Book I Read April 30th, 2020

A few low days but I got my Covid second wind and breeze alongcomfortably, a childless man with a freezer full of chicken and a profession which doesn't require him to leave the house. My score the second half of this month was affected by my current project of reading a Shakespeare play every evening (Julius Caesar awaits) about which you'll read more when I'm finished, by which point hopefully I'll be able to go outside again. We'll see. In any event, the second half of April I read...

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas – 1000 odd pages detailing the decline in magical belief in 17th century England at the expense of the comparatively rational Protestant faith. Exhaustive in its collection of magical beliefs and clear-headed in its thinking, if occasionally repetitive. Still, if you're looking for a doorstop of social history to wade through, you could do a lot worse.

Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath – Bitter and engaging.

Books I Read April 14th, 2020

I got things to write, music to listen to, weights to lift, walks to take, elderly folk to assist (email me if you want to help!) and of course, books to read. I'm hanging on, and I hope you're doing the same.

I read these books the first two weeks of April...

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – Re-read for a thing I'm writing. Still great.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard – Disturbingly appropriate.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler – Pitiless mothers, weak-willed sons, Chandler's archetypal noir protagonist, surely you can't fault a fellow for seeking literary comfort in these dark times.

The Thief's Journey by Jean Genet – The scattered reflections of a minor thief, thug, and homosexual prostitute, some bizarre amalgamation of Edward Bunker and William Burroughs. As a youth Genet set out to explore the darkest and most sordid corners of the human psyche, in part as a deliberate reaction against conventional human morality and in part just because it seems to have given him a kick. It's weird and disturbing and kind of amazing. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to everyone but if you can force yourself through all the nastiness it's worth your time.

The Singapore Wink by Ross Thomas – A stunt man is drawn into an elaborate web of criminal conspiracy. I turned the pages quickly enough but can't say I got tons out of this.

The Queen of Katwe by Tim Crothers – The story of a bitterly impoverished Ugandan girl rising in the ranks of woman's chess made for a fabulous long form essay and an an absolutely interminable 200 pages.

The Blacks by Jean Genet – A surreal symbolic depiction of the plight of black folk in the West. I guess it must have been staged at some point, but I can't imagine how that would have went.

Triggernometry by Stark Holborn – Fair warning, Stark and I are old friends, but this brief story of a mythical west where mathematics have been outlawed and rogue academics rob trains was thoroughly enjoyable and well worth a few hours of your time. Lots of fun.

Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon – A delightful series of interlinked vignettes discussing god, belief, the power of story and faith. The prose is lovely, the narratives surreal and clever. Reminded me of Borges. Lots of fun, I'm going to check out more by Michon soon.

Family Life by Akhil Sharma – A man recalls his childhood emigration from India to America and the tragic results that befall his fractured family. Didn't do much for me personally.

Books I Read March 31, 2020

Right—so I'd like to blame the slow start to this year book wise on the apocalypse, and whatnot, but that's got nothing to do with it, really. I had a friend here for a while and apart from that I was pretty much spending all my energies on pushing through a first draft of a new WIP. But that's with my agent and we can't go outside and my weight set hasn't arrived from Amazon and there's nothing else to do but read and mull, mull and read, with a dash of despair for seasoning. Anyway. Here were the sad handful of books I read the last two months, while I was wondering about LA and then stuck inside my cell-like apartment, very resolutely not having a cigarette.

All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe – A detective investigates a woman's disappearance, the corrupt credit system of early 90's Japan. It was kinda slow.

Birth at Dawn by Driss Chraibi – A brutal warlord leads the Muslim expansion into Spain, dreams of a better world, is disappointed in its reality. Lyrical, violent, short, excellent. I liked it and will pick up more by Chraibi.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion – A morally bankrupt Hollywood hanger on commits to her self-destructive decay. Didion can write, this is sharp and mean, but also kind of one note? I appreciate that life is often an open wound, but still I wish so much of contemporary literature wasn't dedicated to poking at it. That said it's a quick, well-written and funny if you've got a nasty sense of humor—which, if you don't, maybe you shouldn't be reading Joan Didion.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson – A collection of short stories about death, drunkenness, bad decisions and generalized regret. Johnson's novels don't do a shit ton for me but his shorter stuff is generally very strong, if maybe a little bit one note.

You Are Free by Danzy Senna – Short stories about motherhood, race, gender, modernity, yuppies, etc. Which, frankly, could be the description of about 100,000 collections released in the past ten years, although very few of them are anywhere near this good. There is a sympathy and complexity to Ms. Senna's writing which marks her as a cut above her fellows, and these stories are genuinely thoughtful rather than overtly didactic. Good stuff.

Last Friends by Jane Gardam – The final installment in the Old Filth trilogy sees us explore the peculiar life and end of Terry Veneering, who's bitter childhood tragedy drives him into a career in law in the orient. Gardam has a peculiar talent for plotting, with lots of obfuscations and seeming irrelevancies revealed ultimately as being critical to the narrative, and basically I enjoy reading anything she's written. Can't help but think this would have been stronger as a single novel, though, rather than chopped up into thirds.

Havoc by Tom Kristensen – The very model of a bourgeoisie intellectual makes a more or less conscious decision to devolve into a drunken lout. An existentialist trope that frankly I'm kind of tired of by this point, so maybe I wasn't the best audience for this. Anyway, didn't do a lot for me.

March Violets by Philip Kerr – A private detective tries to find some jewels during the Berlin Olympics, as the growing Nazi menace makes questions of personal morality largely irrelevant. Swift, engaging, a decent enough potboiler in an interesting setting. Occupied my mind briefly during our bubbling apocalypse.

The Medieval Castle by Phillip Warner – A book about castles. I dunno, I can't really remember why I read this.

Triple Jeopardy by Rex Stout – My first foray into the apparently gigantic history of Nero Wolfe, a lazier, rotund Holmes, and his Watson analog Archie Goodwin. These were breezy and fun, I imagine I'll work my way through a few more while I'm stuck in my cell-like apartment or an indeterminate amount of time.

Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck – Contrasting tales of a medieval saint's adoration of Christ with the author's own obsessive affection for a younger man. Is this a clever idea or is kinda on the nose? Hard to say. It's also the kind of book where some of the lines are really fabulous and some of them are just total duds. But it's quick and it's weird and I thought it was kind of funny and ultimately this was firmly in the like column.

A Journal of the Plage Year by Daniel Defoe – Thematically appropriate!

A Theft by Saul Bellow – I've been going back and dipping my toe into Bellow to see if he holds up 20 years after I was obsessed with him and I...still can't tell? He manages to imbue his creations with a great deal of mythical energy, but sometimes this gets a little bit much, with every side character being an oil magnate or a faded drunken ex-Hollywood star, you get the idea. This is one of the few of his that I can remember reading with a woman as the protagonist and it didn't work absolutely perfectly for me. I dunno, now that I'm quarantined maybe I'll have time to read something more significant by him.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler – Like all of Chandler's work it's disjointed, kind of incoherent plot wise, racist, sexist, and a little mawkish. It's also got some of the best prose you're ever going to find in literature—there's a bit about a pink bug crawling across a police desk which is pretty marvelous. And for that matter Marlowe's brief adventure with Red, the beautiful, violet eyed ex-cop is indisputably the most potent romantic interaction in Chandler's oeuvre. I think it's a ton of fun, for all his faults Chandler remains at the top of the heap.

The Inferno by Dante (Longfellow Translation) – There are a fair few classics of world literature that I can genuinely claim to enjoy but I just do not give the slightest shit about Dante. I appreciate his role in making Italian an acceptable language to write poetry in, but basically this book sucks, sorry. The best you could say for it is that it effectively depicts medieval Catholic morality, but as this is an utterly contemptible philosophy by the standards of most people reading it I'm not really what the point is other than to feel superior to our ancestors. Even trying to be forgiving it just doesn't make a shred of sense. Why are counterfeiters worse than rapists? For that matter, why is the 7th level as big as all the rest of them combined? Dante himself is the original Mary-Sue, a tiring asshole who's just so gosh-darn special that all of Heaven and Hell have to make way to show him a good time. A thousand pages of biblical fan-fiction the point of which mostly is to get back at old associates. It's like if you wrote a book about going to hell and kept putting in people you knew from high school getting their heads ripped open or whatever.

So, you know, that's my take.

Books I Read February 5th, 2020

I know it's been a while. You've been waiting, 'more patient than a Browns' fan.' But I got shit I got to do, boss. I write things and such. I talk to people. You know how it is. Maybe it's occurred to you I don't get paid none for these brief, semi-informed views on novels that came out a long time ago and no one else really wants to read. Still, as my brother texted me last night – 'quit tweeting about the homeless and do more book reviews.'

Ask, and ye shall receive. The following are the books I read since the turn to 2020.

The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald – An Englishman in Moscow during the waning days of the Romanov Dynasty is abandoned by his wife, contemplates the absurd improbability of the Russian character, human existence. I've come around on Fitzgerald, a subtle and funny writer, even if her neatly wrapped narratives can come off a little twee.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman – I liked the mean ones.

Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala– An orphan is forced to become a child soldier by a sadistic, pedophiliac martinet. It's grim, it does what it sets out to do, I was never absolutely mind-blown by the depth of thought or the excellence of the prose. It's a heavy premise and I kinda thought that did a lot for it. Take that as you will.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky – A starving student pays for taking Nietzsche too literally. What can I say about this justifiable classic of world literature? You read Dostoevsky to watch mammoth expressions of contradictory sentiment clash across the page, and not for like, coherent plot mechanics. He's his own genre, unique even 200 years on, and it must have been absolutely staggering to read him back in the day. I'm kind of embarrassed it took me 35 years to get to this one, but if Raskolnikov taught me anything it's that confession is good for the soul.

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill – A collection of nightmarish short stories. I came in bluntly skeptical but there's some strong stuff here, Hill's got chops and generally does a good job of navigating between genre scares and broader literary concerns. I liked the one about the kid and the cardboard box fort, and the Cape, which is straight nasty.

The Gathering by Anne Enright – The expectedly unexpected death of her miscreant brother forces a woman to reflect upon the failings and tragedies of her large, Irish family. I've got nothing bad to say about it but it failed to stick around in my head to any degree.

Beasts by John Crowley – In a broken America, a leonine crossbreed becomes a symbol for humanity's redemption. At once a striking and original adventure story and a brilliant allegory for our increasing divorce from the natural world. Crowley is a master.

First Love and Other Shorts by Samul Beckett – Beckett's neurotic, miserable, possibly insane everyman considers his lost love and miserable childhood, plus a couple of wackily incoherent shorts that I likely lacked the literary understanding to appreciate. The eponymous story is excellent, however.

The Judges of the Secret Court by David Stacton – A fictionalized history of the events surrounding the death of Abraham Lincoln, with particular though not exclusive focus on the Booth clan. An engaging and evocative thriller about the roles we play, and our complicity in the show that unfolds around us. Very good.

By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar – (Full disclosure—every couple of years Lavie and I end up in the back of a bar saying mean things to one another, so I can't pretend to be entirely unbiased here) A re-telling of the Arthurian legend serves as Tidhar's opportunity to shove all his genre interests into one violent, funny, absurd epic, with Guinevere as a cold-blooded hitwoman and Lancelot a wuxia master. Tidhar remains an utterly original voice contemporary fiction, a pulp master striking out boldly in unexpected directions.

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russel Hoban – A middle-aged cartographer, disappointed with his life and family, flees his village for the city, pursued by his son and an invisible though not imaginary lion representing the vigorous potency of existence and its helplessness in the face of implacable death. I became convinced this month that Russel Hoban is one of the mpre original and underappreciated voices of 20th century literature, and this is exhibit A. Magical realism at its finest, strange and evocative and beautiful. A strange delight, worth savoring.

Lancelot by Walker Percy – A southern lawyer laments sexual modernity, the consequences of his wife's infidelity, while locked in an insane asylum. A funny, bleak, tortuously nasty insight into what would now be called toxic masculinity, peculiarly prescient given these incel heavy days. I really liked it, but its ugly.

Mr. Pye by Mervynn Peake – A would-be saint gets caught between heaven and hill, and the consequences of righteousness and sin, while trying to bring happiness to a small Channel island. It's weird, it's funny, it was nice to read something by Peake which didn't mostly involve descriptions of rumbling masonry.

Novelties and Souvenirs by John Crowley – A nearly universally excellent series of shorts by maybe (probably?) the best living fantasist. Excellent, well worth your time.

Pilgermann by Russel Hoban – A castrated Jew meets Jesus, joins the first crusade. A spiritual, one might even say mystical novel, about sin and God and meeting God and meeting characters from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. Didn't really do it for me but it certainly demonstrates the man's range.

Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer by Russel Hoban – An infidelite (I made up that word but it should exist) sells his death to a sadistic billionaire. Weird! Dark! Obscene and disturbing! Like Ian McEwan if Ian McEwan didn't kinda suck.

The Mark of the Warrior by Paul Scott – An officer trains the younger brother of a soldier he lost in battle during WWII, contemplates the essential qualities of the warrior archetype, in this short novel by the author of the Raj Quartet. Scott was a great talent, with a distinct genius for illuminating the side corners of great human events. Good stuff.

Remake by Connie Willis – In a sci-fi Hollywood that never came to be (or hasn't yet), deep-fakes of old actors are digitized into new movies, and a hack editor falls in love with a would-be dancer. Both a prescient satire of the Hollywood machine and a clever whodunnit, my favorite thing I've read by Ms. Willis thus far. Weird and fun.

McGlue by Ottessa Moshefegh – A brain damaged alcoholic in 1851 tries to figure out if and why he murdered his best friend and lover. Lots of body horror and descriptions of the Dts. Skillfully written and deliberately horrid. I confess I don't really understand the literati's affection for repulsion, which seems not that difficult a reaction to evoke in a reader, but what do I know. At least it was short.

Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino – Some Calvino hits me and some don't, this was the latter.

The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville – A revolutionary struggles to survive in a ravaged Paris in which a supernatural Nazi plot has raised the devil and brought to life surrealist imagery of the age. I think probably my favorite thing I've read by Mieville. A fast paced, tightly written genre exercise full of fabulously weird visuals and free of any bloat (except to the epilogue which didn't really add anything.) Lots of fun.

The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat – A second-generation Nigerian grows up in Boston, becomes embroiled with a charismatic conman. A solid and engaging examination of the immigrant experience—the depiction of Ayale, the eponymous attendant and all around hustler, was particularly strong, a character I feel like I've met a couple of times in real life but never saw so well illuminated in fiction. Good stuff.

Your Republic is Calling You by Young-Ha Kim – A North Korean deep-cover spy operating in Seoul is given twenty-four hours to return to his homeland, comes to realize he's always been playing a role and so has everyone else in his life. There are a lot of books that try to do this sort of thing but not many I can remember doing it as well. Even in translation Kim is a strong writer, and has a rare talent for broader human examination without abandoning the genre tropes that give this story of story its structure.

The Deep by John Crowley – An alien amnesiac crash lands in a medieval world. In two hundred pages Crowley limns an epic fantasy then upend it. Fabulous stuff, Crowley (as I've mentioned earlier) is one of our best. Both this and the earlier Beast are fascinating in that they show his range as a writer, eschewing the pageantry of his later writing in favor of a style which seems boiled down to its barest essence, telling in a few pages what could plausibly be expanded to five or ten times its length. Excellent.

The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata – The adopted daughter of a kimono wholesaler meets her twin, searches for love. Didn't do it for me. Lots of descriptions of flowers and festivals about flowers.

A Way of Life Like Any Other by D'arcy O'Brien– The son of an ex-Western star and a mercilessly selfish dilettante grows up too quickly, learns to hate his parents. A very funny depiction of neglect. One of my new favorite books about my adopted homeland.

The Dying Gaul and Other Writings by David Jones – A rambling collection of essays by the author of In Parenthesis. I have no idea why I read this.

In Hazard by Richard Hughes – A merchant ship gets caught in a terrible storm, the crisis illuminating the characters of its diverse and peculiar crew. Disaster stories don't do a ton for me but Hughes utilizes the set-up for a fascinating series of digressions about the various shipmates, sketching their histories in vivid if brief detail, then wrapping the whole thing up in deceptively unsatisfying fashion. You can tell I liked it.

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata – Several lovely stories about youth, yearning, love and disappointment, and a bunch of strange, short parables. I was gearing up to not like this because the Old Capital wasn't really my jam but I was happily disappointed. These were varied and excellent.

Four Freedoms by John Crowley – The lives of a handful of idiosyncratic shop workers in an airplane factory during WWII. Crowley is a beautiful writer, the prose is a joy and it has a strangely effective eroticism. It didn't really seem to quite go anywhere, though.

The Flemish House by Georges Simenon – Obese, discourteous detective Maigret (I've gotten really good at coming up with two line descriptions of him after writing so many of these reviews) investigates a possible murder by a family of shady Belgian bourgeoisie. I've kinda come around on the Maigret stuff, they're breezy but also pitilessly mean.

Favorite Books of 2019

Another year in the books. You will forgive any lack of thoughtful ruminations on the passing of time, the death of youth, societal fragility, and grand struggles of the heart; I have a splitting headache. In 2019 I read 368 books, of which the arbitrary 10 follow.

Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White – A collection of misfits engage in spiritual warfare against the grinding forces of bigotry and human cruelty. Stunningly written, unique in scope and execution, a genuine masterpiece. I loved this fucking book.

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase – The memories of a group of formidable, complex, troubled women in a small Midwestern town. Chase was a real marvel, a fabulous writer of prose with a keen insight into gender relations and the inexplicable ties of family.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood – A day in the life of a widowed homosexual college professor. Bittersweet, perfectly written, justly recognized as a classic.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – Wolfe's death earlier this year deprived us of genre fiction's most frustrating and captivating author, evidence for which can be found in this suite of short stories, puzzle-box ruminations on the nature of humanity in a vastly foreign future.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – There are few things rarer or more valuable than a genuinely hopeful work of high art, and Marilynne Robinson's beautiful meditation on fatherhood, family, love, death, and God, was the single best thing that I read in 2019.

The Children Of Dynmouth by William Trevor – William Trevor was one of my best discoveries of 2019, a writer of formidable technique and wide imagination with an oeuvre of impressive depth, but this bleak but not hopeless depiction of a sociopathic youth in a small Irish town of hypocrites stands out.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf – The collapse of a family is told in Woolf's maddening, brilliant, oblique prose. If you didn't read this at at some point during your schooling, you should do yourself a favor and pick it up now.

Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban – A boy grows to manhood in post-apocalyptic England. A masterpiece of world-building, written in a bizarre but coherent future patois, a distinctly brilliant work of science fiction.

Silence by Shusaku Endo – A Portuguese Priest sneaks into a Tokugawa Japan, spreads the gospel, discovers uncomfortable complexities in his pursuit of righteousness. Subtle, thoughtful, excellent.

In Parenthesis by David Jones – An epic poem set in the trenches of WWI. The prose is luminous and alien, the sentiment penetrating and tragic, excellent stuff, if a little difficult.

Books And Tunes December 31st, 2019

I spent the end of December at London Christmas Markets, wandering briefly through New York, playing chess with my little brother, holding young children, and returning, finally, to the blissful warmth of Los Angeles. For those following along at home, this is not my end of year post, that comes tomorrow.

The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe – A detective tracks down a woman's husband, illuminates the limitations of identity, truth, and reality. Haruki Murakami very much read this book—if that sounds like a good thing to you, then you could do worse than give it a read. In fairness, it does seem to have come a rough half-century before the high point of esoteric pseudo-noir, in which style and mood are substituted for plot and narrative coherence, though frequent readers may recall that this is generally not my bag.

Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – An everyman coder finds himself working for the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy in this early urban fantasy/satire of scientific existence. Even the lesser works of the Strugatsky Brothers are kind of interesting simply by virtue of showcasing a form of foreign genre fiction—I'm going to bet this was a big influence on the Night Watch series—but it's basically altogether lacking in plot or conflict, and apart from a few fun asides probably isn't worth the time.

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson – A gambling addicted crooner shoots a guy, gets involved with a femme fatale, in this swiftly moving, admirably realized comic noir. It's not bad! It's not amazing! It's OK! OK is what's between not bad and not amazing!

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer – A drunken, licentious stage magician struggles with the age old question of whether or not to sleep with a Shiksha. Well written line to line but taken altogether its a little bit half-baked.

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively—A woman watches her daughter's marriage collapse, remembers her own marriage doing the same, considers the eternal war between the sexes, makes her own contribution to the fight. Excellent. The writing and characterization are subtle but strong, and it's got a great sting. Good stuff.

A History of Warfare by John Keegan – While back in Baltimore over Christmas I broke out this classic of military theory, in which Keegan rebuts the Clausewitzian paradigm of war as a political activity, arguing instead that mass combat is best understood as an emanation of a particular culture and moment. Looking back in on it ten years after I read it last it pretty much stands up, and though I would quibble with a few of his examples I basically found the thesis compelling. Probably if you have any interest in this subject you've already read this book, but if not, maybe get on it.

The Recognitions by William Gaddis – Writing a review of Gaddis's 1000 page post-modernist ur-text – initially maligned by critics before ultimately going on to take a place in the modern canon – is a daunting prospect. William Gass, in the introduction, more or less accuses anyone not loving the book of being a philistine and probably an idiot. It is unquestionably a work of brilliance, an investigation of the nature of authenticity through the perspective of fraud in the world of high art. Apart from its linguistic complexity, Gaddis has a genius for a peculiar sort of world-building, in which themes and stylistic distinctions gradually accumulate to give weight to the whole. That said, and Mr. Gass's challenge not withstanding, I didn't particularly enjoy this book and probably wouldn't recommend it. Like a lot of writing of this sort the characterization is terribly flat, with characters operating more as stylistic flourishes than as fully rounded people. A lot of it amounts to an ill-tempered and ultimately exhausting skewering of the artistic and cultural elite, which, fair enough, who the fuck likes them assholes, but around the seventh parody of a Manhattan literary party one wanders if we haven't reached diminishing returns. In short, this is the sort of book which demands rereading but maybe doesn't actually warrant it, and while I admire Gaddis's intelligence I couldn't help but wish it was put to a less sterile end.

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – A space-wrecked savage seeks vengeance on those who wronged him. Pleasantly bizarre, with a focus on economic and cultural exploitation which would go on to influence a lot of 80's sci-fi writers, but it's kind of incoherently structured and the narrative basically didn't function that well for me.

The Epic of Gilgamesh – Mankind's first hero learns to hate death. How does one review a foundational text of human civilization? It was not good as the Illiad. I tell you, if I was writing cuneiform in 2500 BC, I'd have done a fuckton better job. Lotta repetition, man, lotta repetition.

Books I Read December 15, 2019

Writing this on a chilly day in Oxford, at the house of my dear, old friends, while drinking a glass of mulled wine. There are so many lovely things in this world that it is terrible we are ruining it at such a breakneck pace.

Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald – An idiosyncratic love affair takes place amid the claustrophobic auspices of the BBC during WWII. I've been lukewarm on the other Penelope Fitzgerald that I've read, but I'm glad I kicked forward, because this was a great delight. She has this peculiar style of misdirection, where it takes you 2/3 of the way through the book to figure out what the main narrative is about, and a rare capacity for limning characters in a handful of lines. Lots of fun.

Triumph of the Spider Monkey by Joyce Carol Oates – The scattered, psychedelic, horrific recollections of a 1960's serial killer, and a companion novelette of similar nastiness. Skillfully written, and disturbing in both its content and confused form. An effectively nightmarish little trifle, though I'm not exactly sure who I could recommend it to.

The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett – Science fiction parody, or bad science fiction? Try as I might, I think Pratchett is not for me.

The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen – The classic novel of the 30 Year War, an inverted bildungsroman in which an exaggerated innocent is led to greatness and ruin by the corrupt and strife-ridden Germany in which he lives. Written several hundred years before the development of the Western novel, you couldn't really pretend that this functions as a story in any conventional sense. Valuable as an historical object, and because it framed how the 30 Yer War was remembered for centuries thereafter, but probably not really of much interest for any average reader.

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble – Two hipster sisters are horrible in 1960's London. Well-observed but kind of mean-spirited. Which is the point but still.

The Exchange and Other Stories by Yuri Trifonov – A pair of novellas chronicling the spiritual failures and bitter concessions required of the post-war Soviet citizenry. Thoughtful in its depiction of the the tortured motivations of its subjects, intricately written, excellent all around. Really good stuff.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King – Roland Deschain pursues the Man in Black across a horrifying wasteland. I read this as a child and still retain an affection for it as being emblematic of King's best qualities as a writer, a hallucinogenic nightmare as brief and intense as the effects of the drug which surely is responsible for its creation. Midway through reading this version, which I picked up from a friend's shelf, I realized it was a revised addition, lots of unnecessary bloat and awkward references to the back story revealed in later sequels. This isn't really the place to go into what a terrible failure the Dark Tower series ending up being, but suffice to say it was harder for me to enjoy this with the weight of the rest of the books hanging over me.

The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner – A fictional history of a convent in medieval England. It's a fascinating premise, and Warner is a talented writer with a comfortable and engaging mastery of her subject matter. But it does have that unfortunate quality of being a book about religion written by a writer who seems to be utterly contemptuous of religion. Among the dozens of nuns who pass through the convent there isn't one who seems to have any sort of genuine conviction, indeed the narrative seems not even to allow for the possibility that such a creature might exist. It ended up feeling kind of mean-spirited to me, and sort of insincere, in a way that cut against the undeniable quality of the work.

A Kestrel For a Knave by Barry Hines – An impoverished, brutalized youth escapes the miserable circumstances of his life through his kinship with a raptor in what I gather is a high school classic of English literature. Effectively sad, is mawkish and predictable.

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes – An apologia for the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who fought against, then made corrupt peace with, the Soviet regime. A well-written meditation on the moral concessions required of artists and humans more generally, though it does have that kind of staid quality common to books written about the Soviet Union 30-odd years after the fall of the Soviet Union, where you're kind of like 'wow Stalin was a bad guy shit who knew.'

Books and Tunes November 30th, 2019

Sitting in a pleasantly ratty cafe in a bustling back corner of London, enjoying a too strong filter coffee and that sort of chilly winter light one can't find in Los Angeles. I hope you're happy, and well.

I mean, probably. I don't actually know who you are, maybe you're like, a Nazi, or someone against whom I have some terrible personal dislike. But, probably, all in all, I hope you're happy, and well.

Call for the Dead by John le Carre – Le Carre's first, semi-canonical Smiley story, similar to the rest of the oeuvre, our graceless, phlegmatic, unhappy protagonist struggling with Soviet spies, the muddled morality of the modern world, all in about a quarter the space of some of the later books. If you were going to read these by now you probably already have, but if you might, and you haven't, you should. Or something.

Apaches by Oakley Hall – A rebellious cavalry sergeant presides over the death of the last free Native Indians and a too-moral gunslinger in another of Oakley Hall's sweeping depictions of a mythic west. Hall was a talented writer working in a sub-genre which tends to be critically dismissed, and you could do a lot worse than reading this book, though you'd do better to start with the genuinely brilliant Warlock, probably the best Western written not written by Larry McMurtry or Charles Portis.

