No posts round here till early next week (but I'm hoping once I'm back from this trip I'll be in more normal read-books-and-literary-news-and-write-about-them mode, I've been excessively frenzied with various work stuff these last couple weeks). Meanwhile let me just say that thanks to Colleen I've discovered a really wonderful little novel that I wouldn't have heard about otherwise but that is pretty much perfectly to my taste, and really beautifully conceived and written: Jo Walton's Farthing.
It's a lovely book, a modest and beautifully written crime novel that also manages to be very imaginative alternate history and casts some intense light on questions about accommodation and moral heroism. Put it on the shelf next to Fatherland and The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policemen's Union (and also the wonderful and underrated A State of Denmark by Derek Raymond).
But the book's style is quite different from any of those--in the acknowledgments, Walton thanks "the dead writers of English mysteries, especially Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers, and to the master of living ones, Peter Dickinson" (also she appealingly observes that the novel arose largely out of her "thoughts on various political situations, and out of wondering what date Josephine Tey could have imagined Brat Farrar to be set"). These of course are three of my favorite, most magical novelists ever--and I will take this opportunity to recommend Peter Dickinson to anyone who hasn't read him, he was a staple of my public-library-and-mass-market-paperback reading in my early teens and I remain devoted to his books. I think my favorite--the one everyone must read!--is The Lively Dead; and one of the narrative voices here distinctly reminds me of The Last House Party, but really with Dickinson you can hardly go wrong, he's just such an intelligent and cunning and deeply appealing writer. Walton's done a very good job with this novel, in other words, and I am dying for the sequel, Ha'penny, though I am afraid it will not be published until October.
The other novels I've been reading are a recommendation from Justine, and also incredibly perfectly to my taste--The Thief and The Queen of Attolia (I've still got the third in the trilogy to look forward to) by Megan Whalen Turner. Again, even before plunging into them I pretty much knew I was going to love them because of the intelligent and altogether delightful material at the back of the volume. This must be the only young-adult novel published in recent memory--maybe ever?!?--whose afterword recommends my beloved Thucydides and also singles out Diana Wynne Jones, Joan Aiken and Rosemary Sutcliff as special loves & influences--I have found a kindred spirit...
Finally I will just observe that though in the end I did have a very pleasant swim this evening, next year I must not go swimming in the last hour the pool is open on the last day of classes as the minutes tick down for final eligibility for seniors to take the swim test they are required to pass in order to graduate!
Monday, April 30, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
The prose of the world
Hermione Lee has a very appealing essay in the latest NYRB on a nice handful of books about novel-reading (Kundera, Smiley, Mullan, Sutherland, Mendelson, Moretti, Parrinder--no subscription required). It's full of good things:
In our Man Booker Prize judging for 2006, however carefully we analyzed our books, however good we agreed our preferred choices were (and we could easily have had a long list of thirty rather than nineteen novels), in the end our arguments came down to matters of taste. The most hotly debated novels on our list (for instance by Nadine Gordimer, Barry Unsworth, Howard Jacobson, Andrew O'Hagan, and Edward St. Aubyn) divided us, finally, not because of objective aesthetic judgements, but because some of us disliked the moral atmosphere of the books, or found them claustrophobic or overinsistent, or were unable to enjoy a particular style of historical recreation, or were irritated by the narrative voice. And there is no accounting for boredom. The critic Jonathan Zwicker writes, in Moretti's collection, of a marginal note scribbled by an anonymous Japanese reader in a 1908 library copy of Tolstoy's newly translated Kreutzer Sonata, whose title in translation was "Chôkon," meaning "long resentment." The marginal note read: "A boring book. Where is the long resentment? The resentment is in having read the book. There is no value in its being translated."
The resentment is in having read the book! I am going to start penciling that in the margins of books that make me angry...
In our Man Booker Prize judging for 2006, however carefully we analyzed our books, however good we agreed our preferred choices were (and we could easily have had a long list of thirty rather than nineteen novels), in the end our arguments came down to matters of taste. The most hotly debated novels on our list (for instance by Nadine Gordimer, Barry Unsworth, Howard Jacobson, Andrew O'Hagan, and Edward St. Aubyn) divided us, finally, not because of objective aesthetic judgements, but because some of us disliked the moral atmosphere of the books, or found them claustrophobic or overinsistent, or were unable to enjoy a particular style of historical recreation, or were irritated by the narrative voice. And there is no accounting for boredom. The critic Jonathan Zwicker writes, in Moretti's collection, of a marginal note scribbled by an anonymous Japanese reader in a 1908 library copy of Tolstoy's newly translated Kreutzer Sonata, whose title in translation was "Chôkon," meaning "long resentment." The marginal note read: "A boring book. Where is the long resentment? The resentment is in having read the book. There is no value in its being translated."
