lriley's early projects for 2009.

Currently working on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. It is going to take me a while. I like it a lot but it is not something that you can rush at all and I think I'll be reading it through December.

Keeping that in mind high on my list for 2009 are:

1. 2666-Roberto Bolano
2. The great weaver from Kashmir-Halldor Laxness
3. The unfortunates-B. S. Johnson--(possibility I may get to this in December; and it is a neat book--comes in a box--the assorted chapters separate and to be read in order or any order that the reader may see fit--keep in mind Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch).
4. A manuscript of ashes-Antonio Munoz Molina
5. Crash--J. G. Ballard--haven't purchased yet.
6. The romantic dogs-Roberto Bolano-haven't purchased yet.

I'm planning as well on rereading some of Le Clezio's works soon--including The Interrogation, Onitsha, The round and other cold hard facts. As well there is another Lobo Antunes coming out soon.

Goodness, I haven't even heard of most of these - but they all look really interesting. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on them!

I have 2666 on my list too -- the length is a little daunting but, with a lot of LT encouragement to keep going, I loved The Savage Detectives.

For my money Laxness is the best of all Nobel literature laureates--at least if you're reading one of the following--all of which are epics--Independent people, Salka Valka, World Light or Iceland's Bell. Le Clezio has been a favorite of mine for a long time and I was very happy when he won the Nobel this year--if nothing else the value of his shortprinted early works just skyrocketed--not that I'm thinking of selling them. With Ballard I really liked The atrocity exhibition and Crash is supposed to be a companion piece only better. B. S. Johnson's Christie Malry's own double entry and Albert Angelo are both excellent. Lobo Antunes is kind of a Portugese mix of Cormac McCarthy/Faulkner/Dos Passos only with a very black sense of humor kind of on a par with Louis Ferdinand Celine.

as for Antonio Munoz Molina--I started his today so I guess it's not going to make '09 now. Junot Diaz's The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao is figuring in the near future as well. As is The kite runner when my wife gets done with it.

i really liked the first 100 pages of the Savage Detectives, then i found it tedious- not in its plot but in its mood, emotional setting, whatever. Read about 2/3 and then dropped it. REALLY liked the brief wondrous life of oscar wao. About half way through Park's Roumania series.

Very disappointed in Jarpe's radio freefall - should have known it wasn't my sort of book when blurbs/reviews etc kept referencing Heinlein; I'll give it another 70 pages to see if it becomes less ... self satisfied. Not to mention I KNEW that the protagonist is called "Aqualung" an aging blues singer with..duh...amazing acoustical engineering smarts. And i bought it rather than checking it out from a library. Jethro Tull references are rarely promising. Suckered by a neat title and cover, and my general enjoyment of SF & fantasy stories featuring music/art.

#5--Bob--everyone has their own unique take on whatever they read and that is the way it should be. For me Savage Detectives is a masterpiece. Bolano has some shorter works as well and you might like them better--I think his short story collection Last evening on earth might be something you'd like better. Anyway never even heard of Jarpe or Park--Roumania?--we all have holes--so I am not fit to comment. I am looking forward to Junot Diaz's Wao though.

I read The Unfortunates this summer (I enjoyed the structural conceit, but Johnson's material just rubbed me the wrong way) and have had Hopscotch on my shelves for a few months (maybe next year). Don't suppose you know of any other similarly structured novels?

#7--an Lt'er (papalaz) some time ago recommended a novel Behind closed doors by Alina Reyes. As it happens he is a huge B. S. Johnson fan. Behind closed doors falls into the realm of erotica--the reader at the end of each chapter has to make a decision on 2 sometimes 3 chapters (or doors) to proceed on from there--into new adventures. It's very cleverly done.

I keep thinking I should try Infinite Jest, and then realize that I lack the attention span.

Not sure if that's a function of parenthood, or the internet - but these days I'm having trouble with longer works.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is also on my list - and significantly more likely (...except for the pesky detail that I haven't run across a copy yet).

#9--I don't know if I've ever taken so long with a book before Bob--not even Finnegan's wake. I'm not even half way through. He has several different threads going--they all have their separate characters. I'm not sure if or how he's going to bring them all together. I seem to read 15-20 pages a day. But I like it a lot. This has got to be at least in the top five of ambitious works of fiction ever by an American writer and he has a lot of chops. He writes with verve and humor. There is a lot about substance use and abuse--psychiatric analysis, alcoholic and narcotics anonymous meetings, Quebec separatist terrorist cells, breakoff american intelligence operatives. It's chaotic but in a very fun way.

