Books dcozy finished in 2013

The second volume of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy, River of Smoke, was as engaging as the first, but in a different way. In both books, Ghosh has the ability to leave us hanging from cliffs at the ends of chapters: both volumes are awfully hard to put down. In River, however, Ghosh seems to be changing things up in how he structures his narrative. In fact, it seems to me that he is doing something that few fiction writers do: he is allowing description and explanation, rather than action, to do—especially in the first three-quarters or so of the book—almost all the work. This could be bone dry, but instead his explication of the opium trade, Canton, Parsis, Victorian plant collecting, and the other subjects he touches on are a joy to read. I look forward to volume 3.

Wow, opium trade, taking note.

Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is fun in the way that mega-bestselling thrillers everyone's talking about are. One sees the ways the plot is going to twist from a good distance off, but still, it is all neatly worked out, and in the half of the novel told by the male narrator he is believably unreliable. It was a diverting, but forgettable, read.

Lola: I've been wanting to get my hands on Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction by Steven Martin (probably not the comedian). There's a good interview with the author at:

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/journey-into-the-opium-underworld/

1> I'm intrigued by this. Amitav Ghosh has been on my radar for a while now - like Lola says, the opium trade - love it, but I've read such mixed things about the first instalment in the trilogy. Can you say what you thought of it? I love the whole idea, but Im worried about how Ghosh executes it.

One of the treasures I picked up in my trawl through the second hand bookshops of Chiang Mai was this:

http://www.librarything.com/work/1951244/book/92398104

which looks jolly.

Short answer for the busy tomcat: I loved Sea of Poppies.

Here's what I wrote about it a couple of years ago:

Sea of Poppies is the model of what a historical novel should be. Unlike some authors working in this popular sub-genre, Amitav Ghosh, while he certainly gets the little details right, doesn't make his presentation of odd historical tidbits the driving force of the novel. Instead, he gives us a novel that is a cracking good read at the same time that it is a searing examination and indictment of globalization which, he reminds us, isn't exactly a new phenomenon: think opium and slaves, India and China, the US and England. I await, with bated breath, the next two books in the series.

I'd add that in both books of the trilogy, but especially in the first, he has a lot fun with language: Indian English, sailor's jargon, Cantonese pidgin, and so on.

4
My hat's off to Martin for becoming an opium fiend. I recall a book by Nick Tosches, The Last Opium Den, in which Tosches goes searching through southeast Asia - unsuccessfully, if memory serves - for, well, the last opium den.

I believe Graham Greene also enjoyed a good pipe after lunch, if Paul Theroux is to be believed.

>6 dcozy: thank you, sounds great. I'll look out for it.

When a new anthology of American poetry appears—Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry is just the most recent example—voices are inevitably raised over the editor’s selections and rejections, and sometimes over whether a new anthology of poetry from a period already well-surveyed is necessary at all. These arguments inspire some fiery polemics, and one can see why. Such questions—whether poet A is deserving of space when poet B gets none; whether the collection as a whole tells a story about the work surveyed that is compelling and new—are eminently worth debating, and one imagines that such discussions took place when Makoto Ooka published the Japanese version of 101 Modern Japanese Poems in 1998.

These questions, though, seem largely irrelevant to the English version that came out last year. Despite the admirable and sustained efforts of the journal Poetry Kanto, and the occasional but welcome special issues of other journals, despite the tireless work of translators like Jeffrey Angles, Hiroaki Sato, and, with this collection, Paul McCarthy, modern Japanese poetry remains little known outside the archipelago. There’s no question, therefore, that this book is necessary, and for readers who would be hard-pressed to name a Japanese poet other than Basho, the question of whether poet A is more worthy than poet B won’t be an issue.

In Carlo Lucarelli's Via delle Oche we follow the protagonist, De Luca, to the logical conclusion of his career as a cop who wants to be a cop and only a cop, unconcerned with the political whirlwinds going on around him. The future looks bleak for him at novel's end, and perhaps this is Lucarelli's statement--though he's never so heavy-handed a writer as to make statements--about what happens to people who believe they can make a life apart from the politics of their time and place.

Phantoms on the Bookshelves is one that I'm happy to have added to my relatively modest library, and it is the kind of book that will please most those who refer to their books as their "library." An aspect of the book those sorts of readers will enjoy most is the many books the author, Jacques Bonnet, mentions--future collecting, future reading. They will appreciate, too, that the book closes with a bibliography.

I love those books even though they fill me with seething envy. I'll have to look that one up. Have you by any chance read Sixpence house, about living the book-life in Hay-on-Wye?

I came across Alex Kerr's Dogs and demons the other day but it seemed too depressing, and published in 2001, I hoped it may be outdated... was I wrong?

We're reading Pu Songling's strange tales in the Ancient China group. They remind me in form of Kenko's Essays in idleness, a genre (if it's a genre--the Chinese call it biji apparently--so close to "bijou"!) I love the best. Must find more.

No fair, come back!

I was going to suggest the Japanese classic Ugetsu Monogatari, but noticed that you already had it.

Essays in Idleness has gone on my wishlist.

Oh Maki get them, get them, you'll love them!

If The Address Book were a novel it would stand a chance of being the best novel I read this (still very young) year. It is actually a true (?) account of how artist Sophie Calle finds an address book on a Paris street, but instead of simply returning it to the owner, decides to contact people listed in the book and see if she can, from their accounts of "Pierre D.," "get to know the man through his friends, . . . to produce a portrait of him over an undetermined length of time that will depend on the willingness of his friends to talk about him—and on the turns taken by events." She records these encounters in austere prose in entries usually no more than a page, and sometimes only a fraction of a page. The portrait that emerges is fascinating as much for the information Calle lacks as for the fragments she does unearth. The Address Book is a mystery, mysteriously profound.

Lola, I don't remember Kerr's book well enough to know how dated it might be now, but unfortunately much of what he writes about—the rivers of concrete, etc.—is something close to timeless.

I saw Kerr speak in Tokyo some years ago, and found his talk odd, because the city he kept holding up as one which, environmentally speaking, had, unlike Tokyo or Kyoto, done it right was Bangkok. If you've ever been to Bangkok you'll know how odd a choice that is.

His heart's in the right place, but I think he never quite got over the fact that even someone who speaks Japanese as well as he does, and knows as much about Japanese culture as he does, still is not accepted by the Japanese as one of them. But that's probably too much armchair psychologizing for one day. Have to run.

I'm in the middle of a couple of knotty texts, but in the throes of a nasty 'flu, I found myself unable to handle anything at all challenging. Luckily, I found in my kindle a Richard Stark (one of many pseudonyms used by Donald Westlake) that I'd downloaded for free when the University of Chicago offered it as some sort of promotion. The Score, one of the series featuring Parker, the cool, professional bank-robber and his colleagues, proved to be just the ticket for a feverish brain. Like Parker, Stark / Westlake is a consumate professional: The Score, like one of Parker's jobs, is perfectly designed, carefully planned, and elegantly executed.

