April Book Blog

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I checked out five or eight books before I went on vacation, thinking surely I will have time to read, not realizing that I'd be jetlagged for the rest of April and not in the mood to read more than about ten pages at a time... for this reason and like the general feebleness of my own mind, I've been neutral-annoyed on most of these. Sorry for people reading these posts hoping for recommendations. Read Janet Malcolm, I guess.

 

A Horse at Night, Cain - this book has a smashing cover. I guess more accurately, the original painting is amazing and the designers made a good choice to use i.

This and In the Land of Cyclops by Knausgaard together made for a difficult paired read because uhhh I hate both of their sentences... I think Cain managed to write sentences about complex works that felt. vapid?! and Knausgaard wrote run-ons about his interests and superflops that make me go, Karl, shut uuuup, stop showing me this...

Let's address the premise of A Horse at Night: Cain presents it as an accidental reading diary, a series of fleeting impressions, a map of her own mind through reading. Already you can see the places where I'm fated to struggle against ("FLEETING impressions? ACCIDENTAL reading diary???? PUBLISHED book???") but will begrudgingly tolerate if the rest of the work holds up or straight up enjoy if it's... you know... ironic: oh, these just so happen to be my brilliant, masterful readings, or, wow, I read this book passage and it made me think of this, so I picked up a different book and searched for the passage I was thinking of but ran into this other passage, which led me down here. or, this is me spending one month wrestling with a text that I love but also gets under my skin. Why?

All of the above I think is acceptable. I'd describe A Horse at Night more as Cain flipping through some books, making a few decent points, and then dropping paragraphs that make me really mad:

To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.

My loss of authenticity is related to change, to how, as I’ve gotten older, I seem to have become a different person. In a way I have become strange to myself, and so how I am and feel around others has also been destabilized. I have more fears than I had when I was younger; I am more rigid; and there has been a loss too of the freedom I once felt, when the world seemed entirely open, and utterly beautiful.

is this the vital pulp of what a reader experiences from reading Villette or Days of Abandonment or the Ravika cycle? is there any sense of the texts that Cain is apparently commenting on? Are these even interesting or good thoughts to read as stand alone paragraphs? Are these even good sentences? I'm trying really hard to not say more than this. She has a great reading list, but you can't see any of it in the words she writes about them. I basically think the book is a total miss.

 

 

In the Land of Cyclops, Knausgaard - I picked this up because someone recommended his book on Edvard Munch as one of the best things they've read and while I was waiting for the book to come off hold in the library, I picked up Cyclops in Libby.

This is an incredibly uneven set of essays and reviews on photography, literature, and whatever the vibe is in Sweden/Norway's literary scene. Knausgaard's readings and evaluations of Scandinavian writers genuinely kept my interest: I enjoyed the essays on Ingmar Berman's memoir and how Knausgaard saw his parents' relationship reflected in the text, Hamsun's literary oeuvre + deeper dive into Hunger, and his writing on photography, one of the few spots where he seems to delight in the works made by women. There's one especially interesting section where he muses on the back of the neck and the literary/cultural significance of it.

O]n the other hand, there are some really really dreadful parts, too, and many, many long sections where I was deeply bored and struggling to find something to attach myself to.

This may seem petty, but he infuriates me on a stylistic level.

We do not see the world, we see the light it throws back at us, and the thought that this light in some way affixes itself to the inner eye is perhaps not as farfetched as it seems, for when we close our eyes and block out the light of the world, we have no difficulty conjuring up an image of it from the darkness inside our skulls. That it does not happen in the way Descartes imagined--an image of the seen attaching to the retinal membrane--does not alter the fact that the world exists inside us in the form of pictures, for of all the light that is continually thrown back at us from objects and phenomena, some will always make an impression on us and remain, and that these impressions should have an objective existence, discernible not only by the inner "I" but by other people too, for instance during a dissection of the eye, is no odder an idea than that the soul should exist independently of the body through which it expresses itself.

Maybe you are more tolerant than I. I'm reading this and experiencing a deep psychic torment... the clauses that lunge at some attempt at stating a hard-won universal truth, but the universal truth is just another settled binary pair, the failed attempt at melding Science As They Thought Of It In The 17th Century with science as we know it now in a literary passage, the total flop attempt at connecting the perception of light to the way we know and understand the world through image, which somehow links to the soul????

on top of that, why the run-on sentences??? I know, I know: but recog, my run-ons create a fun and jangly rhythm! First, you are free to make this assertion, but I do not think it is true in most contexts.... second, in published prose, I do not want to think, now here is a comma splice! I never want to think, "This would actually be better and more effective punctuated in a more conventional manner;" either the authorial style is so strong that it overcomes my awareness of a comma splice, or Iiiiiiiiiiiii haaaate youuuu........

