In which I review every book I've ever read

[Melville]

124. Nightwood (Djuna Barnes, 1936)
Genre: modernism
Rating: 4

Reminds me of Henry James' Wings of the Dove: a melodramatic narrative of high emotions, but one which purposefully avoids the emotional moments of that narrative in favor of relentlessly structuralizing them. But where James does his structuralizing analytically and drily, Barnes does hers almost obscenely ornately. In both cases, I'd rather be given direct access to the moments' still-beating heart.

At some point, a character in the narrative effectively takes over that style of narration, explaining and commenting upon events otherwise undescribed. He seems at first a Wildean wit, standing apart from events and passing pithy non-sequitirs, but later is seen as a self-pitying transvestite drunk on pomp and aphorisms. I don't care for pithiness.

Quote: The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

[Melville]

125. Endgame (Beckett, 1957)
Genre: theater of the absurd
Rating: 6

People pop out of holes like Oscar the Grouch. Not one of Beckett's best.

Quote: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.

[Melville]

126. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (Sartre, 1939)
Genre: existential philosophy
Rating: 5.5

Sartre insists that psychology should focus on actual conscious experience. But he conflates the forms and patterns our consciousness takes with being conscious of them, based perhaps on a misapplication of the notion that consciousness must be consciousness (of). That is, some psychologists would say a person does such and such, even if it seems to go against their conscious thoughts and desires, because they have a subconscious desire to do so. Sartre says, no, that's nonsense: there is only consciousness; 'subconscious' desire is an element of consciousness. I agree with that (what other psychological existence is one talking about if not consciousness? unless 'subconscious' is simply taken to mean aspects of our neurochemical and physical state of which we are not aware), but then he muddies that statement and makes it mean that the way we act, feel, exist in the world—the forms our consciousnesses take in response to events and previous moments of consciousness—is a result of free conscious will. For example, see the below quote, in which he describes emotional responses as if they were consciously willed. While such things obviously occur, I think in many cases their is no willing lining up with the response, and there is a fundamental semantic problem in Sartre's description.

Not one of his best.

Quote: We can now conceive what an emotion is. It is a transformation of the world. When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exact and difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world; that is, to live it as though the relationship between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic. But, be it understood, this is no playful matter: we are cornered, and we fling ourselves into this new attitude with all the force at our command.

[Melville]

I figure I'll go with my plan of writing reviews for the books I read in 2011, before reviewing anything else.


The Foundations of Arithmetic, Frege - 8.5
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty - 8
The Petty Demon, Sologub - 8
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume - 7.5
The Devils, Dostoevsky - 7.5
Nostromo, Conrad - 7
Hills Like White Elephants, Hemingway [short story] - 7
Quadraturin, Krzhizhanovsky [short story] - 7
Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre [essay] - 6.5
The Lottery, Shirley Jackson - 6.5
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Abridged), Locke - 6
A Rose for Emily, Faulkner [short story] - 6
[S]Endgame, Beckett [play] - 6
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene - 6
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre - 5.5
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry - 5.5
Ethics, Spinoza - 5
Oblomov, Goncharov - 4.5
Walden, Thoreau - 4.5
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes - 4
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley - 3
A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett - 3
The Stars My Destination, Bester - 1
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling - 1

[Qrazy]

I disagree with this. Particularly if you are primarily a consequentialist (which many, if not most, people are, in my experience), but even if not, it's often very difficult to determine what is the morally right action.

Well I do agree that we often do have to make these decisions, I just think the desire/moral choice problem happens even more frequently.


Good?

Pretty good.

Looks like you had a solid reading list last year even though your scores are a bit harsh. :lol:

[Melville]

Looks like you had a solid reading list last year even though your scores are a bit harsh. :lol:
Tough but fair. :P Which ratings do you think are harsh? Spinoza? Nothing wowed me like the year before, when I read a bunch of rattlingly great books.

[Qrazy]

Tough but fair. :P Which ratings do you think are harsh? Spinoza? Nothing wowed me like the year before, when I read a bunch of rattlingly great books.

Spinoza, Hume, Sartre. Even your lowest rated two I'd bump up quite a bit.

What did you read last year?

[Melville]

Spinoza, Hume, Sartre. Even your lowest rated two I'd bump up quite a bit.

What did you read last year?
I liked the Hume a lot. I thought the lowest-rated two were among the worst things I've ever read. My review of Harry Potter is on the previous page, in case you haven't read it.

