Books dcozy finished in 2012

I hope dumping this topic here won't be considered an intrusion. If it is, Lola, say the word and I'll make it vanish.

For the last few years I've been keeping track of what I read in the 75 book challenge group, but since I really don't care how many books I read a year, and reading has never been a challenge, that never seemed to be the ideal place.

So, without further ado, here's a squib on 1Q84, the first book I finished in 2012 (though I started it months ago in 2011, but had to put it aside to read a couple of other 1000 page tomes).

Haruki Murakami has said that when he is writing a novel he generally doesn't know, when he sits down at his desk, what is going to happen next. The freedom he gives his subconscious to structure his narratives has been, most often, a strength, but one feels that a bit more rigor might have made 1Q84 a better book, though to be fair, even as it stands—with all its longeurs and repetitions—it is a good book, with much in it that keeps one turning pages. There are good lines—"Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists"—amusing metaphors, and Murakami's trademark ability to make the mundane compelling, but it has to be said: the novel could stand to lose a couple hundred pages. Comparing this with Murakami's excellent and underrated After Dark suggests that the economy of a short novel—or, as some have suggested, the short story—brings out the best in this author.

Glad you're here, and looking forward to the thread.

Thanks for the welcome, Makif.at.

Having read this profile of Colin Dexter I filed his name away thinking that I might, one day, like to sample one of his Inspector Morse mysteries. A trip to a thrift shop when in California for the holidays that turned up The Wench is Dead for 50¢ gave me the opportunity to do so. I'm not sorry that I snapped it up.

Morse is an amusing character, and because this one is, I think, atypical in that it's set mostly in a hospital and in the 19th century, I look forward to reading one that gives us more of Morse's and Dexter's Oxford. The Financial Times profile of Dexter is here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/21d7657a-f81b-11df-8875-00144feab49a.html#axzz1iZbRxOj...

great suff, dcozy.

Given its,length—the 1,167 pages translated, in three volumes, into English, are only one part of a five part epic—comparisons between Pak Kyung-ni's Land and War and Peace are inevitable. The titles, however, illuminate a key difference between the two epics. The two nouns in Tolstoy's title suggest, correctly, that the author is concerned with geopolitical wrangling of the sort that ends up in history books. Land, on the other hand, centers, as the title hints, on that fundamental thing the lust for which sometimes gives rise to wars, but is more often attended to by peasants than generals. Pak successfully creates for us a village in all its strength and all its pettiness populated by the sort of people who are not the actors of history (in the case of Land the Japanese colonization of Korea and the attendant bleeding dry of the peasantry) one finds in the Russian master's novels, but rather the acted upon. Pak's achievement in bringing them and their world to life is breathtaking. Land is one of the great national epics.

Colour me blind as a bat!! I just saw this thread! A thousand apologies, David!

I hope dumping this topic here won't be considered an intrusion.

Dumping in Hell, are you kidding, it's actively encouraged. Now I go to read your posts, tardy and shamed!

Murakami mildly puzzles me, usually when I read him I'm vastly entertained, but then feel as if I've been living on gummi bears for weeks. There are moments to remember (the use of the well in The wind-up bird chronicle still haunts me), but no idea what it all adds up to. With fiction it doesn't matter so much, I can always decide there's a basic incompatibility with the given writer's sensibility, but I was very disappointed to find how disappointed I was with Underground.

The wench is dead is the only book of Dexter's I've read and I remember liking it very much. I was surprised (positively) by the pathos that sneaked in, how subtly it did, that is.

I've never even heard of Land! How exciting!

Lola, I think that bloated full of junk food feeling you sometimes get after a Murakami novel comes from the fact that his books tend not to be well-wrought urns, but rather sort of one-thing-after-another constructions--with some of those things, to be sure, quite memorable. For all the faults that one can point to in Murakami's novels, though, his writing is, for some of us, addictive. I'm sure I will reach for his next novel, and his next.

I actually liked Underground quite bit. It seemed to me that he had imposed an almost OuLiPoean sort of rigor on himself in letting the victims tell their stories, one after another, in more or less the same form and in more or less artless language. The stripping away of adornment and the relentlessness of the repetitious tales seemed to me to bring home--slowly, gradually--the horror of what had happened.

(It was an odd time to be in Tokyo. We were told to beware, when riding trains, of people carrying suspicious packages and parcels. But what exactly constitutes a suspicious package or parcel? A cake-box? Think I'll move to the next car. A golf-bag? Call the police immediately.)

tomcatMurr: Land is exciting. It was published by some odd outfit out of England in three volumes with bindings that're glossy and reminiscent of the cover of, say, a 7th grade science textbook. My squib doesn't do it justice. It really does contain multitudes, and Pak has a real gift for drifting from story to story--key characters disappear, sometimes for several hundred pages--that keeps your interest. It's a major work of world literature, and that remains clear in spite of the fact that the book is poorly edited--a typo or two every eight or ten pages--and that the translator's first language, one quickly becomes certain, is not to English. My other quibble is that the very useful glossary of Korean terms appears in the third volume, so if an asterisked word turns up in the first you're out of luck unless you make a habit of carrying the full set around with you. It would have been nice to have troublesome words glossed in the volume in which they first appear.

These quibbles, though, are nothing but fleas on elephant.

The stripping away of adornment and the relentlessness of the repetitious tales seemed to me to bring home--slowly, gradually--the horror of what had happened.

I felt the horror at the news alone, I was hoping to learn more about why it happened and especially what the people thought about why and how it happened and there was practically none of that.

Local is the best comic I've read for a while. Twelve stories set in twelve cities accurately and stunningly rendered, Local follows a young woman as she rambles among these second tier burgs trying to figure out what she is running from, running toward. Each story is structured differently from the others, and few adhere to a simple first-this-happened-then-that-happened narrative scheme: author Brian Wood's adventurousness is a constant delight. Indeed, so sophisticated is the structure of some of the tales that one can easily imagine writers of non-picture books cribbing some of Wood's ideas. I'll keep my eye out for more of his work.

Kafka, it seems clear, suffered from culture shock; the culture that shocked him was the one into which he had been born. John Givens's book A Friend in the Police is rich in the same kind of tension, the same constant frustrations as a Kafka text, but the culture in question is one foreign to Givens, and also to at least a couple of his characters who wander around the unnamed South-East Asian "republic" where the action transpires. Given that there is a murder, a young Californian who may be guilty of it, his father come to rescue him, and a methodical local policeman—though his methods are unorthodox—this might sound like a Graham Greenesque thriller. It is not. Givens has given us something richer, something stranger.

Do you read many comics, David? Japan seems awash in them.

You're right, Lola, that Japan is awash in comics, or, as they're known in Japan (and increasingly elsewhere, too) manga. Unsurprisingly they range in quality from popular dreck to real art.

A few years ago I became aware of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and talked my editor at the Japan Times into letting me review some of his stuff. That lead to me becoming, quite accidentally, the go-to guy for comics (I could never stomach the term "graphic novel" which seems to me insufferably pretentious), so I've read more comics in the last few years than I would have otherwise, but I'm not really as in love with the form as a lot of people (just a matter of personal taste).

Having said that, Tatsumi and the other artists who joined him in the movement within manga known as gekiga are well-worth checking out. The delightfully named Montreal publishing house Drawn & Quarterly is committed to making English translations of gekiga available in English.

As for non-Japanese comics, I picked up Local on the basis of a review I read somewhere, and it is very, very good.

I like Drawn & Quarterly very much. There's a big annual comics event here in Toronto so I've met a few of the currently popular authors: Chris Ware, Seth, Alison Bechdel... do you know them? Recommendations for Ware and Bechdel especially.

I read a couple harrowing books by Osamu Tezuka, MW and Apollo's song, I'd be curious to discuss them with someone who knows Japan.

...popularizer of the Bechdel Test.

Sometimes, with a selected poems, one gets the impression that the desire to be comprehensive is at odds with the imperative to choose only quality poems. This is never the case with Joanne Kyger's As Ever, though it's hard to deny that, as we move through the years from 1958 to 2001, the poems do improve, or perhaps improve is not the right word; perhaps it's simply that Kyger, over those years, finds out who, as a poet, she is. The process is a pleasure to experience. As her poems focus less on the grandiose and mythological, and more on the mundane they grow ever more exciting. As speculation gives way to observation and description precise and rigorous the pleasure becomes sublime. Kyger, it is often forgotten, was one of the original Beats; like the best of that coterie she long ago transcended it.

So popular is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo--everyone and his dog seems to have read it, or at least have an opinion about it--that I sort of figured it probably wasn't for me. I didn't think something so popular could be good (Call me a snob . . . ).

Some discussion over Christmas dinner convinced me that it might be worth a look, and the truth is, I couldn't put it down. I even found the first 100 pages, which I'd been lead to believe one had to slog through, painless (though it's clear Larsson was a journalist: he likes his details), and once the hook is set the pages fly by.

Indeed, the hook is set so deeply that I've already downloaded the next in the series--downloaded because I couldn't wait to get to the store to buy it.

I wish Larsson had lived long enough to write a 4th one.

