dmsteyn's default books 2011

CharlasClub Read 2011

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dmsteyn's default books 2011

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1dmsteyn
Editado: Oct 31, 2011, 11:25 am

I've never done this before, but baswood suggested I might try my hand at a blogging thread, so here it is.

Read in January
1. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen - ****
2. Big Dan's Sofie by Keith Cornelis Britz - his nephew is my best friend, Charles. ***1/2
3. The Best of Gene Wolfe by Gene Wolfe - *****
4. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes - ****
5. Spenser’s Art: A Companion to Book One of The Faerie Queene by Mark Rose
6. A Preface to Spenser by Helena M. Shire
7. Peer Gynt in Ibsen's Selected Plays by Henrik Ibsen - Interesting play, didn’t like the translation ****

Read in February
8. Super Sad True Love by Gary Shteyngart - ****
9. W.B. Yeats, A Life: The Apprentice Mage by R. F. Foster - ****
10. The City and the City by China Miéville - ****
11. The Verneys by Adrian Tinniswood - ****1/2

Read in March
12. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy - some good, some very good, some, like Hadji Murat, indescribable ****
13. W.B. Yeats, A Life: The Arch-Poet by R. F. Foster - ****1/2
14. The Visionary Company by Harold Bloom - Brilliant but antagonising

Read in April
15. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano - ****
16. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins
17. A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay - ***
18. Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor - Excellent, especially if you're interested in Synge, Yeats. *****
19. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss - ****
20. Lost Ground by Michiel Heyns - met the author, got the book signed, not bad either. ***1/2
21. Under the Dome by Stephen King - I have soft spot for King ****1/2

Read in May
22. Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel
23. The Two Gentlemen of Verona in The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare: The Complete Works Annotated
24. Love's Labour's Lost in The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare: The Complete Works Annotated
25. Titus Groan in The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake
26. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
27. Sunnyside Sal by Anton Krueger - he used to teach me in 1st year. **
28. Ivanov in Anton Chekhov's Selected Plays - ****
29. The Complete MAUS by Art Spiegelman

Read in June
30. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell - ****1/2
31. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes - ****
32. Poems and Poets by Geoffrey Grigson
33. The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill - *****
34. Familiar Spirits by Alison Lurie
35. The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick - ****1/2

Read in July
36. Ideas: a history from fire to Freud by Peter Watson - ***
37. The Medieval West 400-1450: A Preindustrial Civilization by David Nicholas - ****
38. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams

Finished in August
39. Porius by John Cowper Powys
40. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer - ****
41. The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington
42. Bright's Passage by Josh Ritter
43. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron

Finished in September
44. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
45. Blockade Billy by Stephen King
46. Babel-17/Empire Star by Samuel 'Chip' R. Delany
47. Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf
48. The Fog by James Herbert
49. Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Finished in October
50. A Universal History of Iniquity in Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
51. American Rust by Philipp Meyer
52. The Cambridge Companion to English Poets by Claude Rawson(ed)
53. Natural Supernaturalism by M.H. Abrams
54. A Life of Emily Brontë by Edward Chitham
55. The Complete Poems by Emily Jane Brontë

2baswood
mayo 31, 2011, 10:22 am

Welcome and keep blogging Dewald

3dmsteyn
mayo 31, 2011, 3:14 pm

Here's my review of Ivanov from Anton Chekhov's Selected Plays

An interesting early play, though it isn't seen as one of Chekhov's best. Full of middle-class ennui and desperation, it isn't dramatically very satisfying, at least not on the page. Lots of talking and even quasi-soliloquies, which tend to slow down the play. Ivanov himself is an atypical protagonist for a play: he even compares himself unfavourably to Hamlet, and one can see that Chekhov had Shakespeare's play in the back of his mind. An excerpt:

Ivanov : No-good, pathetic, insignificant - that's the kind of man I am... How I despise myself, my God! How profoundly I hate my voice, my walk, my hands, my clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't this ridiculous, isn't this offensive? Barely a year's gone by since I was healthy and strong, I was hale and hearty, indefatigable, impassioned, worked with these very hands, talked so that even ignoramuses were moved to tears, was capable of weeping when I saw misery, feel outraged when I encountered evil. I knew the meaning of inspiration, I knew the splendor and poetry of quiet nights, when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or beguile your mind with dreams. I had faith, I gazed into the future as into the eyes of a loving mother... And now, oh, my God!

The only other Chekhov I've ever read was years ago, a short story in a Ghost/Paranormal/Horror anthology. I must have been 10 years old, but I remember that it impressed me quite a bit. I'm not sure which one it was - it might have been 'The Black Monk'. I do remember that the anthology had Poe's 'William Wilson' in it, as well as E.T.A. Hoffmann's 'Don Juan'.

4dmsteyn
Editado: Jun 1, 2011, 12:24 pm

A review of The Complete MAUS by Art Spiegelman

Maus - a recounting of Art Spiegelman's own father's experience of WW2 as a Jew - really captures something that I haven't experienced in most other WW2 stories. The rough drawings perfectly fit the matter-of-fact tone of Vladek Spiegelman's story, and the animal imagery doesn't so much dehumanise the characters as accentuate the deceptive simplicity of the tale.

The story may be straightforward, but the complexity of human interaction is never obscured: Spiegelman doesn't paint his father as anything but a lucky survivor - in many ways a broken, ravaged man. Nor does he flinch from relating the story of his mother, Anja, who, despite surviving Auschwitz, still committed suicide in America. Why did she kill herself? Art seems as perplexed as the reader. I think it reflects, in many way, the knottiness of all human life. Art doesn't understand - perhaps cannot - understand her death, in the same way that he can never really understand his father's experience of Auschwitz.

In the end, the story of Spiegelman facing his dead leaves us with the same unanswerable questions: Why? How could any of this really have happened? And will it happen again?

(Note: I found this very hard to review. As Theodor Adorno famously said, "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," and I felt that writing a review about anything to do with WW2 might in a sense belittle it.)

5zenomax
Jun 1, 2011, 11:20 am

I am not really a big reader of comic novels, but did read The Wild Party some time back.

MAUS is of course of a different nature altogether. I liked your comments - despite it being hard for you.

6stretch
Jun 1, 2011, 11:29 am

Maus was one of the first books to really turn me onto the graphic novel and the ability of those kinds books to tell a compelling story. Your comments remidnded me of why I loved Maus so much.

7dmsteyn
Jun 1, 2011, 12:22 pm

Thank you for the comment, zenomax. The Wild Party looks interesting, but it doesn't seem widely available.

8timjones
Jun 6, 2011, 8:20 am

We have quite a lot of reading tastes in common, dmsteyn! I haven't read The Best of Gene Wolfe, but as The Island Of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories is one of my very favourite short story collections, I am sure I would enjoy it.

At the moment, I am reading and enjoying The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, KSR being an author who, if he doesn't equal Gene Wolfe in literary technique, perhaps exceeds him in range.

As for Chekhov, I recommend his short stories collected in Lady With Lapdog.

Finally, have you read any Turgenev? In my view, his achievement is a little neglected, standing as it does in the shadow of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky - but he's one of my favourite Russian authors.

9dmsteyn
Jun 6, 2011, 10:42 am

Hi, Tim

Thanks for the comments - I've been interested in KSR for a while, but I never know which book of his to start with: the Mars trilogy?

I am definitely interested in more Chekhov - I'm going to try to read his main plays this year, and will take up the short stories later.

I still have to get around to Turgenev, but I want to read him in the future. The main reason that I don't have any books by him, is that I've never actually seen any of his books in a store here in South Africa. Maybe the Penguin edition of Fathers and Sons, but that was quite some time ago.

10janemarieprice
Jun 7, 2011, 9:48 pm

Maus has been on my radar for a while. Wanted to add my appreciation of your comments.

11timjones
Jun 10, 2011, 5:20 am

>9 dmsteyn:, dmsteyn: Sorry it took me a while to get back here - it's been a busy week!

Re KSR - I think the Mars Trilogy is his best work overall, though some people think it's too talky. If you want to try his work in bite-size chunks, The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, his collected short stories, is an excellent place to start.

Re Turgenev, I think Fathers and Sons is my second-favourite Russian novel, perhaps just slotting in behind The Master and Margarita - oh, and A Hero Of Our Time... maybe I shouldn't try ranking them... but anyway, it's very good, as are his other novels and plays.

12dmsteyn
Editado: Jun 16, 2011, 1:55 pm

I was in the Kruger National Park this week, so no reviews for a while. Did get quite some reading done, though.

So, time for some reviews!

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell:

This book has been over-reviewed, so I will not rehash the story. Rather, I will give my overall impressions. The story is very good and entertaining - perhaps too entertaining for my tastes, especially the second of the three parts, which reads like a thriller. It seemed a bit improbable to me, unlike the rest of the book, which is full of historical verisimilitude. I liked the complex characterisation of most of the characters, although I was not always convinced by the Fu Manchu-like Enomoto and his 'magical' powers. As with some of the other Japanese characters, he seemed a bit inhuman / artificial at times. (This problem with the Japanese characters may be only my reading, as 18th century Japan may very well have been as hierarchical and artificial as Mitchell depicts it).

I also disliked some of Mitchell's English transliteration of the Dutch speakers. Although he tries hard to reflect the differences between the speech patterns of the different cultures, it did not always convince me. Some of the Dutch seaman seemed very Cockney-like in their expressions, for example. I did, however, really enjoy the historical cut-and-thrust of the narrative. It was quite gritty at times, but measured and controlled. Mitchell's control of exposition is masterly.

I would also like to mention a personal note on the dichotomy of the perfidious Englishmen / honourable Dutchmen in the novel. South Africa also faced this international brinkmanship during the stretch from the 17th to 19th centuries. I obviously know this history better than that of Japan, but I found the interactions between the English and Dutch very realistic, despite the somewhat clichéd situation. Mitchell is good at presenting the characters as rounded human beings, preventing the story from falling into an 'us vs them' mindset. The foreign policies of the different nations convinced me no-end. We have an expression in Afrikaans for a good result to something: 'Die Kaap is weer Hollands', i.e. the Cape is again Dutch, reflecting our own colonial history. Mitchell trod the line between strawmen and real humanity very carefully, and I really appreciate that.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

I enjoyed this Arthur C. Clarke Award winner by my fellow South African, Lauren Beukes - it is really gritty and not afraid to throw its punches. The concept of people being 'animalled' - that is, people who have committed serious crimes are bonded with animals, and are called aposymbiots - was interesting. It hardly, however, seems like a science fiction novel, as the reason for the bonding is never adequately explained. There are snippets of info here and there about the symbiosis, but it never really makes sense in any plausible manner. I would rather call the novel an urban fantasy. Oh, and I missed the similarities to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series (the daemons are similar to the animals in this book) until Beukes threw in a tongue-in-cheek reference to a (fictional) book called Steering by the Golden Compass: Pullman's fantasy in the context of the ontological shift, in a fake IMDB movie citation.

That reference only hints at the witty nature of the book's riffing on popular culture. The South African milieu is also handled very well. It all seemed very realistic to me, as far as the settings and characters went. Of course, just because I am South African, does not mean that I can personally vouch for the accuracy of all the scenes in the book. It felt realistic, is all I can say. The main character, Zinzi December, is well-handled, but, again, I cannot really say if she really reflects a black South African woman's perspective. She seemed natural to me, which is all that you can really ask for in a book, one assumes.

The book reflects many other South African issues, such as xenophobia towards outsiders (AIDS victims, refugees from African wars, etc.), but this is handled quite sensitively, with little proselytising or moralising. To give you an idea of the 'animalled' people's situation, think of X-men crossed with Apartheid. Not a perfect similarity, but close enough.

I am a bit tired with the whole noir slant of the novel (it is a missing persons/things story) but Beukes does at least shake it up a bit. Not one of my favourite genres, to be honest. The genre seems a bit paint-by-numbers to me, though this book admittedly does some new things with it. Like China Mieville's The City and The City, which I read earlier this year, Beukes's novel mixes speculative fiction with the very popular mystery/thriller format, to some interesting effects.

A fun read, all said. Not lofty literature, but fun (and at least somewhat thought-provoking) reading for the holidays.

13baswood
Jun 16, 2011, 5:46 pm

Interesting thoughts on the The thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I have not read yet, but plan to later this year

14dmsteyn
Jun 24, 2011, 11:39 am

Poems and Poets by Geoffrey Grigson

I picked this up for research: Grigson has two interesting and insightful essays on John Clare, one an overview of Clare's life, and the other focusing specifically on Clare's time in the asylums. Grigson is now almost forgotten as a critic, which I think is a shame - his is a very original and 'strong' voice, very idiosyncratic and original in his readings of a wide variety of poets. I liked all of the essays in this slim volume (even when I disagreed with Grigson), especially those about the lesser poets that I had only incidentally heard. These include William Barnes, who often wrote in a peculiar Dorset dialect, thereby lessening his appeal, though he was a friend of Hardy and Tennyson. Another interesting character is William Allingham, now known mostly for the opening lines of his The Faeries (Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen/We daren't go a-hunting/For fear of little men...), though he was also a protege of Tennyson. Barnes and Allingham may not be the greatest Victorian poets, but they led interesting lives that Grigson expertly delineates.