This is actually from one of his better essays... the worst part is when he starts talking about the Norwegian/Swedish literary scene and how his works have been received, or his encounters with disapproving readers. these sections manage to be both tedious and embarrassing.

I did eventually get my hands on the Munch book and let it go back to the library without complaint. the munch was more rooted in an analysis of Munch's painting and biography, but the sentences, man... I can't live like this.

 

 

 

The Anthropologists, Savaş - I checked out this book from the library because I wanted some fiction to read on the plane and frankly did not have high hopes, but I enjoyed the anthropologists more than I expected but not as much as I could have.

The Anthropologists is a fragment novel about a married couple, Asya and Manu, living in some European city, strongly influenced by Paris. essential to understanding this novel is that Asya and Manu met in university; they emigrated for university and did not return to their home countries after university and chose to move to the city where they live now; they live a quiet, small life together. I use small not as a pejorative but as a factual description that the characters would probably agree with: Asya and Manu eat at the same places, visit the same people, experience distress but never disaster.

As the title might suggest, Asya sees parts of her life through the anthropologist's lens. The novel's interested in what holds people together when they do not share the usual set of things that commonly bind communities together: language, religion, ethnicity, customs, a network of friends and family members, and so on. They are, on the other hand, more or less alone, in a foreign country, apart from the locals and their fellow ex-pats. traditionally, this type of alienation is accompanied with abundant angst, but Savaş takes a lighter touch. The pangs of sadness--aging grandmothers, friends that grow more distant, an upstairs neighbor slowly unraveling--are part of a regular, often happy life.

Personally, it's a bit too light for me. I skimmed through some interviews, and it's clear that Savaş has read and loves Tove Jannson's The Summer Book, a book that I think achieves a rare type of perfection as a total object, and Ginzberg's The Little Virtues. I haven't read Ginzberg's The Little Virtues, but I have read Family Lexicon, a memoir that focuses on daily rituals, patterns of speech, and small bites of history, and see a lot of similarity with The Anthropologist, in the ending especially.

These books achieve a stronger sense of thematic and formal unity than The Anthropologists does, and part of it is that these books have a stronger sense of purpose and history in its characters and in the authors' historic positions. Family Lexicon obviously is Ginzberg's experience leading up to and during World War 2; the focus on the every day of a leftist family leads to arrests, disappearances, and war, then into post-war, without losing its charms of humors. The Summer Book is, on the surface, a pretty small novel about a girl and a grandma and their summer vacation on the island. There are three factors that give The Summer Book its strength: 1. the girl's mother has recently died and mortality is on everyone's mind; 2. summer eventually ends; 3. the extreme difference in age, pushed far from the "center" of one's uhh I guess "the time where your personhood is taken most seriously" (20s-50s) lets Jannson take life from two very different perspectives. I really think Jannson conveys a lot of wisdom in this book. I came away from The Summer Book with like, the sense of, oh, she understands something about being alive that goes well beyond mine.

The character work in The Summer Book matters a lot, but the sense of something beginning and ending gives it a clear frame: how do you feel at the start of vacation? how do you feel once it ends? what do you have to do to get started or to put an end to something? There's a clear beginning occasion in The Anthropologists (they're apartment hunting) but no clear end "destination," so to speak, though things do come to a funny head towards the end as their friend Ravi keeps getting into romantic entanglements with Aysa's female friends. Aysa's project gets funded and she's out doing interviews, but to what end? They find an apartment, but it doesn't change much of the texture of the book or narration. the knowledge the book gives the reader is that the every day is tentative, a series of repeated gestures that build into meaning in an undirected and unforced way, and SDKFMN I think we can ask for a book to say more.

 

 

 

On the Calculation of Volume, Book ii, Balle - That's right folks, he didn't like the first book and read the second one and didn't like that, either!!! Give him an award!

Last time, Tara stayed close to home for almost an entire year. this time, she travels all throughout Europe, trying to recreate the experience of a "year" even when she's stuck in a single day in November: traveling north for winter, then heading back south to give herself spring and summer. She comes to realize that this endeavor is basically pointless. In the last five pages, she writes that she's discovered someone else who's trapped in the time loop with her. Great! Yeah. I'm not picking up the third book and cannot uh meaningfully recommend the first or the second to anyone, especially given that this is book. two of seven.

