Learning to Talk: Stories by Hilary Mantel

 

Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories by Elmore Leonard

 

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samantha Schweblin

 

Saw this review in the WPost (probably). Strange, eerie, pathologically deep examinations of characters and plotlines that sometimes feels like they're straight outa Stephen King fiction. 

Wasn't digging it, but just read and liked her long story ("The Woman from Atlántida") about two young sisters "rescuing" an alcoholic reclusive poet living in the beach resort town they're visiting.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

Good but the usual Greenblatt treatment - take a subject about whom almost nothing is factually known, and build out the social/intellectual/historical era around the black hole of the character's existence, and posit how he must have participated.

Marlowe is regarded as being Shakespeare's progenitor with his plays TAMBURLAINE, DR. FAUSTUS, and THE JEW OF MALTA. He was the first playwright to succesfully use blank verse in his works, and though Shakespeare surpassed Marlowe by a stunning margin, it's possible to see how Marlowe had to come first.

Watched SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE again last night, in which Kit Marlowe features.

Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford

 

I remember as a child reading a young person's biography of Beethoven - or at least reading the first chapters, where a six year old Ludwig races home through the village streets humming the melody of a composition he's going to give to his mother at her nameday celebration.

This biography is good if stuffed with cultural history of Bonn and Vienna, the other German states and Europe at the end of the 18th century. Lots going on. Meanwhile, Beehoven, preternatually gifted, sullen, isolated, productive, does exactly what he needs to do.

From a junior Mozart/Hayden imitator, he creates incredible music that builds on their example, and then towers over it.

The Angel of Rome and Other Stories by Jess Walter

 

Good if minor stuff. Seems like he's imitating Richard Russo sometimes though, but without Russo's snarky undertones.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

 

I'm late to this party, but find the novel clarifyingly beautiful...

... if long and somewhat tediously overwritten. I watched the 2007 BBC series with Ruth Wilson instead. Quite good!

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

 

Finally got around to this. Found it tedious and overstuffed with internal psychologizing.

The Novelist by Jordan Castro

This was what the literary world did now, I reminded myself, they celebrated stupid novels for stupid reasons.
Not very compelling single day single consciousness pov of someone not writing.

 

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

 

Finally bearing down and reading this, the greatest Iceland novel. It's a slog but worth it so far. Like the incident where the farmer chases down a reindeer and jumps on top of him and they ride down the river together, farmer nearly freezing to death. 12/23/25

And the wife killing the ewe who's been left behind as her company, then eating it.

Brutal. Only entertainment is coffee and reciting ancient poetry. My kind of people.

1/20/26: Still laboring away at this. It's great but so dense: some of the most common, primitive people in world having extraordinary poetical thoughts about mortality and the natural world. Finally into the life of Bjartur's children, which is helping things. But much work still ahead of me.

2/3/26: Less than a hundred pages to go, and it's certainly an epic: who knew that primitive sheep farmers and their families could have such rich inner lives, in such a blasted, bleak, and unforgiving environment. Not I for sure.

2/3/2026: Finished. Showed literary fortitude but it almost killled me.

p.10 - On such a day the sun is stronger than the past.

p. 67 - [long rain description] ... And at the bottom of this unfathomed ocean of teeming rain sat the little house and its one neurotic woman.

p.267 - Surely they could no longer hide behind the skirts of existence if they wished to preserve a last shred of repute.

286 - ...the life of man is so short that ordinary people simply can't afford to be born.

So Far Gone by Jess Walter

 

Good but not that exciting.

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

 

same old Jackson Brodie story. Atkinson seems to churn them out effortlessly, but there doesn't seem to be much difference between them. Understand the Jackson Brodie TV series, CASE HISTORIES,  is interesting.

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

 

Short, punchy, sort of modern What Maise Knew, about a privileged, neurotic, highly intelligent adoped Korean girl.

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer

 

Engaging, ambitious first novel about identity, adolescence, boxing, mystery. Does go on for a bit though.

The Antidote by Karen Russell

 

Meh. Too long. Historical-ish sci-fi-ish novel about a tiny farming town In Nebraska during the 1930s, with the Great Dust Storm as its central calamity. A praire witch, a female high-school basketball player and her farmer-uncle, and a WPA black photographer from Wash DC solve a crime.

Russell's language can be exquisite - but the narrative takes forever to wind up, or down, or any which way.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

 

Interesting, frustrating, elliptical novel about a gifted child and his gifted disturbed mother.

Lots of text in foreign languages - Greek! Latin! etc. 

An American single mother in London raises her child and will not tell him who his father is, except to elliptically suggest he was a great scholar and an adventurer.

The two obsessively watch and re-watch Kurosawa movies - and the boy becomes (sort of ) convinced that he is training to become a Samurai warrior, and his ultimate trial and Samurai quest will be in finding his father. He confronts numerous candidates.

Weird, wacky, sort of wonderful, and sort of brow-beating: this book.

