What I read in November, in list form, with light opinionation. No idea what good this is to me, except psychologically, and I doubt that, much less to anyone else. If I wrote something else, I include the link.
French
La Bête du Vaccarès (1926), Joseph d’Arbaud. Tourism and other interesting things.
Poèmes : 1919-48,
André Breton. Really just 1932-48. I would never guess from Breton’s 1930 poems
that this is the Surrealism tyrant phase, or the Communist phase. The poems look a lot like they did in the
1920s. The “Ode to Charles Fourier”
looks different, but that is from 1947. Breton
seems second-rate to me. Louis Aragon is
more linguistically playful, a better poet all around. Benjamin Péret is more pure,
more committed to the concept. Still, I
found plenty of good lines, good images, even whole poems. The little 1934 collection L'air de l'eau
(The Air of the Water) seemed especially striking.
La Corde au cou (Rope to the Throat, maybe, 1873),
Émile Gaboriau. Most of my French reading
energy was for some reason drained into a 500-page proto-mystery. I want to write separately about this
book. I hereby commit to etc. It ain’t The Moonstone, but it’s
interesting.
Poetry
The Complete Poems (1994), Basil Bunting. A good Auden imitator in the 1930s, the war
and a long break from poetry turned him into his own poet, most notably in the
long “Briggflats” (1966), but I need to reread him to know what I mean by any
of that.
Rescue (1945), Czeslaw Milosz.
North and South (1946), Elizabeth Bishop.
First Poems (1951), James Merrill.
What I really read here are the relevant parts of volumes of
Collected Poems (or selected, for Merrill, From the First Nine),
so I don’t know what tinkering and quiet omission has been done. All three poets are firmly material, in contrast to so
many Surrealists and Audenists of the previous decade. If the poem is titled “The Fish,” it may be about
many things, but at least one of them, no matter how lost I might get, is a
fish.
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth. (Bishop)
Milosz’s material reality is the destruction of Warsaw and everything
around him. Merrill’s is rather
different:
Friday. Clear. Cool. This is your day. Stendhal
At breakfast-time. The metaphors of love. (“Variations: The Air Is Sweetest that a Thistle Guards”)
Narrative
Young Joseph (1934), Thomas Mann.
The Beast Must Die (1938), Nicholas Blake. The flap said this is often called the
greatest detective novel ever written, which is preposterous. The 1990 Crime Writers’ Association poll put
it at #81 which is plausible. It is
cleverly structured, with the detective not appearing until the exact halfway
point. It is quite funny, with some
pathos at the beginning and end. Since “Nicholas
Blake” was a poet, I had hopes that his writing would be interesting, but he writes
in the conventional commercial style that almost every English Golden Age
mystery writer adopted. It’s better than
the Blake I read a couple of months ago, Thou Shell of Death (1936).
Murphy (1938), Samuel Beckett.
At Swim-Too-Birds (1939), Flann O’Brien. Wild things going on in Irish fiction at the
end of the 1930s! So much fun.
The Day of the Locust (1939), Nathanael West. Of West’s three little novels, this apocalyptic
small-time Hollywood novel is the most conventional, although certain scenes
are spectacular. The chapter where the
protagonist wanders through a wilderness of movie sets, for example –
Surrealism perfectly harnessed for narrative fiction.
Still, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) feels like the one where the
abyss is bottomless.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), Katherine Anne Porter. Ah, these are great. Three fifty-page “short novels” (Porter loathed the word “novella”), two of them about her greatest invention, her stand-in character Miranda. She is a child in “Old Mortality,” working through her family history in East Texas and New Orleans, and a young theater critic in let’s call it Denver in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” where she is stricken, hard, with the Spanish flu. Poor “Noon Wine,” a non-Miranda story, is almost lost between them, but it is good, too, a fine piece of American violence. But it's "Old Mortality" that is like Texas Proust (the Proust of “Combray,” specifically, the best Proust).
Galileo (1947), Bertolt Brecht.
Criticism
The Novel, an Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
(2010), Steven Moore. A good way to demolish
any simple notions of “firstness” – first novel, first English novel, first (any
adjective) novel. Also to demolish any
notion of being well-read. Moore is limited
in his reading only by the energy of translators. An exercise that would be useful simply as a
list is also full of good criticism, with extended sections on The Arabian
Nights, The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Tale of Genji, and
many more books filled with the most extraordinary things. Learning that some of these books exist at
all is a pleasure, like the burst of Byzantine fiction in the 12th century, or
Tibetan religious fiction in the 15th.
So much fun. I said that up
above, too. I could have said it more.
