Boccaccio's Decameron. Because I should - and I need something amusing. I am also slowly carving my way through
The Thousand Nights and a Night, for the same reason.
Message edited by its author, Mar 16, 2009, 10:35am.
Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic or the Sexual Intellectual Why indeed? This tome weighs 1685 grams (3 lbs 11.5 oz) and is deforming my rib cage (I read in bed). I've started taking Vitamin D supplements, just in case my marrow collapses on the 'morrow.
Last summer, on MySpace of all places, a friend called my attention to D'Arconville's Cat, Theroux's minor masterpiece. It was unlike anything I'd read to that point, and its digressions (longueurs) were as interesting as the storyline. This lead to some background reading on Theroux, and his "take it or leave it I'll write whatever I damn please even if no one reads it" philosophy. A philosophy I have a very soft spot for, I might add.
Thence on to
An Adultery, another, not quite as long, novel devoted, again, to an obsessive relationship of an artist for his raggedy ann Beatrice.
And now, I find myself halfway through Laura Warholic. Theroux's "heroines", by the way, have become increasingly odd and unappealing over the course of his three novels, and Laura is such a wreck that I find myself reading on just to see how many different ways Theroux can describe her decrepitude.
One summer, many years ago, I sublet an apt on West 95th street. It was next to a SRO welfare hotel. On hot nights, I could hear the street noises through my open window. One Friday, a black woman with a very urban NYC accent, deep into her wine bottle, began berating someone else on her stoop regarding touching her dog. For the best part of an hour, she conjugated, subjugated, declaimed, and destroyed every possible variation of the phrase and the concept "Don't touch my fucking dog!" She was symphonic, avant garde, tapped into the universal energy source which exploded in the big bang. Even John Cage would have been astounded at her stresses and pauses, and at a loss to score them.
Until Theroux, I never came across another human who could similarly say the same thing so many different fascinating ways. The reason I'm now reading Warholic is 1) to see how many more times he can say IT and 2) to understand just exactly what IT is that he is saying.
I'm pretty sure his message is "Girls are nutz!" but at the same time it could be "Hah hah...Turn of the Screw on you... "Men are nutz!"
And finally - and not the least - there are the factoids. Theroux's novels, if stripped of the descriptive and narrative elements necessary to the "stories", would constitute, like a block of exotic swiss cheese, a proteinaceous nourishing mass of odd facts about art, history, sex, famous personalities, curious customs. A weirdo's Golden Bough of western culture. The ultimate desert island novel.
Wonderful review - and it brings on the guilt... I was ranting about this novel before it was published and yet I have not read it.
Theroux's work is a dense homage to literature and the English language. Just in Darconville's Cat, everything is there - the epic, the university novel, social satire, metaphysics, the occult, the revenge tragedy, romantic poetry, decadence and the gothic novel (and, like in Adultery, the wraith of Baron Corvo). But it is the language, rich and ripe to corruption, that either either allures or repels you. Theroux says that he has "lexical ambitions" (like another famous curmudgeon of English literature). All of his work is a love song to the English language. In the words of Dr. Crucifer (a devil, a cross-bearer, a cabbage): "How I love the language that can tell you this"
Message edited by its author, Mar 16, 2009, 3:19pm.
1) to see how many more times he can say IT and 2) to understand just exactly what IT is that he is saying.
Lol
Thanks for alerting me to this writer. I am dying to read him now.
I am reading Oblomov. it is making me very sleepy...
Peggy Guggenheim used to refer to
Samuel Beckett as her "Oblomov" - and Beckett's novels should be on every reading list, particularly if you interested in language and density (and everything else. By the way, Alexander Theroux's dissertation was entitled "The language of Samuel Beckett". Like Theroux, Beckett, most evidently in his earlier writings, required of the reader that s/he had steady access to the OED). Along with
Oblomov, of famous dense/modernist, if not voluminous, 19th century Russian novels, we should put in our homage to
Andrei Bely's St. Petersburg and his forgotten fellow symbolist/decadent compatriot,
Fyodor Sologub - particularly the
Created Legend trilogy and
The Petty Demon.
Message edited by its author, Mar 27, 2009, 8:53am.
Andrei Bely absolutely! I have not yet read Sologub, but everything is pointing in that direction.
ADTTMOT turning out to be a strange odyssey in the ambitions of a very mediocre author Ha!
Bang on!
I agree with tomcatMurr, but always thought I was alone in that perspective.
(and don't ask me about Shakespeare...)
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