If it's the bug that ruined January for me, my deepest sympathy. Vicious thing took forever to clear.

Lola, thanks. I think--fingers crossed, knocking on wood, rubbing my lucky rabbit's foot--that I'm over it. Been back at work for half a day, and feel . . . normal. How pleasant that is, and too easily taken for granted.

I found I could process movies much better than books during my down time, so I did get caught up on my to-be-watched stack: Dreyer's Gertrud and Day of Wrath, Marker's Sans Soliel and and La Jetèe, and An Agnes Varda documentary Daguerréotypes. All were good, but the Dreyer stood out.

And by the way, all Varda's documentaries are streaming free until February 17 here: http://dafilms.com/director/8991-agnes-varda/

I picked up Will Alexander's Diary as Sin, a short book, thinking it would be perfect reading to accompany me on a trip of a day or two. Boy was I wrong. It's short, but each sentence is so dense and fecund that careful reading and rereading--always rewarded--become necessary, a process that took more than the few hours on trains I had imagined would be sufficient.

The transparent style--the words and the manner in which they are organized are not important and should be ignored; only the "message" matters--has become such an overwhelming presence in prose that we forget what an artist as skilled as Alexander can do with words, that there are styles other than the transparent that give the mind a welcome workout. Alexander, who must be read with a dictionary at hand--and he misuses none of the arcane words in his vocabulary--constantly yanks our attention back to the language of which his art is made, and at the end of the experience that Diary as Sin is, we are grateful to him in the same way we are grateful to a challenging poet. The imagined monologuist at the center of the tale, who speaks the novel into tapes, does the same thing, and the tale this blind and brutalized woman creates is a monologue that stands with the masters of this form: Beckett and Bernhard. Will Alexander is a major artist too little known.

Unknown to me until your post. Most interesting.

That's some heavy cinematic fare you went through while ill; it's a wonder if I can watch anything more complicated than cartoons when flu'd. Then again. So much is on the cartoon level these days...

I'll confess, I dozed a little during Sans Soleil--and it didn't seem to matter.

It's been an age--Sans Soleil is the one that begins with the American pilot grinningly exulting over picking out the next nifty Vietnamese target, no? That riveted me, in pure horror, for all the rest, although yes, the collage format can be distracting.

Marker was great.

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate consists of the the first three volumes (first published between 1986 and 2001) of Nathaniel Mackey's ongoing prose project, a series of epistolary novels in which the letters (we only get one side of the correspondence) are written by a multi-instrumentalist member of a band comprised of other multi-instrumentalists committed to a fusion of avant-garde jazz with music from other cultures, especially Africa and the African diaspora.

It is common for music to be described in terms of speech: we talk about different voices, statements, arguments, calls, responses, and so on. Mackey doesn't quite turn this way of talking about music on its head, but he does develop it in unexpected and enticing directions: the band members argue and discuss everything from philosophy and sex to dreams, history, and society in the course of making their composed and improvised music, and Mackey puts these musical arguments into words that attempt to capture not only the essence of the arguments, but also what is extraneous to the verbal: the music.

He may not be entirely successful—how could he be?—but he does give us prose that is almost as fun to read, though of course fun in a different way, as jazz improvisation at its best. A bonus is Mackey's wide knowledge of (mostly) modern jazz. We learn a lot from the conversations of his characters about the music that has inspired them, and there is a complete discography at book's end: several new albums entered my collection as a result of reading Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus's Run and Atet A.D..

Lola: I was feverish when I watched Sans Soliel, but the truth is I don't remember the scene you describe (doesn't mean it wasn't there). The one that sticks with me from beginning of the film is of travelers to Japan's Northernmost island, Hokkaido, on a train. Many are asleep, and those whose eyes are open seem more asleep than awake. They all look like refugees or survivors of some sort of catastrophe—though apparently they're on vacation.

Chris Kraus's Summer of Hate is an excellent novel about what happens when the path of a hip, cosmopolitan, intellectual, the sort of woman who writes novels like this one and publishes them with Semiotext(e), crosses that of a damaged ex-con, the sort of guy ground down by the institutional American hatred of the poor. It's tautly written literary noir, an existential novel for our time.

A Clean Kill in Tokyo is a competent thriller in terms of narrative--protagonist gets in a jam, uses ingenuity and brute force to kill the people responsible for that jam, escapes until his next jam. What makes it better than competent is the complexity of the main character, the assassin John Rain, a character who, let's face it, is a stone killer, and seems to feel very little remorse, even when he inadvertently kills not such bad guys rather than actual bad guys. That Rain is not an entirely good guy, but convincingly conflicted, coupled with the well-done and accurate Tokyo setting, makes this a pleasurable diversion.

Have you read any Amelie Nothomb, David? The books set in Japan? I read the other day Ni d'Eve ni d'Adam, about a couple years she spent in Tokyo when she was 21-22, with a young Japanese boyfriend. Lots of "culture clash" moments. I like her deadpan humour.

The description of climbing Fuji really made me want to do it--have you?

Lola:

There's a saying in Japanese to the effect that everyone should climb Fuji once, but that only a fool climbs it twice.

I've climbed it twice.

I did read Nothomb's book a long time ago. (Tokyo Fiancé is the English title.) I remember it as being okay, but--the memory's hazy here--I seem to recall a lot of set pieces that turn up all to often in the foreigners-write-about-Japan sub-genre.

The all time best book in that sub-genre is Alan Booth's account of walking the length of Japan, The Roads to Sata. Strongly recommended.

And the foreigner who taught most of us foreigners who think about Japan how to do it, Donald Richie, has passed away. There's a good remembrance here: http://philipbrasor.com/2013/02/22/donald-richie/

"If Molly Bloom was a real woman writer, she would probably be dismissed as mad and unnecessarily pathologized. We glorify our male literary hysterics who often channel women and condemn our female literary hysterics." This captures in a nutshell (an altogether too reductive nutshell) the gist of Kate Zambreno's Heroines, a revisionist look at the "wives" of modernism: Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, and others. It's hard to disagree with her here, or when she extends her argument to the present, and argues that women's writing is still often pathologized and silenced (but that the Internet has made things a little better). There's much to quibble with, too, Must women's writing necessarily be autobiographical, "about our psychological histories, the truth of our toxic girl-pasts sic? it seems to me the hyphen belongs between "toxic" and "girl": the book is oddly edited--but some of the oddities are surely intentional, our gooshy, goopy, confessions," and while Zambreno is right that such writing should certainly not be ruled out on account of its roots in autobiography, such texts, it needs to be acknowledged (and Zambreno does seem to understand, but dismiss this concern) that such writing can slide over all too easily into solipsistic writing-as-therapy. The quibbles one might have with Zambreno, however, are a product of the book's strength. She is taking a stand, one that we are compelled to take seriously enough to argue with (and we male readers may worry that some of our quibbles are rooted in precisely the ways of thinking about men, women, and literature that Zambreno is attacking). As interesting as the content of Heroines is its form. Appropriate to the argument she is making, the book is a mix of autobiography, biography, criticism, literary history, and pop culture, and is never, ever dull. Zambreno may be opening up a new avenue for literary criticism, and for feminism as it pertains to literature. (Given her subject, I was a bit surprised that she never mentioned Antonia White.)