A Murder of Quality by John le Carre – In a peculiar deviation from form, Smiley solves a murder in a toney English public school, basically le Carre doing P.D. James. It's interesting to watch Smiley out of his 'normal' element, and le Carre provides an adequate English-style mystery, with a lot of expectedly unexpected turns, but since I basically don't like English-style mysteries this one didn't do as much for me as some of Smiley's other glum misadventures.

The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgewood – An absolutely masterful depiction of Mitteleuropa's greatest pre-20th century tragedy, in which religious and political differences within the Holy Roman Empire incite a pan-European conflict. The wars of religion have long been a source of fascination for me, one that I'm returning to in preparation for a thing I'm working on, and I've read quite a bit about this era—duplicitous Wallenstein, desperate Frederick, cunning Matthias, and the brilliant Adolphus—so I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that there is no better work on the subject available in English, despite it being some 90 years out of date. One might quibble over some of the author's particular conclusions – I think she tends to give the various Emperor's a bit too much of a pass – but this is an indisputably masterful work of popular history on a complex subject largely unfamiliar to modern readers. Highly recommended, assuming you have some interest in the topic and the energy to cram through 600 pages.

Woman with a Blue Pencil by Gordon McAlpine – A Japanese writer on the eve of internment is forced to abandon his literary mystery for shlocky, jingoistic pulp in this nested, complex narrative. A clever enough premise to sustain its brief length.

Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories by Svetlana Alexievich – Another in Alexievich's polyphonic histories, this time detailing the experiences of children during the Great Patriotic War. This is basically a four-hundred page gut punch, repetitious (though not tedious) recollection of tanks streaming through orchards and parents disappearing forever. As a whole the reminisces are, appropriate given the age of the children, less coherent narratives than impressionistic depictions of the maddening, confused horror of modern conflict, and I think somewhat less affecting than some of Alexievich's other woks. Still, well wroth your time.

Scenes From Village Life by Amos Oz — A cycle of short stories depicting ennui and lingering despair in a small Israeli town, just to the coherent side of magical realism. Strong stuff, all in all, Oz is a talented writer and these are subtle and disturbing, without completely forgoing sympathy for the characters involved.

When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson – Another of Robinson's broadsides against modernity, vigorously if politely defending her brand of thoughtful, empathetic whitebread Christianity against the oppressive and barbaric influences of capitalism, thoughtless leftism and mass media. As always I find Ms. Robinson's brand of thought a tonic for troubled times, although I will also admit that some of these essays read a lot like some of the other essays from her I've read. Take that for what it's worth.

Babe in Paradise by Marisa Silver – A suite of short stories depicting the scuzzy, bitter, lonely realities of life in Los Angeles, where everyone imagines themselves two steps from blissful good fortune and would elbow their mother down an escalator to get there. I'm about half-kidding with that depiction, and while some of the stories do feel like every other story written about Los Angeles ('the air quality is terrible and I was going to visit a pornographer in the valley') the prose is strong and the occasional moments of human kindness feel earned and authentic.

Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle – The arrival of a mysterious woman upends the relationship between two elderly lovers and their child, in this pleasant if fairly predictable modern fairy tale. Beagle's a solid writer, lyrical if occasionally overwrought, and this is solid stuff if its what you're looking for, although personally I kinda felt like it could have used a few more curveballs to keep me on my toes.

Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks -- The impressionistic experiences of a black woman in Chicago, common in her decency, misfortune, and earthy optimism. Strong stuff, Brooks has a talent for writing lines that feel like lines you've never read before, and the relative complexity of the prose provides an interesting counterpart to the deliberately prosaic narrative.

The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka — Memoirs of the three-odd years that Soyinka spent imprisoned by the Nigerian state, mostly in solitary confinement. This is quite marvelous; Soyinka's prose is excellent, his motivations admirable, his struggle to avoid madness uplifting. This stands among the better examples of what is, alas, a distinctly popular 20th century subgenre.

The Little People by MacDonald Harris – A dreamy, dazed American goes to live with friends in an English country house, meets fairies, maybe goes crazy. MacDonald can write, and he has a talent for winding you up with a lot of lyrical prose and then punching you in the gut with something really nasty. All the same this felt a little...languid to me, which is sort of the point, admittedly, but still, it felt a little dull.

The Silence in the Garden by William Trevor – The mysteries of an Irish manor and the small village it neighbors are revealed in a series of nested narratives, as sin and misfortune slowly work their way through several generations. William Trevor is, as I've had occasion to note, an absolutely masterful writer, marrying subtle but fabulous prose with a natural grasp of narrative rarely found outside of genre fiction. This is, like the ten-odd other books I've read by him this year, fabulous.

The Alchemist by Hanz Holzer – So I got this from the library thinking it was a thoughtful biography of Rudolf II, the melancholic art collector and Hapsburg Emperor who did very little to stop the 30 year war from burning down his country, only to discover that it was, in fact, an enormously sloppy work of popular 'history' written by a writer whose dozens of other credits seem to involve investigating ghosts and pretending astrology is true. But since I was reading about Rudolf for this project I'm working on, itself a rather slapdash work of historical fiction which nakedly sacrifices accuracy for fun, I thought this might be worth my time. It wasn't, however. It was stupid. People who believe in astrology are stupid. Also, magic. Magic isn't real. Get over it, kiddos.

The Grass by Claude Simon – A woman tell her lover about her husband's aunt, who was a lovely woman, and lived a life like any other life, which is to say pregnant with hushed meaning, tragic in its quotidian reality, sublimely beautiful, and largely without the benefit of the period, a form of punctuation which, it must be said (must it be said?) Simon rejects on basic principal, because he has read too much Proust or is just very French or perhaps because it beat him as a child, the period, I mean, coming on him at the schoolyard or perhaps at home by his writing desk (the oak one, the one that faced out the window, the one beside the yellow wallpaper) and delivering such vigorous and forceful cruelties that our author (Simon) chose to eschew them (periods as a form of punctuation) throughout his long career as a writer, a career which included winning the Nobel prize, not that there's anything wrong with this style of writing, which allows (forces?) the reader basically amount to push one's mind through the complex series of exercises required to make heads or tails of the prose, prose which is beautiful but often, after all the navigation, the deciphering, the wandering about, proves to be, say, a description of a fat woman's blouse, a blouse which, like every other blouse, is a fractal, proving some essential and indelible truth about the nature of the world, a sad world, a world we inhabit against ourselves, a world which, once again, must avoid ending its sentences as it would throwing a baby out the window, and heaven forbid someone calls you while you're reading or you want to stop and scratch your armpit or something, because as soon as you break the flow of the sentence it takes another five or ten or twenty minutes to get back into the groove, which, fine, some people like, even I like, sometimes, but not all the time, and not here as much as I have in other works of Simon's that I've read.

The Owl Service by Alan Gardner – Three adolescents in a decaying house in rural Wales are forced to recreate a tragic mythic rite. Gardner is widely regarded as one of the best Y/A writers of the 20th century, but the things that I've liked by him (this and the bizarre, horrifying, very clever Red Shift) are barely Y/A at all. The narrative and conflicts in this book are as far as possible from the 'special child discovers how special he is' plot of most modern Y/A books (and, for that matter, Gardner's to my mind overlauded Wisestone of Brisingamen (or whatever it's called, I'm in an airport and can't be bothered to look it up), the characters well-etched and sympathetic, if often unpleasant. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying this was very good, and it would be worth trying to trick your niece or nephew into replacing it for whatever Harry Potter clone they're currently choking on.

Futureland by Walter Mosley – Interlinked short stories about an improbable dystopian future. Pedantic and on the nose, this is one of the weaker things I've read by the author.

Conundrum by Jan Morris – A brief, lovely account of the authors transition from male to female, a lifelong journey which Morris chronicles with great charm and lucidity. Thoughtful and genuinely engaging, Ms. Morris comes off as an enormously likable person who bravely and optimistically faces, and overcomes, the bitter circumstances of her birth. Excellent and engaging.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Short stories by a late 19th century feminist, critiques of the patriarchy which, with the exception of the fabulously weird eponymous story, are clever but kind of soft.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A small Colombian town is universally complicit in the honor killing of a young aristocrat. A short novel by Marquez that doesn't focus on pederasty! This is strong stuff, full of the odd digressions and rich side characters that made Marquez so fun to read, but with less of the hyper-stylized impossibilities that tend to grate on me. Then again that seems to me to be what a lot of readers like about the man, so maybe ignore me.

Books I Read, November 14th 2019

Autumn has finally come, such as it is in LA. Sometimes you have to drag the days behind you. But you do it. The last two weeks, I read these books...

Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – An executive suffers a traffic accident, is forced to survive in a trash strewn borderland between several highways, recreates the essential evils of capitalism among the vagrants he finds there. One of Ballard's slim nightmares, taking an absurd premise and working it with vigorous practicality into a vicious indictment of modernity. Ballard was a raw and unique talent, and belongs in any list of the 20th century's best writers.

The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened by Don Robertson – The conclusion of the Morris Bird III trilogy, which chronicled the growing moral sense of a Cleveland everyman (boy?) from early childhood, takes an abrupt and unexpected turn here, such that almost any description would serve as spoiler. Rather than offer that I'll just say I found this funny and sad, stylistically unremarkable but extremely readable and genuinely affecting. Taken together they serve as a really lovely, unassuming bildungsroman that should be better known than it is.

Love and War in California by Oakley Hall – A college-student and would be writer suffers through his first love, goes to fight in Europe, spends the rest of his life obsessing over the aforementioned in this uneven triptych. It gets a little loose in the third section, but the bulk of the book is compellingly readable if perhaps not staggeringly original. It didn't change my life but I also didn't throw it out the window at a passerby.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf—A woman plans a party, thinks thoughts, in this classic of modernist literature. Quite fabulous, I'm sorry I put off reading Woolf for so long, but glad I finally managed it. The soaring prose, the peculiar structure, the sharp insight, it's always nice when the cultural establishment elevates a writer to a deserving position.

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler – Maybe not for me.

The Low Road by Chris Womersley – A junkie ex-doctor escorts a gut shut hooligan through the Australian countryside. In it's favor, its both nasty and short. I can't say I got a ton out of it apart from that.

Volcano by Shusaku Endo – A petty scientific functionary retires, grapples with his meaningless existence and horrible family in the shadow of a volcano which may or may not erupt. Endo was a great talent, and his status as a Christian offers a peculiar and distinct insight into the nature of Japanese society. Less grand than his period pieces, but with the same fine sense of—not subtlety, exactly, this is after all a book in which an active volcano serving as a metaphor for life's subterranean passions—but appreciation for the complexity of human agency. Good stuff.

Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert – A government agency discovers an underground cult-nation of humanoid-bug creatures, in this sci-fi thriller by the author of Dune. It is...not Dune.

The Journey of Ibn Fatouma by Naguib Mahfouz —A traveler passes through a loosely veiled parody of the third, second, and first worlds. Sort of a modern, Islamic take on Gulliver's Travels, lyrical but a little heavy-handed.

The Taiga Syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza – An out of work private detective tracks a man's ex-lover through the Russian wild. In so far as there is a plot, I mean, which there basically isn't. Probably there's a name for this contemporary sub-genre, with its esoteric, unstructured paranoia, or at least I feel like I've read a bunch of books like this. It evokes a mood effectively, but its an easy mood to evoke. I didn't love it.

The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris—An obsessive explorer battles the Arctic elements, his patriarchal limitations, in this gorgeous and peculiar novel. Lyrical descriptions of nature interspersed with a compelling an idiosyncratic romance. Excellent stuff, I'll be looking for more from the author.

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury—A collection of short stories by one of the most beloved fantasists of the 20th century whom, I confess, I had not actually read prior to last week. These are a somewhat mixed bag, and occasionally I tired of the underlying conceit that the far future is exactly like middle-America in the 1950's, but there's some hot fire in here, and a real willingness to go nasty which I tend to find admirable. I'm not sure I think he's Borges, but this is stronger than most of the stuff I can remember reading by his contemporaries.

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka– A tightly written description of a Japanese family's internment. It's narrow, but it owns the ground it stakes, and the language is compelling.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn—A reporter returns to her home town to investigate the murder of a young girl, revisits the tawdry and awful circumstances of her upbringing. Probably everyone already read this, or I guess saw the adaptation, I know I'm late to the game. Also, I have nothing particularly relevant to add to the torrent of acclamation which it enjoys. This is very strong stuff (although the ending didn't land perfect), Flynn is an excellent writer, with a disturbing and authentic viewpoint on gender relations, sexual misbehavior, adolescence, evil generally. It's always hard to compare a contemporary writer to their predecessors, but if I made a list of best crime writers of all time, I think I'd probably have to put Gillian Flynn on it.

Books I Read October 31st, 2019

At the moment the fires here in LA are not so much 'spooky' as they are 'nightmarish harbingers of a global apocalypse'. My Halloween costume is, 'Man in Suit', which, hey, I don't wear suits a lot, so for me they're kind of like a costume, just one that you don't need to purchase at a seasonal outlet store.

Morte D'Urban by J.F. Powers – A worldly member of a minor ecclesiastical order is sent to work at a modest retreat in a midwestern backwater, wearies of its unpleasant duties and banal personalities, struggles to reconcile his ambitions with the moral obligations of a man of the cloth. Less a book about God and more a book about priests, if that makes sense, far from the searing religious melodrama of a Power and the Glory, for instance. That said, it's solid work, the characters are well-drawn, not always likable but basically sympathetic. Small but well-made, let's say.

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter – An orphan with anger control issues grows up on the streets, struggles to escape his destiny in a penitentiary and to become capable of love. Not quite a prison novel, there is a feel of authenticity to its Pacific Northwest poolhalls and juke joints, and a shaggy sort of structure which likewise seems to honestly depict the misadventures of a certain sort of protagonist, one outside respectable society but not given to the forms of vigorous criminality which make for melodrama. Sad but honest, strong stuff, worth your time.

