Now reading...

[BillF]

My second Middleton and I preferred it to the first, Holiday. Story of marital woes in a classical music and English Midlands setting. Beautifully written.

[A Lark Ascending]

Standard British crime novel set in nice town. Enjoyed it though rather sad to see the most attractive character felled just before the end.

In the early Soft Machine years at present - a little bit of inevitable overlap with the Soft Machine bio of some years back but intriguing. A more fragile character than I imagined.

[ejp626]

I'm maybe 20% into the second part of Herzen's My Past and Thoughts (Ends and Beginnings from Oxford Press). It's good but I think Isaiah Berlin blew it up just a bit much (putting it on the same level as War and Peace ). Herzen himself thought of his memoirs as comparable to David Copperfield. I would be enjoying it a bit more if my expectations hadn't been raised quite so high...

[johnblitweiler]

After sleeping on Philip Roth forever, I finally read The Plot Against America and I Married A Communist. His characters' dilemmas are moral and complex and subtle. They may have been his last 2 novels - especially his utter seriousness, his indignation are engrossing. After those 2 explosions I can see why he gave up writing.

[Leeway]

THE STARCHED BLUE SKY OF SPAIN - Josephine Herbst (1892-1961).

Herbst is an interesting literary figure. Born and raised in Iowa, she formed a passionate devotion to literature and writing, and became a ubiquitous figure on the Bohemian and radical left scene of the 1920s and 1930s. This book is a collection of four autobiographical pieces, describing her Iowa upbringing; her life in Manhattan, Connecticut and Maine with her husband John Herrmann, also an author (Herrman's first novel was banned by U.S. Customs; he later became involved in the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss affair, and fled to Mexico with his new wife and the FBI at his heels, where he lived an "Under the Volcano" life); her time in Weimar Germany; her travels to Communist Russia in the '30s; and her experiences on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War (the title piece, and best of the group), where she hung out with Hemingway and DosPassos. Along the way, Herbst talks of her friendships (or at least relationships) with Katherine Ann Porter, Maxwell Anderson, H.L. Mencken, and Hemingway (who turns up everywhere). Later in life, Herbst was befriended by Alfred Kazin (whose prose has an interesting similarity) and Saul Bellow. I believe she ended up in an old stone house without plumbing buried in the Pennsylvania countryside. Anyway, an interesting figure, one admires her feeling and her intellect, her literary passion and her political commitment, and although she must be considered a minor writer, she was a writer nonetheless.

[jlhoots]

After sleeping on Philip Roth forever, I finally read The Plot Against America and I Married A Communist. His characters' dilemmas are moral and complex and subtle. They may have been his last 2 novels - especially his utter seriousness, his indignation are engrossing. After those 2 explosions I can see why he gave up writing.

Should win the Nobel, but they don't seem to want to give it to an American.

[niels]

I hear this more often, but fact is the US is second on the list of nobel laureates by country, so this is not a correct statement. I think the list of nobel prize winners can certainly be debated ( I mean writers like Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Kafka and Nabokov never won), but on average I think it is a pretty strong and correct list. As for the writers who still have a chance at winning, I would go for Milan Kundera (now that's someone who should have won it allready in my book), Wieslaw Mysliwski, Alessandro Baricco ( little bit of an outsider, but a personal favorite) or Haruki Murakami (I personally think his books are a little to "light" to win, but I can't think of a serious writer who managed to receive such a rockstar like status).

[jlhoots]

I hear this more often, but fact is the US is second on the list of nobel laureates by country, so this is not a correct statement. I think the list of nobel prize winners can certainly be debated ( I mean writers like Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Kafka and Nabokov never won), but on average I think it is a pretty strong and correct list. As for the writers who still have a chance at winning, I would go for Milan Kundera (now that's someone who should have won it allready in my book), Wieslaw Mysliwski, Alessandro Baricco ( little bit of an outsider, but a personal favorite) or Haruki Murakami (I personally think his books are a little to "light" to win, but I can't think of a serious writer who managed to receive such a rockstar like status).

I should have said the Nobel for literature - or are we 2nd there too.

[niels]

Yes, sorry could have been more precise myself. I have to say I didn't read anything from Philip Roth myself, so can't really comment on his work personally.

[jlhoots]

Last American Nobel laureate in literature that I can remember is Toni Morrison. That was 20+ years ago.

American or not I believe Roth is qualified.

[ejp626]

Well, Alice Munro just got it, so I suspect North America will be passed over for a couple more years, just like the World Cup...