Last year:
1. The Unnamable by Beckett - 10
2. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy by Beckett - 10
4. First Love and Other Shorts by Beckett - 9.5
5. Malone Dies by Beckett - 9
6. Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Duras - 9
7. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier - 8.5
8. Summer Rain by Duras - 8.5
9. Dance of Death by Strindberg [play] - 8.5
10. Story of the Eye by Bataille [reread] - 8.5
11. The Soldier and Death by Arthur Ransome [short story] - 8.5
12. Pedro Paramo by Rulfo - 8
13. The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard - 8
14. The End of the Affair by Greene - 8
15. Repetition by Kierkegaard - 8
16. 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings - 8
17. The Malady of Death by Duras - 8
18. The Lankavatara Sutra by Anonymous - 8
19. Solaris by Lem - 8
20. A Sentimental Journey by Sterne - 8
21. Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
22. Correction by Bernhard - 7.5
23. The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 by Beckett - 7.5
24. Selected Tales by Brothers Grimm and David Luke (translator) - 7.5
25. Billy Budd and Other Stories by Melville - 7.5
26. The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard - 7.5
27. Vermillion Sands by Ballard - 7
28. At Swim-Two-Birds by O'Brien - 7
29. The Long Goodbye by Chandler - 7
30. The Holy Terrors by Cocteau - 7
31. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos - 7
32. Basic Writings by Heidegger - 6.5
33. Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 6.5
34. The Storyteller by Anthony Minghella - 6.5
35. Go Down, Moses by Faulkner - 6.5
36. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - 6.5
37. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales by Kingsland (translator) - 6
38. Emily L. by Duras - 6
39. Strait is the Gate by Gide - 6
40. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho by Beckett - 6
41. Erotism: Death & Sensuality by Bataille - 6
42. Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau - 6
43. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard by Ballard - 6
44. Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare [play] - 5.5
45. The Trouble with Being Born by Cioran - 5.5
46. The Painted Bird by Kosinski - 5.5
47. Moderato Cantabile by Duras - 5
48. Valis by Philip K. Dick - 5
49. Twelfth Night by Shakespeare [play] - 4.5
50. Maldoror by Lautréamont - 4.5
51. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - 4.5
52. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Hardy - 4
53. Don Pablos the Swindler by Francisco de Quevedo - 4
54. Old Peter's Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome - 3.5
55. Brideshead Revisited by Waugh - 3.5
56. Story of O by Pauline Réage - 3
57. Emily of New Moon by LM Montgomery - 2.5
58. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2
59. Her by Ferlinghetti - 1

[Qrazy]

Haha your review is hilarious and I largely agree but at the same time I still wouldn't rate it as harshly. Also as the series goes along many of your character issues with the first book are fleshed out. Malfoy and Snape become much more interesting characters.

Without a massive background in mathematics can I tackle The Foundations of Arithmetic? I'm guessing yes, but just making sure.

[Melville]

Haha your review is hilarious and I largely agree but at the same time I still wouldn't rate it as harshly. Also as the series goes along many of your character issues with the first book are fleshed out. Malfoy and Snape become much more interesting characters.

Without a massive background in mathematics can I tackle The Foundations of Arithmetic? I'm guessing yes, but just making sure.
Yeah, I figured that would be the case, but after the first book, I definitely won't be reading another. A good writer can convey more precise characterization in a sentence or two than was in that entire book.

Definitely no math background required. Anything you'd need, you'd have learned in a logic course, I think. It's a great book.

[Qrazy]

Yeah, I figured that would be the case, but after the first book, I definitely won't be reading another. A good writer can convey more precise characterization in a sentence or two than was in that entire book.

Yeah, I'm not going to defend the series because I don't think it's particularly good, so fair enough.


Definitely no math background required. Anything you'd need, you'd have learned in a logic course, I think. It's a great book.

Nice.