Silence by Shusaku Endo – A Portuguese Priest sneaks into Shogunate Japan, tries to keep the gospel alive among converts being brutally hunted by the authorities, is forced to confront the depth and meaning of his faith. Fabulously strong stuff, a great psychological novel. The writing is neat but effective, the moral complexities of the situation feel uncomfortably and honestly messy, the characterization is fabulous. A strange, thoughtful, and sympathetic take on the demands of the righteousness and the nature of sacrifice. Very strong stuff, deservedly venerated.

My Friends by Emmanuel Bove – A cowardly, ineffectual everyman searches for understanding in the back streets of Paris. I read it late at night in an airport and confess it didn't leave much of an imprint.

The Moon and the Bonfire by Cesare Pavese – Returning to the Italian countryside in which he was raised an impoverished orphan, our unnamed protagonist loosely investigates the fascist history of his village, discovers death, brutality and betrayal. Combines a wistful, Proustian sort of nostalgia for youth and love and passion mixed with an effective, oddly believable mystery. Sly and subtle, good stuff.

On the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil – Simone Weil thinks it would be better if democracies didn't have official parties, is probably right, doesn't have any real clear on idea on how to set that up practically. Weil was a fascinating and admirable character, but there's not a ton of meat on this bone.

Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter – Two young children get lost in the Alps, in this slender, excellent work. The story is, obviously, very simple, but the writing is magnificently vivid, the descriptions of the glaciers and mountains being powerful enough to lower the reader's body temperature a few degrees. A lovely little fable.

The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu – Tales of a Bucharesti holy fool and his attempts to live entirely free of cant or dishonesty and in naked service of the immediate reality of existence. Records of his speeches, stolen snatches of his poetry, depictions of the strange friendships and enmities which he has formed, largely without any sort of story. Obviously this sort of thing lives or dies on the naked strength of the author's prose and thought, and Calinescu proves himself the rare sort of talent who can manage this kind of novel. Lichter himself is a strange delight, a modern day Diogenes who rejects all forms of insincerity, down even to memory, in favor of a furious attachment to a sort of pre-conscious conception life itself. I thought it was funny and moving and thoughtful, though I concede it won't be to everyone's taste.

Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler – The story of two young siblings, told in diary entries and snatched of dialogue. Schuyler has a great talent for depicting the passionate and confused state of childhood, its jealousies, passions and follies. The structure alone is worth your trouble.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf – Props to Marlon James for just straight up writing an epic fantasy, but this didn't do it for me.

The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy – An American party-girl with a dark secret seduces a middle-aged Englishmen of modest renown. A lot of the Anglo-American feuding kind of bored me, and in general I didn't feel like the comic prose was as funny as it should have been. The noirish bits are much more interesting, but like in The Dud Avocado Dundy ultimately shies away from it, committing to a less interesting romance that ends kind of neatly.

Blindness by Henry Green – A tragic accident blinds a gadabout public school boy, messes with his family and loved ones, highlights the broader tragedy of the human condition. Green wrote this when he was still in undergrad, and it kind of reads like it. He's still a clever writer but this is kind of over-emotive line to line, a far cry from the devilish (sometimes exaggerated) subtlety of his other works.

Duffy by Dan Kavanagh (Julian Barnes) – A bisexual private detective investigates blackmail. Competently but unexceptional.

The Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories by Albert Moravia—Italian men of various ages make poor decisions while in love. Well-written and engaging, if fixated on a fairly singular theme.

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson—The final book in Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy sees a collection of addicts, celebrities and general losers caught up in a lots of criminal/corporate shenanigans, an AI singularity. The weakest of the three, but still strong, and as a whole I have to say these are pretty masterful. The setting is enormously clever, and Gibson has a gift for pacing and structure, lots of fast moving stories a-typical to the genre but still fairly action packed. He's also a genuinely good writer; he knows what not to say, and for all the metal arms and weird guns this is a deeply wistful quality to the story, a patina of sorrow which hangs over the story without overwhelming it. One of the handful of truly excellent works of sci-fi ever written.

A Posthumous Confession by Marcellus Emants—A chronically miserable misanthrope details his pointless life and terrible crimes in this confessional novel lying somewhere between Dostoevsky and Jim Thompson. Why are some men better than others? Are we constitutionally equipped for certain behavioral patterns, and if so, does this inborn identity not make a mockery of conventional morality? The confessional novel as a subgenre can get tiring pretty quickly, bogging down in endless description of petty grotesques, but Emants manages to pull it off pretty fabulously. The writing is lucid is bitter, the questions being asked thoughtful and sincere. Really very good, if, obviously, quite grim.

In Parenthesis by David Jones—An epic poem in the style of the Mabinogi detailing a company of Britishmen being slaughtered on the Somme. Genuinely masterful. The writing is sonorous and madly complex, rich with strange and disturbing imagery, colloquial conversation interwoven with allusion to myth and legend. It all serves to turn the comparatively familiar image of a WWI battlefield into a world that seems as alien as outright fantasy, treating war as a foreign country, horrifying and in some ways beautiful. Unquestionably a masterpiece, difficult but well-worth your time.

Miserable Miracle by Henri Michaux—A frenchman details his experiences with narcotics. I've never really understood the tendency people have of imagining that hallucinogens provide some pathway towards a more 'authentic' experience of reality, as if deliberately taking a substance the explicit purpose of which is to corrupt and distort your thought might lead to genuine insight. For that matter, Michaux seems like kind of a bullshitter. His depictions of the effects of eating hash, in particular, are so baffling peculiar as to make one question his veracity more generally; in thirty-five years I have never, ever heard of anyone having had 'visuals' from marijuana, and remain skeptical at the five pages or so he dedicates to his own fever-dreams after eating an undisclosed amount of 'Indian hemp', as he calls it. Ultimately, this has not done much to break my general opinion that there is nothing duller than listening to someone brag of their drug use.

A Death in the Family by James Agee—The unexpected death of the patriarch of a Knoxville family thrusts his child, wife and other relations into a desperate reconsideration of their own lives and limitations. A kaleidoscopic rumination on the weight, purpose and essential tragedy of family. Sad and lovely,

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks—Far future space opera shenanigans. Not for me.

Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson – A Venezuelan revolutionary escapes to the jungles of Guyana, falls in love with a forest nymph. A throwback romance which seems more appropriate to 1890 than 1940, and there's some icky ethnic stuff, but despite a general lack of originality that is a well-polished gem of a story. Its melodrama but all works, Hudson has a talent for bucolic description and its just weird and subtle enough to work.

Books I Read October 14th, 2019

After several weeks of enjoying myself I got back down to the grind, though not quite quick enough to keep up with my appropriate monthly pace. Judge me as you must.

The Killing Gift by Bari Wood – A telekinetic woman who can kill with her mind!!! is pursued by a police detective to unclear ends. This felt like the kind of book that I sneaked off my father's shelves in middle school, which isn't really anything one way or the other as far as you're concerned. A competent if unexceptional 80's horror story.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson – Essays on God, faith, hope, humanity by one of the better living writers working in English. Some of the theological stuff was outside my bailiwick but I always find Robinson's sober, sincere Christianity a balm to my troubled mind.

Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte – A suite of short stories of the 'I used to be a scuzzy drug user' school. They're competently, sometimes even skillfully written, but bluntly this is an MFA sub-genre I've just lost interest in. It's got that unrelenting semi-comic bleakness which comes off as one note, not to mention kind of tedious from a reader's perspective since every story pretty much ends the same.

The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka – A group of young Nigerian intellectuals struggle to articulate meaning amid the general squalor of modernity in post-independence Africa. Very good. Soyinka was better known as a playwrite, but this is small masterpiece. The characters are rich, humorous and tragic, the style is difficult but evocative, the setting will be foreign to most readers (or most readers reading this blog); in short, everything you'd want in a novel. Worth your time.

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter – A young woman and her orphaned siblings go to live with a tyrannical toymaker. I wanted to like it more than I did. There's a lot of artistry here, Carter's a skillful writer, but I felt like this was stuff I'd seen before, and not in a 'we're contemplating our collective gender archetypes through the medium of myth' kind of way (although we are) but more in a 'Barbara Comyns did this better' kind of way. That said, other people might react more strongly to it. What do I dunno, I can barely work my moka pot and I've had it for like two years.

Bonneville Blue by Joan Chase – A diverse collection of short stories, narratively sufficiently dissimilar as to leave me struggling for simple description. Thoughtful ruminations on the fault lines that run through human existence, how was that? Anyway, they're excellent, really, really good. Joan Chase was a fabulous writer; her prose is excellent, the narrative construction generally quite tight, and she had a genuine sympathy for her characters which you don't always find in these sorts of things. I'm saddened to have just discovered I've now read all her published work, and envy you the opportunity to check her out.

The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald – Biographies of the author's father and three exceptional uncles, Victorians who distinguished themselves in a variety of fields. It's fine, I dunno. I don't have anything clever to say about this, sorry, maybe just move on to the next book, not that I can guarantee much insight there either.

Nada by Jean-Patrick Manchette – A group of fabulously unlikable leftists kidnap an American ambassador in 70's Paris. The characterization is a little spotty, and this might have been a better book at half again the length (I never, ever think this) but the end is Manchette in his usual masterful form, brutal noir serving as scathing satire for every element of French civilization. Very good, if not his best.

English, August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee – A pampered, cosmopolitan, aimless Anglo-Indian goes to work for the civil service in a miserable, backwards portion of his country, smokes a lot of pot, struggles to accept the essential necessity of labor as a condition of human existence. Very funny, very clever, like Soyinka above a novel which feels at once very much of its place and universal in its depiction of youthful ennui. Excellent stuff, I'm looking forward to picking up another by the author.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel – A drunken book-collector and paper pulper struggles to make sense of literature, his life, life generally, in this slender but compelling volume. I really like Hrabel's zany, stream of conscious style, and the text is richly marbled with allusion and literary subtext. Visceral and complex, worth your time.

Count Zero by William Gibson – Apparently I read this already, and actually don't seem to have enjoyed it that much, but maybe I was just having a bad week or whatever because I thought this was actually a ton of fun on a second pass. Apart from the fact that Gibson was genuinely inventing a sub-genre (and one which seems increasingly prescient as time passes) but the narrative is propulsive and mean but not too mean. I liked it, I'm looking forward to finishing out the series.

Books I Read September 30th, 2019

A short one today, but I spent the last few weeks otherwise actively engaged in adventure and merriment, so give me a goddamn break.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf – The cataclysmic tragedy of human existence as revealed in the quotidian interactions of a wealthy intellectual family at their beach house in coastal England, as described by one of the better prose writers of the 20th century. Thunderous and profound.

The Wishing Tree by Christopher Isherwod – A collection of essays dealing with Isherwood's midlife conversion to Vedanta. Most of the stuff in this will be familiar to anyone with a basic knowledge of Hinduism, I can't really say that I took a lot from it.

The Collected Short Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford – Wide-ranging but unremarkable. I was looking forward to this after having really enjoyed the Mountain Lion, but the stuff in here felt flat, predictable or entirely without a proper sting.

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabel – A licentious, charming cad serves as a valet during the wild days of prewar Mitteleuropa, sells his soul to the Nazis, redeems himself in philosophical old age. Surreal and funny, with the propulsive stream of consciousness that was Hrabel's house style. Lots of fun, worth a read.

Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter – Another collection of short stories by a talented writer that kind of bored the hell out of me. Carter has chops, but the stories were fuzzy and unstructured, at least to my tastes.

The Guide by R.K. Narayan – After a life ruined by greed and obsessive love, an ex-con finds himself ensconced as a self-styled guru in a temple in rural India. A swiftly paced, charming depiction of man's weakness before the demands of fate and the whims of instinct, kin in some interesting ways to Hrabel's two spots above.

A Dream of Africa by Camara Laye – A pessimistic satire of the plight of independent Guinea. I really liked Radiance of the King, but this didn't quite come together. Rushed and somewhat didactic.

The Second Book of Fritz Leiber by Fritz Leiber – I picked this one off a rack at Space Cowboy in Joshua Tree partly because I have kind of a soft spot for Leiber but mostly because the cover art was just so insanely bad (what is going on with the proportions to those arms, man? Fafhrd looks like Mr. Fantastic). It's fine, the short stories are clearly not his best stuff but some of the essays were thoroughly enjoyable.

Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser – The dreamy, dishonest son of a minor aristocrat chronicles his education in a servant's school in this nonsensical Bildingsroman. Or, maybe none of that happens, its the kind of book where you can't really be sure how much of the narrative (such as it is) is actually taking place. I gather this was a seminal text for a certain sort of German intellectual circa 1910, but the stream of conscience ramblings which must have been innovative has since become commonplace, and the emotive silliness bored me to tears.

Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban – In a distant post-apocalypse, a savage child from a tribe of hunter gatherers struggles to find redemption for the human race. Absolutely brilliant. Although presented in a peculiar, alien vernacular, with words written phonetically and concepts from the present reimagined in a dreamlike but entirely plausible fashion, it still manages a profound depth of insight. Quite simply one of the best works of speculative fiction ever written—I can't fathom why it isn't more universally regarded, except in so far as its a difficult if compelling read. Anyway, don't sleep on this, its tremendous.

Books I Read September 14th, 2019

Apart from a couple of fun things I can't talk about, I basically did nothing the last two weeks but read and bicycle. Which is to say, all is well! I read the following books so far in September...

The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato – An isolated painter falls obsessively in love with a woman, is driven mad, kills her, in this classic of Argentinian existentialist literature. Funny how things which begin as transgressive end up becoming a cliché. Anyhow, if the essential premise doesn't seem like something you've had your fill of, this is worth your time. A grimly funny, well-observed portrait of jealousy and self-destruction.

