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A detail of a painting by Natalie Frank -- click to see her site
EYESHOT'S EXHAUSTIVE YEAR-END READING RUNDOWN (2012)
BY EYESHOT AL SHERRIF
 
Last year we posted little impressions of books that left the longest lasting lingering impressions on us, and this year, lacking new stuff to post, we decided to do so again. All years are good reading years, but 2012 was beyond good, better than good, because we foresaw that in 2013 and subsequent years we might not have as much peaceful quiet reading time/energy and so we devoted 2012 to reading as though our procreative balls were to the proverbial wall -- finally getting to Mann, Musil, Proust, among many others. We read like camels gearing up for a long journey without watery books, although we're sure we'll read just as much in the future as we have in the past, mixing in way more Dr. Seuss and Curious George with the serious hi-falutin lit we love, which we intend to read aloud to little Baby Eyeshot. Anyway, here's what we thought about a few (not all) books we read this year, presented in no particular order. Note: all paragraph breaks have been removed for density's sake. To see future impressions as soon they see light, befriend or follow us on Goodreads and/or to a lesser extent on Twitter. As a last resort, notification of new Eyeshot additions can be attained by liking us on Effbük.

Inscriptions for Headstones 
by Matthew Vollmer

Author is a friend from grad school but that doesn't mean I can't sincerely proclaim that I just took a much-needed break from Proust to read a signficantly more contemporary exercise in memory, only to discover that it doesn't read like "an exercise in memory," thankfully, in fact it didn't feel like a creative writing exercise at all (my initial fear), since -- lo! -- after a bit the conceit seemed to melt away to reveal an excellent, formally interesting, audacious, moving, vivid, suggestive, life-affirming, open-hearted collection of short one-sentence autobiographical essays involving undergoing surgery to correct a weird chest cavity, beheading copperheads, Tumblr, long-lost Jordan-like friends, cutting one's own hair, staring at the embers of a fire while coming off psychoactive drugs, strict Christian upbringing (the whole thing inexplicitly expresses conversion from following G-d as a child to something more mystical/literary as an adult), haunting old family houses, advanced directives re: what to do with one's body, classic '80s NBA (Bird, Rambis) -- not to give all the wonders of its nature away, but this is a book that gawks at the wide-open world and thereby experiences a sort of grace, making peace with the old verity of so much world/so little time upon it, walking through neighborhoods at night wondering why everyone doesn't walk at night every night (mad but not really mad at the blue glow in at least one window per house), and -- most affectingly -- being a father and being a son, plus other not-quite-polar pivot spots that make these epitaphs come absolutely alive and, whether or not you're a fan of Michael Martone or Some Instructions to My Wife or Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes, this writer -- who come to think of it organized a touch football game on weekends in grad school -- commands the huddle and, with confidence in your writer/reader tandem's mutal desire to win a nonexistent existential trophy, places a tight spiral into your outstretched hands after he instructs you to go long.

*
 

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Within a week of each other, my mother and a grad school friend recommended this to me, both calling it "up my alley," maybe because it's a literary autobiography unafraid of piling on the detail and ripping off pages of dense, insightful exposition. I hadn't seen the James Wood review in The New Yorker (didn't skim it until after I wrote a draft of this review), but I've long loved the look and feel of Archipelago's books and I'm an Anselm Keifer fan (there's a Keifer on the cover). Fiction is fact selected, arranged, and charged with purpose, said Thomas Wolfe in the foreword to Look Homeward, Angel, but Knausgaard's acknowledged precedence is Proust. Narrator admits to gulping Proust down before writing this novel, memoir, "roman," something that maintains the circuituous structure but swaps out the velveteen serpentine suffusions for something cleaner, starker, heteronormative, and involuntarily cathartic more than ecstatic -- none of which mean it's better than Proust, just comparing the two because Proust is the archetype, the way some bands derive from The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zep, and others from Kraftwerk. A pretty clear division between scene and summary (exposition): pages of always welcomed dense/deep exposition (usually about death, although at first about parenthood) followed by pages of scenes (sometimes with quick little refreshing streams of sparsely attributed dialogue). The exposition I loved whereas the scenes, especially in the first part, I only admired -- or maybe I overrelated to the first section involving his adolescence? Teenage dudes driving around looking to drink, playing guitar (I loved how my electric guitar case smelled), crappy bands playing outside to no one (my college band once played outside to four of our friends), lusting, making out, varieties of -- to my mind -- overly common experience that may account for why I've never really written about my teen years, have always pushahed them, deemed them necessarily stoned more than beautiful, and therefore unworthy. But Knausgaard seemed to OK those years, those experiences, and shows how to go about it as long as -- as in Proust -- teen/childhood talk is filtered through a mature narrator's recollections. That depth, that distance, seems necessary for me in part to evade accusations of YA-ness from fuckheads like me. Something else I loved: things are detailed at times to the point of what Frank Conroy called "abject naturalism": comprehensive minute detailing of minor movements, especially washing dishes or setting a table or other rote physical actions. Here, such naturalism is less abject than the object, the point, a cataloguing of momentary forms, like monumental skyscapes at sunset, momentary, meaningless, lacking secret codes to crack, glanced at, deemed beautiful, that's it -- appreciated but so common they're taken for granted. "The veranda, the plastic bottles, the light in the neighbor's windows . . . The gutter and the rainwater still running down it into the grass. I could not grasp that he wouldn't see any more of this, however hard I tried." There's something steely about the narrator no matter how often he, like water from a rock, breaks into tears. Things are clear and rational and yet move unpredictably -- nonlinear layering of the story gives it more depth. It feels absolutely real and reading it enhanced perception of life around at least one reader. Also, when they inevitably round up the post-irony novels that have come since DFW's prediction in the famous TV essay about Leyner, Knausgaard will be mentioned. He's sincere without being stupid about it, without feeling like he's restraining a natural instinct to entertain or humor. Loved the bit, after he talks with his wife on the phone and they both say how much they miss and love each other, how he gets some things at a convenience store and wants to sleep with the chubby Iraqi or Iranian girl who won't look up at him. It's very well-done, understated, its significance not overexplicated with exposition, plus it suggests issues that might arise in later volumes. Throughout, its naturalism feels natural, like literature more than contemporary literary fiction that adheres to the rules of its genre and thereby so often for me feels unreal, like a story, like fiction. 4.5 stars for me -- I'll definitely read the next five or so volumes as they come out and maybe revisit this rating if moved to do so. I'm sure this will stick with me. A half-star off since it was a bit of a slog midway before the second half when the aftermath of the father's death started up -- but I also had trouble finding time to sit down for consistent stretches, plus it's too cold and windy to walk and read at lunch or to/fro work. One thing of note: when I did walk around at lunch and read this, it was fun to think that a few folks might have thought I was reading a fancy new translation of "Mein Kampf." That suggestion/juxtaposition is pretty audacious/rad since it adds heft to the minor details throughout -- reminds me a little of the early Kiefer photos (late '60s) of the artist giving the Heil Hitler while standing in a bathtub filled with toy boats, in front of the ocean, or alone in a field? The author's struggle is artistic, emotional, personal if not solitary (ie, familial), literally and figuratively cleaning the mess others have made in life, dealing with the memory of his father now that the narrator himself is a father of three. Not a depressing book since it's filled with life, even if it's mostly about death. Minimal talk of fjords, too, although the word definitely appears a few times.

