Petroglyph's 2018 Challenge

Authors from countries I have not read (enough of)

1. China:
   Love in a fallen city by Eileen Chang. Finished: December 2018
   Collection of reportedly great short stories by a highly acclaimed author. Having recently visited Shanghai (where I picked up this book), I’m keen to read stories set there.


2. China:
   The invisibility cloak by Ge Fei. Finished: January 2018
   All I know is that this is supposed to be slightly surreal.


3. Czechia:
   Cutting it short and The little town where time stood still by Bohumil Hrabal. Finished: April 2018
   A recommendation by a Romanian friend, who knows I was looking for good books from Central Europe.


4. Romania:
   For two thousand years by Mihail Sebastian. Finished: December 2018
   A Romanian Jew comes of age during the Interbellum. I picked this one up on a trip to Romania.


5. Guadeloupe:
   The bridge of beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart. Finished: July 2018
   My first Guadeloupean author. Litfic from the Caribbean.


6. Soviet Russia:
   One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Finished: December 2018
   It’s one of those books I feel like I should have read.


7. Zanzibar:
   Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Finished: May 2018
   My first Zanzibari / Tanzanian author. He is a recommendation by my SO; I just picked what Wikipedia claims is “one of Gurnah’s most acclaimed novels.” I have no idea what to expect.


8. Kenya:
   One day I will write about this place by Binyavanga Wainaina. Finished: January 2018
   My first Kenyan author. A recommendation by my SO. A memoir.


9. Italy:
   The castle of crossed destinies by Italo Calvino. Finished: January 2018
   This one has stood unread on my shelves since the early 2000s, and that needs to change.


10. Pakistan:
    Basti by Intizar Husain. Finished: February 2018
    My first Pakistani author. A 2017 Santathing present.


11. Argentina:
    Thus were their faces by Silvina Ocampo. Finished: December 2018
    Short stories. Written by someone from the same circle as Borges and Casares.


12. Maya civilisation:
    Popol Vuh: the Mayan book of the dawn of life, edited by Dennis Tedlock. Finished: December 2018
    Mythology and history of a conquered people in a prize-winning translation.

Reading projects

1. Der Winter tut den Fischen gut by Anna Weidenholzer. English title: Winter is good for the fishes. Finished: February 2018
   Part of an effort to read more in German. A recommendation by an Austrian friend. I know nothing about this one ahead of time.


2. Histoire de la femme cannibale by Maryse Condé. English title: The story of the cannibal woman. Finished: November 2018
   Part of an effort to read more in French. A woman’s life in South Africa, written by a French-Caribbean woman. Sounds like an interesting mix of perspectives!


3. Drosilla and Charikles, edited by Joan B. Burton. Finished: October 2018
   Part of an effort to read more by the Ancients. This is a 12thC Byzantine “novel”, patterned on Ancient Greek romances from the Roman era.


4. Le rouge et le noir by Stendhal. English title: The red and the black. Finished: November 2018
   This year’s Big French Classic has stood unread on my shelves for eleven years.


5. Lady Susan by Jane Austen. Finished: January 2018
   I’m working my way through Jane Austen’s bibliography, in chronological order of publication. This one is next and last on the list.


6. Middlemarch by George Eliot. Finished: December 2018
   This year’s Big Doorstopper Book. Seven or so years ago I made it about a third through; this year I’m going to start over and make it to the end! (hopefully)

General Owned-but-Unread

1. Vele hemels boven de zevende by Griet Op de beeck. English title: Many heavens above the seventh. Finished: August 2018
   A Belgian author’s debut novel. Reactions have been mixed.


2. Sund by Tove Folkesson. >Finished: December 2018
   An impulsive purchase, b/c I wanted to read more contemporary Swedish authors (I live in Sweden). No real idea what to expect. I haven’t even checked the reviews for this one.


3. An artist of the floating world by Kazuo Ishiguro. Finished: June 2018
   Latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Also the final 2014 SantaThing present I have not yet read. The others included a great book (The song of Achilles), an ok book (The garden of evening mists), and one I loathed (The kite runner). Let’s see what I think about this one.


4. The island of the day before by Umberto Eco. Finished: september 2018
   I’ve had a copy of this book on my shelves for sixteen years. And to think he’s an author who I’ve enjoyed before and who I think I would enjoy reading again.


5. Dvärgen by Pär Lagerkvist. English title: The dwarf. Finished: February 2018
   My SO’s favourite from this Nobel Prize winning Swedish author.


6. The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth. Finished: December 2018
   A 2014 Christmas present from my SO. About an unhinged Anglo-Saxon sociopath’s resistance to the Norman conquest of England in the 11thC. Written in faux Old English, not intended to be accurate, but to make the language feel authentic to present-day English speakers. Sounds like it’s right up my street!

This year I have set up three sets of books. The first set, aka the ‘main list’, contains twelve works by authors from countries un- or underrepresented in my catalogue; the second group covers a few “reading projects” (loosely speaking) I’ve got going on; and the third group is a more or less random selection of unread books from my shelves.

The latter two sets speak for themselves. The ‘main list’ is there because I like to think of myself as someone who reads widely (though not particularly deeply). But the condition of having read widely necessarily involves me actually working my way through books from all over the world, and I’ve been doing too little of that, really. So here’s a stab at rectifying that. Reading globally really should become a recurring category of at least six items on these yearly challenges.

This year I’ll also read the following books:

• Vingt mille lieues sous la mer /Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne
• Little, Big by John Crowley
• Tilgang by Naja Marie Aidt
• The bluest eye by Toni Morrison
• The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
• The grace of kings by Ken Liu

They’re not on the list, they’re just a few of the other books I want to get to this year, usually for TBR-clearing purposes, and including them here is going to serve as a nudge to embark on them as well.

What a great idea for a list! I look forward to reading your reviews.

Neat themes for this year. Following along again.

Can't say I've ever targeted authors from other countries specifically. I'm knowingly guilty of reading a lot of historical fiction taking place in Eastern countries that's written by Western authors. I would like to read more Japanese authors, and I've been trying to compile a list of their canon.

Middlemarch is very worthwhile, though it didn't become a favourite of mine. Italo Calvino is an author I need to revisit. I have that Stendhal on TBR, but similar to your story it just never seems to float to the top. Ishiguro is another author I want to know. I read that Eco title in November, and I believe it's great if you're already a fan like me although it probably wouldn't make you one.

Little, Big is topping my primary list, probably a January read.

The Solzhenitsyn was on my list a couple years ago, it's a good one!

Lady Susan I just read a couple weeks ago. Initially I wasn't thrilled with the epistolary style of it, but once I got a handful of letters in I started to get caught up in it and didn't mind anymore. I mean, it is Austen, after all, it's not like it can be bad! :P

Oooooh you loathed Kite Runner too? Man that is one of very few books I literally wanted to destroy once I got through it. UCK!! Hahaha

I will have to watch your list closely, lots of intriguing stuff on it! :D

And we're off: I started One day I will write about this place on the train to work this morning. I'm about one tenth in, and so far Wainaina's writing is lovely.

>6 .Monkey.:
Let me point you to my review of that shoddy melodrama last year. Man, a few times I was close to throwing the blasted thing at the wall and abandoning it. I kept hate-reading it, just so I could look people in the eye and tell them that, no, I really, honestly, did finish the thing, and yes, I do know what I'm talking about.

If we move to a larger place where there's a spare room to be turned into a library, I am so dedicating a shelf to "hate-reads" or "Shiterature". I've collected a few of those now, and I already know where in the bookcase that shelf is going to be: at the bottom.

LOL! I never get rid of books, but honestly I want that one gone. But my husband hasn't read it yet and he, for some reason, says he wants to ...eventually. So for now it sits. I glare at it every time I notice it, lmao. Yeah, I totally wanted to chuck it at the wall, repeatedly. But it was one of those huge things, I had to finish it (plus I almost never abandon anything, I prefer to get the full picture and all that). Blech.

One down, twenty-three to go! I finished One day I will write about this place on the commute back home. Up next: The invisibility cloak by Ge Fei.

Woo!

I really have to make it part of the annual planning to start off with an easy hit. It lends a lot of momentum to tackling the list.

One day I will write about this place by Binyavanga Wainaina



Why did I choose to read this?
My first Kenyan author. A recommendation by my SO. A memoir.

Review (Also posted here.)
In a style of writing that I cannot but call absorbing, Wainaina talks about growing up in Kenya in the 70s and 80s, his addiction to fiction, about his booze- and cigarette-fueled attempts at studying in South Africa, about his early days as a writer, about his travels around the continent and the world. Over the course of his personal story, he adds in just enough politics and historical background to keep things firmly in memoir territory (as opposed to general history or international relations).

Some of the chapters were published as magazine articles before, and much of the book reads like that: a skilled writer using personal stories to talk about his world of intertribal distrust, colonial legacies, hesitant African democracies, Lagos cityscapes, Togo markets, and how to chart Kenya’s development through a succession of music styles. The best vignettes in the book, though, are the personal ones: this is where Wainaina’s less-is-more writing style does its most evocative work; his sparse sentences and carefully picked details are more artificial and less effective when it comes to more general topics.