Grigson also writes about the Romantics other than Clare, and this is where I found myself disagreeing with him the most. He has good essays on Wordsworth, but he completely lacerates Shelley, based on what seemed to me the flimsy grounds of Shelley's generalities. I am simplifying here, but Grigson seems to share the animosity to Shelley which Eliot's 'school' of criticism espoused. His reaction seems merely personal, as he does not even quote much from Shelley to back his claims, merely mentioning Robert Graves's remarks on Shelley's Skylark, which supposedly 'ranks among the shoddiest poems ever wished on us as the product of genius.' Now, to be honest, this is not one of my favourite Shelley poems. I do, however, feel that Grigson (and Graves) should at least give more reasons for calling it 'shoddy'.

I say that Grigson's reaction seems merely personal. Perhaps my reaction to him is also personal. I've been steeped in the critical writings of Harold Bloom since I was in High school, so perhaps his love of Shelley has rubbed off on me. I candidly admit to not having read everything by Shelley. But what I have read convinces me that he is a great, if difficult, poet. Just think of the epic grandeur of such a poem as 'Ode to the West Wind'.

Well, that was a long polemic, especially considering that I actually like most of what Grigson has to say. He has very perceptive things to say about Walt Whitman, one of my favourite American poets, and DH Lawrence, whose poetry (at its best) seems to me unfairly neglected.

15baswood
Jun 24, 2011, 5:30 pm

#14 Grigson is a new name to me, but looking at wiki I noticed that he also wrote poems as well as criticising others.

Poor old DHL just doesn't seem to be fashionable any more. I think he was a great poet and of course one of the most important novelists of the 20th century.

16dmsteyn
Jun 25, 2011, 10:45 am

Time for a double-review, one on which I have thought long and hard:

The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill

How does one describe a 560-page modern day epic poem, which goes beyond the bounds of nearly anything that is out there, perhaps even beyond the bounds of reality and mortality? This is the question I was left with after finishing Sandover earlier this week. Perhaps I should start with a description of what the poem is about. In Sandover, James Merrill, with the very considerable help of his partner David Jackson, created an epic of the same scale as Dante's Divine Comedy. Already, that seems like a big, bold claim to make. But the scope of Sandover demands big, bold claims. The poem consists of Merrill and Jackson's communications, by way of a Ouija board, with spirits, angels, demons and other powers and principalities. Whether one believes in these entities is, if not inconsequential, at least tangential to one's enjoyment of Merrill's aesthetic achievement. The fact is that neither Merrill nor Jackson always believed in the reality of their spiritual communicants. The fact also is, however, that sometimes they did.

The poem can be deeply disturbing - on many levels - deeply touching - on many levels - and deeply puzzling - on many levels. It is divided into three sections, mirroring the outlay of a Ouija board. The first section, The Book of Ephraim, is divided into 26 sections, each beginning with a letter of the alphabet. The second section, Mirabell's Books of Number, is divided into ten books, 0 to 9, each further divided into nine sections. The third book, Scripts for the Pageant, is divided into three sections, called (respectively) Yes, &, and No. Finally, the poem is rounded out with a coda, The Higher Keys.

So much for the shape of the poem, labyrinthine as it is. What about the substance? The Book of Ephraim contains comparatively little messages from the 'spirit' world (which Merrill represents by printing the words in small block letters, LIKE SO). It is 'about' Merrill and Jackson's communications with the spirit Ephraim, ostensibly a first century Greek, but the book is about so much more. Merrill is in many ways a classical verse artist - he usually writes in a fixed metre, and often employs rhyme - but this is to sell him short. As Harold Bloom says of him, he was a 'Mozartian verse artist', and this shows in his use of classical tropes to present a wholly new spin on epic poetry. In Ephraim, we are introduced to a varied dramatis personae of spirits, ranging from friends of JM and DJ (as Merrill and Jackson usually are called in the poem) to WH Auden and WB Yeats.

In Mirabell's Books of Number, Merrill and Jackson are introduced to a new occult system of knowledge, which Mirabell, a spirit from a primordial existence, teaches to them by way of several 'lessons', interspersed with more of Merrill's own poetry. Of course, one might argue that it is all his own poetry - or is it? As more and more of the poem is taken up by spirit communications, one begins to wonder how in control Merrill really is. What of Jackson's influence? I have more to say about this in the second review, but for now let us say that I personally think that Merrill was more in control than some writers have claimed. And what of the spirits? How real are they? I cannot really say. They probably are not real. Probably. As Merrill later explained. "If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."

The last section of the poem, Scripts for the Pageant, again takes a different tack. In it, the communications are presented as if they are a script for a play. Even more astonishing is the range of new voices found in this section. After Mirabell's instruction, JM and DJ attain a higher level, and are now to be instructed by none other than the archangels Michael, Gabriel, Emmanuel and Raphael. They are joined in the 'schoolroom' by the spirits of Auden and Maria Mitsotaki, a deceased Greek friend of theirs. The lessons, as in Mirabell are strange, otherworldly, and, at times, disturbing. What the real Auden (if this isn't the real Auden) would have made of this spiritual instruction is anyone's guess, but I tend to think he would have been amused and a little angry. Yeats makes more appearances, and JM and DJ learn about the plans of 'God Biology', (or God B, for short).

The (relatively) brief coda presents the immediate aftermath of JM and DJ's communications and instructions, with appearances made by Jane Austen, TS Eliot, Nabokov, etc.

I found the poem by times brilliant, funny, even exasperating. As poetry, the spirit communications do not always work, but that is to be expected in any long poem. Most of the time, the otherworldliness of the poem captivated me. But I have always been interested in both poetry and the supernatural. Perhaps that allowed me to accept the more disturbing aspects of the poem. I certainly would not recommend the poem to fundamentalist believers of any faith - figures from all the main religions, including Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha make their appearance in the poem, and not always in the most flattering ways. The spirits can also be very elitist, judgmental, even racist. Whether this reflects something of JM and DJ's subconcious minds, or the actual spirits, seems to me pragmatically unimportant. It may have been subconcious promptings - it may even have been an ironic way of distancing themselves from the spirits. I do not know. What I do know is that this is in many ways an extraordinary achievement, eldritch and enchanting, puzzling and profound.

To the second, related review:
Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson by Alison Lurie

This is an excellently written, at times horribly unfair memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Foreign Affairs. Embarrasingly, I admit to never having heard of her before ordering this memoir. She is certainly an accomplished writer and has a real gift for bringing to life James Merrill and David Jackson. I found her memoir essential reading for anyone interested in the life of Merrill, one of America's best poets of the previous century, and that of his friend, David Jackson, who apparently was a gifted writer in his own right, but unlucky when it came to getting published.

Merrill and Jackson's life together makes for very interesting reading. It runs the gamut of emotions, from hilarity to estrangement to a profound sadness. I thought it really conveyed the subjective understanding Lurie had of Merrill and Jackson, and the way that a wonderful relationship can come unstuck.

What I did not care for, however, are Lurie's repeated claims that it was Merrill and Jackson's experiences with the occult that led to the relative tragedy of their later lives. Lurie's argument is quite sophisticated, and probably correct to a degree: the Ouija board seemed to consume quite a big part of Merrill and Jackson's time, which might have been more 'healthily' spent, if not more productively. She never directly comes out and contends that the spirits they contacted were malevolent - but there is a suggestion of this. As I said earlier, I am wary of dismissing the reality of the spirits, whether they were benevolent, malevolent or neutral. What I would contend is that Merrill and Jackson's relationship had many other stresses placed upon it. That they - especially Jackson - sometimes claimed to be unhappy with the communications, is certainly true. But things are inevitably more complicated. The poem might also have served as a way for Merrill and Jackson to spend time together, or as a way for Jackson to express his frustrations at being 'left behind' by the publishing world.

Of course, I did not know Merrill and Jackson personally, as Lurie assuredly did. But hers is only one perspective on Sandover. Many critics have praised the poem. Lurie makes a snide remark in the memoir that these have been mostly male critics, which seems neither here nor there to me. I see little reason for distinguished critics - and friends of Merrill - like Bloom or JD McClatchy to sing the poem's praises if they do not really feel that it is a worthy thereof.

As Lurie writes at the end of the memoir: If you take no chances, make no sacrifices, and reject the irrational in any form, how can you ever 'make it new'? And if you decide to take these chances, will the end justify the means? Unfortunately, we cannot know the answer to any of these questions until long, long afterwards.

I mostly agree with that statement, but with the caveat that I doubt we can ever know exactly what led to an artistic truimph, or a human tragedy. James Merrill remains one of my favourite poets, but I know feel that I have a better understanding of his life and untimely death. If Lurie had left it at that, I would have been more satisfied. But I suppose she has her reasons for saying what she does, and I accept that we have a difference of opinion on this matter.

17baswood
Jun 25, 2011, 5:37 pm

Excellent review of The changing light at Sandover. It convinced me I needed to buy a copy - that is until I saw the price of it over on Amazon. I will just have to wait until it becomes a bit more affordable.

18dmsteyn
Editado: Jun 26, 2011, 7:20 am

I bought mine at abebooks, because, as you say, the Amazon price is stratospheric.

19dmsteyn
Editado: Jun 27, 2011, 2:01 am

The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick

An excellent book that I found hard to read at times. The prose is crystalline throughout, something which is lacking in most fantasy novels. But I am somewhat wary of pigeonholing this book as a ‘fantasy’, despite its inclusion in the Fantasy Masterworks series, because that might lead to a wrong impression of the book. In many ways, although not as sui generis as Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, or David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, this book resembles those works in being something that I cannot quite pinpoint. It is an anti-fantasy, in many ways, but that is also to limit the book’s scope. Because, in many ways, if Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are humorous anti-fantasies (and much more) then this book is a deadly serious commentary on the genre. It is postmodern in the best sense – not too pretentious, but willing to take risks that can seem pretentious.

As Swanwick has said, the book is both an homage to the genre, but also a response to the growing commercialism of the genre:
“… The recent slew of interchangeable Fantasy trilogies has hit me in much the same way that discovering that the woods I used to play in as a child have been cut down to make way for shoddy housing developments.”
If anything needed (and needs) a good kick up the wazoo, then it is commercial speculative fiction. There are few things that I personally despise as much as the carrion crows picking over Tolkien’s (and many, many others') legacy, although, to be honest, I have problems with most overly commercial writers. So I felt very happy with the premise of the novel.

As I said, I sometimes found the novel difficult to read. But that is not necessarily a bad sign. What made it difficult is Swanwick’s way of interpolating many different ideas into the smallest of narrative spaces. The text is full of references to Dickens, medieval Christian philosophy, fantasy tropes and more. Swanwick also has fondness for doppelgängers, which sometimes led to a temporary dissonance in reading the book, as I scratched my head wondering which character was actually being referred to. But this is definitely done on purpose – the main character, Jane, is a changeling, apparently abducted from our reality into a Dickensian nightmare of factory-enslavement, which also has fantasy elements. I advisedly say apparently because this novel is in the end concerned with interrogating appearances, and rejecting easy cop-outs. It deliberately subverts the easily digestible flow of commercial fantasy novels, and smashes one’s preconceptions of what a fantasy novel can, and should, do.

In many ways, it is a bleak book, harrowing and distressing. It has graphic depictions of sex and violence, but these never seem overly gratuitous. I was a little concerned when the narrative seemed to lose some steam during the middle parts (you know what Larkin says about a beginning, a muddle, and an end) but I think this was mostly due to my own preconceptions getting in the way. At the end, one can see that Swanwick had a clear idea of where he wanted to go with the narrative, and I feel that a reread is in order – sometime.

Oh, and don't be fooled by the Masterworks cover: this book is not like Ted Hughes's The Iron Man, or the Brad Bird movie based on it.

20bragan
Jun 27, 2011, 1:58 am

OK, I really need to not let The Iron Dragon's Daughter sit on my TBR pile much longer.

21baswood
Jun 27, 2011, 5:20 am

Excellent review Dewald. I am intrigued. Its getting pretty dangerous for my bank balance reading your thread.

22dmsteyn
Jul 1, 2011, 7:53 am

Ideas: a History from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson

I am in two minds about this book. On the one hand, I was deeply stimulated and intrigued by most of the information and in the book. On the other hand, I found myself vociferously disagreeing with a lot of Watson’s surmises. Maybe both these responses are twined around each other, as Watson obviously wrote the book to elicit a strong response. But what disappointed me in the end was not so much the content of the book, objectionable as some of it is to me, as the style in which Watson writes. He gathers a lot of interesting facts together, which is fair enough, but then he generalises ad infinitum – leading to a reduction ad absurdum, to be frank.

Let me start with a few positive aspects of the book. Watson introduces a lot of information with which I am not really familiar, and he does this engagingly. The early chapters I found a little tedious, perhaps because I am no anthropologist or archaeologist and consequently have little interest in pre-historical humanity. Despite that, I found these chapters well-written and fairly interesting. As Watson moves into territory with which I am more familiar, he asks interesting questions and posits interesting answers. A lot of the things he has to say about, for example, the Middle Ages, are if not original (the book is endlessly footnoted – not necessarily a bad sign) then at least fresh. Watson brings to the table broad reading of the latest controversies in historiography, and he gives a good overview of many contested points of canonical history. An example would be the reassessment of the role the Renaissance played in Western history. Watson questions the importance attributed to the period – in fact, he questions whether the period can even be considered as a homogenous block of history. Watson also presents both the Occidental and Oriental sides of the historical narrative, and in so doing calls into question whether we can really separate the world into such easily pre-digested chunks.