*

The Scientists: A Family Romance 
by Marco Roth

Read this in various locations (parks, rooms, trains) but finished the last few pages in the tiny park at First Ave and Houston about a block from where the author bounds up the subway steps toward the end. I expected to look up and see a 3D projection of Marco (a Philly frend) turn the corner and bound toward the Lower East Side, conspicuously alleviated, his self-portrayed nervous, self-defeating, self-consciously "intellectual" intelligence at long last chanelled toward specific purposes: this recently published, smart, moving "anti-memoir" about more than his father's HIV contraction and death by AIDS, and his work as co-editor of n+1. Anti-memoir, essay, or whatever it's called, it's a book very much about the interdependent duo of life and text. As such, it's also very much a book about writing a book, and therefore eligible for shelving among other books I've loved like Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, and Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, among others I can't remember now but will add once I do. I love books about trying (and predominately failing, of course) to write books -- it's probably my favorite literary subgenre, in part because the existence of the book itself suggests a successful struggle. This is an excellent example of the genre, although it's not quite as explicit as those mentioned above. The author traces intricate patterns on a sophisticated, elaborate, endangered foundation of artistic, tempermental, and intellectual inheritance. Hand-wringing involves living up to the expectations of privilege and one's talent and education, and at most matching (if not necessarily surpassing) one's parents' success. Like all worthwhile writing, essay or otherwise, this is primarily a Truth Hunt, with the author presented as fragile literary investigator with a nose for the facts, even/especially if they're abstract realizations achieved via strict scrutiny of serious Russian/European novels his father suggested he read. The investigation takes the author to Paris to study with Derrida (as he learns more about his father's history/orientation, the son's origin/center shifts); to Yale's PhD lit program to assay his father's favorite texts (including Fathers and Sons -- high on the Eyeshot 2013 reading list thanks to this list) for traces of truth about father and son and to hash out anti-narrative ideas of identity with brilliant/sloshed fellow grad students; and to his ever-changing place of origin, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It's an investigation that pays off for the author in that this is clearly a book that had to be written, and it's something that had to be written in proper and attentively phrased prose worthy of the author's cultural/famililal legacy and intense literary interest. But it also pays off for readers because of the clarity and intelligence of the prose, the general spirit of erudition lofted by engines of emotion (and vice versa), but also it succeeds as a simple high-lit whodunit (the conclusion of the case I won't reveal). All in all, a brave, intelligent, moving book for telling the story of discerning the truth about the father's tragic story while devising out of aesthetic and emotional necessity the book in the readers' hands. After alleviating his family burden by abstractly avenging his father's death, the son seems ready to trace new patterns across the interdependent pages of life and text. Alt title: "Portrait of the Public Intellectual as a Young Man."

*


Zone by Mathias Enard

A discontinuous sentence broken up by chapters, a few of which relate a tradtionally formatted story (many sentences, paragraphs, etc) the narrator reads while on the train from Milan to Rome. Not really a single sentence, folks, but the formal aspects of this one only superficially interest, the way each comma-delineated phrase is like a train-track tie, which the book associates with bodies piled up on the horizontal. Like a cut-up of an encyclopedia of the secret history of 20th century European/Mediterranean atrocities, seamlessly streaming from the consciousness of a veteran of endless armed conflict and endless psychic wars whenever at rest (if never at peace). Namedrops and occasionally animates Genet, Burroughs, Joyce, Pound. Receives consistent nonintrustive canonical support from the Iliad. Every page lists exotic locations, not so Anglo names, wars, skirmishes, battles, conflicts, assassinations, genocides, all while alluding to classical mythology/long-lost antiquity, blending up a froth of world-weary and wartorn sophistication, like a Sebald/James Bond hybrid, like Vollmann oozing Euro essence (a mix of blood and Ouzo), like Keroauc invoking Zeus instead of Buddha, like a paramilitary Proust (oft alluded to, as well as Celine), all in all exactly like the narrator concocted by Monsieur Enard, born a few weeks before me. As ambitious in its way as Infinite Jest and other monsters (517 pages filled with words -- not much white space, no dialogue etc), yet nary a mention of advertisements -- the stuff that makes people sad in the Zone (the Mediterrean region, plus Serbia/Croatia, Austria/Germany, Paris, etc) is purely gruesome historical hysteria thanks to compounding violent revenge violently avenged, on and on to the apocalypse. Yeah! Good times! Maybe four stars rounded up for the sake of audacity, authority, originality, heft, scope, execution, oomph, language always pushing ahead, hard to look away yet hard to read in bed, recommended for walking readers or anyone reading on the move. Really a first-class foward-flowing associative collage of horrific histories, but never seemingly gory for the sake of gore (there's a great amputated forearm toward the end -- quotations to come), sometimes it's tender, a heartbreaking memory of a glimpse of white panties, the ecstatic sight of a pair of siren-like dolphins. A book everyone should probably read since it so generously suggests how much I at least don't know, not only the Iliad but mostly everything beyond the knowledge of the occurrence of everything that's happened over time in Germany, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, Algeria, on and on. Not really actually recommended for most readers but, for fans of Sebald, Bolano, Vollmann, for fans of intertexual and/or high-art international lit, this is a can't miss atrocity exhibition.

*

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

A flowing, engaging, gripping, hefty, accessible, masterful novella. Effortless/seamless old-timey Austrian structure: a narrator tells a story that includes someone's third-person account about one major character and a longish first-person account by another major character. The two chess players are well drawn and absolutely differentiated: one's a stoic idiot-savant peasant, the other's an anxious intellectual from a highly regarded Viennese family. Really worth spending the hour or so it takes to read. Directly addresses Nazi interrogation tactics and oppression, but I'd say it's maybe more about the ability of the mind to free one's ass but also potentially become a sort of prison in itself. The imagination can embue a wooden grid and wooden statues with so much serious rational significance that people devote their lives to chess and can ideally provide a refuge against oppression, whether as obvious as Nazi occupation or as subtle as daily boredom and/or a sense of the nothingness of existence etc. But then it can also operate in overdrive, go too far, feed on itself, become a sickness, an arrogance, a feverish instability that fails to recognize what's going on in reality. I suppose this could be extrapolated to critique National Socialism, too -- something about rational reclamation of a country's spirit taken to sickly irrational extreme? Or maybe it has to do with the war-damaged artistic imagination? Regardless, looks like I need to read a lot more Zwieg . . . 