That said, One day I will write about this place was an immersive read that I was eager to pick up and looking forward to read. I would very much like to read more by Wainaina.

The invisibility cloak by Ge Fei



Why did I choose to read this?
All I know is that this is supposed to be slightly surreal.

Review (Also posted here.)
This was indeed slightly surreal. A Beijing audiophile limps from commission to commision, navigating poverty as he builds high-end, high-quality sound systems for various wealthy amateurs. His wife has divorced him after her infidelities, his sister is ejecting him from her spare flat, his only friend is increasingly remote, and his work assignments are unavoidably drying up. And then a final, all-in job presents itself, for a shadowy, instinctively unpleasant client.

The surreal tone of the novel is due to characters’ unexplained motivations, inscrutable inner worlds that have become inaccessible due to social distancing and a distinct dispreference for really getting to know their fellow human beings. There’s no magical realism, just alienation, but that is surreal enough.

This may sound weird (and potentially off-putting), but The invisibility cloak felt to me as a successful version of Tommy Wiseau’s The room -- if that film had been competent, insightful, professional and emotionally intelligent. As in The room, the main character is a forty-something semi-recluse who is betrayed by his wife, his family and his friends while he does not understand why. But whereas Wiseau’s version is just some emotionally stunted weirdo’s transparently self-aggrandizing martyrdom whose preferred method of audience interaction is cheap melodrama, Fei’s short novel is thoughtful, full of empathy, well done, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and knows exactly how far it can push its premise. There’s a lovely idea at the centre of the book, namely that using alienation itself as a good-enough counter to alienation, and it ties the whole thing together beautifully.

The idea behind it sounds interesting. And I like when I can do comparisons like that to similar stories, it often offers additional insight.

Two already! Now I'm a slacker ... :)

Don't be hard on yourself: Fei's book, at 126 pages, barely qualifies as a novel. I'm rushing through a few short items on my list and expect to slow down considerably soon. I'm already taking a break by reading something else! (The beginning of spring by Penelope Fitzgerald)

Lady Susan by Jane Austen



Why did I choose to read this?
I’m working my way through Jane Austen’s bibliography, in chronological order of publication. This one is next and last on the list.

Review (Also posted here.)
Not Austen’s usual fare, this short, posthumously published novella features Lady Susan Vernon, a narcissist attempting to rule her social circle through deceit, manipulation and emotional blackmail. As her fortunes change and people grow wise to her character, her goals shift back and forth between making her puppets dance for her, marrying herself off favourably, preventing her daughter from marrying favourably, and spitefully marrying off her daughter unfavourably. All that matters to Lady Susan are her self-importance and swift and excessive punishment for any resistance.

I understand why this was never published during Austen’s lifetime: it is clearly unfinished. The ending is undoubtedly rushed, breaking with the epistolary form of the rest of the novel, and the whole thing is more straightforward than her other works. Still, even minor Austen is fun to read.

What I especially liked was the spot-on description of the narcissist at the centre: acutely observed and very accurate.

And that wraps up my read-through of Austen's novels in publication order. I wonder who will be next. Penelope Fitzgerald? Another 19thC writer? I'll have to think about it...

There's not too many authors I'm personally intent on reading every work by, but I can understand finding Austen worthy. I usually sample and move on, but probably a consequence of being a slower reader than you - obviously, the score now being 3-to-1!

I also read the last 6 of Austen's chronologically last year, finishing up with Lady Susan about a month ago (the first I'd read back in 2016). Indeed, it wasn't quite up to snuff for her, and the first couple of letters I wasn't sure what to make of it, but then I started getting invested, lol. Even her not-mindblowing stuff is still more enjoyable than most other authors' best works! :P

The castle of crossed destinies by Italo Calvino



Why did I choose to read this?
This one has stood unread on my shelves since the early 2000s, and that needs to change.

Review (Also posted here.)
This one was a great deal of fun: I was absolutely delighted by this exuberantly postmodern game with literary tropes and retellings.

The castle of the title is located at the centre of a vast forest, where it serves as an inn for a host of inexplicably voiceless guests -- suddenly none of them are able to use their voice. And so they resort to using a pack of tarot cards to tell each other their adventures and the events that led them to this place. This is, of course, a flimsy excuse for Calvino to indulge in a multi-levelled game of connect-the-dots: the stories that he spins off sequences of tarot cards are spurred on by associations, hints, creative liberty, literary allusions and an impish eagerness to take visual details on the card out of context (the symmetrical ten of swords, for instance, is called on to represent opposing armies in one story and a barrier of archangels in another; the ace of cups stands for a forest spring, the fountain of youth, and a magic-beanstalk-type tree). One story’s sequence of cards will, when read the other way, yield a completely different story. And so, as he first builds and then explores his square of cards, Calvino presents a lovely array of stories built around late-medieval, and renaissance-era tropes: retellings of Roland, Faust, Parsifal (among others), even Oedipus in the spirit of courtly romances, Boccaccio and Chaucer.

The second half of the book is similar in setup, but serves as a basis for a retelling of Shakespeare plays, coupled with a few passages of musings on Art and Life that are decidedly Literary Criticism.

It is all a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek game: Calvino only took things seriously enough to adhere to his square of cards to be read in all possible directions. But other than that, it’s sheer indulgence: an erudite, playful writer enthusiastically exploring the worlds of literature and the mechanisms of story construction. More than once Calvino’s boundless enthusiasm reminded me of Borges and his extravagant literary funhouse.

The book must have been an absolute riot to write, and I found it infectious as anything: it made me giggle with delight, repeatedly.

>20 Petroglyph: That does indeed sound fun! :)

>20 Petroglyph: I just looked up Italo Calvino in the county library catalogue after reading your review and made a note to self to check out some of his writings soon. Some of his books, like Invisible Cities, Numbers in the Dark, Under the Jaguar Sun, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount, sound very intriguing, if not downright bizarre. They've even got The Castle of Crossed Destinies!

>22 passion4reading: I think If on a winter's night... is probably his most well-known. I didn't superduper love it, but it was an interesting style and I'm glad I read it, and am curious about reading more of his work. I totally added >20 Petroglyph: to my want-to-read list, lol.

>22 passion4reading:
Calvino is definitely best known for If on a winter's night a traveller, which is entertaining (and, I think, one of the Big 20thC Classics), and was my gateway drug for more of his stuff. I thought it worked, even though the central premise becomes clear quite soon, and then there's the whole rest of the book to get through, but that is engaging enough to keep you going. (Still, Calvino is best in short form, and If on a ... is basically a collection of stories.) Under the Jaguar Sun was published posthumously and was left unfinished -- I wouldn't recommend it. The others I haven't read (but I've been making eyes at Invisible cities as my next read by him). So I'd recommend you start with his best known book, like >23 .Monkey.:.

The fun in both If on a... and Castle is not so much rooting for the main character -- those are barely there. Plot level, Person vs Society, Person vs Themselves etc -- all of that is hardly relevant in those books. Instead you're rooting for the author: once you see what they're trying to do, how they're trying to build up their book, you start rooting for them to actually pull it off and bring things to a satisfactory conclusion. To me, both worked.

All I've read is If On a Winter's Night a Traveller and that was enough to plunk him on my list of favourite authors. Still haven't circled back to him, although I've Cosmicomics in the TBR pile somewhere.

>23 .Monkey.: >24 Petroglyph: Funnily enough, I haven't come across his name before, or maybe just in passing when it didn't register. Must read something by him soon as this seems a grave omission (says she, when her TBR tower is currently numbering over 180).

>26 passion4reading: lmao, I have more than 536 books (because a bunch aren't entered on LT and are mixed among the rest so a pain trying to figure out what's unadded) on my shelves still waiting to be read, a number of which have 2-7 books within their covers even. And that's not including the bazillion on my haven't-yet-acquired or want-to-read-sometime lists! :P

>27 .Monkey.: I'd love to spend some time browsing your shelves. Sounds like heaven!

>28 passion4reading: Hahaha, yeah, there's plenty of good stuff (at least, imho :P). But on the other hand, it drives me crazy trying to keep things properly sorted! Lol.

Ooh another Calvino to read/buy. I loved If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, Cosmicomics, and The Baron in the Trees but wasn't as enamored with Invisible Cities. I have a few more on my shelf just waiting to be read:

Marcovaldo
The Path to the Spiders' Nest
Italian Folktales
Six Memos for the Next Millenium
The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount

And that's Basti and The Dwarf finished! Reviews are on the way.

Woo!

This year's German-language book, Der Winter tut den Fischen gut, has also been wrapped up.

Better watch out, .Monkey.! I'll catch up to you yet!

Hahaha, the race is on!

I've just finished reading Cutting it short. It was okay.

Gotta catch some sleep now: a 22-hour shift is coming up! There'll be a lot of downtime after about 1 am, though, and I hope to strike at least one more of the ones I'm currently reading off this list by the end of it.

Der Winter tut den Fischen gut by Anna Weidenholzer



Why did I choose to read this?
Part of an effort to read more in German. A recommendation by an Austrian friend. I know nothing about this one ahead of time, so I’ll be going in cold.