The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald – An anemic academic and an impoverished nurse in pre-war Cambridge are brought together by God, narrative trickery. One of these books where you're reading it and recognizing the artistry and can't figure out why you aren't enjoying the thing. I think I found it was so narrowly drawn that I couldn't get into any of the characters, but maybe I'd just eaten something that day that didn't agree with me. This is why I'm not a real book reviewer.

The Sum and Total of Now by Don Robertson – Morris Bird III, a child of 13 growing up in Cleveland in the 1950's, loves baseball, FDR, his grandmother, hates the Yankees and hypocrisy, struggles with sexual desire and the fundamental cruelty of human existence. A charming, thoroughly enjoyable coming of age story, although I could have done without the box scores. Still, lots and lots of fun, the voice here is, if not utterly original, still really perfectly done. I'm looking forward to the last book in the trilogy.

Children of Gebalawi by Naguib Mahfouz – An early 20th century Cairene ghetto is the setting for a retelling of the joint histories of the Abrahamic faiths, as well as a final section devoted to modernity and the death of God. The first 80% of the book are an attempt to turn stories of Adam, Moses etc. into earthy melodrama, and were sort of a mixed bag. But the final portion, a fabulously strange (and admirably nuanced) portrayal of the rise of secular humanity, more than pays for all. Weird, thoughtful, worth your time.

The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald – A mixed collection of short stories. All are subtle to the point of being elusive, some of them have some pretty mean stings snuck in, but some kind of...didn't? I'm going to keep going with Fitzgerald because I can recognize the artistry, even though both this and Gate of Angels left me a little flat.

A Mind to Murder by P.D. James – A murder in a mental hospital is solved (spoiler alert!) by James's poetry-writing, melancholic, brilliant sleuth. These books are interesting, half locked-room mystery and half probing dissection of the mores and psychoses of the various participants. I don't actually like locked room mysteries (I just never have the energy to play along at home, so to speak) but the writing and general psychological insight are enough to make up for the 'but how could the door have gotten locked from the inside?' bits and the unoriginal hero.

Lost Time: Lecturs on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Jozef Czapski – Recollections of a series of lectures given by the author about Proust while incarcerated in a Soviet prison camp. À la recherche du temps perdu is the sort of monumental text which remains potent in the minds of anyone who managed to finish it, and has a way (I suspect) of getting locked into the lives of its readers, both because it's so lengthy and powerful an undertaking and because its general theme, of memory as being the bind which ties existence together (I'm simplifying, obviously) probably infect the reader with a certain degree of the author/hero's obsession for self-chronicling. I can vividly remember carrying around the Moncrieff editions through eastern Europe ten years ago, a brick in my backpack that I would peak at in Belarusian bus stations and the occasional squat. Which, admittedly, does not have the same cachet as a Soviet prison camp, but still it was fun to watch someone go through the same essential process, of remembering having read a thing. Anyway, this amounts mainly to a short series of thoughtful essays about one of the great literary works of the 20th century; I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read Proust would get much from this, but if you have this is one of that substantial body of Proust-related work worth reading (Mssr. Proust, also out from NYRB Classics, is another).

Ake by Wole Soyinka – Recollections of the author's early childhood in a town in pre-independence Nigeria. The dreamlike patina of childhood adds a fascinating dimension to the myths and customs of a culture now lost (Soyinka is brief but brutal on the effects of post-colonial globalization on his homeland), and the stories of his loving, enlightened family, and precocious academic career are a joy. Beautifully written, funny and engaging, as good a work about childhood as you are likely to read. Lots of fun.

A King Alone by Jean Giono – A lawman kills a werewolf in a small town in the French Alps, despairs when more werewolves don't show up. This is...a very odd book, written in such a fashion as to obscure most of the essential workings of the plot, both the action itself and our hero's reaction to it. Clever and deliberately unsatisfying, but still, you know, kind of unsatisfying.

The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor – An adolescent sociopath exposes the evils of a seaside English town, calls into question the nature of God and human morality in this small masterpiece of a novel. A fairly conventional genre set up elevated by the author's genuine genius both with prose and in the small intricacies of his plots. Fucking William Trevor man, this guy could really do anything. Having read a half-dozen of his so far, I'm not sure why he doesn't seem more revered.

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess – A hack novelist looks back on his 80 years of life, with attention given to a wide variety of literary feuds, a lengthy struggle with his sexuality, and an intimate relationship with a fictionalized pope. This is a very big book, both in size and scope; virtually every historical development, from the the slow death of Britain's empire to the growth of the 60's counter-cultural movement, is lived through and contemplated by Burgess's erudite, embittered, somewhat exasperating protagonist. It is also a book by a very smart person about very smart people, which means you're in for a lot of caddy (if witty) asides about obscure topics. I think I've started to lose my taste for both of these kinds of books in recent years, which may explain my coolness towards what is, by any debate, an admirable work of art. Burgess is very smart, and this is a genuine attempt to work through the great complexities of human existence in the modern age. But it is also an awful mixed bag – his take on fascism and post-colonial Africa being in particular rather weak, although everything having to do with the fake Pope is pretty glorious. I'm not honestly sure I could recommend the time it would take to work through this, but then again I suspect there are a lot of very clever people who would disagree with me, so take that for what it's worth.

Men in Prison by Victor Serge – The 20th century's premier revolutionary recounts experiences of his time imprisoned for leftist activities/the general experience of incarceration. My admiration for Victor Serge is unbounded, and this is generally strong stuff; that said, there is (tragically) such an impressive variety of books given over to this topic, from Primo Levi to Varlam Shalamov, that I'm not sure I could consider this of the first water. I think Serge is a little better at fiction, actually, where he has more space for his imaginative gifts.

The Badlands by Oakley Hall – A widowed New Yorker becomes a cattle baron, gets caught up in the range wars. Is it too much to say that a good western is by definition a threnody, a meditation on the death of a 'lawless' land, its absorption and eradication by civilization? No, it isn't. In any event, this is a very good book, by the author of the even slightly more fabulous Warlock, an insightful meta-commentary on the Western which also serves as a delightfully executed example of that genre. A genuinely fabulous epic; it's not quite Lonesome Dove, but it's better than whatever other book you were planning on comparing to Lonesome Dove.

The Wind by Claude Simon – An emotionally stunted man becomes embroiled in a melodrama between a hotel maid and her abusive husband. Shades of Faulkner in the rolling, elaborate sentences, the effort to imbue commonplace reality with mythic beauty, and the willingness of its narrator to engage in lengthy descriptions of physical events to which he was not witness. I liked it but didn't love it.

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Henry Crews – Remembrances of a hand to mouth upbringing in rural Georgia; meditations on family, childhood diseases, and animal husbandry ensue. You could do a really fun comparison between this, Ake, and the Don Robertson one I read earlier in the month, but I’m not going to. Anyway, I liked it enough to want to pick up some more by the author.

We Always Treat Woman Too Well by Raymond Queneau – A nymphomaniac sassesnach corrupts the IRA squad which accidentally kidnaps her during the Easter Uprising in this satirical take on the erotic pulp novel. Perverse and funny.

Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age by Stephen R. Platt – A thoughtful, well-researched, well-written history of the opium war. A fascinating topic and a first rate work of popular history. Always fascinating to be reminded of the degree to which England's ad hoc empire (and for that matter, most major political developments) were the results of the small, selfish decisions made by harried or bigoted men with little actual understanding of the events taking place.

The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam – The second in the 'Old Filth' trilogy advances the stories of characters dimly touched upon in the first work, offering an overlaying level of complexity to the story of a renowned Hong Kong lawyer. Another one in which I appreciated the artistry but wasn't overly enthused. I think it's possible this would have worked better as a single sustained work; some of the emotional heft of the revelations within might have landed harder.

The Poet Assasinated by Guillaume Apollinaire – The godfather of Dadaism writes a Rabelesian retelling of his birth and life, simultaneously satirizing the pre-war state of French letters. At 150 pages I can enjoy this form of surreal absurdity, though your tolerance for it may differ.

The Jokers by Albert Cossery – A coterie of Egyptian revolutionaries weaponize irony in an attempt to shatter the corrupt, all-encompassing structure of human civilization. Prescient and clever, if a little looser than it might be in terms of structure and climactic weight.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal – I actually read this book last month and forgot to write a review of it, which is odd because it was thoroughly enjoyable. A sustained series of digressions from a drunken cad, delivered (one gathers) to a group of horrified bourgeois bathers. Amorous conquest, military misadventures, the end of the dual-monarchy, whats not to like? Lots and lots of fun, worth your time.

Books I Read End of August

I went to a dance party on a mountain, I saw an old friend, I listened to some people read some things I'd written, I biked a lot, I helped a few people, I did my best to appreciate my brief period of time on this burning planet, I read and listened to the following...

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood – In a dystopian America, women are forced to serve as breeding chattel for a corrupt pseudo-Christian elite. Come on, you know what this is about I'm the last person on earth who hasn't read it. It's good, actually, although it's a little bit light on plot and some of the literary flourishes get in the way of the narrative. But its evocatively creepy, and its depiction of gender relations is mean and unpredictable.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter – 'Adult' retellings of classic fairy tales. This is a pretty staid idea (though in fairness, Carter seems to have gotten at it pretty early), but it's done very well, the sexy bits are sexy and the scary bits are scary and they're sufficiently closely intertwined that you can't always figure out what you're supposed to be feeling in any given passage. Most things like this aren't as good at this, and if you're in the mood for some light S/M flavored erotica you could do a lot worse.

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan – The sad lives of three men intersect tragically in a small town in Ireland. Well-written but kinda slender, didn't quite feel like there was sufficient meat on the bone.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada – The biographies of three generations of semi-magical polar bears who sort of sometimes exist as humans. This was...bad. Just not good. It's the kind of book where nothing makes any sense but also line to line the story is all kind of drivel, hokey where it's supposed to be funny, maudlin where it's supposed to be effecting and always pretty boring.

The Ten Loves of Mr. Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami – Recollections of a lonely, lovesick cad from the ten women who loved him. It's a clever premise and pleasantly reasonable, but I felt like the esoteric, faintly mystical stylizing didn't improve the story, and the anti-hero himself is not so much insubstantial as insincere, seems more of a romantic archetype than a fully realized character.

The Crossing by Andrew Miller – An introverted, independent, arguably emotionally stunted woman has a family, loses it, crosses the Atlantic in a small sail boat. For my money, Miller is one of the best writers working. The writing is strange and strong, his characterization is slick but non-judgemental, and (rarest of all) each of his books feels fresh and different, rather than basic retreads of some essential idea. I thought was real strong, I thought the other things I read by him were real strong, I think you should check him out.

The Weekend by Peter Cameron – A trio of Manhattan bourgeoisie deal with death, love, age over the course of a weekend Upstate. It's gracefully written, and I can't say there was anything actually wrong with it, but frankly rich people at garden parties is just a subject I never really need to revisit again. Which, fair enough, is probably on me for having picked it up. What can I say, I read a book a day you can't always be that choosy.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone – During the waning days of the Vietnam war a second-rate stringer and his hippie girlfriend try and put together a heroin deal, horrific chaos ensuing. Quite good. You can see the influence it had on a wide-range of contemporary popular culture, from Oliver Stone to Thomas Pynchon, although it's better than most of its children. The story is propulsive and often funny, and its nihilism is bleak and honest and not that masturbatory, so far as these things go.

Into the War by Italo Calvino – Three brief vignettes about Calvino's experience in the early days of World War II. Strong stuff, a nostalgic depiction of the rich intensity of youth atop a nation unknowingly headed for vigorous calamity.

The Devil in the Forest by Gene Wolfe – A weaver's apprentice in a small European village is caught between a charismatic, brutal outlaw and a savage squad of guardsmen. Wolfe has a real gift for being able to think his way into specific situations, how and why people act in the way they do, but he also has this exhausting tendency to relate critical narrative bits in deliberately incoherent ways, then explore them through lengthy expository dialogue. If you haven't read Wolfe (what are you doing?) probably don't start here, but as far as completists go it's worth a look.

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe – The corruption and destruction of a civil servant in post-independence Africa, caught between adopted models of behavior and the traditions and loyalties of his native culture. Achebe is one of the great interrogators of late-stage colonialism, and this is strong stuff. He has a talent for limning characters very quickly, as well as an insight into the conditions of post-independence Africa which is sympathetic but still critical. Very good.

Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz – Surreal recollections of the author's youth in a provincial Dual-Monarchy capital, a series of short, largely incoherent vignettes about death, madness, youthful love, all that fun stuff. The stories are unsettlingly weird, but mostly I didn't feel like they were much more than that. With the exception of the eponymous entry, about living in a halfway point between life and death, they seemed vaguely formed and a little repetitive. Which, I guess is maybe part of the charm? I can see why this guy is considered the ur-text for a lot of contemporary fiction, but I think if I'm being blunt I would say that its the sort of contemporary fiction I don't much enjoy.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West – An amnesiac soldier returns to England obsessed with his teenage love/the time before war, death and adult responsibility swallowed life's joys. I've been in love with West since reading Black Lamb and Gray Falcon in college, and was in retrospect surprised I hadn't picked this one up before, especially cause it's very short. Of course, it's a dangerous thing trying to recapture an old love, as our hero finds out to his despair, but happily no similar tragedy awaited me. West is a marvelously talented writer, this is sweetly written, romantic but not cloying, and authentically sad. Good stuff!

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow – A middle-aged failure tries to make sense of his life over the course of a desperate day of further failure, which is to say this resembles every other Saul Bellow book except for Henderson the Rain King. I guess this was a month for revisiting old favorites, as once upon a time I was quite the Bellow aficionado, although it was far back enough that this seems almost a condemnation (sorry, high school Danny! You were an idiot). Anyway, I couldn't really come to any conclusions based on this slim novel. There's a sort of manic energy, but it was also a little one note. At some point I'll just have to man up and break back into Herzog or something.

