 20th century Russian poet and critic, Georgy Adamovich.
"There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible."
Firstly, thank heavens NYRB is doing the work of Job (Job 1:10) by making this and myriad other works not recently in print available to many. Secondly, the Chandlers have done some incredible work in translating this author's work. Finally, what a writer this person must be in their original language.
There appears no bottom, as suggested by Adamovich. I get some Way of a Pilgrim sentiments from this collection in the first story "Kishmish", and now I expect great things from this writer. Things done that don't feel as if they've been done before.
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Dellarigg
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This is a public service announcement - with guitars
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Post by Dellarigg on Apr 21, 2024 5:10:35 GMT -5
The Waste Lands, Stephen King
Yet another return to the world of The Dark Tower books. This was the one I knew and remembered least well, but I thought I would give it another shot ... and I enjoyed it a surprising amount.
It's mid-saga, book three, so I won't go into much detail. Suffice to say, it completes the assembly of the Gunslinger's gang, gets them orientated on their trek to the Tower, and throws in a couple of adventures along the way. It isn't too weighed down by plot furniture yet, though you can see it's getting there, and it isn't too silly, though there are things I could do without, a suicidal talking monorail among them.
An overview of the series would suggest that King was finding his feet in the first two books, getting somewhere in the next two, and then it falls into over-complicated meta stuff in the final three (I'll leave The Wind In The Keyhole out of consideration for now). Pity - it coulda really been somethin.
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