Here is a perfect introduction to Jimmy Joyce – very short (91 pages) and because it was written in 1971 totally free of the clogged infarcted mandari Here is a perfect introduction to Jimmy Joyce – very short (91 pages) and because it was written in 1971 totally free of the clogged infarcted mandarin language that wrecks so much writing about JJ (and everyone else) since the 1980s. Unfortunately it’s out of print.
I was always amazed by JJ’s scorched-earth policy towards writing – one single short story collection; one single conventional(ish) autobiographical novel; one play; one exploded-multiverse reinvention of the novel; and one final work which leaves the English language behind completely. What JJ would have done next if he hadn’t been so remiss as to die at the age of 59 is beyond our tiny imaginations.
I myself am not so much of a Joyce fan, really, I’m a Ulysses fan. I think Finnegans Wake is unreadable. JJ in his madness took 17 years to write it, that’s 17 wasted years for me, falling down a rabbithole he himself made, entranced as he fell like Alice. It was a grossly self-regarding experiment. As for the other stuff, Dubliners is excellent but oh so miserable (Gross says “the prose, for all its artfulness, tends to level off into an even drone”) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is tiresome (except for the hellfire sermons) and pompous, or I thought so when I read it many years ago, I should give it another go. (Gross says “The portrait of the artist turns out to be the dissection of a second-rate aesthete”.)
But all introductions to great authors should be like this – short, sweet, pungent.
I think this is the book written by the oldest author I ever read – Scott Donaldson was born in 1928 and this was published in 2014, so he was 86 whenI think this is the book written by the oldest author I ever read – Scott Donaldson was born in 1928 and this was published in 2014, so he was 86 when it came out. He was the biographer of various writers including Hemingway and Fitzgerald and John Cheever – the last one got him into trouble and nearly into court, it’s a sorry story. He proposed a biography to Cheever’s widow 6 months after his death and at first everything was happy and welcoming but then the Cheever family realised he was the competition as they were putting together their own memoirs and volumes of journals and letters, why give it away for free if you can get paid for it. It all turned quite ugly. After 6 years the biography came out (John Cheever : A Biography, 1988) and 20 years later was flattened by Blake Bailey’s massive Cheever : A Life (how do they come up with these titles?). I liked his rueful ponderings on being so thoroughly relegated, and his list of “Mistakes” he made in so successfully turning the Cheever family into enemies.
The life of the literary biographer is mired in drudgery, says Scott. Take the case of Mark Schorer, whose subject was Sinclair Lewis. Mark wrote dolefully that writing his biography meant reading Lewis’s
twenty-one novels, all but five of them of small literary worth and some of them almost unbelievably poor
And then the 100 or so short stories
almost all of them worse than poor
And then as SD says
reading most of this execrable fiction a second or third time, in order to arrive at a pattern of the mind that created it
Another biographer, Justin Kaplan, remarked that
you need oxlike endurance, resignation to the swift passage of time without much to show for it, and the capacity to feed on your own blood when the sources run dry
SD says that the biographer needs to be a drudge, a critic, an artist, a historian, an investigative reporter and a polymath. And a psychologist.
So not only is the work involved laborious and fraught, the end result is dubious, based on inadequate material and addled self-serving witnesses, and has the result of deflecting attention from the writer’s work to the writer’s life, which is very likely the opposite of what the writer would have wished.
Literary biography is a mug’s game.
That said, I love a good meaty biography. Here are my top ten favourites (in no order, and including everybody, not just writers)
Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
[image]
- This isn’t a biography in a modern sense as Bozzy doesn’t really dig up much about SJ’s early life. It’s more a documentary, with hundreds of pages of actual verbatim conversations from the 1760s to 1780s. Very amazing.
The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm
[image] - This is not so much a biography as an exquisite meditation on the bitter war waged via biographies between the Plathophiles and the Hughes fans. Brilliant! And unlike all the other book in this little list, short!
The Marquis de Sade by Donald Thomas [image] An amazing life – de Sade may have been revolting but he was never boring, even when he was shut up in an insane asylum for years.
Adolf Hitler by John Toland [image] The recent even massiver bio by Ian Kershaw is probably better but this is a rollercoasting riot, not a dull page in its over 1000.
The Passage of Power by Robert Caro [image] Book 4 in the series about Lyndon Johnson. This is the part about how LBJ became president in the worst way. Caro is quite repetitive but the story he tells is riveting.
Dostoyevsky by Joseph Frank [image] Dosto’s life was not a placid one and he showed how you can write masterpieces whilst on the run from your creditors. This is probably too much of a giant biography so this is probably a Stockholm syndrome entry.
The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammed by Andrew Clegg III [image] Malcolm X : A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable [image] These two brilliant books should be read in order so you get the full sweep of the strange story of the NOI and what caused the tragedy of Malcolm X. Both are great.
James Joyce by Richard Ellmann [image] Kind of solid and respectable, you know, but JJ was such a weirdo. Funny and sad by turns.
Jean Rhys by Carole Angier [image] A massive book but worthwhile – I think this biography is much longer than Jean Rhys’s collected works, that seems a little crazy. But she had a pretty crazy life....more
Wait, what is this, why did you read a book about Alexander Theroux, you hate Alexander Theroux don’t you? You never even finished a book by him! AdmiWait, what is this, why did you read a book about Alexander Theroux, you hate Alexander Theroux don’t you? You never even finished a book by him! Admit it!
Well, I read a hundred or so pages of Darconville’s Cat, and about half of The Grammar of Rock. That was more than enough, you know. Darconville’s Cat showed me that AT was a formidable, extraordinary showoff stylist, a brilliant linguistic excavator and museumkeeper who demonstrated on every page that if you empty out the recherche, the obsolete, the froufrou and the sesquipedalian from the 15th to 17th centuries into your every paragraph you are gonna sound like one smart cookie. Let’s quote AT himself – he wants to write fiction that is
Always erudite, as game, pleasure, hobby and puzzle – a mottage of rich and well-born nouns that can roister with sluttish verbs and prinked-out allusions, snoozy bedfellows all, content and uncomplained of
- possibly the opposite of what 99.9% of people want to read, but that’s ok by him, and Steven and the fanboys who are the 0.01% and proud of it.
The Grammar of Rock showed me that AT was a big fat fraud, so bloated in fatuous self-importance that shooting fish in a barrel and missing most of the fish was the very thing his fans would lap up. Would they excuse the billion mistakes and the obvious fact that this was a first draft which he hadn’t even bothered to reread? Of course. His fans excuse him everything.
But… but… why on earth would you want to read a book about him then? This is eccentric!
Well, er… it’s kind of complicated but since you ask… Do you know about maximalist writers?
Yes, yes, do you take me for an idiot – Marguerite Young, Vollmann, McElroy, Pynchon, Gaddis, Gass, etc.
Well, there’s a kind of maximalist fanboy type who adores all of those and Alexander Theroux is one of their pinups.
You aren’t a fan then?
Well, I SHOULD be a fan, since I love Ulysses so much, but mostly these authors intimidate me. But I discovered that there existed on the earth the very quintessence of the maximalist fanboy, who eats 800 page difficult novels for lunch, dinner and supper and still wants more, and his name is Steven Moore, very appropriately. So I thought he would be the very person who could explain to me what is great about Alexander Theroux. Because really, he has been the world’s greatest Theroux fan ever. No one could be greater.
How can you say that?
On page 25 he says about Darconville’s Cat
Simply thinking of the novel can bring tears to my eyes… it exhausts my superlatives
Next, he secretly paid AT $500 to write an introduction to a Dalkey Archive book. This was when Steven was working for Dalkey. He pretended the cheque came from Dalkey but they didn’t pay people to write introductions and AT wouldn’t have written it for free. So there was that, and also he copyedited AT’s massive novel Laura Warholic for FREE, a horrible job that lasted over a year and nearly caused him to have a nervous breakdown, because of AT’s intransigent unreasonableness, which is gruesomely detailed right here in chapter 5. This is the saddest part of this book. You don’t expect literary criticism to be sad!
