What Himadri is reading

[Himadri]

Bible reading going well: I have now read thefour gospels, as well as Acts of the Apostles (all in the KJV version), and have read several long essays on them in the very useful and scholarly Oxford Companion to the Bible.

In th e mantime, I am taking a bit of a break from the Bible with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I have only read one novel by McCarthy before - All the Pretty Horses - and I had mixed feelings about that. The Road has long been recommended to me, but I have been putting it off as I am not really a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre. But what I have read so far is, I must admit, rather impressive. there is a sense of bleak emptiness about it - a sense of everything stripped away - that rather puts me in mind of Beckett. I can't really see how he is going to achieve a denouement though - I guess I'll just have to read on and find out!

[rughooker]

I read The Road a year ago, Himadri. It is indeed a bleak story, and the stark prose fits it perfectly. It did take me a chapter to get into the writing style, but it soon became part of the experience.

The movie just came out here a few months ago. I have no desire to see it. I was deeply moved by the book and while I have heard that the movie is true to the book, I don't think I want to see it all on the big screen. Too much.

[vtel57]

I enjoyed The Road, but I tend to like end-of-the-world type literature. I didn't like his writing style in this book, though. It took some getting used to. It's a little like Woolf's stream-of-consciousness narration with McCarthy's own version of punctuation rules, if there were any rules. I'm still not sure. That aside, I did enjoy the story.

[Lex]

I am taking a bit of a break from the Bible with Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
...
there is a sense of bleak emptiness about it - a sense of everything stripped away - that rather puts me in mind of Beckett.

Himadri, at this point we part company! IMHO, C McC is nothing better than a text-messaging hack.

I would never mention him by name in the same sentence with Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett. Not even in the same paragraph!

Please, don't get me started, OK?

[vtel57]

Uh... Himadri... we forgot to warn you about Lex's C McC bias.

[Himadri]

Oh dear! - I'm obviously revisiting an old debate here!

As I said, I wasn't quite convinced by the claims that had been made for All the Pretty Horses, but this one frankly doesn't seem bad at all...

As you'll probably know, I do have a bit of a problem with much of contemporary literature. I'm sure there's wonderful stuff being written out there, but usually, when I try something out (usually because someone has told me "read this, and you'll change your mind about contemporary novels!") I am left either feeling indifferent (at best), or, worse, wondering why I wasted my precious reading time when I could have been re-reading some Tolstoy instead. So I've generally taken to humming and hawing politely, and shrugging my shoulders and saying "I'm sure it's good, but it's probably not my kind of thing". What has happened as a consequence is that my level of expectation has plummeted.

I suppose that those of you I have known in past incarnations of this board know my tastes well enough: the novels I like best are mainly those of the past - Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner (European literature's best-kept secret, according to Andre Gide!), Tolstoy & Turgenev (Dostoyevsky I have a bit of difficulty with!), Dickens and Eliot (that's G Eliot, as the famous anagram of "toilets" was a poet rather than a novelist), Melville & Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, etc etc. Of my reading in the last few years, the novel that completely overwhelmed me was Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers: what had appeared to be some 1500 pages of Teutonic turgidity now reveals itself (in John Wood's resplendent new translation) as a masterpiece of the highest order. I really don't think I have read anything written in the last 50 or so years that has matched these. I'm sure they exist - just that I haven't come across them. As far as I've read, I suppose that of the novelists of the last 50 years or so, the ones I enjoy most are Graham Greene, R. K. Narayan, and Muriel Spark, but I don't know that I'd include even the finest of their work amongst the very best I've read.

I'm sure there are others I'd enjoy - but the problem is that I have far too much on my To-Be-Read list. One novelist I'd like to read a bit more of is Updike, whose Rabbit, Run took me by surprise by being, I thought, rather good: I'd really should read the rest of the tetralogy.

Well - back to The Road. I wasn't expecting anything at all from this, but I must confess I'm quite engrossed in it. Oh well, Lex, we can't always agree, I guess... <Looking for a suitable icon, but not finding one, deciding it doesn't really matter...>

[vtel57]

Simmons - Drood You'll like it... maybe.

[Lex]

Uh... Himadri... we forgot to warn you about Lex's C McC bias.

There's always the risk of ambiguity, alas. My C McC bias in no way extends to Carson McCullers, who died far too young, at the age of fifty. Her titles alone are admirable: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Reflections in a Golden Eye; Clock Without Hands; The Square Root of Wonderful; and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, among others.

To quote Graham Greene:

Mrs McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Mrs McCullers to Mr. Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message.

At one time, she resided at February House, located at7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn, along with W.H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee. Amazing, isn't it?

Her five novels have been collected in #128 of The Library of America.

[Urmas]

<Looking for a suitable icon, but not finding one, deciding it doesn't really matter...>

Urmas -

[ChipDoc]

I can't let this discussion pass without plugging one of my own favorite authors, Orson Scott Card. His The Folk Of The Fringe is a collection of five rather lengthly "short" stories about the post-Apocalyptic world. Despite the setting, they're actually stories of rebirth and the first one contains that aphorism I use about women creating the pattern of civilization.