*

The Man Without Qualities, Vol 1 
by Robert Musil

Among the very best I've read. No question. Up there shining a bright light in my own little personal canonical firmament. The ideal book of ideas. Fans of towering literary artistry will love this. Recommended for fans of Infinite Jest -- there's even a riff about what it means when a tennis player is called a genius. Somewhere in Extinction (see below), Bernhard notes that Musil is the best prose writer ever in German. Fantastically drawn characters with incomparable depth thanks to such clear, fluid, insightful exposition. Things happen early on that are sustained and revisited throughout (ie, there's a plot). Ulrich's beaten up, he hangs with his artistic piano-playing friends, enjoys some intimacy with a married nympho, gets arrested, takes a shine to a society-symbolizing lady killer, and becomes a member of the Parallel Campaign! Otherwise, despite all this plot crap, every page packs an epigrammical wallop. Unfakeable insight, wisdom, striking images. Exactly the sort of thing I want and rail about when I don't get, especially in books considered excellent. So many ideas, too many to even begin listing, but never does it feel thematically scatterbrained or "encyclopedic" -- it's like a gracefully revolving squeezing out of nuanced colors from every gradiation stop along the emotional, intellectual, psychological, artistic, political, societal, and most importantly the spiritual spectrum (note: "spiritual" doesn't mean "religious" as much as having to do with that very Germanic concept of Geist, which I think is like the soul, the body, the mind, the will, and all those old verities like courage and dignity wrapped up in one -- the sort of thing ye olde uber-Modernist novels like this are most concerned about). It's the sort of book that you want to start summarizing and quoting until you've plagiarized all 725 pages. Did things sometimes get a little slow? Not so often that I lost patience -- slower lulls came before the storms (albeit more of axiom than action). Loved the Utopia of Essayism sections, sort of like prose-poem unpredictable statement tilt-a-whirls re: Ulrich's way of life. Loved the two sections about the Great Author (Arnheim) -- couldn't help thinking about how it applied to JFranz these days (particularly the recent shitstorm about his off-the-cuff anti-Twitter riffs). So often things seemed to directly address today's Twittering soul (the action is set in 1913 Vienna; Musil wrote it in the '20s/'30s) and, toward the end, the Occupy Movement. Not sure how well this one would make out if run through the race, class, gender thresher. Soliman, one of the most vivid and "poignant" characters in the book, is like a horny Pip awash in a sea of upper-crust whitecaps. Diotima and Bonedea I confused a little, despite warnings not to do just that, thanks to their idealized names, but Rachel and particularly Clarisse, if not Gerda, were more developed and felt real. There's still the second volume and the notes of volume 2 to read but volume 1 feels absolutely complete -- if Musil had said he was done at this point it would've been considered a complete masterpiece instead of the first volume of an unfinished mega-masterpiece. All the major character and thematic dealios seemed to evolve and climax and close down at the end. Anyway, really glad I've read this. Can't recommend it more highly to pretty much everyone -- for a book of this size and sort, it seemed surprisingly accessible. Can't wait to read some more Musil, some Mann, and other related Germanic stuff (Broch's The Sleepwalkers) this summer. Let's hope it's dark and dreary. 

*

Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

Have had this since 1997, a crusty old paperback taken for free or not much more from a neighbor's yard sale. Read some in the past but never persevered to finish. Recommended for fans of dark, violent, realist fables. Call it skewed yet scarily/stuntedly straightforward post-traumatic stress syndrome lit? Sometimes like Kafka anecdotes but never even a smidge irreal (what seem at first like humanoids are simply humans), also lacking suggestion of a spiritual side? Sometimes like Jesus' Son but without that hazy Christian glow. Heavenly reflection on earth is just the shadow of a rotten brown leaf. Sometimes like an evil Kundera with a long knife instead of philosophical exposition -- at the end of a brief part, when the knife goes in, the whole thing seems to crystallize (sneaky starts, in general, and yowza sensationalist endings). Perpetuates stereotypes of the sicko post-war Old Country (fans of this sort of stuff should definitely check out The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels). Right away, ignorance and oppression dupes an innocent into beliving her liberator's credit cards are magic. Decapitations. Gang rape. Crazy naked lady in a cage. Soccer team obliterated by artillery fire. Bored snipers take out strolling couples, a bored guy takes out the night watchman of an abandoned building. On and on, short psychically linked bits, carefully and cleanly composed, often told by a cold if not pathologically calculating post-war narrator. Sometimes italicized psychoanalytic-like dialogue. Suggestion of unspecified international atrocities provides sense of serious heft (ie, human condition significance) throughout, despite book's general brevity. Literature of the "Oh the Humanity"- or "The Horror, The Horror"-type. A precursor to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men -- read this after so many years because it's mentioned in the DFW bio as an influence. A particularly vivid bit about a fast driver hired to do just that as business deals go on in the back. I'm interested in Kozinski's others but not about to run out after them. Amazing this won the National Book Award in 1968. A very different literary world back then, huh? 3.5 stars for me? Will come back to parts of it now and again to retrace some unexpected "steps." 

*
 

NW by Zadie Smith

The cover-flap copy makes this seem like a playfully pomo tragicomic treatise on contemporary city life but it seemed more like a simultaneously straightforward and purposefully skewed narrative exploration of superaccessible topics like long-term friendship, fluid identity (possibility of), order/chaos (extremes to which we might alternately lean when there's lack or excess of either), ye olde search for meaning in a world that rarely stays ordered forever. All these themes are reflected in the structure: the stories of two long-time female friends (Leah and Keisha/Natalie) interrupted by the tangentially related story of a familiar neighborhood face (Felix), streaked with the story of someone tangential from the girls' past (Nathan Bogle) who affects Felix's present. These stories are for the most part presented in chapters/sections ordered with traditionally ascending numbers, except that (in Leah's section) when presented with a sufficient stressor, the chapter numbers jump from 14 to 37, a number of irrational/mystical significance involving numerological quasi-faith/sense of order in an otherwise disordered world (see p 37, UK edition). Keisha/Natalie's section of the book is the most traditional, an episodic series of 185 numbered short bits (missing #37, of course) relating fleeting coming-of-age memories/nostalgia (great bit about first listening to a Walkman, suggestions of TV shows from Friends to The Wire), sexual experience with objects and others, first loves, education, ascendancy by virtue of working twice as hard as whites not from the council estates. This section, despite the appearance of numbers, reads traditionally/linearly, often with scenes and dialogue, but it's an unfulfilling order for Keisha (renamed Natalie to reflect her new professional identity), who longs for disorder (p 267, UK): "There is a connection between boredom and the desire for chaos. Despite many disguises and bluffs perhaps she had never stopped wanting chaos."  A thematic key for readers confused by this novel appears early on (Page 10, UK): "Leah spins her spoon in her tea . . . She pressed the bag too hard. The leaves break their borders and swarm." Such swarms (chaos) abound after the borders of various tea bags (ideas of order) are broken. Clearly, Leah's metaphorical tea bag is broken when Shar enters her apartment in the first scene, but she can deal with it until, in chapter 14, again, she breaks down after calling Shar a thief and receiving a volley of patois in return on p 36, a scene followed by chapter 37. Keisha at first longs to escape the order of the family unit and then later as Natalie with her own family plus nanny etc she again longs to leave it -- she wants to tear open her tea bag and let the leaves swarm. Other ideas of order are expressed as The Law (see Kafka's The Trial; also, "At RSN Associates the law burst from broken box files . . ." p 215 UK), ye olde Anglo-Saxon London, bellies kicked and sliced or swollen with baby, the encapsulated past (Garvey House photo book) and the uncollected present, and again -- on an all-important formal level -- conventional versus unconventional structure. Other dualistic dealios exist, especially one related to boredom opposed to ecstasy/catharis/the fullness of time (google link to Kierkegaard quote presented on p 223), the difference between a moment and an instant that Natalie thinks of as "blossom." And this sort of thing relates to the difference between a page of Mapquest-style directions from point A to B (p 33) and a page of sensations and specifics along the route (p 34). Some folks mention that they don't quite like the characters, and I think this has to do with structure and characterization. Early on I had trouble with characterization -- at first it felt detrimentally underdone, but by the end I realized that this was consequence of the structure (for example, Natalie and her kids are presented early on but we don't know much about them -- they're more or less disembodied proper nouns at first) but major players come to life once things focus on Keisha/Natalie Blake, the latest in the line of slant semi-autobiographical characters (see Irie in White Teeth and Zora in On Beauty). Minor players (Jayden, Nathan Bogle, Marcia, Tom, Annie) maybe remain a little underdrawn, and therefore seem like thematic representatives more than characters (Jayden reps open-living freedom; Nathan Bogle reps the encapsulated past torn open)? Natalie's husband Frank is somehow almost a sort of superhandsome successful Trinidadian Italian hybrid stereotype (if such a man can possibly be a stereotype), but he's the only one who's characterized with real vibrant zeal, like the author was concerned that James Wood might protest (oh lord, there she goes again with that Hysterical Realism!) if she didn't tone shit down a bit in this one? In general, names at first seem unremarkable (Tom, Frank, Leah, Natalie, Michel, Ned) but fill out with compelling prosaics in time, almost as a lesson to the reader in the importance of considering the complexity of consciousness and experience inherent in commonplace names and faces. I realize I haven't gone into the section with Felix and Annie so much. Felix tries to set things in order and do what's right -- and he gets swarmed for it. Maybe I'll revisit this part a little later on. In general, I feel like I need to re-read the first two sections to really see how the parts relate, but that's also the point of this book, to create initial readerly disorientation/sense of disorder that solidifies/focuses/blossoms as the characters' lives become more disordered (ie, as their tea leaves swarm)? That tension, that movement -- readers acheiving order as characters lose it -- is maybe one of the book's pleasures? Again, it's the sort of book that probably requires a second read, a book whose first read for me I felt merited a second read because I'm sure it's chockful of rewarding links between parts and people, associative goodies throughout I couldn't easily make on first read, that importantly relate to overarching themes of order and disorder/connection and disconnection. It might call for a second read but not the way Joyce or Faulkner usually do -- it's comparatively easy reading on a line to line level throughout. Overall, an engagingly slant story -- in terms of thematic and narrative procession, it's necessarily more angular (NW) than straightup (N-S-E-W).