Varielle: Actually he did write most of a fourth one, but because of the wrangling that is going on between Larsson's family and his partner of many years (who has the manuscript) it's anybody's guess when or if it will be released. Google around and you'll find further information.

tros: The only thing that struck me about the ending of the first one is that the book seemed to keep going after it should have ended, but given the loose ends Larsson left to be picked up again in subsequent volumes I wonder to what extent he considered the end of the first volume to really be the end.

Other than that it was fairly standard for this sort of thing in that the good guys mostly win. I thought the conclusion (to that point) of Blomquist's relationship with Salander (being vague here because I suppose it's possible some people still haven't read this) was a refreshing splash of cold water just when I was afraid things were going to get gooey.

The most interesting criticism I've seen is that, although Larsson wears his feminist sympathies on his sleeve, and, in Salander, depicts a woman who is anything but a doormat, he also feels compelled to depict a woman as independent and in control of her life as Salander as a sort of freak. To be fair, this is mitigated by his portrayal of Berger, who is also shown to be in control of her life, but whose independence is not linked to any freakishness, at least as far as I've read.

#21

I've defended the books before (against accusations of misogyny, paradoxically), and I disagree with that criticism as well. I see Lisbeth as Pippi Longstocking of the 21st century; just as much of a "freak", and just as beloved. (To me the fascination of the books lies entirely in her character.)

If you haven't read Pippi Longstocking, David, and are curious enough about Larsson and his saga, I recommend that you do. (There is a direct reference to another of Lindgren's creations, Kalle Blomkvist, right there in one of the main characters.)

Not sure that "spoiler alert" is enough, tros...

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SPOILLLLLLL
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I don't recall Larsson going into the etiology of his killers' pathology. The father initiated the son into the game, and that basically from childhood. They were killing together for years. Genes, nurture, or both, that boy obviously had one majorly warped development. I've come across people hunting with their children (most notably in the US South); it takes but a small adjustment to substitute people for squirrels and deer.

I didn't like the ending either because serial killers are so overused. Then again, when you get wind of them in the news, like recently that pig farmer in Western Canada who killed 49 prostitutes on his farm (convicted for six), it often seems the fantasists fail to go far enough.

We don't have to look far to find this in reality, though the D.C. killers were step-father and son.

That's interesting, Lola. If I've read Pippi it was so far in the past I've forgotten it. When I have a spare moment (hah!) I might have a look at it.

It depends on how interested you are in the specifically Swedish background and motifs of Larsson's project, although, yes, I think there's some broader relevance to the similarities between Pippi and Lisbeth too.

Poems of the Late T'ang is worth the price of admission for A.C. Graham's witty and informative essay, "The Translation of Chinese Poetry," alone. It is, of course, insightful about Chinese poetry, but no less illuminating about modernist European and American poetry, and poetry in general.

Concerning the textual apparatus that is a necessary part of a collection such as this one, he writes: "How much of this information can a reader be expected to tolerate? Equally important, how much of it will do him any good? There is more literary allusion in early twentieth century English than in T'ang poetry; we can read Eliot with excitement although missing most of his references, and when we look one up often find that it enriches the response disappointingly little." Aware of the limitations of such notes and explanations Graham strikes just the right balance. He does supply notes, and sometimes paraphrases for some (but not all) of the poems, and those he includes are uniformly helpful: they never enrich the response "disappointingly little." Of course, however, the point of this book is the poems, and in the work he has chosen, from seven different poets, Graham shows us how rich and varied the writing of the late T'ang poets was. As with a group of any seven poets, the work of some will be more to one's taste than others, but all the work collected here is worth reading, and much of it worth reading again and again.

I liked the way the characters develop in the second entry in the series, The Girl who Played with Fire. It seems that now we know all of Salander's secrets, so one wonders what surprises volume three of the Millenium Trilogy holds. The references to Pippi Longstocking (which I missed entirely in volume one; thanks, Lola, for making me aware of them) are made explicit here and add an interesting substratum to the surface story. Now, off to download volume three.

I didn't think so much in terms of direct references (with the exception of that honking big one of Mikael's name), as of Lisbeth's whole persona. Larsson, like most Swedish kids, would have grown up with the stories and the character; there's much irony in confronting the real world after being steeped in the mythology of a supergirl.

Reading Vikram Seth's translations of Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu in Three Chinese Poets shortly after enjoying A.C. Graham's translations of seven T'ang Chinese poets (Du Fu or Tu Fu is the only one they have in common) reveals how big a tent translation is. Seth's and Graham's approaches to the poems, both effective, are very different.

Graham writes that "almost all Chinese poetry is rhymed, and most classical forms have lines with equal numbers of syllables," and that "the sacrifice of strict form for the sake of content was first made possible by the doctrine that the essence of poetry is the image, the exact presentation of which imposes a rhythm out of accord with regular verse forms." This is more or less fine with Graham, whose translations recall the best of early modernist Imagism.

Seth, on the other hand, and this will surprise no one who has read The Golden Gate, does his best to preserve the formal rigor of the Chinese originals. Both translators, according to their different lights, produce poems that read well in English. So intent is Seth on preserving the rhyme and rhythm of the originals, that one occasionally fears he might drift into doggerel, but then one comes across, for example, his version of the Du Fu Autumn meditation in which the poet compares Changan to a chess board. Seth's version is, one finds, not only formally more intricate than Graham's, but the images, too, seem more apt, as when Seth writes "dragons and fish are still," rather than, as Graham would have it, " . . . the dragons and fish fall asleep."

This is the only poem the books have in common. They compliment each other in the different treasures they make available, and the different ways in which they present those treasures.

When the house in which Yoshiyuki Junnosuke grew up burned down, Lawrence Rogers writes, "he fled the flames with only his Debussy records and some fifty poems he had written in a notebook." Given the family in which he was raised, it is no surprise that even as a teenager Junnosuke had already given art pride of place in his life, and that his relation to art bordered on the neurotic. His father, Eisuke Yoshiyuki, for example was a dadaist poet, who, in Donald Richie's account, "gave up on literature and threw away his library, all except the three books he had published." What is surprising is that even a man with as unconventional a background as Junnosuke wrote so many stories driven by a fear of being made to conform. The vehicle that might cause a man such as himself (and he was a writer very much in the tradition of the Japanese I-novel) to conform was sex—sex, that is, which might lead to pregnancy, children, and, therefore, a domestic suburban prison. Most of the tales collected in Toward Dusk and Other Stories have to do with sex; none make the act at all attractive. We do, however, with horrified fascination, keep on turning pages.

greatly enjoying your thread, dcozy. your reading of the Chinese poets especially. Have you come across Wei Lin Yip's translations?

Also, heads up for David Hinton (if you don't already know him). To my mind his translations are the best. He's done most of the tang poets, including Li Fu. apparently his next project is to do the three big books of Chinese Philosophy: the Dao Der Jing, the Analects, and the Chuang Zu. If his translations of tang poets are anything to go by, these three should definitely be worth a look.

Pipi Longstocking! I adored those books and wanted to be supergirl too!

The right people do the right thing, the bad guys get their comeuppance, and Salander remains appealing: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is a fine conclusion to the trilogy.

TomcatMurr:

Thanks for the encouragement and for the tips on T'ang translators. More anon, but off to hear some Sibelius now.

Satisfactory ending for such an essentially lonely character, no?

#32

I'm interested!

“I can hardly be accused of being an expert on Japanese film,” Adam Mars-Jones assures us in the second paragraph of Noriko Smiling, his monograph on Yasujiro Ozu’s "Late Spring." He goes on the remainder of the book to support this claim.

This is the laziest, most ham-fisted, most wrong-headed work of criticism I have ever read, and I say this as someone who makes my living, in part, by reading essays produced by undergraduates working in their second language. Donald Richie's book about Ozu (one Mars-Jones seems not to have read) is a bracing tonic after this non-expert twaddle.

Bruce Chatwin was, from England to Greece to Italy to Ghana to Nepal to India and elsewhere, constantly on the move; he was, it seems, trying to keep up with the ideas that filled his brain to exploding. He was able to distill these ideas into a handful of brilliant books, and also, along the way wrote the many, many letters that have been collected in Under the Sun. They are a pleasure to read. One suspects that, at times, the constantly gabbing, know-it-all side of Chatwin could be a bit wearing (some of his correspondents confess that this was the case); it's there in the letters, too, but one can close the book when one has had enough. For all that, it's clear, tracing the links between Chatwin and the many fascinating recipients of his letters, that he had a real gift for friendship.

Leaving the Atocha Station is the first novel by a young poet, Ben Lerner. It is the story of a young poet who doesn't believe in his poetry or himself, but who somehow wangles himself a fellowship to spend a year in Spain. Americans abroad are always good for a few laughs, and Lerner's protagonist, Adam, is no exception. Even as readers laugh, however, they will begin to suspect that the novel is another clichéd account of an American melting down in a foreign place. The author, however—his tongue never leaves his cheek—makes even Adam's deterioration amusing, and manages to end the novel on a positive note: Maybe, Adam comes to realize, he is not the no-talent phony he had believed himself to be (and readers will have believed it, too). Maybe he's the real thing, and maybe art is real, too.

How did you come to read that? Know the author?

