Books I read in August 2024

My ambition this summer was to read extensively in Arabic literature.  Eh, I did all right, but I will have to save Ibn Battuta’s Travels and the second half of Leg over Leg for some other time.

 FICTION

The Arabian Nights (14th c.), many hands – In the great Hassan Haddawy translation.

I and My Chimney (1856), Herman Melville – Because I saw the actual chimney last month.  I thought it was made up.

I, Claudius (1934), Robert Graves – Is this a book for people who know Roman history, or is it a way to learn Roman history?  I suppose both.

Herself Surprised (1941), Joyce Cary – Classic mid-century British-adjacent novelistic eccentricity.  “I never saw Rozzie laugh right out in her life but once, and that was when she lost all her money and her left leg in the same week” (NYRB edition, p. 96).  Like I, Claudius, interesting in the ways it is a novel pretending not to be a novel.

Laura (1942), Vera Caspary – I was almost irritated by the voice of the narrator of the first third of the novel.  But then the narrator changes and there is a twist that completely changes the story - that moves me to an entirely different story - and everything was fine

The End of the Affair (1951), Graham Greene – Now that I have read it I do not understand the reputation of this novel, likely related to my puzzlement over that of Brideshead Revisited.  I mean, characters debate theism.  Am I supposed to take that seriously?

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), James Baldwin – An entirely different way to write a novel that is serious about religious belief.

Fountain and Tomb (1975), Naguib Mahfouz – Fragments, some of which almost amount to stories, which thirty years after Midaq Alley again depict life in one little corner of Cairo, this time largely from a child’s point of view.  Formally and sociologically quite interesting.  “But that’s how stories are told in our alley” (96).  Set in the 1920s, the book is of course full of gangsters.

Hurricane Season (2016), Fernanda Melchor – Perhaps the most disgusting book I have ever read, up there with Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (1973), but where McCarthy aestheticizes the language, shoving signifiers of beauty against the appalling subject matter, Melchor lets the ugliness spill over everything.  I would like to think of the novel as a fantasy, a horror novel, but I am afraid it is also a Condition of Mexico novel – poor Mexico!  And the most outrageous, maybe the best, part was the last chapter, the last three pages, a travesty of hope.

Telephone (2020), Percival Everett – Every Everett novel I have read is some kind of balance or reconciliation of the postmodern and domestic novel, and this one leans the most to the domestic side.  It is the sad story of parents with a mortally ill child.  But it is also the most conceptually radical Everett book I have encountered, an art object that attacks the idea of a stable text.

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy in the Islamic World (2016), Peter Adamson

POETRY

Selected Poems (1851-1901), George Meredith

Poems by Emily Dickinson (1859-80) – A chapbook length selection sold at the Dickinson House in Amherst, well chosen by three of the amazing house guides.  It is worth going to the Dickinson House just to meet the guides.

The Music of Human Flesh (1966-77) &

Adam of Two Edens (1989-95) &

If I Were Another (1990-2005), Mahmoud Darwish

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

La vendetta (1830) &

La bourse (1832), Honoré de Balzac – I had read La bourse (The purse) in English, but La vendetta was new, #46 in my reading of the Comedie humaine.  Almost halfway!  I will never read them all.

Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Some notes back here.  If only Céline could read that Melchor novel.

Dia do Mar (1947), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Vou Mudar a Cozinha (2022), Ondjaki – I’m Going to Move the Kitchen, stories from Angola and elsewhere.

A Descoberta das Ilhas Selvagens (2024), José Pedro Castanheira – The second self-indulgent diaristic travel book I have read in two months by a Portuguese journalist, this time about a sailing trip to desert islands belonging to Madeira.  A great book for the Portuguese language learner, full of useful vocabulary with strong context and much repetition.  That is all I am asking for.  Yes, the book comes with its own bookmark.

You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit

Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night.  That “end of night” is death.  The existence of death makes everything hateful and nullifies the value of anything else.  I gotta say that the ideas and satire in the novel are not exactly deep.  It’s all in the attitude, the language.

Le voyage c’est la recherche de ce rien du tout, de ce petit vertige pour couillons…  (274, 1952 Gallimard paperback, ellipses in original, how Céline loves ellipses)

The voyage is the search for this nothing at all, this little vertigo for imbeciles...  (tr., against good judgment, mine)

“Couillons” has stronger, more obscene possibilities.  The translations of this novel are feats.  It is the longest and most difficult French book I have ever attempted, 630 pages of informal, slangy French, much of it in the form of commentary or even rants.  Some earlier books, like Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends (1924), had pushed towards a less formal, less correct, literary French, but it was Céline who demolished the concept.  Surrealist semi-novels like Nadja (1928) and Paris Peasant (1926) look so well-behaved by contrast.