The resentment is in having read the book! I am going to start penciling that in the margins of books that make me angry...
Mmmm...
Sebastian Faulks has a new novel out, reviewed here by Allan Massie at the Scotsman. Somehow I missed his last one, perhaps I will get both at once. I am going to London on Tuesday for a conference on rationality in literature (check out the program--pretty fun, eh?!?) and I have pretty much already decided (a) that I am going to have one day of down-time where I wander into either a real bookstore or more likely WH Smith and descend on the light-reading shelves and devour at least two or three trashy novels and (b) that I am going to drop a lot of money in the airport bookstore on the way home, I must think about what UK Amazon-shippable titles I could spare myself from needing to obtain...
Friday, April 27, 2007
Do you not
totally want to go and study for years in the Shaolin Temple?!? I've got to get both of these books...
Beyond nose to tail
At the FT, Rowley Leigh and Fergus Henderson have a delightful conversation about cookery. A snippet:
RL: The one person I come back to and always use as a really reliable metronome of good taste and proper English cooking is Eliza Acton and I just think she has perfect pitch: “Take a wild duck, put him on a brisk fire, serve him up with a little orange salad and watercress,” you know, that sort of language of cookery, which is exactly what you want.
RL: The one person I come back to and always use as a really reliable metronome of good taste and proper English cooking is Eliza Acton and I just think she has perfect pitch: “Take a wild duck, put him on a brisk fire, serve him up with a little orange salad and watercress,” you know, that sort of language of cookery, which is exactly what you want.
On pride
I think it is very difficult to take a clean pride in one's own achievements, or at least in any kind of public recognition of those achievements; it is too often tainted either by some reservation about the thing you've done or a sense of the deep bad decorum of pride as opposed to humility (there is always a sort of shame, I find, in whatever pride we feel on receiving an award or distinction of some kind--as if it's a distinctly lowering thing to find one even cares about such recognition); but I love taking pride in my friends' accomplishments, and of course pride in a present or former student's accomplishments is by far the most gratifying sensation I can think of, a more innocent and purer pleasure than any satisfaction elicited by our own public successes. So here I am ridiculously bursting with pride about this great piece of writing by a dear friend who's also a former student: it's Nico Muhly at the Guardian on the deep allure of English choral music. Here's a particularly good paragraph, but go and take a look for yourself:
My love for Thomas Weelkes, especially, was like a childish celebrity infatuation. If the internet had existed, I would have been running the Weelkes fan site and moderating the message boards. There was something about his 400-year-old music that felt so right in the throat and brain; I would have followed him on tour and lit my lighter during When David Heard. I'd have told all my friends that he had written the Ninth Service for me. Part of what is so appealing to me is the athletic teamwork required to pull that music off; in his anthem Hosanna To the Son of David, the basses begin with a swift kick to an A on the syllable "Ho-". Immediately afterwards, the rest of the voices enter on a fat A-major chord, and spiral out into a quick cadence, some moving quickly to a distant note, some staying right where they are, and the tenors doing a little back-flip to their second positions. I cannot remember any other music that has excited me as much as that one balletic and powerful gesture: it has got to be right or there is nothing to listen to. Weelkes makes you do it again and again, with subtle variations each time; singing it was a pleasure that made me feel larger than myself, part of a different body of work.
My love for Thomas Weelkes, especially, was like a childish celebrity infatuation. If the internet had existed, I would have been running the Weelkes fan site and moderating the message boards. There was something about his 400-year-old music that felt so right in the throat and brain; I would have followed him on tour and lit my lighter during When David Heard. I'd have told all my friends that he had written the Ninth Service for me. Part of what is so appealing to me is the athletic teamwork required to pull that music off; in his anthem Hosanna To the Son of David, the basses begin with a swift kick to an A on the syllable "Ho-". Immediately afterwards, the rest of the voices enter on a fat A-major chord, and spiral out into a quick cadence, some moving quickly to a distant note, some staying right where they are, and the tenors doing a little back-flip to their second positions. I cannot remember any other music that has excited me as much as that one balletic and powerful gesture: it has got to be right or there is nothing to listen to. Weelkes makes you do it again and again, with subtle variations each time; singing it was a pleasure that made me feel larger than myself, part of a different body of work.
Goiter excision practice
Ed Park has a quite delightful little squib about Harry Stephen Keeler at the Poetry Foundation website (and if you have not read The Riddle of the Traveling Skull you're missing out on one of the strangest and most enjoyable reading experiences known to man--here was my Keeler post a while ago, it will give you the flavor of the prose at least).