I think I heard someone talking about it on NPR. Lerner seems to know all the right people: blurbs from Ashberry, Franzen, etc.

Like all right thinking people I love Edward Gorey's work, and so always love to learn more about this very interesting man. (Yes, I've watched and rewatched those YouTube snippets of him talking about movies and his influences.) Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, therefore, is a treat. Letters, because they are informal and diaristic, at least in the best of hands, are always illuminating; one feels one knows Gorey better after reading these. His passion for ballet, books, and movies is infectious and endearing. Wouldn't it be wonderful if more letters surfaced?

That I must get. I recommend Ascending peculiarity, a collection of interviews. Gorey pops up in most unlikely places, or what would appear to be unlikely places for an aged Victorian gentleman in a raccoon coat and sneakers--then you remember he went to college with Frank O'Hara, was pals and contemporary with Abstract Expressionists! etc.

Ascending Peculiarity is essential. The New Yorker piece in it is excellent.

Gorey says something in one of his letters about cultivating his rather odd appearance so that when people got to know him they would conclude: "Oh, he isn't so strange after all." If he dressed "normally" he was afraid people might come to the opposite conclusion.

One might hesitate before tackling a five volume translation of an eighteenth-century Chinese novel—even if it is reputed to be the best Chinese novel ever written. The idea of such a book is intriguing, to be sure, but before one commits oneself to David Hawkes's translation of the novel in question, which he titles The Story of the Stone, one may want to get an idea of what it's all about from Chi-Chen Wang's one volume adaptation, which he names Dream of the Red Chamber. If even Wang's version seems too much, though, there is now another option: Taku Ashibe's mystery, Murder in the Red Chamber, set in the world and populated by the characters of the Tsao Hsueh-Chin's (Cao Xueqin's) masterpiece. Western readers will find the conventions of the mystery that guide Ashibe in constructing this thriller comforting even as they ease their way into the unfamiliar world in which this genre-piece is set. Further, some of the events that occur in Ashibe's mystery also occur in the original, and it's good fun to see the uses that Ashibe makes of them. But even if one has never read an eighteenth-century Chinese novel, and has no desire to do so, Ashibe's mystery is artful enough—he's a prize winning author and screen-writer in Japan—that one will want to read it anyway.

Another must have, thanks!

I list Cao Xueqin as a favourite author based simply on The Dream of the Red Chamber (which was even completed by another person); it's that garden-life and poetry clubs that does it for me. By the way, there's a long group read of the Dream in Ancient China group, David, in case you haven't noticed it, there were so few of us the thread would be missed in a blink.

I skimmed though the thread on The Dream of the Red Chamber, and learned a lot. Thanks, Lola, for pointing me to it. I've been reading the Chi-Chen Wang abridgement (that's the one I had on my shelf) and enjoying it immensely.

Neither here not there, but since Edward Gorey's name came up earlier, I'll mention that my Chi-Chen Wang is an old Anchor paperback, and Gorey did the covers for a lot of those. Alas, this is not one of his.

Still, I kept looking at it and thinking there was something faintly Goreyesque about it. Then I read the small print. The cover is by Seong Moy, but the typography is, indeed, credited to Gorey, so it wasn't just my imagination, or a Pavlovian response to old Anchor paperbacks.

I've also been reading art criticism:

A recent Vermeer show (well, three out of the scores of paintings on display were Vermeers) in Tokyo reminded me how little I know about painting, especially painting from before the twentieth century. I wished I had an educated, observant, and articulate friend to guide me through it. I wish, in fact, that I'd walked through it with Norman Bryson, whose Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting is an absolutely essential guide to a genre that has been, as he notes, overlooked. All four of the essays are essential, and intelligently linked to each other, but the final essay, "Still Life and 'Feminine' Space," is brilliant in its consideration of just why still life painting has been marginalized (and yes, it's partly because the home, and particularly the kitchen, has been defined as a feminine domain, but that's not all there is to it). Looking at the Overlooked is Criticism at its finest.

I know a few people who collect those original Gorey Anchors (and some others--did he do anything for Dell?)--it's not a cheap undertaking. I must content myself with all too rare random finds. Like the Ernest Jones book on Hamlet and Oedipus. And reprints. I give thanks for reprints.
Also, he was prolific and industrious and I see the estate is busy keeping the Goreyana on the market--have you seen the Gorey's Dracula toy theatre yet? Can't remember where it was linked... the Folio group I think.

So what is it about still life? That it's things and interiors and not people and landscapes? I don't think anyone ever dared marginalise Cezanne's.

On still lifes:

"From the beginning still life was systematically downgraded by the defenders of the higher genres who in their theoretical work provided the rationale for the professional hierarchy of the genres with history painting, the exclusively male genre, at its apex. If still life could be regarded as an appropriate channel for female talent, this was because it ranked as the lowest form of artistic life, of course below the painting of biblical, mythological, and national subjects, but also below portraiture and landscape, even below animal painting (Féliben: 'He who paints living animals is more to be esteemed than he who only represents des choses mortes et sans mouvement'). Supposedly requiring no thought at all to produce, still life represented the mechanical other to the exalted aims of the academies' grand manière. In the words of Reynolds:

'The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principal is preserved or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art or a mechanical trade. In the hands of one man it makes the highest pretensions, as it is addressed to the noblest faculties: in the hands of another it is reduced to a mere matter ornament; and the painter has but the humble province of furnishing our apartments with elegance.'"

Reynolds, of course, was writing a good many years before Cezanne picked up a brush, but Bryson argues that, at least as of 1990 when this book was published, nothing had really changed:

"Though the twentieth century has seen a tremendous proliferation of exhibitions of still life, and of catalogues and monographs dealing with matters of chronology, provenance, and connoisseurship, interpretation of still life has generally languished on all sides. Here Reynolds is not like ourselves; he has passionate reasons for his condemnation of still life, and the energy of interpretation in the Discourses is tumultuous compared with the polite avoidance of interpretation in today's average still life catalogue (where ritual invocations of vanitas sometimes constitute the sole critical act)."

Apparently Looking at the Overlooked was, at the time about the only attempt to address this lack.

It really is a fine work of criticism: informed, perceptive, well-argued, and well-written. Highly recommended.

I generally deplore abridged editions, excerpts, and extracts, but I have to confess to enjoying Chi-Chen Wang's abridgement of Dream of the Red Chamber thoroughly. Not having read the (unfinished) original (least of all in Chinese) I can't discuss what must be missing from this version; what is here, however, hangs together well, at least for readers comfortable with the episodic and the (even in this shortened version) sprawling, qualities that, I expect, characterize the unabridged original as well. And the abridgement has done what any good one must do: it's made me eager to plunge into David Hawkes's five-volume unabridged translation.

I didn't want to say anything before, but now--YES you should read the whole thing!!

Art criticism doesn't age well, doesn't it. It becomes a curiosity, a historical datum in itself, useful perhaps in reconstituting an era, but rarely to current experience of the object.

Not that other forms of criticism fare much better--music, literature... Although I confess a weakness for some crotchety musical sorts, Emile Vuillermoz, Shaw, Sorabji.

Death is Now My Neighbor is the second of Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse novels I've read, and I enjoyed it more than the first, perhaps because it was more typical in that Morse was up and about Oxford rather than confined to a hospital bed as he is in The Wench is Dead. Dexter is witty, well-read, and spins a good tale. Based on the two I've read, Dexter's books are just the ticket when one is in the mood for a fun and intelligent who-done-it.

Have you read Reginald Hill? I'd say he's got everything you like in Dexter, but (to my mind) more so! The latest books especially become Ecoesque in literary associations and games.

Sounds good, Lola. I'll keep my eye out for Hill.

J.I.M. Stewart (who published fifty-odd mysteries under the name Michael Innes) has given us, in his A Staircase in Surrey quintet, an attempt at a Anthony Powell / Simon Raven (with Proust hovering in the background)-style multi-volume, state-of-England, roman fleuve. I only became aware of it a little while ago, and when I did I googled around in search of more information. The results were not encouraging. Those who had commented on it mostly seemed to have given up after the first volume, finding it neither as funny as Powell, nor as nasty as Raven. Still, I plunged into the first volume in the series, The Gaudy, and found it a pleasure, but then I enjoy the mustily old-fashioned prose that Stewart (writing in the 1970s) employs. Clearly, though, such donnish fustiness is not for everyone.

Stewart's very aware of his illustrious predecessors (one character has written a book on Proust and Powell; another is named Nicholas Junkin) but seems most influenced by Powell (which I always forget is pronounced /pole/). His narrator, Pattullo, like Powell's Jenkins is a bit of a cypher, but he is quite aggressive about inserting himself into dramas which are really none of his business. He's a playwright, and that seems to be his excuse for constantly putting himself in a position to observe the humanity around him. To say that he inserts himself into dramas might be excessive. This is not a novel that has, at least onstage, a great deal of event. Offstage, on the other hand, there is a rape; the rapist appears to be the son of Pattullo's old Oxford room-mate, who has just been appointed to the Cabinet. Pattullo, not present for the crime, eagerly joins in the cover-up, an activity that Stewart depicts with no overt moral censure, a reticence which drives home the ugliness of the crime the men are concealing, and of the attitudes that allow them to see covering it up as the right thing to do. Though the cover-up seems, at the end of The Gaudy, to have been successful, it is likely that there will be repercussions in the remaining volumes of the series, volumes I look forward to reading.