Noting the Booth recommendation. Well, if you climbed Fuji twice, I envy you at least once! Yes, Richie. I have a few of his books around... and Donald Keene's. I space them out as special treats.

Donald’s rationale for staying here, his insistence that Japan was more stimulating than likable.

Har.

#32

Don't know whether I'm following the argument, and whether, with my abysmal record of reading modern fiction I should even talk, but what isn't at least in some degree and manner autobiographical? (Outside genre lit, say.) Jane Bowles' Two serious ladies, for instance--is it really more autobiographical than, say, Hemingway, or Updike's Rabbit saga or Roth's Portnoy? And in some way that it would matter, for the quality of writing, the worth and interest of the book?

That said, I don't quite understand taking the example of these three, who, as far as I know, weren't "actually" writers. I have Zelda Fitzgerald's Save me the waltz (unread)--did she write or want to write more? I mean, is the "hysterics" found in their writing or their lives? Why compare life to books?

the truth of our toxic girl-pasts sic? it seems to me the hyphen belongs between "toxic" and "girl"

Girl-pasts makes sense to me. The whole phrase makes sense (alas). The way I see it, every woman who reached cognitive adulthood has had to go through realisation of being a being of lesser worth in the eyes of the world. This is a female-specific experience (somewhat analogous perhaps to what a racially or ethnically disadvantaged class might experience), an eternal insult and wound. It follows us through time and space. There is nowhere in the whole world to escape, except quite literally in a room of our own. Which is only as good as one's powers of leaving the worldly shit outside the walls are.

RIP Donald Richie.

I'm curious. Will he be buried in Japan? or shipped back to where he came from in a box?

Lola: It's hard to encapsulate Zambreno's argument, because she's all over the place: she characterizes her own writing as "bulimic."

Zelda apparently did want to write more, and wrote a different version of Save Me the Waltz than the one actually published. The reason for the changes was that Scott felt terribly, terribly threatened by Zelda's use of material from their lives, and particularly her life, that he felt were his property, to make use of in his art. He used all his power as a husband, a man, and a literary lion to appeal to doctors, agents, publishers, and lawyers to stop her unless she made the changes he stipulated.

Zambreno's point is that women writers have been marginalized and pathologized for exactly the things that male writers are celebrated for. It's hard to disagree with this, even if one does argue with Zambreno from time to time about the details.

Tom: I haven't heard what the plans are for Richie's remains, but I very much doubt they will be returned to Lima (pronounced like the bean, as he always used to remind people), Ohio. I imagine he will be cremated, as is the norm in Japan, and that his remains will remain in the country that was his home.

Dave Hickey is the art critic I most enjoy reading, and an essayist of no mean ability . In The Invisible Dragon, originally published in 1993, and then in this revised and expanded edition in 2009, he is a bit less unbuttoned than he is in the wonderful Air Guitar, but perhaps the rigor was necessary in a time when beauty in art was--perhaps it still is--undervalued. He writes well about, among other things, the cant surrounding the Robert Mapplethorpe brouhaha, and also about Mapplethorpe's art. "They may," he writes of Mapplethorpe's photographs, "be legitimate, but like my second cousins Tim and Duane, who have paid their debt to society, they are still far from respectable." That's an example of the wit and irreverence, buttressed by substantial knowledge, one can always count on from Hickey. Start with Air Guitar, but having consumed those essays, you'll probably want to move on to The Invisible Dragon.

I would have liked James King's Under Foreign Eyes: Foreign Cinematic Adaptations of Postwar Japan better if it had been presented as an encyclopedia of Western cinematic representations of Japan (not "adaptations," as the subtitle has it). Then I wouldn't have expected analysis of and interesting claims about such films and would have been satisfied with the plot summary after plot summary the author gives us. This quibble, which boils down to Under Foreign Eyes not being the book I wanted it to be, is perhaps unfair. There's no excuse, though, for the sloppy editing: the same name spelled two different ways on a single page, words mis-used, sentences incoherent. To his credit, though, King did sit through a lot of movies of variable quality, and his recapitulations have made me aware of a few that might be worth tracking down.

Well, since the loss of my one fun go-to art critic, Robert Hughes, I could do with a replacement. I could never understand, that is, feel the outrage Mapplethorpe's photos caused in Americania. There are so many more provoking, outright pornographic photographers; whereas Mapplethorpe's aesthetic is sedate, sculptural, contemplative... Rarefied, even. Proof that one can take tasteful pictures of engorged dicks. And how can something that is tasteful not be respectable?

But maybe I'm just too much of a pervvy Euro to get it.

Incidentally, this reminds me of something I read not too long ago, Patti Smith's memoir Just kids, basically the story of her friendship/loveship with Mapplethorpe. A great read, the sort that makes you nostalgic for someone else's youth.

Right, us damned pinko European perverts simply don't get it.

Somebody at a place I used to work had made a photocopy of one of Mapplethorpe's images to use–a braver teacher than I–in a class on censorship. That image ended up in the box of recycled paper next to the copy machine. I have to admit, expecting as I was the usual miscopied article or worksheet, the fellow (is it the artist himself?) with a bullwhip up his ass gave me a start.

Part of Hickey's point is that Mapplethorpe's work is also (but of course not only) pornography.

And to tangle threads, here's another good piece on Richie by the film scholar and friend of Donald's, David Bordwell:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/02/25/donald-richie/

Part of Hickey's point is that Mapplethorpe's work is also (but of course not only) pornography.

Ah, well, I disagree completely. Not sure Hickey's the one for me, then.

Well, I think Hughes said about the same thing. The idea is that you're not really doing Mapplethorpe's work justice by ignoring the content and pretending one's response is entirely aesthetic.

Hickey: " . . . Hardly anyone considered, even for a moment, what a stunning rhetorical triumph the entire affair signified. A single artist with a single group of images had somehow overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystification that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threatened those in actual power with his celebration of marginality. It was an extremely cool moment, I thought, and all the more so because it was the celebration, and not the marginality that made these images dangerous. . . . you have to credit Senator Jesse Helms. In his antediluvian innocence, he at least saw what was there, understood what Robert was proposing, and took it, correctly, as a direct challenge to everything he believed in."

There is a good lecture of Hickey's available on YouTube if you want a taste. The link for the YouTube version is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyx-DlK96s8, but if you have iTunes there's a better quality version, one that's not chopped into pieces and shot from someone's iPhone. Search the iTunes store for Dave Hickey and you'll get directed to a list of lecturers from some lecture series. Hickey's about number 30 (and there are also some other interesting talks there).