[Melville]

127. The Devils (Dostoevsky, 1872)
Genre: reactionary politics and slavophilism
Rating: 7.5

Definitely the least of Dostoevsky's novels I've read. It's a criticism of the radical politics in Russia at the time—primarily, the nihilist movement to destroy all traditions and social orders. I would have hoped for some insight into or analysis of those movements and their ideologies, but Dostoeskvy never explores either the ideologies or the people behind them, instead creating a cast of simple caricatures, grotesques and lunatics perverted by absurd and grandiose thoughts. (As far as criticisms of grandiose reimaginings of society go, I prefer his short story The Crocodile.) The people in power, on the other side, he portrays as mere bumblers who court the radicals in order to feel and seem hip. There are a few well-developed characters in the midst of this, such as the sentimental, self-deluding, self-aggrandizing former self-styled-radical who dominates the early chapters; Dostoevky's scathing psychological dissection of this character is terrifically compelling and funny. The man who obsesses about gaining power and freedom in suicide is also great, or rather, the almost sickeningly specious idea is. And I loved the bitter irony with which everything is treated. But it didn't add up to any substantial ideas about its subject matter, and the general lack of psychological nuance was disappointing coming from Dostoevsky.

More interesting to me was Dostoevsky's equally lacerating, but more subtle, treatment of the Byronic hero. Dostoevsky once gave a public lecture about how Pushkin, in his Eugene Onegin, made the Byronic hero into a distinctly Russian character, a wanderer who was outside society rather than superficially disdainful of it as the Byronic hero was. Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time continued that, and Dostoevsky brought it to its conclusion in the character of Stavrogin: he possesses the almost supernatural charisma and fascination of the Byronic hero, has the power of will and action and seeming mastery of social behavior he has no care for, acts with the bipolar erraticism capable of both great generosity and great malice, embarks on the passionate love affairs—but takes the disdain and apathy toward social norms to an extreme of nihilism: on a nihilistic whim, he seduces an eleven-year-old girl, and he later sits by while she kills herself; on another such whim, he throws money at a man who has offered to murder his wife, as if just wanting to be done with the man, and then lets the murder occur. He is divorced from society, from morality, seeking some goal or meaning but, finding none, acting aimlessly and horribly. Either his Byronic qualities lead him to have such profound apathy for everyday reality, society, and people, or it is precisely that divorce that allows him to act as he does and gives him his magnetism and power. Or both. He's also one of the two characters in the book who one feels has a real, turmoiled inner life. Anyway, he kills himself in the end, which seems appropriate.

Quotes: "I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other."

"It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is—for me to kill myself...to kill someone else would be the lowest point of my self-will, and there's the whole of you in that. I am not you: I want the highest point, and will kill myself...It is my duty to proclaim unbelief," Kirillow was pacing the room. "For me no idea is higher than that there is no God. The history of mankind is on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God, so as to live without killing himself; in that lies the whole of world history up to now. I alone for the first time in world history did not want to invent God. Let them know once and for all."

[Melville]

128. Hills Like White Elephants (Hemingway, 1927)
Genre: iceberg minimalism
Rating: 7

Hemingway in his minimalist-short-story mode: almost wholly dialogue, with momentous personal events and emotional upheavals pointed to at the periphery. Good stuff.

Quote: ‘You’ve got to realize,’ he said, ‘ that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’
‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.’
‘Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want anyone else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.’
‘Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.’
‘It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.’
‘Would you do something for me now?’
‘I’d do anything for you.’
‘Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?’
He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.
‘But I don’t want you to,’ he said, ‘I don’t care anything about it.’
‘I’ll scream,’ the girl said.

129. Quadraturin (Krzhizhanovsky, 1926)
Genre: Gogol-esque absurd fantasy
Rating: 7
A guy buys paint from a door-to-door salesman who promises it will add more space to his tiny apartment. The painted apartment grows bigger every day, until he's lost in the midst of it. Wonderfully absurd in that particular Russian way. Perhaps a simple fable of the beware-what-you-wish-for form. Or perhaps a more specific allegory for being sold dreams of wealth and freedom by Communism and ending alone in a void. Preferably not the latter, as I don't like allegory.

Quote: "Yes: a matchbox."
"What?"
"Your room, I say: it's a matchbox. How many square feet?"
"Eighty-six and a bit."
"Precisely."

[Melville]

130. Toilers of the Sea, scandalously abridged version (Victor Hugo, 1866)
Genre: Romantic melodrama with crashing waves, social outcastery, and unrequited love
Rating: 4

I just discovered that the edition of this I read was horribly abridged—while giving no indication of such abridgement! Bah! All I remember of it was some melodrama, suicide, and a murderous octopus, but presumably the full-length version had more to it.

Quote: Nothing was visible now but the sea.