 

 

 

Reading Chekhov, Malcolm - I feel embarrassed as I type the words, "and I'm a huge fan of this!" What would it take for me to hate a Malcolm book... I guess she could just print the words, "having read many things, I have realized the only truth in the world is hating the tumblr blog recog" -- of the books I've read, I think the one I've been most "meh" about is The Crime of Sheila McGough, but even that was intensely interesting in terms of its themes and the frustrations Malcolm encountered... she has a great oeuvre. Everyone should get into some malcolmani.

Reading Chekhov is, as one might expect, from a Malcolm text, a literary analysis of Chekhov and his biographies, a biography, and a travelogue of Malcolm's journey through Yeltsin Russia; she doesn't give a date, but it seems to be between 1999-2001. Her travels take her to Yalta, Moscow, and Petersburg, and to various Chekhovian + Chekhov-adjacent literary estates and museums. The travelogue pieces are filled with her usual sharp character observations of people and places. To me, the travelogue element was the least compelling part of it--I understand its purpose and enjoy seeing Janet Malcolm losing her luggage and wrestling with pushy tour guides, but I cannot lie: I'm here to watch Janet Malcolm read a book.

One of the great annoying things about reading Chekhov is having to read the common person's opinion on Chekhov. Let's leave aside the usual "he's boring, nothing happens, etc." and skip to the literary one: Chekhov as a mythical, saintly writer, a writer who is universal and speaks to all people equally. This perception of Chekhov as some kind of ultra-humanist whose works transcend Russia and its history is a bizarre one, and I think that's part of why Malcolm took the trouble to travel to Russia, to help her overcome the distance between Chekhov the international literary emblem and Chekhov the Russian. The Russia Malcolm encounters is one struggling to stand upright with its past glories behind it and mired in the apparently never-ending mud of widespread poverty and grift, a characterization that apparently suits its past as well.

Much of the enjoyment of reading Malcolm is reading her firm pushbacks against common wisdom. There are, hearteningly, many dry corrections throughout. However, thinking about Two Lives, Malcolm's great biographical treatment of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, I find myself thinking that many of her readings would benefit from a stronger sense of Russian history. I found this analysis of chekhov's story, "In the Wagon," by U.R. Bowie, a professor of Russian Literature. (Of note, the occasion for Bowie's reading of this short story is his review of Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book I also hate... do not recommend the review of Saunders, though, as it tips into a level of vitriol that I find a little embarrassing.)

Malcolm examines the story as an example of Chekhov's mature and developed literary style, with deep pleasure and enjoyment. Malcolm's reading of the story is a strong one: she identifies Marya Vassilyevna as a sturdy, long suffering character, a woman who has fallen from her caste and into a profession she grinds through at great difficulty and cost to herself; she takes note of the wagons "filled with large bottles of crude sulfuric acid," and that the peasants at the tavern "show small respect for the schoolteacher. She is practically one of them." Hanov the landowner is noted for his drunkenness and the baffling sense of charm and beauty being given to "weak, unlucky, useless people."

There are, however, details that Malcolm misses: why is the journey so miserable and long? Why do we see Hanov twice? Bowie identifies the corruption and bribery at play in the countryside, and also emphasizes the implications of Marya Vassilyevna's tedious work obtaining firewood and her struggles with the peasants in positions of authority. The detail about the wagons full of sulfuric acid is a connection I've never seen made before--I wouldn't expect someone who's not an expert in Russian literature to get it, but I do think that the implications that Hanov and the other landowner are actively worsening the life of those around them through nepotism and grift is vital for understanding the story beyond the journey narrative.

Is a lack of 19th century Russian history knowledge a fatal shortcoming for Reading Chekhov? I think it's still a very enjoyable book, especially for illuminating Chekhov's early life and career. In particular, Malcolm shows a deep interest in understanding why Chekhov is so good and memorable. How do Chekhov's stories achieve their power? What can explain the repeated motifs in Chekhov's works: the failed artist, the flop dandy, the sneering, knowing sophisticate who is doomed to never have the final say? She examines the things Chekhov actively disdains with deep interest and curiosity. A good book for having a better sense of how Chekhov's literary mind worked and a useful map for the reader to know how to better approach his stories.

Favorite bits: Malcolm analyzing various biographies for how they treat Chekhov's death, Malcolm analyzing Dostoyevsky's possible influence on Chekhov, exploring Chekhov's religious studies and their influence on his style, Malcolm's examination of the mechanics of grace and love in Chekhov: who gets to have theses moments, when do they occur, etc.

 

That's it for April. May's reading list includes some callbacks to Rebecca... maybe that is the opposite of enticing for you. To me, it's very enticing. look forward. to suffering