Dubliners by James Joyce

This is a nearly perfect book of short stories.  From "The Sisters," about the wake for a newly-dead priest who went mad and was found laughing quietly by himself in confessional, to "The Dead," an epic story about a New Year's musical recital and the memory of a dead first love, Joyce writes minutely about ordinary Irish lives and summons a monumental tone of liveliness and regret.

Prized Possessions by L.R. Wright

Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann

This is a tremendous literary biography.  It has compelled me to go back and read James Joyce again, and as I progress through Ellmann's book, it has become impossible for me to not to try to write about Joyce, as I'm thinking about him so much.

Three things stand out in my mind as I come to a new, larger understanding of the man and the author.

First, from age six to age twenty, he was almost without interruption educated by Jesuits and boarded at Jesuit educational institutions.  This led Joyce himself to say that though it wouldn't be accurate to describe himself as a Catholic, describing himself as a Jesuit did seem appropriate.

Second, and via the first fact, Joyce's most extraodinary mental ability seemed to be his tremendous Jesuit-led instruction in rhetoric, the ordering and advancement of argument in language.  Even his most brutish physical descriptions, piled on as they are, always appear to be grasped within a ligament of argument.

Finally, As J. M. Cohen suggests, Joyce seems to come to things through words, instead of to words through things.  This has more than a little to do with his vision problems:  born with weak eyes, he developed severe ocular disorders that progressed throughout his life.  So seeing things physically, while certainly important, was not his finally wrestling ground for language.  He put things in words before they made sense to him.

His sins became serious, and his sense of sin, 'that sense of separation and loss,' brought him to consciousness, from which vantage point he sloughed off all but the vestiges of Christian guilt.

On top of that Howth train alone crying to the rain:  naked women! What about that, eh? (Ulysses)

To become greater than our sins is worth more than all the purity you preach. (Sudermann's Magda)

Silent Years by John Francis Byrne, coded memoir, largerly about Joyce. "One of the most crotchety and interesting of the many books of Joyce's friends."

Women: "soft-skinned animals."

Shakespeare= "Literature in dialogue."

Lermontov's "Hero of Our Days."

Schnitz:  "The writer must write every evening the history of his day."

GB Shaw had a very complex reaction to ULYSSES, who had once been a young man in Dublin himself.
 “I was attracted to [Ulysses] by the fact that I was once a young man in Dublin, and also by Joyce’s literary power, which is of classic quality. I do not see why there should be any limit to frankness in sex revelation; but Joyce does not raise that question. The question he does raise is whether there should be any limit to the use in literature of blackguardly language. It depends on what people will stand. If Dickens or Thackeray had been told that a respectable author like myself would use the expletive “bloody” in a play, and that an exceptionally fastidious actress of the first rank, associated exclusively with fine parts, would utter it on the stage without turning a hair, he could not have believed it. Yet I am so old-fashioned and squeamish that I was horrified when I first heard a lady describe a man as a rotter. I could not write the words Mr Joyce uses: my prudish hand would refuse to form the letters; and I can find no interest in his infantile clinical incontinences, or in the flatulations which he thinks worth mentioning…

    Ulysses is a document, the outcome of a passion for documentation that is as fundamental as the artistic passion — more so, in fact; for the document is the root and stem of which the artistic fancy works are the flowers. Joyce is driven by his documentary demon to place on record the working of a young man’s imagination for a single day in the environment of Dublin. The question is, is the document authentic. I, having read some scraps of it, reply that I am afraid it is, then you may rise up and demand that Dublin be razed to the ground, and its foundations sown with salt. And I may say do so, by all means. But that does not invalidate the document.”

Shaw famously concludes:  “If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing — not whitewashing — it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.”

Joyce thought very highly of Yeats, that he was a true imaginative talent.  Later he (Joyce) said to Jacques Mercanton, “Why regret my talent?  I haven’t any.  I write so painfully, so slowly.  Chance furnishes me with what I need.  I’m like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.’  On the other hand, he often agreed with Vico that ‘Imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered,’ and said to Frank Budger, ‘Imagination is memory.’”

Joyce's favorite song:  "The Brown and Yellow Ale."

His daughter Lucia struggled her entire life with mental illness, and was finally confined for schizophrenia.  Joyce took his daughter's illness extremely personally, and Ellmann notes that several scholars find the father and daughter very similar creatively.  One notes, though, that though they both spent their lives as if they were jumping out of a boat into the ocean, but that James Joyce was "diving" while his daughter was "jumping."

"I ask myself what then will happen when and if she [Lucia] withdraws her regard from the lightning-lit revery of her clairvoyance and turns it upon that battered cabman's face, the world."

Joyce's beautiful later poem, "Epilogue to Ibsen's Ghost," which begins:

Dear quick, whose conscience buried deep
The grim old grouser has been salving,
Permit one spectre more to peep.
I am the ghost of Captain Alving.

Silenced and smothered by my past
Like the lewd knight in dirty linen
I struggle forth to swell the cast
And air a long-suppressed opinion.

King Suckerman by George Pelecanos

Bicentennial week in Washington DC, 1976. Get some body bags!

A Chill Rain in January by L. R. Right

LR Wright is a delicious small pleasure, like a sip of something strong that's over before you know it, and then it gives you a kick.