What went wrong?
Instead of helping, AT just bombarded him with extra material, which even Steven came to realise was “excessive, unnecessary verbiage at the sentence and paragraph level”. He describes the novel as being periodically interrupted by
The author’s volcanic rages and verbal bullying, his intemperate displays of misogyny, antisemitism, body-shaming, ethnic bigotry, homophobia, slut-shaming, misanthropy and very unchristian intolerance
But AT fans can wave away all of that and more and Steven ends this painful chapter by declaring Laura Warholic to be “one of the first great novels of the 21st century”. He writes:
The novel is very funny, though I often felt guilty for laughing, since so much of the humour is cruel: ethnic slurs, making fun of people because of their appearance, comparing them to animals, etc.
Well you know, I don’t think you were ever going to be convinced to give old AT another go, were you.
Not a chance. Steven Moore does a frantic dance throughout this book of painful worship, acknowledging Theroux is a very rarefied taste but bemoaning how he is never reviewed or read or reprinted :
It may be that Darconville's Cat’s chief virtue, its style, is for many its chief fault. It is a mode that fewer and fewer readers are capable of appreciating…a style that demands of its readers an almost antiquarian devotion of English language and literature.
He will defend this novel in ways that might make some gentle readers turn pale:
The novel is piously Roman Catholic, unapologetically elitist, unfashionably misogynistic (unfashionably? As opposed to fashionably misogynistic?) (Steven is constantly describing AT’s opinions as “unfashionable” and of course this is a euphemism for reactionary.)
All right so you really don’t like Alexander Theroux – what about Steven Moore?
I think you can’t help but like this guy. He is such an AT doormat your heart goes out to him. Also, he is the world’s fastest and bestest reader. AT’s third novel An Adultery was considered a disappointment by his fans, who were
reluctant to trade the exuberance of Darconville's Cat for the inquisitorial grimness of An Adultery. But repeated readings bring out the third novel’s many strengths
So when Steven is disappointed in a Theroux novel, why, he just rereads it repeatedly until he gets it! Other authors would hack off their right arm for such devotion.
Steven also has read all of AT’s many reviews and articles, his poetry, his books about oddball subjects like food phobias (Einstein’s Beets, 792 pages) AND all of his many unpublished novels in manuscript.
And I might add that he has done all this whilst at the same time being the world’s leading authority on the novels of William Gaddis (says Wiki). I mean, fair play.
A CONCLUSION OF SORTS
This is a great book for thinking about taste, what you admire or detest in literature, where commonplace morality fits in, how much bellyaching you can take from elderly white men anymore, how much authors should be allowed to take revenge on the girlfriends who dumped them in their giant novels of bloat, whether some readers are being honest with themselves, what a brilliant style can conceal, how much of realism you need in your fiction or is it all just a web of inspissated gestures towards a dwindling concept of what might be mistaken as meaning, that kind of thing.
This book is half excellent and half terrible. First, it’s a great subject, horrible people who make great art is something that bothers all of us herThis book is half excellent and half terrible. First, it’s a great subject, horrible people who make great art is something that bothers all of us here I think. Claire Dederer asks all the right questions and rounds up all the usual suspects, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Hemingway, Picasso, JK Rowling…. Huh? What’s that you say? The author of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Incorrect Opinions?
This is not an exhaustive trawl through the long list of awful men, so no R Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Chuck Berry, Bill Cosby, etc etc. And for the most part the details of the alleged bad behavior are not described, it’s assumed you already know. CD says clearly that this is a book about the audience not the artist, about what we are supposed to do now that we found out about ---------- (fill in your favourite painter/singer/director/actor/author).
I cannot refrain from pointing out the wretched irony of JK Rowling being considered monstrous these days. Most of the male monsters were raping and abusing girls and women, of course, and she (misguidedly or not) is all about trying to protect the rights of girls and women. We live in strange times.
LITTLE LO
The chapter on Nabokov is called “The Anti-Monster” because Vlad himself was in no way shape or form a monster but he wrote an appallingly accurate book about Humbert Humbert, the pedophile, leading CD to worry
Only a monster could know a monster so well. Surely Lolita must be some kind of mirror of its author?... Just how did Nabokov come to understand Humbert so perfectly?
Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it.
There’s a strange side issue here : this book is about 50% memoir, and not so coincidentally, that’s the 50% I disliked. I wanted to get back to the nitty gritty, and CD was waffling about left liberal life in the Pacific North West. One autobiographical detail jumped right out and whacked me about the gizzard, however :
I was thirteen. I knew Lolita was officially an important book, but it was about a girl my age… I thought I might give Lolita a whirl…
13? This was some kind of madly advanced reader… I was still reading William books and starting on Ray Bradbury at that age. I would have made zero sense of Vlad’s fantabulous serpentine bejewelled sentences. I wouldn’t have made it to page two, but CD finished the whole thing. I am in awe.
This is a most interesting chapter, a nice addition to lolitological Studies, but every time you are thinking this book has now found its groove CD comes out with some highly dubious apercu that calls forth a groan or a puzzled frown :
Lolita is the scorched-earth offensive of pedophile novels (and sometimes, it seems, of novels in general)
FEMALE MONSTERS
CD meditates on whether women writers need to become more monstrous. The ruthless selfishness of the men is easy to see and involves tireless sexual appetites and endless expectations of a flock of female servants scurrying around. The selfishness of women is different – the only examples CD gives us is of women who abandon their children. Muriel Spark, Joni Mitchell, Doris Lessing, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath (who only abandoned her children when she abandoned herself) – oh, and there’s Valerie Solanas, who gets a chapter. (“Once you start quoting Solanas, it’s hard to stop, largely because she is often so right”). I was very happy to see her included. Yes, she was a monster! As were my other two favourite radical feminists, Andrea Dworkin and Aileen Wuornos (Aileen the more practical of the three).
Of these beleaguered women artists, CD writes the best sentence in the book:
What is feminism if not a daily struggle against forces that are so large, so consuming, that those forces are invisible to – forgotten, taken for granted by – the very people wielding them?
Yes indeed.
THE WRAP UP
An interesting, frustrating, often aggravating first attempt to answer the question can we still watch Manhattan or Chinatown, can we still listen to Kind of Blue or River Deep Mountain High, can we still enjoy Les Demoiselles D'Avignon or Where do we Come From? What are We?
The answer in the end is :
You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction.
Written with whitehot outrage that flashes forth on every page, this book is brilliant and exhausting.
Gone With The Wind, the book and the film, is tWritten with whitehot outrage that flashes forth on every page, this book is brilliant and exhausting.
Gone With The Wind, the book and the film, is the beloved sunkissed window through which Sarah Churchwell directs our gaze – backwards to the Civil War and forwards to the attempted fascist putsch of 6 January 2021. All the dots are joined.
SC says that GWTW is the most popular American story of all time. Wikipedia confirms it’s the highest grossing film ever, adjusted for inflation. The book still sells 300,000 copies a year. And it is all about people who hate the USA. In GWTW Abraham Lincoln is a villain.
I never read the book – it’s not necessary. But I think you do need to have seen the film, to experience the power of the gorgeous blazing design, direction, cinematography, the dashing and extraordinary characters, and the narrative power. Altogether a sumptuous production, an angel cake injected with poison.
I did feel that I needed a better grasp on the history of the postwar period (Reconstruction) – exactly what did the victorious North do or not do in the defeated South; exactly why did they, having fought a horrible war to free the slaves, then supinely or connivingly allow the Southern states to re-erect a new form of slavery-in-all-but-name, which goes under the name Jim Crow.
This is a book about the fight to speak the truth about history. Sarah Churchwell pulls no punches in accusing the USA of wilful blindness about its past, of revelling in myths collected together under the name “Lost Cause”, for which GWTW is a brightly-lit shop window.
