The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

 

To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss

 

Dombey & Son by Charles Dickens

 

Persevered and finished this massive book.

Too much to recount. A good example of its richness is the wedding of Florence and Walter, late in the book: the memorable image of Toots running in and out of the church repeatedly, as he is overcome with emotion, and peeping in a different window from outside each time, so that the congregation eagerly awaits where next he will show up.

The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams

 

Odd, compelling, disturbing book. You never know where Williams' character will go next, either physically or mentally.  A little wearying, too -- it could have gone on forever, or been half the length it was.

"For most inhabitants of modern industrialized nations," Alice said, "the principal contact with other species does take place at the dinner table."

"Their life had been their soul and had been extinguished with them."

This somewhat fit in with her more recent theory that the soul was something you acquired only after you were dead..."

Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

Got through 150 pages but then crapped out. Have already read four three enormous quite really boring novels this year (THE REVISIONARIES by The Revisionaries by A.R. Moxon, THE STAND by Stephen King, A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara, and ANT KIND by Charlie Kauffman).  I'm now officially too old to risk another.

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Began it with trepidation - thought it some sort of English Patient romantic mystery.

Which it is and isn't. Hazzard's lapidary prose takes some getting used to, but the brilliance makes wonderful effect. Reminded me of Penelope Fitzgerald, with her use of ellipsis and understatment, and delayed exposition.

Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz

 

"Autumn"

"The Sanitarium Beneath the Hourglass"

"Dodo"

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

 

Inside Story by Martin Amis

 

“After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship — marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.”

The Searcher by Tana French

 

Deep River by Karl Marlantes

Had to bail at page 385. Underwhelming and duddish, particularly in comparison to Marlantes's ferocious Matterhorn. Logging detail was fantastic if largely beyond me, union/Wobbly stuff was sorta boring. But in the end it was all the Finnish names that crushed me.

Philip Guston

A painter's first duty is to be free, unless you're the kind of artist that gnaws on one bone all the time, and I don't seem to gnaw on one bone.  - Philip Guston

San Clemente

Couple in Bed

The Painter

The Studio

The Line

To Fellini (1958)

If This Be Not I (1945)

Processed Cheese by Stephen Wright

 

This starts out promisingly, but the second half seems to lose the luster somehwat. The first half is laugh-aloud, stuffed with the consumer-crazed, imaginary commercial labels and proper nouns of society of Wright's today-at-warp-speed vision, while the second devolves into a more traditional narrative of several doomed romantic relationships and family connections, where I stopped laughing, or at least laughed more ruefully.

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall by Frank Brady

 

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

 

Via Negativa by Daniel Hornsby

 

A "retired" priest drives across the country with an injured coyote in the backseat and buys a handmade gun made out of an animal skull.  Turns out he has vengeance on his mind. Makes it sound like an action-packed thriller, but instead, it's more of a meditative journey toward spiritual peace. Good, small, deep book.

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Chilling early scene, where Bardamu is alone on scouting expedition, and goes into the town where Germans have just attacked.  Goes to house where young boy has been stabbed and killer with saber, and mother and father are kneeling by bedside where boy's body lies, and all Bardamu cares about is bartering for a bottle of wine, which he pays five francs for, which is too much, he thinks.

First third of book is more rivetting: joining the chaotic French Army for WWI, a stint in rehab/mental hospitals, a harrowing journey to Africa for a turn as a colonial shopkeeper. When he returns to France, then to the NYC/Detroit, it fell off for me somewhat. Then the final third, back in France at the mental institution, picks up again.

But what a voice! I can see how it affected the Beats and American war novelists. Cruel, particular, self-lacerating, and endlessly dissatisfied. And the novel is loaded with aphoristic paragraphs. Forget quotable sentences!

[New Directions, 1983, trans. Manheim]

p. 4 - Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles.

p. 14 - When you have no imagination, dying is small beer; when you do have an imagination, dying is too much.

p. 18 - The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That’s work enough for a lifetime.

p. 47 - Those trees are as vast and gentle and strong as dreams. But trees were something else I distrusted, ever since I'd been ambushed...Outside the kiosk the soda-water lady seemed to be slowly gathering the evening shadows around her skirt.

p. 99 - And besides, when you stop to think about it, at least a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day...

p. 99 -  On boarding the ship in Marseille, I had been nothing, just a dreamy sort of nobody, but now, thanks to the concentrated attention of all those alcoholics and frustrated vaginas, I found myself changed beyond recognition, endowed with alarming prestige.

p. 125 - You can't deny it, men have a hard time doing all that's demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end.

