A Momentary Taste of Being

Start the Not Literature Debate with Anthony And continue to his source I haven't fully assimilated the arguments (and I will), but I have said before that arbitrary denigration of a genre or even of a particular work is less about supporting literature than it is about bolstering one's own ego and weltanschauung .

An appreciation and interpretation (broadly speaking) of the works of Francine Prose.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Chinua Achebe. An excerpt: When, in 1958, the London publishers William Heinemann received a manuscript of Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart," they were unsure whether to publish it. The central question, according to editor Alan Hill, was this: "Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African?" Not only were there a mere handful of examples of African writing in English at the time – such as Amos Tutuola’s surreal "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" and Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel of contemporary Lagos, "People of the City" – but none of them had the ambition, the subtlety, or the confidence of "Things Fall Apart."

Here via Wooden Spoon an interesting excerpt: The pigment that made them – there were thirteen of these paintings done altogether – is not pure; it is made from the ashes of a copy of Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting . When they had finished burning and painting, the artists wrote to Derrida and offered him one of the paintings. I can't imagine anything better than a work made from an unread copy of Derrida (read the post to find out more.)

Here Which leads me to some thoughts.  Of the making of lists there is seemingly no end.  And I would not wish for an end.  It is in the reticulation, the warp and the weft of multiple lists that I often dredge up the finest things to read.  But even reading some of these very fine things, I'm left with a kind of questioning longing--where is our new Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Joyce, Conrad, James.  No--I'm not looking for a replica, I'm not looking for anyone whose style is similar or who rights on similar themes.  I'm looking really for the best of the best--the works that in our present foreshortened judgment constitute lasting work. I enjoy reading.  I don't always have to read the very best of the very best.  I like to read some bad books--things no self-respecting admirer of literature would be caught dead with.  I'm a reader, not a classicist (in a very bowdlerized sense of that word--substitue the snootier sounding "literateur"). ...

A suggestion, an analysis, here.

At The Reading Experience

This year I've made one find myself, and through a list found another author whose work I will pay close attention to in the future. My own find: Yiyun Li.  I'm not claiming to be the first person reporting on her work.  Rather, I found her by picking up A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in the Libary. While not yet a perfect stylist, her stories lead to natural ephiphanies--unexpected light that throws the whole tale into a different perspective.  This is a rare and valuable gift.  Her novel, The Vagrants can be read a a recounting of the horrors of China after an abortive attempt at democracy, or, as much more challenging, the trials of people seeking meaning outside of love--the vagrancy of the title.  The whole novel centers around deep questions of what and how we mean to one another. The other writer I found through a list in a recent issue of Bookmarks: Elinor Lipman.  She's witty, she's sly, she's smart about people, and she writes in a light w...

Having composed now a number of reviews for this blog, I realize that I really need to work on the art of reviewing.  I share some impressions, but I don't give the kind of discursive, lengthy, thought-provoking review that I like to read.  On the other hand, perhaps the sharing of impressions is enough.  I'm not a scholar, nor can I pretend to be--I don't care much for the scholarly apparatus and the set of scholarly assumptions that often surrounds a work.  I certainly don't mind reading scholarly reviews, articles, and analyses--but I don't have the mindset that would allow me to produce such work--I'm constitutionally opposed to the idea that most authors write or even revise with all of the assumptions in place that seem to make up most of the scholarly analysis.  Did Shakespeare really reflect on anti-semitism, racism, or Oedipal anxiety in composing "The Merchant of Venice," "Othello," or "Hamlet?"  I actually think Joyce d...

I would like to say that I postponed posting on this book out of courtesy to Nigeness who reported being in process.  But that simply isn't the case. I delayed posting because I didn't care for the book.  I wanted to be able to see why it had been placed on the "Best of the 20th Century list."  However, I couldn't.  But, then that is a matter of taste, and very likely, in my case, a matter of mood.  I didn't find the language compelling, nor did I really care much for the story--which seems to trace the history of a young woman who has recently become an orphan and is taken in by her half-brother and his wife.  She falls for a ne'er-do-well young man and spends the rest of the book in the entanglements that result from that. Her own predicament in the present is used to help cast the history of the sister-in-law in a somewhat different light. The novel seems to move at a snail's pace through various drawing rooms, dining rooms, tea shops, and parks.  T...