Review (Also posted here)
This is the story of a woman descending into depression: she loses her husband, loses her job, and stays away from family, friends and neighbours. A person succumbing to a lifelong sense of inadequacy.

None of that is a spoiler, by the way: the novel is also told backwards. It starts at chapter 54 and ends with chapter 1, and so we find out she’s depressed and powerlessly alone in the first few pages. The rest of the book fleshes out individual humiliations, shortcomings, and episodes of inhibition. As the book progresses (regresses?), the chapters get shorter: we already know what is going to happen, and exposition can be done away with. Perhaps unexpectedly, the book gets more engrossing as it moves along and events hinted at or events surmisable from context are brought to the fore.

This book, I think, did the reverse ordering right. In the past, I’ve criticized similarly structured books for mishandling that aspect, in particular Sarah Waters’ WWII novel The night watch, which which treats all the things readers are able to figure out in the earlier (though chronologically later) portions as surprise revelations once we get to them in later (though chronologically earlier) chapters. Der Winter tut den Fischen gut has a little more respect for its readers: it fully expects us to keep track, and merely elaborates on what we have worked out on our own.

Well-told, restrained, not overwritten. I recommend it (if you read German).

Very interesting review. I am German but have never heard of either the novel or the author. May have to get my mum to send it to me - if I ever find the time to finish my TBR towerpile.

>37 passion4reading:
She's Austrian, perhaps that's why you've never heard of her. I've also heard good things about her Weshalb die Herren Seesterne tragen.

Her writing style is quiet yet full with razor-sharp observations. She says a lot in few words. Recommended!

>38 Petroglyph: Sounds like it could be right up my street. I've made a note of her name.

Oh dear - the aim was to reduce my TBR pile with this challenge, not pick up more recommendations! :-)

>39 passion4reading:, I know right? There's almost no helping it. Begs the question, are we really supporting one another in this group or just enabling? lol

>40 Cecrow: Haha!

>40 Cecrow: A bit of both I think :)

Basti by Intizar Husain



Why did I choose to read this?
My first Pakistani author. A 2017 Santathing present. No idea what to expect.

Review (Also posted here)

Basti is a fictionalized retelling of much of the history of Pakistan in the twentieth century through the eyes of a teacher who, as a child, lived through the Partition of India and Pakistan in the 1950s, and who experiences the secession of Bangladesh in the 1970s as an adult. The word basti in Urdu means something like “settlement”, and it is through a sequence of villages and towns and cities and the sometimes coerced transitions between them that Husain builds up the plot to his fictionalized history of Pakistan.

On a more abstract level, much of the novel deals with questions of home, of belonging to a land (or the land), and it follows its narrator and his family and friends as they uproot themselves and are forced to move to new places where the tough and intricate business of creating a new home can always be disrupted as the political and religious winds change. Family ties weaken and friendships dissolve across sudden national borders, and the town that became so familiar when your own wave of immigration moved in may change again as the next one is forced through.

That is not to say that the book is not readable: it speeds along at a crisp enough pace, slowing down where necessary and moving towards associatively-connected dream time passages when that is called for. One of the things I’ll remember best about this novel, though, is just how densely the prose is spiced with quotes from and allusions to various poets and religious and mythological texts, from several languages and traditions (Urdu, Persian, Arabic) – references which the footnotes take pains to elucidate. The ending, particularly, appears to be Husain’s reworking of an intense amalgam of poems and lines from other sources (akin, I believe, to how Umberto Eco blent the Song of Solomon, among others, into his own prose for the sex scene in The name of the Rose). Knowing about the references, and especially knowing how frequent they are, adds to the sense that this novel is solidly anchored in a rich and interconnected literary tradition with tropes and techniques of its own.

There were things that did not work for me. For one thing, Husain didn’t always juggle the two timelines (1950s and 1970s) as smoothly as he could have. This was particularly noticeable towards the beginning of the novel, where a few brief cutaways to the later timeline were especially inelegant – nothing happened in them, they merely repeated prior cutaways, and they served quite transparently to signal to the reader that the later timeline was going to be important, just not at that moment. I don’t think the gears and joints of writing should be showing this much. For another, I don’t think the characterization worked out all that well: several of the narrator’s friends ended up too similar to each other and could easily have substituted for each other.

Reading Basti on its own is a bit of a challenge: unfamiliar as I am with Urdu literature, the dense allusions and the assumed familiarity with the history of Pakistan and Bangladesh threw me for a bit. But once I got into the movement of the prose, I was more than happy to be along for the ride. I now feel much better prepared to tackle more literary fiction from Pakistan!

>43 Petroglyph:, wow, nice branching out. I only finally learned about Pakistan's early history through fiction myself, first in A Division of the Spoils and then later in Midnight's Children (although those were both India-centric). I can see how the India/Pakistan split and then the founding of Bangladesh lends itself to some back-and-forth parallels.

That's an interesting insight into that scene from The Name of the Rose, I didn't know that.

>44 Cecrow:
Midnight's children is buried somewhere in the mountain titled "perhaps some day", though Rushdie is certainly on my tbr. (The satanic verses, of course, probably for next year's challenge.) I'll see then how I feel about more Rushdie.

Several books I've read in recent years were literary comments on 20thC history that I was not really familiar with before picking them up (to name a few, a book of Estonian short stories for last year's challenge, this year's Desertion, and probably a few others on this year's list, too). I enjoy learning new things! And it's always good to discover new authors who are really good at what they do. Double win.

Re: The name of the Rose: I am sometimes embarrassingly familiar with the KJV and with judeo-christian mythology, so those passages jumped out at me. That, and Star Wars is another thing I'm entirely too au courant with. It's frustrating: I don't think much of either universe is really any good, but given my related interests and given the people I hang out with, it's hard not to absorb encyclopedic minutiae. I could really use that mental storage space for other things, though.

Dvärgen / The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist



Why did I choose to read this?
My SO’s favourite from this Nobel Prize winning Swedish author.

Review (Also posted here.)
I really liked this one!

Historical fiction, set in Renaissance-era Italy, with squabbling city-states and courtly intrigues as the backdrop. The narrator, a dwarf kept as a curiosity by a local lord, has rejected all connections to humanity, and views everything and everyone else with barely-concealed hatred and disgust. Absolutely no-one he’s ever met has treated him in any other way than as a despicable non-human, and so he keeps himself aloof, separate from the accursed human race.

The narrator is unapologetically and just so delightfully evil. Early on in the book, to establish his character, Lagerkvist has him kill a kitten, just to hurt the child whose pet it is. As the novel progresses, and his lord’s ambitions soar, he delights in wreaking underhanded havoc, revels vicariously in crude bloodshed, and spews his indiscriminate revulsion at any and all.

It’s one of those books where the main character would be an awesome villain in someone else’s story, and where the story is one of things going from bad to worse for a fascinatingly evil main character, such that you enjoy the destruction while at the same time kinda rooting for and admiring them.

Cutting it short & The little town where time stood still by Bohumil Hrabal



Why did I choose to read this?
A recommendation by a Romanian friend, who knows I was looking for good books from Central Europe.

Review (Also posted here.)
This book contained two sets of short stories -- well, anecdotes -- set in the same village and centring around the same family, but about ten years or so apart. The first cycle deals with the exploits of Maryska, the village’s brewer’s wife, whose unconventional (for the time) and unencumbered approach to the joys of life make her quite the character in pre-war Bohemia. The second set of stories/anecdotes deals with her son, age ten or so, who wanders around the village and sees it slowly adjusting as the Soviet occupation and the associated power structure changes intensify and leave ever clearer marks.

I wouldn’t call this a novel -- the structure is too loose for that. These are collections of bar yarns, stories of the do-you-know-what-so-and-so-did-the-other-day variety. As such, they are very good at drawing you in and making you feel as though you are one of the locals gossiping about a neighbour. The yarns also abide by the adage that a joke is not funny unless someone gets hurt. Case in point, one of the stories features a ten-year-old boy who wants a chest tattoo of a little boat when he sees dockworkers’ manly chests full of ships, anchors, mermaids and the like. Because the kid is an altar boy, he has the opportunity to steal money from the collection plate to pay the local tattoo artist, who promptly inks a big-breasted mermaid onto him.

These were enjoyable tales of family life in a sleepy village, against a background of post-war Czechia undergoing societal changes that slowly take their toll.

An artist of the floating world by Kazuo Ishiguro



Why did I choose to read this?
Latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Also the final 2014 SantaThing present I have not yet read. The others included a great book (The song of Achilles), an ok book (The garden of evening mists), and one I loathed (The kite runner). Let’s see what I think about this one.

Review (Also posted here.)
An artist of the floating world is a pretty languid book: it deals with an ageing painter, Ono, who spends most of his time thinking about his past and feeling abstractly confused about the present, particularly about why his family and his former friends keep their emotional distance.

His past is Imperial Japan before and during the second World War, when he was a talented mid-level artist working within the system and supporting his country. The present is a post-war, American-dominated Japan eager to do away with its past, actively establishing a new self-image that rejects and de-emphasizes uncomfortable elements of the old one.

Ono, as supporter of the status-quo, did rather well for himself in Imperial times; his former friends and students, who sometimes chose more counter-cultural paths, generally did not. Ono, of course, fails to see where he went wrong: he never did anything wrong, never engaged in objectionable behaviour; he merely fit into society and its expectations of him, and is now vaguely annoyed at people who seem to blame him for having earned a comfortable living and a fêted career. Having retired, he no longer needs to worry about things like a roof over his head (he managed to find a lovely traditional villa that was sold dirt cheap after the war), establishing a career, or finding a spouse. And so, from his comfortable position, he’s benignly oblivious to how he comes across to others.

I read this book surprisingly quickly: it flows along quite speedily, as large sections of the book consist of the narrator reminiscing meanderingly, and fairly pleasantly, about episodes of his past. Incidents in the present, interactions with his family, and visits to former friends are quite transparently occasions where Ono’s unthinking acceptance clashes with others’ perspectives. Ishiguro has an engaging way with words, and the prose offers no obstacles. An artist of the floating world is a straightforward, guileless, smooth read.

Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah



Why did I choose to read this?
My first Zanzibari / Tanzanian author. He is a recommendation by my SO; I just picked what Wikipedia claims is “one of Gurnah’s most acclaimed novels.” I have no idea what to expect.

Review (Also posted here.)
Much of this book is historical fiction: the first part is set in the 1890s, as a Zanzibari village shopkeeper takes in an Englishman found wandering the desert, which leads to an interracial love affair. The second part is set in the 1950s and deals with a schoolboy secretly falling in love with an older divorcee as Zanzibar/Tanzania moves towards Independence. This part turns into a fictionalized autobiography of sorts, with the narrator moving to England and detailing his experiences there. This, too, includes a romantic attraction that contemporary society and the narrator’s family might not be all that fond of.

The transition between the 1890s and the 1950s sections is deliberately sudden, and while I did get a sense that the characters were related in some way to the ones 60 years earlier, Gurnah chooses not to tell us until quite late into the second part.

I really enjoyed reading this book: it was very well written, the prose flowed neatly and very deliberately. I liked how Gurnah used the jarring transition between storylines to reinforce the thread of abandonment and, well, desertion that permeates the relationships portrayed in the novel -- not just in the various illicit or taboo romantic attractions, but in the way family ties change over time and drift apart as various members change their minds and/or respond to society’s changing mores. No high-stakes melodrama, merely people dealing with trying to fit in with others’ ideas of proper behaviour, even when those ideas change, or when multiple conflicting in-groups demand to be satisfied.

A very powerful book. Possibly one of the best I’ll read this year.

Taking stock:

• Read: 10
• Currently reading, almost done: 2
• Currently reading, less than halfway through: 3
• To be cracked open: 9

I take that to mean that I'm over halfway by the end of June. Good prospects for finishing the challenge this year, in other words!

>50 Petroglyph:, you're about where I was each time that I finished, so that does sound promising.

I've not read any Ishiguro yet but he is definitely on my do-that-someday list.

Congrats on being right on track for the year!

You are really zooming along! I'm a fan of Ishiguro, and would like to read the one you reviewed.

This one would not be a bad Ishiguro to read, I think: it's written very smoothly and is a breeze to read.

Friends tell me that this book sounds very similar to The remains of the day, though, so it's not an unqualified recommendation: ugh, more of the same, or more? Of the same? Yes please!. Myself, I'm less likely to pick up that one, but I'm totally on board for another Ishiguro.

Earlier today I finished Simone Schwarz-Bart's powerful The bridge of beyond. Next up: either Eco or Kingsnorth. I'm saving Middlemarch until I'm finished with that other Big 19thC book, Le rouge et le noir.

>55 Petroglyph: Middlemarch is a favorite of mine; I've read it at least twice and listened to it on audio twice. If you enjoy audiobooks, Juliet Stevenson does an outstanding reading. She's also done most of Austen.

The Red and the Black is another book I've been meaning to get to.

>57 billiejean:
I'm struggling with The red and the black. It's not that I don't think it's good, because it is, objectively speaking. Still, I find myself eagerly reaching for other books instead.

It's a very good 19thC psychological novel, in which a well-rounded character with believable issues and tendencies is confronted with various challenges and their mental world is explored skilfully and with great insight in the human condition. So far, so professional. Most characters, though, including the main one, are selfish arseholes, which leaves me with precious little patience to tolerate their antics. But I'm having an especially hard time, though, engaging with 19thC small-town concerns: the nobility's sensibilities of what is proper behaviour; everyone's callousness towards class- and political opponents; petty squabbles over things that seem ridiculously quaint (the cost of a servant's uniform, or whether or not they get to stand in a crowd to see a king). I just can't find it in me to care.

>58 Petroglyph:, I'm having similar issues with Vanity Fair right now, although at least Thackeray acknowledges his characters are lousy people and he's having fun with it. Don't think I'll rush Stendhal to the top of my TBR pile just yet, lol.

Yes, I might put it off a little longer, too.

Vele hemels boven de zevende by Griet op de Beeck



Why did I choose to read this?
A Belgian author’s debut novel. Reactions have been mixed.

Review

I posted my review in Dutch here, but here’s the gist:

I quite liked this book, even though it fell short of greatness. Many heavens higher than the seventh is a slice-of-life family drama, as told by five members of one family (well, four, plus one of their lovers), spread over three generations. That’s a nice setup for a diverse bundle of everyday litfic, and it allows Op de Beeck to cover a lot of ground in just a few pages.

The book is noticeably a debut, though, in that the author is trying so hard to write a novel that that effort becomes visible. In all the diversity of life that is on display here, the selection of character worries that the book chooses to focus on is just a tad too lit-ficcy: alcoholism, adultery and suicide. As a result, the effort involved in writing a novel becomes noticeable, the constructed narrative becomes conspicuously so. Also, while all five characters are given distinctive voices and concerns, they all share the author’s knack for well-chosen words and phrases, and here, too, the writer’s tools and techniques were insufficiently covered.

In all, though, I can’t really fault an author trying hard to ply their trade. I consider this book to be a largely successful attempt at a well-written book, and will gladly read her later work.

I finished The island of the day before a few days ago (review on the way; I liked it). That's one of the big volumes off the list; only two books with a high pagecount remain to be read: The wake and Middlemarch.

Fortunately, I've now also started Middlemarch (finally!), having abandoned that one years ago because there's always too many books that I'm reading at once. I'm currently only a few pages in, but already Eliot's quiet snarkiness has worked its magic: plenty of leisurely descriptions of country life that she then undercuts with a precisely timed placing of a tongue in her cheek. Expertly done, and it works on two levels -- "let me tell you how these people think things work", and "I'll make a joke so you and I both know that things are actually more complex than that". Good stuff.

What a difference with Le rouge et le noir! That one, too, is largely about observing daily life in various classes and commenting on their mutual snobbishness, but holy crap is it boring and pretentious! I'm now exactly at the halfway point (50%, as my ereader has it), but every percentage point achieved is a slog through ponderousness and self-importance, two things I have very little patience with. I foresee an abandonment. Perhaps I'm finally too old to waste time on books that bore me. Or maybe I'm lazy and that's just a convenient excuse for accepting what the internet has done to shorten my attention span. Perhaps this book is simply one of the ones that do not agree with me (you can't stomach them all!). Perhaps I'm shallow and I need someone like Austen or Eliot to make social commentary on bourgeois and upperclass mores cute and snarky for me. Whatever the reason, I don't think I'm ready to admit defeat just yet, but that decision isn't far off.

>62 Petroglyph:, whew, nobody seems to much enjoy The Red and the Black, I'm going to have to note that when I'm trying to queue it up; surround it with light and fluffy or something.

Middlemarch is brilliant for sure, but not a favourite since I found it more lecture-like than wink-wink. "Let me show you some terrible examples of how not to go about things, by way of explaining the correct way." Not sure I'll revisit, but I'd try seeing it your way if I did.

>62 Petroglyph: - Oh dear The Red and the Black is one of those classics that I have on my shelf but haven't gotten around too. Maybe I'll continue to let it just sit there...

Drosilla and Charikles by Nicetas Eugenianus (Author) and edited by Joan B. Burton



Why did I choose to read this?
Part of an effort to read more by the Ancients. This is a 12thC Byzantine “novel”, patterned on Ancient Greek romances from the Roman era.

Review (also posted here)
Strangely repetitive, and too affected for my tastes.

Drosilla and Charikles is one of a small number of 12thC Byzantine novels, which were written in the style of 2ndC Greek novels. Briefly put, the Byzantine efforts imitate their examples’ zeitgeist (Classical gods, 3rdC Parthians instead of 12thC Seljuks, …), their language (which deliberately affects Classical Greek, sort of), and their tropes: young lovers, separated by capricious gods, kidnappings, and pirates. In the introduction, Burton floats the hypothesis that in the intervening centuries these tropes had been taken over by hagiographies until that genre’s decline by the 12thC, when they could be reclaimed by the “novel” again. The whole thing is covered in a christian sauce (of course), so the archaising elements have to work within christian parameters.