Thursday, April 26, 2007
More books I want to read
on chimpanzees and human morality--how delightful--the TLS is hitting a lot of my favorite topics this week...
Same or different
At the TLS, Mary Beard has a great piece about a quite wonderful-sounding book (I think I must read it; I've got a thing about this period, it comes I assume from obsessive re-readings of I, Claudius at an impressionable age--I popped to attention when I saw the name Germanicus!), Peter Parsons' The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt. She includes a host of fascinating details in the review, go and take a look, but here are Beard's final paragraphs, which touch on something I think about all the time:
In some cases it is actually Peter Parsons’s elegant and judicious translation that serves to domesticate the strange. In one papyrus letter, Titianos, probably a Christian, writes to his sister about a lucky recovery. “I was gripped for a long while by an illness”, runs the translation, “so that I couldn’t even stagger. When my illness eased, my eye suppurated and I had tachomas and I suffered terribly and in other parts of my body as well so that it nearly came to surgery, but thank God!” It is the word “surgery”, or “operation” in another modern version, that gives this account a particularly familiar ring, with all its connotations of hospitals, anaesthetic, antiseptic and so forth. In the original Greek, the word in question is “tome”. This means “cutting” – of anything from wood to flesh. “Surgery” is a perfectly legitimate translation, though a rather nice way of putting it. “It nearly came to the knife” or “it nearly came to chopping me up” might be a better reflection of ancient medical procedures – as well as a stronger prompt for us to go beyond the comfortable modern analogies.
“Same or different” is a dilemma for any historian who tries to recapture the structures and concerns of everyday life at whatever period of the past. On the one hand is the obvious fact that some things do not change, or only very slightly. People in Oxyrhynchus would have had coughs and colds, sore feet and blistered hands just as we do; and they may well have baked their bread in ways that are still instantly recognizable to us. On the other is the unnerving thought that these people lived in a world so different from ours as to call into question that superficial familiarity and to challenge our ability to understand, let alone empathize with it. My only qualm with this otherwise brilliant book is the slightly too cosy image it offers of ancient Oxyrhynchus and its people. Much more stands between us and making sense of their world than the decipherment of Grenfell and Hunt’s tins of papyri – fascinating and formidable a task as that is.
I'm not a historian, obviously, though there's a strong historical component to my scholarly work, but I fall down very strongly on the "same" side of the "same vs. different" divide; really I must get this book and read it. (It is funny what beneficial effects a good night's sleep can have, this time of the semester is quite brutal but I actually feel myself again this morning, that's good! I've been reading in the tiny scraps of spare time I can muster a very delightful young-adult trilogy that's based in a semi-mythologized version of the ancient classical world, about which more anon; also a really wonderful alternate-history novel; no time to blog 'em now, perhaps later...)
In some cases it is actually Peter Parsons’s elegant and judicious translation that serves to domesticate the strange. In one papyrus letter, Titianos, probably a Christian, writes to his sister about a lucky recovery. “I was gripped for a long while by an illness”, runs the translation, “so that I couldn’t even stagger. When my illness eased, my eye suppurated and I had tachomas and I suffered terribly and in other parts of my body as well so that it nearly came to surgery, but thank God!” It is the word “surgery”, or “operation” in another modern version, that gives this account a particularly familiar ring, with all its connotations of hospitals, anaesthetic, antiseptic and so forth. In the original Greek, the word in question is “tome”. This means “cutting” – of anything from wood to flesh. “Surgery” is a perfectly legitimate translation, though a rather nice way of putting it. “It nearly came to the knife” or “it nearly came to chopping me up” might be a better reflection of ancient medical procedures – as well as a stronger prompt for us to go beyond the comfortable modern analogies.
“Same or different” is a dilemma for any historian who tries to recapture the structures and concerns of everyday life at whatever period of the past. On the one hand is the obvious fact that some things do not change, or only very slightly. People in Oxyrhynchus would have had coughs and colds, sore feet and blistered hands just as we do; and they may well have baked their bread in ways that are still instantly recognizable to us. On the other is the unnerving thought that these people lived in a world so different from ours as to call into question that superficial familiarity and to challenge our ability to understand, let alone empathize with it. My only qualm with this otherwise brilliant book is the slightly too cosy image it offers of ancient Oxyrhynchus and its people. Much more stands between us and making sense of their world than the decipherment of Grenfell and Hunt’s tins of papyri – fascinating and formidable a task as that is.
I'm not a historian, obviously, though there's a strong historical component to my scholarly work, but I fall down very strongly on the "same" side of the "same vs. different" divide; really I must get this book and read it. (It is funny what beneficial effects a good night's sleep can have, this time of the semester is quite brutal but I actually feel myself again this morning, that's good! I've been reading in the tiny scraps of spare time I can muster a very delightful young-adult trilogy that's based in a semi-mythologized version of the ancient classical world, about which more anon; also a really wonderful alternate-history novel; no time to blog 'em now, perhaps later...)