Not that you care: but I have a number of small distractions that can often spell a wasted novel for me: (1) Extraneous political intrusions--In a novel about the disintegration of the suburbs, I really don't need to read the author's opinion of the war in Iraq.  Or in Philip Roth's Exit Ghost , an otherwise excellent novel, I don't really need Roth's own intrusion on the story to tell me about how much he hates George Bush.  I'm just not that interested. (2) Excessive use of foul language and/or sex.  Haven't been able to get through a book by Stewart O'Nan, among others for this particular vice.  I do not know people who speak this way in real life and I have no desire to make their acquaintance in ficiotn.  This is also a heavy distractor in a great many Stephen King novels. I'm sure there are others, and I'll add them as I think of them, but that's it for now.  If you can't make your point without foul language I'm not inter...

I've posted excerpts from Liquidation over the past few days, and now comes the time to make some estimation of the book as a whole.  It's very difficult to do, not because I don't know how I feel about it, but because it is difficult not to gush and enthuse. I don't know enough about Mr.Kertész's opus to say whether this is a major or minor work in it.  Regardless, it is a major work of lliterature and one that parades a seemingly endless set of influences and patterns throughout.  B., a writer and a translator and one of the rare few born in Auschwitz/Birkenau and surviving to adulthood commits suicide.  Those he has worked with, his ex-wife, his lover, and those closest to him (although I'm not certain that any one of these people could be called a friend) are affected by this in different ways.  The protagonist of the book Kingbitter is searching for a lost manuscript that he is certain exists.  Much of the book is told in the form of a clairvoyant ...

I was able to snag a copy of Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us , and was delighted by the opening. from Ulysses and Us Declan Kiberd When a painter visited James Joyce in his Parisian apartment, the famous author pointed out of the window to the son of the concierge playing on the steps. 'One day,' he said, 'that boy will be a reader of Ulysses .' Already the book had a reputation for obscurity as well as obscenity, but Joyce remained confident that it would reach and move many ordinary readers. On its publication in 1922, he gave a copy as a present to François Quinton, his favourite waiter at Fouquet's. In those years, he preferred not to discuss literature with experts or writers, but 'loved to carry on a dialogue babout Dickens with some unknown attendant at the post-office window or to discuss the meaning structure of Verdi's La Forza del Destino with the person at the box office'. Sylvia Beach, whose bookshop published Joyce's masterpiec...

When one notes "perfection of language" as one of the qualities of a work, waht is one saying? Is there any sense in saying that "her sentences work perfectly?"  Isn't that just much nonsense? Of course they work perfectly, if they convey her meaning.  When I read about how marvelous Gertrude Stein is, I can only scratch my head and wonder about what might make her so--complete opacity? total indecipherability? babbling nonsense? She writes on the page what anyone else speaks and the speaker is remanded to custody for his own protection. I read the doped up, drunken blitherings of a Jack Kerouac and cannot deny the energy of them even as I find myself in rare agreement with Truman Capote. Is the language of Henry James perfect?  Gustave Flaubert? James Joyce? Virginia Woolf? William Faulkner?  If so, in what does the quality of perfection subsist?  How can all of these writers be perfect? Sometimes, I'm of the opinion that one starts with one's react...

The reader's lament.  And it's not going to get any better.  If all book production stopped this minute, we would still have more books than any one person could read in a lifetime.  Even prodigious and rapid readers couldn't master all the languages required to take in the literature available in print today.  The problem then becomes one of deciding how one should spend one's reading time.  How does one choose the best of the best to read? To start, the best of the best is a necessarily subjective categorization.  Best how?  Best written?  Most provocative? Best to me?  And even,  to some extent, the question of best written does not stand up well to scrutiny.  Is James Joyce better written than Saul Bellow?  By what criteria?  Is Virginia Woolf better written than Eudora Welty?  We have a general view of the morphoscape of literature--we know that Shakespeare occupies something near the pinnacle and that various ...