Like other novels written by the Ancients, this one has a flimsy plot that serves as a framework upon which to hang eruditely composed prayers, speeches, letters, lamentations, songs, and bawdy humour (though only rarely so, in the case of Drosilla and Charikles). Sudden plot twists, abrupt character deaths and far-fetched coincidences are what moves the story forwards. I would compare it to a mid-20thC Hollywood Musical -- the appeal lies in the performances, the dancing and the singing, not so much the characterisation or the plot. All that is fine: I’ve come to expect that from Ancient works. What was too much for me was that there was too much repetition going on, though: the entire plot is summarized several times, when newly introduced characters need to be brought up to speed; missives between characters are elaborately reworded by the messengers; and many classical myths are referenced multiple times.

I found it hard to appreciate this book for what it was. The main audience for this type of writing would have been classically educated 12thC Greek-speaking aristocrats eager to consume non-Western, non-Latin media, so far as their christianity would let them, and eager to recognize Classical references and tropes. As a result, the density of references is too great for my liking, and there’s a few too many layers of affectation in there, too.

Great introduction, though! Excellent text edition.

The island of the day before by Umberto Eco



Why did I choose to read this?
I’ve had a copy of this book on my shelves for sixteen years. And to think he’s an author who I’ve enjoyed before and who I think I would enjoy reading again!

Review (Also posted here.)
This was the fun kind of postmodernist novel. Not as ebullient as Calvino or Borges, but more deliberate, more focused. Clever, but not insufferably so.

The island of the day before is set in the 1630s-40s. Its frame story deals with Roberto de la Grive, minor Italian nobleman, who is shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean but manages to end up on board of an abandoned vessel anchored between two islands. Because he can’t swim, he is confined to its decks, thus prompting him to comment he has been shipwrecked on a ship (f you like that sort of snarkiness, this book has plenty of that). Fortunately, the ship is well-stocked with food, water, a scientist’s collection of birds and plants, and a room full of clocks. Roberto settles in for a few weeks. In order to maintain his sanity, he starts writing letters to the girl he loves, which soon becomes a diary of sorts, which turns into his biography, which turns into a thriller of 17thC mercantile espionage.

Eco has a lot of fun with this setup, and spins it off into an astonishing diversity of chapters. Portions of the book read like a dramatic episode in the history of the city of Casale, in northern Italy, where Roberto served in his father’s army. The chapters most like a spy thriller feature Roberto’s long-lost evil twin, who may or may not be imaginary, and a supporting character from Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (which is set in the 1620s). There’s editorial chapters and asides, where an unnamed editor tries to make sense of Roberto’s writings as his state of mind deteriorates. Particularly enjoyable, I thought, were the chapters where Eco positively wallows in imitations of 17thC writings, their styles and their tropes -- I adore the exhaustive compilation of things that may be symbolized by the dove and the attempt to present all of that as one coherent idea. Finally, and, perhaps most impressively, many chapters deal with debates and conflicts from contemporary philosophy, theology and science, presented as learned discussions by experts in their respective fields. These chapters are where Eco really captured 17thC mentalities: how people thought, and why they did so, and why that adds up to a coherent worldview, dove-metaphors and all.

All of this adds up to a wonderful book that revels in its erudition and its own cleverness, and that has absolutely earned that right. It’s uneven in places -- Eco does sometimes let his obsessions go on for a tad too long -- but it’s never boring.

>66 Petroglyph:, you found some references in it I didn't know about, the Musketeers character and the 17thC style/tropes imitation with the doves (I thought that was just Eco being Eco). That would make it even more fun to catch those. I read it a year ago and it still springs to mind now and then. I'd rate some of his other work clearly above it, but I'm glad I read this one too.

Great review! I've been meaning to read some Eco for quite a few years now.

Le rouge et le noir by Stendhal



Why did I choose to read this?
This year’s Big French Classic has stood unread on my shelves for eleven years.

Review
This year’s Big French Classic has stood unread on my shelves for eleven years.

Review (Also posted here)
French Naturalism and me will likely never get along very well. This book was a struggle for me, and in the end I gave up and skipped large portions of it.

On the face of it, I can without qualms say that Le rouge et le noir has the makings of a very good 19thC psychological novel, in which a well-rounded character with believable issues and tendencies is confronted with various challenges, and their mental world and their social environment is explored skilfully and with great insight in the human condition. The main character is Julien Sorel, a working class lad from small-town, provincial France, who’s got a talent for book-smarts, and who is anxious to climb the social ladder to upper-middle class or lower-upper class levels. The obstacles are well-developed, too. One is that the people on those upper rungs will never accept him as one of their own: he’s at most a pet displaying impressive tricks, but never an equal (this is part of their upbringing, of course). Another obstacle is psychological in nature: Julien’s congenital, knee-jerk disdain for higher-class people and the way they behave towards anyone not from their class. Yet another obstacle is that Julien himself develops a haughty disdain for people from his original class: he’s trying to fit in, but this renders him an outcast almost everywhere. The result is an impossible conundrum, and Julien struggles mightily to navigate it.

So far, so professional. What made me want to give up, is a combination of vexations I had, all of which are excusable individually, but the cumulative effect proved to be too much.

For one thing: most characters, including the main one, are straight-up selfish arseholes, quick to despise anyone qualifying as The Other, which leaves me with precious little patience to tolerate their antics. Many are incompetent, too, unable to stick to a course of action and veering back and forth between two sides of a decision as a new mood overcomes them. This also annoyed me. Watching a moody adolescent failing at his half-hearted attempts at get-riches-and-a-title-quick schemes isn’t a fun experience, either -- whether they be impossible designs, half-baked plans, spur-of-the-moment decisions, or a systematic faking of religious fervor that higher-up clergy are bound to see through. I also had an especially hard time engaging with 19thC concerns, both petty squabbles of the small-town kind (the cost of a servant's uniform, or whether or not someone is allowed to stand in a crowd to see a king’s procession), and the ridiculously quaint class sensitivities (constraints on proper behaviour; everyone’s callousness towards members of another class). I just can't find it in me to care.

Then there is the unpleasantness that is Julien’s amorous escapades. Julien seduces two higher-class women -- one is his first employer’s wife, Mme de Rênal, who he decides is pretty even though she’s already thirty. Julien desires her because she represents an ideal to him, and because his self-image would look pretty good with a higher-class mistress. When the adultery becomes known, his reputation (and hers!) is ruined, and Julien has to run from the vengeful husband. A well-placed connection sets him up as the secretary of Marquis de la Mole -- whose teenaged daughter Julien promptly seduces. Again, his motivation is more class envy and a feeling that a man of his pretentions ought to be looked up to by a woman such as Mlle de la Môle. Throughout it all, Julien is consumed by contradictory emotions, passions and wild flights of fancy, which serve as a complex psychological shield for his sometimes-calculating moves in securing money, lovers and status he thinks should be his due. Other people’s sacrifices for his sake barely register in Julien’s self-estimation.

Finally, there’s the novelist’s approach to their work: It is clear they have chosen their subject carefully, wishing to show certain societal currents and what kind of effects they have. But I felt as though Stendhal were trying to dissect their characters with such levels of emotional detachment and objectivity that it all felt forced and needlessly explicit. The image I have of Stendhal is that of a droning teacher who fails to realise their pupils have gotten the point but overexplains every step, and nothing is going to deter him. And so subplots and new characters are introduced merely to press a button in Julien’s psychology, or to bring out a conflict Stendhal wishes to turn to next. All the conflicting dilly-dallying between Julien and his female objects of desire is this writ large: their endless drama serves merely to have the occasional realization occur to Julien, or to make points about the rigidity of the class system. As a result, the demonstration of Julien’s psychology and his struggles with himself and with society is done with a graceless lack of subtlety, a tedious plodding through the whole process, step-by-step, that ends up feeling so forced it loses all semblance of realism. In a word: I found this book too noticeably constructed.

Taken separately, I would probably be able to overlook these points, but taken together they made working my way through this book an unpleasant chore. They were also magnified by the book’s length: my physical copy has over 820 pages with tiny print.

Like Julien, I struggled (though perhaps not mightily), but was unequal to the task, and more or less abandoned this book. I ended up reading to the 52% point (as per my e-reader) before I was ready to give up. I spoiled myself thoroughly on a synopsis and an article or two about the book’s influence and Nachleben, trying to decide whether continuing the drudge was worth it. In the end, I decided not to. I read a chapter here and there, but ended up skipping most of the rest of the book. The final 10% (again, as my e-reader has it) I did read, and so, having reluctantly read some two thirds, I can happily say that I am properly done with this book.

Here’s hoping next year’s Big French Classic will be a more agreeable read.

>69 Petroglyph:, been a rough Classics year for me too, I liked Dickens as usual but Vanity Fair was similarly full of unlikeables. This Stendhal is still on my shelves and will come up sooner or later, but it seems pretty happy where it is (i.e. pretty far down the TBR pile at the moment). Now I'm curious what your next year's entry in this slot will be - not more Stendhal, I hope?

They're hit or miss. "Classics" encompasses so many genres and changing tastes and trends and nations that there's bound to be duds. Who knows -- you might end up thoroughly enjoying this one!

