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Tuesday 11 May 2010

Review: 'Britannica Latina' by Mark Walker

Along with Peter Jones, whose Learn Ancient Greek and Learn Latin courses (subsequently published in book form) enthralled many Daily & Sunday Telegraph readers some years back, and whose Ancient and Modern column continues to adorn The Spectator, Mark Walker should be declared a national treasure...

Now, Walker gives us Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin, proclaiming via the dust-jacket blurb "It is time for British Latinists who reclaim their heritage." It is, indeed, when we contemplate ignoramus philistines in departments and ministries of education who dismiss Latin and Greek as 'dead' and ancient history as 'elitist' and/or 'irrelevant'.

Barry Baldwin reviews Britannica Latina by Mark Walker here on ReadySteadyBook.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb

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Tuesday 23 March 2010

Thomas Jones on 'Solar'

Ian McEwan's new novel Solar has been embarrassingly over-lauded in the Broadsheet reviews I've read. Thomas Jones, writing in the LRB, is a little more circumspect:

In a New Yorker profile of McEwan last year, Galen Strawson is quoted as saying that ‘Ian is essentially a short-story writer,’ that none of his longer books ‘has the unity of drive that the best novels have’. It’s hard to disagree with this assessment. The disappearance of the daughter in the supermarket at the beginning of The Child in Time (1987), the balloon accident in Enduring Love, the retreat to Dunkirk and the arrival of the wounded at a London hospital in Atonement (2001) are among the most compelling passages of English fiction of the last 25 years. The novels they’re in, however, are schematically structured, with occasionally lurching plot development, and the main themes are loudly hammered home. Solar is no exception (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review

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Monday 22 March 2010

Jeff Bursey reviews Josipovici

Jeff Bursey's review of Gabriel Josipovici’s two short novels, After & Making Mistakes, just went up on The Quarterly Conversation:

Like Beckett’s plays, Gabriel Josipovici’s works fend off resolution; also, his texts have more white space than is found in most novels (mainstream or not), and there’s a great use of dialogue. Great, as in its great compactness, naturalness, and poetry — but also as in a lot. There are few narrative passages in the recent novels Goldberg: Variations (2002) and Everything Passes (2006). The space around the words emphasizes that each line counts, and allows each line to breathe on its own. They have, so to say, sentience. The lulls and repetitions of Josipovici’s prose give readers the opportunity to see how his characters come across while they think, feel, talk, repress, obfuscate, and go about their business (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, gabriel josipovici

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Friday 19 February 2010

Metro on Shields' "Reality Hunger"

I don't normally think of the London freesheet Metro as the place to go to read a decent book review, however I think Ben Felsenburg's dismissal of David Shields Reality Hunger is pretty spot-on here:

Whatever criticisms David Shields will attract for Reality Hunger – and he can expect plenty for a book as divisive as Marmite – no one’s going to accuse him of modesty.

This collection of 617 pensées is subtitled A Manifesto and sets out its stall in grandiose style: ‘Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.’

For some that line will be playfully provocative, for others ridiculous and infuriating; the same goes for all that follows.

Shields draws upon Ezra Pound, Eminem, Proust and Moulin Rouge as if they’re all knocking around one pick’n’mix bag. Wave after wave of quotes and Shields’s wearying pontification work that old saw about the way fiction and non-fiction are blurring into one.

Telly viewers know the concept – it’s called Big Brother. One surprise, though: Reality Hunger might be mistaken for the notebook of a naive undergraduate after a first encounter with Postmodernism 101. Shields is a middle-aged professor.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, literary criticism

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Friday 05 February 2010

Tom McCarthy on Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Via Sponge! (the new name for our friend Lee Rourke's Scarecrow blog) I note that Tom McCarthy has been writing in the LRB about Jean-Philippe Toussaint:

For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’. Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint (more...)

More on this over at 3:AM too.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review, nouveau roman, tom mccarthy

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Tuesday 05 January 2010

Ellis Sharp's 'Dead Iraqis'

Ellis Sharp's blog The Sharp Side used to be one of the most acute and prickly blogs out there (out here!?) in the blogosphere, but either Ellis stopped blogging as much or I stopped paying as much attention as I should have been doing and he, and his blog, fell from the front of my mind. Regardless of that, it seems that Ellis has actually been rather busy...

Over at the New Statesmen Mark Fisher (author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (part of the excellent Zero Books series) -- which I'll review as soon as I see a copy -- and blogger at k-punk) reviews Ellis's new book of short stories, Dead Iraqis:

Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavented spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is "timeless", but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review

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Wednesday 30 September 2009

Coetzee's 'Summertime'

Maurice Blanchot observed that there was a tripartite structure to literature: allegory, myth, symbol. A story is allegoric (always already a great big metaphor), mythic (specific; about what the story says it is about) and symbolic (or, think, subversive; about itself, about itself as a text, about itself as a written artefact; writing, on some level, is always writing about writing). A book like Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the 70s, world-conquering, self-help classic, foregrounds the allegorical aspect so much that it is clearly no longer really a novella about a big bird, but rather fully an attempt to say something (something rather cheesey, for sure) about life's big questions. Most novels emphasise their story and plot -- and, with (Establishment) Literary Fiction, especially the elegance and care with which that story is written. It will speed us to my substantive points if I am allowed to claim that Modernism, with its focus on form, was predominantly interested in the symbolic, the subversive. It is easy to see how criticism itself tends to hone in on one particular of these elements to foreground its own concerns (most book reviews of ELF titles are merely plot synopses with attitude). Where literature leads, criticism follows. This is why great, groundbreaking books teach you how to read and good books remind you how. The best book to teach you how to read Proust's ISOLT is Proust's ISOLT, and the best guide to Joyce's Ulysses is Joyce's Ulysses itself.