I know that Oprah is controversial in a number of ways.  I know that some authors don't particularly care for Oprah's book club.  I know that it is not considered savvy to speak out in her favor; however, I have to say that I have tremendous respect for anyone who encourages people to read.  And I especially have respect  when Oprah asks her audience to indulge in reading as harrowing, and beautiful as Uwem Akpan's powerfully written Say You're One of Them.   I was reminded of the luminous stories in this collection as I read through Adichie's book.  Akpan's stories are powerfully written, brilliantly imagined.  But they are relentless, unsparing, and occasionally brutal.  Even the gentlest of them "What Language is That?" is heartrending in its depiction of the destruction caused by sectarian sentiment and violence. However, "What Language is That" is a walk in the park compared to either the tale of preparing to sell children into slavery ...

Because I'm in a dreamsome mood, let us suppose for a moment that some unnamed someone were to approach me on the street say, yesterday, and were to say, "We need 500 words on Dubliners , stat.  We're doing to press next Thursday.  I'll need them by Tuesday if we're to set them."  (Why they should say such an unaccountable thing, I cannot begin to imagine, but it's my dream, so let's let that be for a moment.)  And let us also say that this mysterious someone offered me both monetary remuneration and copies of the monumental study of which this 500 words is to be a part  (or more likely, the bird-cage liner that needs a filler.) Let us suppose this bolt from the blue.  What then, would I do? Before anything else I would sit down and read three stories from the collection--the three that, for whatever reason, have left an indelible impression on me.  (Actually four--but let's start with three).  First, I would pick up "Araby,"  next I ...

For a long time, I've felt an odd affinity to Joyce Carol Oates.  It is odd in the sense that while I do not like most of her stories, I often found myself in love with her prose, which is so mutable and so perfectly attuned to where she is going in her stories.  I've read only a very small portion of her opus (which is of Dostoevskian proportions and makes one wonder about the temporal lobe epilepsy theory).  I found a sort of spiritual home in this book because her view of the writing life, and my own coincide on all major points. Let's start with an essential: from "What Sin to Me Unknown" in The Faith of a Writer Joyce Carol Oates Not "realism" (a convention most people believe to be primary) but a kind of "surrealism" is the mode of storytelling that seem to have predated all others. Legends, fairy tales, ballads, the earliest preserved drawings and other works of "primitive" art are not at all realistic but magical, with...

I've been thinking a bit about the purpose and meaning of rating a book.  What information does it give a reader?  What information do I intend for it to give a reader?  The answer to the latter is simple--it should tell a person reading a review how much I enjoyed this book relative to other books.  But enjoyment is such a complex of things, that even such a simple concept becomes fuddled.  Let's take for example The Sun Also Rises and a book I reviewed here today Broccoli and Other Tales of Love and Food.   Let's say that I gave both of these books a 4-star rating.  What would that indicate?  It would suggest that I "enjoyed" both books a great deal and would consider recommending them to readers.  But to say that I enjoyed them both begs the question.  I enjoyed The Sun Also Rises in a very different way than I enjoyed Broccoli .  While more than a toss-off light read, Broccoli did not demand from me or engage me in the way th...

I'm amazed by my ability to read things now that I found way beyond the pale in high school and college.  Herman Melville has always struck me as the most unreadable of a passel of unreadable American authors (my opinions of all of whom have changed dramatically in the past few years). Can we all chant, "Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, ewwww!"  Well, that was then, and this is now and I'm grateful that I now have access to these previously opaque authors. Last night I had the delightful pleasure of reading "Bartleby the Scrivener" for the first time.  (In high school I had read "Billy Budd" and in college I had read at Moby Dick , neither of which looms large in memory--but, I've discovered, that is less a comment on Melville than it is on Steven.) And while I have asked myself to review this particular work, I find that at present I would prefer not to.  (See the story.) I have the distinct impression that had I read this in high school or c...