In a book that spans so much of history, generalisations are to be expected. Where Watson does seem to trip up, to me at least, is in his somewhat arbitrary selection of historical figures. He seems sometimes to decide on historical figures merely out of personal taste. This would be more acceptable if he admitted to this, but instead he portrays his reading of the history of ideas as the ‘correct’, unquestionable version. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but that is the impression I got. My real problems with the book started with Watson’s writing on things of which I have a fair amount of knowledge, such as Greek philosophy and English literature. I would not claim to be a world authority on these topics, but I have read widely on the subjects, so I found myself often disagreeing with Watson’s generalisations about them. For instance, Watson contends that Aristotle has been much more influential than Plato, claiming that the ‘great success stories in the history of ideas have been in the main the fulfilment of Aristotle’s legacy, not Plato’s.’ To start with, I disagree with Watson’s thesis that Aristotle and Plato represent two contrasting, mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world. But what really irritated me was this: ‘It is a remarkable conclusion to arrive at, that, despite the great growth in individuality, the vast corpus of art, the rise of the novel, the many ways that men and women have devised to express themselves, man’s study of himself is his biggest intellectual failure in history, his least successful area of inquiry. But it is undoubtedly true, as the constant ‘turning-in’, over the centuries have underlined. These ‘turnings-in’ do not build on one another, in a cumulative way, like science; they replace one another… Plato has misled us.’ Now, I cannot emphasise how wrongheaded this conclusion is to me. Watson seems to completely misunderstand the point of the arts, something which I would not presume to define, but which is surely not to act like the sciences. If one could simplify art into something inherently useful – the aim of science – then one would no longer have art, as far as I am concerned. It is not that Plato has misled us, as much as that humanity has always struggled with whether something is ‘useful’, or ‘meaningful’. I would say that art has meaning, science has use. That is obviously a simplification (the two do not really form a strict dichotomy) but it seems a more ‘useful’ way of looking at things than Watson’s pessimism towards the humanities.

Ok, polemic over. This book obviously made me think, for all its faults. Maybe Watson’s own idea was somewhat too ambitious to put into a single book. It ends up being a jack-of-all-trades book, which is not masterly on any of its various fronts.

23janemarieprice
Jul 1, 2011, 12:08 pm

22 - Nice review. I think agree with you in your objections.

24baswood
Jul 1, 2011, 2:28 pm

I think Peter Watson's book might make me angry too Dewald.

25dmsteyn
Editado: Jul 6, 2011, 6:28 am

The Medieval West, 400-1450;: A preindustrial civilization by David Nicholas

I found this book very instructive, though I doubt I'll remember a tenth of the hard facts in it. Nicholas obviously has a broad understanding of the Middle Ages, and he isn't afraid to lace his prose with dates and names. Nothing wrong with that in a history book, of course. Nicholas divides the Middle Ages into three parts, Early, Middle, and Late, and he gives a fairly good overview of each period, focusing more on society and the economy than most history books of the 70s did (well, that's what he claims, anyway). I found the text a bit dry at times, but maybe that's a good sign in a scholarly book. It could have been a bit more engaging, but Nicholas does attempt to give an idea of daily life, technology, and popular culture.

Nicholas does make some statements concerning the literature of the Middle Ages that I found a little condescending. He for instance dismisses the Italian 'humanist' movement (which included Petrarch among its proponents) after Dante as a 'manuscript-hunting craze', and calls the Italian Renaissance of the late Middle Ages 'a stillborn creation in most respects'. He also says of northern Europe (including England, with Chaucer and Langland) that the 'fourteenth century is a period of increased individuality, although not better quality, in art and literature...' (p.267). I think my problem with this is that Nicholas isn't really an expert in these fields, and he basically flings out misguided generalisations about the art and literature of the time. That makes me worry that Nicholas's generalisations about other aspects (of which I know comparatively little) might also be misguided.

On the whole, I found the book informative and accurate as far as dates and information that I could check up went. It did give me some insights into medieval life, but it is really very broad, so it doesn't help much for works set in specific eras (such as Powys's Porius).

26baswood
Jul 5, 2011, 4:54 pm

Dewald, You are the first person to review this book and it would appear that not many people own it. It sounds OK as an introduction. I think you are right to be wary about it. I think I will pass on it and make a note not to buy it if it comes up cheap somewhere.

27edwinbcn
Jul 5, 2011, 9:34 pm

>25 dmsteyn: I agree that I cannot place the generalisations which you quote from the book, but your conclusion that Nicholas may not be an expert in this field must be wrong. Checking the author's biographical information, shows him to be very expert in the Middle Ages.

I would suggest that in your review, you mention the full title of the book at least one, viz. The Medieval West, 400-1450;: A preindustrial civilization. The full title tells us that the scope of the book is a 1000-year period, from 400 to 1450 AD. It would then be clear that Nicholas statements about Chaucer and the Italian Renaissance, are about the end of that period, and are likely to be seen as a transition to the next period (in as far as we can see history as having clear boundaries). However, Dr. Nicholas has also written a book about that transition period, viz. The transformation of Europe 1300-1600.

Poring over Prof. Nicholas bibliography, also shows his main interest is in social and political science and technology, rather than literature. The remarks about the differences between the 1970s and current scholarship must probably be seem in that light, with the former focusing on Literature, and the latter on social structure and (economic) development. Again, full inclusion of the title would indicate that Prof. Nicholas would describe medieval Europe as a preindustrial civilisation, suggesting a focus on production, technology, daily life and popular culture, rather than court culture, arts and literature. Therefore, the reader should not judge the work on its usefulnes as a guide to the work of authors from that period.

It is a pity we cannot compare notes with other readers, as so few copies are available on LT, as might be expected for such a relatively specialised subject.

Nonetheless, I would heed your review as a warning, and be cautious in purchasing this book. On the other hand, those quotes being so taunting, other reader's opinions are really needed.

28dmsteyn
Jul 6, 2011, 6:31 am

>27 edwinbcn: I agree fully with what you have to say, and may not have expressed myself as clearly in the review as I wanted to. I thought the book was a very good introduction to social and political aspects of the period. I just felt that some (definitely not all) of the literature criticism was done a bit cursorily. I don't mean to imply that Prof. Nicholas is not an expert in his field - he is definitely well-read and erudite, and I enjoyed the book.

Admittedly, I quoted selectively, but I do think that he was quite dismissive of Petrarch and the early Italian Renaissance writers. I am definitely going to read more books by Nicholas, if I can find any in our library.

Thank you for pointing out the complete title. The only reason I didn't use it was because I couldn't get the touchstone to work yesterday.

Thank you for reading my booklog, and for criticising where criticism is due.

29dmsteyn
Jul 28, 2011, 7:38 am

The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams

I've read snatches from this book before for undergraduate essays, but never the whole text. And, I must say, I now feel very foolish for not having read the whole thing cover-to-cover previously. M.H. Abrams, the well-known critic and editor of various Norton Anthologies and Literary Glossaries, attempts in this book to convey the tenets of Romantic theory and how these were shaped by the critical western tradition from Plato up to the nineteenth century. His prose is always succinct and calculated, with little extraneous emotionalism or attempts at bravura criticism. Although I do not really have a problem with more 'subjective' criticism (and I use that term advisedly, as Abrams has a whole section in which he delineates the ascendancy of the terms 'subjective' and 'objective' in the critical lexicon) I did find Abrams's restraint refreshing.

Most of the book is not, in fact, Abrams's own criticism, but rather an exposition of the various streams of literary criticism during the Romantic period, and how these evolved from ancient times. Abrams obviously did extensive (and by extensive, I mean panoptic) research during the writing of this book. He often quotes the usual proponents of Romantic critical theory, such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc., but he also digs up critics that have fallen through the cracks of history. If there is anything bravura about Abrams's approach, it is this bringing to light of unknown and forgotten literary theorists and commentators.

I did feel that Abrams held back on his own opinions a little too much in the book, which makes it a bit bloodless. I'm not, however, saying that he should have made it a personal document, or a panegyric to any one critic or school of criticism. God knows we have enough of those. I'm just saying that it would not have hurt to add some more personal appraisals, perhaps as a coda or so. Obviously, Abrams does find some joy in Romanticism and the critical tradition, or he would not have written the book.

I'll end with one of my favourite quotations from the book. It is from the last subsection of the book, The Use of Romantic Poetry, in the chapter, Science and Poetry in Romantic Criticism. Here is Percy Bysshe Shelley giving what Abrams calls a 'classic indictment of our technological, material, and acquisitive society.' It is from Shelley's 'Defence of Poetry':

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave... The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.

Whether one agrees with Shelley's sad indictment of modern material man, one can surely not deny that it is cogently, even beautifully, expressed. For me, it is a motto that I have transcribed deep in my own heart.

30baswood
Jul 28, 2011, 8:39 am

Right on with Percy. Excellent review Dewald and a book I will keep in mind when I come to tackle the Romantic period.

31dmsteyn
Ago 7, 2011, 8:33 am

39. Porius by John Cowper Powys

Finished with the tome. I might review it eventually, but for now, I'm just glad to have survived the Great Vowel Shift.

32baswood
Ago 7, 2011, 11:21 am

You have done well to survive Dewald

33Poquette
Ago 8, 2011, 5:21 pm

Hi Dewald. Sometimes weeks go by and I forget to check for new threads in Club Read. Just now in an attempt to procrastinate over doing some work, I belatedly found your thread and enjoyed reading through your comments and reviews.

I have The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet to read on my Kindle but haven't gotten there yet. I did enjoy Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and hope I'll enjoy this one, too.

Earlier this year I listened to a Teaching Company course on the middle ages – actually three courses by the same professor divided the same way as your book The Medieval West 400-1450. It probably covered the same ground and is perhaps more current. It's a subject of great interest to me as well.

I have had The Mirror and the Lamp here for several years and like you, have dipped into it in connection with course work or other reading. But I have not read it cover to cover. Sounds like maybe I should. I agree the writing is excellent and informative.

At any rate, glad I have caught up with you here and now that I have posted, your thread will be on my radar screen.

34dmsteyn
Ago 9, 2011, 1:45 pm

Hi Suzanne, thanks for reading my thread. I really appreciate your comments, and the fact that you trawled through my (overly long?) reviews.

35dmsteyn
Ago 10, 2011, 7:58 am

40. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

The only book shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize which I haven't read previously, this book surprised me with its fairly original take on the European experience of the 20th century. Originally, I didn't read the book because I thought it was going to be a turgid WW2 novel - not that a WW2 setting is necessarily a bad thing - but this book, although the war plays a large part, is more about the tangential effects of history on human relationships.

I enjoyed Mawer's acuity of perception when it came to character portrayal, and I found his descriptions of the house around which the story revolves (The Glass Room of the title is a room/space in the house) very interesting. The decision to focus the story on the house is a real coup on Mawer's part, with it a forming a constant basis for perspicuous metaphor and a setting for the action. I did find the constant roll-call of new characters a bit distracting - one couldn't really form a strong attachment (or dislike) towards some of the later, less individualised characters - but the main family of the story is beautifully drawn.

A small irritation was Mawer's use of the word 'humped' in the book. Every time someone lugs/carries/hauls something, Mawer writes that they 'humped' it upstairs, for instance. A peccadillo, I know, but it distracted me from the otherwise lucid and vivid language.

On the whole, an excellent book. Of the 2009 Booker nominees, I still prefer the winner, Wolf Hall, maybe even The Quickening Maze, but I am glad that I eventually got round to this book.

36baswood
Ago 10, 2011, 8:31 am

The use of the word humped could have been worse

37Cait86
Ago 10, 2011, 12:06 pm

Just de-lurking to let you know that I am enjoying your thread very much. I read The Glass Room back when it was shortlisted in 2009, and really enjoyed it. I thought there were a few too many unbelievable coincidences in it, but I agree that the original family members were interesting characters.

I haven't read Wolf Hall yet, but I think my favourite Booker novel from 2009 is still Byatt's The Children's Book. I find it interesting that you enjoyed The Quickening Maze so much - what about it did you like? I found it beautifully written, but lacking in substance.

38dmsteyn
Ago 11, 2011, 9:31 am

Hi, Cait. I liked The Children's Book as well, it just seemed a bit too ambitious for me - too many things that felt unresolved at the end. I think I remember The Quickening Maze better because I have an abiding interest in John Clare. He has such an interesting history, and his poetry isn't half-bad, either.

I also found the coincidences in The Glass Room a little unbelievable, but then I think back to MAUS, in which there were even more coincidences. I guess happenstance is more believable in real life than fiction. There's a quote about that somewhere - I know Byron says 'For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction' - but I'm thinking of someone else. It'll come to me later, I guess.

39dmsteyn
Ago 15, 2011, 5:09 pm

41. The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington

An interesting picaresque fantasy set in the Middle Ages (1364, to be exact), this book grew on me in the reading, and I can see why it has garnered such diverging reviews and reactions. At first, the two main characters (Manfried and Hegel Grossbart) seemed totally off-putting. They begin the book by murdering a man's whole family. Then they murder the posse sent out to avenge the family. And so on. Bullington obviously has no intention of presenting these murderers as anything but reprehensible figures. They rob graves, too. In fact, the ignoble quest of the two 'hearty adventurers' is to reach Gyptland (yes, Egypt), kill all the Infidels, and loot the ancient tombs. Their granddad done tole em to.

