What did you read last month?

[nrh]

septmeber -
authority, jeff vandermeer
acceptance, jeff vandermeer
heir of sea and fire, patricia mckillip
harpist in the wind, patricia mckillip
to each his own, leonardo sciasia
the good apprentice, iris murdoch
dinner at deviant's palace, tim powers
shadow of the wolf, robert holdstock
the bull chief, robert holdstock
the horned warrior, robert holdstock

[Holymanm]

The Princesse de Clèves (Madame de Lafayette, 1678) - 1/5

[kanafani]

By Night in Chile (Roberto Bolaño)
Senselessness (Horacio Castellanos Moya)
Troubles (J.G. Farrell)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Tishomingo Blues (Elmore Leonard)
No Tomorrow (Vivant Denon)
Austerity (Mark Blyth)

Locas (Jaime Hernández)
Corto Maltese: La jeunesse (Hugo Pratt)
Corto Maltese: La ballade de la mer salée (Hugo Pratt)
Corto Maltese: Sous le signe du Capricorne (Hugo Pratt)
Ping Pong Omnibus, Vol. 1 (Taiyo Matsumoto)
Hellboy, Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction (Mike Mignola)
Hellboy, Vol. 2: Wake the Devil (Mike Mignola)

[brian d]

what did you think of senselessness? that's one of my favorites. for whatever reason i can't get much into bolaño, though. i think the skating rink was the only one i liked very much of the three i've read.


black thunder (arna bontemps) ****
the left hand of darkness (ursula k le guin) ***
agamemnon (aeschylus) [reread] *****
the libation bearers (aeschylus) [reread] *****
the eumenides (aeschylus) [reread] *****
the woodlanders (thomas hardy) [reread] ****
terzetto spezzato/the broken triangle (italo svevo) **

[nrh]

inspector cadaver, georges simenon
no room in the morgue, jean patrick manchette
the way out, ricardo piglia
the wealdwife's tale, paul hazel
lock no. 1, georges simenon
the final programme, michael moorcock
the cure for cancer, michael moorcock

[Holymanm]

Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl, 1946) - 4/5
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (Cho Nam-Joo, 2016) - 3.5/5
Maurice (E.M. Forster, 1914?) - 3.5/5
A Room with a View (E.M. Forster, 1908) - 3.5/5
I Have My Mother's Eyes: A Holocaust Story Across Generations (Barbara Ruth Bluman, 2009) - 3.5/5
Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling, 1902) - 3.5/5

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Haruki Murakami, 2006) - 2.5/5
City of Glass (Paul Auster, 1985) - 2.5/5

The Locked Room (Paul Auster, 1986) - 1.5/5
Ghosts (Paul Auster, 1986) - 1/5

[kanafani]

what did you think of senselessness? that's one of my favorites. for whatever reason i can't get much into bolaño, though. i think the skating rink was the only one i liked very much of the three i've read.

senselessness was wonderful! Hilarious and terrifying at the same time, an unusual mix. The mix of the narrator's stream-of-consciousness with short eyewitness indigenous testimonies works very well. I haven't read anything else from Moya. I'll surely read more soon.

By Night in Chile is the first Bolaño I've read. I also liked it a lot. Kind of a relentless tour de force. Nazi literature in the Americas is on its way from the library. Not sure if it is the best choice for what to read next by him, but I did not feel up to 1,000+ pages of 2666 at this point.

[mesnalty]

I'm also a big fan of Senselessness - the only other Castellanos Moya I've read is La Diabla en el Espejo (only available in Spanish when I read it, but I think it's available in translation now), which is not quite at the same level but still very good.

[brian d]

yeah i taught la diabla en el espejo once in translation. didn't seem to appeal much to the kids, but it worked alright. dance with serpents is also translated and i like that one more, but i also like slightly bonkers novels so that might not work for everyone.