The influence of the novel is linguistic and formal.  Henry Miller scrapped his manuscript and rewrote The Tropic of Cancer (1934) from scratch as soon as he finished Voyage.  Jean-Paul Sartre completely rewrote Nausea (1938), not that he did anything half as radical.  Here is Céline’s narrator on Sunday mornings, a bit borrowed directly by Sartre:

An empty bus rushed towards the depot.  Ideas also end by having their Sunday; you are more stunned than normal.  You are there, empty.  You drool from it.  You are happy.  You have nothing to do, because nothing really occurs to you, you are too poor, you are disgusted with existence?  That would be the usual.  (377)

Poisonous pessimism, but from a narrator too passive to do anything about it.  The novel is structured like Candide (1759), with the narrator spending the first half of the book experiencing terrible things – the front line of World War I, colonial Central Africa, Spanish pirates (?), and the Ford Motor Company – and the second half observing terrible things happening to other people, in the role of a doctor in a working class Parisian suburb and later in a mental hospital.  Although by temperament Céline is over on Rousseau’s side of things, not Voltaire’s.

The ethos of Voyage is anti-war, anti-colonial, anti-American, and anti-industrial.  There is a chapter that is specifically against scientific testing of animals.  Based on nothing else, I would align Céline with the French left of the time, and my understanding is that the literary French left was fooled for a while.  But Céline was not going to be aligned with anyone, even if he had to prove it, a few years later, by becoming the most hysterical Jew hater in French literature. If there was a hint of anti-Semitism or any mention of any Jewish subject at all in Voyage I did not recognize it.

Crazy stuff.  I am glad to have finally read this missing link between Rabelais and Villon one the one end and Jean Genet and the anti-novel on the other.

Then they looked at me, he and Madelon, like they found themselves before a druggie, a victim of poison gas, a drooler, and it was not even worth the trouble of responding to me… (603)

What am I doing, I have no business translating Céline.  I do hope I will now remember his favorite vowels like baver (drool) and bafouiller (stammer).  Metaphysics, a vision of existence, expressed by verb choice.

Jeremy Denk plays Charles Ives and Blind Tom Wiggins - a pleasing conjunction of Wuthering Expectations stuff

More Massachusetts semi-literay adventures.

Last weekend I was at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, enjoying Jeremy Denk’s performance of insurance executive Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata (c. 1913).  It was a pleasing congruence of Wuthering Expectations themes.  I have nothing to say about it in particular, but I will, I guess, register that I was there.

I wrote about the Concord Sonata a decade ago, one of a number of posts of Little Women.  The piano sonata’s third movement, among the most beautiful in the piano repertoire, is “The Alcotts,” where Ives imagines the sisters, in particular Beth, the real Beth, but in this exercise what distinction is there from the fictional one, at the piano, wandering through Beethoven’s fifth symphony, hymns, Scottish songs, and whatever enters her head.  I included a link, still working, to Denk’s performance of the movement.

The earlier movements are “Emerson” and “Hawthorne,” the last the contemplative “Thoreau,” all with programs of some kind.  “Thoreau” is a day at Walden Pond; “Emerson” is, well “Emerson” Is a thorny one but let’s say an imitation of his thought, and “Hawthorne” is a collage of his stories, including “The Celestial Railroad,” which I wrote about fifteen years ago.

I’ll interrupt myself to note that it was a pleasure to me, certainly, to hear the “Hawthorne” movement in a performance space literally named after a Nathaniel Hawthorne book.  Did I ever write about Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853)?  I sure did. 

Denk’s performance of the “Hawthorne” movement was astounding.  I believe it has evolved over time.  At one point in the piece, Denk reached for a wooden plank, which allowed, or forced, him to play an entire section of the keyboard.  All the notes, all the dissonance, that is what Ives wanted.  This is all in the score.

Denk opened the concert with the once massively popular “Battle of Manassas” by “Blind Tom” Wiggins.  I wrote about Wiggins long ago because an avatar of him appears in My Ántonia.  Cather readers should try to hear what Wiggins played.  His music is full of surprises.  “Manassas” is a tone poem made up a collage of popular songs and massive chord clusters that sounds avant garde for now but was somehow a crowd pleaser at the time.  I wondered if someone would have to tune the piano after Denk was done pounding on it.  Someone did.

Wiggins is also the central character of Jeffrey Renard Allen’s 2014 novel The Song of the Shank, almost objectively the fifth best book, at least, of the last twenty-five years.  The trombonist, composer, and musicologist George Lewis has written, with Allen, a “monodrama” of Song of the Shank, described here, which I would love to hear someday.  Lewis was sitting almost directly in front of me.  Based on his enthusiastic movement he also particularly enjoyed the “Hawthorne” movement.  After the show I thanked him for his own music, decades of it.  He did not seem to mind the compliment.  This week I have been enjoying his 1979 Homage to Charles Parker (on Youtube here and here), and if you just want to hear him play the hard stuff go straight to Anthony Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music 1976.