I’ll give one longish example of how racist GWTW is and how the author deals with it :
Like the rest of her circle, Scarlett is highly indignant at the Yankees for cracking down on the Ku Klux Klan, furious at the prospect of summary justice for members of an organisation created to inflict summary justice. “Suspected complicity in the Ku Klux Klan, or complaint by a negro that a white man had been uppity to him were enough to land a citizen in jail. Proof and evidence were not needed. The accusation was sufficient.” In reality, this is the exact system that pertained first to the enslaved, and then to the free Black people in the Jim Crow South. This grievance appears within pages of Rhett Butler’s admitting he murdered a Black man for being “uppity”, at which no one bats an eye… Instead, Scarlett believes that murdering Black men for being what white people consider uppity is generally the right thing to do: “Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a negro for being ‘uppity to a lady’”. Whatever defenses of Gone with the Wind one may entertain, the fact is that it regards murdering a Black man as evidence of Rhett’s residual morality. Rhett is redeemed by his willingness to act as judge, jury, and hangman, whereas the idea of anyone being imprisoned for lynching is an outrage to all the novel’s protagonists.
So GWTW sells the idea that the war wasn’t about slavery, that the slaves were cheerful workers being tended lovingly by their careful masters who looked after them from cradle to grave, that the South was a gracious land of magnolia and cotton until the War of Northern Aggression and those nasty Yankees torched it all out of pure spite, vindictiveness and mercenary greed.
SC is not so blinkered as to fail to notice the feminist aspects of GWTW, or the rueful humour strewn throughout, or the pace of the story, but these all pale before its successful attempt to whitewash Southern history. I would say that at just under 400 pages of dense text I might think it’s around 100 pages too long, but I would not be able to figure out which pages could be deleted. It’s one of those books – it has to be this intense and this wrathful.
When the South Korean film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture, President Donald Trump asked a rally in Colorado : ‘What the hell was that all about? Can we get like Gone with the Wind back please?’...more
Someone should have sent this book off to see Dr Nowzardan at his clinic in Houston, Texas. You know him from the famous tv show My 600lb Life. He migSomeone should have sent this book off to see Dr Nowzardan at his clinic in Houston, Texas. You know him from the famous tv show My 600lb Life. He might have been able to get Matthew Hollis to shed a couple hundred Pounds by some expert radical surgery, trimming the walls of fatty tissue and unclogging those silted up arteries and putting a clamp into the whole frankly obese enterprise to stop this exasperating book becoming ever more engorged with microdetail about restaurants, footling arguments, minor publication history, irrelevant holiday itineraries and endless minor illnesses. You may be thinking well all this is relevant to the writing of "The Waste Land", that famous monument of modernism, but most of it is about My 600 Ezra Pound Life (!) (since Eliot and Pound were the Laurel and Hardy of 1920s poetry) and all the other lesser literati that swam around in the same aquarium. For little me, this was how not to write about T S Eliot.
THE RISE AND FALL OF A COMPLETELY WRONG-HEADED IDEA
54 fake leather volumes, which included 443 different works by 74 white male very dead autho[image]
THE RISE AND FALL OF A COMPLETELY WRONG-HEADED IDEA
54 fake leather volumes, which included 443 different works by 74 white male very dead authors, everything important from Homer to Freud, all human knowledge worth having, all great thoughts worth thinking, yours for ten bucks down and ten bucks weekly payments, we’ll throw in a bookcase, come on sir, educate your family - with these Great Books behind them there’s nothing your kids can’t do, no toffeenosed patrician can patronise your boy when he can fire off a quote from Aeschylus’ "The Suppliant Maidens" or Aristotle’s "Posterior Analytics."
Well, it was 1952. The three mildly eccentric academics who came up with this master plan had some dreamy notions that all Americans, be they ever so humble, could find joy and enlightenment in these Great Books, that after a day in the tuna cannery a guy would repair to his den and pluck from out of the attractively displayed set something like Fourier’s "Analytical Theory of Heat" whilst sipping a Bud.
WAIT, SCIENCE? NOT JUST LITERATURE?
Yes, scientific treatises which were gigantic forward strides in the 17th and 18th centuries were dished up as Great Books. Literature is not progressive, but science is. So ancient technical science books become obsolete. This is obvious, but was not to the Great Books editors. The American Association for the Advancement of Science commented :
Few thinking persons are likely to linger long over tables giving for the 1840s monthly magnetic declinations at Toronto, St Petersburg, Washington, Lake Athabasca and Fort Simpson.
EVEN WORSE
The Great Books were presented in 32,000 pages of tiny 9-point type in double columns and with NO introductions and NO footnotes and NO context at all. Well, if it’s such a Great Book, maybe all that is just fluff, and Aristophanes and Apollonius of Perga will just speak directly to your heart.
BUT THE SILLIEST PART IS YET TO COME
Inside the Great Books the editors decided were Great Ideas. Wouldn’t it be extra great to be able to follow a Great Idea – like, say, Democracy or Logic or Truth – all the way from what Plato said about it down to what Freud said about it? So they assembled a two-volume index. It turned out that there were precisely 102 Great Ideas. And they hired 120 recent graduates to read through the 443 mighty works looking for references to the 102 Great Ideas. Compiling this index nearly bankrupted the whole project before it got started. But after two years and around one million dollars it was done. They called it THE SYNTOPICON and it was 2428 pages long.
Advert :
A Problem? Consult this evening with the greatest minds of the Western world – grasp their precious wisdom…The ability to Discuss and Clarify Basic Ideas is vital to success. Doors open to the man who possesses this talent.
DID PEOPLE ACTUALLY FALL FOR THIS RIDICULOUS IDEA?
Well, kind of. Alex Beam says
Against all odds, the Great Books joined the roster of postwar fads like drive-ins, hula hoops and Mexican jumping beans.
Many libraries and colleges were kind of browbeaten into thinking they should invest in a set but sales to ordinary Americans were disappointing to begin with, until a new breed of tough door to door salesmen were recruited, and then – boom! At the peak, in 1961, they sold $22 million of these absurd sets. When people started to challenge the idea of a canon of exclusively DWMs, Adler, one of the three editors, said "there are no 'Great Books' by black writers before the 1955 cut-off” and “I think probably in the next century there will be some Black that writes a Great Book, but there hasn’t been any so far”.
Eventually the whole Great Books idea picked up more and more killing associations :
Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbitry….they were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about Middle America.
(Which is a paradox, since the whole 54 volumes is unceasingly and ferociously highbrow from start to finish.)
It was a late 50s to late 60s phenomenon, then dwindled into a ghostly afterlife of discussion groups attended by elderly adherents which apparently survive to this day.
WHAT IS A GREAT BOOK ANYWAY?
Is it a book wherein you may read the author’s answer to the following question :
Whether we should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?
I would hazard that the answer is no. The above is from Thomas Aquinas.
This book is awesome and not in a hey, did you get that job you applied for? Yeah, I did! Awesome! kind of way, no, I mean awesome like when you timidThis book is awesome and not in a hey, did you get that job you applied for? Yeah, I did! Awesome! kind of way, no, I mean awesome like when you timidly tiptoe into a lofty cathedral and look up up up, and this is because of the author Boyd Tonkin – I know, it sounds like a household appliance – darling, the Boyd Tonkin is acting up again, did you clean it out? – Aw sorry, I forgot – Awesome! (sarcastic tone of voice) – but apparently he is real. So I think we may assume that Boyd is reasonably well-read in your standard government-issue anglophone literature from Beowulf to Infinite Jest, he doesn’t actually say he is but I’d bet my complete set of Captain Beefheart original vinyl on it. But then, this book demonstrates that he is fully conversant in the literature of at least 20 other countries over four centuries. Oh yeah. Out of all that towering pile he selects these 100 best novels in translation. But what he explains is that there are some great authors you will not find in here, not because they don’t deserve it, but because he doesn’t think they have been translated well enough into English. Danilo Kis, Eileen Chang and our old friend Roberto Bolano are three such. This sounds to me as if Boyd is familiar enough with their novels in the original languages to be able to judge that their English versions are not as good as they should be. Whew, how many people could do that. But THEN, for the 100 novels he does choose, he will tell you WHICH translation to go for, meaning that he has compared all the available ones of each novel. So he will say stuff like (for Madame Bovary) :
Among recent versions, those by Lydia Davis and Geoffrey Wall both excel, but the novelist Adam Thorp (2011) – who, brilliantly, employs only the English vocabulary of Flaubert’s time – achieves a flavor that approaches the dream-like strangeness of Flaubert’s hyper-realism
And (regarding The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes)
Alfred MacAdam’s 1991 version restores some structural idiosyncrasies of Fuentes’ text that the original translation by Sam Hileman (1964) had smoothed away. Hileman’s ventriloquism retains a striking early-sixties flavor, truculent and transgressive
This is all awesome!