Did I ever grow to like the brothers? No. Did I find them morally deplorable? Yes. Does that mean I disliked the book? God, no. Does that make me a sadist? Hope not.

As with all picaresque worth their salt, this book is laced with ribald humour (and bodily humours). Much (hell, most) of it is decidedly off-colour, but that doesn't mean it has to be off-putting. Bullington obviously has a fairly good knowledge of the time period, with jokes about all the sacred cows from Church dogma to the Avignon papacy. I especially enjoyed the brothers' philosophical musings concerning the different monsters they encounter: they have great debate about the difference between a basilisk and a cockatrice, and they also debate what part of a mermaid/siren is edible (i.e. where to draw the line between cannibalism and a wholesome seafood dinner). I admit to feeling a bit uncomfortable at times for laughing, but I couldn't help finding a lot of it gut-wrenchingly hilarious.

The writing isn't flashy or 'literary', but it gets the job done without getting in the way. As Bullington himself says in an interview at the end of the book, his intention was to 'satirize dull literary devices and archetypes', and he manages this without any fanfare or pretensions.

Everyone will not like this book, especially if you are sensitive to visceral eviscerations or blasphemous doings and sayings. For me, it was a breath of fetid air, straight from the catacombs and tombs.

40baswood
Ago 15, 2011, 5:59 pm

The Jesse Bullington book sounds like good fun. Not to be confused with Porius then.

41Mr.Durick
Ago 15, 2011, 6:13 pm

I've read Wuthering Heights so I should be able to read The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart. It is now on my wishlist and may even be cheaper in the Barny Noble store I frequent than on line. Thanks for the review.

Robert

42dmsteyn
Ago 19, 2011, 2:45 pm

42. Bright's Passage by Josh Ritter

Before I begin, a full disclosure: Josh Ritter is one my favourite musicians, so a certain amount of bias might be expected in this review. Mea culpa. To the review.

Henry Bright is a veteran of the first World War who, after the horrors of the trenches (and other life-changing experiences), returns to his home in West Virginia. But Henry Bright has picked up a companion from the trenches: an angel has started following Henry around, giving him advice and generally trying to direct Henry's life towards some greater goal. At least, Henry believes that it is an angel. We are left to decide whether this is a real supernatural being, or perhaps only Henry suffering from some mental aberration brought on by shellshock. Ritter is careful to never tip has hand decisively towards either explanation.

The book begins with the birth of Henry's son, and the death of his wife. The angel, who has taken possession of Henry's horse, claims that this new son will be the Future King of Heaven. Apparently, the abiding woe of the War has convinced the angel to rebel against God. Henry struggles with the advice the angel gives him throughout the novel. On the one hand, the angel miraculously saved Henry several times during the War with his warnings. On the other hand, the angel also tells Henry to abandon his cabin in the woods - in fact, he tells Henry to set the house on fire, starting a conflagration from which Henry has to flee with his newborn son and livestock in tow, and which plays a threatening role during the course of the book.

Henry is also trailed by the father of his wife, the Colonel, who believes that Henry stole his daughter. The Colonel is a very enigmatic character: he obviously has no morality, but has an enduring belief in civility. For instance, he berates his two sons, who accompany him on his pursuit, for using contractions in their speech. He also believes himself to be righteous and beyond rebuke.

I felt conflicted about this book, and not only because I am such a fan of Josh's music. Having read Stephen King's review of the book in the New York Times, I have to agree with King: 'This is the work of a gifted novelist, but the size of that gift has yet to be determined. One thing that is sure: Ritter has not, as yet, fully unwrapped it.' The book is very well-written, especially for a debut novel. Ritter's wordplay and prose is beautiful, but I would expect that from having enjoyed his lyrics for years. What did bother me about the book was the lack of narrative drive at certain points. The book is written retrospectively, the main storyline interweaved with chapters concerning the past: some of the best chapters deal with Henry's harrowing experience of the frontline. This does, however, lead to some slowing down in parts and a bit of a disjointed pace. Some of the characters seemed a bit clichéd, such as a loquacious socialite Henry meets towards the end of the book. But these are mostly minor quibbles.

This is far from a vanity book, published merely because of Ritter's musical success. Yes, there are issues with the book, but these seem to arise more from inexperience than from lack of talent. Ritter sometimes lapses into unlikely happenings, but considering the nature of the book, these are mostly forgivable. I also agree with King that Ritter is a little too fond of the adverb, though I don't have the same morbid aversion to the things that King has.

I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in well-written, interesting narratives which challenge some holy cows (and horses). The book certainly did not disappoint me, but I am certain that we can expect even better from Ritter in the future.

To illustrate Ritter's potential, and as a small bonus, here is the YouTube video of him performing 'Girl in the War', a song with similar concerns to Bright's Passage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqLssKusGzM

43baswood
Ago 19, 2011, 5:15 pm

Good review of Bright's passage. I would have thumbed it, but you have not loaded onto your library page.

I enjoyed the Josh Ritter song, but Bob Dylan has a good case to sue I think as it sounds very much like Billy's song on Dylan's Pat Garrett and Billy Kid.

44Poquette
Ago 19, 2011, 6:45 pm

Nice review, and I think I'll wait on this. My TBR is so overloaded . . .

45dmsteyn
Ago 20, 2011, 6:50 am

> Barry, I know Josh has often admitted to his debts to Dylan, and agree that the songs are very similar in structure, but I don't think that he would win his case. I can't find the original song on YouTube, but the covers sound interesting. I really need to listen to more Dylan!

46baswood
Ago 20, 2011, 7:05 am

Dewald, Dylan seems to be very protective of his copyright. I have not seen any original Dylan recordings on You Tube.

47dmsteyn
Ago 29, 2011, 9:28 am

I began reading the following for research purposes (John Clare had an obsession with Byron, even believing himself to be Byron), but I found myself enjoying the poetry so much, that I read all four Cantos through about three times.

43. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron in Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)

Byron - a name to conjure with. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, was famous (rather, infamous) during his lifetime, and became to many the Romantic Hero par excellence. He has a uniquely interesting biography, and I urge anyone who does not know at least a bit about his life to find out more. In this review, however, I will focus on the poetry of his early composition, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and try to steer away from the more risqué elements of his history. Byron is still often read in the hope of titillation, a frivolous pursuit at best, like skimming a Mills & Boon for the naughty bits. But Byron is worthy of much more than this, I believe, and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage blazons this forth.

Admittedly, the four Cantos of the poem are a mixed bag. The first two Cantos are often denigrated as mere self-indulgent travelogue. This is not an altogether unfair criticism, as they do tend to focus on the exotic and oriental, much like Byron's Turkish Tales of the same period (it should be noted here that Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was written over several years starting in 1809, and published between 1812 and 1818), but these Cantos are not without some charm and skilled versification. Like the last two Cantos, they are written in Spenserian stanzas, which work well for the most part. I read somewhere that WH Auden thought it strange that Byron should use Spenserian stanzas for such a fast-moving poem, and this is fair enough. Byron's later use of ottava rima for Don Juan is much better suited to conveying pace and action than the Spenserian stanzas. They make the poem appear archaic and unduly sonorous. Of course, Byron was aware that his poem would appear antiquated - he often uses this for satiric purposes in the first two Cantos. But the mixture of earnestness and satire often sits uncomfortably, and I sometimes wished that Byron would decide what he truly had in mind in these early Cantos.

The third and fourth Canto (especially the fourth) abandon the ruse of having 'Childe Harold' stand in for Byron, which seems a felicitous choice on Byron's part, as they are much better written and more engaging. After publishing the first two Cantos, everyone already knew that 'Harold' was really only a thinly disguised portrait of Byron. In these last two Cantos, Byron struggles more with the past, his own and Europe's. These Cantos seem more sincere than the previous ones, as Byron tries to come to terms with his own fame and a feeling of satiety and alienation. The third Canto is my favourite, as Byron evokes the Battle of Waterloo, and considers the Alps, Rousseau and Lake Leman / Lake Geneva. I think I enjoyed it most because I am more familiar with the setting and the artists which Byron mentions in it. The fourth Canto is considered the maturest of Byron's writing up to this point, but I found it somewhat long-in-the-tooth and exhausting. Maybe it is because it is twice as long as the other three Cantos, or perhaps because it deals with Italian writers like Tasso and Ariosto, who are not widely read anymore. It also reminded me (as if I needed it rubbed in) that I still have to read Dante.

So, a great if uneven poem, and highly recommended as an introduction to longer Romantic works.

48baswood
Ago 30, 2011, 7:35 am

Enjoyed your review of Childe harold's Pilgrimage. I notice it came from the major works, so do you intend to read the rest? I have Don Juan sitting on my TBR pile, but it is way down the list at the moment.

49dmsteyn
Ago 30, 2011, 7:47 am

Yes, Barry, I do hope to read the rest, especially Don Juan, but I want to get back to Spenser now. Where are you with The Faerie Queene?

50baswood
Ago 30, 2011, 8:36 am

I have just finished book II

51dmsteyn
Sep 16, 2011, 5:17 am

44. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The review will follow, but first, an illuminating interlude:

All:
God save your majesty!

Cade:
I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

Dick:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Cade:
Nay, that I mean to do.

Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2

Shakespeare was, of course, not really against all lawyers per se. Nor, despite appearances to the contrary, was Dickens. Bleak House, based on Dickens's experience as a law clerk and on litigation concerning the copyright of his early books, is often considered his greatest novel. Much of the plot of the book is concerned with the Chancery case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and how it impacts all the characters involved in the book. I enjoyed the book immensely, but not without a few caveats, which I will get to.

Recently, I read in a (South African) newspaper that one of our local literary doyennes said on a panel that 'children need to stop reading Charles Dickens'. My first thought was, well, that must be out of context. Yes, there are problems with Dickens, especially socio-political ones, but one cannot deny that, at his best, he was a great writer. I for one read him as a child and, though I only understood him as a child, I still loved his ability to weave a story. Now, although I have put away some childish things, I still admit to a deep, abiding passion for Dickens, who is more than merely a great plotter. Bleak House has again proved to me that beyond a doubt.

I will not get into the story much - it is much too labyrinthine to summarise adequately, and as it is also a bit of a mystery, I would not want to give away some of the plot. Rather, I will mention a few of the characters that I found particularly interesting, and some incidents which elucidate Dickens's methods. Dickens writes the story in alternating chapters of anonymous third person narration and first person narration. The third person narration is more terse and to the point, but it also has lively imagery and telling moments of detail. Here, for instance, is the famous opening of the book:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The terseness beautifully captures both the hidebound, rule-governed atmosphere of the Chancery court, and the dismal quality of the weather. The Megalosaurus - a humorous touch! - also indicates the 'dinosaurs' one finds in the courts.

The first person narration is from the point of view of one Esther Summerson. Dickens is often accused of being unable to write realistic female characters: they are either angels or devils. Esther is certainly on the side of the angels, but she is more complicated than that. Her narration is usually straightforward and candid, but at times she can even be a bit unreliable. Here is the opening of her first paragraph:

I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my doll, when we were alone together, 'Now Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!'

Esther protests too much, methinks. Through the course of the story, we will see that she is quite shrewd.

Dickens beautifully ties together these two narratives, introducing such memorable characters as Richard Carstone and Ada, the 'wards in Jarndyce', mad Miss Flite, who haunts the Chancery courts, and Harold Skimpole. Ah, Harold Skimpole! What a character! Supposedly based on Leigh Hunt, Harold is 'a child' in the matters of money, human relationships and society - or so he claims. He is quite charming, in his way, but he mercilessly sponges off all the characters who are of a noble persuasion. And then there is John Jarndyce, whom Nabokov called 'the best and kindest man ever to appear in a novel'. He is such an endearing, humane character, that he puts the lie to suggestions that Dickens can only write grotesque caricatures.

I do not usually show much emotion when reading books - I tend to think that tears can be evidence of cheap emotional exploitation - but this book really touched a deep chord in my heart, and I admit to sometimes wiping away an errant drop of salty moisture. Dickens is not saying that the law is inherently bad - on the contrary, he has some very humane legal characters in his fiction. Rather, he shows how the impersonal, mechanical application of the law, without consideration of human frailty, can lead to a grinding down of people and their hopes.

I will miss the friends with whom Mr Dickens has acquainted me. Lovely is the thought that, in the days to come, in the years that wait, I will be able to revisit this brave company of souls.

Oh, and I didn't even mention the Spontaneous Human Combustion!

52Poquette
Sep 16, 2011, 2:19 pm

Dewald, what a lovely evocative review of Bleak House. I have not read it, but I remember a wonderful BBC production of it that showed here in the US on a program called Masterpiece Theater that has been showing in one form or another since the 1970s. Thus we have had the opportunity to see some wonderful BBC-type films of great literature. I have read embarrassingly little of Dickens actually but almost feel as though I had read most of it because his stories and characters lend themselves so well to quality film series such as those produced by the BBC. At any rate, your review makes me want to read it and other Dickens novels sooner rather than later.

53baswood
Sep 16, 2011, 6:14 pm

Great review of Bleal House, Dewald. It is one of the few Dicken's novels I have not read. Many think its his best, I suppose I am saving it for a special occasion.