Summertime, J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, is a very good book. It is the third in a loose series of books of fictional autobiography following Boyhood and Youth. It is, ostensibly, so clever and playful -- and both these adjectives are particular weak in the face of Coetzee's work -- that whilst unveiling itself it seems it has already, simultaneously, done a very good job of reading itself too. The form of the novel need not detain us for too long. We are presented with a casebook of unfinished texts which themselves are presented as the working documents for a biography of John Coetzee, now deceased. A few fragments of John's notebooks occupy the first chapter, then we have transcripts of interviews between John's would-be biographer and four women and one man who have occupied important positions in John's life. Most of these interviews take the form of written Q and As, but one of the 'interviews' is presented to us, with the occassional interuption, in the form of an extended narrative -- the abstract artist reminding us of just how good at figurative drawing he still is, perhaps? The novel ends with several more fragments from John's notebooks.

Coetzee's metafiction (for want of a better term) has, it would seem, already thought about and answered all the questions most critics are likely to want to ask of it or draw out from it; especially if those critics labour under the misapprehension that this is, indeed, something called 'fictional autobiography'. Coetzee's book is, doubtless, a compelling work of auto-critique, but such critique is not hermetic; it always leaks. Freud's self-analyses tell us more about Freud than he ever knew -- as does his the whole body of his work. Any idea that auto-critique can be complete and whole unto itself falls under the anthropologist's fallacy of objectivity. The scientist always affects the results, simply by asking the questions in the first place. Coetzee, of course, knows this. So, are we really in such dangerous, vertiginous, Dante-esque territory? A lit theory hell where nominal crises arise and set in? Is this meta-auto-critical fake-real / real-fake (auto)(biography)? Well, it is both more simple and more complex than that. This is merely a novel and that is, already, already more than enough. Summertime is always tempting us to misread it as a biography of some kind (transcripts, interviewees, references to real events in J.M. Coetzee's real life, even a jacket cover photo that shows JMC at the age he was when the events we are reading about were taking place). We can enjoy it more, however, and get much more from it, if we remember that this is a novel; if we note that Summertime is very clear to remind us of this simple fact all the way down; and that it is about the very temptation it induces fully to misapprehend it.

Despite what some reviewers have suggested, then, this is not a fictionalised biography of John Coetzee because the texts we read are not yet worked up to the standard that biography (even fictionalised biography) demands. For example, when speaking to his interviewees, our would-be biographer says that he will change aspects of the interview if his interviewees are not happy with any part of what he has written; often, they are not happy, and call for changes to the text. These are, then, fictionalised transcripts presented as unfinished. This, then, isn't just J.M. Coetzee's fictionalised autobiography of his life during the 70s in South Africa when he was writing some of his most important work. It isn't just this because this is a novel and JMC knows, as a novelist, that some of all its levels of meaning, despite his care, will always evade him. Indeed, what makes Summertime such a very good book is that it is precisely that lesson that is emphasised in a careful reading of it. Despite how knowing a writer JMC is and despite how knowing he makes us feel and helps us be (and reminds us we should be in general as readers far more attentive than we habitually are) something remains outside of his grasp. Texts, like people, can never be wholly self-aware or self-available nor can they ever be fully appropriated. Therapists, recall, can be nutters too!

Indeed, the way to read Summertime I think is to see how it tempts (aware, of course, of the Freudian overtones of the word) a particular response (the response we've seen in many reviews, the response to it as fictional autobiography) which actually, over the piece, it fully counsels against. Summertime requires a creative, novelistic reading not a reductive, (pseudo-)biographical reading; indeed, is about such a reading. On a quick glance, it looks like this fragmentary 'thing' is something that the reader is being asked to bring together into a unitary whole (to finish the unfinished biographical fragments and turn the pieces into a whole biography). But that is the most dangerous misreading of them all. And that is the temptation that this particular novel (and, indeed, the Novel -- Literature as a whole, as a fragmentary history) warns us fully away from. This is what Summertime is about.

The last chapter of the book containing yet more of John's notebook entries evidences this most clearly. JMC gives us five short fragments of John's unfinished notebook materials that act as a coda to the novel we've just read. The temptation here -- and I think JMC is tempting us, and I'm not sure if this may actually be a weakening in his resolve, if he really does want to help orientate us with a Key to All Mythologies -- is to see each of these fragments as representing each of the major themes of the novel, perhaps even the themes of JMC's life itself. But life doesn't have 'themes' and only an overly simplistic reading of a novel thinks that listing a work's themes somehow 'gets it down'. We have, then, in the fragments, the father/son relationship, John's education, his relationship with women, with writing , with death (and this is the order in which they appear, tempting us to think about such themes hierarchically). But we do not, with this, capture all that the novel is about. The biggest temptation -- to return to Blanchot's formula -- is to read this novel as myth. To think that any novel can ever be read by reducing it to its themes; to think a novel is about just what it is ostensibly about, and not to see that as a possibly very conscious mis-steer, or a very easy way of reducing it to -- following Blanchot -- just one third of all it could be on a more sympathetic reading. It is not only that something always remains after we've reduced a novel to its themes -- which is a commonplace; Moby-Dick, we all know, is not just a novel about a monomaniac -- but to say that we've barely begun even to focus on what it is about even after iterating a whole list of themes, presenting a synopsis, deconstructing its ambiguities, etc.. JMC tempts us to do so, but the whole novel works to show that it would be foolish to succumb. Summertime is about the very misreadings which have subsequently happened to it. It is an ambiguous schooling in the ambiguous nature of writing (and reading) – an ambiguity that it sometimes looks as if JMC is seeking to control, but which the whole novel simultaneously shows is always one step ahead of both him and us, the readers.

