A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

 

Great luxurious read. Rather than being shot, a Russian nobleman is confined for the rest of his life to a tiny attic room, 10 feet square, in a grand hotel in the heart of Moscow across from the Kremlin. The novel covers the next thirty years of his life, as he struggles to maintain his outstanding character and morals through the birth of the modern Soviet Union.

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 by Peter Schjeldal

 

It is becoming evident to me that I'd read read about something than experience it. Take painting for instance. I have little patience with an art gallery -- my legs grow as bored as my eyes walking room to room, dodging the poseurs and tourists -- I find it completely uncomfortable to stare at paintings on a wall for hours, all that standing, all that taking of little steps to move in closer and move from one side of a canvas to the other.

But I like very much to read great writers talking about paintings. And Schjeldahl is one of them (seems to be in the Ashbery school of art criticism, which I'm also a fan of.) Such close, imaginative, lively, informed thinking makes an artist and his work and his life a thousand times more interesting to me.

The show was conceived on the Planet of the Scholars, where every question is considered except "So what?" [178]

I began to imagine the artist's [Picasso's] pictures as a steamrolled sculpture. [190]

Cartier-Bresson: [Photography] is a marvelous profession while it remains a modest one. [320]

James by Percival Everett

 

Another classic from Everett, this time longer and "more conventional" than his other novels, a resonant and deeply felt re-telling of the brunt of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, who in this version is far from the ignorant version Mark Twain gives us.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson

 

Have had this on the shelf for literally 35 years - but have I ever read this? No sign of markings, no memory. And it's a lot to take in: none of the colorful and hallucinatory characters and action of LAS VEGAS, which I remember well (well, mostly for the drugs). And the 1972 McGovern presidential candidacy is not something I know a thing about.

Thompson's political writing style (if one can call it that) is absurd - he reports a ton about what other reporters are reporting, and he reports on his own personality.

After suffering through the first 2/3rds of the book, I finally got to August 1972 (chapters run chronologically by month for the year) and it's finally paying off - after an especially dull long section about the McGovern campaign leadership's machinations at the convention to delay declaring victory until the Humphrey and Muskie forces were completely confused and demoralized (can you tell I didn't even understand the section? or quite finish it?).

Thompson barely touches on policy or governmental action: he dwells on the political as personal, on polling and popularity, on the athleticism of devoted journalits. V. odd book. 

And HST pops in this quote late in the book for no apparent reason (good quote though):

Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race—small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them … They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They threaten to take [the land] away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland.” Excerpt from Sioux chief Sitting Bull’s speech at the Powder River Council in 1877.

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

 

Stunning WWI novel about two English schoolboys who fall in love, enlist, and then meet again in the trenches at the battle of the Somme.  Terribly sad, quite beautiful - and even ends well! Well, not for most, that is. It's apparently Winn's first novel, but seems a much accomplished and polished and thoughtful work. Her close writing about men on the battlefield is exquisite.

Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir by Jann S. Wenner

 

Had to put it down not even halfway through. Though the dude knew everybody from the 1960s, his sly and immodest style of claiming to influence almost any important work that took place during his tenure as publisher of Rolling Stone became too annoying for me to take.

Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

Munro's first published book, and a fitting way to kick off my retrospective of her important body of work. She hasn't yet unleashed the "time torquing" technique of her later work, but the stories are wonderfully detailed and the characters deeply engraved.

The story “A Trip to the Coast” ends in a decidedly Flannery O'Connor manner. 

"Walker Brothers Cowboy"

"The Shining Houses"

"Images"

"Thanks for the Ride"

"The Office"

"An Ounce of Cure"

"The Time of Death"

"Day of the Butterfly"

"Boys and Girls"

"Postcard"

"Red Dress—1946"

"Sunday Afternoon"

"A Trip to the Coast"

"The Peace of Utrecht"

"Dance of the Happy Shades"

The Pigman by Paul Zindel

 

Revisiting this 1968 YA title after fifty years! Still pretty good, pretty sad, little melodramatic, but basically a strong story. The ending particularly bittersweet -- narrator's rumination on how the whole human race are "baboons" waiting around the monkey house for someone to visit.

Alice Munro RIP

Self-deception seems almost like something that’s a big mistake, that we should learn not to do. But I’m not sure if we can. Everybody's doing their own novel of their own lives. The novel changes -- at first we have a romance, a very satisfying novel that has a rather simple technique, and then we grow out of that and we end up with a very discontinuous, discordant, very contemporary kind of novel. I think that what happens to a lot of us in middle age is that we can't really hang on to our fiction any more.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving stories there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing pieces of. What would be more interesting as a life’s occupation? One of the ways we do this, I think, is by trying to look at what memory does (different tricks at different stages of our lives) and at the way people’s different memories deal with the same (shared) experience. The more disconcerting the differences are, the more the writer in me feels an odd exhilaration.

I’m sad that I haven’t written a lot of things, but I’m incredibly happy that I’ve written as much as I have. Because there was a point when I was younger where there was a very good chance that I wouldn’t write anything – I was just too frightened.