"Let's kill all the Lawyers"Hmmmmmm.......... I dunno.

54dmsteyn
Editado: Sep 17, 2011, 6:29 am

Thanks, Suzanne and Barry. I dunno about killing all the lawyers, either. Maybe just the ambulance-chasers.

55dmsteyn
Sep 21, 2011, 1:24 pm

46. Babel-17 / Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany

Wow! Exhilarating stuff, this. Two books for the price of one, and both, in their diverging ways, brilliantly conceived. Both are, nominally, SF novels, but that hardly does them justice. They are much more concerned with the limits of language and plot, and only use some well-known SF tropes in order to knock them down.

In Babel-17, Rydra Wong is a young poet and brilliant code-breaker. She is approached by the military arm of the Alliance to decode certain strange messages in a cypher dubbed Babel-17. She soon realises that Babel-17 is more than a mere code. Rather, it is a complete autonomous language, the most complex she has ever encountered. So she sets off on a strange quest to figure out the code, assembling a band of misfits to crew her spaceship and help her solve the mystery.

So far, so fairly typical. But it is what Delany does with the story that really matters. He is master of word and plot games, but they are nearly always functional. An example is where Rydra visits the Alliance War Yards. The commander of the Yards takes her on a tour of the latest weapons, most of which he denounces as ‘Gross, uncivilized weapons’. There is, however, a secret weapon, the TW-55, a super-engineered human spy. As the commander says, ‘To find among ordinary men someone who can function as a spy, is willing to function as a spy, you must search the fringes of neurosis, often psychosis.’ Obviously, this is a problem, as the Alliances enemies, known only as the Invaders, also have psyche-indices with which to determine the psychological profile of possible spies. The TW-55, however, will register perfectly normal. These spies can even expound with scholarly acumen for an hour and a half on a subject – incidentally, this specific one’s is ‘haptoglobin groupings among the marsupials’.

Now, you might by this point ask, what are you getting at, Mr. Delany? Well, the kicker comes a while later, as the commander is assassinated by an unknown young man. Funny thing is, this unknown young man spoke to Rydra shortly before killing the commander. And what did he say when looking down from the balcony with Rydra?

‘They make such odd faces when they glance up here to see if it’s you, Miss Wong.’

‘They leer,’ she said, shortly.

‘Bandicoots. That’s what they look like. A pack of them.’

He laughed. ‘Bandicoots with thalassanemia!’


Delany slips this in so delicately, and over so many pages, that you’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to catch it first time round. Luckily, he explains it (to a degree) to the slow reader (i.e. me) a few pages later when Rydra realises who the assassin was. But Delany plays these games throughout the book, and I doubt I picked up on all of them.

The book is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and, although that has been disproved, it still makes for a wonderfully intelligent book.

Empire Star, much shorter than Babel-17, is a quasi-Bildungsroman, concerning one Comet Jo. But like Babel, it is much more. In fact, Empire Star is supposedly a novella written by one of the characters mentioned in Babel. It features many overlapping narratives, which switchback on themselves, with many of the characters appearing in different incarnations throughout. I read it twice, and I still don’t understand how all the pieces fit together. Not because it is unclear. Rather, as Delany writes, because there are ‘simplex, complex, and multiplex’ interpretations on offer for the action in the book.

Oh, and did I mention that there is a computer in the book called the Lump who continually makes literary allusions? Or that Delany wrote it in 10 days? No? Well, then try these books for yourself. Not only are they excellently written and engaging, but they also present a very stimulating mental exercise.

56RidgewayGirl
Sep 21, 2011, 2:42 pm

Fantastic review of Bleak House. You know, until just this moment, I'd forgotten how enjoyable Dickens is.

57baswood
Sep 21, 2011, 5:36 pm

Not sure I can cope with the mental exercises, but I will certainly give these SF novels a try

58dmsteyn
Sep 22, 2011, 2:18 pm

>56 RidgewayGirl: Thanks, Alison! Dickens is, to me, one of the most readable authors - which sometimes blinds me to some of his faults, but, hey, that's still a better deal than you get with most writers.

>57 baswood: Barry, if you can keep up with Oscar's wit, than you shouldn't have many problems with Delany. These kinds of plot tricks and word games are, in some writers' hands, a mere distraction, but Delany ensures that they further the story and enhance his themes.

59Poquette
Sep 22, 2011, 2:38 pm

Science fiction has fallen onto a back bench in my parliament of books – alas! Because I have been absorbed by it throughout my reading life. These Delany books sound very unusual and intriguing. I have added them to my TBR thanks to your enticing review.

60dmsteyn
Sep 25, 2011, 2:10 pm

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

This novel, published in 1922, the same year as Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, is acknowledged as a landmark Modernist text. Having previously read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway during my undergraduate years, and having enjoyed those novels, I came to Jacob’s Room with certain expectations. For one, I expected it to be challenging, and challenging it was. But it is also very short (around a 120 pages) and therefore more manageable than Joyce’s magnum opus. It also illustrates some of the problems I have with Modernist fiction in general, and Woolf specifically.

More on that later. First, let me expound on the technique of the book. Whereas Woolf’s first two novels were, according to what I have read, fairly straightforward, in this novel, Woolf takes a much more impressionistic approach to novel-writing. Jacob’s Room has barely any plot. Ostensibly being about the life of Jacob Flanders (supposedly based on Woolf's brother, Thoby), the book presents snatches from many different points of view on Jacob, and, sometimes, from Jacob’s point of view. Despite being presented in chronological order, these impressions are disjointed, and it often takes some effort to make sense of what is going on. This creates a collage effect, very different from most novels that one might encounter.

I liked Woolf’s attention to detail and her way of turning a phrase. She creates an intense emotional portrait of Jacob, even though he is not really the protagonist of the novel; no-one is. To get an idea of what Woolf is endeavouring to do, here is a short passage from the novel:

It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by – this unseizable force.

Although Woolf displays some scepticism in this extract – all those ‘they say’s – it is still evident throughout the quasi-novel of Jacob’s Room that it is exactly this ‘unseizable force’ that she is trying to grasp. It is the ineffable quality of life that Woolf tries to represent, precisely by going against the supposed realism of the Realist writers, such as Arnold Bennett.

Her characterisation is fluid to the point of flowing down the drain, at least at times. That is one problem I had with her writing. Despite beautifully lyrical and elegiac passages, the book sometimes felt insubstantial – ‘flimsy’, maybe. Perhaps this is because of its lack of plot and other anchoring points, such as relatable characters and substantial events. Woolf sacrifices these on purposes, but it sometimes felt like the book was an experiment that either went too far, or did not go far enough. To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway seemed comparably more successful attempts at marrying traditional novelistic techniques to Modernist experiments in narration. Ulysses, which uses similar techniques, also seems more successful, as it goes the whole hog in rejecting Realism. That said, I read Jacob’s Room without any guide, so I might have missed out on some of Woolf’s intentions with the novel.

On the whole, an interesting, if flawed, attempt at presenting a life as it is really experienced, and not as it is usually channelised into easily digested fiction.

61baswood
Sep 25, 2011, 2:50 pm

Very good review of Jacob's Room Dewald. I have not read it but I am intrigued to give it a try after reading your review. I read To the Lighthouse in school and have a copy of it sitting on my kindle to read again. Woolf writes so well at times that she can be forgiven for anything. There is always something to enjoy.

62Poquette
Sep 25, 2011, 6:55 pm

Dewald, very interesting review of Jacob's Room, which I have not yet read but now I am going to definitely take a look at it. To the Lighthouse had a stunning effect on me when I read it a few years ago. Your comments resonate in a big way with regard to my current attempts to come to grips with Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater, another plotless novel which in addition suffers from shallow characterizations to boot.

63edwinbcn
Sep 26, 2011, 6:42 am

Thanks for your wonderful review of Jacob's room; even your prose is a joy to read.

I can no longer make out what I felt or thought about the book read back in 1993, shortly before my graduation. Then, I gave it 3 stars.

Your review makes me curious about what I missed. Other reviews from folks here have had that effect on me, that I want to reread some of those classics which I read with only half understanding in my youth and student days.

64dmsteyn
Sep 26, 2011, 6:56 am

Thanks to everyone for the compliments! As I mentioned, I think I also missed a lot on the first read through the book. Ideally, I would like to buy the Norton Critical Edition of the book, which has comments on the book by such luminaries as E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot, but I think I'll wait on that - too many other great books to read!

65dmsteyn
Sep 27, 2011, 7:39 am

Talking about other great books to read - er, this isn't quite one:

48. The Fog by James Herbert

I had hoped that this would be a light distraction from some of the heavier books I've been reading, and it was, to a degree. But I seriously doubt if I'm going to be reading any more of Herbert's books. This just wasn't good enough to consider putting myself through a similar experience. Many people compare him to Steve King, and I can see why - they've got a similar knack for storytelling, and both obviously write about similar things. Heck, King even got me to read this, because of his reviews of Herbert in Danse Macabre. But believe me, having read quite a bit of King, he is a much better writer than Herbert. Not to say King is a particularly good writer: he has a way of writing, and he usually sticks to it, outside of a few salubrious experiments in his shorter works. But as for Herbert, well, to quote A.E. Housman out of context, 'Terence, this is stupid stuff'.

Herbert's characters are just, well, cardboard compared to King's. I just didn't care for any of them. And the whole premise of the book is so absurd, especially Herbert's quasi-scientific explanations, that I couldn't help laughing at some of the things in the book. Which brings me to another problem with the book - it has no sense of humour, and is only funny by accident. The dialogue is also so stilted that I thought I was reading a bad translation into British English.

That said, the book is fairly entertaining - if you can forgive the inconsistencies and other faults. I couldn't. Maybe I've grown too critical - one can't expect too much from these books, obviously. The gruesome bits of the book are at least properly blood-curdling, but, because I didn't care about the characters, I just didn't feel anxious or sympathetic. I can see why it caused a big stir back in 1975, but, honestly, it just doesn't have the impact it should. Seeing the deaths of cardboard characters is pretty much comparable to watching reams of paper going through an industrial shedder - it left me quite indifferent.

I read this book because I'm interested in the history of speculative fiction. But this just goes to show that all oldies certainly aren't goodies. In Herbert's foreword to the 1988 edition, he says that he felt the temptation to 'smooth out the rougher edges, perhaps endow some of the characters with a little more depth.' He defends his choice not to by saying that 'change would be an unnecessary indulgence' on his part, and goes on to call the book 'a throwback to the fifties and much earlier', paying homage to H.G. Wells and John Wyndham. Well, that's fair enough, I guess. But it still doesn't excuse the bad writing found throughout the novel.

66baswood
Sep 27, 2011, 8:55 am

Good review of The Fog Dewald. I will certainly give this a miss. I have not even read any Stephen King, but that is because I equate him with Stephen Spielberg, which is probably totally irrational.

I hope Mr Herbert only paid homage to H G Wells and John Wyndham and was not comparing himself to them.

67dmsteyn
Sep 28, 2011, 8:46 am

Like Spielberg, King usually does the same thing on a sub par level over and over again, but also like Spielberg, he can sometimes score a miraculous hole-in-one (to stretch the golfing metaphor a bit). His short stories can be quite good: he even won the O. Henry Award in 1996.

Mr Herbert doesn't so much compare himself favourably to Wells and Wyndham as acknowledge them as (subconcious) influences. Obviously, he is quite knowledgeable concerning the speculative genre - this book just wasn't a good example of it.

68Jargoneer
Sep 28, 2011, 12:11 pm

I read quite a lot of horror fiction as a teenager and I always saw the hierarchy as: King - Herbert - Shaun Hutson/Guy N Smith. The British press however were always promoting Herbert as the British King and he did sell by the truckload, to the extent of becoming a bit of celebrity. i.e., he was one of the few authors invited onto mainstream chat-shows. The Fog was his second book and he did improve but probably not enough to recommend.

>67 dmsteyn: - I agree re King. His early novels are quite enjoyable but then he started writing too much and editing way way too little.

69dmsteyn
Sep 30, 2011, 8:22 am

49. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

This novel, about a young Irishwoman’s experiences in her birth country and the deracination she experiences when she moves to America, touched a deep chord in me. I found the observations on home-sickness and sadness beautifully measured and assured. They reminded me of my own first experiences away from home, and it is this resonant quality of Tóibín’s writing that I enjoyed most. The story is not remarkable in any way; there are no great plot twists, nor does Tóibín bother with any over-the-top scenes. In less assured hands, it could all seem very pedestrian, but Tóibín’s mastery is in making the ordinary seem extraordinary, taking a common little life and infusing it with dignity and interest.

The heroine, Eilis, does not seem remarkable at all, at least initially, but through her experiences of pain and love, we come to see her as a fully rounded personality, with her own hopes and aspirations. One could easily dismiss her story as inconsequential, but that would be foolish. It is, after all, the little, seemingly inconsequential events that make up a life. And Eilis does experience monumental events in her own life, even if they do not seem so monumental to an indifferent observer.

Tóibín handles Eilis’s burgeoning character expertly, especially when he describes her return to Ireland after a tragedy at home. The way he handles this tragedy, and its effects on Eilis and her family, together with a secret that Eilis has kept from her family, is truly masterly. He sets up tension without resorting to any outlandish tricks, making Eilis’s situation seem all the more universal. The book left me feeling sad at the seeming determinism of our lives, but also hopeful that we do have the ability to choose, whether for good or ill. That may seem somewhat trite, but any fiction that makes one consider your own choices in life seems, to me, to be doing something right.