p. 172 - “There's something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't even try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care.”

p. 189 - "Chin up, Ferdinand," I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. "What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night."

p. 196 - Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention.

p. 247 - I'd pretty well come to the point, the age, you might say, when a man knows what he's losing with every hour that passes. But he hasn't yet built up the wisdom to pull up sharp on the road of time, and anyway, even if you did stop you wouldn't know what to do without the frenzy for going forward that has possessed you and won your admiration ever since you were young. Even now you're not as pleased with your youth as you used to be, but you don't dare admit in public that youth may be nothing more than a hurry to grow old.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

p. 290 - "While he was cautiously preambling, I tried to form a picture of all he did each day to earn his calories, all his grimaces and promises, pretty much like my own . . . And then to amuse myself, I imagined him all naked at his altar . . . It's a good habit to get into: when somebody comes to see you, quick reduce him to nakedness, and you'll see through him in a flash, regardless of who it is, you will instantly discern the underlying reality, namely an enormous, hungry maggot. It's good sleight-of-the-imagination. His lousy prestige vanishes, evaporates. Once you've got him naked you'll be dealing with nothing more than a bragging pretentious beggar, talking drivel of one kind or another. It's a test that nothing can withstand. In a moment you'll know where you are at. There wont be anything left but ideas, and there's nothing frightening about ideas. With ideas nothing is lost, everything can be straightened out. Whereas it's sometimes hard to stand up to the prestige of a man with his clothes on. Nasty smells and mysteries cling to his clothes."

p. 291 - "This kind of meticulous observation was a habit, you might say a hobby, of mine. When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. The corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges teeth--how revolting! Yet that is what we are abjured to sublimate into an ideal. It's not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it's sticking together that's difficult. Feces on the other hand makes no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state-- that's the unconscionable torture.

Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but "us," the jerks of infinity. We'd burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us with our pride."

p. 305 - "So Parapine told me that during the retreat from Russia Napoleon's generals had a hell of a time stopping him from going to Warsaw to get himself sucked off just once more by the Polonaise of his heart. That was Napoleon all over, even in the midst of the worst reverses and calamities. Absolutely irresponsible! Think of his Josephine! He was her eagle, but it made no difference! Ants in his pants, come hell and high water! If you've got a taste for wine and women, nothing can stop you. And we all have it, that's the sad part. That's all we think about! In the cradle, at the cafe, on the throne, in the toilet. Everywhere! Everywhere! Our peckers! Napoleon or not! Cuckold or not! Pleasure first! To hell, says the Great Defeated One, with those four hundred thousand fanatics, emberesina'd[77] to the gills ... as long as old 'Polion gets one last squirt! What a swine! Never mind! Life is like that! That's how everything ends. In absurdity. Long before the audience, the tyrant is bored with the play he's acting. When he's good and sick of secreting delirium for the benefit of the public, he goes and gets laid. When that happens, he's washed up. Destiny drops him in two seconds flat! His fans have no objection to his massacring them with might and main! None whatever! That's nothing! They forgive him a hundred percent! What they won't forgive is when he starts boring them all of a sudden. Good work is tolerated only when hammed up! Epidemics stop only when the microbes get disgusted with their toxins. Robespierre was guillotined because he kept saying the same thing, and what did for Napoleon was over two years of Legion-of-Honor inflation. That lunatic's headache was having to supply half of sedentary Europe with a longing for adventure. An impossible job. It killed him."

p. 369 - "During those attacks I despaired of ever recapturing enough peace of mind to fall asleep again. If someone tells you he's unhappy, don't take it on faith. Just ask him if he can sleep ... If he can, then all's well. That's good enough. I would never again succeed in sleeping fully. I had lost, so to speak, the habit of trust, the enormous trust you need to sleep soundly among human beings. I'd have needed at least an illness, a fever, a specific catastrophe to retrieve some small part of my old indifference, neutralize my anxiety, and recapture the divine stupidity of an easy mind. The only bearable days I remember over a period of many years were a few days of heavy feverish flu."

p. 395 - "One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort . . . You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk . . . you abridge . . . You give up ... For thirty years you've been talking . . . You don't care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved yourself among the pleasures of life . . . You're fed up ... From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others . . . But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it's there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we've vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We're nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore. If you've got to be unhappy, you may as well keep regular habits. I insisted on everybody in the house being in bed by ten o'clock. I was the one who turned out the lights. The business took care of itself. We didn't overtax our imaginations. The Baryton system of taking cretins to the movies kept us busy enough. Under our management the institution wasn't run as economically as it had been. Wanton waste, we figured, might bring the chief back, since it gave him such nightmares."

