2015

October 06, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

Today is a special edition of Books I Read This Week, because it takes up three weeks instead of 1, and also I drank a lot before writing it. More than usual, I mean. Not that it matters, no one reads this, it's just something I use to keep track of the things I read and because I'm a glutton for recording things. Why are you reading this? Don't you have something better to do, like bang on a trash can or howl at the moon? Anyhow...

The Last 3 Weeks I Read:

Tun-Huang by Yashushi Inoue – yeah....uhhhh, so this was three weeks ago and I can only faintly remember it. That's not a great sign I guess. It's about a period of Chinese history which I knew nothing about before reading it, so that's a plus. I admit that apart from that it basically was not of any interest to me. Seems to be highly regarded, so there's a fair chance that I missed what was special about it, but either way.

Were there swords: Yes, actually, but it was still pretty dull.

The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin – a cute historical fairy tale, but again it didn't really do a lot for me. I understand that a lot of Pushkins appeal is that he had a critical role in the elevation of Russian as a literary language, though reading it in translation that doesn't really do anything. Also it seems to have been a very early example of the now pretty ubiquitous historical fiction genre, so there's that.

Were there swords: Yeah, there were swords, but you couldn't exactly call it riveting. Still two books with swords in a week! I'm on a roll!

The Misanthrope and Other Plays by Moliere – the titular play is pretty hysterical, and beyond that a rather cutting critique of human misbehavior. A lot of the others are just silly romps, neatly executed but not much more than that. Can someone who understands this subject better explain to me why the English plays of this period and even earlier are so much richer and more complex than this? Even the Misanthrope, which again is a lot of fun, really can't possibly be compared to say, Midsummer Night's Dream or what have you. Thoughts? Anyone? Bueller?

Were there swords: Yes, but used for comedic effect.

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya – Man, I really liked this one. Sort of a post-apocalyptic narrative but actually a really brutally mean comment on the pointlessness of literature. The prose is extraordinarily inventive, both in terms of the language itself and of the viewpoint provided by Benedikt, the idiot manchild and protagonist/anti-hero. Having read so many endless self-serving paeans to the power of literature to ennoble the human spirit, there's something really hysterically funny about the idea of a book the essential set up of which being how reading making a person more barbaric and horrible. I just loved this book, it made me laugh constantly. Between this and the also fantastically kid Ice Trilogy, I'm starting to wonder why the Russians have all the good scifi writers?

Were there swords: No.

Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck – yeah, this was a fun one. Reck was a German arch-conservative and constant, bitter opponent of the Nazis who would end his life tragically shortly before the end of the war. With extraordinary clarity and depth of insight, he identifies the apocalyptic course which German society had embarked on, a madness which he identifies as being the ultimate product of the French revolution and of modernity generally. This is the angriest book you'll ever read, 200-odd pages of burning, lucid hatred for the moral degradation of Rcck's beloved homeland, of the apalling brutality and stupidity of the Nazis and of a society which is willing to follow them blindly off a cliff, and to lead much of the rest of Europe there with them. Excellent, worth reading, terribly sad.

Were there swords: This whole were there swords conceit is not as funny as I thought it would be.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household – this was a ton of fun. Our unnamed protagonist, an English sports hunter of wealth, good manners, impeccable pedigree, superhuman strength, giant balls, etc, gets captured by the secret service of an unnamed country (context clues suggest Germany) who (mistakenly?) suspect him of trying to assassinate their leader (Hitler). One of those very first-rate thrillers (reminded me of Forstyhe in this) where everything makes really perfect sense, the author has seriously considered all of the events and the book would have served as a useful roadmap for escaping Germany or the London police or whatever. Better still is the very gradual reveal of the hero's motives. It whiled me through a very rainy Saturday, for which I'm thankful.

Were there swords: No, but there were rifles and ballistae and killing generally.

The Jewish War by Josephus – is it maybe kind of stupid to criticize a work of classical history as being dry? Well, I just did. Basically it's just Josephus's immensely self-serving explanation of why it was OK for him to turn traitor and join up with the Romans rather than getting himself killed like all the other Jews did. This was a pretty far way from Thucydides.

Were there swords: There were a shitload of swords. There were swords all over the damn place, seriously. If you're looking for swords, BOOM, here you go. Enjoy yourself.

Right Now I'm Reading: Nothing, but I got a Samuel Delaney book in the hopper.

Books I read 9/15/2015

September 15, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

A person gains attention on the internet mainly by talking about themselves. To that end: here are the books I read this week, and how I feel about them. Why would you be interested in this? I have absolutely no idea.

This Week I read:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin – Coming to Le Guin rather belatedly. She has a rare gift for portraying the complexities of alien civilization (alien in the sense of being unlike our own) without devolving into agit prop. I confess to feeling, however, it was more of an intellectual exercise in a certain sense then it was a real comment on the nature of humanity. At least with Left Hand of Darkness, the differences in basic human interaction were explained by the native peoples being dual-sex. By contrast in this one, certain core aspects of the behavior of the Libertarian planet did not ring true to me. It's hard to imagine any amount of education/indoctrination could breed out the basic selfishness and violence which is at the core of the human animal (I'm a Hobbesian – can you tell?) Very interesting all the same, I can understand why this book/her work is held in such high regard.

Were there swords: No, but there were aliens!

The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platanov: No one does despairing magical realism like the Soviet-era Russians. Foundation Pit was strange, horrifying, immensely depressing, like a lot of the Stalin-era books that were banned and have found posthumous release only in this century. Was it good? I guess it was. Did I enjoy it? Not at all. Did I understand it? To a certain extent – I admit that I didn't have the energy to sift through it to the degree that it probably deserved, but in fairness, I have at this point read many thousands of pages about the horrors of communism during this period. Was this a useful book review? No, it was not. Sorry, but there we are.

Were there swords: Absolutely no swords.

Dr. No by Ian Fleming: With the exception of Casino Royale, I never really enjoyed any of the Bond movies – dated as all hell. A toupeed Connery, half-baked puns, etc. Still, there have been innumerable bad movies made from good books, and prior to last week I had sort of vaguely assumed that original Iam Fleming books fell into this category.