>35 dcozy: Thanks. I ask because as I get older, it becomes more and more of a moot question: what to do with one's earthly remains, a question brought home to me vividly a couple of years ago with the death of my dear friend, Serafim Yevgenyvich Yusupov, who spent most of his adult life in Japan and Taiwan, but when he died suddenly and unexpectedly, having left no provision, he was put in a box and shipped off to the states because he had a US passport. Now my dear dead friend is lying for eternity in some godawful cemetery in Texas, which I know would have horrified him.

BTW, count me in as a leftish redish Pinko European.

It would be terrible if some bureaucrat at the embassy shipped what remains of Donald off to Lima. I'm sure that's not what he would have wanted.

#42

Yes, I think I'd need more to grasp fully what Hickey's on about (what is "pornography" to him, to begin with?), but I do get a feeling we are looking at these photographs from entirely different bases, backgrounds, whathaveyou... Does one's response--what kind of response?--determine whether something is "pornography"? Because all kinds of people are excited erotically by all kinds of stuff. Or is it about the "I know it when I see it" response? I couldn't care less what Jesse Helms thinks is porn, or what he thinks about porn.

But, essentially, I don't believe in pornography at all, to me all representations of sex and sexual responses to art are covered by the "erotic". Pornography is an economic, market category, not aesthetic one. My angle.

I've never been much of a fan of "golden age" mysteries, nor of the English jocular tradition, but every so often I give books that might fall into those categories (or their overlap) a try. There are lots of readers whose taste I respect who swear by them. Having read The Case of the Gilded Fly (1954), a golden age mystery written after the heyday of that sub-genre I'm still not entirely convinced—but neither was I bored. The author, Edmund Crispin, is witty and erudite, and provides us with a cast of characters that are engaging. The book was a pleasant diversion, but when I want to be diverted I'll always turn first to something a bit more hard-boiled.

Yeeees, Crispin would be the "one of these is not like the others" item on the background of your crime reads. I think I read that one (I know I read The moving toyshop, although don't ask me what it was about), to mild amusement--but one really must be in the mood for nonsense. I mean nonsense in the Edmund Lear sense. Have you read John Dickson Carr? Gervase Fen is a sendup? tribute? of/to Carr's Gideon Fell. Carr's plots are even more outlandish and bizarre than Crispin's. Possibly a watermark in that kind of detective fiction.

I love John Dickson Carr and Fire, Burn! and The Devil in Velvet are particular favorites. See http://jdcarr.com/ for some wonderful covers

There's a point in The Gilded Fly where Fen does something embarrassing and says that he hopes Gideon Fell doesn't hear about it. I've heard good things about Carr, and will probably give him a go when I come across him in a used book store or charity shop (as was the case with the Crispin). Interesting to learn from wikipedia that Crispin was the pseudonym of an alcoholic composer.

Fun fact: John Dickson Carr also wrote under the name Carter Dickson

A few decades ago Peter Dimock was doing some research into how people living around the time of the American revolution and the early days of American nationhood, felt about the history they were living. What he found was that a "triumphant narrative of a redeeming national American greatness" displaced every other way of telling the story so that the documents he was reading "broke off abruptly, ending almost before they could begin." "There was," Dimock writes, "a disturbing incoherence about them."

He believes that in our time, too, any way of understanding the incarceration without trial, the renditions, the torture, the killing of innocents, that the USA now endorses in the name of keeping the heimat, er, I mean "homeland," safe, or winning the "war on terror," has displaced other ways we might understand the frightful story we are living. George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time is an attempt "to write a novel that explores what Dimock believes is "a national narrative failure." I've not read another novel that is formally similar. It takes its shape from those early self-help manuals, the spiritual exercises of folks like Ignatius Loyola. Dimock posits a narrator who, among other things, ghost writes memoirs of those enabling the torturers, and who comes up with a series of such exercises designed to wake himself and others implicated in such practices—all Americans—to the narrative failure they have experienced, and to address ways of repairing it.

Both thematically and formally this small book is ambitious. In the end I admire it, both for the author's moral seriousness, and for his attempt to do something new, more than I actually enjoyed reading it.

I didn't know Nanao Sakaki, but I was in his presence twice, and both times he filled the room—rooms that were already full of interesting people. His collected poems, How to Live on the Planet Earth, too, are rich in the energy and wit with which he lived his life, but it seems to me the energy, the wit that defined him is at its most vibrant in his shortest and simplest poems. One example:

If you have time to chatter

Read books.

If you have time to read

Walk into mountain, desert and ocean

If you have time to walk

Sing songs and dance

If you have time to dance

Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot

One is grateful to Maine's Blackberry Books for bringing his scattered work together.

Great.

David Albahari's Leeches is an absorbingly paranoid journey through Kabbalah, conspiracy, antisemitism, pot-smoke and Serbian politics in the run-up to the bombing. Entirely unparagraphed, the book flows from one scene to the next, and it's hard to stop turning pages. The dread is palpable, and one imagines this might be a reflection of how the citizens of Belgrade were feeling as they waited during those days.

Lola, do you know Albahari's work? Apparently he lives in Canada now.

I haven't read him (yet, I think I have a couple of his books around), except for some journalism, long ago... culture, book reviews, and general chatter pre-Yugoslav wars. Yes, I heard he was in Canada. It's always odd to imagine what could those people end up doing outside their cultural milieus... must be a dismal existence.

Casting Off, the final volume in Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicle, is, like the others, very readable realism. I enjoyed the earlier volumes more because, or so it seems to me in hazy memory, they were better at giving a picture of the years around World War II, and less soap-operatic. Casting Off was still enjoyable enough, though the coincidences and happenstances that made possible the more or less happy endings in the lives of each of the characters it followed—an unexpected inheritance; the discovery of thirty or so paintings by Joshua Reynolds in a forgotten maid's room—detracted a bit from the grit and privation of postwar England (felt even by upper class folk like the Cazalets) that Howard had been at pains to establish.

A private eye novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is, with its odd mix of the occult with the mean streets we've come to expect, entirely original. This is the first in what will surely be a series, and I am eager to follow the further adventures of Ms. DeWitt.

I remember how exciting it was, back in the '70s, to discover Gabriel Garcia Márquez and other Latin American writers who seemed to offer a whole new way of writing fiction. Sure, magical realism, as Márquez's style came to be called, was overdone in the years to follow by the master's epigones, and sure it's a style that's easy to parody, but at the time it was pure gold.

Martín Solares is no magical realist, but in The Black Minutes he gives us a narrative that is, in its fecundity, reminiscent of the Latin American Boom . He grafts his tale—a detective story within a detective story—onto a police procedural, and gives us something that transcends the genre to such an extent that it has to be considered something else: literature at its most rip-roaring.

Nice praise!

Nicholson Baker is in top-form in The Anthologist. He combines two of his modes: avuncular observer of the minute and often missed and ranter at a society that seems to want to discard everything old. In this case Baker, or rather his protagonist, Paul Chowder (Baker noted in a recent Paris Review interview that his writing is eighty percent autobiographical), rants at what he feels was a wrong turn taken by poetry in the Pound era: the rejection of rhyme. One may not agree with Baker/Chowder's conservative take on what poetry should be, but one will learn a lot about poetry, and, as with all Baker's books, about life from this book.

Tristan Garcia's Hate: A Romance is about the cultural, political, and intellectual life of France—which is to say Paris—in the last two or three decades. Since that life can be seen as a series of conversations (also arguments, shouting matches, and hissy fits) this is appropriate: we never quite know what Garcia thinks about AIDS, Israel and Palestine, head scarves on Moslem women, Internet culture, or any of the rest of the issues that he, or rather his characters, are on about. We do see them loving each other, and thanks in large part to a sort of man without qualities from the provinces, hating each other, and doing their best to destroy each other, before the novel's end. The book is compelling, though, thanks to the odiousness of this interloper, at times it is hard to read. Hate is the 27-year-old author's first novel (he's also published a book of philosophy), a fact that makes it all the more impressive.

Interesting. I'm reading a "young-Frenchman" book on my commute which sounds like the opposite: it's all about love.

If you're on a young-Frenchman (and woman) jag Hate is worth a look.

It's all about what's on the cover these days... this one has a St. Sebastian, tastefully arrow-bedecked, by Il Sodoma... who apparently couldn't get enough of the subject (at least three paintings I recall).

I swear I shall go babble back in my thread soon--2013 was too harrowing for words so far.

"Hate" has Andy Warhol's "Querelle" on the cover. Appropriate. http://bit.ly/Y62MR9

There is, I am sure, a lot of roman-a-clef stuff going on in the novel, much of which is going over my head, though the philosopher character is pretty clearly André Glucksman.

And I look forward to more Lolaesque babbling, and I'm sorry to hear about the harrowingness of this still very young year.

Readers of Dawn Powell must be grateful to Gore Vidal for bringing that, for a time, forgotten writer to our attention. Unfortunately, although she surfaces now and then on the Internet, Theodora Keogh has yet to find such a high-profile champion. That's a shame, because The Tattooed Heart alone demonstrates that she is worthy of our attention. It is the story of a chaste, though always simmering, first love between a twelve-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl, a summer romance destroyed by adults and adulthood. Most of the story takes place on a New England estate with lots of woods for the young people to roam in, and the atmosphere is almost gothic: accompanying the young lovers one sinks into Keogh's world as into a dream. Published in 1954, the novel remains compelling. Surely it, and the rest of Keogh's work, are worthy of reissue? NYRB, are you listening?

Dr. Kenjiro Setoue, a successful surgeon, took a temporary job at a clinic on a remote Japanese island in the South China Sea. He intended to stay six months, but has ended up spending his life in that remote place and caring for the people there. Setoue's Island Journals, excerpted in Doctor Stories: From the Island Journals of the Legendary Dr. Koto are unexciting, and that is as it should be. He does what needs to be done, and writes about it simply, but in a way that helps us to understand why he remains with the aging islanders, and why they have come to trust and depend on him. He is, it is clear, a good man.

Roz Kaveney's Rituals: Rhapsody of Blood, Volume 1 is a well-written fantasy—largely urban—about two heroines who, mostly independent of each other, set about removing evil-doers from the world. Both of the heroines are, perhaps, a bit too heroic—they hardly seem challenged by encounters even with monumental evil—but Kaveney's intelligence saves the book. She manages to weave together lots of the world's mythologies (she writes hilariously about Judeo-Christian mythology in particular) and augment them with her knowledge of music, opera, history and literature to produce a fantasy more than usually engaging.

Though not quite as coldly elegant as The Tattooed Heart, Theodora Keogh's The Double Door is another excellent short novel that belongs on your "we forget how weird the '40s and '50s in the USA were" shelf. The double door of the title is between two buildings in New York City. The first is occupied by a family made up of a neurotic and unlovable mother, a girl with a heart of ice who is her 12-year-old daughter, and the girl's father, a South American gigolo who passes himself off as European nobility. The other is where the nobleman indulges in debauchery with a select circle of friends augmented by young men picked up off the street. That one of this gang is a monk on leave from the monastery only adds to the gothic tone of the book. It's not surprising that one of the few positive reviews Patricia Highsmith ever wrote was of one of Keogh's novels. Fans of Highsmith's cold eye will certainly enjoy her work.

Well, THAT goes straight to the top of the old "to get" list! I admit, I'm curious about whatever it is that quickened Highsmith's lump of ice.

A Lonely Resurrection (previously published as Hard Rain is the second I've read in Barry Eisler's series about assassin John Rain, and I'm afraid I'm hooked. They're well written, his evocation of Tokyo rings true, and his protagonist is interesting. It seems odd to suggest that the actions of a character who is a cold-blooded assassin could be morally ambiguous, and in most novels like this he would not be; he would be either a good guy--his assassinations were somehow justified--or a bad guy--defined as such because of his assassinations. Rain moves back and forth between those camps: sometimes he's only in in for the money, but thinks he's at least not in the pay of absolute evil. Other times the people he kills are absolutely evil, so the killings could possibly be defined as heroic. Other times somebody irritates him, and ends up with a broken neck. In keeping his protagonist wondering about whether he's doing the right thing, whether he could choose to do otherwise, and whether he could atone for what he's done, he keeps us, his readers, guessing about how we should feel. This places the book a rung up from the run-of-the-mill.

Well, I said I was hooked on Barry Eisler's John Rain series. Winner Take All is good too, with Macau and Rio de Janiero added to the Tokyo setting of the first two books, along with increasing complexity in the assassin's character. A quality thriller.

I've yet to come upon some of Guy Davenport's books (if you remember, you brought him up before) but I got a 1973 copy of Hugh Kenner's The counterfeiters (literary criticism, mixed type essays)--and it's illustrated by Davenport. Talented person.

Davenport's paintings and drawings are remarkable. He didn't sell them, and I've never seen them in person, but there's quite a good book collecting them by Erik Anderson-Reece called A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport. Another one to put on your list.

Some of the early stories are illustrated, though Davenport complained that this was a failed experiment, that no one had ever properly noticed them. I did my best to notice them in my Review of Contemporary Fiction piece about his work, but unfortunately he had died before it came out.