*

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: 
A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max

A complicated chap, this DFW: capable of Aspbergian selfishness and more than semi-noxious competitiveness, an explicitly excellent writer who posits concern for readers yet nevertheless once dropped from a great height "Mr. Squishy" upon our poor heads, an arch-grammarian thanks to his mom capable of making usage stuff look like calculations intended to trap infinity in a jar, maybe sort of a wonky weany despite his size and high-protein breakfast vomit, apparently helpless around the house beyond changing bulbs in his many lamps, a mama's boy who liked the ladies and the ganja when young, no apparent deep interest in fine art or music or food (beyond blondies and poptarts) or footwear (beyond untied workboots), psychopathically obsessive about Mary Carr in an unambiguously creepy way, worried about media's affect on American morality in what amounts to unattractive moralizing at this point maybe -- his intelligence and humor and perception and sentences are undisputed champs of the world but the overarching media-saturation sadness stuff and his obsessive insistence on sadness/suffering/darkness etc only seem to fight half the thematic battle (ie, what Milton called "light and darkness in perpetual round"). But I'm not here to judge the dude -- this is an impression of a biography that lays the foundation for better ones to come but which is very readable and steady and an excellent start. I admired how it mutes for the most part its judgments, how it presents the facts, the quotations, the timeline, the memories of friends etc and always lets us see the lies as much as the kindness. Typos and misused words (passify, skein) didn't overly distract me but I did find recaps of all work other than Infinite Jest not so fun. Would've LOVED 25+ glossy insert pages of photos (at least the obligatory elementary school class portrait with young DFW, top left, eyes bright but mercurially averting direct contact with camera) and facsimiles of handwritten manuscript/journal pages and college transcripts and samples of his teaching syllabi! Generally, a serviceable bio studded with Franzen and DeLillo correspondence, with juicy bits about his total insanity for Mary Carr, plus details w/r/t his obsessive showering . . . Loved that he could write 22K words in a day. Loved that he brushed his teeth for 45 minutes every morning and night in college. Loved that the opening college interview freakout in IJ was based on real events at my (and Lenore Beadsman's) alma mater. Loved that he turned down inexpensive Iowa on financial grounds as though he couldn't get loans and teaching jobs -- or have his parents pay his way through his MFA. Mentions unrepentantly parochial books I'd heard he'd loved like (the unfinishably slow for me) Catholics by Brian Moore and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. After a point I couldn't put this down and it was a fine companion while cooped up sick as Superstorm Sandy devastated everything -- there's something asssociable about reading a long-awaited bio about the recently deceased DFW (a man known for his overwhelming intelligence and outsized novel) and the recent Frankenstorm that churned slowly up the coast. There's maybe something alternately devastating and underwhelming about both, too, depending on where you live (literally/figuratively). Ultimately, this more than sufficiently suggests what it felt like to be the FHB (fucking human being) known as DFW -- and it answered lingering WTFs w/r/t his life and superfucking heartbreaking death (surprised there wasn't a post-death chapter about reactions and a lot more about his final days than first appeared in the New Yorker article). Worth it if you've ever wondered about the guy's story, his high school history, his grades in the second semester of his sophomore year in college (spoiler: A+ across the board), how much action he got after IJ came out, how many students he slept with, etc, how many friends from recovery groups he helped out financially, etc, and have read the interviews and Lipsky thing and want to live in DFW World awhile more. It's a charismatic, virulent, thought-colonizing place but, again, thematically, I feel like it's maybe partially pathological and reliant on therapy/recovery-related simplicities restated in overeducated serpentine slipstreams of high/low language -- not all of it, just some of it, I'd say. What I mean is: what once was a literary marriage between author and reader built on unabashed love has changed its status to "it's complicated." Anyway, RIP DFW, although through IJ and your essays you'll live forever. After Both Flesh and Not: Essays is published next week, let's hope for a bit of silence -- at least until the collected letters, emails, responses to student stories come out.

*

Written Lives by Javier Marias

Enjoyable little book of portraits of mostly very famous writers. Took me longer than I thought it would since I usually read it in bed and usually put it down and turned off the light before pushing on to the next writer. I liked how Henry James and Ford Maddox Ford and Oscar Wilde and others were strung through the text, like a Bolano book about real writers. Not too much to say about it since it doesn't really present an argument etc other than stray, not so immortalized moments in the lives of these writers. Makes me want to read Djuana Barnes and James and Ford Maddox Ford and Emily Bronte and Robert Lewis Stevenson. 

*

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

The gateway to a full-on Proust habit. About varieties of love: eros (carnal), agape (unconditional/motherly), societal (admiration), divine (mystical/aesthetic). That last one isn't old-fashioned denominational GOD LOVE, but more like a recognition of the wonder of existence/beauty, often tinged with a wistfulness, or melancholy, since the instance of divine love is experienced without warning or reason and then only remembered/recaptured with decreasing intensity thereafter. Importantly, this sort of divine love requires one to have an innate capacity to experience moments of incapacitating/life-elevating beauty. The narrator has it, Swann does too, others also suggest an experience of rapture. (Others not so much -- I'm looking at you, Odette). Everyone knows the famous madeleine, but the other similar motifs/vehicles of ecstatic beauty come to the reader in passages just as good/memorable/beautiful about pink hawthorns and a phrase in a sonata. Not the stuff of visceral plot-driven fiction, alas. No plot. It's also about the experience of TIME, of course, and the book's length and approach exercise the reader's memory and reinforce a sense that time in the novel has really passed, in part because it's been days since you'd read a passage or image referred to later on. Sometimes felt suffused with chrysanthemum dust. Best when discussing solo apprehension of the divine. Slowest when about carnal superficial love and attendant tilt-a-whirl adolescent worries (like what little I've read of Balzac, Stendhal), and related highly calibrated societal sensitivities. Words I'd use to describe the prose and approach would include mixolydian, serpentine, rapturous, velveteen. At times like a psychedelic Stendhal, sort of. Good call by the translators to name the first volume Swann's Way instead of Meseglise Way, the true name of the path but not nearly as catchy a title! 4.5 stars rounded up for canonical status and the sense that it must be re-read to really appreciate once the whole thing's been completed. It's clear now that I'm 250 pages into the second volume that the prose in the first volume is softer, sort of prissier, redolent of youth in the country, more innocent than it is at least later on when it offers plenty of writer-related talk and brothels. A good time of year to read this stuff -- something about it matches the light in September (ie, it's "radiant" or "luminous"), although that might also have to do with the beautifully formatted Modern Library paperbacks. 