Incorrect. False. Wrong altogether. Dr. No is an absolutely fetid pile of crap – it is a shit sandwich, it is falling face down into an open sewage tent. It is stupid from top to bottom, it is irredeemably horrible. I never give up on a book and I very nearly gave up on this one. Every bit of it is an inane adolescent fantasy – the writing is terrible, the pacing is execrable. There is nothing interesting about bond, there is nothing interesting about Dr. No, there is just nothing at all interesting in this anywhere at all.

Sidenote: I'm not the sort of person who criticizes works of a past generation for being racist – I assure you, you hold opinions your grandchildren will find horrifying – but Dr. No deserves particular opprobium not only for being casually racist but for being lazily racist. This is a book in which Bond, investigative genius that he is, realizes that a secretary working for the home office is in cahoots with the villain because, get this, she, like Dr. No, is also of Asian descent! Zing! A riddle wrapped in an enigma, my friends! I hated, hated, hated, hated this book.

Where there swords: No, but you'd need to hold one to my throat to get me to read another Ian Fleming book.

Anatomy of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Strange, sad, funny, the back of my book compares this to Borges and Beckett and that sounds about right. About half of the stories missed me, but about half of them – one about a priest given control over all of the world's cracks, one about a man who tries to bite his own elbow, and the societal rage this sets off – I absolutely adored. Definitely recommended.

Were There Swords: No.

The Centurions by Jean Larteguy: Held in immensely high esteem within the Special Forces community around the world, The Centurions tells the story of a group of French paratroopers who are captured after the debacle at Dien Bien Phu and survive the communist camps only to return home and discover themselves estranged from capitalist, bourgeois France. I've actually been looking for this one for years, as being a classic text on the mind state of today's all-volunteer army, and it did not disappoint. Although it did depress—Larteguy's portrait of a society utterly consumed by hedonistic excess and bereft of a moral code; and of the men sworn to defend that society, who defend but are secretly loathed by it; both hit home in uncomfortable ways. I told Myke Cole he should read it, and he told me he was reading the Builders already, and I said this was better than the Builders, and he told me that was the sort of thing I shouldn't write in public, and then I went ahead and ignored him. Anyway – this was really excellent, deserving of the regard it is held in by a small portion of the population, definitely worth trying to find.

Were there swords: No, but there was some well-written, unheroic, realistic-seeming action, as would be appropriate for a book of this sort.

Acme Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware: My first encounter with the man, and I can see why he's so highly regarded. A very good pulp sci fi story and a strong digression into the personal history of the man who wrote it, both making use of the format in ways which I was unfamiliar with and enjoyed.

Were there swords: No.

Terror Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T.) by Benjamin Marra: A one note joke which quickly falls sour. The art is nothing really to speak of, and the hyper-stylized, childlike masculinity warrants a chuckle but not more than that. Not good.

Were there swords: Actually, There's one right there on the cover! Much good may it do you, you fucking dick. Yeah, I'm talking to you -- who the hell reads this shit anyway? Bring it on! You don't scare me!

Right Now I Am Reading: The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin.

Books I read 9/8/2015

September 08, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

This Week I read:

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane by Frederick Starr: Pretty much as the subtitle says – an intellectual history of Central Asia during that period when it was dominating the philosophical, mathematical, medical and scientific firmaemnt.. Always interesting to read about a part of the world of which I know only a little, of which Central Asia is at the top of the list. Really made me want to take off on my do-before-I-die trip through the 'stans. Somewhat dry, but that's to be expected given the nature of the work. It also gave a lot of pushback to the Mongols-as-civilization-builders meme which has gotten a lot of play in academic circles in recent years, though to be blunt I have absolutely no capacity to mediate in this particular dispute. Interesting if you have the time.

Were there swords: There were not a lot of swords, no.

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima: Best known as this point in the West for the least successful coup attempt in the history of mankind (worth a Google, I promise), Mishima is still generally considered one of the great 20th century Japanese writers, and one can see why. This book is beautifully written, even in translation the prose sparkles. I admit that the story itself, which is sort of a lost-love story and sort of about Mishima's obsession with suicide/brevity/emotional purity/the transient nature of perfection, did not resonate in any particularly strong way with me. It reminded me a lot of the German romantics, so if Rilke etc. is your bag this might do it for you. Maybe if I'd read it 15 years ago the passion in the novel would have affected me more strongly, as it was I felt a little bit like, ugh, grow the fuck up kids. Anyway, just me.

Were there swords: No.

Doctor Frigo by Eric Ambler: Fucking Eric Ambler, man, fucking Eric Ambler. Best spy novelist ever, though the protagonists are never spies, just regular folk in over their heads. Very cleverly written, possessing a moral weight which more conventional novels in this genre can only dream of, never allwoing geopolitical concerns to outweigh the human element. Not his best (personally I would go with Judgment for Deltchev though there are lots of contenders) it's still pretty stellar, definitely worth a look.

Were there swords: Not really, but there's action of various sorts.

Right Now I Am Reading: As soon as I post this, I'm going to buy another beer and read Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which should be fun. Update: Bought beer early.

Do I Write Dark Fiction?

September 08, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

I recommended a book to Mark Lawrence on twitter the other day, (Red Shift, in case you were wondering) commenting (in a positive sense) that it was quite bleak. A Facebook follower, alluding to the general darkness of Mark and my work, that if we think something as grim, it must truly be a nasty piece of business. I admit I was sort of taken aback – when I think of really bleak books, I'm thinking of Jim Thompson, or maybe the Gulag Archipelago, meditations on the nature of sin, which is to say the nature of man, not the sort of adventure novels for which I'm known. On the other hand, pretty much every review of my stuff that I've ever read, positive or negative, has commented on it being very dark, not-your-parents-sort-of-fantasy, that kind of thing.

So I got to thinking – just what kind of books do I write?