Off Course by Michelle Huneven

 

I liked it but didn't love it. The protagonist - a 29 year old economics scholar finishing her dissertation at her parent's mountain cabin in northern California - grated on me after awhile. She's in love with an older blue-collar married man, a cabinet-maker, and the relationship seems contrived. The close writing about the natural Sierra landscape is quite beautiful throughout, though.

Poems by V.R. Lang

Excellent and interesting New Yorker piece on forgotten American poet Violet Ranney "Bunny" Lang (forgotten by the academy, I guess, as I never knew her work to begin with.) 

(A débutante, a burlesque dancer, and a poet, the shape-shifting Lang—who died at thirty-two—wrote some of the most aching, entrancing poetry of the twentieth century... - The New Yorker)

Born in 1926, died in early 1950s, socialite, in the Frank O'Hara orbit of New York poets - she reminds me of Medbh McGuckian somewhat, the obscurantist Irish poet. 

The Suicide

by V.R. Lang

Shocked that she missed the footbridge! She cried out,
But no later than the water she fell in and drowned in;
God help me, they tell us she shouted, but she had no sovereign --
No one at all to order her out of the water.

Now the animals have charted the land for their reasonable holiday;
All have appointed this time to be there to see them.
Photographers capture each other -- the carnival quickens!
The spectres, the hawkers, the talkers, the damned are all there.

At the Meeting of Two Families
by V.R. Lang

Who were the assasins that came to get you?
Six of them coated in black and silently smoking --
Slithering quiet like empty clothes

Alert to the dark, from hangers.
Who were they that came to watch you?
Chewing cigaretts they looked at you, they looked at me.

What in a hay moon hovers and waits like a bag
With a man in it? Why did you make
Your face like a Japanese mask of terror to style?

Limply arranged they waited, just waited.
As always I gave back your terror, I felt it --
I grimaced, aped it, then flashed it to you.

And we stared at each other and back to our inerlocutors,
The bareback riders from kingdom to kingdom --
You knew them, I knew. You remembered.

Why is your dark like a bag with a man in it?
In the moment of panice, hardly anything happens,
But nothing is true. I remembered, I knew.

I cried out, and the light broke. Your family
Pronounced me charming. My love, my love,
We will scratch all over the dusty earth crawling

The way out of dread we've no name for, could not tell.
We will come to dread all we own, as well --
Till you make and weep, till you break the spell.

25 Years
by V.R. Lang

We got through this year and nobody;
We got through this year and perhaps.
On the day of the white crow somebody
Will kiss us and keep us, but this was not this year;
This year is over and nobody; this year is next year now.

    Here is the hole in the wall. Here we peek.
    Here is Chanticleer. We shall do everything but speak.
    We shall bless, address, abuse -- we shall not speak.
    Had we to love or were we at fault? 
    We were confused, affection or assault
    Proved only beasts will eat themselves or anything:
    Let us join hands and dance around the naked king.

This year the creeping itch was apparent in the left hand,
This year perhaps it will sneak to the right, we will see.
The eye shivered at the slack it saw it did not understand;
The white crow never came to kiss us under the pear tree.
Twenty-five are pinching parents, poppy-addled, fed-on-us--
We wept our dusty latter thoughts, we stretched and scrabbled loose.
O! the day of the white crow will come, when it will come it can;
Then shall we shake our sticks, o years, in wicked triumph then.

from "Poems to Preserve the Years at Home"
by V.R. Lang

Tuesday when you opened your eyes your
Room was a cold disaster. Arranged
Around you, its own disorderly life

Took stock of you like a crazy pendulum
Swung over your head like a demonstration
In a science museum, your hands were numb,

All the pieces of you clunb to the bedclothes
Like a broken promise, sorrow sticking to the cracks
Till you sat up and the floor went dizzy.

You did not go near the mirrow, you fed the cat
But it went on weeping, and you had to sit down.
Still all that day you were followed by your

Tall still angels, walking like trees.
You had no choice but to lead them, and twice
You listened, and once, you smiled.

Some days the days for providence we wak
Up taller than the telephone, our eyes more harsh and black,
And even its screaming cannot shock us.

Some days we wake up the Act
Which casts a shadow on the infinite plane
of suggestion, we become our Agents,

Pay our rent and sort the laundry,
Make appointments, go to market,
Lay in stores with strange, beleaguered haste.

Some days our guardian days we
Go gladly into one dimension;
These days our days are not our dominion

But our deliverance, practical and moral.
On these days only motion casts a shadow.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

 

Years since I read this. Struck anew by Flaubert's chiseled detailed style. 

Re-reading in honor of the late great Northwestern Professor Paul C. Edwards, who died on October 15 at the age of 75, of alcoholism and grief. He staged this in the mid-1980s with Alchemy Theatre Company of Manhattan, which I was a member of in its first formative lackluster year. I left group just in time for them to successfully mount BOVARY.

Salve, magister!

After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

 Slow going and a little aimless, but the story is building in its way. Three generations of women - grandmother, mother, daughter - are slowly revealed in all their damaging passion. I guess.