What I’m reading
Currently reading, or recently read:
J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Coetzee continues his eccentric exploration of authority and identity in the novel.
Mark Sarvas, Harry, Revised (2008). Harry Rent, recently widowed, tries to escape benighted “Harry-land.” Comic novel by the creator of The Elegant Variation.
John Gay, Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). Here’s an online version. Read about a related book in the TLS.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1962). “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”
Alastair Dingwall, ed., Traveller’s Literary Companion to Southeast Asia (1994). “For the Western visitor to Southeast Asia, the perceptive comments of observers such as Isabella Bird, Anton Chekhov, and Marguerite Duras often help to articulate feelings that we feel but cannot always express.”
John Heilpern, John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man (2007). Bio of the British playwright, just out in paper.
Czeslaw Milosz, ed., Postwar Polish Poetry (revised ed. 1983). CM translated 25 Polish poets and provided lovely one-paragraph summaries of each (”his imagination is not urban”).
January 23rd, 2008 08:31
Not sure if you’ve seen this – they don’t publicize it very much – but the NYTimes has been running an online reading group which recently has been going over The Moviegoer. Haven’t looked at their discussion of it, but they did interesting things with The Education of Henry Adams.
January 23rd, 2008 09:00
I had very mixed feelings about the Coetzee. I thought it was good — far better than most anything else around — but, given that, I thought that JMC could have made it much better still.
Saying that, it has stayed with me in quite an eerie way …
January 24th, 2008 23:31
Hey, if smart guys like you are going to show up, maybe I should blog more often.:)
Dan, I think hearing about the NYT dialogue is what caused me to take down my copy of the Percy novel and dive in. I’d had it for years and never read it. I loved the commenter who recommends Percy’s essays – I’ve always loved “Metaphor as Mistake.”
Mark, I find that I’m no longer able to evaluate Coetzee’s books (good/bad, successful/unsuccessful); I just have silent arguments with them. I certainly experienced many times what Frank Wilson described – I’d paraphrase it as “he can’t really expect us to believe that he believes this” – but his identity is so slippery I’m hesitant to say who “he” is. Coetzee is playing a very profound game I think, and I’m not ready to say I understand it.
Funnily enough, there’s something that ties together Moviegoer and Bad Year; both include encomia to Tolstoy. In Percy, as Steve Coates describes in the NYT discussion:
“Binx’s Korean War wound is a turning point in his life: regaining consciousness under a chindolea bush, he sees, six inches from his nose, a dung beetle scratching in the leaves. “As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search.â€
This crucial scene reinforces Percy’s wider theme of coming to a sense of self through ordeal. (â€Isn’t it true that the only happy men are wounded men?†Kate asks.) But it is also an overt allusion to “War and Peaceâ€! It’s the passage where Prince Andrei, gravely wounded at Austerlitz, looks up and sees the clouds and the eternal sky, really sees them, for the first time in his life. (Prince Andrei gets clouds, Binx a dung beetle.) Binx has read “W&Pâ€: he calls it “the novel of novels.â€
Coetzee:
As a child of my times, I read, admired, and imitated Diderot and Sterne, But I never gave up reading Tolstoy, nor could I ever persuade myself that his effect on me was just a consequence of his rhetorical skill. I read him with an uneasy, even shamefaced absorption, just as (I know believe) the formalist critics who held sway in the twentieth century continued in their spare time to read the masters of realism: with guilty fascination (Barthes’ own anti-theoretical theory of the pleasure of reading was, I suspect, put together to explain and justify the obscure pleasure that Zola gave him.) Now that the dust has settled, the mystery of Tolstoy’s authority, and of the authority of other great authors, remains untouched.
February 6th, 2008 20:56
[...] Currently reading, or recently read: J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Coetzee continues his eccentric exploration of authority and identity in the novel. Mark Sarvas, Harry, Revised (2008). Harry Rent, recently widowed, tries to escape benighted Harry-land. Comic novel by the creator of The Elegant Variation. John Gay, Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). Heres an online version. Read about a related book in the TLS. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1962). source: What Im reading, Golden Rule Jones [...]