what are you reading?

[sally]

oh i was really intrigued by that one, enough to put it on my wishlist....have read a couple of other gides, many many years ago and was pretty meh, but this one sounds so different that i'm wondering if i just didn't pick up on the subtlety of those i read or if this mega-meta one is highly anomalous...

[sally]

the only book i have to hand that is from 1946 is boris vian's i spit on your graves, so will be reading that next.

[sally]

LEM!

[Monsieur Arkadin]

How was the Vian? I'm interested in the movie version that apparently killed him, thanks to James Baldwin's really provocative analysis. But the book itself seems interesting.

[sally]

How was the Vian? I'm interested in the movie version that apparently killed him, thanks to James Baldwin's really provocative analysis. But the book itself seems interesting.

urk! i didn't make more than 20 pages in, hated it. turns out i had zero patience for staying with the affectation of trashy writing long enough to see if he did anything interesting with it...i read heartsnatcher from him and liked it, but that was totally different.

[sally]

haven't cracked open a twisted spoon in a while....

farewells to plasma - natasza goerke

[sally]

i have come to the conclusion that i have only two modes of living - thomas bernhard & robert walser (not counting the chaotic interruptions of unica zürn or ingeborg bachmann, which are the death modes) & that this can be complicated by inhabiting bernhard thru walser.....or walser via bernhard - such is today!

[karl]

and

[sally]

finally starting this!



but delighted that i even have an appropriate bookmark to read it with

[ole dole doff]

read today in one of the Walser's "microscripts" a reference to "Die Herrin der Welt"
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mistress_of_the_World
thus, making this note for my own reference — so, i can find it here (once) and (eventually) watch the series.

[sally]

i think your microscripts are different to my microscripts!!!!! what was the context? was walser watching this himself? unless i did actually also read it, but the act of reading walser has the property that it makes you forget everything outside in the world, even cinema, and that once you leave walser (and for instance enter the realm of laxness) all of walser is too small and contained in the act of only reading walser to exist outside of it in the later memory.

[ole dole doff]

my local "microscripts" edition (based on 2011 Suhrkamp edition) has at the end "commentaries" that provide all kinds of related trivia.
and in the commentary to a microscript called "Sám tančit jsem si zapověděl" (i forbid myself to dance alone) it is said...
"Zmínka o "vládkyni světa" se pravděpodobně vztahuje k filmu Herrin der Welt z roku 1919."
("The mention of the 'ruler of the world' probably refers to the Herrin der Welt film of 1919.")

the long sentence in the aforementioned microscript (with the aforementioned reference) starts...
Tanec probíhal podle programu a skutečnost, že tomu tak bylo, mi dovolovala myslet jak na vládkyni světa, jejíž zobrazení vztahující se k jakési knize, kteréžto titulní strany byla ozdobou, jsem někde někdy jen krátce zahlédl, ...
(The dance took place according to the program and the fact that this was the case allowed me to think of the ruler of the world, whose depiction related to a book, whose title page was decorated by her image, I saw only briefly sometimes somewhere, ...)
((mildly edited google translations))

[sally]

this dude! (well not quite, given that this is an ACTOR and arbes was dead in 1921)

[ole dole doff]

It is often referred to as the first Czech science fiction.

[wba]

Leviathan (1929) by Julien Green.
It rocks!

[sally]

starting on my (one) uruguay reading! (the onetti is currently outside budget)

[sally]

i may be going through an impossible movie phase but at least i'm trying to participate

the kleist for the 1984 kleist movie (tho not an adaptation of, i don't own that)

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

After a long hiatus, I've started reading film books again. I reread The New Cinephilia by Girish Shambu a week or so ago: still a diverting pamphlet, though it didn't do as much for me this time. I should finish Bordwell's The Rhapsodes today. Enjoyably written and intellectually substantive study of Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler.

[wba]

Currently reading "Die Schwimmerin" (The Swimmer) by Theodor Wolff, published in 1937 in Amsterdam.

https://assets.thalia.media/img/artikel ... 00-00.jpeg

[ole dole doff]

not reading, but listening to someone else reading (on the local Radiobook channel) the "In-House Weddings" by Bohumil Hrabal...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/872 ... e_Weddings

Inspired by “Mrs. Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoevsky, whose biographies about their husbands have now been published in Prague,” Bohumil Hrabal decided to produce his own autobiographical work, ostensibly fiction, from his wife’s point of view. He would write, he said, “not a putdown about myself, but a little bit of how it all was, that marriage of ours, with myself as a jewel and adornment of our life together.”