To see Summertime as a failed or veiled (auto)biography, then, is precisely to fail to read it as a novel. JMC has foregrounded the Real -- it is about John Coetzee who has written novels called what JMC's novels are called and who shares many verifiable life events with JMC -- only to show the Real is never congruent with the Truth. It is not then of much interest to disentangle how much of JMC's actual biography inheres in his latest work. Rather, we should see that Summertime perpetually problematises a fixed point from which to orientate oneself about anything -- particulary about reading the Novel and particularly about reading this particularly fine example of the modern novel by one of its best practitioners.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review

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Monday 28 September 2009

Durie on Robinson

In the latest review here on ReadySteadyBook, Robin Durie reviews Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson:

I was intrigued by Kim Stanley Robinson's attack on the conservatism of the Booker prize, its tendency to favour historical fiction whilst overlooking science fiction, and his claim that science fiction at its best explores the new, for a number of reasons. First, I think the general thrust of his critique is well justified. Second, over the last 12 months I have consciously begun reading a fair bit of science fiction (a genre I had more or less ignored since my teenage years). And, third, when I read the article, I was in the midst of reading Robinson’s new novel, Galileo's Dream.

Whilst Robinson was making specific claims about the UK SF scene, the timing of his intervention nevertheless prompted the question of how his own book measures up to the criteria of his critique. The book -- which, at nearly 600 large scale pages, shares a common predicament with the tendency of both historical fiction and SF to indulge in length, often, it seems, for its own sake -- has a structure which has felt forced and not entirely successful to most reviewers. In "parallel" stories (how and why they are not parallel will prove to be significant), Robinson depicts Galileo more or less biographically, as his astronomical observations and interpretations inexorably lead him into conflict with the Catholic church; whilst, at the same time, Galileo makes a series of journeys to the moons of Jupiter, at a time some 3000 years in the future, where the descendants of humanity are about to encounter their first alien species. The threat would have been that, by this plot device, Robinson might risk undermining the scientific achievements of Galileo. Whilst for much of the book, the "parallel" stories do sit uncomfortably alongside one another, by its conclusion, Robinson's gamble reaps a very rich reward (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb

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Monday 21 September 2009

'Cities' by Robert Kelly

From Steven Fama's blog the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica (don't blame me for the daft name!):

... despite, or maybe because of it ambiguous character given its prose, and somewhat occult status, Cities – a most fantastic work by Robert Kelly – ought to be celebrated as poetry, and more widely read. And thus the mission here today, in the glade: to show and tell a bit about Cities and its prose poetry, and perhaps encourage some to go out a find it (more...)

Steven suggests that Robert's Cities is hard to find -- the limited edition is, but the piece was reprinted in A Transparent Tree which should be a little easier to get your hands on.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, poetry

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Thursday 10 September 2009

Review of new Josipovici

The Jewish Chronicle offers the first review of After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici's two new novels in one (very handsome) volume (via This Space):

Dissatisfaction is a peculiarly middle-class indulgence. A life that from the outside appears perfect — moderate success, sufficient income, a loving family — can from feel from within claustrophobic and merely adequate, plagued by thoughts of the successes unachieved, the ones that got away, and a nagging lack of purpose.

Gabriel Josipovici’s two new novellas — each barely over 130 pages and issued together under one, elegant cover — both deal with this quiet despair of the bourgeoisie (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, gabriel josipovici

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Tuesday 07 April 2009

Marina Hyde's Celebrity

My mini-review of Marina Hyde's Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy over on The Book Depository:

It is hardly original suggesting that celebrity -- and our obsession with it -- is absurd, but Marina Hyde's excellent book also fully debunks the idea that it is harmless. Hanging our collective hopes on the do-gooding activities of entertainers is not only childish and ridiculous it is, Hyde argues, dangerous.

For sure, celebrity-worship has been around for a long time, but in our media-saturated age the easiest copy to write and publish normally involves Someone Famous doing Something (anything!). Look at any tabloid "news"paper -- news is now simply what A. N. Actor has recently got up to, however dull or tawdry. Tragically, what now passes for more substantive copy is when Someone Famous does Something for Charity. But obscenely overpaid mannequins lecturing us to cough-up our hard-earned on their personal hobby-horse is no way to solve the world's problems.

Is there anything more senseless then Sharon Stone attending the World Economic Forum or Jude Law lecturing us about the Taliban? Hyde doesn't think so. Ginger Spice may well be a goodwill ambassador, but all that shows is that even the UN has bought into our collective inanity and fawning in the face of fame.

So, what is the solution? Hyde doesn't really offer one, but the first step might be simply to laugh at the pomposity of the performing monkeys we've insanely begun to worship. Hyde's book is as good a place as any to start our much-needed celebrity detox!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, the book depository

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Friday 27 March 2009

House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism

I review William D. Cohan's House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism over on The Book Depository:

In normal economic times the fall of Bear Stearns, founded as an equity trading house in 1923 and one of the largest global investment banks prior to its sudden collapse in March 2008, would be a major story. But, then, Lehman Brothers disintegrated, Merrill Lynch was sold for a pittance, and the world's banking system suddenly realised that virtual assets were worth virtually nothing and all but came to a standstill. After all that Bear Stearns's story didn't seem quite so exceptional or noteworthy. However, the story of this 85-year-old bank, securities trader and brokerage firm is worth hearing and is grippingly told by William D. Cohan who concentrates his attention on three wild and whacky bank bosses: Cy Lewis, Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne. The latter, Cayne, is described as having "world-champion-level bridge skills". His machismo and his gambling are emblematic of a system that from the outside seems impenetrably complicated but is, in truth, run by men of limited intelligence and unlimited avarice.