A minor curiosity
for the young-adult-fiction readers among you: I really am totally swimming-obsessed now as well as running-obsessed, I am dreamily (if that adverb can be applied to someone whose thinking happens as if under insane compulsion!) in the grip of future triathlon training that will start casually as soon as I get a bike (in a couple weeks--don't have time now), and in the midst of some internet search I came across this piece by Catherine Gilbert Murdock about the Total Immersion swimming method as applied in the Endless Pool!
These terms will mean nothing if you have not been recently obsessing over triathlon-related swimming (I read one of the Total Immersion books, I found it illuminating but not quite my style--I have found my own swimming guruin any case!), but I was quite delighted (her novels Dairy Queen and The Off Season are on my very, very short list of particularly most favorite young-adult fiction of recent years (well, of fiction generally, really!), in spite of the fact that there is no magic or dragons in them, just a lot of athletic activity--they are really absolutely delightful, I cannot recommend them too highly--the way she handles the first-person voice is exceptional. Maybe she will write a novel about triathlon training, that would make me happy...
These terms will mean nothing if you have not been recently obsessing over triathlon-related swimming (I read one of the Total Immersion books, I found it illuminating but not quite my style--I have found my own swimming guruin any case!), but I was quite delighted (her novels Dairy Queen and The Off Season are on my very, very short list of particularly most favorite young-adult fiction of recent years (well, of fiction generally, really!), in spite of the fact that there is no magic or dragons in them, just a lot of athletic activity--they are really absolutely delightful, I cannot recommend them too highly--the way she handles the first-person voice is exceptional. Maybe she will write a novel about triathlon training, that would make me happy...
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
The Children of Hurin
provides John Crace with irresistible material for his Digested Read:
"Forsooth," he swore. "Henceforth shall I remain a derivative Wagnerian hero and wander mindlessly through the realms of Middle-Earth on a quasi-symbolic quest and, Children of the Eldar, resolve only to talk in sentences of unspeakable leadenness, punctuated by manifold parentheses."
Really of course this is too easy a target, none of this will stop lots of people from reading & greatly enjoying the book...
"Forsooth," he swore. "Henceforth shall I remain a derivative Wagnerian hero and wander mindlessly through the realms of Middle-Earth on a quasi-symbolic quest and, Children of the Eldar, resolve only to talk in sentences of unspeakable leadenness, punctuated by manifold parentheses."
Really of course this is too easy a target, none of this will stop lots of people from reading & greatly enjoying the book...
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Some truly evil giraffes
Michelle Pauli has a very good profile of China Mieville at the Guardian.
(Why have I never heard of Cliff McNish? Must get his books & read them--the others Mieville lists as "top-notch children's fantasy writers" are all favorites of mine...)
(Why have I never heard of Cliff McNish? Must get his books & read them--the others Mieville lists as "top-notch children's fantasy writers" are all favorites of mine...)
Sunday, April 22, 2007
The Stygian council
The first installment of Astral Weeks, Ed Park's monthly science fiction column at the LA Times. Here he reviews new books by Nick Mamatas (I've got that one awaiting my attention, it looks great!) and Brian Aldiss.
In the neighborhood
David Masello has a rather nice essay in the Times about sightings of his neighbor Kurt Vonnegut in the vicinity of the United Nations (sort of a curiously appropriate area for him to have lived).
I've missed the boat on Vonnegut links, there's been a lot of very good stuff around the place, but I must take this moment to say that my favorite Vonnegut novels by far are Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5. I think of both of these novels quite often, and never without also a moment of remembering the person who introduced me to them, my beloved high school boyfriend Anton Segal. Anton was murdered in 1998, almost ten years ago now; he was the first person I really knew well and cared about to die violently by someone else's hand (he has since been joined in this sorry distinction by Natasha Fuentes and Helen Hill, and I hope it will be a very long time indeed--a never-type long time!--before I have to add another name to the list).
I've missed the boat on Vonnegut links, there's been a lot of very good stuff around the place, but I must take this moment to say that my favorite Vonnegut novels by far are Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5. I think of both of these novels quite often, and never without also a moment of remembering the person who introduced me to them, my beloved high school boyfriend Anton Segal. Anton was murdered in 1998, almost ten years ago now; he was the first person I really knew well and cared about to die violently by someone else's hand (he has since been joined in this sorry distinction by Natasha Fuentes and Helen Hill, and I hope it will be a very long time indeed--a never-type long time!--before I have to add another name to the list).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