[Leeway]

If you want the complete list of Nobel Prize winners in Literature, you can check out this link:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/

I too think that Roth should have been awarded the Nobel. His novels have such an incredible, personal, immediate voice to them, his approach is searingly honest, and his works are fearless in their subject matter. He also meets a standard of greatness an old literature professor of mine once mentioned to me: a substantial body of work, a uniformly high quality of work, and work composed over a sufficient period of time to allow judgment. Not only that, he "finished strong" in his literary career, with the later works rivaling, maybe surpassing, some of the earlier ones.

So why hasn't he received it? Leaving aside the various dark mutterings one hears (who knows, they might be true), one reason I think is that his best known work is "Portnoy's Complaint," and the Nobel folks are probably too stuffy to contemplate naughty things done to a piece of liver, or base an award on it. OTOH, Elfride Jelinek got her Nobel with some very kinky material.

What bothers me most is that some of the literature awards go to complete nonentities, people it seems no one has ever heard of, before or since; authors with slim vitaes; authors with little more than a local reputation. These surprises cause the obligatory fifteen-minute sensation, then return to obscurity.

[jlhoots]

Well, Alice Munro just got it, so I suspect North America will be passed over for a couple more years, just like the World Cup...

Canadian - I'm just saying, nevertheless deserved.

Reading Bone Clocks, so I'm not partial only to American authors.

[A Lark Ascending]

Nothing you didn't already know or suspect in the first 100 pages. But utterly depressing when every page is littered with examples of how everything is fixed.

[BillF]

Nothing you didn't already know or suspect in the first 100 pages. But utterly depressing when every page is littered with examples of how everything is fixed.

Mr Jones is writing some great stuff in the Guardian nowadays; e.g. yesterday on the duping of the working class by UKIP:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2014/nov/21/rochester-byelection-beliefs-of-ukip-voters

[BillF]

Have just finished the Atwood and am now reading the Ford. They have little in common, other than havng been published in the past year and having considerable literary merit IMHO :-)

[A Lark Ascending]

Nothing you didn't already know or suspect in the first 100 pages. But utterly depressing when every page is littered with examples of how everything is fixed.

Mr Jones is writing some great stuff in the Guardian nowadays; e.g. yesterday on the duping of the working class by UKIP:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2014/nov/21/rochester-byelection-beliefs-of-ukip-voters

Thanks, Bill. That is very much in tune with the book.

He's very good on the way the neo-liberal right has appropriated the language of protest - opponents of mass deregulation condemned as 'reactionary', enemies of 'progress' and 'reform'; above all, enemies of 'freedom'. Freedom seems to now mean the freedom for the wealthy to get even more wealthy, having thrown off the shackles of such restrictive practices as paying their taxes.

Had to smile (a rictus one!) - only a couple of weeks ago Eton Boy was declaring reducing taxation to be a moral imperative. Even morality has been turned topsy-turvy.

[Leeway]

Just finished Drabble's The Waterfall (1969), and my reaction falls neatly between johnblitweiler's and Bill F's, the former chucking the book aside, the latter praising its intense inner monologue. I finished the book but I didn't find it easy. The protagonist, and part-time narrator, Jane Grey, has to be among the most neurotic characters I've come across, a mash-up at times of Oblomov and the narrator of Notes from the Underground. An Oxford graduate (but with an inferior degree- a joke I suppose), she is defeated by everything from putting the bread away to taking the bus. She's incredibly inept for the most part, but there seems to be a deeper meaning to that ineptness that eluded me. Her husband has left her after a violent scene (not to be condoned (it doesn't seem to affect Jane too much), but after a few hundred pages of Jane perhaps understandable), and she takes as a lover, a day after giving birth to her second child, James, the husband of her cousin Lucy. Lucy is more than a cousin really, in all respects Lucy is Jane's sister and near look-alike. Jane obsesses her way through the adulterous relationship, defying all logic, morality, convention, anti-convention, or romance. I guess that is the point of the book: a love affair that exists outside of all definitions. Jane's habit of asking endless rhetorical questions and then acting in various improbable ways got tiresome for me. Having said that, there are powerful and even beautiful moments in the book, meditations on Elizabethan song, the card tricks that give the story its title, the car accident, but these are quickly deflated. In general, the story itself is deflationary. What looks to start out as a Jacobean tragedy, or even Elizabethan comedy, becomes a mundane suburban tale.