How much reading has gone into this compact 300 page guide?
A lot, is my guess.
According to Goodreads as of today I have read 777 novels, a weirdly palindromic number, but when I look through this guide I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface. Some of the usual suspects are here, Don Quixote kicks us off and in rapid succession along comes Dangerous Liaisons, The Red and the Black, Dead Souls, Lez Miz, War & Peace, and later on The Master and Margarita, Memoirs of Hadrian, If On a Winter Night a Traveller etc. But at least 80% of this stuff I had never heard of. Check out these titles
Journey By Moonlight – Antal Szerb The Hive – Camilo Jose Cela The Time Regulation Institute – Hamdi Tanpinar Season Of Migration To The North – Tayeb Salih
Now if anyone is interested in stats, I made notes on the origin of these 100 novels. 20 come from France. 11 from Russia. 9 each from Germany and Italy. No other country got more than four. Total number of countries represented here : 34. Surprising omissions : The Netherlands and Sweden. This is the only time I can raise an eyebrow – what? I would say. No John Ajvide Lindqvist? No Let the Right One In?? Asleep at the wheel, Boyd?
For anyone wishing to expand their reader's horizon, this is unreservedly recommended.
It’s a good job Steven Moore wasn’t born as a dog because by now he would have wagged his tail so wildly, so enthusiastically, it would have shot off It’s a good job Steven Moore wasn’t born as a dog because by now he would have wagged his tail so wildly, so enthusiastically, it would have shot off & would have had to be replaced. He might be on his eleventh tail by now. He’s the most positive happy critic-reviewer you ever did meet. He loves books! So much! But there’s a catch. He only likes the big stuff – the fatter the better. The more wildly experimental, the happier he will be. The best ever is when he gets a 900 page novel that verges on total incomprehensibility. Then he almost passes out with pure joy.
Because he never reviews stuff he doesn’t like. (Not like me!)
For most of my career I’ve either chosen what I wanted to review or was sent books by editors who knew my tastes, I’ve rarely had to review what I consider a bad work, and unlike some reviewers I take no malicious joy in skewering writers.
This means that for the great majority of this large book Steven Moore is in a state of loved-up euphoria, lavishing endless gurgles and cooings over all these novels, from the really obscure (Mexican Trilogy by D N Stuefloten) to the really famous (Infinite Jest) but all really challenging, or experimental, or difficult, or postmodern, choose your preferred term.
I see that Steven’s entire raison d’etre as a critic has been to promote this difficult/challenging stuff as hardly anyone else was doing it and (he clearly thinks) there are so many great but undeservedly obscure writers out there in the darkness. So that’s got to be a good thing. And there are lots of names in My Back pages I will be checking out. But oh dear, Steven so often comes across as if he really doesn’t care if a huge challenging novel makes any sense at all, so long it can deliver linguistic delight on the level of its individual sentences. And worse, that Steven seems to think that him not being able to grasp what the novel is all about is a sign of its profundity.
The best example of this is his review of the famously obscure famously huge novel (1200 pages) Women and Men by James McElroy. Some quotes:
After completing the novel the reader may too be unsure what has actually happened
McElroy’s knotty political intrigue is too complex to unravel after one reading – but the inescapable interrelatedness of things – human, animal, vegetable, political, economic, atmospheric – is not lost on the reader who has grasped only a few of those relations. The rest can be taken on faith
It is often difficult to tell exactly what is going on, to whom, and why… many readers will be hard-pressed to answer the who, what, where and why of much of the novel
Like all truly innovative novels, Women and Men is baffling much of the time… but one closes this extraordinary novel with the conviction that McElroy is fifty years ahead of anyone else now writing.
What we have here is Steven Moore admitting candidly that he did not understand much of this novel’s 1200 pages, and doubts anyone else would either, but that’s okay, in no way is that a criticism, that just means McElroy is a greater writer than his contemporaries, and he will be revered in the future when his giant book can be understood and appreciated as a work of genius.
I had a sinking feeling. This was reminding me of the fairly ghastly old musical starring Danny Kaye – Hans Christian Anderson (1952). Remember this part ?
Now there was once a king who was absolutely insane about new clothes and one day, two swindlers came to sell him what they said was a magic suit of clothes. Now, they held up this particular garment and they said, "Your Majesty, this is a magic suit." Well, the truth of the matter is, there was no suit there at all. But the swindlers were very smart, and they said, "Your Majesty, to a wise man this is a beautiful raiment but to a fool it is absolutely invisible." Naturally, the King not wanting to appear a fool, said,
"Isn't it grand! Isn't it fine! Look at the cut, the style, the line! The suit of clothes is all together But all together it's all together The most remarkable suit of clothes that I have ever seen. These eyes of mine at once determined The sleeves are velvet, the cape is ermine The hose are blue and the doublet is a lovely shade of green.”
Well, as you can see, I’m mightily conflicted about Mr Moore. He’s a great tubthumper about the joys & delights of avantgardy non-mainstream writing, and who wants to spend their reading days sploshing safely in the shallow end of the mainstream? Steven should therefore be a great guide. But I dunno, he kind of comes across as so much of a True Believer you often feel like backing slowly away from him.
I’m being harsh. This was a review of the first part of MBP, I’ve yet to read his essays. Perhaps they will be a little less googly-eyed....more
The breakdown of what’s in here is roughly as follows
Novels – 382 Memoir/autobiography – 154 Short stories – 40 Religion – 10 Children’s – 47 Plays – 36 TraThe breakdown of what’s in here is roughly as follows
Novels – 382 Memoir/autobiography – 154 Short stories – 40 Religion – 10 Children’s – 47 Plays – 36 Travel – 33 History – 72 Biography – 32 Essays – 35 Poetry – 38 Other including all the sciences – 118
It doesn’t add up exactly, because of my bad counting!
SOME OTHER RANDOM OBSERVATIONS :
This is a gorgeous book – it’s so diverse one’s little head is spinning. I think you probably need it!
It is true that Mr Mustich’s enthusiasm for each and every one of the thousand-ish books here often sounds like a publisher’s blurb :
Unique in the genre when it appeared, Stranger in a Strange Land compels immersive reading with its suspense and grace, and had immense cultural fallout during the 1960s. It continues to absorb, entertain and jostle readers today
The force of Rushdie’s prose is so propulsive, the currents of story-within-story so transporting, that each page is a further winding of the crank on an enormous jack-in-a-box that explodes again and again with the wonders of living that history can never contain.
Philosophical profundities and everyday realities, petty jealousies and pregnant poetry are conjured one after the other with subtle intelligence and art. Forster’s masterful absorption of the colours, tones and shadows of life and language provides an almost symphonic literary score that lifts the details of his characters and their actions into some new dimension that sets this book apart – in manner, mood and mystery – from any other you have read.
There are so many memoirs/autobiographies, 95% of which I had never heard of, some are by people who played sports, and those I will not be reading! I wasn’t expecting that.
There is a lot of science, food and gardening.
As we can see from the almost 50 children’s books, like The Secret of the Old Clock, Little House in the Big Woods, Little Bear, Goodnight Moon, etc, this is not a big list for all adults to plough through religiously.
I’m a bit suspicious about whether James Mustich has really read all of this stuff – I know, heresy! But ignoring the easy peasy lemon squeezy stuff, there is a LOT of big fat fundamentals-of-human-thought type material here. Has JM really read All the Bible, ALL the Koran, ALL of Proust, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, The Tale of Genji, War & Peace, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Godel Escher & Bach, Freud, Marx, the complete stories of Clarice Lispector….? (sound of reviewer slumping to the ground).