*

Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

Now just past his adolescent years, our nameless little narrator friend spends time at the Balbec beach and basks in the ambit of some fine young lasses after chatting with a kindly ambassador and a famous (albeit brutishly dressed and mannered!) writer he admires. The bits with Bergotte, the great writer, were fun -- I love great writers as imagined by great writers (the only other one I can think of is Arnheim in Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1). I'm having trouble recapturing all that's covered in this one, particularly early on, since I somehow started it about six weeks ago. Good to see Swann and Odette years later, comparatively settled down, to feel like I'd experienced their most passionate episodes and now know them well, can see the world through their eyes and appreciate changes in character. Little narrator dude alludes to time spent in a brothel, just chatting of course, and in general seems a lot less wispily enthralled by pink hawthorns. Once he travels to the beach, he recognizes young yearning ladies but has a low estimation of his ill self and sort of holds his tail between his legs and talks not of sharing in their yearning but appreciating young ladies for how interesting they might be, something which at first seemed indicative of the author/narrator's sexuality but also nicely setup a change of tune (from bashful whistle to let's get it on) after hundreds of pages. Narrator hangs with some male folks his age, particularly Saint-Loup, who really stands out at first, erect as a silver bishop on the swirly shifting societal chess board, a kind kindred aristocratic kid for Marcel to marvel at and befriend. For the most part, over 730 pages, all that really happens (ie, in terms of a concentrated burst of action) is he tries to mack on a hot little lady who's asked him to come sit by her bedside after pressing on his hand, giving him meaningful looks, and speaking "the language of affection" with him, and so when he leans in to kiss her . . . I won't give it away since it's a relatively pleasurable payoff on page 701. This long second installment seems a little more solid as narrator comes into his own, essentially sides with writing over an ambassadorial career, and then develops his eye for beauty in art, nature, and pale little dark-haired ladies wired to please, all near the sea with its sets of waves as liquidy and luminously lapidary as the prose, as always. A cathedral is associated with rocky cliffs along the sea while talking to a cool painter guy who sees everything's intricacy and serves as role model and ambassador to the girls. Something continually of interest is the lack of Christian religious significance/influence and the suggestion that a sort of mystical artistic perception (all elements of life are embued with beauty!) transform the world into a cathedral. The end's very much about the first stirrings of adolescent eros, whose innocence is underscored by the hysterical tilt-a-whirl romance between Swann and Odette in the "Swann in Love" section of Swann's Way. This one ends with the recognition of his reserve of passion within, sort of how the first one ended with recognition of his reserve of divine love/artistic perception. It's not so much a "five star" book in itself -- some stretches really dragged and others soared -- but the overall project (its themes, characters, settings, execution, insight, and particularly its language of course) is without a doubt at least seven stars. Monumental without being monstrous at all.

*

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

A perfectly enjoyable, effortlessly proceeding, airily formatted, short novel. It's not really 312 pages, more like 250 with lots of extraneous white space between frequently occurring sections. A tone so accessible it almost seemed like a YA version of some classic salesmanzy novel teleported to 2010 Saudi Arabia. Loved the inclusion of nonfictional bits like about Schwinn's fall and the blast-resistant glass for the Freedom Tower made in China. Loved the snorkeling frolic and didn't really mind the end (won't give away whether the King comes or not). Loved the attempt to dramatize the moral complexities related to the current reality of international commerce. Loved the sad little story about the wall the main guy built in his hometown. Generally though Adam Clay felt fictional to me -- his issues felt like a limited number of balls tossed in the air and juggled but they never really transformed into birds of paradise and prey. I therefore had some trouble believing he wasn't something of a fictional holograph himself, which may have been totally intentional of course? The other characters, particularly the other Americans, suffered from Disembodied Proper Noun Syndrome -- that is, their only physical presence in the novel's world was their name. Overall, it's a beautiful product proudly made in the USA -- in the acknowledgements, every single person who works at the Michigan-based printer is listed -- but I sort of felt like its innards were overcrafted for me, too careful, restricted, self-consciously mature, maybe too off-handedly newsy (a single mention of the concurrent BP spill), luminous thanks to spacious formatting more than the brilliance of its bright-shining horizon (by which I mean: its distant ideal narrative destination, beyond the shimmering desert or the expected eventual arrival of the King). I liked a lot of it a lot and enjoyed reading it most of the time -- and of course I've seen people put out of work by outsourcing and fear at any minute I could be next! -- but I prefer the similarly toned, wrenchingly readable Zeitoun. As with the recent non-fiction "novels," there's something to this that feels like he's doing a good deed maybe? And maybe something apparently philanthropically/generously motivated doesn't distribute throughout the prose and subsequently the reader's guts the same sort of viral barbaric yawp as something apparently born of aesthetic self-indulgence, obsession, greed? I've followed this author's stuff for years now but would love for him to take off the gloves and claw the world's eyes out. Or at least revisit the kingdom of smart funny inventive metafictional maximalism now that he's older. I'd love to read an evil Eggers, essentially -- more expressive, adventuresome, unconventional, improvisational, indulgent; less intentionally artistically inclusive -- but maybe that's logistically impossible at this point? Anyway, a beautiful hard cover and an ultimately memorable story. 