The task, taken up by such a rogue comic talent, could be nothing other than strangely delightful; and in In-House Weddings, the first of the trilogy that Hrabal produced, we meet the author through the eyes of his wife Eliska. She narrates his life from his upbringing in Nymburk through his work as a dispatcher in a train station and then in a scrap paper plant, his first publication, his trouble with the authorities, and his association with notable artists and authors such as Jiri Kolar, Vladimir Boudnik, and Arnost Lustig. Hrabal’s bohemian life was itself a source of great interest to the Czech public; transmuted here, it is even more compelling, a wry portrait of artistic life in postwar Eastern Europe and a telling reflection on how such a life might be recast in the light of literary brilliance.

[sally]

starting on my netherlands reading

cees nooteboom - in the dutch mountains (1984)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o86s10YyBo

[sally]

currently reading (very slowly because it's so misogynist it's almost incomprehensible) paul leppin's blaugast.

anyone else read this? it's pretty.....extreme...for 1930s? (eg masturbating onto saucers in public cafes for money) i never wanted to give an author a tender hug so badly.

on related note i thought i'd got rid of it, but i found my copy of irene's cunt not risking posting it abroad but if anyone in uk wants it, i will send....

[wba]

currently reading (very slowly because it's so misogynist it's almost incomprehensible) paul leppin's blaugast.

anyone else read this? it's pretty.....extreme...for 1930s? (eg masturbating onto saucers in public cafes for money) i never wanted to give an author a tender hug so badly.

on related note i thought i'd got rid of it, but i found my copy of irene's cunt not risking posting it abroad but if anyone in uk wants it, i will send....

I have this one sitting on my shelf (an old German language edition, that is), and was just recently wondering what it might be about. Haven't read it yet.
You make it sound way more interesting, than I would or could have guessed, I guess.

I just thought this was kinda some novel about Prague, from the turn of the century 1900s/1910s, before WWI, from one of those many Prague authors writing in German (e.g. Kafka et all). That's why I bought it.

[wba]

On another note, I just finished Thomas Hardy's THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE (1878) today, and though it started out great (especially the first 30 or so pages about the heath and the many people we don't know yet as individuals were magnificent), it unfortunately swiftly declined into middlebrow soap opera after about one third of its length and nothing much else other than that (extremely boring people having extremely boring "psychological" problems, with a huge mixture of "fate" thrown in for good measure) was going on till the end.

This was my first Hardy, so I just wanted to ask if most of his books are about people suffering in this "realist/fatalist/naturalist" manner or if there is also something else in his writing to recommend (as I said, the world building and nature writing and stuff, before the novel focused on the individual characters was superb)? I have a volume of four more novels of his at home, but am currently not sure with which to proceed, if at all...

[brian d]

if you don't like melodrama then you wouldn't like any thomas hardy. if you want bucolic descriptions of nature then under the greenwood tree or far from the madding crowd might have at least some scenes of interest. as far as what he does have to offer, it's a lot of people doing things that aren't always immediately understandable, no one really all good or all bad, mostly just people being like people are. and yeah plenty of suffering (except for under the greenwood tree). but he's solidly in the realist-melodrama side of things, growing out of the sensation novel. (though i wonder if two on a tower or a laodicean might be possibilities. but like i said, if you don't want melodrama, then i can't recommend anything by him very highly to you.) that said, i love thomas hardy.

i read blaugast several years ago and it looks like i liked it, but i don't remember it very well... i have too many books that i need to read again...

[wba]

if you don't like melodrama then you wouldn't like any thomas hardy. if you want bucolic descriptions of nature then under the greenwood tree or far from the madding crowd might have at least some scenes of interest. as far as what he does have to offer, it's a lot of people doing things that aren't always immediately understandable, no one really all good or all bad, mostly just people being like people are. and yeah plenty of suffering (except for under the greenwood tree). but he's solidly in the realist-melodrama side of things, growing out of the sensation novel. (though i wonder if two on a tower or a laodicean might be possibilities. but like i said, if you don't want melodrama, then i can't recommend anything by him very highly to you.) that said, i love thomas hardy.

i read blaugast several years ago and it looks like i liked it, but i don't remember it very well... i have too many books that i need to read again...

Thank you very much for your reply brian! ♥

I LOVE melodrama - but not "realist" melodrama, which tends to be "mere" drama without the melodramatics (at least in my opinion). For my likes there was way way way too little melodrama in THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE. Thus I found the Shakespeare comparison from some scholars not really fitting. Shakespeare does melodrama, and there's not much "realism" in Shakespeare (if at all). But yes, Hardy creates fully fleshed out characters with a few lines of dialogue, which is just like Shakespeare does. And the small side characters are all wonderfully realized and are very interesting and extremely reminiscent of what Shakespeare did. But enough about Shakespeare. ^^
I don't know about bucolic, but when he writes about nature, Hardy is excellent.
As for "people doing things that aren't always immediately understandable"- I do love that and I would have loved any of that in THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE. Unfortunately all of the main protagonists (of which there are 5 or 6) do completely understandable and predictable stuff all of the time from the very beginning till the very end - so much so, that I could have written the whole "psychological" aspect of the story myself as it plays out till the end (it's "psychology 101 really...). It's all "by the numbers" and nothing but. Nobody NEVER does anything slightly unpredictable. Never. ^^
It wouldn't be so bad, if any of the protagonists had anything interesting about them, but they were so utterly bland - "mostly just being people like people are", as you say. That doesn't make for a satisfying reading for me. And combined with all that "fate"-stuff Hardy mixes into his tale... If he would have refrained from doing that and been "merely" in the realist mode, I might have loved that as well. Ordinary people doing ordinary things - I usually enjoy reading about that as well (books or films where ostensibly "nothing happens"). He did that in the first 50 pages or so, which were excellent. But then the plot mechanics begin (which are extremely badly constructed), and coupled with the realist descriptions you just get that middlebrow "drama" stuff I was talking about (without the melodramatics). People were suffering a lot, yes, but that's life, that's not melodrama. Nothing exceptional ever happened to them (too much "Madame Bovary" [life as it is, without any ups or downs], too little "The Charterhouse of Parma" [life as it is, but also as it could be, with all the possibilities life has to offer at every turn as well]. They were all suffering like they were supposed to, and like it made sense for them (how they were constructed as persons and in their behaviour and psychology by Hardy). Thus the many possibilities life has to offer every day, the whole business of chance (instead of fate, with which chance has little in common), what is called nature (and not just "human nature") never comes up in the "story" of the book.
In my opinion the novel needed either much more drama or much less.

What would be more melodramatic stuff by him in your opinion?
Does he ever let go of the "realist/naturalist" mode that was fashionable back then (from 1960s t0 1910s)? Or maybe does he have more grounded, more mundane, more realist stuff, with the minutiae of daily life instead of psychological descriptions of his characters?
Also maybe some more "sensationalist" stuff?

What would be your favorite Hardy novels, by the way?

Sorry for that many questions.


PS: As I said I was totally into the book from the very first page, when the plot hadn't yet started and the characters had only done one step (and not yet the second) and Hardy's writing seemed so so so good - far too good to be wasted on mere "psychological" depicitons of people living their lives in the 1840s by adhering to that "naturalist"/realist" style that was fashionable back in the late 19th early 20th century in bestselling novels. At times he negatively reminded me of someone like Romain Rolland (though Hardy has without question a far better way with words). It's frustrating to see a writer not realizing his talents but instead adhering to plot constructions and rigorous character dynamics. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE felt to me a bit like a master writer having trouble with the mechanics of "the novel" as a literary genre, trying to adhere to conventional ideas of "craft" when he is already capable of much much more than this. So it felt a bit like the debut novel of a talented 20something writer (who doesn't yet know much about life, beside having understood how people act and think) which paradoxically reads at first like a novel by a masterly writer who has already written much in his life.

[brian d]

favorite hardy novels: far from the madding crowd, under the greenwood tree
right under those: the woodlanders, tess of the d'urbervilles, the return of the native, a pair of blue eyes, a laodicean, the trumpet-major
right under those: jude the obscure, the mayor of casterbridge, desperate remedies, two on a tower
so-so: the hand of ethelberta
bad: the well-beloved

the most sensationist novel he wrote was desperate remedies (his first novel), but you can see the influence of it in the other more or less standard hardy novels that people talk about: far from the madding crowd, the mayor of casterbridge, jude the obscure, and maybe tess of the d'urbervilles.

based on what you're looking for, maybe give a shot to under the greenwood tree (landscape is important, the stakes are small, but character drives plot more than plot driving character), far from the madding crowd (plenty of melodrama, lots of landscape, plenty of people being real people), or maybe possibly the mayor of casterbridge (i was laughing out loud at the twists and turns by the end, cause things get pretty ridiculous, and i still found it better the second time around, early last year i think, than the first time i read it way back when i was a teenager).

unfortunately i can't think of any hardy novels that immediately make me think of stendhal, though under the greenwood tree might come the closest. (and i'm getting close to picking up the charterhouse of parma again, so that should be fun.)

[wba]

Thanks a lot (and once again) brian! ♥

I'll try to get my hands on UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE. And keep a look out for DESPERATE REMEDIES and THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.

Stendhal just came to my mind as someone whose characters are also described in psychological terms but get to remain "mysteries" as well (as all people are to each other, in the end), as he lets them "breath" a bit more, lets them live more in their surroundings, I guess, with still somewhat predetermined people and plots but having that chance-stuff going on (instead of the man-made "fate is what it is" thing). Of course the "ending" (if I remember correctly, the last 30 or so pages) of THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA is truly awful, as it should have been a fleshed-out part 3 of many hundred pages (as the other two parts). Stendhal admits this, but I haven't read anywhere why he didn't write it - or simply abandon the story without those sketchy last pages. It is much much worse than the tacked-on, compromised ending of THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE which Hardy bemoans (though of course the (ending of the) novel might have been slightly better with Thomasin remaining a widow and Venn "vanishing" from the story, etc.). Other than that the Stendhal is truly splendid, doing much of the later "realist" stuff while nevertheless keeping a lot of the romanticism of French literature of the time (I'm thinking of Alexandre Dumas and a novel like GEORGES or Gerard de Nerval and his SYLVIE).

[wba]

as an aside: as I've been reading a lot of reviews of THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE online today i got the general impression that most readers found the first 50 or so pages boring, dreadful, a chore to get through, etc. and those who loved the book loved the whole story and plot stuff. One passage referring to a high school teacher got me laughing hard in particular: "I kept falling asleep at the beginning of this book. Finally I gave up. I mentioned to my friend Rich that I'd stalled out, and he quoted his high school English teacher, whose words predicted Rich's own experience of the novel: "For the first fifty pages, we would think Return of the N the worst book we had ever read and after that it would seem the best book we had ever read." So I pressed on, and sure enough, around page fifty the book grabbed me and didn't let go till I finished."

I guess I just like different stuff in my reading than the general reader who loves THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE: I want more books that are like the first 50 pages of this novel, stretched to hundreds and hundreds of more pages.
Well, you can't have it all...

I also wondered about all that mention of melodrama and melodramatic plots and illicit love affairs, and maybe it's also a cultural/temperamental thing. That for a 19th century British citizen certain stuff might be exceptonally melodramatic which for an 19th century Italian would be plain ordinary (I kept thinking of E. M. Forster and his Italian novels from the early 20th century, where Brits go vacationing in Italy and are somehow delighted, surprised and shocked by boring everyday Italian life). I wonder what happened between the times of Shakespeare and the times of Queen Victoria, to make the British so puritanical. The popular English renaissance theater of Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson et all always struck me as much more lively, magical, un-realist, melodramatic, etc. All that seems to have somehow got lost over two centuries, from the early 17th to the middle of the 19th.

[brian d]

For the most part, the human body closes up from the enlightenment and until the twentieth century. There are exceptions of course, the decadentists definitely opened things quite a bit, but even by Voltaire's time, there's a clear rejection of how Rabelais or Shakespeare depicted humans in the world. Some of Hardy shows a turn back, even if it's not as joyful as what you'd see in Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes.

And yes about the opening of Return of the Native, that's what got me hooked on Hardy from the start. I just found more to latch onto.