And no -- no more Stendhal for at least a few years, if ever! I'm eyeing Balzac for next year's French Classic -- Le colonel Chabert, most likely. Besides one book by Sartre and one by Romain Gary, that is the only really "classic" book in French that own but haven't yet read. This year I re-read a Jules Verne book (20.000 leagues) and sped through a de Maupassant book (A woman's life), so it feels unfair to select either of those authors. I need more unread French Classics. George Sand? Colette?

Great review! That book has been on my shelf for over 30 years. I did make one attempt to read it unsuccessfully. I guess I will wait a while longer. :)

>72 billiejean:
Thanks!

I tried to give it a fair assessment. But I will say that, privately, I agree with your decision to put this one off a little longer. ;)

Histoire de la femme cannibale by Maryse Condé



Why did I choose to read this?
Part of an effort to read more in French. A woman’s life in South Africa, written by a French-Caribbean woman. Sounds like an interesting mix of perspectives!

Review (Also posted here.)
Rosélie, a Guadeloupe native, has lived all over the world -- Tokyo, Washington DC, N’Dossou (appears to be a made-up city in Western Africa), and has now settled, somewhat, in Cape Town, South Africa. She used to live there with her husband, paint, and be generally passive. Now, after her husband’s murder at an ATM, her painting days seem over. Rosélie’s housekeeper-slash-friend has encouraged her to start a career as a medium and a healer, and in mentally tugging at the circumstances of her husband’s death, she is forced to actually go out and do something.

That’s a setup for one kind of book. And Histoire de la femme cannibale kinda unfolds that way: the prodding at a loved one’s dead leads to a reassessment and a way to deal with depression. In addition, though, there are more sub-genres.

We also get parts of the stories of Rosélie’s clients, who come to her for her gift of healing, and her friends and lovers. These mostly are immigrants from other African nations, or Afrikaners. And this being Post-apartheid South Africa, people’s racial, ethnic, and linguistic allegiance make up a large part of people’s identity, almost as basic as what gender they are. These clients’ and friends’ stories deal, of course, with trying to fit into a society that is sometimes virulently prejudiced against them. This applies to Rosélie herself as well, who is from kinda everywhere, who has no local people, and who is Parisian-French-speaking: she doesn’t fit in any of the boxes South African identity wants to tick. She’s no longer considered properly black, either: her twenty-year marriage to a white Anglo-Irish professor has seen to that. And so this book tells another kind of story: that of immigrant narratives, and life in South Africa, and the way racial identities rub up against each other.

All this adds up to a pretty solid example of what I would call political fiction: where the characters take a step back, and the real meat of the novel is discussing the real world through an in-universe window. From that point of view, Rosélie is kind of an interesting litfic character: she is passive to a fault. Not the kind of passive where she permits the people close to her -- family, lovers -- to fill her with their passions. She just ambles along, is vaguely annoyed at being dragged to yet another event by an enthused partner, but not worked up enough to object. She’s never cared much for other people’s interests, is apathetically a-political, and refuses to spend the mental effort to engage in discussions about the things that seem to animate people so much: race, inequality, globalization, the future of the African continent, the legacy of post-apartheid South Africa. She loves certain people very deeply, but prefers a one-on-one existence, as opposed to a one-to-many that is real life. As a black woman, she’s been largely invisible most of her life, un-catered to, of minimal importance in most people’s lives, and so, once left to her own devices, she largely lounges around the house in a state of permanent indifference and does nothing -- she might as well be properly invisible.

As the narrative thread moves from observations and interactions into extended flashbacks about people’s backgrounds and Rosélie’s African-American activist friends in New York, the prose moves the reader pleasingly from one sequence to the next, a languid pace that keeps on offering up discussions about race relations, identity negotiations, globalization, and the chaos that all that is in South Africa. At times that felt less convincing: Most of the places were Rosélie has lived feature extensively (except Tokyo, for some reason), and this a-chronological tour of her life reminded me sometimes of secondary-world fantasies where the plot has the protagonists visit all the areas on the map. But it is remarkable how many times that felt entirely natural: Condé, in selecting this particular character flaw, this character biography, these narrative devices, has built a novel that quite naturally and quite confidently ventures out into the territory of political discourse.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, and you want to read it: it’s been translated into English as well.

>71 Petroglyph:, I have Colette's Cheri and a Simone de Beauvoir memoir, thinking I'll do the memoir.

>74 Petroglyph:, on the South Africa front, I have Disgrace and July's People in TBR but I haven't explored the area yet. This sounds like it would expand nicely on that (and I would definitely need the English version, ma Francais est tres mal).

>75 Cecrow:
Chéri sounds mighty interesting, actually, so thanks for bringing that one to my attention!

Lots and lots of interesting authors to explore in SA. You won't feel under-served there, lol

Disgrace I've read. It's good: memorable, packs quite a punch. (My spoiler-full review is here)

The only Gordimer I have read is None to accompany me, and I didn't like it, not really. Partly because of my expectations about what fiction should be, so your mileage may vary -- July's people might be a better book, too. (my review of that book here).

I have no real, specific, comments to make, but caught up reading your reviews, so much interesting stuff!

>77 .Monkey.:
Thank you! And you're back!

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn



Why did I choose to read this?
It’s one of those books I feel like I should have read.

Review (Also posted here.)
There’s not much I can say about this that hasn’t already been said. Nasty, brutish and short. Read it.

>79 Petroglyph:, and worth emphasis: according to Ivan, this was an example of a very good day.

I've been meaning to read that for a long time.

>80 Cecrow:
More food than usual, not getting caught, tortured, not falling ill, not losing another tooth... Yeah, it was a good day. If you lower your standards far enough, almost anything becomes "not too bad", as Ivan repeatedly forces himself to admit.

>81 billiejean:
Do so! It can be read in one sitting, and it'll make you want to be a better person afterwards.

And that's three more down: last night I finished For two thousand years, and then finally read the last few items in the story/novella collections Love in a fallen city and Thus were their faces, which I'd been reading on and off throughout most of the year.

On the "Currently Reading" front, I am just past the halfway point in Folkesson's novel Sund, and I made it 70% through Middlemarch. Now all that's left is The Popol Vuh and the pseudo-Old-English The wake. I might actually be able to make it this year.

Great!

You can do it!!

Almost there!! You totally got this :D

Thus were their faces by Silvina Ocampo



Why did I choose to read this?
Short stories. Written by someone from the same circle as Borges and Casares.

Review (Also posted here.)
This is a collection of strange stories. The best word I can think of to describe them is unmoored -- Ocampo seems uninterested in tethering her stories to reality. Dream and reality blend into each other; past memories and future desires are interchangeable; and characterization is nonexistent -- characters are so empty and alike that anything that impacts them seems more the result of a choice rather than characterization. And then a desultory choice at best.

These stories refuse to adhere to the conventions of written prose: Aristotle’s three unities are roundly rejected, as are unity of theme, plot linearity, plot coherence, and whatever other expectation you may bring to them. Dipping into these felt like descending in a barely-coherent dreamworld in which anything out of the ordinary might happen, on the condition that it’s barely sensible.

For two thousand years by Mihail Sebastian



Why did I choose to read this?
A Romanian Jew comes of age during the Interbellum. I picked this one up on a trip to Romania.

Review (Also posted here.)
For two thousand years is a journal kept intermittently by a Romanian jew during the late 1920s - early 1930s, divided into six sections. Each section sees Sebastian at a different phase in his life, whenever he feels the need for regular journal-keeping. The first section deals with his experiences as a first-year undergrad, dodging punches in the aula and anti-semitic trouble-seekers in the hallways. Later sections see him striking up a friendship with a revolutionary-spirited professor, as an ordinary architect in a factory serving as American-led modernization propaganda, and hanging out in Roaring Twenties Paris.

There’s no real structure to this journal: life just happens to uncoil plotlessly. Sebastian uses his journal to keep track of what happens, what he feels about that, and what his friends think -- fellow jews, revolutionaries, students, mentors, hard-working colleagues, mistresses. He’s more the hanger-on type, writing almost wistfully about his idealized friends, wishing he could sometimes be bothered to want to be more like them. One recurring worry is the individual’s inability to change a (sub)culture, when that group considers his undesirableness to lie in what he is, not what he does. Another is the lament that adulting is hard, but dogged persistence in aiming for lower-hanging fruit is one way of getting somewhere.

A Romanian friend of mine described Sebastian as “a shitty philosopher”, and I can see that: many of his musings can come across as underdeveloped, and, dare I say it, as coming from a first-year undergrad. Also, as Sebastian grows up and his concerns turn to his job and his easy living, assorted practicalities dominate -- there is less time for Pure Thought. That is true. But the philosophical themes surrounding man-versus-society and man-versus-himself and man-versus-subculture are pretty universal and essentially without definitive answer, and I’m not faulting Sebastian for using his diary of musings to only cover well-trodden philosophical ground. Every individual mind will have to deal with the beginnings of philosophy, however fumbling. Even the ones who wrote pre-Adorno and pre-Levinas.

Love in a fallen city by Eileen Chang



Why did I choose to read this?
Collection of reportedly great short stories by a highly acclaimed author. Having recently visited Shanghai (where I picked up this book), I’m keen to read stories set there.