The Low Town stuff is, on the surface at least, quite grim. For those of you who haven't read it (and really, if you haven't, please do, the rent man has been banging loudly at my door these last days) the protagonist is a (nearly) amoral sociopath who makes his living selling drugs, conning the stupid, brutalizing the weak. He curses, he snarls, he snorts the secondary world equivalent of cocaine. He kills a lot of people with bladed weapons. What morals he holds are hidden so deep that even he seems barely aware of them. His past history, gradually revealed over the course of the trilogy, is filled with acts of betrayal, blasphemy and depredation. Compared to classic fantasy, with its paladins, white horses, shining swords and swooning maidens, it certainly has more of an edge to it. So far as I can tell, there's no sex to be found in Middle Earth, let alone people paying for it, and although the exact chemical composition of 'pipe weed' remains unclear, it presumably isn't what we would all hope it to be.

All that said, and for my money, Low Town isn't really dark, despite bad things happening to all of the characters pretty much all the time. The narrative is constructed in such a fashion that you can always be rooting for the Warden, even if it's just because his opponents are so much worse. And while he does terrible things, he's doing them for sympathetic reasons, and you sort of get the sense that he regrets it in some distant way. The Warden is, in short, something of a genre cliché, if, I hope, a well written one. This is not the Sheriff in The Killer Inside me – you are meant to root for the Warden, to hold out hope for his redemption.

But even if you didn't – if you found him to be irredeemable, or simply too unpleasant to want to spend an entire novel with (as some readers did) the book is all the same so clearly in the classic genre mode, that it seems sort of impossible to take it seriously. From the frequent scenes of physical violence, which are described in intimate detail, to the highly stylized dialogue, which is sharper then any normal conversation, it is clear that the narrative is taking place in a world which, beyond its obvious fictional characteristics, is not the same as our own. Too much happens too quickly, reality is made subject to the deadheads of a fast-moving plot. In short, even a largely unobservant reader will implicitly understand that they are consuming a story which has only a very loose connection to thei own lives. It is difficult for me to imagine there are many readers working their way through Low Town and grappling, with the moral struggles facing the Warden. The day to day concerns of modern existence – alienation, over-consumption, good old fashioned ennui – have little reflection in the Warden's own troubles. His misfortunes are entertaining, a happy distraction from our own, more complicated, less solvable, problems.

On another, deeper level, the fact that Low Town coheres to a traditional structure, however grim that might be, is in itself a source of comfort to the reader. Stories are attempts to force a narrative pattern on a world which steadfastly resists it. It is far easier to accept that we are the victim of tragedy, one of our own making or one decreed upon us by grim fate, than it is to admit that life essentially consists of random or seemingly random events, that boulders fall on us from the sky, that bullets catch heroes and cronies alike, that the only purpose or meaning is that which we create for ourselves, dependent and not external to us.

A book like Red Shift, by contrast, which is of genre but not within it, works deliberately to confuse and confound the reader. The perspective changes abruptly and with little warning, terrible violence is introduced without preamble or postscript, the dialogue is confusing and somewhat obtuse, and all of these work to unmoor the reader from their usual perspective. In its refusal to give clear answers, in its confusing and opaque structure, Red Shift mimics the nature of human existence in a more accurate and thus more discomfiting way then more conventional genre fiction.

In short, the the things I write are satisfying, even if they aren't happy. That's my feeling – what's yours?

Books I Read 4/28/2015

April 28, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

This Week I Read:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor: Patrick Leigh Fermor, when he was eighteen, decided to walk from London to Constantinope, and this is the first third of that trip. I suppose this isn't quite Marco Polo but amongst travel writers in the 20th century it reigns pretty much untouched.. To have been able to explore this last fragment of pre-modern Europe – Germany before it was turned to ash, Central Europe before fifty years of a Soviet yoke! – is something that no serious traveler cannot look upon without undisguised jealousy. And there is a great deal here that any backpacker, even those of us in this dull and benighted and progress-throttled modern age, can appreciate. The sudden fortuitous kindness of strangers, the stunning, childlike jubilation one feels when one is utterly alone and untraceable in some strange place.

On to the downside. Fermor is tremendously erudite, which can be marvelously fun when you are dealing with intersecting interests (the 30 year war, the early migrations of peoples in Europe) bot at other times can grow quite ponderous, as for instance the phenomenally rococo descriptions of steeples and church naves. It has to be admitted even by a fundamentally positive reviewer that Fermor's linguistic excesses grow wearisome. Three times in the book Fermor has occasion to use the term Caracol, a cavalry maneuver which utilized the pistol and which saw brief use during the Wars of Religion but swiftly fell out of favor as reducing the shock value of the charge itself and generally being less valuable than just riding up and sabering people. It has a lovely sound to it but is unknown except amongst specialists and probably not the thing a good editor should let slip past. In any event, in none of the instances does Fermor appear to use it properly, but rather as a simple euphemism for ride, which is really just bad writing all around. I only harp on this because it was one of the innumerable obscured words in the book that by coincidence I happened to be familiar with, and because I can't help but think that many of these linguistic bric-a-brac, if investigated might reveal a similarly dubious provance.

Put another way – were I more clever, Fermor might appear less so.

Happily, I am not that clever, and anyway when Fermor returns to his narrative, winking (asexual?) trysts with German maidens beneath the claws of Nazi SS leches, making a living as a professional portrait artist in Vienna, being invited into the castles of the fading Dual-Monarchy nobility, it is impossible not to enjoy yourself. I would certainly have picked up the next two in the trilogy if I wasn't about to follow Fermor's example (if, it goes without saying, in a less admirable and courageous fashion) and going traveling for a while, and thus can only take giant books which will take me a long time to finish. It might also be the reason why next Tuesday you don't get a blog entry. Heartbreaking, I know.

Were there swords: No, there were no swords.

Books I Read 4/21/2015

April 21, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

This Week I Read:

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge: So after last week's debacle, after I laid that goose egg, after the rare route in the lifelong battle against ignorance, I had hoped to return this week at double-speed. Alas. I only read the one book, and even then only barely. Part of this is because I'm under the gun with Those Below, and I'm moving out of my apartment, and I'm going traveling at the end of the month, and also for other reasons that don't need to be entered in on. But mostly because Unforgiving Years is not a page turner, not something to skim while defecating or half-read in a bar while eying a pretty girl. Simultaneously complex in language, structure, and thought, Unforgiving Years chronicles the terrible brutality of the years leading up to an immediately after WWII. It is loosely the story of Daria, a Soviet revolutionary struggling against the onslaught of Fascism while trying to survive Stalin's savage series of purges, although really this is to simplify the matter immensely.

It is a fantastic book. It is a minor masterpiece. It is very, very hard to read. The complexity of Serge's language and thought, the curious shifts in perspective—he has a habit of slipping seamlessly from one character to another so that you barely notice he has done so—are not easily comprehended, not even to a relatively capable reader. Moreover, the subject matter itself, which, though despairing, is not nihilistic, is similarly something of a challenge. The third portion of the novel in particular, which chronicles Daria's mission in war-ravaged Germany, is ferocious and disturbing, the imagery horrifying, the prose chaotic. Serge's perspective as true witness to war—he fought for the Red Army during the Russian revolution—offers an authentically tragic perspective on what is one of the darkest periods of human history, when the full potential of the industrial age has been turned towards the eradication of all that is decent and noble and innocent in humankind.

It took me a while, but it was worth it. And it got me thinking some about difficult literature, and of the things that books ask of us. Books can serve different purposes—to educate, to entertain, to enlighten, although the last I think it ultimately the most important. But revelation is not something which can be easily granted—it requires struggle, it requires sacrifice. The best books, in my opinion, are usually not the easy ones, not the downhill sprints (though they can be fun also). They're the rough ones, the ones that force us to stretch ourselves, the ones that stare back at us from our bedside tables contemptuously, challenging our attention. Unforgiving Years is one of these books, though a reader who makes the attempt will find not only a profound meditation on the nature of man, and on the foolish, formless optimism which is a requirement to avoid the weight of nihilism, but also a work of immense lyrical and aesthetic excellence. Highly recommended.

Were There Sword Fights: No, but there was some action. Although I mean, obviously, from the above you shouldn't expect a whiz-banger. Anyway.

Right Now I Am Reading: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and just loving it.

Books I read 4/14/2015

April 14, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

This Week I Read:

Nothing, by no one. Not a damn thing. I read about 50 pages of one thing but 50 pages isn't a whole book. 50 pages isn't close to a book. Why? Laziness, essentially. Spring finally arrived in Brooklyn, green buds and smiling girls, and the sun returned also, you remember the sun, and also my brother and some friends came to visit, and I found I preferred to enjoy their collected company rather than keep my nose firmly into the terrifyingly grim if very well written Russian novel I'm am trying to read. So anyway, I didn't read anything. Were there sword fights: No, my life generally contains very few of these.

Right Now I Am Reading: I could tell you, but why would you trust me at this point?

Books I read 4/7/2015

April 07, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

This Week I Read:

Last Call by Tim Powers – As a rule, I don't see the point in ever reviewing a book negatively. I'm not a professional reviewer, I don't have any obligation to anyone to try and present an impartial opinion, I'm obviously not playing any sort of role in a larger aesthetic and cultural discourse, and therefore saying anything bad about anyone else in a public forum just seems mean and cheap and nasty. Who cares? There are so many good books in the world, spend your time talking about them. At some point you start meeting these people and attaching the names on their books to hands you've shaken and smiling faces and people who seem altogether decent or who at least seem like people, trying to get through the day like all of us and why do you want to have done anything to even in some minor way add to their burdens? (I haven't ever met Tim Powers, I'm speaking abstractly at this point) But then again Tim Powers has sold about a million books and won every aware you can win, and will in all likelihood never see this review and so I don't feel quite as bad about it.

This is kind of a big build up especially because actually I pretty much liked Last Call, I just didn't like it to the degree that I thought I would given some of the other things he's written. Tim Powers is such an enormously imaginative writer, his stuff is always weird and clever in a way which the vast majority of the rest of us in the genre only distantly aspire to. And there's a lot of that on evidence in Last Call. The beginning is very mean and fierce, and the entire idea of stealing bodies and whatnot, the fortune teller, lots of fun bits. But not all the subplots work as well, and like a lot of these sort of things the early build up is more fun than the pay off. I dunno, endings are tough. It's not really fair because I went in comparing it to Declare which is just stunningly fucking cool, if you haven't read that stop reading this review and pick it up ASAP. And then after you're done that go ahead and read Last Call, because it's really quite good despite this damn-with-faint-praise thing I've been doing for about four hundred words now. The truth is that even one of Tim Power's lesser works is probably better than 90% of the rest of the stuff in the genre.

Unrelated to this, it's really weird that when you type 'Last Call' into goodreads the entire first page are for bodice rippers. Were There Sword Fights: No, but there was pretty much everything else. People get shot and there are magic fights and etc. So I think I'm going to count this one.

The Great Sea by David Abulafia– Do you have--(you might, what do I know, you're reading this blog post)--some interest in writing a work of high fantasy? Then this is exactly the sort of book you need to be reading. A sweeping history of human activity in the Mediterranean, going back to pre-history and extending up to the modern day, thoughtful in its conclusions and evocative in its language. Here is Leonidas at Hot Gates, here the bastard Don Juan saves the West at Lepanto, here Napoleon's hopes for an Egyptian empire go down in a hail of shot and splinter. Here false-Converso Jews scuttle through the trading ports of the levant, here the Ragusans plot and scheme against the Doges of Venice, here is the interplay of nations and cultures and languages on a vast scale. This is just absolutely enthralling stuff, a magisterial history, the sort of thing which one might look at in the moment before dying, nod their head, and drift off happily. Kudos to David Abulafia—this is worth every moment of the time it will take you to finish it. The best work of non fiction I've read in a long time. Were There Sword Fights: Not described in vivid detail, I guess, but there's a lot of battles.

Right Now I'm Reading: Yeah, nothing actually. I gotta pick something up tomorrow. Rjurik Davidson and I both promised we would read the others book ( after having already reviewed it) but I kind of suspect in the end we'll both prove to be liars. I'm insanely busy all of a sudden with work and moving out of my apartment and going back to being a vagabond again, and also finishing up Those Below, and don't have quite as much energy to throw into my studies. Which is not an excuse. Maybe I'll read the Mahabharata. I dunno.

Books I read 3/31/2015

March 31, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

Last Week I Read:

Stoner by John Williams: First of all, can we talk about the goddamned New York Review of Books Classics? Can we please talk about the goddamned New York Review of Books Classics? We can? Great. These things are just fantastic, whomever is in charge of putting this collection together has done an immense good service to the reading public. I've been basically just buying any one of these that crosses my path in the last six months or so and they've all been great, virtually across the board, lesser known writers who's lack of fame is in no way related to the excellence of their works. God bless those guys/gals. Good stuff.

Right, where were we? Our eponymous hero, Stoner, is the son of Missouri dirt farmers who becomes a professor of English and then dies. Spoiler Alert. It's not exactly action packed, but it's beautiful and erudite and terribly sad, sad because the world is often kind of a sad place, even for people for whom nothing very bad happens, the quiet weight of day to day existence is often a heavy one and the book is a rare celebration of the strength required of all of us to carry it. I thought it was really lovely and I'd recommend it broadly. Were there sword fights: No. Not a lot really happens, like I said. But maybe still don't let that discourage you.

The Duke of Wellington's Military Dispatches by Arthur Wellesley collected by Charles Esdaile: I really have no idea what possessed me to read this, it was just entirely beyond my ken. I also have no idea how to review it—this is indeed the collected dispatches of Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, detailing various aspects of his Penninsular campaigns and Waterloo. It is of essentially no interest to anyone not a narrow specialist in the field, like very narrow, like which division went where on what day, which I am not at all. So, it was kind of a slog, and also for some reason I refused to stop reading it, and so most of my week reading-wise was eaten up by this. That's not it's fault though, really. Anyhow. Were there sword fights: God, I would have killed for a sword fight just to break up the monotony. But no, there were not really any sword fights.

Call for the Dead by John le Carré: After the last two books I really needed to read a book in which something happens. Of course the joke with le Carré is that lots of things tend to happen but always in the grayest sort of ways. I really enjoy le Carré, although sometimes he gets a bit too 'it was a rainy day in London and the sky was gray and there was mud everywhere and people's clothes were very drab and the steak was burnt and the tea was weak...' But then again any distinct voice carries the capacity for self-parody. Anyhow this is really burying the lede, I quite liked it, Smiley's first appearance though in a slightly different form than he would appear in the better developed Karla series. It's John le Carré's first book and you can definitely tell that, the theme's haven't quite asserted itself, there is some physical combat (which there virtually never is in the later stuff although I admit I enjoyed it, especially after the last two books I'd read) and it's all not quite as tight as some of the later stuff, but it's also a fiercely-paced 150 pages and a ton of fun. Strong recommendation. Were there sword fights: No but there are shootings and bludgeonings and generally action and that was enough.

Right Now I Am Reading:

Last Call by Tim Powers: And it's great.

Books I read 3/24/2015

March 24, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

Last Week I Read:

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, translation by Donald Rayfield: A classic work of world literature I no longer need to lie about having read! Dead Souls is the story of Chichikov, a double-dealing antihero who travels through the provinces in an effort to purchase ownership recently deceased serfs, a MacGuffin which allows Gogol ample opportunity to skewer the foibles, pretensions, and general awfulness of the backwater nobility, Russia, and humanity generally speaking. The language is nuanced and rich and tons of fun, and by the standards of canonical Russian literature it's really quite breezy (admittedly, damning with faint praise). Of course, only part one was ever completed (supposedly Gogol destroyed the rest of what he had written shortly before his death) and whatever grand point he might have been building towards never really gets made— But still, really very laugh out loud funny, and although an informed reader will understand, in a broad way at least, what the plot behind the purchasing of all of these 'dead souls', still you have to appreciate the quite modern-seeming brilliance of not telling the reader what the hell is going on for more than two-hundred pages. Were there sword fights: No, the only sparring is verbal.

East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick: A grand an entertaining history of Russia's conquest and colonization of Siberia, from Ivan the Great to Stalin (chronologically if not morally distant). I learned some things I didn't know, I got some ideas for a sort of magical western novel that I might someday write, after I write about five other books and assuming I don't get hit by a car crossing the street this afternoon. A worthwhile read, all around. Were there sword fights: I mean, there aren't any literal descriptions of anyone going at it, but there's a fair bit of violence in the conquest of Siberia, as you might imagine, and the book doesn't stint. Speaking strictly, though, no, there weren't any sword fights.

Right Now I Am Reading: Stoner by John Williams, because I'm a glutton for punishment.

Books I read 3/17/2015

March 17, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

Last Week I Read:

War and Gold: A 500-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng: a perfectly acceptable history of 20th century finance, breezily written, coherent to a reasonably attentive reader without much prior knowledge of economics. In and of itself an admirable, if not particularly ambitious work. Lamentably, this is not at all how the book is marketed or presents itself. The first four hundred years alluded to in the subtitle are dispensed with in about fifty pages, and it really could not be said to deal with war to any particular degree, nor finance as an aspect of war. Still, I learned some things I didn't know before hand. Were there sword fights? No, it was not that sort of book.

Conquered City by Victor Serge: holy shit, this was a book. Victor Serge was the child of Anarchist revolutionaries who fought with the Reds in the Russian Civil War before breaking with Stalin and dying penniless and basically forgotten in Mexico. This story of the attempt of the Red Army to fend off the White in St. Petersburg in 1919 is fabulously good. With blistering if difficult prose he describes the thought processes of a menagerie of different characters on both sides of the struggle, die-hard Soviet Partisans and White Army hold-outs, peasants and prostitutes and bandits, all well-realized and clearly drawn from the author's own experience in the conflict. Excellent, all around. Were there sword fights? No, but there was a brief knife fight which I thought was done well.

The Caucasus: An Introduction by Thomas de Waal: as the title says. A good primer on a region of the world I am visiting in a month and half but didn't know much about. It seemed admirably even-handed given the complexity and diversity of the region, not that I'm really qualified to comment on that. On the other hand, often times you can read when a guy has an act to grind and if de Waal does I couldn't pick it up. Recommended. Were there sword fights: No, no sword fights.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett: so I guess probably you've heard of this guy. My first Pratchett, and I appreciate why people love him. Sort of a PG Wodehouse with dragons, which I mean entirely as a compliment. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Were there sword fights: Yeah, pretty much. I mean actually there weren't any sword fights that I can recall, but there were a lot of other swords of fights (bar brawls, dragon attacks, etc.) that I think we can put a check in the sword fight column.

Right Now I Am Reading:

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol: because it seems like the kind of thing a person should read before they die.

A Review of Those Above, by Rjurik Davidson

March 13, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

It had been said that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, though I hope to god this is not the case. The specifics of that long ago night in Brighton in which Rjurik Davidson and I decided that we not only were but, in some ineffable sense, always had been bitter arch-rivals need not be entered into, though it involved hard alcohol, straight-razors, and soft-boiled eggs. Having cruelly reviewed (though not actually read) Davidson's Unwrapped Sky over on his own blog, it seemed only fair to offer him a similar forum for a shrapnel-sharp, if utterly ill-informed, critique of my own work. It is as follows.

The thing is, I wanted to read Daniel Polansky’s novel, Those Above. I wanted to, in the same way that I wanted to eat the spicy chicken and rice from the roadside stall in Thailand. That memorable time in Bankok, the drifting aroma attracted me like a rat to refuse. I scurried forward, bought my little plastic tub of the stuff, and ate it in the gutter. The flavours! The aroma! The thrill of risk-taking! How little I understood, in those glory days when the world was young. No sooner had I finished than the stabbing pains began, deep in my stomach. There was a rusty jagged dagger, somewhere in my intestines. I broke into a sweat. Tsunamis of nausea washed over me. The world lost all center. Things fell apart. For close to a week I stumbled through life, sweating, weeping, despairing, declaring I would never face a Thai hospital. Never! You can see, then, that though I wanted to read Polansky’s new book, I stayed well away from its seductive and vicious attractions.

To begin with, take the title: Those Above. Obviously this isn’t a book about Gods now is it? I mean, that would be too predictable. No, it’s more likely to be about an alien species, who have come to enslave the human race, or perhaps enslaved it in the past and now we – or the lame, hobbled things passing for characters within – must rebel against them. Oh Lord, could there be anything more trite than some kind of neo-Marxist parable of class struggle? I mean, next thing I’ll discover that Those Above is some crude fantasy recasting of a late 19th Century revolution, influenced by the realists and existentialists, filled with ponderous philosophizing, its plot creaking like some lumbering pirate galley against the waters of his leaden political positions. Forgive me if I’m jumping to conclusions, having not, of course, read the book, but doesn’t it make you want to punch Polansky in the head?

You see, there was a time when I attended the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton. Across the room I spied what might have been mistaken for a tall, debonair New Yorker. Our eyes locked. In that baleful stare coming from across the room I immediately recognized my nemesis. He was the black to my white, up to my down, the evil to my good, the dunce to my genius. Oh Christ, I thought, who is this dastardly, bile-spitting, hate-filled fiend come straight from one of Lovecraft’s more adjective-filled tales? Oh yes, he can be charming and witty. Oh yes, he can write. But underneath, I understood, this was the type of man who read Evelyn Waugh. It was, of course Polanski – yes, Polanki with an ‘i’, because he likes to deny his relationship with his slightly less odious relative, Roman.

Why then should we be surprised that he should write a book like Those Above? A book filled with such a malevolent ideology that you should want to pluck out your eyes from the very first page, thus freeing you from the horrid labour of having to read it. But knowing Polansky, he would only send you an audio-book version of it, the better to send you towards the knitting needles, your eardrums quivering with fear. Yes, I’m sure the world building is fantastic, if you like that kind of thing. I’m sure the plot builds to ever more intense crescendos. I’m sure it’s moving and humorous and one of the best books of the year. But that doesn’t contradict the fact that it is a horrendous novel of dastardly proportions. That doesn’t redeem Polansky. What could?

Oh, how I’ve wanted to read Those Above, but I remember that stall in Thailand. I remember that delicious and villainous scent. I remember the days of agony following. Can you hear its call, like a Siren calling you onto her rocks?

Books I read 3/10/2015

March 10, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

Last Week I Read:

The Tale of Heike, author unknown, Royall Tyler translator: I bought it as as being the Japanese Iliad and it lived up to that billing in terms of being the artistic expression of a highly militarized society of great physical violence and also a profound sense of poetry. The Iliad is fascinatingly the product of a civilization at a fairly early stage, in so far as literacy and the complexity of the polity and so forth go, while Heike is from a much more advanced society. Anyway, the style is completely foreign although sometimes quite beautiful (I am completely unequipped to determine if the translator has done an admirable job, though to judge by its reception the answer seems to be yes) and anyone with any narrative sense can appreciate the very long build up of violence which explodes furiously close to the end of the book. It's hard to recommend this sort of thing blindly since it is about 700 pages and sometimes sort of impossible to understand but on the other hand you can't go wrong with reading the foundation text of a major human society which by all account this is. Infinitely more readable then The Tale of Genji, which really is on a different level altogether. Were there sword fights: Yes, people fought with swords.

The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis: I've been on an Amis kick lately but this probably broke me of the habit. Not because it's not good—it's very good. It is written with the same style and excellence which everything that I've read by Amis at this point has been, and the subject matter—which is simply put, the social, romantic, and national friction caused by the return of an aging 2nd rate intellectual to his hometown in rural Wales—is admirable in putting a serious focus on a period of life which receives short shrift in literature. Digression: why are there so few good novels dealing with aging? Is it simply because many great writers with their tendencies towards self-destruction don't make it that far? That having reached that stage, few have the energy to dedicate towards their last stage of life, or they would rather think about earlier times, or that no one has a creative peak (especially not writers) that lasts from the beginning to the end of a career? What was the best novel by a writer in his/her dotage? End of digression. Anyway, it's clever and well-written but maybe a little bit dry. It was also my 5th Kingsley Amis in like a month, which probably had some effect on my not liking it to the degree it might deserve. Were there sword fights: No, there were absolutely not any sword fights.

Right Now I Am Reading:

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng. I mean, hell, what's not to get excited about on this one?