[Melville]

131. The Silent Cry (Kenzaburō Ōe, 1967)
Genre: existential malaise and grotesquerie
Rating: 8.5

A book of big, intricate ideas and strange style. Both the narration and the characters endlessly explain the meaning of every minute occurrence, all in the same morbid, unnaturally technical tone. It reads like the monotone speech of a robot obsessed with the grotesque—every sentence seems touched by that grotesqueness. Such an explicit and technical-sounding style is sometimes frustrating, but it's also compelling in its idiosyncrasy. And it suits the state of the narrator, who is variously detached from and repulsed and vaguely baffled by existence. The characters in general feel themselves flung into existence, into themselves and what they are culpable for, and they grapple with it. Japan's post-war social decay provides an undertone to this, but that's placed within a broad depiction of how the characters' take personal meaning from their place in a larger personal and cultural history; the way they define themselves and see the world is not just colored by, but integrally connected to the way they interpret that history, which can never truly be known, since its events are buried by time and appropriated into a web of cultural meanings.

The ending, which the book so carefully builds to, is profoundly moral: it's a call to action, to risking something and going beyond oneself, and thereby achieving wholeness and meaning for oneself and letting oneself be known to others.

Quotes:
The small features of the flat, vegetable face that so cruelly resembled her dead son were all slack, like melting candy. It seemed to me I'd never seen a face express so immediate or utter despair.

The kind of robotic description that often follows dialogue, though probably not the best example: Backed up by the obvious reality of pain, his words struck home, despite my justifiable incredulity, with a shocking conviction that transcended logic.

[monolith94]

I'm sorry, but a 1 for The Stars My Destination? That's just objectively wrong.

[Kirby Avondale]

6. Beckett - the absurd and the breakdown of human existence

The Unnamable - 10
Molloy - 10
First Love and Other Shorts - 9.5
Malone Dies - 9
Waiting for Godot - 8
The Complete Short Prose - 7.5
Murphy - 6.5
Endgame - 6
Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho - 6

I defy you. Particularly for the last one, which easily measures among Beckett's best. It kills, consistently and completely, Ill Seen Ill Said being the deadliest of the pack. It's where all his work outside of the first person, all his closed spaces, contradictory images and knotted systems really cash out. Great as the "Trilogy" is, and as far as he takes it, he hadn't yet honed his prose to the zero point he'd been aiming for. It's almost in the nature of his project that he's at his most vital when he's winnowing his words down to their embers, dissolving them, a few breaths here and there, tending them right up to the last choke. Altho I'm more agnostic on Endgame, another one typically ranked top tier, I don't know how you're coming at it, since your review was just a drive by.

[Izzy Black]

Endgame is my favorite Beckett, personally.

[Melville]

I defy you.
Haha. I like your opening.

I find Beckett's late, extreme minimalist style interesting, but it doesn't work as well for me as his middle-period stuff. As you can gather from my reviews of the first trilogy, I love it largely for how it breaks down human experience into bare elements of Being. But it starts from something recognisable as experience and shows the disintegration of that (and shows the disintegration itself as an existential process). The Nohow On trilogy kind of starts at the end, working with just a few bare elements of movement, geometry, thought, image, and company. For me, that feels too abstracted to really get a lot out of it. The bare elements feel divested of their meaning. I may read it again at some point, as I probably didn't get as much from it as I could have.

Also, the maximally pared-down prose doesn't appeal to me as much as the anxiety-riddled style of Molloy or the broken rush of words in The Unnamable; I'm captivated by anxiety and frenzy (hence my Zulawski avatar).


Endgame is my favorite Beckett, personally.
Thoughts on it? I know you're a big Beckett fan.

[Qrazy]

Molloy and Watt are his best because they're freaking hilarious. Endgame left almost no impression on me.

Did you read Watt yet? God damn.

[Kirby Avondale]

Haha. I like your opening.
Came from the heart. But hold your breath, because I'm about to croon again.



I find Beckett's late, extreme minimalist style interesting, but it doesn't work as well for me as his middle-period stuff. As you can gather from my reviews of the first trilogy, I love it largely for how it breaks down human experience into bare elements of Being. But it starts from something recognisable as experience and shows the disintegration of that (and shows the disintegration itself as an existential process). The Nohow On trilogy kind of starts at the end, working with just a few bare elements of movement, geometry, thought, image, and company. For me, that feels too abstracted to really get a lot out of it. The bare elements feel divested of their meaning. I may read it again at some point, as I probably didn't get as much from it as I could have.