Occasionally I get overwhelmed (but not very often LOL). It gives me hope in mankind to see your reading, Larry. With all I do, and the fatigue factor, my attention span is very limited now. I looked briefly at Dennis Johnson's opus, Tree of Smoke 600+ ambitious pages, and could not tackle it. Looked at the LeClezio and Laxness from you and went, "it will have to be later". I am trying to read Dostoevsky and am very impatient with it. Even in the car, listening, I thought I would enjoy reacquainting myself with Portrait of a Lady but gave up. So Transposed Heads which I read in three days was a lovely morsel of just the right size. There is no way I would even consider reading Infinite Jest now. But I will eagerly await your report on it.

I don't know. I'm a bit of a junkie. I'm always looking for something new. I think of it almost as therapy.

Anyway I think you will like Laxness but you may need to get into it a 100 or so pages. And Tree of smoke is worth the time. Maybe the best thing from Denis Johnson though is his short story collection Jesus' son which is only 160 pages--borrows its epigraph from the Velvet Underground song Heroin.

lriley, of your list, I have only read Ballard's Crash, which made an excellent object of literary criticism. I didn't exactly enjoy it, and thought the somewhat belaboured treatment of fetish eventually grew tedious, but I nevertheless appreciated it.

#10 Finnegan's Wake ... The closest I've ever gotten to it is Esther Greenwood's decision to junk her thesis and quit school after reading it, in The Bell Jar. Since I was writing a dissertation myself, I thought I'd better not...

"the brief wondrous life" isn't esp. short and has multiple story lines; but reads very quickly - and pleasurably. I'll probably buy a paperback copy someday, but finding it down the street in the library was a nice surprise.

#13--I like Joyce a lot but did not like Finnegans wake. I just could not get it and I think most people fall into that category but there are some...it's not incomprehensible if you're willing to go to great lengths--I actually went and bought which kind of would explain what was going on. For me it wasn't worth it.

On Ballard--I liked Atrocity exhibition a lot. It's kind of collage-ish--imagistic in a Kubrick kind of way--like in the street scenes from Full metal jacket. Robbe-Grillet comes to mind--objects were as important if not more important in his novels and he was a filmmaker as well.

#14--I had bought a trade copy of Diaz's book and as it happens polutropos and myself got to conversing one day and he was going to a Diaz book signing event and offered to take mine along if I sent it to him--which I did. I like signed copies. If not for that though I would probably have read it by now.

#15 Interesting. A friend keeps recommending Robbe-Grillet to me - especially Jealousy. He's on my list, but not for while...

#16--not to get me wrong. I like Robbe-Grillet but a lot of people will find his work tedious. I'd be careful to recommend him to anyone. When it comes to the Nouveau Romantists a better place to start IMO would be Pinget's The Inquisitory--it moves faster and calls for more audience participation.

#17 thanks. never heard of it, but I'll check it out.

Anyway myself and another LT member have been talking about doing a noir thing focusing especially on Scandinavian writers--I have a bit of catching up to do. My interest was perked after reading a early reviewers copy of Johan Thoerin's Echoes from the dead. On our radar is Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast. Other writers being preliminarily mentioned include Arnaldur Indridason, Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum, Stieg Larsson and a Scot Denise Mina.

>19 lriley: now why would you consider Indridason and Mankell 'noir' or are you using the term loosely? They are pretty straightforward police procedurals, imo. OK, both of their detectives are pretty morose most of the times but still. . . I've read two Fossum mysteries and haven't been impressed enough to chase down more. Noir would be something like L. A. Confidential, imo (but I could be wrong here). Perhaps "Nordic Crime"?

#20--Avaland maybe I do use the term loosely. I haven't really anything to base Mankell, Indridason and Fossum on since I've yet to read anything by them. For me police procedurals though aren't necessarily something I'd exclude from the genre. Off the top of my head I'd consider Sciascia, Vazquez Montalban, Taibo (at least some times), Derek Raymond noir writers with Jean-Patrick Manchette as the best--therefore the yardstick to judge everyone from but I'm probably not the best judge of the category.

#20 - not to jump too heavily on the noir bandwagon...but i think of noir as both being set in the midst of a general "culture" of official seediness and corruption and (often) w/ a protagonist who despite outsider status and "damagedness" in some sense, brings a sense of personal justice to the mix. I like the icelandic and Scando mystery procedurals i've read ..but, i too, think they are pretty much straighforward procedurals (albeit w/ protagonists depressed by lack of sunlight).