(PS: If one invites a writer like J.I.M. Stewart to dinner, would it be gauche to ask him to come as Michael Innes?)

Hm, Powell--now that was a big literary disappointment for me. I read the first volume of his Dance series, and despised it so much I chucked the rather expensive Folio Society set (almost 300 bucks it cost me) for about a twenty.

There's a section of Anglo lit populated by works about little boys written by little boys--generally little boys from "better" classes--a strange, warped, inbred, stunted little literature, without any insight into life, without any knowledge of the world outside their impoverished unnatural childhood and school experience. Powell must be something like their Head Boy. I picture that lineup of aristocrats from Monty Python tossing their boy's own novels one to another: "Catch, Evelyn!" "Hewwve, Anfony!"

I was hoping for some observation, verve and wit a la Wilde and Saki, and instead got this drippy, bland, boring story, plodding linearly like a streetcar, but without a whistle or bell in sight. I can't believe the poor guy thought he was doing something Proust-like, or whatever it was he thought in regard to Proust. When it finally dawned on me THAT was what he was alluding to with that title, I laughed. I'd say equal parts offended and amazed. Proust is introspective, Powell nothing but egotistical; Proust describes a living universe, Powell couldn't identify his own liver. It's probably bad manners to have a liver, in that dead, aseptic mind.

Gee, sorry about the rant!

P.S. So I'm a wimp, edited some of the spluttering. Sorry, David, shouldn't post when suffering lack of sleep. :)

It's true that Powell, et al, write about a circumscribed world, but I actually think a lot of good novels have come out of precisely such accounts of circumscribed worlds. Think, for example, of Jane Austen (though I'm not saying Powell is in her league). I much prefer Simon Raven, where you will find wit and verve, although he, too, is interested in privileged Oxbridge boys (in more ways than one). He shows his cohort in all its nastiness and absurdity (and yet, is never sanctimonious about it: they were his people, and he makes no apologies for it).

When Raven's wife sent him a telegram reading "Wife and baby starving send money soonest," he replied, "Sorry no money suggest eat baby." Okay, that's terrible, but it did make me laugh. If it makes you laugh you might like Raven.

A good piece on Raven here: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/simonraven-allen-1756

>56 LolaWalser: I totally agree with all of it. Can't stand Powell. Evelyn Waugh is another of his ilk.

I might like Raven though.

#59

Well, I'm glad to have you on my side, cat!

I promise there are things I can dislike with ladylike composure, this just isn't one of them. ;)

Oh, agreed, David, Powell isn't in Austen's league by an ocean and a half.

I haven't read Raven.

I should have made clear, perhaps, it's trivial really--it's not that I have a problem with certain themes, or narrow boundaries, it's strictly the mentality and talent and experience (or lack of) going into working them over.

Simply as a for instance, Philip Larkin's Jill is an Oxford novel, a first novel, and it's of its time, but it has Larkin's sensibility and taste going for it, and it's good. Of course it's of more modest ambitions than Powell...

P.S. So I'm a wimp, edited some of the spluttering. Sorry, David, shouldn't post when suffering lack of sleep. :)

Akhmatova—an elegant little volume in the Everyman Pocket Poets series— is an excellent selection of the poet's work. Beginning with poems written early in the twentieth century that seem romantic, almost decadent, in a sort of fin-de-siècle sort of way (but good of their kind) we move deeper into the century, into the horror, and as we go we watch Akhmatova grow as a poet. The first flashes of genius come in the selections from Reed and The Seventh Book (she carried her "seventh" with her when she was flown out of Leningrad during the siege; likewise, her flight-mate, Shostakovich carried his seventh—in his case a symphony) and continue through "Requiem" and "Poem Without a Hero," poems that are literally stunning in their force. I can't judge translator D.M. Thomas's fidelity to Akhmatova's Russian, but one who can, Nancy K. Anderson, writes of his translation of Poem Without a Hero as an exception to the sea of failed versions of Akhmatova's work. Thomas's rendering certainly reads well in English. This is a volume to which I'll return.

#60: No need to deprive us of your spluttering, Lola. We can take it! I think.

If Philip Marlowe had been a Turk in contemporary Germany he would be Kemal Kayanaka, the wisecracking, just this side of parodic, hero of Jakob Arjouni's series of hard-boiled thrillers. They're all good fun, leavened with a pinch of acerbic social commentary, and One Man, One Murder is no exception.

I read a strange kind of mystery by a Turk in contemporary Germany... Felidae. It was strange, first, because everyone's a cat; second, because it was genuinely creepy. Of course, to cat-phobes it is genuinely creepy from the title-go.

Arjouni's choice of detective is interesting in that he himself is not a Turk, and the detective, though a Turk, was raised by non-Turkish Germans, and is quite distant from Turkish culture.

It's clear that in Emma Gerstein's Moscow Memoirs there is a lot of score settling (mostly with Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet, Osip Mandelstam), and with those who haven't followed the game of literary politics in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR closely, some of it seems a bit arcane. Given how much most Soviet citizens suffered in those times, some of it can seem a bit petty, too. People behave badly when under tremendous pressure, and it's hard not to forgive them for doing so. Still, one can see why it stuck in Gerstein's craw that Osip tends to be remembered as a brave and saintly figure, and that his wife's memoirs tend to be viewed as entirely reliable with regard to her husband's work and life, even when, as Gestein demonstrates, her interpretation of both the life and the poetry can be self-serving. Still, even her somewhat jaundiced account of the couple, rather than diminishing Osip and Nadezhda, helps us understand how hellish the times were through which they lived.

Anna Akhmatova, it should be noted, comes through entirely unscathed. Gerstein clearly respects her and her work greatly, and sees no reason to revise that judgement.

Gerstein's memoirs are rather clunkily written—in English translation, and apparently in Russian, too—but still, they provide good background to the period.

Joseph Brodsky comments somewhere in his essays on the reception of Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs in the USSR, among the people who knew them or felt addressed in some way. One said (to Brodsky) "she shat upon our entire generation".

As you say, it's devilishly hard to navigate the accusations and counter-accusations with any clarity, but in the end, what remains as fact is that Mandelstam was shamefully hounded and finally killed basically because he wrote a poem, and something similar happened to many others.

But the problem of survivors. And changing times. The sixties weren't the thirties. The seventies weren't the sixties. As with the Holocaust, or any war, you have people who have suffered horrendously and know something essential about human beings and society based on that experience, and you have others, who were affected in different degree, or maybe not at all, maybe just through hearsay. What is the relationship between them, what can it be? Some people tried to help the Mandelstams, some didn't, most obviously couldn't (didn't anyway) in any way that would really matter, that would have spared Osip. I wonder if it is possible even for people inside the situation to judge what they could have or should have done, and if anyone else can really understand the extent of their guilt.

Thanks for that post, Lola. You've helped me clarify (a little) the muddled thoughts I had about Gerstein's memoir. Gerstein certainly doesn't doubt that Mandelstam was a victim and a great poet. She makes it clear, though, that there were unpleasant aspects to his character. For the record, I guess, it's important to know that, but in the larger scheme of things, it can also seem trivial.

Yes, I think it's the OTHER world where we're supposed to pay for being unpleasant.

It could be important in details--who liked him, who hated him and why, but overall, once Stalin's mark was upon him... I think Pasternak intervened, more than once.

It touches on what I've been trying to understand for a long time (or maybe it IS the thing I'm trying to understand)--what the passage of time and circumstances does to experience, and to perception and understanding of things. Alongside the NKVD and the KGB and the persecutions, gulags, executions, a society was being actively built, people lived, worked, and were being born, and for them--especially the always new just-born ones--even the present was already the ungraspable, foreign past. It could be reached only partially, imperfectly, through customs that were similar but changing, and through memory and history. How would they relate to people like Nadezhda Mandelstam, who had the thirties frozen inside them?

I get the sense that Nadezhda's critique didn't limit itself, it covered all of USSR, forever. It was tainted without repair. (Brodsky agrees, and flees. Flees not just the USSR, but what he calls "Byzantium". Travelling in Turkey made him spiritually ill. Solzhenitsyn agrees, but he's a mystical nationalist, he doesn't budge from a basic conviction in the glory of Mother Russia. And I think that's where they're at, right now...) But the question is then, what is everyone else supposed to do? Can everyone leave? If they don't, are they guilty, and of what?

Akhmatova on those who left:

I'm not one of those who left the land
to its enemies to grab and rend.
I'm not flattered by their clapping hands,
I offer my songs, but not to them.

Me? I would have been on the first droshky to Paris.

It's hard to know what to say about a book like The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills except that it's competent. The prose seldom obtrudes on the reader's consciousness; the characters are often slightly implausible, but not enough to be either awful or interesting; the obsession with men at loose ends, and the manner in which women exist in most of the stories—most egregiously in the novella length title tale—primarily as vehicles to aid men in their quest for whatever it is they're questing for, is tiresome, but not unusual. If the author, a retired banker named Hans Brinckmann, possessed a sensibility that was profound, or an insight into life that was startling and fresh we might forgive all of the above, but unfortunately, in these stories, though Brinckmann is neither insensitive nor dim, one sees little evidence of superlative sensibility or insight. Competence is no small thing, and one is grateful for it. It is not, alas, enough.

