One of these books is 1,100 pages long. It was just by chance that I read two genuinely disgusting books at around the same time.
FICTION
A Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper Powys - I will write a bit about this beast, soon. That line in the title is from Chapter 25, p.
798 of the Overlook edition
Claudius the God (1934), Robert Graves
A Buyer's Market (1952), Anthony Powell – The second novel in a series of twelve. I will write about this, too, but I do not know when. Each time I read one in the series I think, just one more, then I will know what I want to write.
Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin
Dispatches from the Central Committee (1992), Vladimir
Sorokin – Actually from the early 1980s, mostly, but unpublishable, real
antinomian anti-Soviet gestures. Sorokin
had two main tricks, first, to begin in a conventional vein but suddenly
interrupting the story with something disgusting or otherwise awful, and
second, to suddenly switch rhetorical modes, say from realism to bureaucratic
nonsense to grotesquerie to surrealism.
The suddenness is always the key effect.
In a sense the stories are satire but by the end I took it more as a
kind of protest literature. The book
includes perfectly suited, disgusting new illustration and is well produced,
not always true of Dalkey Archive books.
I guess it could be full of typos but given the nature of the text how
would I ever know.
POETRY
Auroras of Autumn (1950), Wallace Stevens
17 Poems (1954) &
Secrets on the Way (1958), Tomas Tranströmer
Scattered Returns (1969), L. E. Sissman – The great Boston
cancer poet.
MEMOIR
Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
(1950), József Debreczeni – Debreczeni, a Serbian-Hungarian journalist, passed
through Auschwitz but was mostly imprisoned in labor camps and eventually a
bizarre hospital camp, the “cold crematorium,” thus the curious, accurate
subtitle. Debreczeni emphasize the
disgusting side of life in the camps, not exactly a neglected aspect in other
accounts but I have never seen so much direct focus on it. But again, that hospital camp, boy. Please see Dorian Stuber’s review for more detail,
if you can stand it. As many Holocaust
memoirs as we have now, it is a shame that this one did not appear in English
until 2023.
The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (2024), Sonny Rollins – Full of notes about fingering
and the effects of his diet on his blowing, this artifact is for fans only, but
this is Sonny Rollins, a titan. Become a
fan!
IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE
Claudine à l'école (Claudine at School, 1900), Colette – Young Claudine has a
crush on her almost as young new (female) teacher, who is perhaps having some
sort of affair with the only slightly older (female) school principal. Colette later said that all of the (barely)
lesbian stuff was forced on the novel by her odious husband Willy, which is plausible
given that Colette abandons the plot – all plot – about halfway through for a
long long long section about taking the bac, the final exams. I found all of that fascinating and wish I
had read the novel long ago. But it was for
some reason the lesbian stuff, not the test-taking, that gave Colette her first
bestseller.
Poesia, te escrevo agora (Poetry, I Write You Now, 1950-84), João Cabral de Melo Neto
– The major works of Cabral de Melo Neto, including full versions of his great
long poems like “The River or On the Course of the Capibaribe River from Its
Source to the City of Recife” (1953) in one handy book. Recommended to the
Portuguese language learner – easier than they first look, and highly rewarding. I assume, and hope, that the English
translations are good.
Yes, you've nailed Sorokin's favorite tricks, which enabled him to produce some brilliant and unforgettable short stories. When he ramped up to longer works, he came up with the equally brilliant and unclassifiable Норма (written 1979–1983, published 1994), which the indefatigable Max Lawton is translating as The Norm (New York Review Books, forthcoming). It can't really be called a novel, but then that's true in one way or another of all the great Russian monsters. If you want to try more Sorokin, that would be where I'd recommend you start (when it comes out, of course). His later, more conventional (in a formal sense!) novels whose translations are already available are good in their various ways but don't give you that sense of having been dumped into an alternate dimension.
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