If you happen to be in New York City on December 12th and enjoy noisy, dissonant, beautiful music, do not miss Jeremey Denk’s next performance of the Concord Sonata.

Books I read, and desks I saw, in July - hoping he might tell me, / tell me what the waves don't know

Right, July, July, so long ago.  I was on the road a little bit, making literary pilgrimages.  Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for example, to Herman Melville’s Arrowhead:

On this spot, not at this exact desk but in front of this exact window, Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, and The Confidence Man.  He wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a story about a man with a window view of a blank brick wall, in front of this view.

Near Ithaca, New York, I crossed paths with Vladimir Nabokov and A. R. Ammons and many other great writers, looking at waterfalls they also looked at, although Nabokov would have spent more time up on the rim looking for butterflies.

And finally, back in Massachusetts to the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst:

On this spot, although not at this exact etc. (see above), Emily Dickinson wrote most of what she wrote.  I had not known that for almost her entire writing life – a pretty big chunk of her entire life – she went everywhere with a Newfoundland named Carlo, after a “minor dog in Jane Eyre,” to quote one of the many superb guides.  I guess I knew Carlo existed, but I did not understand that Dickinson’s dog was a Newfoundland, gigantic, shaggy, weighing more than her.  Imagine here at the little desk, writing whichever masterpiece you have in mind, while shoving a giant dog head out of her lap.  Changed my whole idea of the Dickinson enterprise.  And she did all that writing while sitting on a pine cone!

The guides – at times literally one per room – were devoted and full of interest.  “When Sir Andrew Motion visited, his first question was” – no, you will have to visit the house to learn Motion’s first question (it was – of course! – about Carlo).

I also read some books.

FICTION

The Road (1934-63), Vasily Grossman – a curious hybrid book, Grossman’s stories, plus “The Hell of Treblinka,” mixed among what amounts to a valuable little biography by Robert Chandler.

Mildred Pierce (1941), James M. Cain – about a woman who creates a successful fried chicken restaurant, one American art form about the greatest American art form.  I had not seen the movie, or for that matter read the book before, and had no idea that it would be perhaps the most purely melodramatic novel I have ever read.

Midaq Alley (1947), Nahguib Mahfouz – a classic “neighborhood” novel, a look in on the various residents of one Cairo block, sociologically interesting and full of good gossip.  The way we live now, for a specific we and now.  I read the book slowly, since there seemed to be no hurry, until the three-quarter mark when the story of one cluster of characters took a melodramatic turn and pushed me quickly to the end.

Ship Fever (1996), Andrea Barrett – High quality stories full of flattering, educational science.

American Desert (2004), Percival Everett – Maybe at some point I will piece together some thoughts about Everett.  I’ve read five of his books now and am beginning to imagine that I have thoughts.

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (2020), Yoko Tawada – what a title.  The novella, written in German, translated by Susan Bernofsky, is crammed with quotations and words from Celan’s poems.  Who knows what I might have missed, or seen.

POETRY

The Pages of Day and Night (1950-83) &

Mihyar of Damascus, His Songs (1961), Adonis – a selected poems and then a jump back to the breakthrough book, where Adonis creates the “Mihyar” persona, a mystical version of himself that pushes past his skepticism, allowing for a more original poetic voice, free from the endless, rich, but possibly stifling conventions of classical Arabic poetry.  The quotation in the title is from “I Search for Odysseus” (p. 24-5, tr. Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard).

Breathturn (1967), Paul Celan – After reading the Towada novel, and I at least took another look, at the Pierre Joris translation this time, which Bernofsky uses.

ANIMALS

The Soul of an Octopus (2015), Sy Montgomery – long time since I read a book about animals.  This one is also about people, with a local angle, the, what are they, fishkeepers and volunteers at the New England Aquarium in Boston, a place I should obviously go.

IN PORTUGUESE

Poesia (1944), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Her first book, little lyrics about the sea, like she would write for her entire life.

Caminhos que faço meus (2023), Pedro Gil de Vasconcelos – My Pilgrimages, maybe, or My Caminos if I can use the Spanish, pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela.  Gil de Vasconcelos is a Portuguese journalist who has done many Caminos, so he can mix stories from the older ones into the current one, which is good since the current one is not all that interesting.  An book of high value for the Portuguese language learner since it is full of useful vocabulary that is constantly repeated.  I mean, it’s a long walk in the Galician mountains.  A glimpse of the trail is in the trailer (Youtube link) for the accompanying documentary, which I have not seen.

Ler, the Spring 2024 issue – To Read, or maybe Read! The Portuguese Bookforum, more or less. I read almost all of it.  An article about Spanish politics was too cryptic, and a throwaway where writers babbled about their most and least favorite words was too stupid. The feature article is about the current wave of young female writers from South and Central America and the interesting books they are writing. Nice to be able to read such a thing.