Of the 380 or so novels, I have read 131 and only disliked 13 so that’s a good hit rate. There are a great number of oddball choices here. I noticed no Handmaid’s Tale, no James Baldwin (except his essays), no Last Exit to Brooklyn, no Martin Amis, no Paul Auster, no George Gissing, no Bernhard, no Pilgrim’s Progress, but he does have room for House Made of Dawn by N Scott Momaday, All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West, Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout and The Spare Room by Helen Garner, none of which I had heard of. Well, I could go on like this.
There are also some pulpy choices he includes companionably, so we can have a good laugh now and then. So in these pages you will find The Da Vinci Code, The Firm by John Grisham, The Silence of the Baa-Lambs and From Russia with Love. So, The Da Vinci Code but no Last Exit to Brooklyn, hey? What a joker.
But this is nit-picking. I will be finding why-didn’t-I-already-know-about-this books in here for a long while to come. Brilliant. ...more
Hell of a story although there are way too many Marys and Janes and Williams. They were brain-rich but name-poor in those days.
1787 – Mary WollstonecrHell of a story although there are way too many Marys and Janes and Williams. They were brain-rich but name-poor in those days.
1787 – Mary Wollstonecraft, a well-educated 28 year old woman with no money and no husband, sick & tired of bad gigs as a governess, decides to become a writer. She gets some run of the mill stuff published but she is plotting something big which arrives five years later.
1792 – The first major feminist statement ever, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Yes, it raised eyebrows but it was a terrific success. In December MW decides to travel to Paris because there’s an exciting revolution going on there. She arrives about a month before they guillotine King Louis. The guillotine was invented to make execution more humane, but it may have been useless trying to tell that to Louis. Mary thought the revolution was going to be where women finally got to be equal! She was disillusioned when it turned out all the revolutionaries had no time for her way too revolutionary thoughts. Also, she hung around with the wrong type of revolutionary. She was very surprised when they started to be guillotined too.
Meanwhile over in Sussex, a boy is born to a filthy rich family. His name is Percy Shelley.
1793 - William Godwin, aged 37, atheist ex-minister, full time writer, publishes the sexy sounding Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Honestly, the marketing departments of publishers in the 1790s were pretty slack. I don’t think they put enough importance on book titles. It should have been called Smash The State! because it was about anarchism. But it was still a big success, so what do I know. Over in Paris, MW meets an American called Gilbert Imlay, who was a shady character, described as an “adventurer” (these days that means you make documentaries in the Amazon jungle or run marathons in Antarctica but in those days it meant you swindled rich guys and shagged their wives). Anyway, she loved this guy.
1794 – MW gives birth to her first daughter, Fanny Imlay. Gilbert hangs around a bit but doesn’t like this domestic turn of events so he is off to London. Meanwhile, WG, his pen on fire, published a great novel called Things as they Are, or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. I have read this and it is RECOMMENDED. It was a big success, because it was EXCITING, and still is.
1795 – MW follows Gilbert back to London but finds he has other female entanglements and so in despair (you know, her situation was not good) she tries suicide by laudanum, but Gilbert rescues her from the lanky arms of Death. That was in April, but in October things hadn’t improved and she made suicide attempt No 2 by jumping off Putney Bridge. This time she is saved by passing strangers. Just think – no passing strangers, NO FRANKENSTEIN.
1796 – MW re-meets WG and this time they click.
1797 – they get married in March. This was somewhat like Karl Marx getting married to Germaine Greer, it was a marriage made in atheistic radical socialistic anarchist heaven. But it is not to last because in September MW gives birth to her second daughter and dies 12 days later. The daughter’s name is Mary.
WG immediately begins a biography of MW – Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Another great title. Because he believes in total honesty and cutting through the bullshit pretensions of bourgeois morality, he includes details of MW’s affairs & suicide attempts & fearlessly states they had sex before marriage.
1798 – Publication of Memoirs - it turns out everybody in the world is OUTRAGED by WG’s bean-spilling. The reviewers say things like :
blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands if they were FORCED to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world
And it has the terrible effect of burying MW’s feminism for many decades. She is now associated with immorality in the mind of the public, and therefore anything she said about the rights of women is ignored with a shudder.
1801 – WG marries again, so Mary has a stepmother, but she is not evil, only irritating.
1810 – Percy Shelley publishes a novel – he’s 17 at the time.
1811 – Percy Shelley publishes The Necessity of Atheism, aged 18. This gets him chucked out of Oxford University. Just after he turns 19, he elopes with one of his sister’s friends, who was 16 years old, and was named Harriet. This was to rescue her from an abusive home situation. I don’t know why she was not called Mary. Then Shelley found out that WG was still alive. WG was his political idol. So this was like when the young white blues fans in the late 50s realised that guys like Son House and John Hurt were still alive, having assumed they were long dead. Shelley now HAD to meet WG!!
1812 – Mary finally meets her father’s rich 20 year old superfan. She is 15.
1814 – After a year of living in Scotland, Mary is back in London & re-meets Shelley. This time they fall in love and decide to elope (he likes to elope). Yes, he’s married and his wife is pregnant, but YOLO. They take Mary’s step sister Jane (now calling herself Clair) with them. That might have been a mistake. It turned out that Shelley was into free love, so you know where this story is going. They went to France & Switzerland and came back when the money ran out just like students do now. Because Shelley’s rich rich parents had cut him off without a penny after he wrote about the necessity of atheism and repeatedly eloped with teenage girls.
Meanwhile Percy’s abandoned wife Harriett gives birth to a son who managed to live until the age of 12. Some feat in those days. Meanwhile meanwhile, by the year end, Shelley is sleeping with both the women he’s living with. Also around this time, he encourages a friend of his (called Hogg) to join the menage. In another age Shelley would have been a cult leader. Two girls for every boy, as the song says. But also, credit where it’s due, under Shelley’s leadership, two boys for every girl.
1815 – Mary gives birth to a daughter who dies after 13 days.
1816 – Mary gives birth to a son named Will.
Claire (the cohabiting stepsister) manages to latch on to Lord Byron (he wasn’t that enamoured). All 4 of them go on their holibobs to Geneva. They have a spooky night and dare each other to write a spooky story. Mary is the only one who takes it seriously and she writes Frankenstein . She is 18. In September they all come back to London. In October Fanny Imlay, Mary’s other sister, commits suicide by laudanum for reasons unknown. In December, Harriett, Percy’s wife, commits suicide by drowning in the Serpentine. This was for reasons too predictable to repeat here. But look on the bright side, Mary can now marry Percy, which she does 20 days after Harriet’s suicide.
1817 – Mary gives birth to Clara, third child
1818 – During a journey across Italy, Clara dies
1819 – Mary’s son Will dies. So now all three of her children are dead.
1822 -On 8 July , less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley drowns in a sudden storm in a boat on the Gulf of Spezia
The day after the news of his death reached England, the Tory newspaper The Courier printed:
Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is God or no.
The rest of her life was not quite so crazy....more
All novelists with 50 year careers deserve a book like this which could not be better or neater – Roth had just retired and completed his life’s work All novelists with 50 year careers deserve a book like this which could not be better or neater – Roth had just retired and completed his life’s work and Claudia Pierpont seized the time and interviewed him about all his stuff and then wrote a solid account of the whole garrulous controversial Rothiverse book by book. I read this to try to figure out my profound ambivalence about Big Roth who was undoubtedly brilliant but also really quite vile. The score so far for me is :
Operation Shylock, Portnoy’s Complaint and Nemesis : great American Pastoral : wellll……. Maybe Sabbath’s Theater, The Dying Animal, The Humbling and Everyman : Hated!!
And there are revelations on every other page. Who knew, for instance, that Philip Roth was a Jewish writer? Sorry, I’ll rephrase that – who knew he was SUCH a COMPLETELY Jewish writer? Not a page goes by in this book without Jews and Jewishness being accosted, interrogated, undermined, belaboured, supported, torn down, caricatured, sentimentalised over, defended and mocked savagely. Also who knew that Roth so very often wrote about writers? (That is one of my personal babadooks – do I want to read a book about a guy writing a book which may be the very book I’m reading? Er, no. Not even slightly. It’s such a tiresome cliché. And yet so many many novels are about novelists. Hey, novelists, don’t write what you know.)