Cohan's book is subtitled How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism, but it is precisely that global, historically-situated, man-made, overturnable social system -- capitalism -- that he never defines or critiques. This is a thrilling narrative in parts but, like so many books about the credit crunch it is curiously incurious about the system that requires bankers to get up to their creative accounting in the first place. Certainly, the world financial meltdown came about because of perverse and ridiculous derivatives, collateralized debt, unrestrained mortgages and also because -- as Cohan shows clearly -- of the negligence, greed and criminality of individual bankers, but behind all of that is a social system that has always been blind to human need and based on the extraction and circulation of value. Wall Street's gamblers haven't broken that system, but they have broken the real economy where real people live and work. And when real people realise that Wall Street gamblers are merely an epiphenomenon of a system that is intrinsically inimical to their needs then it might be them and not a bunch of greedy, overpaid, blue-eyed white men who really break capitalism. For good.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, the book depository

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Monday 02 March 2009

Monti on Énard's Zone

François Monti discusses Mathias Énard's 517-page, one-sentence novel, Zone, in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review

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Monday 26 January 2009

n+1 book reviews

n+1 magazinehave a new book review supplement, N1BR, which will "publish reviews of new literature every other month."

First issue includes: Neil Gross's Richard Rorty by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Marilynne Robinson by Charles Petersen and Tony Judt by Saul Austerlitz.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, internet

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Thursday 22 January 2009

Colm Tóibín on Edward Carpenter

Via the LRB, Colm Tóibín reviews Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham:

In 1897 Edward Carpenter, among others, had joined a small group outside the Spanish Embassy in London to protest against the treatment of the anarchists in Barcelona. Carpenter wrote the preface for a leaflet called ‘Revival of the Inquisition’, which argued, perhaps incorrectly, that the bomb they were accused of throwing was in fact thrown by an agent provocateur...

Carpenter was born in 1844 and attended Cambridge, where he took orders and had sexual dreams about his fellow students. Having left Cambridge, unhappy with its stuffiness, he began to give lectures to working men and women in the North of England. Eventually he moved to Sheffield where, having inherited capital on the death of his father, he built a house, Millthorpe Cottage, near the village of Holmesfield, where he lived for most of the rest of his life (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, politics

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Wednesday 21 January 2009

A Book of Silence

Hilary Ely reviews A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland:

I don’t think I have ever read a book quite like this one, and it is just possible that it may change my life. I rather hope it will, even if in the small way of opening my mind to the possibilities of silence. After reading this book, I shall no longer ever be afraid of silence, or confuse it with loneliness and abandonment. This book makes an amazing case for seeking it out, and drawing on its power, though I do not think I am strong enough to take it to the ultimate conclusion (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review

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Tuesday 13 January 2009

Richard Lourie on H.G. Adler

Richard Lourie reviews The Journey by H.G. Adler (translated by Peter Filkins):

I’ve read a lot of books, but nothing quite like this one. An attempt to use the instruments of 20th-century literature to depict the dislocations of spirit and consciousness caused by the genocide against the Jews, its style could be called Holocaust modernism, an improbable formulation if ever there was one.

H.G. Adler’s fate was as unusual as his art. Born in Prague in 1910, he failed to flee before the Nazi takeover and ended up in Theresienstadt, where, as he later wrote in a monograph about the “showcase” camp, “illusion flourished wildly, and hope, only mildly dampened by anxiety, would eclipse everything that was hidden under an impenetrable haze.” Adler spent two and a half years there with his family. Later, in Auschwitz, his wife decided to accompany her mother to the gas chambers so she wouldn’t have to die alone. In all, Adler lost 18 members of his family, including his own mother and father (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review

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Tuesday 13 January 2009

The Post Office Girl

Tom Cunliffe reviews Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl:

Many thanks to Sort Of Books for publishing yet another posthumous work by Stefan Zweig - even if as in the case of The Post Office Girl, Zweig's intentions for the book were somewhat unclear. In an Afterword, the translator, William Deresiewicz, points out that Zweig "nibbled away at The Post Office Girl for years... and given that he chose his own time of death (by suicide)... it seems clear that he never managed to hammer the novel into a shape that satisfied him. Despite its less than perfect state however, we can be grateful for substantial segments of "classic Zweig". In some ways, it could be seen as a short story (although nearly 250 pages long) and that would allow us to be tolerant of its less than satisfactory ending. We could then perhaps put its incompleteness down to modernism, or to an attempt by the author to create a deliberate literary enigma (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Monday 22 December 2008

Paul Griffiths' let me tell you

Good to see that two very positive reviews of RSB-contributor Paul Griffiths' let me tell you have appeared recently:

At first sight, Paul Griffiths’s exceptional novel might be recognized as an attempt to draw the profile of the woman Shakespeare obscured, and that would not be wrong, but it is not why the book is exceptional. Ophelia has been reimagined before...yet never with such restraint, or, more precisely, constraint....[The] formal restriction still enables Ophelia to tell a story rich in detail and expression, taking us back to her happy childhood with a distant, speech-making father, to the birth of her beloved brother and to the glowing presence of a nameless maid who comes from over "the cold green mountain"; a radiance soon gone. The repetitions of words and familiar phrases powerfully evoke what remains uncertain in Ophelia’s life outside the play, what these words alone will never quite say....The effects of necessary variation and repetition kindle both the freedom of another life and the fire that burns it away.
(Stephen Mitchelmore, Times Literary Supplement, 19/26 December 2008)

Paul Griffiths's book is a more profound achievement [than Eunoia by Christian Bök]... Griffiths pulls off some fine tricks, and shows how much of [Ophelia’s] speech can be chopped up and made to sound like Beckett, or the Beatles (she quotes Love Me Do verbatim), or Oscar Wilde. There are the rhythms of recognisable nursery rhymes throughout....[T]his is a vital book, as much for musicians as for literary theorists. From Griffiths, who is perhaps best known as an invaluable guide to contemporary music, this is a composition in its own right, to listen to along with Berio’s Sinfonia with its spliced quotations from Mahler and Beckett, or John Cage’s Dadaist treatment of Finnegans Wake. For feminist critics, ironies abound: here is Ophelia’s story, at last, but with words that a man wrote for her being hacked about by another man. But then, somebody had to do it (the book does make you feel this way).
(Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2008)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb

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Friday 14 November 2008

More on Zadie's Paths

Anthony Cummins has written to me responding to the recent discusion around here on Zadie Smith. With his permission, I reproduce Anthony's email to me below:

Excuse the ramble which follows, but it's fascinating to follow the cackhanded response to Zadie Smith's superb NYRB essay via ReadySteadyBook. Via Monk's House I note: "And maybe Smith in quarreling with Netherland is quarreling in part with James Wood, from whom she has famously diverged before, and who ecstatically reviewed O'Neill in the pages of The New Yorker."

I think this is the key -- not a side issue -- in understanding what Smith's on about: "Lyrical Realism" -- an odd term she must repeat so much only because of Wood's "hysterical realism" tag; the emphasis on Flaubert, the darling of How Fiction Works; the fact that Wood effectively made the reputation of Netherland; HFW vs DFW. The NYRB already reviewed Netherland, too, when Alan Hollinghurst wrote about it the other month: how often does that happen? I reckon it's a more calculated attack on Wood and How Fiction Works than people seem to have realised.

Did you catch this interview with Robert Silvers? "'[Zadie's article is] an ambitious essay, a daring and original piece by a brilliant mind,' Silvers said. In it, she dismantles the status quo in the form of a review of two new novels - Netherland and Remainder - that she holds up as representing where the novel's been and where it's going. 'Some people will be slightly shaken,' Silvers said, with delight." Among them James Wood? It's quite curious since John Banville's moderate piece on HFW immediately precedes Smith's essay. I suspect it has something to do with heralding Smith's arrival as a Wood-status critic pre-Fail Better.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, establishment_lit_fiction, literary criticism, rsb

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Monday 10 November 2008

Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic

Via Steve, Tadzio Koelb's Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic. The title rather says it all, I think.

The scope of Suite Française, had it been finished, would certainly have been remarkable, taking in the whole of the occupation, with dozens of characters, both French and German, and a storyline featuring violent murders, daring escapes, forbidden loves and more. It is not finished, however, and lasting art requires more than broad scope. Several French novels about the war have been celebrated by francophone readers but met with indifference in the English-speaking world, for example The Last of the Just by André Shwartz-Bart, a magisterial work of art and probably the best work of fiction ever written about the Shoah. Given the relative differences in popular response, we must wonder whether Suite Française would have been so favourably received in the UK had it not been for the incredible circumstances of the book’s composition, and the horrors that left it unfinished (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review

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Friday 31 October 2008

Zadie Smith on McCarthy and O'Neill

Zadie Smith, writing a piece in the NYRB entitled Two Paths for the Novel about Netherland by Joseph O’Neill and Remainder by Tom McCarthy, seems to be groping her way to an understanding of Establishment Literary Fiction. This is very interesting:

From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal — indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is, in part, a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.

These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done — in a sense that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait (more...)

"It seems perfectly done — in a sense that's the problem." Yes! Exactly.

 

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, establishment_lit_fiction, literary criticism

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Wednesday 22 October 2008

Self on Hofmann's Lichtenberg

John Self on Gert Hofmann's Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (which was reviewed here on ReadySteadyBook a couple of years back):

Poet and translator Michael Hofmann has been cited before on this blog as a reliable source of reading - he wouldn’t waste his time, so I won’t be wasting mine - but I wondered if his judgement might be clouded when it comes to his father. Gert Hofmann has had his final three novels translated by his son: this, published in 1994 following Hofmann’s early death at the age of 62, was the last. Until now we’ve had to rely on an (admittedly handsome) US edition from New Directions. This month, the book is finally published in the UK by CB Editions.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, book review, rsb

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Thursday 02 October 2008

Gently Read Literature

Lots of new and interesting stuff up at Gently Read Literature, but I'm not sure the blog format really works that well with what they are doing. A good, old-fashioned website would be a better way to go, I think.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, poetry

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Tuesday 30 September 2008

Nick Murray on James Hawes's Kafka

Talking about The JC.com, Nicholas Murray writes a brief demolition in its pages of James Hawes' recent study, Excavating Kafka. Hawes condemns Kakfa scholarship for creating and cultivating "the K. myth" of a saintly, tortured, unknown artist. He quite rightly calls this a nonsense and uses... Kafka scholarship to prove his point! So, Murray (author of a recent Kafka biography himself) nails the biggest absurdity of the book in his review: "it is Hawes's mission to remind us that he liked upmarket porn, consorted with prostitutes, and treated his women rather badly, none of which will be news to anyone who has any basic knowledge of Kafka derived from recent biography."