I found Tóibín’s unadorned style refreshing, but a bit anaemic at times. That sounds a bit contradictory, but what I am trying to say is that I enjoyed the purity of the prose, but I wanted a bit more red meat. I tend to prefer a more descriptive style of writing – not necessarily purple patches, but cross-hatched colouring. Perhaps the argument could be made that this style fits the nature of the story. Or perhaps this is just the way Tóibín always writes. Either way, this is not really a criticism, just a preference.

On the whole, a beautifully understated book, which I recommended for anyone who likes thoughtful literature. I will definitely be reading more of Colm Tóibín.

70baswood
Sep 30, 2011, 5:15 pm

Dewald, excellent review of Brooklyn. I read The Blackwater Lightship a couple of years ago and while I enjoyed his prose, especially his use of conversational style. I found some of it a bit precious. i will try him again sometime soon

71theaelizabet
Sep 30, 2011, 5:38 pm

A well-written review, Dewald, and I couldn't agree more. I loved that book.

72edwinbcn
Sep 30, 2011, 8:25 pm

Nice review of Brooklyn, which I have on my TBR pile, not yet come round to read. I used to consider Tóibín as one of my favourite writers, and read almost all his works before moving to China. Since, I have been able to buy a few but not read them. I guess I should.

73dmsteyn
Oct 1, 2011, 7:33 am

Thanks for the nice comments, everyone. I think Tóibín is a master of a certain kind of restrained fiction - not necessarily my favourite sort of writing, but I can appreciate the artistry of the writing.

74dmsteyn
Oct 1, 2011, 7:46 am

And number 50 for the year is

A Universal History of Iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges

“All it takes to die is to be alive” (from the story, ‘Man on Pink Corner’)

These strange stories of the worst men (and women) on earth left me wordless – literally, I did not know what to write about them, at least initially. Each tale is enigmatic, seemingly meaningless, and yet horribly telling in its own special way. Each one is about a different character in Borges’s ‘History of Iniquity’, and seems to represent the universal sordidness of the human condition. There are murders, knife fights, suicides, and other grisly ends galore in this collection. What inspired Borges to write down these horrible histories, I can only speculate, but he obviously enjoyed it. According to his 1935 preface, ‘The stories are not, nor do they attempt to be psychological,’ which is fair enough (though Borges may, of course, be deliberately misleading us). They are rather portraits of infamy, without any attempt at humanising the perpetrators.

Borges calls these stories ‘exercises in narrative prose’; they certainly are not traditional short stories, except for the above-mentioned ‘Man on Pink Corner’. All of them are based on research Borges did – he even has a source list at the end of the volume. But that is also being somewhat disingenuous: these are no straight researched pieces. Rather, Borges takes what he finds interesting/relevant/macabre from the source material, and then reworks it according to his own predilections. The end part of the book, called ‘Et cetera’, is a collection of very short pieces translated almost directly from their sources, including from Swedenborg and the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Well, I say ‘almost directly’ advisedly, as Borges again plays fast and loose with his translation.

A problem with this edition is, of course, that it is at two removes from the source material: often, Borges has translated something from English into Spanish, changing many of the details, and now the translator of Borges, Andrew Hurley, has changed the things back into English. Hurley is at least aware of this difficulty, and tries to stay true to Borges’s intentions. He also usually indicates where things might be ambiguous, and where he has differed from previous translators, such as in the title of ‘Man on Pink Corner’, which is given without a definite article to give the impression that it is a prose picture.

My favourite piece was Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities, the story of one leader of the New York Gangs of the nineteenth century. Anyone who has seen Scorsese’s Gangs of New York will recognise Eastman as the composite origin of several of the characters in that movie. As Borges writes, ‘The story of the New York gangs… possesses all the confusion and cruelty of barbarian cosmologies, and much of their gigantism and ineptitude.’ Another good piece is The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan, about Billy the Kid.

The stories are genuinely amoral. Borges does not attempt to sermonise, despite the obvious temptation that he might have felt to do so. As he says of the book in the preface to the 1954 edition:

Gallows and pirates fills its pages, and that word iniquity strikes awe in its title, but under all the storm and lightening, there is nothing. It is all just appearance, a surface of images – which is why readers may, perhaps, enjoy it.

I admit to enjoying the read. Whether that is a sign of psychopathy, I leave to others to judge.

The utterly pointless atrocities made me think of Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’, which is about the Starkweather homicides: ‘I guess there’s just a meanness in this world’.

75dmsteyn
Oct 1, 2011, 7:50 am

I read the Borges in his Collected Fictions, so I haven't posted the review on the book page.

76Poquette
Oct 1, 2011, 3:59 pm

Intriguing comments, Dewald. I have not yet read A Universal History of Iniquity, but I have read most of the stories in the subsequent sections of Collected Fictions called The Garden of Forking Paths, Artifices and The Aleph. These are collected in Labyrinths, which I am just now noticing involves different translators. Now I am curious to investigate the differences.

77baswood
Oct 1, 2011, 5:22 pm

Excellent review Dewald of A universal History of Iniquity. One that I will avoid I think, especially after reading this year 2666 by Roberto Bolano.

78StevenTX
Oct 1, 2011, 6:59 pm

I was intrigued by your review of A Universal History of Iniquity, then delighted to read that the stories are included in Collected Fictions, a book I already have.

79kidzdoc
Oct 2, 2011, 12:58 pm

Beautiful review of Brooklyn, Dewald; it reminded me of what I loved best about that very special book, and it's definitely the best review I've read about the book. I also enjoyed your review of A Universal History of Iniquity, which I'll add to my wish list.

80dmsteyn
Oct 9, 2011, 3:09 am

51. American Rust by Philipp Meyer

A well-written debut novel that I enjoyed despite its stark sensibilities, American Rust has been reviewed often, as it was part of an Early Reviewer batch. Most people gave it something between three and four stars, but I think that it deserves at least four stars simply for Meyer’s stylish way of presenting a well-managed plot. I see that many people disliked the dreariness of the story, but I think that is mostly a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. The tale is, admittedly, a depressing one, with small town Pennsylvania serving as the backdrop to a story of accidental murder, and all the consequences that flow therefrom. It is a character-driven novel, however, and one never senses that the plot becomes too restrictive.

I liked the pace of the novel, which is abetted by the often stripped-down narration – many of the action and descriptive passages have a Hemingway-like minimalism to them, although the description is a bit more textured than Papa’s tends to be. The staccato sentences and mixture of first and third person narration can get a bit much, but it is mostly handled well. What I also liked was the way Meyer switches between the different characters, with each having a unique angle on the story, and a distinguishable voice. Not all of them are likeable, but they are all recognisable as individuals. I did like Isaac English, the young man who actually commits the murder, mostly because I could relate to his situation – no, not to murdering someone, even accidentally, but to being a young man of a peculiar stripe: at Isaac’s age, I also felt that I did not really fit into any particular society. I have mellowed out somewhat since then, but I can still connect to that feeling of alienation. But enough about me – Meyer obviously has a strong feeling for character idiosyncrasies, which he puts to good use in representing characters from different generations.

To give you an idea of Meyer’s style, here is Isaac on the murder and his friend, Billy Poe:

Only reason you and Poe are alive, that small choice. Your own body trying to keep you breathing - go in the other door. Hard-wiring. Old as gravity. Look what you did to the Swede: no premeditation, no knife, gun, or club. A found object. A natural part of you, the lower level. Built into every man woman child, you tell yourself you don’t need it but look around you. Your friend over the stranger. Yourself over the friend. Highest stakes and you are still here and the other guy is not.

Grim indeed. Isaac’s interior monologue is beautifully realised – he even has an alter ego he calls ‘the kid’, more worldly-wise than himself, whom he defers to when he lands in tough situations. Of course, it is only a coping mechanism that does not always work. But Isaac has a few amusing conversations with himself / the kid throughout the book, especially when he flees home on a quixotic quest to reach California.

American Rust is obviously informed by contemporary concerns about American exceptionalism. Not being American, I can only speculate as to how accurate description the book gives of present hopes and fears. Perhaps the characters in the book are a tad pessimistic, but their situation in a dying rustbelt town probably does not engender confidence in the nation or themselves. It did remind me of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, as mentioned on the back page, but only tangentially. This book is a more personal statement about relationships, be they between family, lovers, or friends. Yet it is also concerned with broader issues of decline and possible redemption. It does not shy away from showing the dark side of unbridled capitalism. Now, I am no socialist, but I do sometimes worry that, as Emerson wrote, ‘Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind’. I remain an irreverent optimist, however, and hope that this is not quite the case. In any case, the ending of the book left me feeling somewhat ambivalent: it is hopeful to a degree, but one cannot help feeling that Meyer himself is anything but hopeful about America and the wider world.

Well, a good, worthwhile book. I look forward to Meyer’s sophomore effort.

81baswood
Oct 9, 2011, 4:26 am

Well I am disappointed to hear that you are "no socialist" Dewald, but an excellent review nonetheless.

82dmsteyn
Oct 9, 2011, 12:18 pm

> Barry, without wanting to walk into a minefield, when I say that I am 'no socialist', I mean that I prefer the state to have as little influence on my life as possible. I tend towards more 'socialist' views on a public safety net, but I am more libertarian when it comes to private property and individual liberties.

Thanks for the continued support, Barry, and everyone else who views my posts! I really enjoy all of your comments, but I have been a bit busy the last week (no, nothing to do with septic tanks) and haven't been able to respond to all your messages.

83Poquette
Oct 9, 2011, 3:11 pm

Interesting review, Dewald. I probably won't read the book but only because I have so many other things to read.

(BTW, I'm with you on the libertarian front.)

84StevenTX
Oct 10, 2011, 8:21 am

I have a copy of American Rust but had no plans to read it anytime soon until I read your excellent review.

And here I thought I was the only socialist/libertarian. It's nice to have company, albeit on the other side of the world.

85Poquette
Oct 10, 2011, 3:01 pm

socialist/libertarian??? There's an oxymoron if I ever heard one! LOL

86dmsteyn
Oct 13, 2011, 1:34 pm

I've just finished book 3 of The Faerie Queene, and am now going to read The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, who is one of my favourite female poets.

87dmsteyn
Oct 20, 2011, 3:45 pm

52. The Cambridge Companion to English Poets, edited by Claude Rawson

This new addition to the series of Cambridge Companions is certainly an interesting collection of essays. It focuses on the most well-known English poets; whether these are always the best English poets is obviously debatable. And when it comes to ‘English’ poets, the selection process seems to have been a bit ambiguous. ‘English’ in this case seems to mean poets from England, but the compilers of this volume seem to have made room for a few exceptions. For instance, Yeats and T.S. Eliot are included in the volume, neither of whom was actually born in England. Yes, they spent a lot of time in England, with Eliot becoming a citizen, but the compilers of the volume could at least have pointed this out to those who come to the book uninformed.

I enjoyed reading most of the entries in this book, and agreed with most of the inclusions of the book. Sometimes, however, I enjoyed the entry while thinking that the poet did not really belong in the volume. An example would be Emily Brontë: she is one of my favourite writers, and a very good poet in her own right, but as she had such a small output, I do not think she should have an entry of the same length as, say, Milton. Nothing misogynistic in that – I am glad that she is being shown some consideration, and I am also glad that Christina Rossetti found a place in the volume. All that I am saying is that some of the entries seemed a bit padded. Which raises the question, if Brontë can be included, why not Swinburne, Cowper, any of the war poets, etc.? I am not saying that they should be included, just that the inclusion (and exclusion) of some poets has the whiff of PC to it.

I did not agree with all of the entries, of course, especially the one that assigns a normative Christianity to Milton. It propounded the old chestnut (well, I view it as an old chestnut) that Milton employs Satan in Paradise Lost as an epic hero in order to teach the reader, by some sort of tortuous reverse-psychology, that Satan + pride = bad, and God + pious smugness = good. I just do not accept that reading of Paradise Lost, and therefore could not agree with the Milton essayist’s conclusions on Milton.

I also disagreed with the inclusion of Jonathan Swift. Swift is, for me, the greatest satirist in the English language, but he is a much better prose-stylist than a poet. The whole essay on Swift seems to be an apologia for the inclusion of him in the volume (at the expense of his friend, Pope, who is in the collection), and I just felt that it is a case of protesting too much on the behalf of the writer.

What I really enjoyed were the essays on writers that I only have a general idea about. This was especially true of Robert Browning, of whom I have only read shorter pieces. His best work, however, seems to have been his longer pieces, like The Ring and the Book. The essay on him has convinced me that I need to look into his work. I also liked the essays on the Romantics (no, Clare is not there), particularly the one on Shelley: his quest to become a true Renaissance man (yes, I realise that is an anachronism) by reading about and writing on as many topics as possible is truly inspiring.

So, a very stimulating collection, but not without its problems. I guess it is difficult to please everyone in a collection spanning the history of English literature from Chaucer to Philip Larkin. At least the collection motivated me to read more poetry over the coming months.

88baswood
Oct 20, 2011, 5:29 pm

Good review of The Cambridge Companion to English Poets. I think the book has done it's job well if can motivate people to read more poetry. There are many books in The Cambridge Companion series and I have often wondered how worthwhile they are. I might be tempted by the Companion to English poets, if I can pick it up cheap somewhere.

89Poquette
Oct 21, 2011, 2:20 am

I too enjoyed your review, Dewald. Poetry is my most neglected genre, and it seems that I make up for this by reading about it rather than reading IT. The Cambridge Companion sounds like a useful resource.

90dmsteyn
Oct 21, 2011, 1:29 pm

Hi, Barry and Suzanne, and thanks for the nice words. I wish this book was around when I was a first-year undergraduate - it really gives a good oversight of England's poets over the years (with a few omissions), and it also gives lists of the best edition's of the poets' works, and useful secondary works.

91dmsteyn
Oct 27, 2011, 3:39 pm

53. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature by M.H. Abrams

After reading Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp, I was eager to read more works by him. As our library had Natural Supernaturalism available, I borrowed the book a few months ago, but only got around to reading it last month. This book is just as good as The Mirror and the Lamp, if not better. It displays Abrams’s tremendous erudition, but it seems more original than The Mirror and the Lamp, as Abrams does not quote quite as extensively in this book as in the previous one. Although this is definitely an academic book, it refrains from unnecessary jargon – yes, there are some complicated terms, but Abrams always explains things that could be difficult to grasp. The book covers most of the English Romantic poets (with the exception of Byron), with whom I am fairly familiar. Abrams also deals with Romanticism as it was constellated in the German states, an aspect of the book with which I was much less familiar. Abrams also pulls his argument through to modern times (well, the 1970’s) and looks at the influence of Romanticism on some modern writers.

It would be difficult to go through everything this book covers, but I will attempt to explicate the main points of the book (as I remember them from one reading). As an overarching structure for his argument, Abrams refers constantly to Wordsworth’s program for poetry, as set out in the ‘Prospectus’ part of the preface to his The Excursion. As Abrams says in his preface, the ‘title, Natural Supernaturalism, indicates that his recurrent, but far from exclusive, concern will be with the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking.’ Abrams’s argument is that the Romantics in both England and Germany – strongly Protestant states – adopted and reworked Biblical exegesis and theodicy into a secular understanding of humanity and Nature. This, although a sudden break with tradition, had a long period of fruition, as Abrams proves by going back to the Biblical text, and then following this development through time. On the way, Abrams discusses Christian psycho-biography (e.g. Augustine’s Confessions), the influence of pagan and Christian neoplatonism, and the Western esoteric tradition. All of these traditions lead, according to Abrams, to the new conception of man and nature found in the writings of the Romantics.

I enjoyed all of these excursions into Western intellectual history. I did, however, find the section on German Romanticism hard-going. This is mostly because I have not read any of the poets even in translation – these include Schiller, Hölderlin, Goethe, and Novalis. I am going to read Goethe’s Faust next year, but for now, these poets are an undiscovered country to me. I have, however, read some Hegel before – unfortunately. He is obviously a very original philosopher, but the obscurity of his style would give James Joyce in finest fettle a run for his money. Even Abrams cannot make him seem worthwhile to me: it still seems like a lot of philoso-babble to me, and I did not enjoy this part of the book.

I was on firmer ground with the next part of the book, which deals with the changing Romantic movement in English literature, starting with William Blake and ending with D.H. Lawrence. Abrams focuses on what he calls ‘The Circuitous Journey’ in these writers’ works – the idea that a journey has to be made in order to return to where one started, but with greater insight and on a higher level. This is often represented by the Ouroboros: a snake with its tail in its mouth. Obviously, I am simplifying Abrams’s argument greatly – he has three sections of the book dedicated to this topic. It was very interesting to see how Abrams traces his argument from Blake’s mystical writings to Eliot’s recurring moments in the Four Quartets. These moments are further examined in section on Wordsworth’s so-called ‘spots of time’, where Abrams moves from the Romantics all the way to the Modernists, including Joyce, and even further, up to the Beatniks.

This book, although not written specifically to inspire, did engender feelings of hope and optimism in me. Despite Abrams’s pessimism concerning modern culture, he seems to say something hopeful concerning culture and art: in his last chapter, titled ‘The Eagle and the Abyss’, he relates how many writers come to a seeming abyss, which seems impossible to cross. However, there is always the hope of spotting an eagle soaring across this divide. This is the triumph of epiphany and sublime vision, which only art can achieve. As Abrams quotes Wallace Stevens as saying:

The astral and Shelleyan lights are not going to alter the structure of nature. Apples will always be apples, and whoever is a ploughman hereafter will be what the ploughman has always been. For all that, the astral and Shelleyan will have transformed the world.

Nothing can better explain the true usefulness of art in its use-lessness.

92baswood
Oct 27, 2011, 5:05 pm

Enjoyed your review of Natural Supernaturalism Dewald. I didn't think that I had heard of M H Abrams before but then I noticed that he is an editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature which is sitting on my book shelf. Obviously then a well respected critic. He sounds fascinating on the influences of the Romantic poets and how they reworked Biblical exegesis.

I shall keep him in mind when I want to explore the Romantic movement more fully.

93Poquette
Oct 27, 2011, 7:19 pm

Very nice review, Dewald. It has recently been brought home to me how little I know about the Romantics, but they are beginning to pique my interest, thanks to presentations such as yours. Once I get past my current preoccupation with the Renaissance, I think I would like to read Natural Supernaturalism. I also have Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp, which I have read parts of in connection with a lit crit course I took a few years ago. Both books should go on next year's TBR.

94theaelizabet
Oct 27, 2011, 9:07 pm

I'm also enjoying your reviews and study of Romanticism and the Romantics, Dewald. I've been hanging around them and this era for a couple of years now, but had never heard of The Mirror and the Lamp or Natural Supernaturalism until now. Thanks to you, The Mirror and the Lamp sits on my shelves. Have you read anything by Richard Holmes?

95dmsteyn
Oct 29, 2011, 11:25 am

>92 baswood: Barry, I think he is one of the most respected critics of his generation. Hasn't written that many books, though.

>93 Poquette: I'm glad that I've contributed to your interest in the Romantics. I seem, however, to read more books on Romantic theory than actual Romantic authors. Something to be set right over the coming months.

>94 theaelizabet: I have read The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, which I really enjoyed. I would like to read his biographies of Coleridge and Shelley.

96dmsteyn
Oct 29, 2011, 6:27 pm

54. A Life of Emily Brontë by Edward Chitham

This is a good, insightful biography on a very elusive character. Emily Brontë left us little personal memorabilia or writings. Rather, we are forced to rely on her fictional works (and what works they are!) and reports from others in trying to understand her. Chitham does a good job in separating fact from fiction, as it were, and also indicates throughout the biography where he is speculating, something that previous biographers have apparently not always done. Of course, our idea of Emily Brontë has also been filtered through the representations Charlotte Brontë made of her. Most early biographers came to Emily with ideas fixed by Charlotte’s descriptions of her, and she also edited and emended Emily’s works, sometimes resulting in unfortunate perversions of Emily’s intention. Chitham is aware of these problems, and tries to keep to Emily’s original intent. Authorial intention is, of course, a nettlesome problem, something which Chitham does not always acknowledge.

Wuthering Heights is one of those monuments to individual genius that escapes mere biographical interpretation. As Chitham says:

The biographer cannot explain Wuthering Heights. The process of using the novel to understand the life, and the life to understand the novel, can easily become circular… What is clear, surely, is that the book is in all ways consistent with Emily’s life as we know it and in particular with her inner life, as that emerges before us in her rare oracular statements, and especially in her poetry.

I agree with that to a degree – the enigma of Emily is that her art, although so personal and idiosyncratic, fails to really reveal her inmost personality. The puzzle is almost of the scope of Shakespeare, whose plays and poetry tell us almost nothing about the artist, except for affirming his genius. Emily did not have the opportunity to create as much true art as Shakespeare –she died at the age of 30. All we have is the monolithic Wuthering Heights and about 200 poems, many of which are only fragments.

This biography gives the bare bones of Emily’s story accurately (I assume) and also some interpretative readings of her poems. The criticism is mostly biographical in essence, and is therefore limited to what is known unequivocally about Emily. One gets the sense of a strong character, but not much more than this. She is also completely different from her siblings – something which can be seen in their writings, to a degree, but also when one reads of their different responses to external stimuli. Charlotte and Anne seem to have adapted to life outside of the Haworth parsonage to a greater extent than Emily. Although she was not the complete recluse that she has sometimes been portrayed as, she was definitely more reserved and ‘shy’ than her siblings.

Chitham is sometimes forced, by the paucity of biographical evidence, to resort to some unconventional, even suspect, methods of analysing Emily’s works. One that I found especially egregious was the way that he correlates the observed meteorological conditions in Yorkshire when Emily dated her poems with the weather represented in the poems. He makes much of it when these conditions coincide, but also when they differ. Now, this just seems absurd to me. One obviously does not necessarily write a poem according to the weather conditions; one could easily write about a storm while the sun is shining outside. Nor is there any proof that Emily wrote each poem in a single day – some obviously took weeks, even months, to write. I also found some of Chitham’s interpretations dubious in the extreme – he likes to infer personal qualities from the poems, and he also uses the relationships between Emily’s fictional characters to posit latent hostilities between Emily and her sisters. Sometimes Chitham also omits bits of the Brontë story which he claims is already well-known. All fine and well if you have read previous biographies of the Brontës, but a bit irritating if you have not.

Despite all that, I found the biography well-written and well-researched. Emily Brontë remains one of my favourite writers, her strangeness and passion always surprising and delighting me. Perhaps, in the end, it is better that she retains some of her mysteries. After all, it is the tale, not the teller, which matters.

97theaelizabet
Oct 29, 2011, 6:40 pm

Very interesting, Dewald. I may have to add this. I've done some reading about the Brontes, though not specifically about Emily. She's just so terribly elusive, but you're right; it's her tales that matter. You might enjoy Lucasta Miller's book, The Bronte Myth, if you haven't read it already. It's interesting, though I don't totally agree with some of her assumptions.

Oh, and thumbed, of course.

98baswood
Oct 30, 2011, 9:21 am

Excellent review of A Life of Emily Bronte. When there is a paucity of material a biographer has little choice but to look for the author in her works. Otherwise it might be a slim volume indeed. Poetry would seem to bear more fertile ground than a novel in many cases. However when the strain of finding materiel starts to show it can become almost comic. Seems like this might have happened here.

99dmsteyn
Oct 30, 2011, 11:14 am

>97 theaelizabet: I definitely want to read more about the Brontes, and The Bronte Myth looks like a good place to start. Thanks for the recommendation!

>98 baswood: I agree with you, Barry, this book would've been only about 100 pages long without the speculations. At least Chitham always adds a caveat when he speculates.

100Poquette
Oct 30, 2011, 4:04 pm

After all, it is the tale, not the teller, which matters.

Kudos, again! And this is so true, yet one cannot help being curious about people of mystery, especially writers because we seem to know so much about them through their writing yet we know nothing about their quotidian reality.

101dmsteyn
Oct 31, 2011, 11:45 am

55. The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë by Emily Brontë

In lieu of a full review, I am going to post one of Emily's best poems, called 'Last Lines' by Charlotte who believed it was the last poem Emily ever wrote. It wasn't, but it does encapsulate what makes Emily's poems so fascinating and enigmatic:

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest
As I Undying Life, have power in thee

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed

Now, isn't that something? Soul-searing stuff!

102baswood
Oct 31, 2011, 1:38 pm

Yes soul searing stuff. I have not read any of her poems previously. Thanks for posting it.

103dmsteyn
Nov 11, 2011, 12:48 pm

56. Little, Big by John Crowley

Not an easy review to write, this. I’ve been reading Little, Big for the last month, taking it slowly, as the book really deserves a thorough read. Despite that, I still feel like I should reread the whole book – not because I didn’t understand it, but because it is just such a rich, textured story. Although nominally a fantasy novel (it won the World Fantasy award in 1980), one would be hard-pressed to find any of the usual, well-worn fantasy tropes in this book. Crowley is such a shrewd writer that he can seem to aim towards typical fantasy narratives, but then swerve away from them, leaving the reader alternately lost, bemused and, finally, delighted. I’m sure that many readers will, unfortunately, give up on the book because it can be difficult, in the sense that it refuses the broad way of genre fiction, rather taking the odd turn-offs and twisting paths that real magical writing demands.

I feel a little daunted in writing this review because I read Roz Kaveney’s review in the back of the Harper Perennial edition of the book, and I feel that I cannot possibly match it. I would advise anyone interested in Crowley or Little, Big to read this review if possible. Rather than trying to emulate it, I’m only going to give a personal response to the book.

So, let me just say this – it is a brilliant, beautiful thing of art, this book. Some people have accused it of tweeness, perhaps because of the element of Feyness in the book. Admittedly, there are echoes of Lewis Carroll in the book, and it does contain trace elements of magic. But don’t be fooled – Crowley’s writing can be deadly serious, and he doesn’t mince words when it comes to heartache and disillusionment. The Faeries are there in the book, but they remain a fleeting, flitting presence for the most part, and when they do play a significant role, there is always an ambiguous quality to their doings – they are neither benign nor inherently malignant. What they are, is Weird, in the good, old meaning of the word.

This book is about a lot of things – family, for one, America, for another. But despite these big themes, the book remains anchored on arresting and revealing character portrayals. We have the (apparently) main character, Smoky Barnable, who comes to the house at Edgewood near the beginning of the novel, and never becomes quite settled in his new life with Daily Alice Drinkwater and her extended family, a family that is closer to the edge of some surreal otherworld than is quite normal. Or safe. The novel follows Smoky and his family’s adventures at Edgewood and in the unnamed City (modelled on New York), sometimes reaching back into the past to illuminate the present story.

As someone who quite enjoys the speculative genre, I loved the book’s complex relationship to the idea of fantasy writing. But that doesn’t mean that one has to like fantasy to like this book. It is beautifully written throughout, and as Kaveney writes:

The prose has a supple tough-minded energy, a luxuriance of conceit that renders the book full of lines and passages that have the air of being quotations from some famous book one has not read.

There is also an inherent seriousness to Crowley’s themes that lifts the book miles above the seemingly exhausted world of postmodern fiction. Although the book plays some metatextual games, these never burden it with too much ingenuity – as Kaveney also says, ‘Crowley is not Joyce, demanding a lifetime’s study.’ Thank God for that. In the end, I felt, despite the niggling suspicion that I missed a few things along the way, that I still came away enriched and enchanted. And for that alone, I thank Mr Crowley.

104baswood
Nov 11, 2011, 1:10 pm

OK Dewald you have convinced me that I should read some John Crowley. I suppose Little, Big is as good a place as any to start as any, and so I will add it to my to buy list.

105StevenTX
Nov 11, 2011, 3:22 pm

I keep promising myself to read Little, Big, but other priorities have always gotten in the way. 2010 for sure! Thanks for your review.

106edwinbcn
Nov 18, 2011, 4:21 am

Great review of Little, Big, which I bought a few years ago, but haven't come round to reading. Your review certainly wets my appetite for it.

107dmsteyn
Nov 25, 2011, 4:18 pm

57. A Visit from the Goon SquadJennifer Egan

A curious book, both well-written and moving, but also sometimes perplexing. I liked the fact that the book challenges some time-honoured novelistic conventions, but these challenges to literary customs sometimes led to a disjointed feel. The book is certainly interesting and unusual in its structure, but does not let these postmodern tricks get in the way of an engaging and delightful story.

The book deals with a large cast of characters, each connected to the others through a six-degrees-of-separation kind of synchronicity. Each chapter of the book is a bit like a short story, in that they seem to stand on their own, but there is a definite progression through the book that lends it a coherence that might seem to be missing initially. With each new chapter, one feels a little disoriented, as the characters at first seem to have nothing to do with the previous chapter’s cast. But, gradually, one realises that there are tangential connections between the characters in each chapter. Often, Egan makes a character who was very marginal or only briefly mentioned in a previous chapter, the focus point of the new chapter. As I mentioned, this lends a disjointed feel to the novel – not necessarily a bad thing. Egan manages to deftly interweave the different strands of her story, even if the ending of the book seemed far-fetched to me. A personal quibble.

I found most of the experimental writing interesting. Egan has a whole chapter presented in the form of various charts, which is supposedly the way in which future generations will post things on the Internet. Hmm, possibly, but unlikely. In any case, this kind of speculation adds to the interest of the novel. And, although I am a bit more of a traditionalist (with a dislike for pictures in novels – I’m looking at you, Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close), this seemed to work better than most attempts at introducing other media into novels. I also found the references to the music industry fairly enlightening and absorbing.

Did it deserve the Pulitzer? Dunno. I liked it. It has definite humour, but also gravitas and an emotional core. Even if you do not like postmodern smoke and mirrors, this book has enough else going for it to be worth at least a dip.

108baswood
Nov 25, 2011, 5:22 pm

Dewald, After your review I will certainly take a dip into A visit from the Goon squad Might be a good choice for our book club read?

109StevenTX
Nov 25, 2011, 6:24 pm

A Visit from the Good Squad sounds like something one should experience for the novelty of it if no other reason. I was planning on reading it in the not too distant future anyway just because it won three major awards, and only a handful of books have ever done that. (The others being, by my count, Rabbit Is Rich, Small Island, The Known World, The Stone Diaries, and A Fine Balance.)

I didn't care for Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close either, and for more reasons than the pictures.

110dmsteyn
Nov 27, 2011, 8:13 am

> Barry, I think Goon Squad would be a great choice for your book club read: it's obviously received many plaudits, and, despite the aforementioned postmodernist techniques, it really isn't a difficult read.

Not that you have any problems with 'difficult' reads, btw.

111dmsteyn
Dic 5, 2011, 1:15 pm

58. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood

H.P. Lovecraft called Blackwood ‘the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere’, and, for once, this is not a hyperbolic blurb to increase sales. Blackwood really is brilliant at creating an atmosphere of otherworldly terror and uncanny intrigue. I picked up this collection of Blackwood’s stories in desperate need of some short fiction, preferably of a speculative bent. Blackwood did not disappoint. Although I was never terrified out of my mind (my cosy nook in our sitting room prevented that) I can definitely say that Blackwood’s stories are a cut above most supernatural tales.

Blackwood spent much of his life travelling around the more remote parts of the world: from the Canadian backwoods, to the secluded parts of the Danube river basin, from the ancient tombs of Egypt, to the Swiss Alps, Blackwood visited them all at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Obviously, these places were more isolated back then, and their seclusion had a salient effect on Blackwood’s imagination. Most of his best tales are situated in these out-of-the-way places, and it is the solitude of his characters as they are faced with forces of cosmic proportion that really stays with one.

One of the interesting things about Blackwood’s stories is that the main characters rarely, if ever, come face-to-face with the source of their terror; they nearly always only experience the sensations of horror at a remove. It is usually something that they manage to just avoid, or they experience it vicariously through another character who faces the horror head-on. This has the interesting result of increasing the isolation of the main character and, concomitantly, that of the reader. Blackwood has an insidious way of increasing the horror of his stories by what he does not show. It is, he seems to be saying, that which we imagine for ourselves which really terrifies us. Even in his longer stories, he rarely reveals the true nature of the horror, opting for more indirect ways of exposing the dreadfulness of the situation. Of course, one might argue that these obfuscatory practices conceal the fact that Blackwood himself does not know what the true nature of the horror is. Perhaps it serves to conceal a confusion of the subject-matter on Blackwood’s part. I would argue against this, although it is probably true that Blackwood sometimes does not describe the horror because it is inherently indescribable. Whether this is obfuscation, I leave up to other readers to decide.

What I can say, is that I really enjoyed this selection of Blackwood’s tales. As always, S.T. Joshi, the editor of the collection and many other Penguin collections of weird tales, has done a wonderful job with his introduction and notes. This is one for the connoisseur of the speculative genre.

112baswood
Dic 5, 2011, 1:44 pm

Excellent review Dewald, I have only read Blackwood's stories in other collections. I will definitely look into a collection of his own short stories.

113StevenTX
Dic 5, 2011, 3:51 pm

Most interesting and enticing. I'm not at all familiar with this author, but I see that many of his early stories are available as free ebooks.

114Jargoneer
Dic 8, 2011, 4:47 am

>111 dmsteyn: - I picked up an anthology of his contemporary, Arthur Machen, from the library a couple of days ago. Haven't started the stories but have read the introduction by Ramsey Campbell. It contains this interesting bit about the changing nature of horror stories:
David Aylward, twenty years ago noted, "Writers, who used to strive for awe and achieve fear, now strive for fear and achieve only disgust."
To which Campbell adds:
Alas they have been superseded by a generation of writers who compete for mere disgust.
I think Blackwood definitely belongs to that era of writer which was striving for awe, that there are forces, and things, beyond our imagining.

115dmsteyn
Dic 18, 2011, 10:13 am

59. One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty

I came to this short book through a friend of my mother’s, who, knowing that I am interested in writing, thought that I might enjoy a peek into the creative maturing of one of her favourite writers. And enjoy it I did, despite not having read any of Welty’s novels or short stories. The book had its origins in three lectures to inaugurate the William E. Massey lecture series in 1983 at Harvard, which explains its length. It is a bit of a non-fictional Künstlerroman, with its focus on how Welty’s childhood and her family influenced the development of her creative writing. It is very well-written, which one would expect, but it is also quite touching – Welty’s evocations of her family’s day-to-day life in early twentieth-century America are poignant and deeply felt, with a touch of sadness that never drops into sentimentality. Growing up in the South (Jackson, Mississippi, to be precise) had a large influence on Welty, but the memoir is more concerned with the personal aspects of family life than public affairs. For instance, Welty mentions the furore caused by Faulkner’s Sanctuary only in passing (in fact, she does not even mention Faulkner’s name), and she says little about racial tensions, that other elephant in the room. I had little trouble with this, as the scope of the book is so personal, with little room for extraneous detail.

Because of this focus on family and personal experiences, the book can seem a bit parochial, but this is a minor caveat. I also found Welty’s densely-knotted family relations somewhat confusing at times. Not because the different people she remembers are not all memorable characters in their own right; I would just like a family tree at the beginning of the book. What I really did enjoy is Welty’s recounting of her and her family’s reading habits. Her mother seems to have been the main influence on Welty’s reading: she once ran into a burning house to save her complete collection of Dickens. And, despite her father’s disdain for fiction (because, unlike fact, it was not ‘true’) he did not stand in Welty’s way of becoming a writer. Unfortunately, he died before she became published, which leads to a sense of regret throughout the book.

Welty’s development as an author is reflected in the titles of the book’s segments: ‘Listening’, ‘Learning to See’, and ‘Finding a Voice’, and is given concrete form through her reflections on events in her young life. How she managed to remember so much in her seventies is beyond me, but it led to a wonderful little book, which I read in two sittings. I think anyone can find something resonant in it, but the book is especially insightful for those bitten by the bugs of reading and writing.

116baswood
Dic 18, 2011, 5:40 pm

Excellent review of One Writer's beginnings. I have not read any Eudora Welty, but I love her photographs.

117Poquette
Dic 18, 2011, 6:34 pm

Hi Dewald,

I have fallen woefully behind in your thread, but am now catching up.

Crowley's Little, Big is probably ancient history for you by now, but I enjoyed your review. After reading his Aegypt (later renamed The Solitudes), I am quite taken with Crowley's writing. You seem to confirm what others have said about Little Big, but I will probably continue with the Aegypt tetralogy before I get to it because Aegypt is more up my street. It even surprised me how much so. Have you read it?

I would love to try Algernon Blackwood, but I have a deep aversion to horror and so Sorceries and Other Weird Stories probably won't fit the bill for me, but I enjoyed your review nonetheless.

You have pretty much convinced me to add One Writer's Beginnings to my want list. I always enjoy books of this sort.

118dmsteyn
Dic 24, 2011, 7:51 am

>116 baswood: Thanks Barry. I haven't seen many of her photographs, but you've piqued my interest.

>117 Poquette: Suzanne, I haven't read any of Crowley's other works, but I certainly will in the future. Thanks for dropping by, and for all the interesting comments!

119dmsteyn
Dic 24, 2011, 8:09 am

60. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

A highly readable account on how language is an inherent characteristic of the human species, which I found a bit unpleasant to read at times. Pinker is such a good writer that I feel a little inadequate in responding to his book, but that aside, I thought it was an erudite book on a complex topic, like all Pinker’s books. It is also a bit controversial, as Pinker skewers many a layman’s misguided ideas about language, its origins, and its uniqueness to humanity. And not only a layman’s ideas; Pinker takes everyone from the social scientists to what he calls the ‘language mavens’ (editors and other arbiters of prescriptive grammar) to task for promulgating false ideas about language. I found Pinker’s more polemical chapters a bit uncongenial, mostly because they attack some of my own subconscious ideas about language. I didn’t realise that I felt as strongly about prescriptive grammar until Pinker attacked it and its proponents. I don’t mind Pinker’s attacks on some of the more archaic rules of grammar (such as split infinitives and ending sentences on prepositions, and so forth) but I did find his fulminating a bit tiresome at times, especially when he sets up some straw men that he can easily knockdown. A quibble, really, but still.

Pinker is on much firmer, and to me more interesting, ground when he explains the psychological and evolutionary origins of language. This is simply brilliant and lucid exposition, and I enjoyed it immeasurably. Pinker’s explanation of how language evolves in children, and how this seems to argue for a ‘language instinct’ in humans (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar) is masterful. I also enjoyed his withering refutations of the assertions of those primatologists who claim to have taught chimpanzees sign language, and the more absurd claims of some anthropologists (such as the infamous ‘100 different words for snow’ claimed for the Eskimos).

My one problem with the book is that it came out in 1994, so how up to date it is, in an ever-changing field, is problematic. I wish Pinker would update the book, but maybe he’s too busy writing books about the decline in violence (The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I intend to read next year), and whatnot.

Highly recommended, but not one to swallow hook, line, and sinker.

120dchaikin
Dic 24, 2011, 8:57 am

I've been slowly catching up these thoughtful reviews, great stuff. Pinker's book sounds fascinating.

121baswood
Dic 24, 2011, 2:39 pm

I agree with Dan, the pinker book I think will 'speak to me' on language issues.

122dmsteyn
Ene 2, 2012, 1:26 pm

Thanks to everyone who responded, or even lurked, on my page!

My 2012 reading is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/129734