His first and biggest hit was of course Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, a full ten years after his first one Goodbye Columbus. Ten years of not much happening and then wham, a million dollars and people calling your novel “the book for which all anti-semites have been praying”. After that he returned to writing stuff nobody liked that much (Our Gang, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire) until finally 22 more years later boom! Boom! Boom! Operation Shylock , Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral got them rolling in the aisles again followed smartly by his one other actual genuine real best-seller The Plot Against America. I count 28 novels in total - some quite short but still, heck, that’s a lot.
It was My Life as a Man in 1974 which started off what Claudia calls “Roth’s big trouble with women”. She says : “the word ‘misogyny’ stuck”. The London Review of Books once said that in Roth’s books
The women are hardly more than receptacles for semen, emotional punching-bags or ministering angels
And Claire Bloom, his English actress partner of 20 plus years, wrote a memoir in 1996 (Leaving a Doll’s House) and had a few choice phrases for Philip including saying he had “a deep and irrepressible rage” toward women. Linda Grant in the (British) Guardian wrote that she would
Rather read a dozen books of Rothian misogyny [than] a single page of Alison Lurie or Carol Shields or Annie Proulx [but] if there ever was a misogynist, Roth Is one.
Wow, with fans like that who needs enemies.
Actually this was like a career of two halves – first the Jewish American part in which many Jews accused him of self loathing and portraying the very worst aspects of Jewishness, culminating in the fantastic anti-Jewish ranting of Operation Shylock; then the sexual shenanigans of the second half when he got slagged off for misogyny – out of many possibilities maybe the culmination of that is in The Humbling where his 70 year old hero has sex with a lesbian, and not just sex but a threesome featuring a green strapon. (I’m not sure why the colour is always mentioned but it is.) Although The Dying Animal got a lot of people’s goat too – even Claudia, Rothophile as she is, confesses “it’s not difficult to understand the anger that Kepesh (the protagonist) provokes… Roth seems at times to court it”.
And in defending him she ends up saying
Kepesh makes a speciality of saying things one should not say. And if only for this, it’s worth listening to him.
Well, since you could say the same thing about Mein Kampf I think that’s not such a good argument.
I think the jury’s out on Philip Roth. But that’s not saying a lot, jury’s out on everybody except Shakespeare. But one thing is true, if you are a Roth fan, and you haven’t read Roth Unbound, you have a treat in store....more
Sometimes even the most turgid tedious books contain a little gem of information, and this one told me that at the age of 75, Leo Tolstoy re-read ALL Sometimes even the most turgid tedious books contain a little gem of information, and this one told me that at the age of 75, Leo Tolstoy re-read ALL of Shakespeare's plays simply in order to confirm his personal opinion that Shakespeare was an awful, terrible writer! All his life he had been baffled by everybody and his uncle raving on about Shakespeare when he, Count Tolstoy, knew - KNEW - that Willie the Shake was a fraudster, a jackanape, a mangler of language and a thief of tales, the worst writer in all of history. Now here he is in his old age thinking well, I dunno, maybe, just maybe everybody is right and I am wrong.... So he re-read the whole lot again and found that in fact he was SO RIGHT!
the works of Shakespeare - borrowed as they are and externally, like mosaics, artificially fitted together piecemeal from bits invented for the occasion - have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry.
I'm thinking that being 75 in Russia in 1903 is the equivalent of being around 110 nowadays and I don't know any 110 year olds who would read through all of Shakespeare to prove a crackbrained theory, so big respect to the Count just for all that crazy reading.
Although the idea of plot in fiction is very interesting - why is there, frinstance, such a polarisation between Art (James Joyce, Faulkner, Infinite Jest - all that plotless maximalisation) and Commerce (soap operas, fantasy epics, Dan Brown - where telling a rattling good story is (Stephen) King) I cannot recommend the other 67 pages of this little book unless you are hot to read about mimesis, poesis, Kierkegaaaaard, Sir Philip Sydney, and a whole lot of other terminal dullards. Somebody needed to have spiked Elizabeth Dipple's tea with LSD. That's what they used to do in 1970 I think?...more
Mary McCarthy saw Susan Sontag at a party, where else, and said to her
“I hear you’re the new me.”
****
This account of the careers of Dorothy Parker, HaMary McCarthy saw Susan Sontag at a party, where else, and said to her
“I hear you’re the new me.”
****
This account of the careers of Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm with walk-on parts for Rebecca West and Zora Neale Hurston was kinda interesting and I must also confess kinda just a little bit boring too.
I have read biographies of three of them already and am a big fan of Janet Malcolm already but the others are mostly just names. Like, I know that Joan Didion wrote The White Album but I have no idea what she thought of Rocky Raccoon.
Big points go to Michelle Dean for wrangling a vast amount of information and squishing it all down into 300 pages but this means that some of it is a breathless dash.
I must take some of those points back, though, for a dull pedestrian no-style of writing, and also for some real clunkers which have you rereading in bafflement :
To the extent it reflected her own experiences, she was clearly standing outside them, evaluating them and evaluating herself, and then fictionalising events according to the judgements she made.
Er, does that actually mean anything?
And because a lot of these women had very similar zigzag careers in journalism & then writing novels & living in New York & having bad marriages & becoming alcoholic & so forth it got a bit samey, to tell you the truth, sometimes it seemed to be about one person with ten heads rather than ten people with one head each.
Like, they all wrote for lotsa magazines and newspapapers, which sounded completely interchangeable to me. No doubt the editors of the said rags would have shot me dead on the spot if I said such a thing back then, but the New York Review of Books sounds a lot like the New York Book Review to me, and Esquire and Vanity Fair and the New Yorker were all the same thing weren’t they and if they weren’t, no one cares anymore. But throughout this book it’s a big deal getting fired from this magazine and hired by that one. Those pages, and they are not infrequent, are a yawwwwwwwwwwwn.
( NB - Hannah Arendt was nothing like the rest of them. She wrote enormous tomes like The Origins of Totalitarianism and why she is in this book alongside Pauline Kael who wrote Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a head scratcher; it’s like inviting Mother Theresa to an all-night poker party; but it’s true the others knew of her and kind of worshipped her from afar.)
Michelle Dean’s main point here, I think, and it’s an uneasy one, is that these intellectual women who were fierce and original and successful had only the most reluctant relationship with feminism, at the very time when it had come back ragingly. Hannah Arendt for one seems to have hated the very word. Eventually some of the others coughed to being feminist but only in latter years. They were conflicted.
I wanted to know exactly why in each case but I think that would have expanded the book to 400 pages. It was complicated, as they say.
The jacket designer by the way should stand in the corner with the dunce’s cap on for the sheer dopiness of including seven photos of these writers without identifying who is who.
And any way, come on, a few photos inside the book too wouldn’t have killed you, Little Brown Book Group trading as Fleet, you mean people! Your budget wouldn't stretch that far? That's not because they're women writers by any chance?...more
This whole survey of science fiction is really solid but the last chapter is what really interested me, taking the story from 2001 to 2017. What’s hapThis whole survey of science fiction is really solid but the last chapter is what really interested me, taking the story from 2001 to 2017. What’s happening now, baby! Yeah! So much stuff is happening these days (“stuff” is a technical term which covers the death of coral reefs, the rise of Isis, the use of drones and the election of Trump and everything in between) that it’s hard to make much sense of it all. Science fiction tries to do just that. It might fail, but it really tries.
SF writers have, according to this chapter, recently become obsessed with one thing above all others:
The dread of climate change and its attendant effects on nature and society permeates SF of the 21st century.
So much so that one wag has called this sub-genre cli-fi. SF writers simply can’t see beyond the looming omni-breakdown, compared to which the world of The Walking Dead is like a stroll in the park on Sunday with a jolly brass band playing and poodles romping amongst the daffodils.