Everyone knows that Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt have no love lost for each other, indeed, rather detest each other. It seems to me that this novel is a Drabble salvo in her war with Byatt, with Jane and Lucy, and James and Malcolm (Jane's husband), serving as proxies. The work seems heavily coded in this altercation. I think the novel is also a working out of Drabble's literary aesthetic. Jane is a poet, and as the novel moves to an end, a certain literary code is established. I suspect this code is also contra Byatt. One last thing, the alternation between first-person and third-person narrative seemed to have no purpose or effect. I respect that the novel got under my skin, I respect the craft, but I can't say I enjoyed it much.

Moving on from Spark to another mid-20th century British female writer. Excellent - I shall certainly read another Drabble.

Just finished another one, The Waterfall. Powerful interior monologue - a good read.

It's so sad that it is clear in the past I read too fast, particularly in the mid 90s. I look over lists of books that I read and can remember very little about them.

AFAIK, I read Drabble's trilogy (The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory) and that's it. There is one fairly powerful image I remember from The Gates of Ivory and that's about it. Maybe someday I will make a dedicated run through her novels (a second time in some cases), though it is not a particularly high priority.

Earlier this week I quit "the Waterfall" on about page 40. I lost all symnpathy with the childish heroine, she was too much like me.

[BillF]

Just finished Drabble's The Waterfall (1969), and my reaction falls neatly between johnblitweiler's and Bill F's, the former chucking the book aside, the latter praising its intense inner monologue. I finished the book but I didn't find it easy. The protagonist, and part-time narrator, Jane Grey, has to be among the most neurotic characters I've come across, a mash-up at times of Oblomov and the narrator of Notes from the Underground. An Oxford graduate (but with an inferior degree- a joke I suppose), she is defeated by everything from putting the bread away to taking the bus. She's incredibly inept for the most part, but there seems to be a deeper meaning to that ineptness that eluded me. Her husband has left her after a violent scene (not to be condoned (it doesn't seem to affect Jane too much), but after a few hundred pages of Jane perhaps understandable), and she takes as a lover, a day after giving birth to her second child, James, the husband of her cousin Lucy. Lucy is more than a cousin really, in all respects Lucy is Jane's sister and near look-alike. Jane obsesses her way through the adulterous relationship, defying all logic, morality, convention, anti-convention, or romance. I guess that is the point of the book: a love affair that exists outside of all definitions. Jane's habit of asking endless rhetorical questions and then acting in various improbable ways got tiresome for me. Having said that, there are powerful and even beautiful moments in the book, meditations on Elizabethan song, the card tricks that give the story its title, the car accident, but these are quickly deflated. In general, the story itself is deflationary. What looks to start out as a Jacobean tragedy, or even Elizabethan comedy, becomes a mundane suburban tale.

Everyone knows that Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt have no love lost for each other, indeed, rather detest each other. It seems to me that this novel is a Drabble salvo in her war with Byatt, with Jane and Lucy, and James and Malcolm (Jane's husband), serving as proxies. The work seems heavily coded in this altercation. I think the novel is also a working out of Drabble's literary aesthetic. Jane is a poet, and as the novel moves to an end, a certain literary code is established. I suspect this code is also contra Byatt. One last thing, the alternation between first-person and third-person narrative seemed to have no purpose or effect. I respect that the novel got under my skin, I respect the craft, but I can't say I enjoyed it much.

Some very interesting speculation in your second paragraph, Leeway.

I'm not finished with Drabble yet. I see The Garrick Year sitting on my to-be-read pile :-)

[ejp626]

It is really hard for me to understand the whole Drabble vs. Byatt feud. What would be unbelievably droll is if they cooked it up to help stir up sales when things were slow. Maybe there will be some grand reconciliation towards the end (like Dostoevsky and Turgenev...).

Anyway, I am wrapping up Herzen's My Past and Thoughts tonight and will be immediately launching into Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album, which I've never read. Then Fathers and Sons for the first time in 20+ years. It's been a long fall with the Russians, but quite rewarding.

[BillF]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/25/readers-prefer-authors-own-sex-goodreads-survey

With my liking for Murdoch, Drabble, Taylor, Bowen, Pym, etc I thought I was the exception to the rule here, but looking at my reading over the past six weeks or so, it seems I'm not.

[niels]

It is really hard for me to understand the whole Drabble vs. Byatt feud. What would be unbelievably droll is if they cooked it up to help stir up sales when things were slow. Maybe there will be some grand reconciliation towards the end (like Dostoevsky and Turgenev...).

Anyway, I am wrapping up Herzen's My Past and Thoughts tonight and will be immediately launching into Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album, which I've never read. Then Fathers and Sons for the first time in 20+ years. It's been a long fall with the Russians, but quite rewarding.