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany – A half-dozen residents of a faded apartment building in Cairo tell a wider story of modern Egypt. The writing is tight, it's thoughtful and at times erotic, but the ending fails to fulfill the promise of the rest of the book, and I found myself a bit disappointed by the time I closed the cover.

Cane by Jane Toomer – Stories, poems and sketches of pre-war black life in Georgia and Washington, D.C. Very good, very strange. Obviously a lot of pretty fabulous fiction came out of this milieu, but Cane is very much its own thing, at turns pastoral, nostalgic, and horrific. Heady stuff, worth your time.

The Samurai by Shusaku Endo – Four samurai during the early Edo period accompany a priest on an ill-fated voyage west. Historical fiction going in a direction we rarely see, sort of an anti-Shogun. It lacks some of the juice of the best of these sorts of books, and the protagonists have that sort of tiring habit of directly stating their thoughts, moods and feelings to other characters/the reader. But it has a genuine (if ironic) sympathy for its misbegotten heroes which more than merits a read.

The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography by Angela Carter – An attempt to re-imagine/reconceptualize the Sadean anti-heroines as proto-feminist archetypes. Ms. Carter is very clever, but I confess I never found anything remotely interesting about the Marquis. This has the feel of a lot of critical theory where its all enormously clever but none of it actually seems true.

BUtterfield8 by John O'Hara – A depression era party girl comes to a predictable if tragic end. I really like O'Hara, he's been one of this year's present surprises. He has a knack for writing about self-destructive behavior in a way that neither judges nor glamorizes it, and unlike a lot of his hyper-masculine peers he has a certain feminine insight. Good stuff.

The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 – A twelve-hundred page overview of the Dutch Golden age, when the beer-swilling regents of Amsterdam drained the seas, overthrew the Western Hapsburgs and burned fleets in London harbor. It's probably kind of bullshit to call something out like this for being dry but...fuck if it wasn't dry. It seems to me that even in a work of essentially academic history there should be a little room for color, and the author has a way of passing over monumental moments in history as if he's slightly ashamed to be discussing them and would prefer to get back to obscure inter-Calvinist feudings. But really this was mostly my fault, I mean, I should have known what I was getting into.

Books I Read August 14th, 2019

Got back to the city and back on my grind, pumping out pages, lifting things, helping folk, reading books (actually I didn't read as many books as I should have but the rest I stand by). They say you can't swim in the Pacific but they're liars, it's not really that cold. Lassens > Erehwon, the Greek > Bowl, Mexican food > everything.

The Manticore by Robertson Davies – In the second book in the Deptford Trilogy, an alcoholic Canadian lawyer engages in a year's worth of Jungian therapy in Switzerland. It's an easy read, the language is concise and a lot of the throw away observations are worth your time, but Davies' naked affection for Jungianism (sp?) ends up feeling advertorial. There's a lot of 'Don't you see that this is a reflection of your Shadow entering the therapeutic process / why yes, yes I do! How penetrative!'

Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut – A fictionalized retelling of the life of E.M. Forster, primarily his time in India and fumbling, forbidden attempts at homosexual romance. It's OK? I didn't really like Passage to India (do people still life Passage to India?) so part of that was lost to me, but also the writing was a little too distant, passionless, for the essential eroticism of the subject matter.

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread by Don Robertson – An elementary school student takes a long walk through a small city to visit a friend, in this charming, funny, nostalgic depiction of youth in middle America. It does an excellent job of recapitulating the peculiar mental state of childhood, its obsessive tendencies and strange rituals, and I found myself in uncanny agreement with the protagonist's moral code – keep to your word, never steal marbles, and be extra nice to the weird kids. Lots of fun.

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber – A war rages across time, fought by unknowable alien powers with time-displaced human slaves as cannon fodder; in between missions they decompress at an interstellar recreational establishment. I enjoyed it more in theory than execution.

World of Wonders by Robertson Davies – In the third book in the Deptford trilogy we are finally privileged to hear the life story of the world's greatest illusionist, an infrequent though critical participant in the previous two novels. After all that build up I was expecting more than a rather tedious depiction of life as a Canadian carnie and a minor theatrical participant, and honestly the thematic heart of the trilogy – that we create meaning in our lives by casting ourselves as heroes in our own stories – is bluntly presented and ultimately not that clever.

Byzantine: The Imperial Centuries by Romilly James Heald Jenkins – A readable history of the high points of the Empire, a useful reminder of a bunch of Byzantine particularities that I'd forgotten.

City of Crows by Chris Womersley – A mother who might be a witch pursues her kidnapped son through 17th century France with the aid of a charlatan who might be the devil. Discomfiting, fast-paced and with a mean sting. Excellent genre fiction, worth your look.

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote – A sensitive southern child goes to live in a dilapidated mansion with a cast of freaks. The writing is excellent if flowery, but southern Gothic as a style peaked with Flannery O'Connor, and I found the procession of incestuous grotesques and descriptions of pungent foliage and rotting masonry interminable even at two hundred pages.

Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante – Fante's alter ego tries to make it as a screenwriter, has some misadventures, makes poor some lamentable life decisions, in what felt like kind of a stale retread of Ask the Dust. I might have come a little too late in life to John Fante, he feels like a young man's writer if ever I read one.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez – An effectively disturbing selection of horrifying short stories. The comparisons to Bolano here are obvious, with most of the narratives being first person south American gritty little nightmares, though for my money the more overtly genre stuff are far more effective than the looser, somewhat unfocused literary efforts. On balance, however, there's more than enough here to warrant your time, provided you want to spend said time discomfited and slightly nauseated.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson – Bad things happen to a western roustabout. It was fine, it was 120 pages, I didn't mind it, I read it yesterday and can't remember anything about it, which to me is usually not indicative of a classic of world literature but what do I know.

Flying Home and Other Stories by Ralph Ellison – Largely posthumous stories from the writer of Invisible Man. Not all of them are absolutely stellar, but Ellison has a rare knack for writing about childhood, and a lot of the stories about being young and black in the south felt like things I hadn't quite seen before. Good stuff, all in all.

Old Filth by Jane Gardner – An elderly English barrister recalls his childhood in the far east and a miserable youth in England, reaching catharsis via a series of tragi-comic misadventures. This kind of thing is pretty well worn territory, frankly, but Gardner manages to offer something excellent if not entirely new. She has a rare gift for giving a lot of narrative heft to brief encounters, and the narrative is pleasantly kaleidoscopic, with characters and previous events intruding only to be concluded with surprising swiftness. Some of these feel insubstantial, but the total effect is grander than any individual strand, and the whole thing is packaged together with becoming sweetness. I dug it!

Buried Treasures of California by W.C. Jameson – Getting a library card since coming to LA has so genuinely improved my overall reading experience, I can't even tell you. Gone are days of carefully curating my purchases at the Strand, weighing the merits of one NYRB Classic against another. Now I just run in and run out laughing maniacally, able to pursue any random strand of learning (or semi-learning, or entertainment, or whatever) without needing to justify it to my purse. Buried Treasures of California! I mean, come on, who can resist? It's got this horrible, Velvet Painting cover and the title is the aesthetic equivalent of getting smacked in the face by a 2x4. Buried Treasures of California! That's what this book is about! Abandoned gold claims, the forgotten caches of bank robbers, the death curses of silver-mining hobos! The 12 year old in me enjoyed it immensely.

Books and Tunes July 31st, 2019

I only read 21 books this month, because I spent about half of it on the sort of vacation where you don't read a lot. But it was a pleasant sojourn, in which I saw chattering children and my beloved parents and so on and so forth. Hope you spent your July in some similarly tolerable fashion.

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American Diplomacy by George Kennan – Essays about American foreign policy by the most influential Cold War thinker. Insightful and lucid, well worth a quick read. Somehow it's sort of comforting to recall that America was always pretty fucked up, although the last few years we have been pushing it pretty hard.

Existentialism and Human Emotions by Jean-Paul Sartre – So I was staying with my brother for a few days at the start of the month, and he has a doctorate and used to be a professor, and I was cribbing through a bunch of collegiate philosophical works, including this short book by Sartre, who was a writer I had a great fondness for back when I was like sixteen, and whom I haven't read since.

Alas for my teenage self. This is...not great, a sophomoric and unserious retread of basic Nietzschean thought. 'Anything you do becomes the thing you are because its the thing you did.' Hey man, that's great, thanks. We didn't seriously give you the Nobel, did we? We did? Shit.

Side note: as a rule it's inappropriate to critique a professional based upon a lack of personal morality, but I can't help but think an exception should be made in the case of ethical philosophers. Sartre certainly implicitly agrees, which is why he makes a fairly naked effort to frame his wartime efforts as being more heroic then they were (without actually lying)--which, apart from being contemptible on its own merits, offers an almost comical rebuke to the underlying argument being put forth, since obviously if all actions are equally credible, Sartre's complicity in the Vichy regime shouldn't be a point of shame.

The Secret Commonwealth of Fairies by Robert Kirk – A collection of observations and anecdotes about fairies written by a 17th century Scottish minister. More fun in theory than concept.

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford – A precocious girl and her brother try and navigate adolescence, their rigidly prosaic family, and the wildness fastness of the Rocky Mountains in this strange and lovely text. Beautifully written, strangely horrifying, I'd have a lot more to say about it but I read it a month ago and my memory is a little scuzzy, but basically it's well worth your time.

The Sacco Gang by Andrea Camilleri– The history of a family of leftists fighting off the mafia and the Fascists in rural Italy. It was fine.

The Fifth Business by Robertson Davies – The life history of an aging Canadian don, who may or may not have found a saint in a mentally ill woman from his village with whom he shares a tragic past. I liked it enough to get the next two books in the trilogy – the writing is good and it moves at a quick pace. There was something a bit too neat about it, however, which for me dropped it down from excellent to only very good. Still, very good is very good, and like I said I'll finish off the series.

Cecile is Dead by Simenon – Phlegmatic French inspector Maigret traces the murder of a casual acquaintance. The Maigret books have generally fell flat for me in the past, mainly because I don't really care about the procedural niceties of crime solving, but this one, which engaged more with the general depravity of the humans involved – as well as offering Maigret a bit more to do than smoke his pipe and mutter – raised the bar.

Sinner Man by Lawrence Block – A man 'accidentally' kills his wife, fleas bourgeoisie normality to become an up and coming mafioso. Very strong, well-written and mean and fast paced as hell. An excellent example of thuggish, mid-century noir, more Thompson than Chandler (if the plot description didn't make that clear).

The Night of the Panthers by Piergiorgio Pulixi – A bunch of evil cops do evil things in Naples. This is the kind of two-fisted action heavy crime novel about which I just can't give the slightest shit. Sorry.

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo – A police inspector in Versailles investigates the death of an old friend, thinks far too much about various lost loves. Another one I didn't get.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonara Carrington – An old woman is given a device to aid her hearing, is moved to an asylum, participates in the end of the world. Generally this sort of wacky premise is my bag, and there were some clever lines here in there, but basically it just devolves into a very lazy attempt at a genre novel, with a lot of silly modern paganism elements that don't really function as satire. Disappointing.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid-- A Pakistani immigrant goes to an Ivy League schoo, gets a job with a financial company, gradually begins to recognize the gaping moral hole at the heart of the American dream. Clean and swift-moving (if a little bit simple), with a nice final sting. A solid 200 pages, if perhaps never quite life changing.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner – Two children fight to save a magic treasure from a Dark Lord, in what I gather is considered one of the highlights of the y/a fantasy genre. I appreciated the dream like, nonsensical quality of the narrative, but got bogged down in all the walking. Lots of walking in this book – through caves, forests, along mountain paths, you get the idea – and I do a lot of walking on my own, so my patience for that is usually pretty low.

Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself by Robert Montgomery Bird – A lazy New Jersey rustic switches bodies down the Eastern seaboard in this enormously peculiar novel which functions as meta-critique about the nature of personhood and satire on Jacksonian America. It's interesting as a historical object but I can't really say I enjoyed it.

Three Plays by Luigi Pirandello by Luigi Pirandello – Three plays examining the nature of theater, personhood, madness and truth. Very clever, like if Borges wrote for the stage. I read a novel by Pirandello a few years back and didn't really appreciate it, but after picking this up I've got a better idea of what all the fuss is about.

Cover Her Face PD James – A maid is murdered in a decaying English mansion, and a phlegmatic inspector (aren't they all?) sifts through a lot of nasty family drama to dry and uncover the killer. A grimly despairing investigation into the evils of human nature, masquerading as a cozy mystery. Quite good.

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frenkl – A psychologist considers the lessons learned from his years in Auschwitz, finds meaning in suffering, advocates for a form of psychoanalysis which (in part) focuses on the need for human beings to do the same. Clever! Insightful! Fairly uplifting, by the standards of survivor literature.

The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono – An Italian cavalry officer and revolutionary tries to survive a plague outbreak while traveling through rural France. Beautifully written, strange and horrifying, extremely nasty in certain places but with a cheery narrative pull. Alas for a disappointing ending which takes it down a few points.

Fine Just the Way it Is By Annie Proulx – I had very mixed reactions to Ms. Proulx's work, and figured I'd pick up another one to try and come to a conclusion, and I think I just don't like her. Most of the shorts in this abide by the formula which made her famous – terrible things happen to sad people in Wyoming – and while I don't object to failure as a narrative outcome, having every single story end in exactly the same way does take away some of the tension. The few that don't follow this structure are fantastical satire, and are frankly just straight crap.

Divorce Islamic Style by Amara Lakhous – A rookie spy infiltrates himself into an Arab neighborhood in Rome, becomes embroiled with a friend's matrimonial dispute. It's a fun premise but the language drifts from conversational to straight banal, and the ending is kinda garbage.

The Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos– In a richly drawn fantasy world, a nerdy introvert is forced to travel to a distant land to marry a man she doesn't know; politicking ensues. It dragged at times, but basically I enjoyed the setting enough to enjoy the thing overall. Which is actually pretty high praise, since this kind of thing generally isn't my bag.

Books and Tunes June 30th, 2019

In Toronto, visiting my brother and his wife and their adorable, loud, occasionally well behaved children. It really hammers home the degree to which all childless people are essentially frivolous creatures, dedicated to their own interests, pursuits, and petty pleasures. To whit, here are the 22 books that I read in the back half of June, and the music that I really liked...

A playlist featuring Justin Townes Earle, Streets of Laredo, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, and others

Three Christ's of Ypsalanti by Milton Rokeach – What happens when three schizophrenics, all claiming to be the heir of God, are forced by an ethically dubious social scientist to interact? Not much, perhaps predictably – reason has very little effect on the insane, that's kind of the point of being insane, and our three Christ's maintain their sad delusions despite the best efforts of their therapist/tormentor. There's a certain sterile fascination to the fantasies of the severely mentally ill, as anyone who has had much interaction with them can attest; primarily as a a strangely complex (if endlessly repetitive) form of world-building. I'm not sure how much relevance it has to the mental structures of more fully functioning human specimens however, and have often wondered (as a sort of meta-critique on psychoanalysis and its various children) if living in a leprosarium might give one confused ideas about the nature of a healthy man. That aside aside, it's an interesting read.

The Invitation by Claude Simon – A lyrical, satiric depiction of a visit to the USSR in the late 80's by a group of public intellectuals, which, if you can get over the author's refusal to ever use a period, a stylistic peculiarity which is either due to some innate defect (virtue?) of the French language or, potentially, the influence of Proust on his countrymen, but in any case results in these endless seeming, though not altogether unpleasant, sentences, sentences which kind of just go on and on and on and include endless sub-clauses, allusions, asides, though very few semi-colons, which is fine, the semi-colon is the punctuation mark of cowards, for people too lily-livered to choose a proper dash, but anyway its actually a pretty good read, with some lovely language and a reasonably healthy dose of contempt for these sorts of expeditions, and indeed the concept of a public intellectual, which to my mind is a definitional oxymoron of the most embarrassing sort.

Home by Marilynne Robinson– A spinster returns to her childhood home to watch her wastrel brother pay a final call on his dying father. A companion book to Robinson's Gilead, this is a haunting, beautiful, sad novel. Robinson has a genius for conveying the bitter complexity of familial relations, the way in which every word and sentence can contain such an endless raft of references, and the constant prevalence of miscommunication even (especially?) among people who are deeply intimate with one another. It works as a stand alone but also molds perfectly with Gilead, offering another layer of complexity to the subtle, gorgeous characterization of that masterpiece. The depiction of Jack, the prodigal son, whose character failing and ill-fortune hang forever over his head, is tragic and affecting, and as always the language is sublime. Marilynne Robinson, man, Hooo-ey.

69 by Ryu Murakami – A callow youth utilizes Japan's late 90's dissident movement to try and meet girls. A Ryu Murakami book without any body horror! I kept waiting for like, someone to eat someone else's tongue but it never happened. Funny and poignant, if resembling a lot of other books you might have read.

Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz – A strangely unemotional Hungarian youth is sent to Auschwitz, based on the author's own experiences. Unpleasant, thoughtful, stylistically distinct within the unpleasantly large realm of holocaust autobiography.

The Soft Voice of the Serpent by Nadine Gordimer – A selection of early stories from this Nobel prize winning South African. Uneven, but there are some gems in here, particularly the titular short.

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf – Short stories from a giant of the 20th century that I actually don't think I ever read before. After the predictable initial impression of banging your head against a wall, the prose starts to cohere into a masterpiece of thought and rhythm. I liked these very much, except for one or two which felt a little unsubtle. Still, quite marvelous.

The Player by Michael Tolkin – The prototypical soulless Hollywood exec is losing his job, maybe his mind in this bitterly satirical neo-noir. It bogs a little in the last act, but the prose is fabulous, mean and funny and reasonable, and he has a writer's contempt for writers and the vapid suits making an excessive living siphoning from our talents (I'm just kidding, all of my suits are awesome people, I genuinely enjoy their company).

The Children of Men by P.D. James — Twenty-five years after the last child was born, a reclusive academic gets embroiled in a conspiracy against the fascist English state. But you know all of that, you saw the movie. The book is not as good; it's a clever premise, it's mostly quite well-written, but the narrative structure is kind of a mess, and it ends as an unsatisfyingly simplistic parable.

Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams – Esoteric flash-fiction. The language is pleasantly difficult to decipher, but once you get down to the nub there usually isn't much beyond a simple scene or statement of feeling, obtuse but sort of insubstantial, even banal. Complexly expressed trivialities.

The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson – A bold and vigorous attack on modernity by one of America's better living novelists. An anti-capitalist environmentalist conservative Christian (or something like that), Robinson is a serious enough intellectual to take the originators of contemporary society – Mssrs. Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud – seriously, which is to say, with understanding and dislike. Some of the stuff about Calvin kind of missed me, but basically Robinson's diagnosis of our lurid moral and philosophical collapse seemed uncomfortably accurate.

Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A priest falls in love with a maltreated, depressed adolescent girl. I'm a sucker for Garcia's house style ('one day the white goat with the human looking forehead whom we called Pablo fell down the well, and for all the albino clockmaker's crying, we could not save him'), but how many books romanticizing pederasty did this guy have in him? Was it only last week I read Memoirs of my Melancholy Whores? Whole thing felt a bit on the nose.

A Clue to the Exit by Edward St. Aubyn – A dying author writes a book about human consciousness, goes a little crazy during his final months on earth. Didn't love it—the funny parts were not funny, and the philosophical bits are pointless and uninteresting, as the nature of individual consciousness is an insoluble mystery which cannot be reduced to logic and swiftly decays into intellectual masturbation (which in fairness, is the sort of meta-joke about the novel he tries to write, but so the fuck what I still had to read it).

The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman -- A dark-skinned woman tries to make her way in a post-war black society of uncompromising color consciousness. Thoughtful and well-written, of surprising subtlety for an overtly political novel. Good stuff.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson – A woman tries overcomes her miserable childhood in accepting the love of an aging preacher, God, in the third book of the Gilead series. I didn't love it as much as the first two, but it's not bad. Also I've been doing an awful lot of Marilynne Robinson lately, I might have gotten a bit full up by this point.

Reading Turgenev by William Trevor– A woman in a provincial Irish town goes mad. This one didn't do a lot for me.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter – A magic crow takes up residence with a writer and his sons to help overcome the unexpected death of their wife/mother. Entertaining and mostly well-written, quick enough that the absurdity of the premise and the occasional flights of literary fancy don't get exhausting. Good stuff.

My House in Umbria by William Trevor – A writer of romances takes in the survivors of a train bombing in what seems like (but is not) a sweet-natured meditation on loss and love. Mean, clever, strange, a curveball coming in high and fast, be careful you don't get plunked. By which I mean you should probably read this book.

Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane-- The lengthy recollections of a small town doctor having a nervous breakdown. Meandering and flabby.

The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam – A woman loses her mind when the X. Meandering. I know I said the last book was meandering also, but what can I tell you? I felt they both meandered. You should be sympathetic to my trouble, rather than judgmental of my word choice.

The World of Odysseus by M.I. Finley – An attempt to construct pre-literate Greece through the Homeric oral epics. Broadly interesting, though one does get the sense that an awful lot of this is riding on what might have been a throw away line by an itinerant half-drunk poet (most poets are half-drunk most of the time, I don't see why it would have been any different in ancient Greece.)

The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt –

Schmitt: Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.

Me: Republicans, neo-liberals, anarchists, academicians, people who underline things in library books, people who ride their bikes on the sidewalk, people who think Pearl Jam are a serious band, anyone who ever liked Forest Gump, people who are rude to waiters, e-sports enthusiasts, celebrity gossip journalists--

Schmitt: ...I think I left the oven on.

Books I Read June 14th, 2019

I write things, I read things, I bike places. I saw a terrible play and an OK movie and one of the best concerts of my life. A lengthy vacation looms ahead of me, so I'm trying to pre-emptively make up for a lot of my bad behavior. Happy father's day, assuming you observe it. So far this month I read the following books...

Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neil's Hotel by William Trevor – A mentally ill photographer forces her way into the lives of a handful of mentally ill people living in and around a dilapidated Dublin hotel. A brutal if someone unsubtle critique of the artistic semi-neccessity of using other people's lives for creative fodder. The anti-heroine is interestingly drawn, but the rest of the crew of miserables are kind of one note, and it's not quite funny enough to be a comedy.

The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff – An impressive collection of short stories, admirable both in execution and scope. Generally excellent, and it was nice to read one of these where every story wasn't a minor variation on the next.

Famous Japanese Swordsmen of the Two Courts Era by William de Lange – What can I tell you, the thirteen year old inside me loved this title too much not to give it a read. Unfortunately it turns out we don't actually know anything about the lives of the two most famous duelists of the Two Courts Era, and so this ends up being an enormously tedious history of the general period, rather than the biography it claims to be. Alas.

What's for Dinner by James Schuyler – The unhappy misadventures of a collection of upper middle class small town elite. One of these 'beneath the happy facade of the American dream everyone is drinking heavily and masturbating' sorts of novels. Mean! Cynical! Like a lot of other books I've read! Not bad, but not particularly memorable.

The Devil's Yard by Ivo Andric – In the waning days of the Ottoman empire, a falsely imprisoned Orthodox monk befriends a mentally ill Turkish aristocrat. Quick, lyrical, sad, a minor work by an acknowledged master.

Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami – Two boys left for dead in a Tokyo train station grow up together, get into some nasty misadventures, decide the world is a cesspool, destroy it. More of the sardonic nihilism one expects of Murakami, but this kind of thing works a lot better in 200 pages than 400. The subplots, while fine on their own, go on too long, especially since the climax is pretty obvious from the early going.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson – An eccentric vagrant raises her two young nieces in a small American town. This was one of those books I think I didn't like quite as much as it merited. Part of that was coming down from the high of Robinson's sublime Gilead, part of it was I am one of those people who just really can't stand bucolic imagery, no matter how lyrical. But it is beautifully written, Robinson is very talented, and I suspect other readers will enjoy it more.

The Flame is Green by R.A. Lafferty – A band of European revolutionaries fight an esoteric crusade against their demonic counterparts. An entertaining adventure story written in a quixotically odd fashion, impossible events incorporated without explanation (but in an engaging way!). Lafferty was really an original, he writes modern fantasy as satire and fairy tale. Strong stuff, alas that no one seems to read him any longer, or at least the LAPL doesn't have the rest of this series.

Marquise of O by Heinreich von Kleist – A German noblewoman gets pregnant unexpectedly, tries to find the husband. I didn't really get it. I know that's not much of a review, sorry, but there it is.

A Sun for the Dying by Jean-Claude Izzo – A Parisian vagrant travels to Marseille to die, recollects his youth and failures. There's a lot of good things about this; its humane and sad and sometimes sweet, and there's a crime thread that works pretty well, actually, but ultimately it was a little too sentimental for me personally. Still, I'd check something out by the author again.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice – A reservation in the far north of Canada survives an isolated winter after an undisclosed apocalypse wrecks civilization. Stronger in conception than execution.

Great Granny Webster by Caroline Webster – A woman traces a strand of familial madness to a brutal, cold-hearted matriarch. Quite marvelous. Funny, sad, a thoughtful exploration of how mental illness is passed down through generations as children, reacting against the sins of their parents, forge their own paths of self-destruction. Very good.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle by Alaine Robbe-Grillet – A post-modern Marquise de Sade. Which, I mean, if that appeals to you, have at it! There's actually a fair bit of artistry here, but beyond illicit erotic/horrific thrills I'm really not sure what the point was.

Fragments of Lichtenberg by Pierre Senges – The false history of an attempt to reconstruct a novel from the scattered posthumous writings of the Enlightenment philosopher/scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg functions as a meta-critique of the modern academy and a meta-commentary on how perspective alters truth. Really, that suggests more of a narrative than actually exists. In practice this is 450 pages of the author spitballing in any direction he feels like, which I don't object to on premises but which requires an enormous amount of genius to pull off, one which, sadly, Senges does not possess. Pedantic rather than erudite, sometimes clever but never funny, this is the kind of books where long lists of things are meant to serve as punchlines. There's no point in disliking a thing more than its importance merits, I know that, but by God I wish I had the time it took to read this back.

The Color of Blood by Brian Moore – The Cardinal of an eastern bloc country tries to avert a catastrophic showdown with the communist government. I admire how many different genres Moore can work in, and this is a skillful if somewhat derivative Greene pastiche.

The Open Sore of a Continent by Wole Soyinka – Some ten years ago, at the first (and as it turned out, only) Brasilia Biennal, I was somehow at a party with the writer/human rights advocate Wole Soyinka, growing long in the tooth but still a statue of a man, with a white mane and dark eyes and a weighty if friendly bearing. My handler, a lovely Brazilian woman whose job was to make sure none of the English-speaking authors wandered away and got bludgeoned to death, made an unexpected point of introducing us. “This is Wole Soyinka,” she said, “Nobel prize winner. And this,” she said, turning to me, “is Daniel Polansky. His book is being compared to Game of Thrones and Raymond Chandler.” It was clear that Wole Soyinka had no idea what this meant, but he fumbled forward kindly, and I did my best to follow.