But Hawes' book isn't all bad. Most Kafka scholarship does have something of an awed tone towards its subject and Hawes is refreshingly cross about this. He seems to dislike Kafka the man as much as he values his work, and he wishes to get the man full square out of the way so that readers can concentrate on his writing free of biographical distractions. But Hawes has created new biographical distractions of his own (his reaction to Kafka's "porn stash" -- omigosh, heterosexual man likes pictures of noody ladies shock! -- is adolescent and priggish in the extreme) and he offers little in the way of new, critical comment on the work. For all that, I enjoyed Excavating Kafka. It is punchy and impassioned and written with some verve, but Kafka and his work remain just as enigmatic after reading Hawes' essay as they do before you begin. And that is only right.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, franz kafka, internet

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Wednesday 24 September 2008

Mark Sarvas on Roth's Indignation

Mark Sarvas reviews Philip Roth's Indignation:

An uncharitable interpretation would suggest that Roth is either unaware he's repeating himself or doesn't mind (or care). He has, after all, given his normally recursive tendencies an unfettered hand in his last few books: From the conclusion of the Zuckerman saga in Exit Ghost to the conclusion of the saga of the body in Everyman to the mining, once again, of his childhood in The Plot Against America, Roth has scarcely stepped away from himself. But perhaps the counterfactual structure of The Plot Against America suggests a more charitable reading of Indignation as something of an anti-history itself. The self-righteous, unyielding Marcus Messner can stand in for any number of earlier Roth heroes, and perhaps Indignation -- the song will have a chilling relevance for Marcus -- is meant to be read as a consideration of what might have happened had Portnoy or Zuckerman or Sabbath (or Roth) not had their hour upon the stage. This seems in keeping with Indignation's stated theme, adumbrated in The Plot Against America: namely the great reverberations of seemingly insignificant choices. Roth, it seems, has discovered chaos theory, but, having done so, delivers a disappointingly heavy-handed treatment of his material.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Wednesday 24 September 2008

Ian Sinclair on Berger's From A to X

Via A Practical Policy, I note Ian Sinclair reviewing John Berger's From A to X:

Ultimately, though, this is a disappointing and strangely unmoving read. The limits of the novel’s unusual structure are often painfully clear - there is a complete lack of narrative tension and regular, awkward passages that are clearly written for the reader’s benefit, rather than the intimate thoughts of separated loved ones.

In addition, A’ida’s letters, which are supposed to be profound musings on life, longing and resistance, often come across as embarrassingly pretentious waffle (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Wednesday 17 September 2008

Thomas Glavinic's Night Work

Steve is at it again: excellent review of Thomas Glavinic's Night Work over at This Space.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Thursday 28 August 2008

Scarred Hearts by Max Blecher

My review of Scarred Hearts by Max Blecher (translated by Henry Howard) is up on the Independent's website today. The Indy sub's header ("a lost classic that is an uneven mix of Thomas Mann and Mills & Boon") is a more than fair summation of a book I really wanted to love, but thought was pretty dreadful:

In recent years, the work of Joseph Roth, Antal Szerb, Leonid Tsypkin and Stefan Zweig has been rediscovered, treating readers to some delightful "lost classics". Each of these minor Mitteleuropean writers has a unique voice to be treasured, despite the slightness of some of their work and the overindulgence of some critics. Max Blecher's Scarred Hearts comes to us packaged as just such a lost classic. It was his second and last novel (in 1937), and Paul Bailey's introduction tells us that Blecher's "elegant style" was compared to that of Kafka and Rilke. Bailey also calls the novel a "masterpiece"...

[Actually, the novel is] a weak pastiche of Mann's The Magic Mountain. Sadly, this is a lost classic that did not need to be found (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review

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Monday 04 August 2008

Dan Green reviews James Wood

The latest issue of Open Letters Monthly is online featuring an excellent review of James Wood's How Fiction Works from Dan Green:

Ultimately the most disconcerting thing about How Fiction Works, and about James Wood’s criticism in general, is that while Wood on the one hand expresses near-reverence for the virtues of fiction, the terms in which he judges the value of fiction as a literary form implicitly disparages it. He doesn’t want to let fiction be fiction. Instead, he asks that it provide some combination of psychological analysis, metaphysics, and moral instruction, and assumes that novelists are in some way qualified to offer these services. He abjures them to avoid “aestheticism” (too much art) and to instead be respectful of “life.”

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Thursday 24 July 2008

Diary Of A Blood Donor review

I have a review of Diary Of A Blood Donor by Mati Unt (translated by Ants Eert) in the Independent today:

Mati Unt (1944-2005) was not only a well-known novelist in Estonia; he brought avant-garde theatre to the post-Soviet state. His progressive credentials are writ large in Diary of a Blood Donor, a curious and oblique retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Only in the latter stages of Unt's surreal book does it become clear that Stoker's myth is being reworked. All his characters are here (Mina is Minni, Lucy is Lussi, Jonathan is Joonatan), and Unt even uses something of the novel's form, a mixture of diaries, memoirs and letters. They are joined by Lydia Koidula (1843-86) the premier Estonian nationalist poet: Lydia of the Dawn, a real writer, haunts the novel, embodying the spirit of Unt's homeland (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, personal

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Wednesday 23 July 2008

Lewis on Claro's Madman

The latest book review, here on ReadySteadyBook, is Sophie's review of Madman Bovary by Christophe Claro (congratulations, too, to Ms Lewis, for the recent publication of her translation of Marcel Aymé's Beautiful Image, which we'll have more to say about soon):

In this literary hijack, Claro infiltrates a classic text and takes the controls. Or does the novel submit willingly?