Should've stuck to skating, Hans!

One can't help but wonder, having finished Nancy K. Anderson's The Word that Causes Death's Defeat, why more books about a writer's work don't take this form. Rather than forcing inquisitive readers to move back and forth between the work of the writer in question, a biography of that writer, and critical essays and commentary, she provides it all: not just a snippet of of biography, but a 100-page-plus section that gives us the facts we need; not just an introduction where a couple of critical insights are vaguely alluded to, but three meaty essays, one for each of the poems that, included in their entirety, are the centerpiece of the book. The three poems are Anna Akhmatova's three long masterpieces: Requiem, The Way of All the Earth, and Poem Without a Hero, and the translations read brilliantly; they are different from, but as accomplished as, D.M. Thomas's versions (not reading Russian, I can't attest to the fidelity of either Thomas's or Anderson's renderings; Both translators, however, inspire trust).

Sounds great, must look that up. Reminds me of Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, about Rilke's Duino elegies (contains translations).

One is tempted to call He Died With His Eyes Open le plus noir des noirs, but then one recalls that Derek Raymond, who knew French well, preferred to refer to his Factory series as "black novels" rather than to use the cross-channel borrowing. The world he gives us is black, the evil evil, the ugliness ugly, but it is underpinned by a humanism that is easy to miss, but central, I would say, to the novel's concerns. The nameless detective comes to understand that the murder victim—honest, talented, kind, generous, loving—was a victim not just of those who killed him, but of pretty much everybody who crosses his path, in the degenerate England where the novel takes place. The dialogue sparkles—the English underworld slang is a pleasant challenge—and Raymond's prose startles, at times, with its deftness. I look forward to continuing with the series.

It's interesting to learn, at least in the version J.I.M. Stewart gives us in Young Pattullo, what mysterious territory sex was for Oxbridge boys in the '50s—but not that interesting. I was eager to move on to the second volume of this series when I finished the first. This one, however proved more of a slog. I may not get to the third right away.

In The Thief Fuminori Nakamura has done it: given us a thriller that has more than thrills, that keeps us turning pages not only to find out what happens next, but also what the author—through the medium of his characters—will think next. The model for Nakamura's account of a pickpocket cut off from the rest of humanity might (though it's a very different book) be Crime and Punishment: a crime novel that raises questions more compelling than "who done it?"

Sounds great.

pickpocket cut off from the rest of humanity

Tough sich for a pickpocket.

The milieu—the English underworld of the early '60s—is interesting, especially when it bumps up against Chelsea Bohemia, and Derek Raymond's deviators (to use his word for what Americans would call grifters), are engaging, but what pulls one into The Crust on its Uppers is the language, the argot of the morries, slags, and boilers, who populate the book (this American was very grateful for the glossary, and suspects most English not from this place or time would be too). Dialect writing can be painfully bad—think, for example, of Willa Cather's "Whatsa Matta You!" Chico Marx sound-alikes—but Raymond makes the language sing. Readers who know Raymond only from his "black novels" may be surprised that this is a comedy, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

(The wikipedia article about the author gives an interesting account of his colorful life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Raymond)

Economists have often worked from models: they imagine societies, and how things like barter, cash, and other aspects of economic life might have come into being and been practiced. David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 years, is an anthropologist. His discpline insists that he study actual societies rather than imaginary ones. One thing his and his colleagues' research has shown him is that the economists' stories about how economic life happens are not, in most cases, the way things actually happen. My background in economics is weak, to say the least, but this book is packed with intriguing facts and convincing arguments—particular about the reification of "the market." I didn't, in all cases, feel I was knowledgeable enough to evaluate Graeber's arguments with adequate rigor, but I am stimulated me to want to learn more.

Oh, that's a hopeless rabbit hole, "economics".

Economics, don't get me started on economics. An uncle of mine was a professor of economics (mostly history of, but anyway..) at Frankfurt University - I mostly thought of him as a border line idiot.

Watching from the sidelines, interested and ignorant, my assessment of practioners of economic "science," is pretty close to Matt's of his uncle. What makes Graeber refreshing is that he's an outsider, too, and is great at illuminating the blind spots of that not very disciplined discipline.

In Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express he writes about how he hoped to have an audience with Borges when he was in Buenos Aires. He made the appropriate overtures, and was told that Sr. Borges was reading Theroux's piece about Kipling, recently published in the NYT Book Review, the implication being that Borges would not waste his time with someone inadequately appreciative of a favorite author. This is, of course, another example of the sort of the sort of theater that Borges always employed in his self-presentation, but it is endearing nonetheless. Borges did grant Theroux an audience, but I'm afraid he may not have wanted to meet me. Having finished Kim, the first substantial bit of Kipling I've read since the Just So Stories as a child left me underwhelmed. It's pleasant enough, colorful enough, but in the end mostly interesting as a document of its time (the late 1800s) and a place (the empire).

I love the just so stories, even now. Kipling is best appreciated in small doses, I think. His short stories are expertly done.

All That I Am is an excellent historical novel which grew out of author Anna Funder's friendship, many years after the events her book describes, with one of the principals, Ruth Blatt. Blatt was a German leftist who was part of a circle of activists that included Ernst Toller and Dora Fabian and whose members went into exile at around the time Hitler came to power. The prose is clean and never fusty in the way that historical novelese—especially when dealing with more distant epochs—often is; Funder's insights into the difficult lives and times of her subjects are acute. The book is well-researched and convincing throughout (even the parts Funder has imagined). All That I Am demonstrates that even a fictionalized account can be a good introduction to history—in this case, a slice of history overshadowed by the horrors that were to follow.

Avram Davidson is a marvelous, and too little known, writer. Perhaps this is because he wrote, among many other things, fantasy and science fiction, genres which have been, at various times, more or less stigmatized. Be sure not to miss his Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends, or The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. You may, on the other hand, choose to bypass Peregrine Primus, a fantasy that is not one of his more inspired efforts (though flashes of Davidson's verbal filigree and his deep learning do enliven things from time to time).

Hmmm... even my science fiction days seem to be over, and fantasy--the Tolkien strain with elves, dragons and wizards--never appealed. But I'll keep an eye open for that Unhistory.

Lola, I strongly recommend Adventures in Unhistory. The collected essays are filled with eccentric erudition, and the prose is remarkable. Davidson seems to break every rule writers are taught—Strunk and White would hate him—but he makes it work.

Yes, it does sound interesting, and vaguely related to this book on black arts I picked up and unexpectedly got engrossed in. I thought the mass of arbitrary superstition would be only tiring, but glimpsing the impulse beneath it I got fascinated. I hope it lasts long enough to go through the rest of alchemical stuff I have, and have been lugging around for years...

It's a fascinating aspect of cultural history.

I love eccentric erudition particularly when it's as skillfully, and tongue-in-cheekishly presented as it is in Davidson at his best and Guy Davenport always.

The form, if not the content, of the fifty-one short pieces that constitute Ryunosuke Akutagawa's A Fool's Life brings to mind currently (and justly) popular miniaturists such as Lydia Davis. Akutagawa tends—being the fin de siècle kind of guy he was—to privilege the portentous over the mundane, but his autobiographical vignettes, some as short as a couple of lines, none a full page, resonate in the same way as Davis's.

Here's number 42, "Laughter of the Gods." "Thirty-five years old he was walking among the pines slant-lit by the spring sun. Remembering the words 'Unfortunately for them, unlike us, the Gods cannot kill themselves' he himself had written two or three years earlier. . . . (ellipsis in the original).

And of course we know how Akutagawa's life ended.

I'm slowly working my way through Trollope's Palliser novels. It took me a while to pick up The Eustace Diamonds, because it is, famously, the least political of the series, and, as I had assumed it was the politics that gave the novels their spice, I hesitated. That was, of course, a mistake. Though it is the least political of the Palliser novels I've read so far, the politics are, as W.J. McCormack makes clear in his introduction, there for those with eyes to see. Politics aside, though, it's a cracking good read. One can only agree with David Cecil that "Trollope has bequeathed to mankind a legacy of enjoyment as solid and unfading and unalloyed as any in English literature."

A mosaic made of discrete parts that it pleases their author, Eliot Weinberger, to call essays (though others might call some of them prose poems, others wisdom tales, and still others jokes), An Elemental Thing is, to say the least, formally interesting. It is filled with knowledge about a an array of topics—rhinoceroses, winter, dream interpretations of the Maya, human sacrifice, the Mandeans, vortexes . . . the list could go on. Each sentence is carefully composed, and, for crying out loud, it's by Eliot Weinberger, an absolute (and of course little recognized and little appreciated) genius of American letters. All of which is to say, that, though I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as I loved his earlier collections, or as much as I always enjoy his essays in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, I am certain that the fault lies in me, in the rather scattered and slapdash manner in which, for various reasons, I read the pieces that make up this mosaic, and not in the words on the page. I did miss the more polemical, more political Weinberger—in this work he's chosen to devote himself to myth, legend, and, well, elemental things. It's his take on ephemera—his essay "Oranges and Peanuts for Sale" is a masterpiece—that I find most rewarding. I will reread his Elemental Thing somewhere down the line.

I've never read Trollope... leaving that for retirement, I think--if I ever see the day...

E. Weinberger--sounds familiar, didn't he edit or translate or both some Japanese or Chinese (or both) titles for NDP? Essays, non-fiction by translators is something I usually like to check out. People straddling cultures, that sort of thing.

Weinberger is very much a culture-straddler. He's the one who brought Borges to English readers, and also Octavio Paz who he started translating as a kid. He published his first book of Paz translations when he was a nineteen-year-old university drop-out.

In addition to that he's very interested in China, and has translated Bei Dao among others.

His essays are tremendous, though I probably wouldn't start with An Elemental Thing.

Here's a link to his NYRB essays, some of which are not locked down.

http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/eliot-weinberger-2/

Thanks, bookmarked.

And here's Weinberger in the London Review of Books: http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/eliot-weinberger

Samuel R. Delany has written a beautiful and important book, and one of the best novels I've read in a while.

One aspect of what makes Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders important (if not always beautiful) also makes it a book I won't be recommending to just anyone. That thing is the sex, particularly the sex that occupies a great deal of the first three-hundred or so pages of the book (and never disappears altogether).

Surely, you say, a little of the old in-and-out, even a little of the old gay in-and-out, or—in these fifty-shaded days—even a little kinky BDSMish in-and-out, won't be as off-putting as all that to anybody, and you'd be right. Your grandmother reads books that feature all those things. And that's precisely, I believe, the reason Delany felt the need to go beyond the warm and fuzzy every-day "deviance" with which we've all grown comfortable. He needed to go beyond it, because the philosophical point of this book, has to do with tolerance, and if we're talking about tolerating something we're already comfortable with—gay people, for example, who are willing to adopt the social mores of straight people and not talk to too much about what they do in the bedroom (or the men's room)—then our tolerance doesn't really amount to much.

Thus, in scenes that go on for pages, Delany trots out pederasty, bestiality, coprophagia, urophagia (the squemish should not run to their dictionaries to look up these terms), the ingesting of one's own, and others' mucous, and . . . the list could go on. None of it is condemned, and none of it is gratuitous.

Though readers may be titillated by one or two of the practices Delany details, no one could possibly enjoy them all, and most will be actively repulsed by at least one or two. But Delany makes it clear that the people who do enjoy whichever of the acts disgust us are—people. They are us. There is no circle marked "normal," when it comes to sexuality or anything else, outside of which these people exist.

So attached are we, by the end of the novel, for example, to the two characters whose seventy-plus year relationship the novel chronicles, so richly human has Delany made these two simple working-class men who are in the thick of much of the sexual action, that we can't not understand this. Delany's novel is richly philosophical—Spinoza is the presiding deity—but I'd hate to give the impression that it is only a vehicle for conveying ideas. Much richer than that, it is, first and foremost, art, a vehicle for conveying beauty: the last couple hundred pages, where we see the two central characters grow old and approach death, are unbearably moving.

I won't be recommending this book to everyone I know, but I do wish, with open minds and good will, everyone would read it.

Delany is a terrifically interesting writer. That sounds similar in some way to how he used sex in Hogg (another book not for the squeamish).

David, if you haven't already, I think you'd enjoy his The Motion of light in water, a memoir of life in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Such a rich existence, incredibly wide spectrum of experience.

I loved The Motion of Light in Water. One of the things he dealt with in that book was the unreliability of memory, and he spends almost as much time on that topic in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders as he does on the sex. His reflections on how we remember and misremember our own experience are fascinating and true.

You are one of the people to whom I would recommend this book without hesitation, and I do, whole-heartedly.

Oh, that's an easy sell!

The second in Derek Raymond's Factory series of novels, The Devil's Home on Leave, is as bleak—perhaps bleaker—than the first. We learn more about the detective (though still not his name) and more about the enervated Thatcherian England through which he moves. Raymond's ear for the way the "villains"—as lowlifes and thugs are called in his idiolect—talk remains as acute as we've come to expect, though he's toned down the argot in these books enough that even Americans can get through them without a glossary (not the case with The Crust on its Uppers).

Lovers of maps, devotees of Borges and Calvino, those who have consumed a certain amount of academic prose, those with an acute sense of wit, those who understand that novels need not be constrained to telling a good story, need not be a first-this-happened-then-that-happened recountings of events in the lives of character to whom we can relate; those who are happy to encounter novelists as adventurous as their counterparts in the other arts will relish Dung Kai-cheung's Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. If you fall into that category don't miss Dung's picture of the pictures of this imaginary city.

"'The horror,' he said. 'I walk the narrowest of ropes. Do you think that I sleep? The walls around my bed, if I go there, are spattered with mad figures of dwarves in the plaster, sneering deities, insane judges with Hapsburg lips and half their head missing, a peasant and his wife with an axe, she laughing in a corner, and God is a middle-aged man with a moustache like an army officer's whose stare varies from wicked to kind according to the sun's position behind the curtains, which I always keep drawn. Cryogenics?' he added. 'The Americans go far too low. They freeze theirs at minus 196 degrees, but sixty-five's ample in my opinion."

This paragraph is a taste of the gothic fancies that appear in the third of Derek Raymond's Factory novels, How the Dead Live. That the action centers around a mouldering estate hours away from the detective's more typical London slums, and that the quaint English town outside which the estate sits could be more accurately described as a village of the damned hammers the gothic funk firmly into place.

Critics have described Raymond as the English Chandler, but this is territory Chandler never, to my knowledge, explored. Another difference from Chandler is that Raymond, though certainly misanthropic in general, seems not to share Chandler's misogyny: there's not always a woman at the root of whatever evil permeates his narratives. I look forward to the final Factory book, I was Dora Suarez, reputed to be the most uncompromising of Raymond's novels.

This police procedural, the last but one of Derek Raymond's Factory novels is a bleak recounting of appalling events. What makes them appalling is that the tough guy police sergeant is sensitive to a fault. He's never cool enough to dismiss the horrors he encounters with a wisecrack. He becomes his victims—he is Dora Suarez—and the tears he sheds at the end are, as he tells us in the final line of I Was Dora Suarez, "for the rightful fury of the people." Not as witty or fun as Chandler or the best of Chandler's epigones, what sets these books apart is the author's humanity, a quality he passes on to his protagonist.

The references to Chandler throw me, as this sounds like someone with a social conscience (not the first thing to pop in mind with Chandler)... Speaking of crime/mysteries with social conscience, and lots of politics, have you read Paco Ignacio Taibo? Most excellent, although I don't read them, or judge them, for the "mystery" as such. Set in and about Mexico.

Manuel Vazquez Montalban (a great inspiration to Andrea Camilleri, who named his detective Montalbano after him) was of similar outlook, in Spain.

I find these politically engaged writers far more interesting than the rote gore 'em, kill 'em folks.

I'm a great fan of the Taibo books, and have read all I could get my hands on (though as near as I can tell, the first book in the series has never been translated and is unavailable in Spanish, too). I like that Belascoarán Shayne NEVER wins in the end, and is even, readers would be forgiven for assuming, dead at the end of the books.

Crudely, I think what Raymond has done is graft a social conscience onto a Chandler sort of frame (smart ass detective, deep understanding of a city). Add a deep, overriding horror at what human beings do to each other—not the same thing at all as Chandlerian cynicism—and you get something unique and appalling. I enjoyed the books, but was rather glad to think I was finished with them—until I discovered that there's a fifth Factory novel out there.

Montalban: Isn't his detective the one who throws his books in the fireplace? If so, I read those years ago, and enjoyed them.

Montalban: Isn't his detective the one who throws his books in the fireplace?

Ha, yes! Pepe Carvalho... Camilleri's Montalbano is a great reader too, although he doesn't burn them. And a great eater, again just like Carvalho.

I think the last one I read was The Buenos Aires Quintet, quite harrowing. I was reading tons about Argentina at the time and yet I think this was the book which really brought home the appalling violence and horror of its recent history.

Coffee, life, and Japan are three of my favorite things, and books would be an obvious fourth, so I opened a book called Coffee Life in Japan with high expectations. They were, alas, only partially fulfilled. The author, Merry White, is an anthropologist but this book is only slightly influenced by her discipline. It has more in common with that spate of books popular a few years ago where an author picked a popular foodstuff—cod, salt, spam, whatever—and then produced a book in which every fact he or she could dig about about that foodstuff was, in more or less entertaining fashion, and with some firsthand reportage thrown in—a visit to a spam plantation in Oklahoma—retailed. Like those books, White's book does contain interesting tidbits of knowledge about her chosen foodstuff, and new ways of thinking about it. Who knew for example, that the world's oldest chain coffee shop, Paulista, is not from Washington state, but from Japan or how important Brazil was in making Japan—today the fifth largest coffee importing country in the world—the coffee mecca it is? The problem is that White doesn't really give us a book's worth of observations and insights; this is clear from the repetitions that litter the book. It's not that her insights are banal or untrue, but that we've already heard them, from White, 20, 30, or 70 pages earlier—or more likely, 20, 30, *and* 70 pages earlier. Further, the insights and observations she gives us are not always clearly connected to any larger point she is trying to make. Indeed, this seems a book driven less by a desire to impart a thesis than by a love of hanging out in coffee shops. One wouldn't want any less of the latter, but the book could have done with a bit more of the former.