5 Things I Like About Those Above

March 08, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

Without doing a formal poll I remain reasonably confident that for most writers, pub day is more a source of stress than celebration. There is a certain joy the first time you see the thing bound up and put together but it does not last long and anyway you get your author copies a few months beforehand (or your parents do; my apartment in Brooklyn is too small to maintain a proper shrine to myself). The actual day of release seems to serve primarily as encouragement for strangers to say mean things about you on the internet. Those Above has been out for a few weeks now and the reviews have mostly been kind, but of course pain is more unpleasant than pleasure is enjoyable (Epicurus based an entire school of philosophy around this concept), and you don't know masochism until you've checked your Amazon sales ranking ten times in a single hour.

Something else writers rarely mention is when they finally get around to releasing your book you generally have grown kind of lukewarm to it. If books are children then Those Above got her MFA six months ago and now just mopes around the basement, skyping her long-distance ex-boyfriend and hitting me up for grass money. 'I've done all I can for you,' I want to say to her. 'It's time to strike out boldly in the direction of your dreams, or at the very least sign up for a temp agency and sublet a room in the city, any city, really, it could be on the west coast or even abroad, Santiago is very nice.'

Or something like that. This metaphor kind of got away from me.

So, because I could use the reminder, here are 5 nifty things about Those Above, which is, put simply, about the attempts of humanity to overthrow the nation of god-like pseudo-immortals who have kept them in bondage for uncounted millennium.

1. Those Above Is Ambivalent

More a question then an answer, or actually lots of questions; about power and about justice, about the degree to which the latter is anything but the arrangement of the former, about the limitations engendered to us on an impossibly fundamental level by the cultures we inhabit and the time in which we live. The narrative is unsettled and so are the themes. A negative review I saw recently read, 'it is hard to know who to route for,' though I confess I took it as a compliment.

2. Those Above Has Women In It

Several, in fact! Those Above was my first time working to an extended degree with a female viewpoint, and I found it challenging and rewarding. That doesn't mean that you'll find it either of those things, of course, but if you were one of those people who read Low Town and thought, “it was good but it would be better if most of the female characters weren't prostitutes,” well, here you are. Two of the four POV characters are female and neither of them are prostitutes, which will probably win me some sort of medal from the National Organization for Woman.

3. Also, Sword Fights

I like sword fights, sue me. I always did and I still do. They were fun to write and they're (hopefully) fun to read.

4. Those Above is Different Than Other Things I Have Written

The Low Town series was swift and sharp and mean, and Those Above is long and languid and meaner. They would be shelved in the same section of a book store but apart from that they have very little in common. I admit I take a certain sort of pride in that. I never wanted to be the sort of writer who wrote 18 books about the Warden, where nothing significant ever changes except that every so often he gets a new magic weapon. And for better or worse, I haven't. Writing She Who Waits was comfortable and relatively easy. Writing Those Above was exhausting and often painful and forced me to stretch myself in different ways.

The upside to all of this is that if you didn't like Low Town you are guaranteed to like Those Above—because they're opposite, get it? You see.
(If you did like Low Town, don't worry, this last entry was just a lie to hook in the rubes.)

5. Those Above Has One Very Good Dick Joke

But I don't want to spoil it.

Of course I could make a list of five things I don't like about Those Above, but that probably wouldn't do much to buy sales, which was the point of this whole exercise, after all. Please, buy her. Things are getting very tense in the house these days, and her mother wants to turn her room into a second study.

Reading as a Writer

March 01, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

Being a writer means that people frequently ask you for advice on accomplishing the same. The vast majority of course have no more real thought of being a writer than I might of becoming an astronaut, a passing fantasy which consists exclusively of the good parts—say, looking down on Earth as a blue marble and being feted by heads of state—rather then any of the toil or drudgery—being confined to a tiny, dark space for a prolonged period of time, or learning basic math. They seem to suppose that my modest accomplishments are not due to effort or meager ability but the the result of having stumbled upon some secret, little known but easily communicable. No such luck, I'm afraid.

It can get a bit annoying. It is why I have been known to tell people at bars that I am a shoe salesman. But, here and here alone, in this blog post, I will offer the most frank and useful advice that I can possibly provide. Ready? Here we go.

You have not read enough. Not near enough.

I don't care if your shelves overflow with books, if you use them for furniture or to prop up your television. I don't care if you're one of those people who frequently post Hallmark paeans to literature on your Facebook wall (although if you are, please stop.) I don't care how desperately you liked the Hunger Games trilogy. I don't care if ever got to the last page on that dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest. You have not read nearly enough.

Have you read Tolkien? I would hope so. Now read Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers. Have you read Murakami? Cool. Now read Borges, Poe and Calvino. Have you read Raymond Chandler? Great now read Dashiell Hammet, Ross McDonald and Patricia Highsmith. Have you perused at least the more interesting parts of the Old Testament? Were you in high school the last time you read Shakespeare? Did you read him then, or only the Cliff Notes? How's your history? Have your read Black Lamb, Gray Falcon? Civil War, A Narrative? Have you read Tacitus? Why ever not?

Don't misunderstand—I haven't read enough, either. I am nowhere close. Would you believe I never read Gogol? I've read some Faulkner but not enough. If the reference in the last paragraph gave you a mistaken impression, let me set you straight—so far as the Bard is concerned I go no deeper than Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's dream. Historically speaking, my knowledge of, amongst many other things, post-Napoleonic France, pre-Romanov Russia, and pretty much everything that happened in China prior to Mao is slim to non-existent. I actually never finished the Brothers Karamazov, though I've been known in my cups to pretend otherwise. And half the things I have read I've damn near forgotten. Remind me, which was the Hemingway book about the very brave man who faces death unflinching, and the beautiful woman who loves him? Oh, all of them. I see.