Also, the maximally pared-down prose doesn't appeal to me as much as the anxiety-riddled style of Molloy or the broken rush of words in The Unnamable; I'm captivated by anxiety and frenzy (hence my Zulawski avatar).
I wouldn't want to rag on the mid-period stuff. The so-called trilogy was my intro to Beckett, and it's fantastic. I've read Molloy twice and soaked in each of them earwards thanks to the Naxos recordings, which I recommend to heartier fans (special praise for Sean Barrett). If I had to suggest a starting point for Beckett's prose, I'd point to those three books (they're always printed together, anyway).

Even so, I think you overplay their anxiety and their frenzy. Those are there, indeed, but they only give part of a picture which veers between the frenzied, the contemplative, the hilarious, and all the muddled shades between. If you think The Unnamable is frenzied, then turn the lights down low, the sound up high, and blast your brains out with some Not I. The stripped down and the abstracted, you'll see, aren't a draining away of meaning (save in the sense that all Beckett is), but a deepening and darkening of everything that came before it. The late work magnifies new problems, complicates old ones, and exacerbates his pet project in startling and uncanny ways.

It isn't as inviting -- since the earlier stuff, altho not bursting at the seams with red carpets, at least has the velvet lining of upfront humor, frequently romantic language, a deceptively discernible perspective, and the suggestion of story, even as each of these get the proverbial rug pull --, but once you catch the late work's rhythm, there's little else like it. Nohow On, to my ear, perfects that rhythm and stands as the pinnacle of Beckett's late style. It's easier to get lost in and drunk on, as the contradictions and ambiguities come quicker, pack tighter, and contort out of grasp. Consciousness no longer streams, but fits, starts, spreads and contracts across dissolving, phantasmic scenes. Self-reflexivity goes into overdrive and the self gets vaporized.

Oh boy. The void, it beckons!

[Kirby Avondale]

Molloy and Watt are his best because they're freaking hilarious. Endgame left almost no impression on me.

Did you read Watt yet? God damn.
Plenty of hilarity, but that's one of the places where his permutations strain, I think. I don't rank it among his best, myself. But you probably already get the sense that humor isn't my baseline for Beckett, important as it is earlier on.

[Izzy Black]

Thoughts on it? I know you're a big Beckett fan.


"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent."
- Clov, Endgame


I share your affinity for the middle period stuff, but I do tend to favor Beckett's stage work to his prose. I certainty wouldn't argue with your interpretation of the trilogy's greater focus on the process of disintegration, but part of why I love Endgame so much is where the trilogy is more about a process of decay Endgame it more about the fallout of decay (although not so much a personal decay as it is a global one).

In general though, as a cinephilie first and foremost, I prefer the visual component of Beckett's stage work. The stage directions of Endgame are simply marvelous, not to mention the staccato rhythm of the dialogue. I think it's this visual element in part that contributes to the thematic distinction. The trilogy seems to have a greater emphasis on consciousness and personal identity, which is all fine and well and very interesting in its own right, but I am partial to Endgame's less emphasis on consciousness and greater (or more tangible) emphasis on the social and environmental, on the interpersonal and the physical. You still have spatial and temporal uncertainty, but expressed differently, less attached to the hyper-subjectivity of the novels and anchored more in a physically robust remoteness and inertia. The emphasis is deceptive, of course. We have a cryptic sense of place that's utterly without location or history, character interactions and behaviors that defy reason or law, both mental or physical, and an environment made up of impossible perpetual gray days and a motionless sea. And the silence, that beautiful silence....

[Izzy Black]

And for the record, I think Endgame is friggin' hilarious.

[B-side]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but I like this Kirby character. Post more!

[Melville]

Molloy and Watt are his best because they're freaking hilarious. Endgame left almost no impression on me.

Did you read Watt yet? God damn.
I haven't got to Watt yet. (I'm still waiting for you to read Karamazov. :P) What style of humor is it? I loved the humor in Murphy that focused on Murphy himself, and some of the pontificating of the others, but the silliness of the supporting characters brought down the book a few notches for me.

[Melville]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but I like this Kirby character. Post more!
Obviously you need to stop watching movies I've never heard of and start reading some books.

[Kirby Avondale]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but I like this Kirby character. Post more!
Hey, Brightside. It's Ergill.