[wba]

September 2020

Sylvie. Souvenirs du Valois “Sylvie. Erinnerungen ans Valois“ [translated by Burkhart Kroeber] (Gerard de Nerval / 1853 / France / French / German) - 7/10 ♥
La bruma, tra una parola e l‘altra “Der Nebel zwischen den Wörtern“ [revised version / translated by Burkhart Kroeber] (Umberto Eco / 1999, ?? / Italy / Italian / German) - 5.5/10
Kalevipoeg (Wilhelm Lehmann / 1947 / Germany / German / German) - 7/10 ♥
Klopstocks 150. Todestag am 14. März 1953 (Hans Henny Jahnn / 1953 / West Germany / German / German) - 7/10 ♥
Il bosco degli animali “Der Wald der Tiere“ [translated by Oswalt von Nostitz] (Italo Calvino / 1948 / Italy / Italian / German) - 6.5/10
Rolando, obiettore di coscienza “Rolando, der Kriegsdienstverweigerer“ [translated by Frauke Funcke] (Giovanna Zangrandi / 19?? / Italy / Italian / German) - 6/10
Vozvraščenie Mjunchgauzena “Münchhausens Rückkehr“ [translated by Dorothea Trottenberg] (Sigismund Krzyzanowski / 1928 / Soviet Union / Russian / German) - 6/10
Egy gazdátlan csónak története “Die Geschichte eines herrenlosen Bootes“ [translated by Vera Thies] (Ferenc Molnar / 1901 / Austria-Hungary [Budapest] / Hungarian / German) - 7/10 ♥
Heinrich von Afterdingen {fragment] (Novalis / 1799/1800 / Kurfürstentum Sachsen [“Germany“] / German / German) - 7/10 ♥
Altató mese “Schlummermärchen“ [translated by Vera Thies] (Ferenc Molnar / 1908 / Austria-Hungary [Budapest] / Hungarian / German) - 6.5/10
Széntolvajok “Kohlendiebe“ [translated by Vera Thies] (Ferenc Molnar / 1908 / Austria-Hungary [Budapest] / Hungarian / German) - 6/10
Postřižiny “Das Haaropfer“ [translated by Karl-Heinz Jähn] (Bohumil Hrabal / 1976 / Czechoslovakia / Czech / German) - 7/10 ♥
Domen (Josip Jurčič / 1864 / Austrian Empire [Celovec/Klagenfurt] / Slovene / Slovene) - 7/10 ♥
Moreno [translated by Judith Klein] (Brina Svit / 2003 / France / French / German) - 6/10
Karl und Anna (Leonhard Frank / 1926 / Germany / German / German) - 6/10
Hunnenblut (Wilhelm Jensen / 1892 / Germany / German / German) - 7/10

[nrh]

the english assassin, michael moorcock
occupation journal, jean giono
falling angel, willia hjortsberg
maigret's holiday, georges simenon

[kanafani]

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (C.L.R. James)
History of the Conquest of Mexico (William H. Prescott)
Family of Secrets (Russ Baker)
Ways of Seeing (John Berger)

Lolly Willowes (Sylvia Townsend Warner)
Nazi Literature in the Americas (Roberto Bolaño)
Ripley Under Ground (Patricia Highsmith)
The Blithedale Romance (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Corto, toujours un peu plus loin (Hugo Pratt)
Corto Maltese: Les Celtiques (Hugo Pratt)
Hellboy, Vol. 3: The Chained Coffin and Others (Mike Mignola)
Hellboy, Vol. 4: The Right Hand of Doom (Mike Mignola)
The Red Sea Sharks (Herge)
Explorers on the Moon (Herge)

[brian d]

the remains of the day (kazuo ishiguro) ****
the sellout (paul beatty) ****
england made me (graham greene) ***
the lifted veil (george eliot) ***
brother jacob (george eliot) **

paltry month, close to done with a thomas hardy though.

[Holymanm]

The Hustler (Walter Tevis, 1959) - 3.5/5
Set the Boy Free: The Autobiography (Johnny Marr, 2016) - 3/5

[wba]

October 2020

La nuit du carrefour “Maigrets Nacht an der Kreuzung“ [translated by Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau, Bärbel Brands] (Georges Simenon / 1931 / France / French / German) - 6.5/10
Junge Bürokraft übernimmt auch andere Arbeit... (Lili Grün / 1937 / Austria / German / German) - 6.5/10
Maigret a peur “Maigret hat Angst“ [translated by Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau] (Georges Simenon / 1953 / France / French / German) - 6/10
Die verschwundene Miniatur (Erich Kästner / 1935 / Switzerland / German / German) - 6.5/10
Celle qui n'était plus “Tote sollten schweigen“ [translated by Justus Franz Wittkopp] (Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac / 1952 / France / French / German) - 6/10
Aus der „vergessenen Zeil’“ (Wilhelm Jensen / 1893 / Germany / German / German) - 7/10 ♥
De to Baronesser “Die beiden Baroninnen“ [translated by Erik Gloßmann] (Hans Christian Andersen / 1848 / Denmark / Danish / German) - 7/10
Ling shan “Der Berg der Seele“ [translated by Helmut Forster-Latsch, Marie-Luise Latsch, Gisela Schneckmann] (Xingjian Gao / 1990 / Taiwan / Mandarin [Chinese] / German) - 7/10 ♥
Pietr-le-Letton “Maigret und Pietr der Lette“ [translated by Wolfram Schäfer] (Georges Simenon / 1931 / France / French / German) - 6.5/10
La Comtesse de Cagliostro “Die Gräfin Cagliostro oder die Jugend des Arsène Lupin“ [translated by Erika Gebühr, Nadine Lipp] (Maurice Leblanc / 1924 / France / French / German) - 6/10

[wba]

November 2020

How long have I been sitting here waiting for you, love (Silvia Szymanski / 1999 / Germany / German / German) - 6.5/10
Le silence de la mer “Das Schweigen des Meeres“ [translated by Kurt Stern, Werner DeHaas] (Vercors / 1942 / France / French / German) - 7/10 ♥
La robe prétexte “Das Gewand des Jünglings“ [translated by Elisabeth Serelman-Küchler] (Francois Mauriac / 1914 / France / French / German) - 7/10
Kein Sex mit Mike (Silvia Szymanski / 1999 / Germany / German / German) - 6.5/10
Sommerglæder “Sommerfreuden“ [translated by Walter Boehlich] (Herman Bang / 1902 / Denmark / Danish / German) - 7/10 ♥
In za Miso Sūpu “In der Misosuppe“ [translated by Ursula Gräfe] (Ryū Murakami / 1997 / Japan / Japanese / German) - 7/10 ♥
Lost Horizon (James Hilton / 1933 / UK / English / English) - 6.5/10
Inverted World (Christopher Priest / 1974 / UK / English / English) - 6.5/10
Erinnerung an M. A. von Thümmel (Wilhelm Lehmann / 1947 / Germany / German / German) - 6.5/10
Novalis (Winfried Freund / 2001 / Germany / German / German) - 6/10
Il fu Mattia Pascal “Mattia Pascal“ [translated by Sabine Schneider] (Luigi Pirandello / 1904 / Italy / Italian / German) - 6.5/10
Paren' iz preispodney “Der Junge aus der Hölle“ [translated by Erika Pietraß] (Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky / 1974 / Soviet Union / Russian / German) - 6.5/10
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick / 1968 / USA / English / English) - 6/10
Beyaz kale “Die weiße Festung“ [translated by Ingrid Iren] (Orhan Pamuk / 1985 / Turkey / Turkish / German) - 6/10

[kanafani]

Pietr the Latvian (Georges Simenon) 2.75/5 - One of the least enjoyable Maigrets I've read. It gets bogged down with a convoluted plot and too much pop psychology.

Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (Horacio Castellanos Moya) 4/5- A hilarious rant - Sadly enough I found it quite relatable.

The Kingdom of This World (Alejo Carpentier) 3/5 - I have issues with magic realism

The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (Georges Simenon) 3.5/5 - Better than Pietr

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk) 3.5/5 - It's fine, but Nobel, really? Maybe she has better books.