Anyway, I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to Mr. Soyinka's work, or in retrospect why I chose this one, which ends up being, basically, a series of essays about the political situation in Nigeria during the early 90's. It assumes an intimate knowledge about the nation's history and then circumstance which I can't claim to possess, and so I don't really have anything useful to say by way of a critique. I'll try and pick up something of his that is of broader interest, if for no other reason than his having shared one of the more awkward moments of my life.

July's People by Nadine Gordimer – When Apartheid South Africa devolves into civil war, with the white establishment on the verge of collapse, a family of white liberals are saved by their black servant, who spirits them back to his village. A strange, discomfiting, very clever commentary on the vast gaps between peoples, and their painful struggle to bridge them. A magnificently vital portrait of South Africa as it might have been. Uncompromising, excellent, worth a read.

Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky – A pair of lovers flee the coming Reich for a two-week idyll in Sweden, have a threesome, free a child from an evil orphanage, in this bittersweet threnody for a dying world. The small triumphs of joy and righteousness in a world growing dark, of moving poignance here in our own pre-apocalypse.

“What is it about? I want to know right now!”

I sucked the end of a bitter fir-twig. “First of all,” I said, “I saw how it was. And then I understood why it was like that—and then I appreciated why it couldn't be any other way. But I still want it to be different.”

Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Multatuli – A damning if overwrote indictment of the Dutch administration in Java, book-ended by a hysterically bizarre commentary by a vigorously hypocritical coffee trader. The main story, of a too-decent administrator in a rural province, is well-meaning but kind of interminable, a lot of the emotive asides common to works of this era. The writer himself is presumably (?) aware of this, which explains the peculiar meta-story surrounding it, which is mean, clever, and worth your time.

Books and Tunes May 31st, 2019

May continued on its curiously gray way. I've been biking a lot and trying harder to notice the flowers. Not while I'm biking, just in general. May's playlist, and brief reviews of the books I read during the second half of the month follow.

A playlist featuring Whiskeytown, The Jayhawks, Bonny Doon, and others

Road-side Dog by Czelaw Milosz – An arrangement of short essays, poems and aphorisms about language, death and Catholicism. I enjoyed it but can't say it stuck with me to any particular degree. Then again, I read a lot of books this month.

Karate Chop by Dorothe Nors – A collection of short stories in the faintly-ominous-but-nothing-actually-happens vein. Didn't do anything for me at all.

Tree of Smoke by Dennis Johnson – American intervention in Vietnam turns out to be a bad thing in this very long, very serious book. It's engaging moment to moment, the various view points are mostly well-juggled, Johnson is a solid writer and has a knack for knowing what details to avoid offering the reader to make the narrative more powerful. But there's nothing really new here, either structurally or conceptually, and I couldn't help but feel like we've probably got enough big books about Vietnam, some of them written by veterans of the conflict, and mostly released in a more timely fashion. Don't we have enough current overseas conflicts to use as literary fodder in illuminating the shady underside of the American dream? Answer: yes.

The Devil is Dead by R.A. Lafferty – A wandering drunk finds himself entangled in a strange web of mystical doings, to give much more of the plot would be to ruin the thing. Another book I picked up because of a mention by Gene Wolfe, and you can see the influence. Stylistically its extremely peculiar, it takes half the text before you realize what genre you're dealing with, but it still manages to offer some narrative thrills. Cool, weird, I'm trying to pick up more by Lafferty but alas, he seems to be largely forgotten.

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene – A famous architect flees the world to take up residence in a African leprosarium, thinks about God. I didn't love it. Greene's books can generally be divided intwo two camps; books about Imperialism, and books about Catholicism, and I tend to prefer the first. Like Waugh (though somewhat less so), Greene has a tendency to imagine his faith as a form of moral masochism, basically, in which suffering is elevated over empathy, misery is portrayed as an essential good, and Christ is reduced to his stigmata.

L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City by John Buntin – An engaging look at crime in 20th century Los Angeles, choc full of weird, memorable moments. Did you know the guy who started Cliftons, once a cafeteria, now my favorite bar in LA, helped fight police corruption? You do now. Fun stuff.

Hellbox by John O'Hara – A collection of stories about over the hill drunks, small time criminals, cheating husbands, etc. Very of its time, but well-written and engaging as hell. O'Hara has a real feel for dialogue, and despite its masculine preoccupation, doesn't have that authorial intrusion you get in Hemingway and Mailer and writers of that ilk. Fun stuff.

Passing by Nella Larsen – A member of the black bourgouise has her life ruined after a chance meeting with a childhood friend passing as a white woman. What begins as a commentary on race relations during the Harlem Renaissance morphs into a larger critique of the compromises and concessions we all take part in while building an adult existence. Very good.

A Kind of Anger by Eric Ambler – A depressed journalist gets involved in a scam to sell the intelligence gathered by a murdered Kurdishman. Taught, extremely clever, very nearly a masterpiece but the landing doesn't quite hit like it should. Still, the usual excellence from Eric Ambler.

Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft – A pedantic school master travels through a vertical steampunk city to find his lost love. An engaging adventure story with a charmingly weird setting.

Disquiet by Julia Leigh – A woman returns to her childhood home with her children and a dark secret. Competently written, atmospheric, unexceptional.

A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka – I spent ten minutes trying to find that clip from Metropolitan where the pretentious protagonist describes a book as 'Kafkaesque', and the heroine replies, 'yes, it was written by Kafka.' But I couldn't find it. Then I was going to post that clip from Annie Hall where Shelly Long and Woody Allen are in bed together, and Shelly Long goes, 'sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience,' but I don't think we're supposed to think Woody Allen is funny anymore. Anyway, this was a pretty good book.

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag – A family is corrupted by wealth in this story of moral decay in modern India. Sharply written and mean, but the characters feel authentic and honest. Very good, I'll get more by Shanbhag shortly.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling – A boy's journey to adulthood through a vibrant, magical India that never was. There's a lot wrong with this book – apart from the imperialism, I mean – it doesn't really hang together as a complete narrative, and the ending is pretty weak beer. But Kipling's genuine love for his adopted homeland rings through, and manages to redeem both the moral and aesthetic issues. Hell, even Edward Said liked it.

What I Lived For by Joyce Carol Oates – A self-important mover and shaker in a fantasy version of Buffalo faces political corruption, comes to grips with his own moral failings in this very, very, very long book. Shades of Tom Wolfe, in the depiction of hyper masculine identity, and Saul Bellow, in a 'this takes place over the course of three days but also half the narrative is filled with past memories' sort of way, although it occurs to me I haven't read either of those authors in closer to twenty years than fifteen, and I probably should be more careful with the comparisons. Anyway, this is competently written but it just goes on forever, like, forever, with scenes and thoughts and images repeated to a point beyond tedium. It's not bad, but I can't possibly imagine recommending it to anyone.

Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata – A wealthy young man deals with the consequences of his father's infidelities. Also, there's lots of stuff about tea. It's finely tuned but very spare. If it was a restaurant, it would be one of those small plate places you go to to impress a girl and then when your food comes you're like, that's it? Fifteen bucks for one squash blossom? Anyway I didn't love it.

The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene – A botched kidnapping by Panamanian guerrillas leads to a lot of philosophizing about God. Another one of Greene's religious works, though superior to the Burnt-Out Case. The plot is still a little too neat, almost sanctimonious in its confirmation of the author's religious leanings, but it is a thoughtful meditation on evil and redemption.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – An old man contemplates his life in a letter to his young son in this luminously profound meditation on life, God, and love, one of the best books I can remember reading in a very long time. It isn't enough to say that it's thoughtfully constructed and beautifully written; lots of books are both of those things. This is a work of great wisdom, of penetrating insight, a compelling argument for the existence of God and the fundamental if tragic dignity of the human condition. I didn't think it would be possible to write a book like this, so honest and yet so hopeful, in an age as awful and despairing as ours. I'm really glad I was wrong. A towering accomplishment that confirms the purpose of fiction, lucky me that I picked it up at random from the library.

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor – Six African American woman living in the eponymous tenement. The prose is very strong, although the stories wrap up a little too neatly, and its a bit...sentimental, I guess. Still, a strong debut novel, worth a read.

Rapture by Susan Minot – A man and a woman reconstruct their romantic history over the course of the world's longest blowjob. Actually pretty good, despite the premise. A thoughtful and largely accurate depiction of the romantic mindset of 21st century proto-hipsters. It was actually a little too close to home for me, a scarred survivor of love in our tarnished time, but I think most readers would find it more compelling.

Books I Read May 14th, 2019

Today I can make honest claim on 35 years of life, during which I have never lied to a friend, broken faith with a lover, or cheated anyone who didn't really, really deserve it. In the first half of May, I read the following...

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene – A vacuum cleaner salesman becomes embroiled with British intelligence, discovers a genius for dishonesty in Greene's just beloved parodical (isn't a word, should be) spy novel. Somehow I'd kind of forgotten I'd already reda this, which ending up OK because by the time I realized it I was having so much fun I couldn't stop. The writing glitters, and it has that feature of the best satire, in which the absurdity of the premise showcases the absurdity of the institution being mocked. I read a lot of people trying to be Grahame Greene, but none of them ever are.

The Secret Agent by Josef Conrad – The misfortunes of an agent provocateur, his wife, mother-in-law, allies, handlers, etc. I am on record as generally not having a lot of fondness for pre-20th century novels (except for the Russians) but Conrad is really very good, and apart from describing rooms in too much detail mostly avoids what I consider to be the stylistic failures of his age. The language is penetrating and insightful, and his cynicism bleak but thoughtful. Strong stuff.

Evil Eyes: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong by Joyce Carol Oates – Four novellas about love and death. Predictable and flat, this should have been better than it was.

Starwater Strains by Gene Wolfe – I confess to finding a lot of Wolfe's later novels not to my taste, but his short fiction remains a clear cut above his competitors. 'The Pope's Head' is as nightmarish a 5 pages as you'll ever read, and there's this one about a guy locked in jail/exploring a pulp fantasy world which I likewise loved, though I guess not so much that the name stuck in my head.

Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe – Nil nisi bonum.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman – A boy and girl fall in love in a magical New York, except then everything gets really sad, but I can't explain anything else without ruining the plot. This is a very good book that I would have liked if it didn't despair for the future in exactly the way that I despair for the future, leaving me in a deep state of melancholy forty-five minutes before I was set to answer calls on the suicide hotline. I also didn’t think the internal mechanics of the thing worked as neatly as they might have, there’s some unnecessary explanation. Still, it is strong, and I gather other readers don't find it quite so terribly harrowing.

The Traitor's Niche by Ismail Kadare – Albanian magical realism – a kaleidoscopic depiction of the late Ottoman empire mourns the corrupting effect of totalitarianism on ruler and ruled. Kadare is a real talent, his stories are evocative and awful, and he manages in a few hundred pages what less talented writers fail to complete in five times the space. Good stuff.

The Investigations of Avram Davidson by Avram Davidson – Stories of wonder from a largely forgotten mid-century fantasist. I picked this up on a recommendation from Gene Wolfe (not a personal one, sadly) and there's something interesting to the construction (particularly the one about the dad picking his son up from boarding school) but mostly they left me a little cold.

Judgment on Deltchev by Eric Ambler – An English playwright covers a show trial – or is it?? – in Bulgaria during the opening days of the cold war. Ambler is about as good at this as anybody not named Graham Greene. He has a real talent for misdirection, and obscuring the motivations of his characters without drifting into outright narrative dishonesty, as well as a deeper feel for the human condition than these sorts of cheap novelettes generally offer. God stuff.

Twenty-One Stories by Graham Greene – Early works from a master. 'I Spy' is very strong, and a few of the others likewise merit recognition, but probably there are about 15 Greene books you should read before this one.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – An old man finds love, meaning, in the catatonic arms of an underage prostitute. If that description doesn't turn you off immediately, have at it! It's beautifully written, generally charming, and quite short! The characters are all sufficiently fantastically drawn that you know you're never really supporting pederasty, but it's still a little queasy. The accompanying text compares it to Lolita, but there's not really any evidence of ironic intent. One does sort of wonder when the inevitable backlash against Marquez is going to arise, and why it hasn't already—is it just that he didn't write in English?

Flood by Andrew Vachss – A superman beats up child molesters in an unrecognizable New York. I was skeptical of the premise on principal, but I really liked Vachss The Getaway Man, and thought I'd give it a shot. My optimism offered slim return, alas, and while I could write a lot here about the stylistic deficiencies of action novels, and also why we should really all stop using evil pedophiles as character tropes, it's my birthday (as I mentioned) and frankly I don't really have the energy.

Oxygen by Andrew Miller – A pair of adult sons return home to tend to their dying mother; a Hungarian playwright hopes to redeem himself for a youthful moment of weakness. Very good. High literature without a cheap hook, sincerely written, thoughtful, sad, hopeful. A serious man trying to grapple honestly with the terrible despair and occasional joy of human existence. Very good.

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq by Jorge Louis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Cesares – A pedant reviews a series of imaginary (though plausible) artistic trends; unreadable books, indigestible food, uninhabitable buildings. Basically a series of clever jabs at post-modernism, the sort of conceptual art which imagines itself superior to form and has been turning out clones of DuChamp's fountain for going on a century. It's a little one note, but then again I can get down with anyone taking a fat crap on Le Corbusier. Fuck that dude. The poor citizens of Brasilia, forced to grapple forever with the conceptual monstrosities of an aesthetic cripple. I'm getting off topic.

The Innocent by Ian McEwan – A British technician works for Allied intelligence in postwar Berlin, falls in love. I disliked this less than other Ian McEwan books I've read. If that sounds like damnation by faint praise, you get an A on today's reading comprehension quiz.

The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras – A man and a woman in a hotel room; it might be me, but I've never enjoyed any explicitly erotic writing, or none created for public consumption. It seems a form of art which suffers the further it passes from a lovers lips.