Review (Also posted here.)
If I had to class this story collection somewhere, it’d be domestic fiction. The setting for several of these stories is a traditional family house in early 20thC Shanghai (and sometimes Hong Kong), shared by brothers and their wives, with assorted children, servants and slaves. The top couple is either the Patriarch and Matriarch or the eldest brother and his wife, and they rule over a strict downward hierarchy. Deviations from that setting are presented as just that: deviations from the norm.

The foreground of these stories tends to be the inner family life and how the various couples and generations jostle under the same roof, depicted almost as political factions vying for influence. Most of the focus lies on the women in the household -- the wives, adopted daughters, the slaves.

In the background there’s always several tensions: between the old Chinese ways and the new Western-style ways, between the fast-changing morals of the city and the stolid countryside, between societal duties and a longing (articulated or otherwise) for more female self-determination.

Domestic fiction usually isn’t my cup of tea, and while the social machinations held my interest, they didn’t grip me: the perspective was a tad too impersonal. Believe me, these are good stories; I’m glad I read them. But I don’t think I’ll be reading them again.

You are zooming along! Hope the next book is better.

Haha, no, just a little delay in getting these written up.

It's not that Love in a fallen city was bad, the stories were just ok. At least some of the remaining books will be better, I think. Middlemarch is awesome. Sund I think is just ok (I'm two thirds through that one). The wake, at about one quarter in, feels more gimmicky than good. I've dipped into the Popol Vuh as well, and that one promises to be super interesting.

>87 Petroglyph:, I wonder what statement was being made with that style? Borges explored ideas, where this seems more like a merging of reality and the dream world. Maybe an investigation into the surreality of life, suggesting it is nonsensical in how it plays out, that we are the victims of fate and chance, choice is an illusion, that sort of thing.

>88 Petroglyph:, I think my focus in reading would be on seeing how life was same/different at that period and place, versus North American society I'm accustomed to reading about. Maybe that wasn't enough the focus to convey anything interesting?

>92 Cecrow:
I picture that style as similar to other postmodern art forms, like painting: what is of interest is not representation or realism, but things like textures and materials, the nuts and bolts of producing the work in question. Borges did that, too, in gleefully playing with and turning around of narrative conventions, but his strangeness and magical realism and postmodern playfulness, I feel, are situated more within the story world, if that makes sense -- there's still coherence and things like plots and causal narrative threads. I would characterize Ocampo as taking things further, e.g. by dismantling one version of a story (say, child's play, or a feast) by turning it into another kind of story (a murder, a funeral). Her stories start off as one thing (a man meeting a woman in the city) and things like dreams and visions of the future and talking about the past disrupt the continuation of that setup. As you say, the illusion that is choices would be the "point", or perhaps the multiple different ways that a choice can be characterized as.

For two thousand years was certainly interesting, but the "worldbuilding" aspect (for lack of a better word) doesn't really come to the forefront in that book: it's more musings about then-current political movements and inner debates about whether aiming for a non-demanding job is the right thing to do, ethically speaking.

Sund by Tove Folkesson



Why did I choose to read this?
An impulsive purchase, b/c I wanted to read more contemporary Swedish authors (I live in Sweden). No real idea what to expect. I haven’t even checked the reviews for this one.

Review (Also in Swedish here.)
Only after picking this up did I find out it was the second part in a trilogy. Ah well. I think it worked as a stand-alone read as well.

Sund is about Eva Zackrisson, a teen from a rural island, trying to find herself. She tries studying in Stockholm, produces her own demos and shops them around, joins a hippy commune, becomes homeless. Nothing she does feels really true to what she really wants, but all her goals lie beyond what words and language can express.

This book felt very contemporary -- disaffected Millennial thinking pseudo-deep thoughts (her favourite book is Coelho’s The Alchemist). I particularly liked the writing style -- very effective. But the whole thing didn’t really grip me: teenage angst and “finding yourself” infused with hippy-grade pseudoscience don’t particularly appeal to me. Also, nothing that happens to Eva felt as though it came with any actual consequences: there’s always friends, parents and money, it seems, no matter how bad things get.

In short, this was a well-written book, but its target audience is not me. Ah well.

That's too bad, but there's still hope you'll end your year on a high note!

>95 Cecrow: there's still hope you'll end your year on a high note!

Definitely! Based on the first fifth or so, The Wake looks like it might end up on the good side of ok. Middlemarch (90% finished) is all kinds of wonderful. And The Popol Vuh is going to be a fascinating end-of-year book. So I'm good, I'd say ;)

Middlemarch by George Eliot



Why did I choose to read this?
This year’s Doorstopper. Seven or so years ago I made it about a third through; this year I’m going to start over and make it to the end! (hopefully)

Review (Also posted here.)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

It was not a good idea to read this book alongside The red and the black, that cold research lab where only the main character is real and all the others are plot devices to trigger psychological and/or political observations. It made Stendhal’s books look so much worse, and Eliot’s book so much superior. But Middlemarch isn’t just great in comparison, it’s great, full stop.

Eliot's quiet snarkiness worked its magic on me from the first few pages, where there are plenty of leisurely descriptions of country life that she then undercuts with a precisely timed placing of a tongue in her cheek. Expertly done, and it works on two levels -- "let me tell you how these people think things work", and "I'll make a joke so you and I both know that things are actually more complex than that; but we still understand why these people think so". Good stuff.

Most of this book centres around the travails of four couples and their immediate families (or lack thereof). That means there’s a fairly large cast to keep track of, but that is exactly where this book’s strength lies: their interactions and conflicts are brilliantly developed. All her characters feel like real, three-dimensional people who act in accordance with their convincingly-portrayed psychological makeup. Relatively few of the conflicts in this book are due to coincidence; it’s real-seeming characters behaving in uncontrived but conflicting ways. Very well done, that. Eliot also makes this seem so effortless and genuine and unartificial, which is another big mark in her favour. And finally, while she cares about all her characters (the omniscient authorial voice will sometimes straight-up tell readers as much), she does not shrink back from subjecting them to ruin and despair -- her caring for these characters does emphatically not trump the consequences of their unfavourable (in)actions or incompatible desires.

This was a wonderful read by an author who knows what they are doing. Those are the best books.

>97 Petroglyph:, liked it too, if maybe not as much. Probably a prime candidate to revisit at different ages to see what stands out differently.

Maybe I'll reread it in ten years' time. I have a feeling I'll have read most of her work by then at least once.

>97 Petroglyph: Excellent write-up of one of my all-time favorites. If you feel like re-visiting at some future point, the actress Juliet Stevenson does a marvelous nuanced reading on audio, unabridged. Her characterization of Casaubon is particularly spot-on. One of the great things about audiobooks, particularly as a re-read, is that you concentrate less on the story particulars, and more on the language and writing; Stevenson brings these out so well.

>100 kac522:
Thank you! And thanks for the tip!

The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth



Why did I choose to read this?
A 2014 Christmas present from my SO. About an unhinged Anglo-Saxon sociopath’s resistance to the Norman conquest of England in the 11thC. Written in faux Old English, not intended to be accurate, but to make the language feel authentic to present-day English speakers. Sounds like it’s right up my street!

Review (Also posted here)
This was both solid and interesting! (And disappointing!)

Solid, because this worked very well as a work of historical fiction. The Wake deals with the run-up to and the fallout of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, as experienced by a conquered people attempting guerilla war. It is also a portrait of the narcissist that is its main character, Buccmaster of Holland. At the beginning of the story he is a prideful freeholder, one of the few in his village deep in the marshy fens, where most farmers are unfree thralls. His psyche is obsessed with his own superiority over those on lower social rungs, those who work for him, and the other members of his household, where he will not tolerate even imagined slights against his god-given patriarchy. He hateful of any kind of attempted control over him (real or imaginary), and driven by a constant need for validation and admiration. When the Normans come and conquer England, Buccmaster loses his lands and, worse, his status. He becomes an outlaw instead, nurturing delusions of infamy and obsessed with maintaining control over his little band of merry men, usually through bullying, manipulation and self-serving biases. His only measure for people’s worth is how high he ranks in their estimation.

Where this gets interesting is the language this book is written in. In order to set his novel in an Anglo-Saxon world that was lost with the Norman conquest, Kingsnorth has produced what he calls a “shadow tongue” of Old English: present-day English re-spelled and purged of French-derived vocabulary in order to make it feel like Anglo-Saxon. It is easier to illustrate than to explain: i stands on a long seolfor strand it is night all is deorcness but the mona thynne lic a sithe blaed the sea is cuman in and risan and fallan on the strand lic the beatan of a heorte (p. 76). It may take a few pages to get used to, but this “shadow tongue” is mostly just unusually-spelled regular English, and adjusting to it shouldn’t be hard. (Though see the tangent below.)

So. If you feel like you can deal with a violent narcissist as a main character, written in English dressed up as its eleventh-century forebear, I think the book is definitely worth your effort.


***


Ok, super nerdy tangent here, probably irrelevant to most of you reading this. You see, I have two MAs in historical linguistics, I am working towards a PhD in this field, I have studied older versions of several Germanic languages and I may or may not have published papers on these subjects. In other words, I think I have a few more things to say about the language in this book. They are not things that are likely to matter to many others, but they do to me.