Compass ( Mathias Énard) 4/5 - Thanks Sally for the recommendation! Just overwhelming erudition. I enjoyed the excursions through Syria and Iran. It does get exhausting occasionally, but it is quite impressive. Shades of W.G. Sebald, though I think I like Sebald more.

Working (Studs Terkel) 5/5 - Very moving. One of the best books of the year for me.

The Bhagavad Gita - Spirituality is not my thing... I wish they just fought that damn war instead of shooting the breeze.

Frogs (Aristophanes) 4/5 - 2,500 years old and still very funny.

The Secret of the Unicorn (Herge)
The Calculus Affair (Herge)
Land of Black Gold (Herge)

Berserk Vols 1->4 (Kentaro Miura) - I don't think I'll continue reading this. Always going 100 MPH, never letting up.

Corto Maltese: Les Ethiopiques (Hugo Pratt)

[nrh]

the condition of muzak, michael moorcock
the absent city, ricardo piglia
maigret's first case, georges simenon
lavondys, robert holdstock
the sunken land begins to rise again, m john harrison
the inugami curse, seishi yokomizo

[Roscoe]

Finished off THE ILIAD 6.5/10
Read WHAT'S SO FUNNY by Donald E. Westlake 6/10
Started SEIOBO THERE BELOW by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, looking good so far.

[brian d]

The Kingdom of This World (Alejo Carpentier) 3/5 - I have issues with magic realism

but it predates magical realism by two decades, it's marvelous realism (ok I'm done, I have plenty of issues with magical realism too but this one's its own genre for me)

light month:
tess of the d'urbervilles (thomas hardy) [reread] *****
thérèse raquin (émile zola) ****
an outcast of the islands (joseph conrad) **
fame (daniel kehlmann) ***

realized i'd much rather read graham greene than joseph conrad no matter what it's about. kept wishing greene had written outcast of the islands, but he kinda has under a few different titles. not sure how conrad is really viewed anymore. i'm sure there's plenty of talk about him being problematic for a lot of reasons, but i don't know if anyone really works that much with him now. or maybe they do. tess was better than i remembered, though it had been over 20 years so no shock. the zola was great but really started to overstay its welcome. definitely should dive into more zola.

[wba]

Pietr the Latvian (Georges Simenon) 2.75/5 - One of the least enjoyable Maigrets I've read. It gets bogged down with a convoluted plot and too much pop psychology.

ha, that's probably one of my favorite Maigrets I've read, maybe even my no.1 (I rated it 6.5/10 last(?) month), cause it's more playful than most of the others (later ones) I've read - much 'pulpier' and less 'mundane bourgeois kitchen sink psychology' - and combined with the different social classes and ethnic backgrounds of the character(s) creates an intriguing kaleidoscope of (French/European) society's psyche. The only thing that sucks about early Maigret is people talking and talking at the end of each novel and spelling out the stuff and explaining it (in a far cheaper and less interesting way than it actually happened! - maybe Simenon's commentary on people not realizing how twisted they actually are (including Maigret himself) and trying to rationalize even the most bizarre things? ...), while especially the endings of most later Maigrets (generally more uninteresting and mostly dealing with middle-class banality of city people) are brilliant. I would have loved to have had the best of both worlds, but, alas...
I mean the "psychology" rarely works in Maigret novels (beside that of Maigret himself, which gets pretty brilliant in later novels, and which is completely uninteresting in "Pietr") and I think one can clearly feel that Simenon was progressively less interested in writing the Maigret stuff at all - while in the early ones from the late 20s/early 30s he was still totally into it (he must have had so much fun while writing "Pietr"!!). If you want interesting characters and great psychology and insights into the human psyche of very different people and how people construct their identities, you get all that in his many non-Maigret novels. I think I also liked it very much that all of his Simenons (later) obsessions were already part of "Pietr", but a bit 'hidden' behind all that 'criminal' surface action, and that Simenon was playing with all the kafkaesque people, moments and situations while not taking the bleak and straightforward look he adopts in his non-Maigrets. Imagine "Pietr" being told from the point of view of Pietr as a 'roman dur' without the comissaire, the investigation and all that... Boy, that would have been one of the bleakest books ever, even compared to the bleakest Simenon.