:pritch:

[Melville]

Even so, I think you overplay their anxiety and their frenzy. Those are there, indeed, but they only give part of a picture which veers between the frenzied, the contemplative, the hilarious, and all the muddled shades between.
Regarding the frenzy, I was really only referring to the second half of The Unnamable, with its uncontained tumble of words. But I think that tumble is so compelling because it comes at the end of the trilogy—it's tumbling toward the endpoint of the disintegration. The earlier portions, with their vision of subjectivity in its muddled shades, grounds the ending, lends it added significance, and gives the trilogy more of an arc. A book like Corrections by Bernhard, which uses a style similar to Beckett's most anxious ejaculations but sticks with it throughout the entire book, loses some of its impact because the monotone style becomes monotonous.


If you think The Unnamable is frenzied, then turn the lights down low, the sound up high, and blast your brains out with some Not I.
I actually prefer that one on the written page. The void of the white page with its pared words somehow works better than the void of the black stage, because the stagedness of the latter feels too obvious; it has some of the awkwardness of performance art.

[Kirby Avondale]

While I agree with Izzy that the earlier plays like Endgame and Godot are shaded with more sociality, I'd qualify, as I'm sure he'd agree, that this is less to the exclusion of than it is a modification of his interest in consciousness. The Endgame stage is still a big skull, and, like Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov are still loosely set up on a disjunction of mind and body.

[Melville]

Hey, Brightside. It's Ergill.

:pritch:
Ergill Sanchez from RT? If so, I only know you from lurking there, but your posts were always some of the most interesting. Cool that you came around here.

[Kirby Avondale]

The Beckett hijack continues!



Regarding the frenzy, I was really only referring to the second half of The Unnamable, with its uncontained tumble of words. But I think that tumble is so compelling because it comes at the end of the trilogy—it's tumbling toward the endpoint of the disintegration. The earlier portions, with their vision of subjectivity in its muddled shades, grounds the ending, lends it added significance, and gives the trilogy more of an arc. A book like Corrections by Bernhard, which uses a style similar to Beckett's most anxious ejaculations but sticks with it throughout the entire book, loses some of its impact because the monotone style becomes monotonous.
They are complementary, if not as self-contained as the trilogy moniker suggests. Tho Beckett kvetched about them always being lumped together, they really do seem to benefit from it.



I actually prefer that one on the written page. The void of the white page with its pared words somehow works better than the void of the black stage, because the stagedness of the latter feels too obvious; it has some of the awkwardness of performance art.
Bah! Hasn't ever been staged near me, but I've watched the filmed versions with Billie Whitelaw and Julianne Moore, both breathtaking, by my lights. Beckett's plays aren't the easiest to pull off.


Ergill Sanchez from RT? If so, I only know you from lurking there, but your posts were always some of the most interesting. Cool that you came around here.
My reputation precedes me! Thanks. Israfel invited me.

I've enjoyed reading your thread, obviously, so it seemed like a natural place to start.

[Melville]

"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent."
- Clov, Endgame

Great line.


The trilogy seems to have a greater emphasis on consciousness and personal identity, which is all fine and well and very interesting in its own right, but I am partial to Endgame's less emphasis on consciousness and greater (or more tangible) emphasis on the social and environmental, on the interpersonal and the physical.
I tend to have a single-minded predilection for existential phenomenology. I like when the interpersonal is approached from the 'inside'—as an experience of the world in its intersubjective aspect. I hate books of manners and tend to be indifferent to stories about social issues, for example. For the most part, I also dislike art where one thing stands in for another: I want direct evocations. Not that any of those things I dislike really describes Endgame, but it's a preference that makes the observation, from the 'outside', of bare, post-disintegrated Being appeal less to me than the hypersubjectivity of the novels.

However, the lack of intersubjectivity in the novels is interesting in itself. It doesn't even really seem to be an aspect that gets disintegrated. There's the eyes watching, the sense of one's own physicality and objective being under the gaze of others, but even from the start (and even in the earlier novels and stories) the characters tend to be radically locked within their subjectivity, incapable of intersubjective experience. Their experience of others tends to be relegated to pure physicality: a disgusting meeting of the flesh. They don't communicate through words. They don't experience things together. The intersubjective appears only as an assault on the subjective, something that makes the characters retreat further into their subjectivity.