I've been wandering in the musty stacks of public domain offerings that are free for the downloading to the device of one's choice, and came across R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke novels, the first of which, The Red Thumb Mark, was published in 1907. Freeman was a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, but Doyle had begun publishing his Holmes tales twenty or so years earlier, and the Thorndyke novels were clearly influenced by the Baker Street boys. Thorndyke is what we would now call a forensics expert, and is also an unflappable genius, a la Holmes, but without a lot of the endearing eccentricity. He has a sidekick, a sort of Watson, who's not as smart or as purely rational—he still does silly things like fall in love—and is the foil to whom Thorndyke explains his methods and his reasoning. The book is a serviceable thriller (Edwardian division), and the prose is witty. The most interesting thing, perhaps, is the treatment of a new-fangled technology for nailing criminals called "finger-printing," which many take to be infallible, but which, Thorndyke demonstrates, has its problems. One could substitute DNA for finger-printing (and add substantial dollops of sex and violence) and the book could be one of the many forensics-based thrillers popular in our time.

I read a bunch of Thorndyke stories not too long ago. Did you read the one with that very serious drawing of a microscopical magnification of some sample? Loved that. I like the atmosphere, that rock-stable rationality and logic. Some have been filmed too, in the seventies, a series called (I think) The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

No, this is my first foray into Thorndyke, though I've downloaded a few more. Why not? They're free.

Hmmm. I wonder if The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes exists in YouTube land.

The game is afoot.

When using an e-reader one can check and find out how many pages the tome in one's device has, but one needs to click a couple of times to do it. Therefore, when reading on a device it's easy not to notice, when swiping that first page, how long a read one is committing oneself to. When I started Tarun J. Tejpal's The Story of my Assassins—for the record, I was using the iPad Kindle app—I hadn't quite understood that the book was more than 500 pages long.

Thus the cynical first-person narrator—the one the assassins were meant to kill—with his acerbic take on Indian life, convinced me that this was going to be a Chandler-inflected thriller of some sort: a couple hundred pages in the mind of the narrator as he tries to learn the story of his assassins and riffs on the people and places he encounters along the way. It is that, or rather contains that, but it is also bursting with a lot more.

The novel begins with what is, apparently, the attempted assassination of the narrator (though he's unaware of the attempt and has no idea why anyone would try to kill him or who the killers might be). We start with the narrator's first person attempts to figure out what happened and return to them throughout the novel, but these vaguely hard-boiled pieces are interspersed with the novella-length stories of each of the five "assassins," and in their stories, driven as they are by religion, class, caste, color, corruption, power, poverty, modernity, and so on, is the state of India today. The portraits of poverty and powerlessness that Tejpal paints in writing about the accused killers, juxtaposed with the narrator's more comfortable life—the rich buffoons who finance his magazine, his angst ridden lefty mistress, his life with a drab family in a Dehli colony—the skill with which he uses language, the laugh-out-loud humor make this novel the rich brew that it is.

I sat down to read Spinoza's Ethics—and bounced off it like a rubber ball.

Most philosophy is, for me, difficult (I've never quite understood why people get so incensed about the supposed difficulty of the post-structuralists; Spinoza and many other philosophers are certainly no easier). His Euclidean presentation of his ideas, a form which he felt would make his logic transparent, didn't help.

Defeated, I threw up my hands and went for the potted version: Steven Nadler's lucid Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction, and am glad that I did. Of course I can't say that I've mastered Spinoza—I don't think anyone can say that—but I have a sense of what he was on about now, perhaps a secure enough one that I can return to the source with some hope of doing that text justice.

Ooh, a Coincidence--I bought Steven Nadler's life of Spinoza just the other day... Allah willing, I'll have me a philosophical winter this year.

A true Spinozan would not say "Allah willing," but "god or nature willing." Let us know how the Nadler's biography is.

His Ethics threw me too. But I'm still glad I read at least part of it. It's been decades though, maybe I should try again some time.

grub first, then ethics.
Brecht

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral!

Don't we know it...

Brecht, but also Marxism in a nutshell.

M. John Harrison's Light is a skillful weaving together of two story lines, one set in 1999, the other in 2400. It features among its characters a serial killer, a human being whose consciousness has been grafted into a space ship, and the odd alien (who may manifest as human). I'm not sure that the science, extrapolated from quantum physics, makes sense (neither am I sure that it doesn't make sense) but it is convincing, and allows Harrison to engage in some interesting speculation. I particularly enjoyed the notion that in 2400, in deep space, human beings will discover technologies left behind by civilizations dead or disappeared, and that the rush will be on to "mine" these technologies that we might be able to use but are unable to produce or even copy.

That is a mix.

A book about Japanese art with the word "Superflat" in the title does little to entice those of us who find the art clustered under that rubric super-dull. The good news is that Adrian Favell's Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011, far from being a fan-boy account of Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and their epigones, is, instead, a sophisticated, sociologically informed, account of the factors that made a Murakami, a Nara, possible, and also of the transformed artworld Superflat left in its wake. The book is a real contribution to our understanding of what happened in Japanese art in the last couple of decades, and also to what happened in Japan.

I must google. Good god, it's all giant-eyed bears and bunnies and little girls. In ice cream colours. And flat for sure, no shadows, no perspective, no weight...

Speaking of what happened to postwar Japan, have you ever read Alex Kerr's Lost Japan? I remember being very moved by it, but it's been so long I don't know by what exactly. I recall the story of how he decided to build a hut Japanese style (or rather, old Japanese style), roping in everyone in the village to help him make the thatched roof (you have to use grass or weeds), as they would have of old, and what a revealing experience that had been...

hello kitty!

lol

The Antichrist... he is Cute!

I have read, and enjoyed, Alex Kerr's Lost Japan and also his follow up, Dogs and Demons. The second is filled with very pointed, and justified criticism Japan. I learned from that book, if I remember correctly, that Japan pours about the same amount of concrete as the United States, and Japan is about the size of California. When one sees all the concreted river beds here that certainly seems plausible.

Sigh.

Kerr does say some surprising, and implausible things. For a while he was touting Bangkok as a green, or at least greener, alternative to Japanese urbanization. I believe he lives in Thailand now.

You can visit his place in Shikoku: http://www.insidekyoto.com/2012/10/alex-kerrs-chiiori-trust-houses-in.html

Oh, that's lovely! What a view! David, I thought Japan still had lots of forest? I always had the impression they were extremely ecologically-minded (what with the long-term devastation of nuclear holocaust)... except when it came to fishing.

Thought you might be interested to hear I heard Steven Nadler today lecturing on Spinoza as moral philosopher--first installment, Good and Evil (there are two more lectures, I'll try to make them). Highlights: good and evil are relative, but not subjective--there exists a specific ideal of good human life; guidance by reason; use Kant's "applied" ethics to override Spinoza when necessary.

Sorry to say that he won't be talking about Spinoza's radical anti-clericalism.

Lucky you, Lola! Is he teaching in your neck of the woods?

Nairobi Heat, set in Nairobi, and of all the unlikely places, Madison, Wisconsin, is a page-turner that is also good on the relationship between African-Americans, Africans, and Africa, an issue that remains problematic even now, many years after James Baldwin brilliantly worried it in one of his essays. It's nice that the African-American cop who chases criminals in Kenya and Rwanda does not decide that, after all, America is the place for him, and also nice that author, Mukoma wa Ngugi has left the door open for sequels featuring this African-American, paired up with an African, as private eyes in Kenya.

Nadler's in Wisconsin, these were public lectures, quite basic and he's not the greatest of lecturers. Still, I like them for the chance to ask questions. Unfortunately I didn't make it to other two, couldn't cut out early three days in a row.

A minority enters a community and through hard work and perseverance gains a measure of financial security and grudging toleration, and occasionally friendship, from their neighbors. Then disaster strikes, the minority is blamed for it, and as a result faces discrimination and mistreatment, not only from the yokels among whom they live, but also from the highest authorities in the land. Members of the minority prove in every conceivable way—including with their lives—that they are not to blame, and indeed are doing everything they can to help the country quell the disaster. When the disaster has passed they return to the community, hoping, for all they had done, to be well-received. Of course—so familiar is the story-line that we can say "of course"—they are not well-received. Discrimination and abuse is the norm, apologies are not forthcoming, reparations are not made—until, that is, about fifty years later. This is the story of the Nisei who fought for the United States in World War II. Linda Tamura tells their story well in Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence, which focuses on the Japanese-American residents of the Hood River Valley region of Oregon. It is a blot on American history, and one from which the country seems not to have learned much.