Frankly, I was actually pretty disappointed with Kingsnorth’s “shadow tongue”. I do realise that a) I am in a very atypical position here, b) this is, realistically speaking, the best fake Old English I am going to get in a traditionally published work of fiction, and c) this book was written pretty much to cater to my interests. But still. I have to admit that what Anglo-Saxon flavour there was in this re-spelled Present-day English, it wasn’t nearly enough! And it fell short of its goals in some pretty obvious ways, too.

My biggest complaint is that I would have liked to see a greater variety of word endings. Nominal morphology is bare-bones, adjectival morphology is non-existent. But it is verbal morphology that is particularly poor: Kingsnorth uses one single ending for the simple present paradigm (I is, thu is, he/she is, we is, thu is, they is); one for the simple past; and one for all non-finite forms. This is so completely unlike Old English that it was a major disappointment. Especially for I is, wtf was he thinking there? Also, the auxiliaries used for tense, aspect and mood were straight-up modern English -- annoyingly so. Also also, I don’t think I can forgive Kingsnorth for doing away with case distinctions in the 2nd person pronouns in exactly those places where Present-day English has none.

Secondly, Kingsnorth’s attempt to simultaneously shun words with French origins and to (mostly) avoid Anglo-Saxon words that require a glossary has a predictable result: the language ended up way too simplistic. While the limited, oft-repeated vocabulary kinda helped in illustrating Buccmaster’s thoughts going round and round in the same rut, it also made Kingsnorth’s fake Anglo-Saxon feel too impoverished to be a proper language. And I think that may have been the opposite of what he was going for.

And finally, and this is more of an anachronism than anything else, Kingsnorth uses the word fuck(ing) quite a bit (spelled as fucc or fuccan). And while Present-day English may use a sexual taboo word as an all-purpose swear word, none of the reasons why that is the case are really valid in the era in which this novel is set. (Much of this goes for other four-letter words, too.) Similarly, Buccmaster (and others) are often very sarcastic in how they express themselves -- again, that feels more like 21st-century speech patterns rather than eleventh-century ones.

In his afterword, Kingsnorth professes impatience with historical fiction written in Present-day English for imposing contemporary speaking patterns on historical eras. In some superficial ways he may have succeeded in avoiding this, because the language used in this book does look and sound a little like Anglo-Saxon. But in others the grammar and the speaking patterns of modern English are so unnecessary and so dominant. And in yet other ways (the limited vocab, having characters say I is, argh!), he makes his characters sound like simple-minded “Dark Age” folk, a caricature that’s the bane of medievalists’ existence. So yeah: speaking as a professional historical linguist: Kingsnorth's "shadow tongue" was frustrating: it had the right ideas, but ended up under-delivering. I am disappointed :(

So, to be absolutely clear: I didn't dislike this book. I enjoyed it for what it was and I'm glad I read it. But some things just irked me.

To complement my post in >9 Petroglyph:

Twenty-three down, one to go. I have five days to make my way through Dennis Tedlock's edition of The Popol Vuh. That should be plenty of time.

I am simultaneously feeling confident I'll complete this year's challenge successfully, and looking forward to next year, which promises to be a great book year.

>102 Petroglyph:, I’ve experienced similar challenges, where as much as I wished to appreciate something and knew sacrifices had to be made, there would be some detail I couldn’t just ignore. The most important factor for me is whether it’s evident a decent effort was made and the sacrifices were intentional (translators go through these same agonies), versus a lazy effort and/or false confidence in the result by the author. I try not to assume the worst, but introductions and afterwords and so on are sometimes the tipping point one way or the other. That could have been the case here, if he has an ungenerous view of others’ efforts.

It sounds like what’s bothered you is feeling petty to snipe at what you know isn’t correct; but I think it would be less correct to dismiss your own better knowledge. You’ve only been generous in your own assessment, I would say.

>105 Cecrow:
Generous? Perhaps. I recognise that writing like that cannot have been easy or straightforward, and I'm assuming Kingsnorth did his best. (I read somewhere that his editors made him tone down things; perhaps they shoulder some of the blame I'm dishing out). I think I can see why he made the sacrifices he did, but I also think he a) went too far, and b) they had unintended consequences (portraying medieval people as simple pidgin-speaking yokels).

It just feels very petty to dismiss a project, entirely because it's not up to my specialist standards. But here we are. I hope he writes more books in this vein.

Very nice reviews! I have a niece who is also quite knowledgeable about Old English. I wonder what she would think of the book?

And that's a wrap!

As is by now traditional, I spent the afternoon/evening of the last day of the year reading the final book for this challenge, which in 2018 ended up being The Popol Vuh, edited by Dennis Tedlock. It was a very interesting read, and an excellent text edition. (full review to follow, if you're interested).

Summing up:

The year's best book (from this list, at least): George Eliot's Middlemarch. Such a joy to read, such accomplishment on display. Wonderful.

Also in the top six, though I won't bother with an actual ranking:

One day I will write about this place by Binyavanga Wainaina, a memoir of growing up as a fiction addict in 1980s Kenya;
Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah, historical fiction (with an auto-fiction sauce) set in Tanzania and London;
The castle of crossed destinies by Italo Calvino, a vivacious and playful romp through Early Modern story tropes;
Lady Susan by Jane Austen, a biting 19thC portrait of a narcissist; and
The island of the day before by Umberto Eco

The worst reads: Le rouge et le noir by Stendhal, definitely. I think that dreadful behemoth put me off Stendhal entirely. It'll be a long while even before a new French Naturalist novel enters my library.

I didn't care much about Sund by Tove Folkesson, either. The wake by Paul Kingsnorth I had professional issues with.

All the others, at the very least, cleared the relatively low bars labelled "readable" and "enjoyable", and most books were the kind I looked forward to returning to. A pretty good reading year, in other words! Here's hoping that the 2019 challenge will be as good, or better!

Congratulations on finishing your list!

>109 Petroglyph:, I'm a little bit scared of Stendhal, now. Even more so than Woolf. Ha ha.

24/24 is awesome! I've gotta fight my way back to that august standing, maybe 2019 will be the year.

Yes, congratulations! And here's to a great year of reading in 2019.

The Popol Vuh edited by Dennis Tedlock



Why did I choose to read this?
Mythology and history of a conquered people in a prize-winning translation.

Review (Also posted here.)
The Popol Vuh is a grand mytho-historical cycle, a reflection of an oral history, as told by the K’iche’, one branch of the Mayan peoples. The cycle starts with a creation myth and then continues with the Gods’ repeated failures to create humans, a series of Trickster Twins and their exploits among the Gods and in the underworld of Xibalba, the eventual creation of humans, and an increasingly historical listing of Mayan and allied communities and leaders, down to the eventual Conquest by the Spanish.

For anyone familiar with other grand mythological cycles (Greek, Norse, Hebrew), these stories follow a familiar pattern: a deep time that is highly allegorical and full of symbolism and larger-than-life heroes, and that becomes progressively anchored in history as the material approaches the present. As such the Popol Vuh reads like a distinctively Native-American variation on a familiar theme: a standardized history of the people, whose cultural practices have roots in deep time and the forces that shape the universe. Good stuff!

The edition I read was prepared and translated by Dennis Tedlock, and it is doubtlessly awe-inspiring. While the text is presented as a smooth, nicely-flowing narrative, the endnotes (whose pagecount surpasses that of the actual Popol Vuh) make apparent the translation difficulties and the cultural references, and provide insight in many of these items’ history in previous editions. Tedlock defends his editorial choices, compares editions and includes the necessary cultural background for an audience of laypeople and specialists. The whole thing must have been a massive undertaking, and Tedlock’s scrupulousness is admirable.

An exemplary edition of a fascinating cultural narrative belonging to a civilization now conquered and largely erased.

>111 Cecrow:
Ha! I think Woolf is daunting only if you let her be. She's eminently readable on a normal level, and will reward deeper levels of probing. But she's never obscurantist. Nothing to be afraid of. Like a jump in a pool that may seem daunting, but once you're in the water it's just lovely.

Stendhal... more myopic and pretentious, I think.

>112 billiejean:
Thank you! And the same for you!

>113 Petroglyph:, that sounds like a very odd mix of myth and history, which must have been fascinating. Not unlike certain other cultures whose earliest era(s) are lost to time and legend. The Japanese history of the samurai that I read for my challenge was somewhat like that.

>115 Cecrow: a very odd mix of myth and history, which must have been fascinating

It was! Warmly recommended!

>113 Petroglyph: Ooh that sounds quite interesting! One more book to add to the millions I want to read! lol

Once again I caught back up on all the reviews, but don't have much to comment. Oh, except the funky language one, I totally feel you on being irked about that stuff. Sometimes we just need to acknowledge that a valiant effort was made and kudos to them but the end result just doesn't work right for us. And that's okay. :)

>117 .Monkey.:
I think I've made peace with the Kingsnorth book now. It's been two weeks (an eternity here on LT). I can let it go.

And the Popol Vuh edited by Tedlock is super readable and super professional. I highly recommend getting that one!

>118 Petroglyph: Found an as-new remaindered copy on Abe for $6, into the cart it goes! XD

>119 .Monkey.:
Sweet!