The canvas is small: a tiny town in Vancouver.  There's a clearly psychotic character, but the secret of her active madness is kept close until the very end, all we see are symptoms and leakages.

The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn executes some gorgeous prose, but she takes her time, and it ends up being too slow a place for me.  Setup and premise is dynamite (PopCultureNerd sums it up well here) but it just seemed to take forever. Still want to read Flynn's first novel Sharp Objects though.

Who gives a shit about this crap?  Do I sound passionately aggrieved?

NAKED EXCEPT FOR THE JEWELRY

"And," she said, "you must talk no more
about ecstasy.  It is a loneliness."
The woman wandered about picking up
her shoes and silks.  "You said you loved me,"
the man said.  "We tell lies," she said,
brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
for the jewelry.  "We try to believe."
"You were helpless with joy," he said,
"moaning and weeping.  "In the dream," she said,
"we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.
The heart lies to itself because it must."

It's not worth parodying, although I considered doing just that.  But how could I surpass the original, both as an original and as a parody?

Still Midnight by Denise Mina

Great detective novel. British female detective struggles with failing marriage, recent loss of child and competition on the beat. Crime is a puzzling kidnapping.

The Iliad by Homer trans. by Stephen Mitchell

A Firing Offse by George Pelecanos

Another great one, the eighties bands that Pelecanos' name-checks for me were worth the price of admission alone. Scathing level of knowledge and detail on electronics retail sales industry. Loved it.

On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks

Friday Night Lights

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

A sneaky book.  A group of British schoolboys grows up and falls out of touch.  One of the schoolboys, Tony, the narrator, shares a girlfriend, with one of the group, the brilliant, philosophically-advanced Adrian.  Time, memory, callousness, narrative undependability, all conspire, not exactly against the narrator or the other characters, but against the reader.  For 164 pages, this novel whallops one.

"Can I ask you something?"
"You always do," she replied.
"Did you leave me because of me?"
"No," she said.  "I left you because of us."

Remorse, eytmologically, is the act of biting again: that's what the feeling does to you.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

Mad talented writer, Faulks.  Tore through this novel of contemporary London -- the interlinked lives of a financial derivatives trader, a poor barrister, a working class young women who drives a subway train, a disgruntled youth flirting with Muslim extremism, an ignored teen from incredible wealth experimenting with drugs.  Not at all like Birdsong, Faulks' incredible WWI novel.  Not at all, but still wonderful, vivid, complete writing.  Each life he touches is more interesting that the last.  I'm so thankful for such wonderful, beautiful, talented writers -- and so annoyed, at the end of the day.  Highly recommended.

Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War by Sebastian Faulks

Don't know quite where to begin with this novel. Powerful, sweeping, moving World War I narrative, that begins with an ordinary provincial love affair in France in 1910, then jumps to the outbreak of the war, then jumps to 1978-1979, then jumps back again. Faulks prose is effortlessly detailed. Each character is fully believable. Heroism is undercut by cowardism and selfishness, which is further cut again with heroism and love.

The futility, horror and grand scale of trench warfare is rendered in an utterly personal manner: each soldier thinks he is doing something important and worthwhile, and each soldier knows with almost complete certainty that he will soon be dead.

Stephen Wraysford is a young Englishman who joins the army in 1914 and commands of a miner brigade. They tunnel beneath the German lines and set explosions under them. The underground combat scenes are incredibly brutal and disturbing. Stephen, rootless and exiled from home after a love affair in France before the war, becomes almost addicted to the danger and impossibility of surviving combat.

It felt as though she were being penetrated by a knitting needle with large walnuts midway up its shaft.

The supressed frustrations and unexpressed violence of his life were turned into hatred of the Germans.

"He's shouting for his mother," said the orderly as they brought him into the tent.
"They always do," said the medical officer, peeling back the field dressing Byrne had applied almost thirty hours before.

Then, as the fever in his abandoned body reached its height and he moved toward the welcome of oblivion, he heard a voice, not human, but clear and urgent. It was the sound of his life leaving him. Its tone was mocking. It offered him, instead of the peace he longed for, the possibility of return. At this late stage he could go back to his body and to the brutal perversion of life that was lived in the turned soil and torn flesh of the war; he could, if he made the effort of courage and will, come back to the awkward, compromised, and unconquerable existence that made up human life on earth. The voice was calling him; it appealed to his sense of shame and of curiosity unfulfilled: but if he did not heed it he would surely die.

Within minutes the hillside was seething with movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.
"Christ," said Weir. "I had no idea there were so many men out there."
It was like a resurrection in a cemetery twelve miles long.

He heard nothing at first. Then, as the last pieces of displaced earth settled in the tunnel, he heard a long thick sigh; it was a sound he had never heard before, but he knew that it was the noise of several men expiring simultaneously.

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of the evening. From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was the sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside of time; there was no human voice to place it.

Above him he saw the white moon, early and low above the elms. Over and behind it were long jagged wisps of cloud that ran in ribbed lies back into the pale blue of the sky, then trailed away in gestures of vapourous white.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the pathgoing back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of of creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them. He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance; these were not different worlds it now seemed clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp grass at his feet. He held tightly on to the gate and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth. He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal errant but beloved son . . . nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness. As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all that he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sin and anger, because his soul was joined to it.