Richard Price's Clockers was a great gritty realist novel of New York. I had hoped he would strike gold again with Lush Life, a novel set almost entirely on the Lower East Side, but though the novel has many glittering moments, the pace is lethargic. One suspects that excessive verisimilitude might be to blame: the novel chronicles a murder investigation, and this one, as one suspects is often the case in murder investigations outside of novels, drags on without major event. Still, Price is always worth a look for his skill as an urban chronicler.

Are you an ex-New Yorker David?

I think it's been a while since Lower East Side was really gritty...

No, Lola. I'm actually a Left-Coaster, born and bred in Los Angeles which is, in some ways, the polar opposite of New York. I've only ever been to NYC once, and loved it. I was in town for about thirty-six hours, and I don't think I slept for more than three or four of them.

Lush Life spends a lot of time on the coming together—sometimes conflicting, but sometimes amiably, but mostly with shared incomprehension—of the gentrifying hipsters, the project-dwellers, and the old timers from various immigrant backgrounds. I suppose that's the most interesting thing about the book, but Price could have done more with it. I did like his approach much more than the Tom Wolfe everybody's-a-caricature-schtick.

When Carlo Lucarelli, "one of Italy's best-loved crime writers," was young he met a policeman who had, in the course of a career that spanned a turbulent political time, arrested anti-fascists, fascists who disagreed with the fascist-in-chief, and, later, fascists in general when, toward the end of WWII, this all-purpose cop joined forces with the Partisans. Later still, after the war, when he had become a member of the Republic's police force it was once again his job to tail and arrest one-time Partisans, and he did so. This policeman was apparently unattached to any ideology, but simply wanted to be—or so he convinced the young Lucarelli—a good cop.

De Luca, the protagonist of Lucarelli's three noir-procedurals that span these years is based on this policeman. The first book, Carte Blanche is a fun, quick, read made most interesting for its temporal setting—the final year of fascist rule in Italy with the Allies pushing North. De Luca is an intriguing character—neither moral nor immoral, but very human. He, and Lucarelli's illumination of a time and place I don't know much about, will keep me on board for volumes 2 and 3.

The Italian crime novel, at least, appears to be in vigorous condition! I've heard of Lucarelli. A while ago someone gave me a dozen or so Mondadori editions with the hottest/newest crime writers, but my first choice was unlucky, because I ditched the lot on its behalf. (Nel nome di Ishmael (In the name of Ishmael) by Giuseppe Genna.) Genna was one of the writers cooperating under the collective pseudonym Luther Blissett in the nineties, a radical activist group (cultural saboteurs, you might call them, shades more of the futurists than surrealists), so I was all curious. It was a story of apparently unconnected crimes (in reality very much connected), an unsolved rape and murder of a child in the sixties and a current-times assassination, involving Italian right wing, the Americans, a religious sect etc. Nothing terribly innovative, but the political background was interesting enough to keep at it... except the appalling, relentless misogyny finally broke me about eighty pages in. It's amazing how divorced from ordinary human rights is the left in the "macho" countries; it's like it's still the 19th century there.

One pleasing quality of the third volume of Kurodahan Press’s Speculative Japan series of anthologies is that it exists at all. Generally, an anthology of translated stories, especially if it is devoted to genre fiction, is a one-off, a snapshot of a particular literary culture as it existed a year or two or five before the anthology was published. It’s rare that we get another snapshot of that culture and genre until a decade, at least, has passed. Kurodahan, however, appears to be committed to giving us regular updates on the state of speculative fiction in Japan. Hats off to them for that. As with any good anthology its various enough that it's hard to imagine a reader—excepting, perhaps, the nameless editor—who would like all the tales gathered here, but it's even more difficult to image a reader who won't find something to enjoy. That's just speculation, though. Check it out for yourself.

This is the second in Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy, and in this one the resolutely non-ideological detective no longer works for the fascists, but is now employed, not entirely of his own free will, by Partisan sympathizers. Lucarelli's picture of life in an isolated village as the war winds to a close, and scores are settled, seems spot on. I look forward to number 3 which will take us into the postwar confusion, and also deeper into De Luca who come to understand better as the pages turn.

Lola, you're certainly right about (some) leftist men, and not only in macho countries. It seems that when a bunch of men get together, whether it's to plan the revolution or to watch football, sexism will rear its ugly head.

I'm thinking particularly of the (male) American Beats, and how, while they were extraordinarily progressive in some areas, they were quite retrograde in their thinking about, and sometimes treatment of, women. (This is something which Gary Snyder—for my money the best of the bunch—copped to years later, and for which he apologized.) The uncongeniality, in some ways, of the milieu in which they worked makes one respect poets like Diane DiPrima and Joanne Kyger (at one time Snyder's wife) all the more.

It's interesting, it looks as if they had no trouble with Ginsberg and his boys--or maybe he was too big to ignore/put down... But I don't know much about that milieu.

Kurodahan Press’s Speculative Japan

Thanks for putting that on the map for me! I've seen some older Tuttle anthologies of Japanese mysteries, big hardbacks, wasn't sure about committing... Wait, what exactly is mean by "speculative"? Is it science-fictiony?

Lola:

Speculative Fiction: It's apparently a catch-all term that includes science fiction, but also fantasy, ghost stories, weird (a la Lovecraft, etc. I guess anything that's not straight mundane fiction.

Ah. I'm not exactly a dedicated follower of the genre, but this year I came across a treasure trove of antiquarian first editions (pretty much all Anglo) of that kind of stuff--ghost stories, fantasy etc.

What's the antiquarian market like in Japan?

SYNCHRONICITY!!! I post that query to you, look in my inbox, and there's a link for Meiji-era crepe-paper books!! David, do you see things like these in shops there?! How much would they cost? Do I have to move to Japan after all?! Arrgh!

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.ca/2008/04/japanese-crepe-paper-fairy-tales.html

Lola:

There's a whole neighborhood in Japan devoted to used and antiquarian books. Here's the Antiquarian Booksellers of Japan homepage with a list of the bookshops that are members. You'll notices that most of them are in Kanda or Jimbocho, two adjacent neighborhoods. As you'll imagine, it's not hard to spend a whole day walking from one of these books shops to the next, admiring their offerings as you go. http://www.abaj.gr.jp/en/shop_list_2.php

Here's a short Fodor's piece. http://www.fodors.com/world/asia/japan/tokyo/review-162701.html

And another piece: http://web-japan.org/nipponia/nipponia24/en/travel/index.html

So basically, you should come to Japan, bringing nothing but a couple of empty suitcases that you can fill with the goodies you find.

As for prices, I'm not a collector myself. When I go to Jimbocho it's mostly just to window shop. I never get around to actually pricing things.

It is a good thing the configuration of online surfing makes it hard-to-impossible to drool ON a computer screen.

In Japan, I think I'd be solvent all of six hours, tops.

Maybe if you had an iPad. Lola.

Small blessings are welcome!

Hello, Cutie! is a cute book about cute things and the (sometimes cute) people who create those things. That description will be enough to divide readers of this squib into two camps. The first will have already stopped reading, so offputting do they find cuteness in all its cloying sweetness; the second will be happy to learn of a book that will tell them more about a quality that has added fantasy and fun to their lives.

I, unfortunately, am in the former group (though since I'm reviewing it, I read the whole book).

You're cute when you're grumpy.

Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond cheered me up.

It is a superb account of (mostly) South Asia's encounter with modernity. Fortunately, though Mishra travels through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Tibet in the course of this book, he is not a travel writer. That is, we don't get side-splitting accounts of the eccentric locals he meets, or bemusement at local customs. Rather we get a politically informed, passionate yet quietly written account, of the lives being lived in these places, and the forces, many of them far from local, that mold, and often blight, the lives of the people who live there. Mishra does deploy irony, but it is always subtle, as is the elegance of his prose. (His one novel, The Romantics, is, I believe, one of the best written in the recent past. As superb as Mishra's reportage is, I hope he will return to fiction one day.)

Never read him. Might now.

yes, sounds excellent.

In 2004, "the world's foremost scholar of Sherlock Holmes," claimed to have discovered some papers of Arthur Conan Doyle's that had gone missing. Shortly thereafter he was murdered (though some think it was suicide), a crime which remains unsolved to this day. This is Graham Moore's point of departure in The Sherlockian, a novel in which he weaves together the story of people investigating the mysterious death of an eminent Sherlockian, and searching for the missing papers (in the novel, a diary), with the story of Arthur Conan Doyle investigating a crime—his Watson is none other than Bram Stoker. The historical narrative gradually reveals why it might have seemed a good idea for that diary to disappear, and the contemporary story is a fun look at Sherlock-obsessives and their world. The Sherlockian is not, of course, as good as anything in what those obsessives would call the canon, but it's a fun read nonetheless.

Wait--some real life "foremost scholar" of Sherlock Holmes got himself unsolvably murdered? That is just too perfect.

1. he ordered the hit on himself

2. a Sherlock nut did him in

I feel it MUST be #2. Only scholars care enough to murder scholars.

Yeah, but if he was a scholar himself that might still get you to #1. ;-)

I think the suggestion is that the scholar did himself in in the hope that the apparent murder would be pinned on a rival scholar.

If one spends enough time in academia, one will see that the above scenario might be described as gritty realism.