My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded. I read short, difficult books in French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside some playful nonsense.
FICTION
The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example. Ninety pages of classic Chinese peasant
misery. Plague, starvation, abuse, and then
the Japanese invade, with a Cormac McCarthy-like level of violence in a number
of places. I had planned to breeze
through this on the way to Xiao Hong’s more famous Tales of Hulan River
(1942) but that will have to wait. “For
Mother Wang, her day of agony was all for naught. A life of agony was all for naught” (p. 29 of
the Howard Greenblatt translation).
The Witch in the Wood (1939), T. H. White – By contrast,
a marvelous piece of nonsense, a much sillier book than the preceding The
Sword in the Stone. Monty Python and
the Holy Grail now seems somewhat less original.
The Sheltering Sky (1949), Paul Bowles – An American
couple tourist around Morocco after the war.
The husband seeks the sublime; the wife does not. The husband is also a sociopath, and I at one
point wondered how long I could stand his company, but after a crisis hits I
was fine. Existentialism can seem
awfully adolescent when the only problem is ennui, but in the face of a real
problem working through the ideas become interesting. All this before the last section, the last 40
pages, as bleak a blast of despair as I have encountered in an American novel. “She felt like saying: ‘Well, you’re crazy,’
but she confined herself to: ‘How strange.’” (Ch. XV, p. 91) That’s how I felt!
I, Robot (1950), Isaac Asimov – I have picked up the
idea that people working or theorizing on computer programs that are for some
reason called “artificial intelligence” take this collection of stories form
the 1940s seriously. See for example Cal Newport, a Georgetown University professor of computer science (do not look at
his list of publications!) who writes in or on the New Yorker that he
was “struck by its [the book’s] new relevance.”
I was struck by how irrelevant the book was, or I guess how it was
exactly as relevant as it has always been.
The first story is a little chemistry problem written by a 21-year-old
working on an MA in chemistry, but Asimov soon switches to philosophy. What I think is the most famous story, “Liar!”
(1941) is a simple puzzle in Kantian ethics.
In the next story, “Little Lost Robot” (1947), the characters solve
problems by pushing fat robots in front of trains. I had not realized how young Asimov was when
he wrote the first Robot and Foundation stories. If they sometimes seem a little undergraduate,
well.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Patricia Highsmith –
A regular old murderous psychopath story, good fun compared to some of these
other books.
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), Anthony Powell –
Another installment of the higher gossip. The narrator has gotten married and
spends the book writing around his new wife, so that by the end I know
as little about her as at the beginning, although I learn a lot about everyone else.
’I suppose she lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust. I don’t think Charles’s father – “Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with. He used to be very handsome, and so amusing. He looked wonderful on a horse. He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya. Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’ (Ch. 2, 89)
Neither Boffles, Amy, the Frenchwoman, or the horse are ever
mentioned again in the novel.
The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Cynthia
Ozick
Suzanne and Gertrude (2019), Jeb Loy Nichols – A short,
sad novel about an introverted English woman who adopts a stray donkey. Expect more donkey content here over the next
few months.
When These Mountains Burn (2020), David Joy – A final
miserable novel, compassionate this time, but unflinching in its look at the ongoing
American narcotics epidemic, this time in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, so
painful in places. Joy has recently
discovered that where he is lucky to get seven people to attend a free reading
in North Carolina he can get seventy people to buy tickets to one
in France. He is joining a sadly well
established American literary tradition.
HISTORY
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014),
Eric H. Cline – In a sense more misery, but at some distance.
POETRY
The Far Field (1964) &
Straw for the Fire (1943-63), Theodore Roethke
Sunbelly (1973), Kenneth Fields
Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1954-60), Richard
Eberhart – the poems of the 1950s, really, not the whole thing.
Foxglovewise (2025), Ange Mlinko – Possibly a major
work. I think I will revisit it next
year when the paperback is published.
Recommended to fans of Marly Youmans.
IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE
Só (Alone, 1892), António Nobre – Since
Portuguese literature is often imitative, I could call Nobre a Symbolist, and he
sometimes sounds like the missing link between Romanticism and Pessoa, but I
thought his voice was individual. A long
poem about a stay in a sanitarium (Nobre died young of tuberculosis) should be
translated; it all should be translated.
I read a school edition that says the book is recommended to 8th graders. I have no idea how, or how often, this book
is actually taught, but I would be shocked if one percent of American 8th
graders are assigned such a complex book of poems.
Pierrot mon ami (My Pal Pierrot, 1942),
Raymond Queneau – Pure jolly fun, but between the slang and wordplay and sudden
shifts in register, hard as the devil. Sometimes
it felt like I was reading a Godard film.
Roberte ce soir (1954) &
La Révocation de l'Édict de Nantes (1959), Pierre
Klossowski – Two odd novellas. The wife
sleeps with the houseguests and the husband theorizes about why this is a good
idea. Each novella has one long scene
that might be pornographic if not written in such a comically formal register. The second book turns the first inside out,
which is interesting. Perhaps those ridiculous
sex scenes, for example, are just the art-loving husband’s painting-inspired fantasies. One curious scene describes a painting that
could easily be by Pierre’s older brother Balthus. Utterly different style than Queneau but just
as difficult. I need to find an easy
French book, a Simenon novel, something like that.
Contos Exemplares (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner
Andresen – Not as intricate, but often a bit like Isak Dinesen.