And if it leads you to any of Card's hundred other works, so much the better!

[Himadri]

Thanks for the recommendation, ChipDoc - that's an unfamiliar name to me.

Eric - Simmons' Drood has been on my list of books to look up for quite some time now - since you first mentioned it, in fact!

Lex - I have read (and have been most impressed by) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of Sad Cafe (and the other stories in that collection). Another Southern writer I discovered in the last few years is Flannery O'Connor: I'm not entirely sure I understand her rather strange view of the world, but it certainly is very striking and powerful.

In the meantime, once I have finished The Road, I have Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate lined up. (I also have the collected poems of R. S. Thomas that I keep dipping into.) And after that, I'll return to my Bible-reading.

[Urmas]

Hey Himadri,

Since everyone else is dishing out stuff for you to read...

Ever heard of a fellow called Paul Britten Austin? Carl Michael Bellman is a perennial favourite of mine. A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing the library shelves in Helsinki's "East Center", and... boy oh boy oh boy:

The life and songs of Carl Michael Bellman: Genius of the Swedish Rococo

It's an effin' masterpiece. It is NOT a complete translation of Fredman's Epistles and Songs, although most of the "good stuff" is there. No. It's a book ABOUT Bellman, about 18th century Stockholm, about Bellman's central characters; Fredman, Movitz, father Berg and Ulla Winblad.

Let asses groan beneath the yoke,
Shrewd men scheme till their brains are broke;
Wine, girls, Fredman's fiddle stroke
Enchant the night!

[F.E. 63]

[vtel57]

Eric - Simmons' Drood has been on my list of books to look up for quite some time now - since you first mentioned it, in fact!

Ah! OK... I can stop nagging now.

[Lex]

Lex - I have read (and have been most impressed by) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of Sad Cafe (and the other stories in that collection). Another Southern writer I discovered in the last few years is Flannery O'Connor: I'm not entirely sure I understand her rather strange view of the world, but it certainly is very striking and powerful.

Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories before her untimely death at the age of 39 from lupus, a wasting hereditary disease.

She was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by The Library of America.

Sadly, Carson McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses and from alcoholism — she had contracted rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen and suffered from strokes since her youth. By the age of 31, her left side was entirely paralyzed. She died in Nyack, New York, on September 29, 1967, after a brain hemorrhage, and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. McCullers dictated her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, during her final months. It was published in 1999, thirty-two years after her death at age 50.

[Eggdog]

Tolstoy & Turgenev (Dostoyevsky I have a bit of difficulty with!)

I read Crime and Punishment at a fairly critical point in my psychosocial development (1), followed quickly by Notes from the Underground, which absolutely knocked me out. Over the next few years I read most of anything by Fyodor that ever made it into English (most of The Diary of a Writer eluded me, which is probably OK, since what little I did look at was cranky, in both senses of the word). My friend Chris (who also headed down some overgrown existential paths) and I used to even quote Stavrogin back and forth now & then if we'd had a few beers (2).

And at about 25, it stopped. I was about halfway through a reread of The Brothers K. and said, "I'm not sure I really need this," and put it down, and I've never been able to go back. Later, I was told that this isn't uncommon: more than perhaps any other novelist in "the canon," Dostoevsky is A Writer For Young People. That is, if he doesn't hit you at a certain era within your life, the chances increase that he won't hit you at all.

I haven't read Turgenev for a few years but have enjoyed some of his stories quite a lot, especially On the Eve. I have to say that I respect Tolstoy's writing more than I've ever truly enjoyed it.

_____
(1) This assumes that what I did can be called "development." But we won't go there for now.
(2) Which transpired often.

[Lex]

Tolstoy & Turgenev (Dostoyevsky I have a bit of difficulty with!)

... more than perhaps any other novelist in "the canon," Dostoevsky is A Writer For Young People. That is, if he doesn't hit you at a certain era within your life, the chances increase that he won't hit you at all.

Equally true of the late J. D. Salinger. Just ask Eric.

[Eggdog]

Equally true of the late J. D. Salinger. Just ask Eric.

I read Nine Stories probably half a dozen times over almost 30 years, and it always held up beautifully for me. I may be in the minority opinion on this, of course. And I didn't much like Franny and Zooey until I was on the dull side of thirty.

Catcher, yes; I can appreciate the timelessness but I'm just not there any more.

Thomas Wolfe is another Young People's Writer. For me, his appeal lasted from, I don't know, age 16 to age 16½.

[vtel57]

Lex is referring to my well known (in these parts, anyway)... ahem... disdain for Salinger's so-called talents, particularly regarding Catcher....

[Lex]

Thomas Wolfe is another Young People's Writer. For me, his appeal lasted from, I don't know, age 16 to age 16½.

Don't you mean Tom Wolfe, author of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), etc., ad nauseum?

[vtel57]

Thomas Wolfe is another Young People's Writer. For me, his appeal lasted from, I don't know, age 16 to age 16½.

Don't you mean Tom Wolfe, author of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), etc., ad nauseum?

Nah... I'm pretty sure he actually means Thomas Wolfe, Lex... I hope so, anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wolfe