*

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

In 1997, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, ~4 am, mid-June, after a college friend's band that was blowing up at the time played the Middle East and everyone afterwards came back to our place, I remember a coolish girl on our porch saying to me something like "Oh, you like to read? I bet you like boring shit like The Magic Mountain." I don't remember my response but since then whenever I've thought of this book I've flashed to that scene and her assumption that only pretentious little fuckers read books like this. Now, if I time-traveled back to Boston that night (the sun was just barely up, actually -- early summer dawn comes around 4 am) I'd change her mind about me and The Magic Mountain with enthusiastic description of how the book was boring at times, sure, totally intentionally boring at times, I'd say, but shit it's most certainly not. Sure, it's so slow at first it seems like a chore, but I think in fact it's also a mountainous testament to the importance of writerly/readerly patience, more than it's a "magical" read. It didn't get going for me until 330 freaking pages in (706 total). Turns out Mann ain't Musil -- he's more like a superintellectual Stendhal or, at his best, matches the vivid prose and encompassing scope of Tolstoy. Formally steady pre-modernist approach: no real structural or extended language-y experimentation (other than a 17-page essay on the connection between cellular structure and galaxies). Content-wise, every page seems infused with intellectual talk -- it's explicitly hyper-thematic, a novel of ideas in which the major conflicts are theoretical, a novel that climaxes with a confounding blizzard of argument between opposing intellectuals ("Operationes Spirtuales," p 432-460) followed by a sublime chapter ("Snow," p 460-489) in which the main dude Hans sets out for some solo skiing and gets lost in an actual blizzard of wind-driven snow that gives way to abstractions and hallucinations, like how conflicting theories about Progress or Spirit or the necessity of terror or humaneness are manifested in reality -- first, escalating into real physical conflict between the two intellectual adversaries (the humanist Settembrini and the protofascist Naphta) and then later on real physical conflict among nations driven to war by ideas: "What? Ideas, simply because they were rigorous, led inexorably to bestial deeds, to a settlement by physical struggle?" Overall, I'd award three stars for maybe 600 total pages of this and nine stars for another scattered 106 pages, mostly during three parts: 1) the Mardi Gras bit ("Danse Macabre") in which italicized English indicates French is spoken, 2) the aforementioned chapter called "Snow" and much of the chapter before it that introduces Naphta's horrific backstory (note: freaking Naphta doesn't appear until page 367 -- try getting away with that these days, writer friends -- also, reviews on here mentioning a certain Herr Naphta helped me make it through the first 300+ pages since it was clear that a major character was yet to appear), and 3) the riveting final 20 pages or so (really gets going on page 686 - won't give things away). All in all, things seem intentionally shaped like an arduous ascent in itself. It's a novel that knows it's arduous, trying to induce irregular, elastic experiences of time in readers similiar to those of the characters (time is one of the novel's major themes; its elaboration/presentation here kicks the crap outta -- ahem, ahem -- recent pulitizer winners also concerned with time). It's a novel that tries to induce a confounded sense in readers, too, erring on the side of a sort of highly managed confusion intermixed with occasional passages of extreme clarity (eg, at one point there's a description of moments when the sides of mountains all around can be seen through temporary openings in the clouds). It's structured like an upwardly undulating slope that ends sort of in open air. The language is always accessible but it's rarely propelled by a narrative engine running on high-viscosity plot. For the most part, the plot involves questions like: Will Hans get sick? Will Hans stay long? Will Hans get the girl he likes? Will Settembrini or Naptha win the struggle for Hans' burgeoning intellectual soul? Will Hans get sicker and die and or freakin' leave this jawn, healthy or not? It's sort of like Paradise Lost, where their sickness (moist spots) and their actual/theoretical removal from the flatlands is their innocence, and Hans over the course of his time on the mountain must awake from his stuporous dream-life where he plays king while expertly wrapped in blankets and waxes about the stars and weighs various philosophies including one involving the supremacy of emotions over the intellect (imagined Pepperkorn in the film played by none other than Don Quixote). Thought about handing out four stars (ye olde 4.5 rounded down) but that seemed more about my restlessness not always dealing with the novel's requirements of audacious readerly patience, not to mention its somewhat underdrawn minor characters, the semi-hokey thing about Hans's unrequited love for a semi-Asiatic pretty boy in grade school he revisits with an alluring lady with similarly slanty eyes and pale skin. Not really a book with many favorable female characters other than one sort of protoliberated object of Hans' lust known for slamming doors. In general, felt like a month-long vacation somewhere I often wanted to leave that nevertheless offered dramatic experiences and vistas and insight. Now I'm glad to be home -- I really look forward to reading a few quicker, easier, shorter books in a row -- but also I feel like the effort was totally rewarded, especially in the last twenty pages. I'd recommend the experience of this book to anyone with ample patience or, better yet, anyone interested in trying to slowly but surely overcome their readerly ADD; everyone else, make sure to read the chapter called "Snow," just under thirty of the finest/most vivid pages I can remember reading in my life here in the flatlands, pages I'm sure to read many more times. Anyway, a major mess-with-me-not weapon to wield against those who argue against the presence of ideas in fiction. Highly recommended to pretentious little fuckers everywhere, of any age over 30 (if younger, I'd wait to read it).

*

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas

Transmigration of souls through time and space via intertextuality transport. Vila-Matas is his own deal but he's also maybe like Markson meets Auster meets a careful dedicated craftsman who juggles thematic balls almost to the point of whirlwind (not necessarily a good thing toward the end since it maybe seems too managed and thereby loses a sense of the noble natural looseness of life?). You don't need to know Joyce or Larkin or Beckett or Borges, but it probably helps to have some familarity with them, to catch it (and care) when the modified first line of Beckett's Murphy starts a chapter. Felt like it went on 60 pages too long as it repeated and maybe sort of resolved everything emphasized in the sparkling first half or so -- felt like it wasted way too much space wrapping things up (almost a quarter of its total length). Would've liked a little more boldness at the end on the part of the author or narrator. Lost a little steam for me when they finally get to Dublin, but so much fun when recruiting fellow travelers for a funeral for the pre-Google Gutenberg age. Loved all the mentions of writers from Bolano to Auster to Handke to Larkin to a one-off David Grossman cameo during the Bloomsday reading, among tons of others real or not (Vilém Vok doesn't exist -- I googled!). To list the themes would require repeating most of the book: chief among them is age, genius, publishing, writing, New York as center of world and what that means, relationships, solipsism, the internet, alcoholism, the ever-present apocalypse, books, books, more books, and maybe how all these come together into a sort of religion almost like a Buddhism-less Buddhism that simultaneously saves and destroys you? Consistently charming, smart, self-negating, probing, opinionated, forever at war with idiocy, and deeply deeply in love with books (in a way that's perfectly non-romantical and therefore doesn't make you wanna puke), I got the sense that Samuel Riba is probably a lot like the author -- and therefore things felt real (until the end, in part because of plot mechanics [it's not a spoiler if I type "young Beckett ghost fog!"] and, again, in part because of excessively crafty repetition/resolution) and so ultimately I rooted for this bundle of thought processes, be it Riba or EVM or the intertextually animated amalgamated spirit of Beckett, Joyce, Borges, Vuk, et al. Uneven, as they say, but really enjoyable for the likes of me (not everyone -- you sort of have to love books and writers and "high lit" in general, or at least really want to learn about this stuff -- this is the sort of book that leads to a longer "to-read" list). Some reservations for me, ultimately, but not enough to undermine my affection for EVM, which after reading Bartleby & Co. last summer hath now progressed to the next level. Will read at least two more titles soon before proclaiming my love . . . Representative quotation: "He'd published lots of important authors, but only in Julien Gracq's novel The Opposing Shore did he perceive any spirit for the future. In his room in Lyon, over the course of endless hours spent locked away, he devoted himself to a theory of the novel that, based on the lessons apparent to him the moment he opened The Opposing Shore, established five elements he considered essential for the novel of the future. These essential elements were: intertextuality; connection with serious poetry; awareness of a moral landscape in ruins; a slight favoring of style over plot; a view of writing that moves forward like time."