In all this ecocatastrophic horror one novel is singled out, perhaps surprisingly : Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is said to be the best of “this sort of necro-futurological imagining” – even though, as is immediately pointed out, this was
one of the many “literary” novels of the period not treated as SF by the critics despite its narrative situation and themes
Those naughty critics have been up to this particular old trick for donkey’s years. They go by the rule “if I like it, it can’t possibly be science fiction”. But wait – Margaret Atwood wrote a trilogy set in a similarly brutal future (beginning with Oryx and Crake ) and declared it was not science fiction. So even now, when SF is the new mainstream, a whiff of trashiness follows it around.
The impenetrable gloom of contemporary SF is so profound that I took a core sample of page 213 and found the following :
Ruin Melancholic Wrecked Destroyed Dark Barren Forlorn Sadness
And turning quickly to page 214 we read : “there has been a spate of cataclysmic novels about utterly ruined futures”. The tone of this Beckettian horror is captured by the opening line of Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves:
The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
William Gibson injects some humour into all of this – or maybe he isn’t trying to be funny – when he tries to rally the thinkers of the time to a new project : predicting the present.
For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.
Well, at least all this gloom and doom has replaced the space-opera of Star Trek and all those tedious galactic empires of the 40s to the 90s. They’re junk now, and deservedly so. Macho, militaristic, fascistic, crypto-racist (all those inscrutable implacably evil aliens), obsessed with winning big wars with real big guns, that aspect of science fiction always nauseated me. I much prefer to chew on a juicy ecocatastrophe. Global warming has therefore done me a favour. Gerry Canavan, author of this last chapter, has given me whole list of what seems to be utterly depressing novels of despair, and I feel re-energised. Can’t wait – all that misery to read about, and Christmas round the corner....more
This came out in 1999 and so is a neat list of 200 novels from 50 years which is…er, ummm, one moment …. About four per year, roughly. I think.
Of theThis came out in 1999 and so is a neat list of 200 novels from 50 years which is…er, ummm, one moment …. About four per year, roughly. I think.
Of these 200 I have read a mere 58 and of those 58 only 17 were out-and-out ghastly (Earthly Powers, Housekeeping, Last Orders etc) so that’s a reasonable hit rate, way better than Booker Prize winners for instance.
Of the remaining I had already intended to read 12 and am utterly uninterested in 27, and this leaves an intriguing 74 that I had never even heard of….
Such as
The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann The Flint Anchor by Sylvia Townsend Warner From the Terrace by John O'Hara A Legacy by Sybille Bedford Power Without Glory by Frank Hardy Private Life of an Indian Prince by Mulk Raj Anand The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton Cotter's England by Christina Stead
So I’m thinking this looks like a nice neat little guide, a bit safe and literary, but handy....more
Henry Miller is a strange case. In the 1930s he decided to write books which put in what all other books left out, so that included a whole lot of rudHenry Miller is a strange case. In the 1930s he decided to write books which put in what all other books left out, so that included a whole lot of rude crude sex and nasty behavior and four letter words flying about like rancid confetti. So he got banned right left and centre. You betcha. He wrote raving ranting autobiographical stuff which got called “novels” because he made a lot of it up. (Somewhat similar to Jack Kerouac 30 years later but Jack was a clean living Zen master compared to filthy Henry.) Anyway every other author rewrites his or her life for the first novel, that’s not exceptional, but most of them avoid listing all the boffing and freeloading and upchucking they did while they were doing stuff to have stuff to write about. Boy, what a monkey on your back, having to do a lot of stuff so you have something to write about. Hats off to Nicholson Baker – in his first novel he wrote a detailed account of his lunch hour. Brilliant. Better than Henry Miller.
Erica Jong is a feminist and Henry Miller was a male chauvinist pig woman hater, so the cartoon goes. But when Fear of Flying, Erica’s first famous novel, was languishing in a tiny print run in 1973 Henry championed it all over the place and sent copies to all his friends and eventually it became a No 1 bestseller. He liked it because it was filthy and full of life. Erica and Henry became major pen pals. Henry was a major letter writer. (This shows you how long ago this all was. Ain’t no major letter writers around any more.)
So the feminist ended up writing this book about the chauvinist to figure out this whole thing – essentially whether it was right to ban Henry from the 30s to the 60s (this ban imposed officially by the public authorities) and then ban him all over again in the 70s (this ban imposed unofficially by feminists). An interesting but uncomfortable fate for a writer.
Erica has to admit she sees what the feminists were getting at, because it kind of stuck out like a big erect pink thing :
Henry is best known for his worst writing…It was Kate Millett’s thesis that Miller’s entire apprehension of sex was misogynistic. In this she was not wrong…He does show the violence of intercourse no less than Andrea Dworkin shows it. He shows it from a man’s point of view as she shows it from a woman’s. The question is : is he advocating this violence? Or is he showing it because it exists? This is a primal question with Miller – and with all literature. The question comes up repeatedly lately because, I think, we have lost the sense of what literature is. Was Bret Easton Ellis advocating murder in American Psycho, or was he mirroring the violence of our culture?
Erica concludes that Henry is doing the mirroring, not the advocating. But Erica is very nervous to be publicly defending Henry, she seems to feel beleaguered and backed into a corner by the hordes of Millett-and-Dworkin fembots, and this makes he come out with some crazy talk:
Am I loving the fascist, the brute, the boot in the face? Kate Millett would probably say so. … (but) it is the role of the artist to express this violence. Art is pagan, wild, red in tooth and claw. It must be, in order to reflect the chthonic side of nature. It follows the furies, the Bacchae, the dybbukim – or it is not truly art.
In what sense Erica? Are we saying that Francis Bacon is art (wild and violent, chopped up meat and screaming popes) but Claude Monet is not (lily ponds and light rain) ?
[image]
("Not art" says Erica Jong)
Henry himself defended his own filthiness thus:
The modern writer, in using obscenity, is trying to rekindle the awe, the shock, the wonder that the ancients found at Delphi or Eleusis.
This also sounds like shite to me. But of course Henry wasn’t living in an age where you can pick up copies of Space Raptor Butt Invasion, The Hottest Gay Man Ever Killed in a Shark Attack, Diary of a Virgin Stripper, Showers of Trump (A Billionaire Romance), Penetrated by Aardvarks and so forth.
[image]
Erica explains the violence : Men and women need each other so badly that they also hate each other when sex is at its hottest.
Well, you might try telling that to the judge. Actually, I’m sure a lot of murders wind up with that kind of explanation. (I loved her so much I smashed her brains and drowned her – you heard it a million times.) Okay, you don’t like that explanation of Henry’s misogyny? Here Erica tries a different tack :
Henry’s voice is the voice of the outsider, the renegade, the underground prophet – and isn’t that, after all, what women still are?
She also tries a thin slice of psychobabble :
Henry’s longing for the sweetness of his mother’s womb followed him all the days of his life. So did his anger at being cast out.
(I mean, get over it Henry. None of us got any more time in the old womb than you did and look, we turned out okay.)
Actually, says Erica, Henry didn’t hate women or want to do violence to them at all, this is a mistake. All that slagging off they get in his books is a bluff.
The violence of his depiction of women is a secret tribute to the immense power women had over him.
Actually, when all’s said and done – Henry was a proto-feminist! (Bet you saw that one coming.)
Henry recognized at once that all male literature was frozen compared to the fecund delta of female prose.
(Erica, what could that sentence possibly mean in any part of the universe?)
A strange book all right.
******
Three books to re-read next (I read 'em years back and have, er, well, sort of forgotten them) :
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Sexual Politics by Kate Millett ...more
Here’s a fast little gallop through the crazy world of bestsellers – I liked it! Some fun facts for you:
Agatha Christie is probably the world biggest Here’s a fast little gallop through the crazy world of bestsellers – I liked it! Some fun facts for you:
Agatha Christie is probably the world biggest selling novelist ever – 72 novels in total, 2 billion sales. That is not really a fun fact. It’s actually a yawn. I think most people are born knowing this already.