LA Confidential IS classic (esp. the film version where the REALLY surprising bad guy looks just like my wife's advisor in her grad program....but Dr. Eyre's a really NICE guy..he wouldn't do that!). I always considered Hammett as the noir prototype - almost an antithesis to the "intellectual" mysteries of Poe and Doyle or the cozies of Christie et al.

#20, from Wikipedia

Noir fiction is the name sometimes given to a mode of crime fiction regarded as a subset of the hardboiled style. According to noir aficionado George Tuttle,

In this sub-genre, the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator. He is someone tied directly to the crime, not an outsider called to solve or fix the situation. Other common characteristics...are the emphasis on sexual relationships and the use of sex to advance the plot and the self-destructive qualities of the lead characters. This type of fiction also has the lean, direct writing style and the gritty realism commonly associated with hardboiled fiction.1

The seminal American writer in the noir fiction mode was James M. Cain—regarded as the third major figure of the early hardboiled scene, he debuted as a crime novelist in 1934, right between Hammett and Chandler. Other important U.S. writers in the noir tradition are Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Williams, and Elmore Leonard. The term "noir fiction" may evoke unrelenting gloom; in fact, while the work of all the major authors in the field might be characterized by a fatalistic attitude, it has been expressed in a variety of tones. Woolrich and Goodis indeed often portray what seems to be a sunless world, but Leonard is frequently bright, even when the color's blood red. Hughes and Williams are somewhere in the middle—her work is serious, yet with a lot of hardboiled "attitude," while his forte is the philosophical smile and shrug. As for Cain and Thompson, each wrote some of the blackest of American genre fiction, and some of the funniest. The popular use of "noir" in the term "noir fiction" derives immediately from "film noir" as it has been used to characterize certain putatively "dark" Hollywood crime dramas and melodramas, many early examples of which were based on works by the original hardboiled writers. In turn, "noir" (French for "black"), first applied to American films in the mid-1940s by observers in France, was used there in similar senses. Most relevantly, the term roman noir (“black novel") was employed to describe a range of books, some that an English speaker might think of as mysteries, others as gothic melodramas. Note that while the meanings of "noir fiction" and roman noir are closely related, the derivation is not direct. Making the connection even tighter, in 1945 the French publisher Gallimard brought out a new series of paperback thrillers, many of them translations of hardboiled American fiction. The line was called Série noire.

Sorry, Larry for the digression:-) Noir or not, I highly recommend the Indridason and Mankell novels; the former is often compared to the latter. I don't get the sense that either detective suffers lack of sunlight, but it seems that some of the other characters in the Indridason books do (a lot of depression). The Mankell novels are set in the very southernmost part of Sweden near Denmark. I would have to make a more focused study on it, but there is a similarity of tone with other Nordic authors I have read.

#24--Not a problem Avaland--actually when it comes to Scandinavian writers--I have not read much. I've been reading bits here and there about some of those mentioned for at least the last two years--as it happens then I got an early reviewer copy from LT of Thoerin's book and I liked it a lot and using polutropus' definition the book is mainly written from a victims standpoint--and the two translated Manchette's books would be as well. In the one a travelling salesman unsuspectingly gets involved in an affair after stopping to help a stranded motorist and in the other a hit man is targeted by his former bosses after he decides he's had enough and is going to retire. Anyway I'm not going to spend all my energy just sorting all that out I'll be at other things as well. I like to keep some diversity. Today I'll add Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh, Roberto Bolano's Romantic Dogs, Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers and Papalaz (an LT member) The lavender way. I also gave my wife a slipcased and signed edition of Alice Munro's Selected stories.

Though I started it a few days ago Elfriede Jelinek's Lust is my first book finished this year. Currently still working on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (page 774 of 981) and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.

#26
Larry,

what did you think of the Jelinek book? Although I have a signed picture of her, I have tried without success to read her, and you are the first person I know who has actually finished something of hers. I am told she is a total people-hater. Did you get that impression from this book?

#27-a people hater?--a possibility, probably not though if she signs pictures on request. One writer she reminds me of is another Austrian--Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard always struck me as anti-Austrian. Jelinek--the same. She writes with a lot of rancor--at least part of it is a gender thing. This is the third book of hers I've read. I'm trying to think of the first. The second was The piano teacher. Going back to her rancorous writing style--sometimes it can be funny and sometimes not--more often than not something true (at least as I see it) lies underneath. Not too many writers could survive this way. I'll give her props for that but she's not a very fun writer to read.