*

Will Oldham on Bonnie "Prince" Billy

At the end of this 2009 profile in the The New Yorker, Will Oldham says "I don't know. I really hate press. And it's . . . . yeah." And so a few years later he's published an official 400-page interview that can be used in lieu of ever doing interviews again. If someone wants to write a profile about him they can simply consult the master interview, recently published in the UK and due out in the fall in the US. For fans, it textually manifests the fantasy of sitting down for a few hours/days to chat with Will about his music and history and performance and identity and the Incredible Hulk. Also fantastic to turn down pages to look up so many musicians I didn't know: Solomon Burke, Oum Kalsoum, Roger Miller, Roy Harper, June Tabor. Otherwise, I first heard "For the Mekons et al" on the Hey Drag City compilation soon after it came out my first year after college and have kept up with every major release (and most minor ones) since then and seen him live maybe a dozen times, so as he talked about each album it brought back memories. It's clear that the music helped define so many personal eras/locales/situations, especially in the Nineties when I was extra-susceptible to exploring the songs, deeply associating with them, co-creating them over and over as I drove around. As I changed, so did the songs, so hearing him talk about how his approach matured meshed with things I've thought about my own maturation. Also great hearing about his collaborations with his own personal holy trinity of Johnny Cash, The Mekons, and R. Kelly. Would have liked some more talk about his family and relationships and all -- there's a suggestion of family wealth that had always been the rumor ("Oldham County"?): international family travel to India, Scotland, elsewhere, plus cabins on plots of lands in the woods, philanthrophy, etc) but he also delivered pizzas in Providence. Maybe would have liked thoughts on how class influenced the art he and friends made, especially the idealist indie approach? I can't think of another book-length interview, although Renegade by Mark E. Smith comes close (loved BPB's references to MES and the Fall, too). Would love to read Volume II in 2030 after BPB records another 20+ good albums (something to look forward to). Otherwise, for Will fans, this is major and essential. I read it slower than I usually do because I didn't want it to end. Would be interested in the opinions of people unfamiliar with his music, although I can't imagine anyone reading this who doesn't know everything from "The Ohio River Boat Song" to "Quail and Dumplings." Odd, also, reading this right after reading Conversations with David Foster Wallace -- it felt like taking the pulse of the two most important younger figures in music and lit I've followed since college ended. As Will says about David Grubbs at one point, it feels good to know that, early on, I put my money on winning horses. 

*

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover 

Thought at first this was five stars all the way. Loved the hokey old-timey baseball lingo, the imagined play by play, wisecrackery, the names, all the TWIBby "how 'bout that?" boyhood baseball wonder and a box of Cracker Jacks, the joys and sorrows of the personalities and stats, the history and the present, especially in that all of it -- the games and the chatter in the dugouts and off-field scandals -- very explicitly took place in an obsessive gamer's imagination. Laughed out loud when I learned what happened to the young ace at the end of chapter two! Really cared about what happened, saw it clearly, dimensionally. Loved how the story slipped in and out of Henry's fictional reality and the imagined reality occuring within Henry's head. Loved the related light-handed metafictional aspects about author and characters, how Coover is to Henry as Henry is to UBA players. Loved larger theological suggestions about freewill and fate: all just a lucky roll of the dice etc. Loved, therefore, the structure, the beautiful nested levels of reality among characters and themes. For the most part, again, also loved the language, which mostly popped and postured and swerved and swung for the fences with poise. But then after the second chapter, things fell off the table, intentionally, since Henry's deep deep immersion and enjoyment in his game would of course cost him in the so-called real world. Anyone who has something serious going on outside of what they do for money will relate. Poor Henry -- a loveable obsessive loser, a tragicomically thwarted genius up there with Ignatius P. Reilly, I'd say -- so deeply sees his game, so deeply believes in the existence of the players and coaches and alt-reality of the UBA, that he loses his grip, but then what happens if he loses his enthusiasm for the game? What's he have then? Very sad. Surprisingly poignant for such a smart book. Coover mimics the drying up of Henry's enthusiasm in the prose, which works in moderation but after a while weighed on my enthusiasm for the book itself, especially when it comes after a longish Ulysses-like bar scene complete with slurred imaginary baseball player speech. Generally, despite all the love for the above, I felt like things peaked early and then fell off the table in terms of my interest as Henry lost his shit and the game became endangered. Occasionally it perked up a bit but never regained its early peak for me. The ending that so many on here complain about didn't bother me, and in fact I sort of like how the players go on with their existence even if their God (Henry) isn't keeping track anymore. I liked the theological/philosophical suggestions but felt things maybe a little fuzzed with that sort of pomo playfulness involving so many characters (characterized mostly by their kooky names) gesticulating giddily and exclaiming excitedly lotsa silly turns o' phrase in alertly alliterative prose. Three point five stars, therefore, rounded up to four thanks to five-star sections particularly early on and overall inventiveness and great names (Witness York, my favorite). Now I gotta go hunt down my old Strat-o-Matic Baseball game in my parents' crawlspace -- note: the UBA game is more like the Strat-o-Matic boardgame than fantasy baseball, which involves teams consisting of real MLB players and mostly is all online these days. 

*

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico 
by Javier Marías

Entertaining, occasionally grammatically liberal, surprisingly gripping, thoughtful, Elvis-evoking, half-day read. My first Marias, although I've read the opening bits of three others. Now I know to trust him and will give the ones I own a serious try before too long. 

*


 

Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

Like Correction, this one is twice as long as the average Bernhard book and therefore it does twice the damage as the average 150-page Bernhard book, damage mitigated by the introduction of self-conscious acknowledgment about the narrator's abominable pronouncements, also direct attack on Austria's Nazi past, also two sympathetic idealized characters to counterbalance all the imbeciles and insincere simulators. As always, there's nothing as good, no approach as viral, nothing as unbearable to read for more than 30-page stretches -- nothing seems as ordered and chaotic at once, organic and orchestrated at once. Interesting that I was thinking about the importance of extremism and exaggeration of approach and then toward the end there's a revealing stretch where the narrator talks about himself as a great artist of exaggeration. Not as "funny" as some of the others (Woodcutters or The Loser). Really great reading but as always glad to step out from under Bernhard's extinguishing shadow. 

*

Soliders of Salamis by Javier Cercas

Fiction that feels unlike fiction. Fiction that's partially about how it's not fiction. Non-fictional fiction about writing, about war, about endurance/persistence, about poets realizing their ideal worlds through political action, about heroism, about historical reconstruction from fragments as a creative act that keeps the dead alive, especially the dead who live on in the words of people almost gone themselves. Structurally interesting novel about a writer trying and failing to write fiction and backing into this significant story through coincidences related to journalism, including interviewing Roberto Bolano who's a major character in the third part of this, a section that made what was an OK novel in the first part (about the writer's discovery of the title story) and a pretty damn good novel in the second half (the title story itself, essentially a biographical essay on a Spanish fascist poet, sort of like Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas but more accessible and more dramatic -- firing squad survival!) a pretty GREAT novel. Almost a few touching moments, too, toward the end. A novel that, although it doesn't feel like a conventional novel, excels thanks to its old-fashioned 45-degree angle narrative arc: upwards, upwards, upwards, upwards until it reaches its long-sentence recapitulations in its last pages, including the refrain onwards, onwards, onwards, ever onwards. Worth it for the intelligence and honesty and the complex yet clear semi-extravagance of the prose, for the approach, for the writing insight ("a person doesn't write about what he wants to write but what he's capable of writing about" or "a writer never writes about what he knows, but precisely about what he doesn't know" or "To write novels you don't need an imagination, Bolano said, just a memory. Novels are written by combining recollections"), for the Spanish Civil War education, and especially for the portrait of Bolano, including what's basically an interview with him ("a man of action is frustrated writer; if Don Quijote had written one single book of chivalry he never would have been Don Quijote") and a drunkenly related tale about a WWII soldier's journey to Chad in Africa and all the way back through Europe, a story reminescent of some of the best parts of 2666 that spurs the final section that makes this book, in the narrator's words, "function." I probably read the first 120 pages in too many sittings. Also didn't love the characterization of the dippy girlfriend, and maybe thought repetitions of sentences in the summation at the end seemed maybe a bit like high-literary hokiness? But otherwise a really excellent, enjoyable, educational, interestingly structured, serious yet never haughty novel that, best of all, felt to me unlike a novel ("all good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them"). Onwards and upwards! From Bolano's Between Parentheses about this novel:  ". . . there appears a character, someone by the name of Bolano, who is a writer and a Chilean and lives in Blanes, but who isn't me, in the same way that the narrator Cercas isn't Cercas, although both characters are possible and even probable." "His novel flirts with hybridization, with the 'relato real' or 'true fiction' (which Cercas himself invented), with historical ficton, and with hyper-objective fiction, though whenever he feels so inclined he has no qualms about betraying these generic categories to slip toward poetry, toward the epic without the slightest blush: in any direction, so long as it's forward."