Our narrator, unnamed until he adopts this twisted title, is reeling from his lover Estée’s departure. He retreats to bed, where for solace he reaches for the nearest novel: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He will cure himself of his hopeless attachment by a non-stop re-reading, ‘like a derailed train’. A few pages into Madman Bovary’s journey, ‘derailed’ looks like a serious understatement (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb

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Monday 21 July 2008

Hass on Stanlis on Frost

Robert Bernard Hass reviews Peter Stanlis's Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher (via Books, Inq.):

On Robert Frost’s 85th birthday, Henry Holt and Company, Frost’s lifelong publisher, threw a party in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and invited the eminent critic Lionel Trilling to deliver the keynote address. Widely regarded at the time as the champion of high modernist culture, Trilling stunned Frost’s friends and supporters by confessing that he had long disregarded Frost as a purveyor of rural pieties and had only recently begun to admire him for the “Sophoclean” horror he saw in the poems. "I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet," he announced. "The universe he conceives of is a terrifying universe." In the wake of the controversy his address instigated, Trilling sent a letter to Frost apologizing for any discomfort his remarks had caused. "Not distressed at all," Frost wrote back. "You made my birthday party a surprise party." Frost then concluded his letter with a sentence that would prove prophetic: "No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down" (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, poetry

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Monday 21 July 2008

Skolkin-Smith on Ann Quin

I should've mentioned last week (especially for those who read the site via RSS) that I recently posted Leora Skolkin-Smith's wonderful review of Passages by Ann Quin on the site:

As one reads Ann Quin's Passages a kind of language serum is injected into the system is a potent as any intoxicant. The end result is akin to an experience of literary drunkenness. I simply stopped caring that I didn't know who Quin meant when she wrote “I” ,“She” or “He”. And, although I was perpetually confused as to what the emotional storms her narrators were experiencing were all about, I was immersed and too “drunk” on her language to care. The concrete, literal reference points stopped having meaning. I was content to simply luxuriate in Quin's emotional pool of words and allusions, of poetry (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb

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Monday 21 July 2008

B.S. Johnson again, but this time with pictures!

Another review of B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, but this time from Caustic Cover Critic so, you know, you get pictures of the box too!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Thursday 17 July 2008

Adorno and Heidegger

An investigation of the relation between the philosophical thought of Adorno and Heidegger (via continental philosophy):

The editors write, “there is much to be gained from working through and reassessing the differences that have kept these two thinkers’ works quarantined from each other for more than seven decades.” The book is, without a doubt, an important contribution to the field. However, the range of articles would have benefited from a more detailed introduction indicating the contents and interrelation of the various contributions (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, philosophy

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Tuesday 15 July 2008

Simon Appleby’s review of War plc

Neat wee review of War plc: The Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary over on the bookgeeks blog:

If the Reagan / Thatcher era of the 80s got us accustomed to one paramount concept, it was that of privatisation - outsourcing, selling on, hiving off - and very few things were exempt, from health-care to education, personnel to transport. We became used to the involvement of private companies in what was previously seen the business of the state, and Stephen Armstrong’s compelling book documents the logical extension of that ethos in to the privatisation of war and armed protection, enabled by the end of the Cold War and the resulting ‘peace dividend’ that made for much smaller national armed forces.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Thursday 10 July 2008

Dispatches from America's Class War

Dave Pollard reviews Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus (via wood s lot):

My friend Joe Bageant's book Deer Hunting With Jesus explains through personal stories his brutal assessment of just how strong the class system in the US really is, why the classes are and always have been at war, and why that plays perfectly into the hands of the right-wing political and economic interests there. These are stories about the people Joe grew up with and calls friends, and to write about their lives so bluntly and candidly is an act of incredible courage and honesty.

This is a society where poverty and illness are stigmatized as symptoms of laziness, ignorance and self-neglect, a society built on two-way class vs class fear of the unknown and misunderstood. The principal determinant of one's class in America, and the hermetic worldview that comes with it, is education.

More than anything, Deer Hunting With Jesus is a plea to those of progressive inclination to meet with their working-class peers, at a grass-roots level, to understand how they live, how they think, and why they think that way, and to find, as hard as it will be to do so, common cause with them against the corporatist exploiters and their right-wing political and religious handmaidens, and common cause for universal health care, quality education for all, a fair pension and a decent wage for a day's work -- the end of the "dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure".