"Really, when you think about it," the protagonist of Hiroyuki Agawa's autobiographical novel, Citadel in Spring, remarks in the book's last pages, "I grew up in the midst of war—it's been going on ever since I was a kid." The novel is the story of how youth is tainted by war, an account into which the author weaves together several strands: the protagonist's work as a code-breaker, his friendships, his literary aspirations, his romances, and finally—graphically and movingly—the destruction of his home town, Hiroshima. The protagonist, who is surely a stand-in for the author is self-centered and seems unable to care much about others. These qualities do not recommend him as a person, but the detachment of which his creator, Agawa, is capable, serves the novel well.

Most of us who read in English will know his teacher, Saussure; his friends: Collette, Apollinaire, Jarry, Valery; and the artists he’s influenced: Wilde, Borges, and Bolaño better than we know Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), author of The Book of Monelle. This is a shame, because this short book suggests that his eminent connections were no accident, that his erudition, sensibility, and style place him securely among those luminaries.

Barry Lancet's Japantown is a competent thriller. Read in conjunction with the thrillers by the other Barry, Barry Eisler, who also writes Japan-related thrillers, it did get me thinking about a sub-genre of pot-boilers: those written by people not of a culture which are meant, at least in part, to illuminate that foreign culture.

When the culture in question is an Eastern one, it seems inevitable that the author will trot out hoary traditions to account for the evil that the protagonist is pitted against, in addition to other moves of that sort. Sometimes this can be tiresome, but on the other hand, it is interesting to take a step or two back and think about how, though the book may be, to some extent, about, in this case, Japan, it is marketed to those outside of Japan: people may want nothing more than to have their stereotypes massaged.

If one aims to write a book that is subtitled "A Thriller" and hopes to sell copies, that's probably what one has to do, and to the extent that Lancet's and Eisler's books do that successfully, they are interesting to read for the ways in which they illuminate the culture in which they'll have to make their way: American culture.

I think I feel an essay coming on.

A good biography is never just about the man or woman who is its subject. It will always be about the world through which the subject moved. In I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens, Peter Hartshorn guides us with consummate skill not only through the events of Lincoln Steffens's eventful life, but also provides ample and fascinating context for that life. As near as I can tell, the history of progressive movements and people in the USA has been, the valiant attempts of a few historians and writers notwithstanding, all but cropped out of the story in favor of excessive attention to the founding fathers and "the greatest generation." Hartshorn's book is a useful corrective, reminding us how important people like Steffens and those among whom he moved—John Reed, Emma Goldman, Louise Bryant, Clarence Darrow, Max Eastman . . . the list could go on—were in the early years of the last century. History is, they say, written by the winners, and most of the crusades with which these people involved themselves were, if not absolute failures, then far from entirely successful. Perhaps that's why they've been forgotten. Perhaps that's why movements like "Occupy" are still necessary.

Barry Eisler's thrillers get better and better; my addiction to them continues. In Extremis, Rain, the protagonist, continues to grow more complex, development that continues in the next and (at present) final volume—which I'm already half-way through.

Suzanne Hall Vogel, with her then husband Ezra Vogel, wrote a book based on interviews with and observations of six Japanese families carried out in 1958. In the Vogels' study, Suzanne focused on the women in the families that participated in the study, and kept in touch with them until her own death in 2012. Thus, what began as a cross-sectional study the Japanese middle-class became a longitudinal study of Japanese women (expanded to include the daughters of the original participants) beginning in an era in which almost the only aspiration available to women was to be a "good wife and wise mother" (a role many fully accepted and even reveled in), to today when wife-and-mother is only one option available to women, though for economic reasons staying home with the kids is increasingly impossible even for those women who would like to do so. Vogel's study of the three families she chooses to focus on in The Japanese Family in Tradition: From the Professional Housewife Ideal to the Dilemmas of Choice is unfailingly (in a fly-on-the-wall sort of way) interesting, and most of her observations ring true, though her background in psychology seems to compel her to offer up just-so-stories to explain her subjects' behavior that are sometimes plausible, but at other times seem overly neat and simplistic.

Speaking of progressives, I've been getting some fascinating insight into the Japanese leftists scene, from the Meiji era to pre-WWII, focussed on women (Reflections on the way to the gallows). I wonder how well known these people may be to today's generations.

A comic book, we have learned, can be a suitable vessel for any sort of narrative (or even poetry) an artist wants to use it for. In Ayako, Osamu Tezuka shows us how effective a container manga can be for the sort of naturalist narrative Zola would have worked into a novel. A family—corrupt, rotten, decaying—is at the heart of it, and there are buried secrets—a buried young woman actually, imprisoned in a cellar for most of her life. The novel takes place in the postwar years, and Tezuka's narrative seems to suggest that there was corruption hidden behind the veneer his country wore during the Occupation and the go-go years that followed it. Lest that make this manga sound cumbersomely allegorical, Tezuka, like the best of the Naturalists, has given us a page-turner that is difficult to put down even as it is never just a page-turner.

Lola: My guess is that these women are not known at all. I have to confess that I'm entirely ignorant of them, and Hane's book sounds like a great way to remedy that. If you're interested in the extreme left you might enjoy a film I recently saw: The Baader-Meinhof Complex which follows the trajectory of The Red Army Faction, and does so in a way that is absolutely riveting, and astoundingly well-acted. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765432/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

The Japanese version of the Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army pretty much frittered into non-existence after they gunned down several of their own over doctrinal differences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Red_Army

The Japanese Red Army's leader was a woman named Fusako Shigenobu. Her daughter gave an interesting interview to the Japan Times a few years back: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2006/05/07/to-be-sorted/a-life-less-ordinary/#....

All of that, though, was, of course, decades after the women Hane writes about were active, and whatever the German or Japanese radicals were, "progressive" is probably not the word for it.

Kanno Sugako (1881-1911) was the first woman to be executed for political reasons in Japan, the leader of the Great Treason incident (attempted assassination of the emperor).

Fascinating lives, an indescribable mixture of misery and passion. Most didn't live past thirty.

When I first read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury more than three decades ago it was the first difficult—at the time it seemed VERY difficult—modernist text I read with joy rather than struggled through. As I was still learning how to read literature, I did struggle, so perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my struggle was transformed by the insights and delight that filled every page, by Faulkner's astute entry into the consciousness of his characters, by his exquisite prose style. Though there were aspects of the novel I'd misremembered, the first pages of Benjy's section—"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting"—and Jason's remark about the sparrows "rattling in the trees" had stayed with me over the decades, and have lost none of their power.

The summer Faulknerathon, preparation for a trip to Dixie in September, will continue with As I Lay Dying.

Having finished The Killer Ascendent I've caught up with Eisler, so now I'll have to wait to find out what the trying-to-reform-but-its-so-difficult assassin John Rain will get up to in his next adventure. These books are great pulp fiction.

Ask anyone who the greatest American novelist it is and nine out of ten times they'll say Hemingway or Fitzgerald. They're wrong, of course. It's Faulkner, more formally interesting than either, and funnier, too. The humor, the insight into his characters' psyches, the deep understanding of horror (by novel's end one character is dead, one on his way to the asylum, one permanently crippled, and one carrying an illegitimate child), are all on display in As I Lay Dying. The Faulknerathon will continue.

After the tight forms of The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying, it seems, in Light in August, Faulkner has decided to expand his palette. Life in the rural South is as horrific as it is in the earlier books. The weight of history compelling people to no good end remains heavy, and the tone has grown more explicitly Gothic. Also, however, it's a love story, one which we are allowed, at the end, to believe may succeed. Byron Bunch, one hopes, will get the girl. In addition, one sees Faulkner having fun with the variety of voices and narrative strategies he employs. The Faulknerathon will keep rolling along.

Faulkner's novels are arguably all about time. He never lets us forget that, though time may move straight like an arrow, that's not the way most of us experience it. He is a master at foreshadowing, hinting at events early, but allowing us to understand their significance, and how they are connected to other events, only later. Though one may prefer the stark modernism of the earlier novels, the gothic exuberance of Absalom, Absalom! allows Faulkner to demonstrate his mastery of his form, and also makes one wonder whether any other Southern novel is really necessary. The answer is probably yes . . . if it's by Faulkner.

I probably made a mistake reading Faulkner's letters before any of his literary work, it made me distrust his judgement, motives, everything.

I was delighted to stumble upon a stack of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries at a bookstall in Amsterdam. Needless to say, I snapped them up. Ezra Pound reminded us that poetry needs to be at least as well written as prose. Likewise, genre fictions needs to be at least as well written as literary fiction. This book, The Moving Target, the first in the series, is. Published in 1949, and set in a Santa Barbara-like town, it also gives us a riveting picture of California becoming California.

I took a detour from the Faulknerathon to read up on Southern music. The music in New Orleans is amazing, and Musical Gumbo by Grace Lichtenstein does it justice, giving us both the music's history, and its continuing vitality. The street musicians on Bourbon and Frenchman Streets are better than many musicians I've heard playing in clubs.

Moving from New Orleans North one encounters the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, home of Delta Blues, the music that was later carried North to Chicago and electrified, and which became crucial to much of the popular music that came after it. Robert Palmer, in Deep Blues, does a brilliant job of elucidating it, moving between the social conditions—harsh to say the least—in which it was born and the artists who invented it: American masters like Robert Johnson, Robert Lockwood, and most emblematically, a man who lived the whole history of the music, Muddy Waters. Essential reading for music lovers planning a turn in the South.

A clever mystery by the inventor of the clerihew, E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case, published in 1913, is a pioneering mystery wherein the detective takes a step or two away from sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes who might be seen as a collection of mannerisms. That's not always evident under the slow pacing of the book, and its flowery Edwardian prose, but nevertheless, it's clear that Trent is a touch more human than was the norm in in Bentley's time, not least from the fact that Trent's powers of logical deduction are not quite powerful enough for him to correctly identify the murderer of an American financier, the crime at the novel's center.

Lola: I have no doubt that the letters reveal Faulkner to be a first-class shit (not least for his genteel Southern racism), but I long ago came to terms with the fact that great artists sometimes are shits, and that being shits doesn't always make their art less great.

I can certainly understand, however, how Faulkner's shittiness deters you from making the trip to Yoknapatawpha County.

Ross Macdonald is a great writer who, oh yeah, wrote genre fiction. It's no surprise anymore I guess that genre fiction can contain great writing. If there are still any doubters, Macdonald will silence them with writing like this, from The Drowning Pool: "Reavis looked at me like a grateful dog. Which I was observing for rabies." or "He sat down at a table again, with his shoulders slumped like a padded coat on an inadequate hanger."

Hello, hello, hello! It's a curious quandary with Faulkner--he is touted as one of the great modernists, a pioneer of the stream of consciousness technique, someone who captured the finest nuances of human psychology--and yet, reading his letters, which clearly lay out his racism and prejudices, I can't believe he knew people at all. At best, he knew HIS people, those like himself, but I can't get excited about assuming that POV. (Someone who, for instance, seriously believes that blacks owe him gratitude for stopping to enslave them simply can't be held up as an example of a psychological genius.)

In short, because of what I read in his letters, I can't believe he wrote blacks well, so perhaps he wrote nobody well. Where there is stupidity there can't be virtue. It's worse than just being a "shit".

Moreover, I know that the Deep South is odious, and a hellish place. He loved it, I hated it. I can't find nor accept excuses for it, or the person who was ready to shoot blacks dead in the streets if they "rose".

I read a few of his stories, unencumbered by that ponderous biblical style he used in the novels (a mannerism I'm not fond of anyway). I can understand the seduction of his storytelling, the vivid voices, the humour. I just can't... believe him.

George Mann's The Affinity Bridge evokes and elaborates upon Victorian London with panache: pea-soupers, but also dirigibles and revenants (sort of like zombies). It's a boy's own adventure that draws its inspiration from Sherlock Holmes (the lead snoop is an eccentric genius who enjoys a bit of laudanum now and then). A diverting bit of fluff.

Ehud Havazelet's Bearing the Body seemed at first to follow a template familiar to readers of lit-fic, and therefore, a bit tired. Nathan Mirsky is a medical resident who is doing his best to destroy himself with alcohol, and to hurt those around him for reasons, and in ways, he doesn't, himself, understand. We turn the initial pages and expect, with a sinking feeling, that we will see him to continue to spiral down the drain until something--a good woman, nature, music--somehow redeems him. Snore. But in fact it's the novel that redeems itself as Nathan and his holocaust-survivor father, go to San Francisco to try to understand the circumstances around Nathan's estranged heroin-addict brother's death. Bearing the Body doesn't quite shake off the template--there does seem to be some sort of redemption at the end--but along the way the author, a master at foreshadowing, and also at setting up interesting parallels between different characters' circumstances manages to present an engaging use of that template, a novel all about the bodies we bear.

Subtle Bodies is a good novel. Since it's a Norman Rush novel, good is not good enough, given that his three earlier books are great: masterpieces. Domestic comedy and bedroom farce—even if the Iraq war looms in the background—are not Rush's forte. It's not that he does them badly; it's that he shouldn't be doing them at all. He's talked here and there about the battle he had to wage to keep Subtle Bodies from turning into a much larger book containing, among other things, a history of the American left. This more expansive novel is, I think, the one I would rather have read.

Oh dear, sad miss from my POV, I would have liked to read a history of the American left!

Not this December, though.

Hauled in a sack of old-ish crime novels for the next few weeks of hibernation.

With very little in the way of first-this-happened-then-that- happened plot (though an awful lot happens), filled with intriguing characters, ideas, language play, and not least laugh-out-loud humor, Nicola Barker's, Darkmans, which I've been meaning to read for the last decade ago, is a long novel that one wishes were longer.