*

The Map and the Territory 
by Michel Houellebecq

Just finished the last thirty wonderfully flowing and surprising pages that end with the total domination of vegetation and then went back to the first lines namedropping Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst and said aloud "Ha, what a great book." I love how clearly he writes, with such unexpected analysis/insight, exaggerated generalizations asserted as truth (although toned down in this one -- not as much potentially politically incorrect stuff in general, and certainly not as much sex as the last two). I purposefully read nothing about this one and only knew it had been called an art world thriller -- which is half right. It's not a thriller and it's not so much about the art world as it is about how the nature of human industry relates to nature itself? A must for fans and a good introduction, too. No one else does genre-mashup semi-misanthropic nihilistic philosophy quite like him, although this did at times seem like a much better rendition of what BEE did in Lunar Park, genre-y literary fiction that includes the author as a character? But this novel doesn't devolve into spare plot mechanics -- the detective crimey bits are just as robust and typically swervy and "written" as the stuff that seems more literary. A nod, I think, to 2666 at one point but transposed to Thailand and the murders dropped from 300 to 30. Overall, an enjoyable weekend plus a few other sittings reading this. A softer, gentler (even accounting for the vicious murder and assorted body parts here and there), more mature Houellebecq, with his sharp, authentically Franch eye now a little more on the end of life (and the end of authentic/traditional French culture), although in this he spends 30 or so pages early on delivering the main character's backstory, something I don't remember in his other books, wherein characters are usually presented without much authorial worry re: their histories, like in genre books. Amazingly, there's even a strong-willed successful female character in this one who's not treated as a sex object! This book will probably be treated as news about contemporary (French and international commerce) culture that'll stay news in the future, or maybe like the old photos Jed films it'll fade with exposure to time and the elements, like Balzac before him? Houellebecq suggests that all he wants to do is account for what he sees, aspiring to the patient vision of plants. What he sees he presents as an inexact map of the thickety terrain of life, where all things change, except for ever-changing nature and the criminal motivations of sex and greed. Something like that. Anyway, a real good book. Might go back and read The Elementary Particles.

*

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 
by Mark Leyner

3.5 stars (of a possible 5) rounded up for the sake of audacity and originality -- and the excitement/expectation/military-grade Gravy-like ecstasy we felt with our hands on a new Mark Leyner novel after a 15-year absence. Didn't mind that it's a looping, recursive epic, with excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes and wearying cliches, overwrought angst, gnomic non sequiturs, off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and compulsive repetitions about Freud's repetition compulsion . . . That last bit there is plagiarized from the novel -- it's compulsively repeated throughout, like a built-in critique for lazy haters to use. Laughed out loud and/or made strange happy vocal noises maybe 40+ times? Bothered wife person several times with requests to let us read aloud. There's a ZINGER of a John Cage joke. There's a tearing-up-laughing joke about Dick Van Dyke. And otherwise there's typical Leyner brand pyrotechnic high-lit pop-lit satirical silliness, featuring clinical language mixed with Romantic language mixed with postmodern theory language mixed with Jerry Springer language mixed with tabloid language mixed with online commentary language, all of it undermined by a god named XOXO. This sort of thing is not for everyone. Not at all for everyone. If you like Charlie Kaufman movies ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or "Being John Malkovich"), more recent George Saunders (Leyner has the same agent, Binky Urban), the wackier DFW stuff (Leyner has the same editor, Michael Pietsch), you'll bask in this intentionally over-the-top hi-falutin mock-Homeric craziness. If you don't like the aforementioned stuff, if you're a picky humorless reader who cares about character development and plot and emotionality, that is, anything more than riffs about gods doing human characters with the frozen head of Ted Williams used as an anal bead once the human character is increased in size by the god to 50 feet, etc, I wouldn't bother with this one. But otherwise, if you're interested in an example of truly LOL writing that's unhinged and intelligent and puerile and SO FREAKING POMO and, importantly, serves as a great example of a book that teaches you how to read it, Leyner is at the very least a demi-god. Otherwise, this was maybe too long for me by 100 quick pages? An absolute must for fans of seriously funny effed-up writing. Familiarity with medical terminology a plus! 

*

My Dark Places by James Ellroy

Loved the phrasing and the author's druggie homeless pervo life story more than the catalogue of vivisected women and the facts of various crimes. Descriptions of mucho paperwork and the prose form the life of the author's murdered mother in ellipsis. Read most of it on location in LA and maybe liked it since I'd just been on the same streets and freeways. Read it thanks to Bolano's recommendation in "Between Parentheses" and liked seeing how this one's occasional transition-less lists of crimes clearly influenced 2666's famous catalogue of vivisected women. The crime's unsolved but it's more an obsessive search for someone long lost than an attempt at closure via belated justice. At times the best DeLillo-y clipped and sculpted language ever. But also often surprisingly boring/stolid/mechanically fact-heavy flat, like the famous 300 pages of 2666.

*

Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan

What a wonderful weird book about the influence of cities and sounds, knowing what you want and going for it and getting it thanks to talent, luck, attitude, and meeting the right people. Funny how it emphasizes what no one really wants to know -- "New Morning" and "Oh Mercy" era stuff instead of everything from "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" to "Visions of Johanna" to "Shelter From the Storm" to "Isis." Those songs are hardly mentioned at all -- maybe one or two mentions of "Hard Rain." Otherwise, this is a compulsively readable, folksy, lightly insightful, non-linear self-portrait of the mythic artist as regular guy from the North Country, a family man more concerned with privacy than popularity, a devout Woody Guthrie fanatic of course, not someone particularly special -- emphatically NOT the messiah, NOT the chosen one, NOT the voice of his generation, NOT the leader of the revolution -- umm except he acknowledges that, for a time, he could see and describe and supercharge the deep truth of reality. This ellipitically argues that his success came from casual, wide-open exposure to the world and art (more than just music). He's a super-sensitive empty vessel blessed with the necessary restless desire for MORE, sufficient native critical faculties, just enough OCD, and more than enough midwestern simplicity and charm -- that's pretty much it, says Dylan (not that he can be trusted). Looking forward to volume 2 where he colors in the circles he's drawn in this one. Required supplementary viewing.

*

[Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/2012.html]

Visit The Eyeshot Readerly Resonance Chamber for impressions of dozens of books unrelated to the end of anything -- it's a new dawn, people. Open your eyes on the sunshine. Days are gettin' longer, too!

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For now, to keep you entertained if not totally sane through the wintertime, listen to the Book Fight podcast -- subscribe via iTunes or stream via their site (I'm a streamer who listens in during my commute). Also, if you've read this far, you might be interested in this essay on Full Stop by our very own Eyeshot Editor -- it's about Goodreads, reviewing, and other stuff. Note: the image far above was taken at a gallery in Chelsea (NYC) this fall -- it's a detail of a painting by Natalie Frank (used without permission but if the image and her name are linked to her site it should be OK, right?)

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