[nrh]

i remember the prose of the english translation of pietr to be weirdly turgid and messy, to the point where i sometimes found it hard to follow sentence for sentence. not sure if it's translation issues or just a very young simenon (the next two books also have some writing issues, and different translators, but not quite as bad). i generally think of the series getting very good with the book right after hanged man, a man's head (which has a terrific duvivier adaptation), with maigret facing off against a kind of dime store raskolnikov.

the one i read this month, maigret's first case from '48, is a genuinely odd one. simenon goes back to young maigret, still an assistant, being asked to investigate a potential crime involving a wealthy family. because maigret is a very junior officer he is unable to get almost any access to the family in question, and so the heart of the case (an extremely boring middle class family thing involving inheritance and a dissipated count) happens more or less off-screen, as we watch a kind of maigret begins scenario where he bumbles around his investigation and simenon the author keeps pointing out all his famous tics falling into place. the effect is oddly to make the maigret character seem less interesting, more just a jumble of tics than a character, than he is in any of the other books i've read.

but then the one i read before that, maigret's holiday, is great - it's still late simenon in style, so he's much less interested in texture than the earlier books, the world he's describing is drawn in very broad strokes, but the whole thing starts with madame maigret getting appendicitis on vacation and until the mystery starts maigret is just wandering around this seaside town getting impossibly drunk by the afternoon with nothing else to do, he's out of his jurisdiction, and the positioning of maigret as a kind of force that moves between the social classes of the milieu is very effective.

[wba]

i remember the prose of the english translation of pietr to be weirdly turgid and messy, to the point where i sometimes found it hard to follow sentence for sentence. not sure if it's translation issues or just a very young simenon (the next two books also have some writing issues, and different translators, but not quite as bad). i generally think of the series getting very good with the book right after hanged man, a man's head (which has a terrific duvivier adaptation), with maigret facing off against a kind of dime store raskolnikov.


but then the one i read before that, maigret's holiday, is great - it's still late simenon in style, so he's much less interested in texture than the earlier books, the world he's describing is drawn in very broad strokes, but the whole thing starts with madame maigret getting appendicitis on vacation and until the mystery starts maigret is just wandering around this seaside town getting impossibly drunk by the afternoon with nothing else to do, he's out of his jurisdiction, and the positioning of maigret as a kind of force that moves between the social classes of the milieu is very effective.

I've only read German translations of Simenon so far, and they were all pretty good. Nothing hard to follow in what is going on at all (which also some other reviewers of english language editions of "Pietr" have pointed out), so I'm pretty sure this must be a translation issue. Too bad, as I honestly think this is one of his best (and best written) Maigret stories. Of course here in Germany Simenon has also had different translators over the years - currently there is a Swiss company with many newly translated editions, as they are supposedly working on publishing everything Simenon ever published (and some more) in the German language (which would mean a lot more than the 100+ Maigret novels/stories and the 100+ romans durs) - and there has been a lot of discussion about the "right way" of translating Simenon. Generally, all of the German language translations I have read have been very good, though.

Ha, that Holiday one! In Germany it's called "Magrait on Vacation" and I also enjoyed his wanderings and his helplessness when left without his wife very much.

So far, I'd say that I probably like the early 1930s Maigrets the most, with roughly his post 1950 Maigret stuff being the worst. But I've read only one really disappointing Maigret novel, which was the 75th and the last which Simenon wrote.

