Currently Reading, Somehow We Have Almost Completely Turned Over Again Edition

Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I read this for the first time at the single weirdest reading time in my life: the summer after I completed my dissertation, while living on ~no money and waiting to move to Princeton. I did not like it then, and was especially hostile to the non-story chapters. 

This time, it's pretty undeniably charming. There's some humor and no particular hurry to get anywhere, just to leave and to go. In that way, it's pretty American. (It is, of course, odd to think of this as being written in almost the same world as Balzac and Dickens, and Baudelaire.)

 

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
A fabled writerly trope, observed in the wild: a new female character whose introductory paragraphs includes an extensive description of her breasts. She later stands naked in front of a mirror and contemplates her breasts for an extended period of time. I would abandon the book, but I am... 1000 pages into it (only 300 into volume 2) and have less than 100 pages of completed material left. How far I will make it into the unorganized chapters and unfinished notes is yet to be determined, but the novel has become less interesting once it went from "novel of ideas about the fall of the Austrian empire" to "weird sexual hangups of early 20th century Austrians".

 

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
I am now in the very long (~150) Baudelaire section. When it was on general Parisian topics, it was easy to see the thrust of it all, and all of the pieces fit in neatly: the transition from Revolutionary Paris to modern/20th century Paris by way of glass and steel, hence the arcades, to department stores and Haussmann, and on through Zola and modernity. But I don't quite see what the thesis on Baudelaire is intended to be: he's a transitional figure from say Hugo to the Symbolists and Decadents as well as modern French verse, sure. He's a flaneur, an observer of the dark heart of modernity, and in his willingness to be unsparing he gives a better picture of the decay than Haussmann. But there's Zola, and Dreyfus, and Proust, and it seems pretty easy to form a picture of French modernity that doesn't involve him at all, or can work around him.

This is perhaps good context to say that I've made several attempts at Baudelaire over the years and simply don't get it: some of the poems are good, but the hit rate isn't high. Unlike other languages, I don't know French well enough to follow the translations, and it does seem quite possible that something vital is lost by midcentury American squishes who don't want to directly translate what they consider to be vulgar. But I just don't see it. 

 

Horace, Odes
I like wine, too, but c'mon.

 

Herta Müller, The Appointment
I was indifferent to cold on this one to begin, but as it gradually became clear that (spoiler alert) the main character was going to miss her appointment with the secret police, possibly on purpose, I warmed up to it. I do think the pacing and some of the thematic concerns were a touch overdone--if you've read one narrative about the depredations of communism in Romania, you've read them all--but I didn't dislike it.