Last night, sitting on my small couch in my small apartment, I recalled the lamentable truth of my ignorance, with a heavy heart I logged out of Netflix and returned to my paperback. It is a Kingsley Amis, it is very well-written and depressing and a little bit dry, not as fun as some of his other books, (Green Man, for instance which reads like a more clever Stephen King but twenty-five years early) but I plow forward. A doctor, a lawyer, a mathematician, a financier, a professional basketball player, a custodian, a bartender, a barrista or model or actor or factory worker or what have you, these people may be casual in their reading, they may take it as pleasure. A novelist may not. If you are serious about ever getting good at writing then your relationship with literature cannot be simply one of entertainment. You sharpen your pen against the lines of better, smarter, more ambitious writers. There is no other option.

Because you never have any idea what will get lodged in the fertile loam of the mind, what will take root and spread and flower in some or other creative endeavor. There are things in Those Above (you didn't suppose my advice was entirely disinterested, did you?) that I have stolen from the most curious and disparate corners of literature. It is a little bit a book called the Last Mogul, by the excellent travel writer and historian William Dalrymple. It is probably a fair bit of Fritz Leiber, whose Lankhmar stories remain as fresh and fun as they were a half century ago. It's quite a lot of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, long hours spent mulling over the despair and heroism and foolishness of great men. You have to cram it all down, as much as you can possibly swallow, of every style and range and color, fiction and non, prose and poetry, low art and high art (a frivolous distinction anyway, as genius is its own genre and brilliance always a bastard child).

Of course this is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for writing well, and writing well itself also only a necessary and not a sufficient condition of financial success, but without having read widely and deeply one cannot hope to produce work of value. Let me again reiterate that none of this is to suggest that I think myself talented or particularly well read. That's the point—you need to recognize your ignorance as a daily call to action. You have to conceive of reading as being not only a source of pleasure or contentment but as a sincere course of study. It seems to me axiomatic that no person could hope to create art if they have not familiarized themselves with the history and nature of that art, and this is the work of a lifetime, this is an effort which ends in the grave.

That's it, that's all I've got. It's like everything else of course, if you want to get good at something you have to work hard at it, and if you hope to be great (if you have that mad ambition, if you are fool enough to measure your efforts against the accomplishments of giants) then you have to work at it forever, constantly, you have to fall asleep exhausted and unsatisfied with your efforts. No short cuts, not to anything.

Now if you'll excuse me, Mr. Amis will not read itself, and my day is only half over.

A Monkey on My Back

January 04, 2015 by Daniel Polansky

He was a sweet thing when he came to me. He was rolly-polly, golden-haired, sweet and languid as molasses. A kindly taskmaster, on occasion he would look up from his nap to tap my shoulder and refocus my attention. But he was easily satisfied—a thousand words were enough to quiet him for twenty-four hours—and if I did not quite hit that mark, he was understanding. There was always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,

Well. Five years now we have been together, and you would scarce recognize him. His fur is mottled, his fingers twist and tighten. His gums are black and his teeth are rotted through or sharp as sin. He is always moving, shaking, gibbering. He loathes me with the single-minded hatred of the broken and the bitter, of the ex-slave, of one who has known nothing but misery. And justly so! I have beaten and abused him. I have starved, kicked, insulted, humiliated, demeaned and wounded him. With great care, with slow and subtle cunning, I have connived this creature into madness. What tireless sadism! What constant savagery! If he was a real monkey rather than an allegorical representation of writerly travails, PETA would picket my house.

And my cruelty—as cruelty always does—has come full-circle. I have bred my own tormentor--dawn and dusk he hunches atop my shoulder, pointing out grammatical errors, plot inconsistencies, aesthetic failures, urging me onward and ever onward. Dates, parties, weddings, funerals, there is no occasion too jubilant or solemn that he will not intrude upon it, demanding the full thrust of my attention.

'Another thousand words,' he says at a bar on an early summer evening, though I have given him three already and a pretty girl has just sat down beside us, brushing back her hair the way women do. I know better than to deny him—the scene he will make! The shattered glassware, the thrown feces, a miserable evening of self-doubt—what if I am done as a writer? What if I have wrung myself empty of words?—and my lab top swings back open, the pretty girl left friendless. Though not for very long, as is the way of pretty girls

Late in the evening, a long day of work behind me, exhausted by honest labor (to the degree that such a thing is possible of a professional fabulist), in that blissful moment just before the numbing arrival of sleep, he bursts into my bedroom. “I have a new idea for the ending!” he shrieks, tearing at my sheets, exposing my nakedness to a cruel world. “You might forget it by tomorrow! Up, up, up!”

There is no escaping him—he does not recognize the vacation days my labor has accrued, he is not interested that I have traveled to some or other sun baked paradise to avoid stress and toil. What is location to him, what is longitude or latitude? I am the center of his orbit, my distress his sole aim. Walking along a beach in the early afternoon I hear the sharp crack of bone, turn to see him holding the corpse of a seagull in his grasping hands, an object lesson if ever there was one. “The opening needs work,” he tells me, well-tanned children screaming, parents dropping boogie-boards and picking up toddlers and fleeing into the distance. “You could get half a day's work in, if you head back now.”

He is never satisfied, scarfs down my offerings as soon as they are provided, eyes casting about warily. What success attaches itself to me is of no interest to him. The package of books sent by my Brazilian publisher he looks over without interest. It was years ago that he first saw those words, years and years; he will have fresh flesh or none at all, and what did I give him this morning? This afternoon? What am I giving him now, in this very instant, tongue smacking against pink lips, slavering, rapacious, insatiable.

He has taught me things, my jailer, and most of all what he has taught me is that there is no such thing as writer per se. One is either writing, or one is not. And when I am not how swiftly despair falls over me! How clouded my eyesight, how frayed my nerves! A snort of cocaine leads naturally to another, one joint rolls the second, an empty stein begs to be filled—writing alone is an addiction which one forces upon oneself, slowly, patiently, over months and years and decades, making oneself a slavering junkie to the filling of an empty page.

Sometimes, with drink or frantic commotion, I am able to confuse him for some brief period, to gain a day, two, aye God, sometimes three even, for myself, to read a bit—remember when I could read for pleasure, as much as I wanted! But not for long. Never for long. If you see a man alone in some strange corner of the world, a mountain cabin or a seaside bar, blind to life around him, focused with single-minded determination on a flickering netbook—please, do not disturb me. He is still hungry, you see. He will not yet let me sleep.