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, internet, politics

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Monday 07 July 2008

Anderson on Baker's Human Smoke

whoeverfightsmonsters brings my attention to the "final words from Sam Anderson’s online review of Human Smoke in the New York Magazine":

To dismiss Baker’s project as a failed work based on the traditional criteria of history writing, however, is to misunderstand its actual purpose and power—and also to underestimate the good sense of the average reader. No one is likely to mistake Human Smoke for a comprehensive scholarly history of the war. It’s an auto-didact’s record of his own obsessive, subjective research. It devotes generous airtime to characters who tend to get excluded from popular history (secretaries, pacifist students, journalists), excavates great lost quotes ('What is the difference between throwing 500 babies into a fire and throwing fire from aeroplanes on 500 babies? There is none'), and powerfully questions canonical events based on carefully identified sources. As in all of Baker’s work, the strength of Human Smoke comes from the defamiliarizing charge it brings to a familiar subject. Its unorthodox form allows it to capture, with brutal efficiency, the daily texture of the war—the suffering, the confusion on the ground, the strike among Viennese mail carriers from the stress of delivering too many death letters. Baker doesn’t hide his omissions or his anecdotes’ lack of context—in fact, each vignette is surrounded by generous white space, so the lacunae are a constant visible presence in the book. It’s the kind of project that encourages, rather than closes off, further reading. Its texture is deeply convincing, and a much stronger message of peace than mere argument could ever muster.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, politics

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Monday 07 July 2008

Dai Vaughan on Anna Kavan

The latest book review, here on ReadySteadyBook, is Dai Vaughan's wonderful essay on Anna Kavan's Guilty:

Rhys Davies, one of Anna Kavan’s few close friends, wrote an introduction for Julia and the Bazooka (1970), a posthumous collection of her stories linked by their common allusion to her heroin habit. In it he describes a meal taken with her at the Café Royal during which she developed an inexplicable revulsion for one of the waiters, and his surprise when later he found this episode recounted in a story (The Summons in Asylum Piece [1940]) in that manner full of foreboding which, for want of a better word, people are inclined to call Kafkaesque. Having myself already come across that story, I experienced the converse of Davies’s reaction: surprise that such a sinister incident could have been experienced, by someone else, as so everyday, so innocuous (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review, rsb

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Saturday 05 July 2008

Figes's Journey to Nowhere reviewed

My review of Eva Figes' Journey To Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land is in the Telegraph today.

The review begins:

Eva Figes wrote Journey to Nowhere as a grandmother. Her head was "full of stories about the past" that were forced to the surface by the impertinent questions of her grandchildren, whose function, she suggests, is to draw such forgotten, forbidden tales into the light.

So, here is a memoir of Edith, the orphan housemaid of Figes's childhood, coupled with a polemic against Israel.

Although herself a secular Jew, Figes shares the view held by some of the ultra-Orthodox that the Jewish state should never have been created: "I do not think there was ever a time when I did not think that the creation of Israel was a historic mistake."

All nation states have founding myths, stories about the past that need unearthing and investigating, but the idea that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land" was particularly questionable (more...)

Tomorrow, I have two very small (160 word) "At a Glance" reviews in the Sunday Times. Sadly, I kinda hated both the books I was asked to comment on. David James Smith's One Morning In Sarajevo was scrappy and The Book of Dead Philosophers no more than a miscellany. I was hugely disappointed by the latter as I'm normally a pretty big fan of author Simon Critchley.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review

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Wednesday 02 July 2008

Henwood on Klein

Doug Henwood reviews Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine:

The Shock Doctrine is organized around a conceit: “shock” and its cousin “disaster” explain the political economy of the last several decades. One ur-figure is Dr. Ewen Cameron, a ghoulish psychiatrist who worked under contract with the CIA during the 1950s, devising methods to extract information and remake personalities through the use of drugs and torture. His information-extraction techniques became the templates for Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and the personality renovation became the psycho-political template for the neoliberal restructuring of much of the globe. And the other ur-figure is Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist who wrote the playbook for the policy innovations themselves. The two came together in Chile, via Gen. Augusto Pinochet, when a whole society was remade, in no small part through literal torture techniques, in accordance with the Chicago School’s radical free-market dogma. Modern capitalism, says Klein, was born in the Southern Cone, and Pinochet was its midwife.

[...] Clearly, there’s some truth here, but the list of instances is so varied that they don’t always merit a single theory. Even if you limit the theory to the idea that there’s nothing “free” about the free market, it’s strange to see that notion presented as the revelation of a secret history. What is called the “free market” has always been inseparable from state coercion; there was never anything spontaneous about it at all. This has been true at least since the enclosure movement in England privatized previously common lands starting in the sixteenth century, give or take a century or two. In more modern times, the role of U.S. imperial power in promoting the so-called free market has long been a central theme of Noam Chomsky, a writer who doesn’t lack for readers.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, politics

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Friday 27 June 2008

The Story of a Marriage review

My review of Andrew Sean Greer's highly-praised, certainly proficient, but in fact mawkish tapestry of cliché, The Story of a Marriage, can be read in the Independent newspaper today.

My review begins:

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs." So begins Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, set in 1953 at the height of McCarthyite anti-communism. This is also the year in which cracks begin to appear in the marriage at the centre of Andrew Sean Greer's accomplished and humane domestic drama. An old pal of Pearlie Cook's husband unexpectedly turns up, announcing: "'Hello, ma'am, I hope you can help me.' With those ordinary words, everything would change" (more).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, personal

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Thursday 26 June 2008

The Unfortunates reviewed

A new review of an old classic: Thomas McGonigle takes a look at B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates ("the British author's experimental novel is made up of sections that can be changed at random so that no two readings are the same).

McGonigle's review begins:

The writer B.S. Johnson was one of a handful of modern authors -- among others, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, Zulfikar Ghose -- who extended the range of the English novel by moving beyond the innovations of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Johnson was trivialized by a ferociously traditional British literary establishment wedded to the conventional realistic novel. He committed suicide in 1973, but thanks to his very loyal readers, his novels continue to be reprinted because they are so deeply human, formally innovative and pay microscopic attention to detail.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review, internet

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