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

Well, I sailed into this one with best of intentions, as a huge fan of Kaufman's screenplays, particularly BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and SYNECHDOCE NEW YORK.

But this book wore me out. Its multiple regressions, its non-linear plot and obsession with time-travel-tomfoolery, its thousand characters (all abandoned before they're at all realistic): that kind of shit just did me in, especially over 700 pages, perhaps twice as a long as I would be comfortable doing the kind of po-mo dance Kaufman was leading me through, although I'm pretty sure he did it consciously: as Randall Jarrell commented about difficult 20th century poetry, in POETRY AND THE AGE, "The poet said 'Since you won't read me, I'll make sure you can't'." 

The first half of the book was extraordinary and bristling with unexpected turns and new directions. There were a million cultural references, most very funny, some very mean-spirited, often goth. There were a lot of puns: some funny, some funny and stupid, some just very stupid indeed.

For me the problem in the second half was it was as if Kaufman had abandoned the first half altogether and decided to start over. I expect connection, conflict, and resolution: a tonic.

The book's ancestors are DF Wallace, Vonnegut, Pynchon, undoubtedly, as many reviewers are saying. I found a much strong echo of Gore Vidal in his awesome MYRA BRECKINRIDGE and MYRON novels.

You can read a (also overly long) plot summary here. I am no longer a young enough man to provide you one written by myself.

Maybe it was just time for me to read another enormously long, enormously annoying novel, as I did in January of this year.

Black No More by George Schuyler

Fascinating, funny, awkward and strange. Schuyler's 1931 satire of the Harlem Renaissance, American racism and white superiority is considered a vanguard in the field of Afrofuturism (although the term itself would not be coined for another sixty years. Max Disher, a black man, falls in love with a white woman at a Harlem nightclub. When she spurns him, his frustration leads him to a nascent medical technology, "Black No More," which turns black people into white people. Controlled, widespread topsy-turvy ensues. Now Matthew Fisher, he infiltrates a Klan-like organizaton (The Knights of Nordica) run by the woman's father, and eventually attains power and money, and marries the woman. Fear that their offspring will be "half-black" seizes him. That's just the basic plot. Nationally, the new technology wreaks havoc on American society; the South is ravaged by the disappearance of its black population, who flock to the new technology. The Northern cities's black commerce and industry are destroyed by the same. Politics is upended in the search for new racial scapegoats. It's funny - but not ha ha ha funny.

Schuyler, a prominent conservative voice, opposed the civil rights movement, and himself married a wealthy Texas white heiress. He was shunned by the black community.

Currently a musical is in production with music by the Roots' Black Thought.

Recommended!

Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Disappointing. Not quite finished yet, but need to organize my thoughts. It's not the technical writing itself, which is terrific, and up to Mitchell's usual lapidary standard. It's not the internal lives of the four main characters, the musicians in the 1967 folk-rock band Utopia. There's Elf, singer/keyboardist, stuck in a troubled relationship with another singer. Dean, the bassist with memories of an abusive father and a mother who died early. There's Griff, the drummer, who loses his brother in a car crash. And there's Jasper, lead guitarist, possibly autistic and suffering from a schizophrenic condition of an inner voice - well, an inner knocking, that he can decode using an alphabet key.

Cool stuff, so far. As always with Mitchell.

It's the dialogue that I dislike. The band members in particular, always communicate in highly ironic, punning, and elliptical exchanges that don't ring true to me.

And though Utopia Avenue is an imaginary band, the rest of swinging London's psychedelic rock scene is realistically evoked: Brian Jones of the Stones, the band Traffic, Nick Drake, Herman's Hermits, the Byrds, the painter Francis Bacon, Rod Stewart in his Small Faces days. These characters also speak freely with the members of Utopia Avenue -- I find their presentation more authentic.

All the Wrong Moves by Sasha Chapin

Unusual book about Chapin's obsession with playing competitive chess, even when he knew he was no good. He studied with fabled teaching grandmaster Benjamin Finegold:
music as "auditory cheesecake"

Isaac, when game is falling apart: "it's mostly fine."

another instance of my manic mind urging me to adopt an unlikely persona that would be discarded as soon as my self-loathing dicated that it should be

the problem with trying to solve your own psychological problems is that you're inside the delusion you're trying to diagnose

Paul Morphy: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

In a way, it happens to everyone, with age - the volume of experience gets turned down.

hot chess grandmaster Sopika: