Currently Reading, Katabasis Spoilers Abound, Proceed With Caution

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
I liked it quite a bit, but to be clear, it's more Foucault's Pendulum than The Name of the Rose: a perfectly enjoyable outing for academics who want to turn their brains off for a bit, not anything resembling a classic. It's also, to my surprise, more Piranesi than Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: the plot machinations are few, it's mostly about the inner life of the main character.

[spoilers]

Of course, as soon as you can piece together that Alice is not going to die in Hell, you can be pretty certain Peter won't, either. And yes, it is stupidly obvious that they're in love with each other in the way that only grad students can muster--they both kinda know it to be a bad idea and it doesn't stop them. So it then stands to reason that Peter won't actually be dead at the end, and everything else kind of unspools from there. (It was also clear right away that Peter had no plans to sacrifice Alice, it didn't make sense in the arc of the story.)

I see the reason for the negative reviews: people don't want a happy ending. I also see the frustrations with the academic side of things, but I was once in a freshman philosophy class and fascinated by paradoxes--the topic of my first paper was the Sorites Paradox. So I'm clearly the audience for it, to grasp pretty much all of the references. 

Currently reading, Catch-up edition

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
If I had to pick the least romantic thing in this book--there are many to choose from--it is our nominal hero taking for his last non-love-of-his-life sexual conquest (there were well over 600) a literal schoolgirl with braces whom he grooms for a year before trying anything. When this poor girl finds out she's being jilted, she kills herself, information which is communicated to our hero in a brief aside and never dwelt on.

The book easily reads as an anti-romance, but somehow I think that's not how it was intended.

 

William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
The book that briefly broke my reading system. Whereas your George Eliots, Charles Dickenses, your Dostoevskys and Tolstoys, etc etc, all break into nice little solitary units of reading, Faulkner demands to be read whole. There's something oddly compelling about the incantatory tone: not Proust, exactly, or Henry James; nor at the other end Thomas Bernhardt, where the long sentences are a kind of fugue repeating the same themes over and over again. Any particular piece of the writing will make next to no sense, but you emerge at the end of a chapter with a picture of the whole even so.

Not much to say about the plot except that if any one of the characters had hated black people less, none of it would have come to tragedy, but that's the American south for you. Well, that and the unwillingness to look a situation square in the face, or have an open and honest conversation.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners
A bunch of stories which are somewhere between perfectly fine and good, and then, wham, "The Dead". I suspect it plays better the older that you get, but even so, it's incredible to get ten versions of "this Irish father is drunk and sad" and then one of the high points of European literature.

 

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Another one that hits differently because I am older when I read it. I think sort of astonishing for the author to get at such a young age what it is like to be an older person looking back.  

Lyric of the day

"[I] never let a computer tell me shit"

-Del the Funky Homosapien, "Things You Can Do", Deltron 3030 

Something for the season

Currently Reading, Recently Read Edition

Anna Seghers, Transit
There are plenty of war novels that traverse a familiar groove: the futility of war (Catch-22, The Good Soldier Svejk), the overwhelming scope of war (War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma), the radical expose of evil where it seems like there is none. Seghers' The Seventh Cross is an example of the last. We know, she knew, everybody kind of could have known that the Nazis were the bad guys, and they received important passive and active support from regular Germans with all kinds of motives. The Seventh Cross is notable in this respect because it was written and published during the war; people come to know the truth in all sorts of ways, and that novel was one of them. Important, but hammering home a point we all know.

Transit is instead a very weird novel, because it is about a German who refuses to leave Europe even though he has very good reasons to want to leave; more importantly, he has--through a series of misunderstandings--the ability to leave. But he doesn't stay for noble reasons, to resist the Germans or to rebuild Europe once it's over: he just wants to be a farmer and not leave. It's like Casablanca if Rick decided to stay but because all he really wanted in life was to run a casino. The novel is even more interesting because it is the exact opposite of the decision Seghers made for herself; it has strong autobiographical elements except that, well, everything the main character does is different than what Seghers did. And it this was it becomes an interesting book, but also a frustrating one: Exillituratur without the exile.

 

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections
I read the first three stories. Every one was brilliantly done. Every one twisted the knife at the end. I decided to abandon it.

 

Charles Portis, True Grit
One of the hosts of my favorite podcast made an offhand reference to Portis, whose The Dog of the South I had read and felt indifferent about several years ago; I saw this while browsing the library shelves and decided to give it a go. Iconic, perfect, inimitable. Hard to say a bad word about it, except the part with the snakes at the end, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, though this was certainly the point.

 

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Reading this one day and then watching Wake Up Dead Man the next was a real exercise in--actually, you know what, going to blog this separately.

 

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
I was required to read this in high school and did not especially like it, finding it to be well short of scary or horrifying. Maybe five years ago I read and enjoyed We Have Always Lived In the Castle, so I thought I'd give it another go. I don't dislike it as a book, but I also think I am not its ideal reader. One must believe something I don't to make the plot work, but I'm at a loss for what that thing might be. It moves along well until the wife and the other person show up and then there's just too many ideas trying to reconcile themselves in not enough space. Maybe I'm not really convinced that Eleanor was captured in any meaningful sense by the house?  

Currently Reading, Guess I Don't Like Milton edition

John Milton, Paradise Lost
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

An apology to one of my good friends from grad school, who loved Milton and tried to get us all to read him: I did not like Paradise Lost. On a poetic level, I did not like it because it was a fusion of a bunch of things I don't especially like: a Roman cadence and insistence on highlighting the depth of reference of which he was capable (having recently read Ovid, this came across as Ovid in spades), a Greek insistence that every thought must be represented in speech (hat tip to Erich Auerbach for pointing that one out to me a long time ago), and a Catholic willingness to invent little filigree details to make the story "richer", which is to say longer. I had been led to believe Satan was a major character, but he disappears pretty early in the poem; its real hero is Angel Who Provides Exposition.

The thing about the story as represented in the Bible is that it is short and woefully short on details. It's not merely that Milton adds details, but that they begin to change the substance of the story itself in ways it's not clear to me that he's aware of. If Adam is prohibited from eating from a tree in Eden that's one thing; if he gets a long explanation from Angel Who Provides Exposition about what happened before Eden and also there's a bad guy who might be trying to sneak in, the meaning and import of Adam's actions change--especially if he does not pass any of this information on to Eve but subsequently blames Eve for not knowing it. Similarly, the human point of the Eden story seems to be that something has definitively come to an end with no particular hope of resolution; it's the first low point in a history full of low points. But Angel Who Provides Exposition explains to Adam that no, it's cool, it's all going to work out in the end; being banished but having definitive proof that things will be fine is very different than being banished and having no particular idea of how things will go. This is compatible, I suppose, with a certain kind of Calvinist reading, but it's not one that I'm aware of a Calvinist ever making, exactly.

It did strike me that this might just be churlishness, so I should read something that attempted to make use of a similarly gnomic passage in the Bible, and so I repaired back to Fear and Trembling for the first time since 1999? 2000? No later than 2001? And as it turns out, it uses similar material to quite a different end. Kierkegaard is working with some respect for the material and his own limitations--the text says what it says and he does not consider himself free to change it. In fact, he demonstrates conclusively that any other way one might frame the story would make it worse, and weaker, and that Abraham can only be a model in part because we cannot enter into the story or his mind other than how it is presented to us--it's just, in the end, a mystery. 

Trying to Summarize the Last 10-15 Years or So of Reading

The "read all of the classics of literature" goal I set for myself at age 15 is essentially done. There are some holes and Italy remains a weak spot. Herodotus, Lucretius, Chaucer, The Scarlet Letter, and a general recognition that I should be more familiar with pre-1900 English poetry, a thing I am absolutely not going to get on right away. I have read only two of the four classic William Faulkner novels and 1.5 of the classic three by Edith Wharton, but these are nits. There is still more to read, but nothing truly embarrassing.