I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way – what happens to somebody – but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something that is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Togdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

 

Re-read this at the beginning of the month, and three days ago saw the powerful production at Round House Theatre in Bethesda. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, for good reason: sort of a True-West-in-the-ghetto drama about two brothers trying to succeed in life and love by switching places, with resonant echoes of a broken family and their inheritances from that.

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick

 

The Man in the High Castle: Fascinating, weird, psychological alternative history, set in 1962, in the Rockies and in SF, after Germany and Japan won WWII. Dick has quite a beautiful prose style, and several of the characters are obsessed with the I Ching, and the process of casting and reading it are beautifully rendered.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: Even more gripping. A future (2016!) where the solar system has been colonized and conscripts from Earth are drafted to inhabit the rough and ugly planets, surviving by regular hallucinegenic dosing and fantasizing about life inside a barbie-like game construct of Earth. Dick maneuvers the reader into a labyrinthe of real/unreal/surreal settings - his characters don't know if they're dreaming life or living it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Renowned as the basis for the film BLADE RUNNER, it actually bears only the slightest resemblance. The movie is all neo-noir and stream-punk moody atmospherics, but the novel is more about relationships between the human and non-human, and conversations about the importance of living animals and.

Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Wellness by Nathan Hill

 A compelling if too-long novel, bringing back memories of Hill's wonderful THE NIX from some years back.

In The Early Times by Tad Friend

 

Good. Weird. Pretentious.

A brilliantly written and odd book, mostly a memoir and an autobiographic essay by career New Yorker writer Tad friend, but verging at times on crystalline fiction, on sappy self-help relationship book, as furtive apologia by an unreliable narrator who cheats repeatedly on his wife, and finds in his father's life both a justification and a source of blame for this.

Friend's Wasp-y background -- born and raised in New England, his father a distinguished East Asian Studies professor an author and president of Swarthmore, a preppy education and avocations (Tad was a nationally ranked squash player - as was his father) -- this chill and chilly background is at odds with Friend's confessional intention.

If you love a demanding task that requires both discipline and talent...-- you eventually discover an innate boundary: you can apprehend real virtuosity, especially as it's used to best you, but you can never quite incorporate it. You will never be more than almost great...Yet the truly great players sacrifice so much that they stare back at us with equal longing. Or so we console ourselves. [115]

"Oversight" is a Janus word, like "buckle" or "cleave": it means both supervision and neglect [122]

'Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.' - James Salter [128]

'Think well on this, my sweet:

Our bodies need not truly beat 

Upon each other,

But, past their funerary heat.

Will slide together perfectly,

Grain and micrograin

Intimate and without stain,

Closer than ever they were in life.' -Day Friend (Tad's father) [155]

The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

 

Another winner from Barry, this one from 1988, so the earliest of his work that I've read. A Sligoman is caught between nationalist and royal sides in the Irish civil war, given a death sentence, and flees, effectively banished for life. He returns several times, though, unable to completely leave home, which eventually kills him.

In Eneas, Barry has created a memorable, gentle, conflicted character torn on all sides by family, country, spirit, goodness, and evil.

Some words have no tune for themselves. [13]

... it strikes him that any person alive in the world, any person putting a shoulder against a life, no matter how completely failing to do the smallest good thing, is a class of hero. [130]

... the peculiar clock of God, whose divisions seem both unending and brief in the same span... [130]

He passes a number of bottles with thick blue glass and the faces of people he knows etched in them... whole "dying" passage at end of novel, [307-308]

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan

 

Good, pungent book. The story of a friendship between two Scottish men broken into two parts: Summer, 1986 and Autumn, 2017. The first half is a trip to Manchester for a concert, and is rip-roaring and drunken, loaded with 18 year old full of themselves and life and bristling with arrogant comic knowledge of a world they barely. The second half, thirty years later, is sobering, to see the least.

Almost all references are insular to UK 1980s pop, American mid-century films, and English literature. Didn't know half of them, but they still gave me a kick.

But found it an abrupt book, something missing from the center, and what happened in the intervening years. Still, O'Hagan a gifted stylist and dialogue-ist. Will seek out more of his work.

They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again. [121]

"'The past isn't really the past, Tully said. 'It's just music, books, and films.'" [p. 244]

Absolution by Alice McDermott

 

Liked this, although there's a cautiousness and a certain smugness to (both) the narrator's voices that I dislike. The first half of the book feels like it's heading toward a more dramatic ending that I got, and the switching of narrators between the older woman and the younger woman does not yield significant unveilings of meaning or narrative.

Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska by Warren Zanes

 

Great book! That rare thing, penetrating writing about music.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Must have read this before but don't really remember it. It's interesting but seems to be an early (1963) experiment in Vonnegut's more mature and radical books Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

The fantastical human-based religion of Bokonism, the short chapters that always end with a flair (if not much narrative oomph), the sci-fi flirtation of the doomsday weapon ice-nine, are all elements to be perfected later.