Minae Mizumura's A True Novel is, in some ways, an updating and relocating of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to post-war Japan. That sounds like it could be quite awful, but Mizumura, far from slavishly following Brontë, makes it something entirely new: an experimental novel, a riveting narrative, a commentary on class, and also on the novel. That A True Novel is more than twice as long as Wuthering Heights—and that none of those pages seems unnecessary—is an example of just how different it is. That it will send readers back to Brontë's classic is, of course, another plus.

Lola, enjoy the crime novels. I'm beginning to feel in need of another installment of Lew Archer's adventures. Happy New Year!

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was my last read of the year, a reread, re-enjoyed as background for a review I'll write first thing in the new year.

There's a reason they call them classics.

Sure is! Happy new year, David. Looks like we're alone on this desert island--wouldn't blame you if you looked for a bigger audience!

I can't decide whether to try for a new year reviewing resolution or not. My inner imp seems to live for thwarting my best-laid plans.

Not quite alone - there are silent lurkers dodging behind the palm trees. And this one is appreciative, picking up the occasional reading hint, and enjoying the stylish contributions. As one with 4000+ books, and zero reviews, or even ratings, to his name, I'm in no position to encourage a new year reviewing resolution, Lola, but it has seemed a long seven months since the last post to Lola reads vol 2.

Happy new year to you both.

A lurker! A real, live, veritable lurker, in this forsaken pit! Wake up, wake up, Estragon!

Thank you, affle--happy new year! I feel I shouldn't make any forceful announcements, but 2014 could be the year of more stringent reviewing discipline, I could use the practice.

So affle, what have you been reading lately?

lurking here too. looking forward to a review of Mizumura. Happy new year to everyone!

Happy New Year, Murr. Settling down to write that review (for the Japan Times) today.

lurkers, lurkers, everywhere.
please keep up the conversation!

>108 dcozy: I have a very low tolerance threshold for yo-ho-ho related activities, so it’s been a good time to catch up on some reading. Two books shed light on remarkable leaders: Alex Ferguson’s My autobiography - Ferguson is the most successful manager in English football history - and Captain Worsley’s account of Shackleton’s boat journey. As leaders, a century apart, Ferguson and Shackleton each combined fierce authoritarian command with high levels of personal commitment and total support and concern for their charges, and shared perhaps nothing else beyond a hard apprenticeship - the older man in the late nineteenth century merchant marine, and the other in the Clydeside shipyards.

In recent months I’ve been revisiting some of the 30s to 50s genre fiction which was a staple of my teenage reading more than half a century ago - Eric Ambler, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham and the like. The most recent was Rogue male by Geoffrey Household, and it has weathered less well than most of the others. The unnamed aristocratic narrator is the rogue male of the title, a big game hunter become quarry, and living in the wild to evade both police and agents of a foreign power - 1938 is its date. Much of the book is a detailed survival handbook, the narration is suitably unreliable, but the plot and motivation depend on the punctilio of a caste, which is explained - and is familiar to someone of my vintage, but which doesn’t wash any more.

The spartan training of the English public schools of yesteryear is evident also in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The broken road, the long awaited third part of the account of his walk from England to Istanbul, also in the 1930s, published posthumously in the last few months. Although written years after the event, the style captures the glad-to-be-alive spirit of a very young man’s adventure.

My history reading has mostly skipped the seventeenth century, except for the scientific revolution, but I’ve just finished Christopher Hill’s excellent study of Oliver Cromwell, God’s Englishman, and I’m lining up some suitable follow up stuff.

Two more worth remarking: The Aspern papers is a perfect miniature, doing all it needs to do to acquaint us with its characters, surround us with Venice, and bring the story to its almost unbearably poignant conclusion - and nothing more - in about 90 pages in my edition. I had to keep putting it aside to spin out the pleasure. It’s such a refreshing contrast to the authorial willy-waving I come across too often: look at my big, big book with all my big, big ideas. And Four fields by Tim Dee, an account of the natural history linked to the human history of four fields - in the English fens, southern Africa, Chernobyl, and Montana - is not the sort of book much chronicled in the annals of The Hellfire Club, but it’s wonderfully observed and researched, highly literate, and possessed of a poetic sensitivity that marks it out as belonging to the upper ranks of the new nature writing.

Sorry to go on - you did ask.

{{{Makifat!}}}

#112

Oh, I enjoyed Rogue male a lot a couple years ago! I think I see what you mean, though, its tone is very much of its period, and the hero very much the superior English gentleman (who else would dare conceive of that scheme?!)

But I think his motivation, being much more serious than the usual whimsically arrogant "because it is there" dare-devilry, gives the enterprise depth and poignancy (in retrospect). Oops, I hope that's not too spoilery, that tight, fabulously understated little story really deserves its last-minute revelation.

Have you seen Fritz Lang's adaptation with Walter Pidgeon, Man Hunt? The novel's much better, but the movie's fun in its own right. Of course, they had to add a lady and a kid.

>113 LolaWalser: My point was not too well expressed: I didn't find the punctilio sufficient to generate the motivation, so the narration seemed unreliable when it should not, and the ending less of a revelation than it ought to have been. But twangingly taut, certainly, and brilliantly short. Thanks for the film tip, a known title but not seen, and unlinked in my mind to the book - it has a surprisingly long cast list for such a sparsely peopled tale. No cat credited. I'll track it down.

Don't expect too much from the story, but the cast is great! One of my axioms: any movie in which George Sanders plays a villain has by that very fact deserved praise.

hear hear, any film with George Saunders actually.

In fact if I wasn't a cat, I would be George Saunders.

Makifat! Happy New year!

Because Murr was kind enough to ask, here's my review of Minae Mizumura's A True Novel from today's Japan Times.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/01/18/books/a-true-novel/#.UtspwPaRXhM

MOST interesting!! *updates want list* (Also--there is still a Tower Records in Japan, and with a classical section?! Behold my bitter tears.)

I am intrigued by the upper class woman-lower class man motif as I just recently came across it in a couple famous stories by Higuchi Ichiyo. Seems it was one of her recurrent themes. Curious how it fits in a society as stratified and misogynistic as Japan's.

Yes, there is a Tower in Tokyo with a huge classical floor, and it's always busy. I know musical sophisticates from New York City who make a point of hitting that classical music floor when they're in town.

And this may be changing now, but not too long ago it really was rare to meet a middle-class or better young Japanese woman who hadn't had years of piano lessons and whose favorite composer wasn't Chopin.

Only peripherally connected, a young engineering student I've taught is apparently a very (like professional level) talented pianist. He's studied since he was a child with some Russians in Tokyo, and goes to Julliard for two or three months a year. (The engineering, I guess, is something to fall back on if the music career doesn't pan out.)

One writing assignment he did for me was a scathing review of a Lang Lang concert he had attended.

And Claudio Abbado has left the auditoreum.

Yes, tragic loss.

I would love to read that Lang Lang review. Loathe Lang Lang.

Good job on your Mizumura piece. I'm going to look out for it.