PS: The romans durs on the other hand are good at any time (be it early 30s or during the 60s), but while I love some, I am very indifferent to others. I think this depends mostly on the identification with the main protagonist in my case, as I have the feeling that Simenon dons a different disguise each time and then just runs with it, so sometimes (if the psychology of a character is completely alien to me) I have a hard time "feeling" the many bleak moments and not seeing the descent into the abyss as completely inevitable or consequent as say in a work by Kafka or Woolrich. So some novels were a disappointment in the sense that I didn't find the key to the character's psyche and was thus left out, being reduced to a 'mere' observer (e.g. The Blue Room (1964), The Watchmaker of Everton (1954), The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938)) while the most effective make me feel physically sick and sweat and tremble with fear and paranoia (The Man from London (1934), The Truth About Bébé Donge (1943) and to some extent Red Lights (1953) and The Mahé Circle (1946)) and I get a feel of a similar immersion in the character as Simenon must have felt it (though of course much lesser in intensity). Somehow this "shamanist" metamorphosis seems to me to be at the center of most of his romans durs (while being completely absent in his Maigret novels - and to me it seems Simenon never in any way identifies much with Maigret either) and if it isn't 'transferred' onto me as a reader, I'm left disappointed. I know that's a bit of a weird approach to literature, but this has been the case with Simenon and me so far, ever since I've first read one of his romans durs...

[Holymanm]

The Bhagavad Gita - Spirituality is not my thing... I wish they just fought that damn war instead of shooting the breeze.

I was severely unimpressed by this, as holy books go... aside from the incredibly bad justification of war (God(s) tell(s) you to), it just wasn't exactly, umm, literate or interesting. Maybe it was the translation...

Much more fascinating is the Popol Vuh

[Jürka]

Certain passages of "The Hasheesh Eater" (1857) by Fitz Hugh Ludlow have a similar tone like certain passages of "Bhagavad-gita" (descriptions of the universal form, with its thousands of heads and hands). Not sure if Fitz Hugh Ludlow read Bhagavad-gita before writing The Hasheesh Eater, or Vyasadeva smoked hasheesh prior to writing Bhagavad-gita?! A few days ago, i bought in a second-hand bookshop the first volume (published in two volumes in my tongue) of "Ginza" (Treasure), the (gnostic) holy scripture of Mandaeism. It is probably just a translation of 18 books of Right Ginza and 3 books of Left Ginza are omitted (seems like). What drugs inspired Ginza i can't tell yet, cuz i just started to read it.

[Jürka]

In my perception, the justification for taking part in the war in Bhagavad-gita is similar to a situation when a film director is trying to convince an actor to "kill" his fellow actors in making of the war movie. If your role as a killer was scripted by the Supreme, then you don't bear consequences. But if your act of killing is your (unscripted) improvisation then you will get fired (will go to hell). Thus the message of Bhagavad-gita is: 1/ life is a scripted genre movie, 2/ realize your role and follow the script prescribed to your role (in conformity with the genre). Bhagavad-gita is a bit too much in the Hollywood spirit.

[nrh]

The Bhagavad Gita - Spirituality is not my thing... I wish they just fought that damn war instead of shooting the breeze.

this is a smaller section of the mahabaratha where they don't fight the war, this is the sub section in which arjuna is going through some shit. like if you were doing a 300 page prose version of the mahabaratha this would be just one (very pivotal) chapter.

[kanafani]

The Bhagavad Gita - Spirituality is not my thing... I wish they just fought that damn war instead of shooting the breeze.

this is a smaller section of the mahabaratha where they don't fight the war, this is the sub section in which arjuna is going through some shit. like if you were doing a 300 page prose version of the mahabaratha this would be just one (very pivotal) chapter.

Yep, I was kind of aware of that, but did not feel up to engaging with the whole mahabaratha immediately.

[Jürka]

Despite the whole Bhagavad-gita Krsna is directing Arjuna as the war hero, His main preoccupation and His favorite genre is clearly melodrama (bucolic pastimes with the cowherd girls specifically). I believe ultimately Krsna might even take interest in melodramas by R. W. Fassbinder if He would descend into our times.

[Holymanm]

None finished in December... but I am officially "taking" 100 books in 2021 0__0