Barbara Cartland is a best selling author although none of her 600-PLUS NOVELS (it says here) was an individual bestseller
Gone With the Wind sold a million in 1936 (first year of publication) which was phenomenal, but the top five novels regularly sell that amount in their first year in recent years in America
Genre novelists, maybe predictably, were able to crank out the merchandise at speeds which indicate some form of chemical assistance – check it out :
Zane Grey – 200 westerns
Max Brand, “king of the pulps” – 600 novels plus 900 stories under 20 pen names in various different genres (most famous title : Destry Rides Again, but he also created Dr Kildare)
Louis L’Amour – 200 western novels
John Creasey – 600 mystery novels
Hank Jansen – about 220 novels with titles like Frails Can Be So Tough and Broads Don’t Scare Easy
[image]
Leslie Charteris – umpteen novels (he created The Saint)
Dennis Wheatley – also umpteen
Erle Stanley Gardner – 80-plus mystery novels
Mickey Spillane – not that many novels but he did brag that he could turn out one in three days if he was pushed
Stephen King – 54 novels and going strong
There’s a constant strand of what you might call research fiction in the bestsellers – The Agony and the Ecstasy, which was the life of Michaelangelo fictionalized by Irving Stone, Hawaii, which is the fictionalized story of Hawaii by James Michener, Hotel, Airport, Wheels, The Moneychangers - all by Arthur Hailey in which he investigates one industry per novel, then there’s John Grisham and Michael Crichton. Some of ‘em contract out the research. There’s an assumption that bestsellers are the fast food of fiction, to be scraped off the shoes of any readers of proper literature before entering a decent household; but sometimes great novels actually sell well, such as
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Main Street The Grapes of Wrath All the King’s Men Lolita [image] The Naked and the Dead Lady Chatterley’s Lover (guess why) Couples Portnoy’s Complaint Humboldt’s Gift Ragtime Sophie’s Choice The Handmaid’s Tale The Satanic Verses The Bonfire of the Vanities
Some big name authors, as you have noticed, turn themselves into franchises and brands – new James Bond novels are produced without the need for the frankly deceased Ian Fleming; likewise V C Andrews novels continued to be published as “A V C Andrews novel by Andrew Neiderman”. If only they’d have thought to do that with Charles Dickens or Shakespeare. Unwittingly I seem to have become a John Sutherland fanboy – I have now read this one, plus his very amusing Lives of the Novelists, plus his also amusing 50 Literature Ideas you Really Need to Know, plus his strange, annoying, but never boring How to be Well Read. Perhaps he is stalking me.
The tenacity of poor SF is renowned. It has unfortunately formed the hallmark of the genre.
THE QUICK VERSIJOIN ME AND TOGETHER WE CAN RULE THE GALAXY!
The tenacity of poor SF is renowned. It has unfortunately formed the hallmark of the genre.
THE QUICK VERSION FOR THOSE IN A HURRY
This could be a rather long review so for those with more time pressure here’s a summary :
This is a splendid history of SF from whenever it started (disputed) up to the mid of the 1980s. It was an update of his earlier Billion Year Spree, and I am only sorry that Brian Aldiss hasn’t done a Gazillion Year Spree yet. He is still with us (now aged 91) so really there’s no excuse. Come on Brian! Get off your backside! I can’t see any other useful history of SF out there. You the man!
MY PROBLEM WITH SF
I could write you a list of my favourite sf short stories as long as your arm but I still wouldn’t call myself a fan because such a large amount of sf, especially sf novels, is obsessed with
war! What is it good for? Absolutely nuthin’. Except providing the plot for every other damned SF novel.
Usually between or within
Galactic Empires!!!
And I’m like …. Yawwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn……
FORTRESS ROUND MY ART
In the olden days Frankenstein and Jules Verne and HG Wells and RL Stevenson and Olaf Stapledon were not recognized as science fiction because the genre did not formally exist. Then it was invented in in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback who called it “scientifiction” and launched the magazine Amazing Stories which amazingly enough is still in existence (online since 2006). Brian calls Hugo
One of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field
because by creating a magazine which published nothing but SF he created a ghetto. And as an editor he was “without literary understanding” and set “dangerous precedents” which have been blindly followed. Brian says that when he made these remarks in the first edition of this book he thought they
merely expressed a truth apparent to any reasonable mind. Instead they aroused fury. My book was widely condemned.
So SF built itself a ghetto (an American ghetto) and all the magazines which followed and authors who filled them up were considered by non-fans as the worst kind of pulp and totally ignored. (“Pornography got a better press.”) It took 30 years for SF to climb out of its self-imposed isolation. A great novel like 1984 was not published as science fiction. In 1960 Walter Miller’s brilliant A Canticle for Leibowitz was published and
was immediately greeted with the warmest praise by reviewers – i.e. they said it was so good it couldn’t possibly be SF
Aldiss is a wonderful commentator on every aspect of the long history of SF because he doesn’t hold back, he’s waspish and sometimes irascible. Here are a few of his opinions which pleased me.
ALDISS ON ISAAC ASIMOV
What does one say in his praise that Asimov himself has not already said?... He is a great producer. He enjoys enormous popularity. He has become monstrous.
ALDISS ON FOUNDATION
(Aldiss describes the Galactic Empire, the Foundation and the concept of psychohistory) Neither of these ideas bears a minute’s serious investigation. Yet upon these structures Asimov builds his huge house of cards. … what Asimov presents us with is Rome in Space… an epic in true Hollywood tradition, with extras hired for the day, rather wooden actors and plastic props.
ALDISS ON ASIMOV’S MERGING TOGETHER OF THE ROBOT NOVELS AND THE FOUNDATION NOVELS INTO ONE GIANT SERIES
What can one say about this painful obsession?
ALDISS ON HEINLEIN
He is not a particularly good storyteller and his characters are often indistinguishable.
ALDISS ON THE LATER A E VAN VOGT (HAVING LAVISHED PRAISE ON THE EARLIER)
Van Vogt produced a number of novels in the seventies, few of which made any real sense.
ALDISS ON PHILIP K DICK
Between life and death lie the many shadow lands of Dick, places of hallucination, perpetual sumps, cloacae of dim half life, paranoid states, tomb worlds and orthodox hells. All his novels are one novel, a fatidical A la recherche du temps perfide.
[fatidical, fa-tid′ik-al, adj. having power to foretell future events: prophetical.]
ALDISS ON STAR WARS
It was apparent from the first that Star Wars was an outsize elephant with the brains of a gnat (Having said that he then goes on to shower praise on it.)
ALDISS ON THE 1980s
Even a cursory examination of the mass of SF currently being published reveals one striking phenomenon immediately. Much of it is not SF. It is fantasy.
ALDISS ON FANTASY
(I paraphrase). The fate of the world depends on some poor slave girl and a man of low birth with mystic powers and an amulet. And by the way, why are so many fantasy novels set in a feudal culture? Because the authors have no knowledge of economics. And also, they’re writing for adolescent boys who have no knowledge of economics.
A TYPICAL STORY OF INJUSTICE
Dimension of Miracles (1968) was Robert Sheckley’s best novel in the 60s. …It puts the Big Questions as perhaps they ought to be put – comically. Some of us grieved when Douglas Adams came along with his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and grew rich doing the Sheckleyan things which appeared to keep Sheckley poor
SECOND STAR TO THE RIGHT, AND STRAIGHT ON TIL MORNING
I finished this with a weighty sensation of the vast amounts of SF written up to the 1980s, and this was before SF REALLY took off and began to eat everything else. I felt like Spiderman in issue number 33 (“The Final Chapter”, 1966)
[image]
In this analogy, I am Spiderman crushed by the weight of all the unread SF.
Then add another 25 years of the stuff…..
But perhaps the problem is not so big, if you exclude all the GALACTIC EMPIRE rubbish AND SF-which-is-really-fantasy, PLUS all the unreadable technophile stuff which can only be read by people who actually know something about science (not me, not me) – maybe you’re only left with 17 books! I could manage that....more
Loading...