That's a coincidence, I just started Sketches from a Hunter's Album (Jagersverhalen as it is called in Dutch) a few weeks ago but decided to lay it back on the shelf for a moment to read Stone Upon Stone from Wieslaw Mysliwski (which is fantastic).

[Leeway]

THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT - (1941) - Vladimir Nabokov

It has been a shockingly long time since I have read any Nabokov, who used to be an important author in my literary firmament at one time, as he was generally. Is that last part still true? Except for the usual case of Lolita, he seems not to be much discussed these days in a serious way. Hope I am wrong about that. In any event, Knight proved a very entertaining read, with all of Nabokov's usual characteristics. As the book's narrator relates from a review of one of Sebastian Knight's novels, "It's fun seemed to me obscure, and its obscurities funny, but possibly there exists a kind of fiction the niceties of which will always elude me." One of many examples of Nabokov' self-reflexive playfulness (?). Or as another reader of Knight's novels states, “Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules.” So it is with Nabokov, as the story progresses through ever elaborating rings of appearance and reality, fiction and history, self and not-self, real and illusory, and on. It's fiction as conjuration. Another of Nabokov's elusive butterflies.

[Leeway]

BEND SINISTER - Vladimir Nabokov (1946).

Paduk, the head of the Average Man Party, has taken over some unidentified Eastern European country and instituted a state tyranny. Paduk is opposed by his old schoolmate, and nemesis, the famed moral philosopher, Adam Krug. The story, such as it is, revolves around Paduk's attempts to get Krug to collaborate with the government, and Krug's efforts to resist.

This could have been a fairly interesting, perhaps even important fiction along the lines of 1984 and Animal Farm. Perhaps recognizing that that comparison will be made, Nabokov, in the Author's Introduction, declares that this is not a novel concerned with real world issues and takes a swipe at Orwell, denigrating him for his cliches. Nevertheless, the reality is that Orwell's works are much superior to Nabokov's. The former have had an important influence on literature, society, and politics, while Bend Sinister remains a relatively obscure curiosity.

There are at least several problems with the novel. First, Nabokov bulks so large in his own story, the reader has to peak around him to get a look at what is going on. Second, Nabokov loves violating the conventions of fiction; he's forever pulling back the curtain on his "conjuration," reminding the reader that it is all a Nabokovian invention. The reader knows. This seems less a stab at post-modernism on Nabokov's part than an impatience or even dismissal of such narrative; basically he could not be bothered with an actual novel. Third, the text is so clotted with archaic, obscure and foreign words (for which Nabokov is endlessly providing scholarly translations), it is practically impossible to get through a page without near-constant resort to a dictionary. Fourth, there is so much bitterness and contempt for practically everyone, not just the bad guys, it's hard to be concerned. One thing that bothered me is that Krug supposedly rises above all this, the incorruptible man, the moral man. But Krug brags that he used to torment Paduk as a schoolboy by sitting on Paduk's head every day after school. Is this moral? Krug feels Paduk had it coming, but that is hardly better than Paduk's state tyranny, indeed may be an inflated version of it. Fifth, the endless digressions get tiresome. The best of them, a deconstruction and reconstruction of Hamlet is quite long, rather brilliant if wrong-headed, but what it has to do with the Krug-Paduk story is hardly clear, Last, when Nabokov does venture to reach for real human connectedness, something in very short supply in this story, it teeters on the brink of sentimentality.

Anyway, enough disparagement. I guess if it is approached as a book of wordplay, an untangling of conceits, a parsing of digressions, or even as something to fit a political theory, then this could be a rewarding read. Otherwise, this could be a slog. I've read that this was Nabokov's least popular book, and that it was widely panned at publication. I'm not really surprised. I don't think time has vindicated it either.

[ejp626]

I debated weighing in a day or two ago, but your comments on Bend Sinister really struck a chord. I've disliked every book I've read by Nabokov, including Lolita, some quite strongly indeed. I think you've pointed out several good points about Nabokov -- it's always about how smart he is and he can hardly be bothered to write an interesting plot, let alone meaningful characters. I feel he wants to rub it in our faces how he is writing from Mt. Olympus and we should be grateful that he ever took the time. I suppose this is more than a little ironic, as I often am camped out in the "high art" bleachers, but Nabokov really takes it to extremes. I may eventually get around to reading the rest of his novels, but life is short and I have about 300 novels that are higher in the queue... The truth is I'm no longer very good at reading something when it just feels like an obligation.