For a long time my reading was dominated my themes or tastes--reading through modern Spanish-language literature, modern Japanese literature, that weird period where I realized I hadn't read a book by a white English-speaking man for six months and then just ran it out for another year. The four-five-six book system makes things a little more intentional and methodical. Thus I have been working through German and Austrian literature for over a year or so. There's been a lot of coverage but not a lot I really love, though a lot of it comes close.

A distinct Spanish-language phase that ran from 2009-2015 or so. Soldiers of Salamis easily the best of this group. A general distaste for El Boom: I did not entirely enjoy Vargas Llosa, Cortazar or Garcia Marquez (or Allende), or enjoyed them in the way I enjoy Thomas Mann: obvious genius and skill that does not speak to me personally usually through too thorough commitment to the scheme. Spanish-language poetry a tough field; Mexican poetry tends to do pretty well in translation, but whatever it is in Ruben Dario, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda et al is lost on me. All minor Spanish-language writers are great, however; regardless of genre, their books punch at or above their weight no matter length or complexity, and you are like as not to find a work of real genius. (I don't even like the genre of Our Share of Night but it doesn't even matter, the book was great.)

The Spanish phase was replaced by Japanese literature with A True Novel, which everyone compared to Wuthering Heights but to me felt more like A Hero of Our Time. From there to Natsume Soseki, especially I Am A Cat but all others. Haiku was, alas, not as much of a hit as I wanted. We eventually ended up in feminist postwar fiction and genre, especially crime (especially especially feminist crime, a fascinating genre, go read Out). Breasts and Eggs. Territory of Light. Another high-value literature, but very slow in translation, especially since there is somewhat lighter fare that sells better and gets translated more readily.

Which I suppose leaves German-language literature as the current phase. I continue to read it because I do see something of myself and the more esoteric ways of my family in it, but I have to admit there's not really any classics here. Anniversaries is closest, but it's still hard to disentangle how I feel about it from the year of my life I spent reading it. Post-reunification literature has not entirely made it past Die Wende, and I suppose I can't blame them: it must've been awesome to be young in Berlin in, say, 1992. (It was not awesome to be young in Michigan in 1992, but I didn't expect it to be, so.) 20th century German literature has an obvious central gravitational pull, and though my appetite for exile-or-staying-or-surviving-or-thriving is higher than average, a lot of these works have narrative problems because events are what they are: you will probably not escape. If you do escape, you will probably have a bad time. If you stay, you will absolutely have a bad time, even if you never lifted a finger to help the Nazis. 

Classical German literature is also a bit of an issue: there's Goethe and then a bunch of dramatists and poets. The poets work in what feels to me like a high classical and romantic metier that is difficult to read at any length (I am having the same problem with Milton and Paradise Lost at this exact moment.) Goethe is weird and interesting, though it was disappointing to learn that he was, charitably, and even by the standards of the time, a dirtbag, not unlike my hated Rousseau. 

I ran through British 20th century literature for quite awhile--Powell a particular favorite, and Elizabeth Taylor still; Pym did not interest me enough to try more; Elizabeth Bowen did, but I foundered on the (excellent) short stories. The Transit of Venus and especially The Great Fire were and remain favorites. Everything Persephone Books publishes is worth it, and the care they put into their editions is amazing, but the cost eventually became prohibitive. Heat Lightning and The Shuttle and The Fortnight in September, the best beach book ever. Girl, Woman, Other. It remains a reliable source of perfectly solid novels of all kinds.

Lagos and Nigeria ran hot for a few years, but it was hard to get a reliable read on what was really good coming out of Western Africa, a sort of version of the Japan problem.

And America, well... it has become clear to me that modernism and romanticism and the sheer dreaminess of the American Dream touched something in American letters from Whitman through World War I, but by the time Hemingway converted to Catholicism, it was over, and never to return. My Átonia and An American Tragedy are unspeakably beautiful. Modern, post-1990 literature is fine and sometimes great, but I wouldn't hang my hat on it.

I may have come around on LeGuin, but I won't be reading Earthsea. Philip K. Dick works best as a treatment writer for movie premises. Pynchon is very weird, and not in a good way.

I like Sally Rooney's novels.