[Qrazy]

I haven't got to Watt yet. (I'm still waiting for you to read Karamazov. :P) What style of humor is it? I loved the humor in Murphy that focused on Murphy himself, and some of the pontificating of the others, but the silliness of the supporting characters brought down the book a few notches for me.

Yes Murphy is a bit lightweight compared to most of his other stuff. Also the ending of Watt is superb and not funny at all, one of the greatest absurdist images ever conjured up.

[B-side]

Obviously you need to stop watching movies I've never heard of and start reading some books.

I will, soon. I promise! It's embarrassing how little experience I have in this medium.


Hey, Brightside. It's Ergill.

Oh man, hey! So glad to see you around. Surprised you remember me. It's probably best we both ignore my career on RT.:P

[Kirby Avondale]

Oh man, hey! So glad to see you around. Surprised you remember me. It's probably best we both ignore my career on RT.:P
I don't remember anything disreputable. Good to see you.

[Qrazy]

Plenty of hilarity, but that's one of the places where his permutations strain, I think. I don't rank it among his best, myself. But you probably already get the sense that humor isn't my baseline for Beckett, important as it is earlier on.

I don't know what this means.

His permutations strain when he's being humorous? Humor is important for him early on? Wut?

[B-side]

I don't remember anything disreputable. Good to see you.

:pritch:

[Kirby Avondale]

I don't know what this means.

His permutations strain when he's being humorous? Humor is important for him early on? Wut?
I think Watt is one of the places where his permutations strain, all the poring over of sequences, possibilities and scenarios, analyzed until they're drained of content. He has this combinatorial bent in practically all of his work, but in Watt it's arguably at its most exhaustive and, occasionally, exhausting. It's almost Molloy's sucking stones stretched out into an entire book, shading now and again from hilarity into simple tedium. S'why even tho I liked it, I don't rate it among his best.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Just read Cities of the Red Night by Burroughs. Have you heard of this one, Melville? It's tonally all over the place but in very exciting ways, which is why I think you might dig it. Probably a little too much completely unnecessary gay sex though.

[Melville]

Just read Cities of the Red Night by Burroughs. Have you heard of this one, Melville? It's tonally all over the place but in very exciting ways, which is why I think you might dig it. Probably a little too much completely unnecessary gay sex though.
Endingcredits has recommended it to me before. Tonally all over the place sounds good. But for some reason I always feel compelled to read Naked Lunch before any other Burroughs.

By the way, if you haven't, you should read Al Columbia's cartoon apocalypse The Trumpets They Play! It's one of the best things ever. You can read scans of it here: http://juryrig.tumblr.com/page/10 (and the next page).

[B-side]

Probably a little too much completely unnecessary gay sex though.

I don't think this is a thing.

[Spaceman Spiff]

I don't think this is a thing.

Are you gay, brightside? There are scenes in this book where people are walking down a river bed and then say to themselves, "gee let's have gay sex", and then they do it. Burroughs also doesn't hesitate to go into graphic detail. It's reasonably cool the first few times, but by the last third of the book there are at least a good few dozen of these moments which you know... makes it a little unnecessary and all. Almost everyone smokes pot and/or opium too, but that's understandable.

[B-side]

Are you gay, brightside? There are scenes in this book where people are walking down a river bed and then say to themselves, "gee let's have gay sex", and then they do it. Burroughs also doesn't hesitate to go into graphic detail. It's reasonably cool the first few times, but by the last third of the book there are at least a good few dozen of these moments which you know... makes it a little unnecessary and all. Almost everyone smokes pot and/or opium too, but that's understandable.

I'm pansexual, at least in my mind. I've yet to put it into action except with a woman.:P

I always appreciate a good slew of graphic gay sex scenes, though.

[Qrazy]

I'm pansexual, at least in my mind. I've yet to put it into action except with a woman.:P

I always appreciate a good slew of graphic gay sex scenes, though.

Read The Thief's Journal then.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Read The Thief's Journal then.

Just read the synopsis and this sounds mighty cool. Any other recs for bizarro wacked-out novels such as this?

[D_Davis]

Just read the synopsis and this sounds mighty cool. Any other recs for bizarro wacked-out novels such as this?

Do you read any bizarro fiction?


http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2BDZAKR1PL._BO2,204,203,200 _PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41xylZDQAAL._BO2,204,203,200_P Isitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5133MJ17lJL._BO2,204,203,200_P Isitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

;)

[Qrazy]

Just read the synopsis and this sounds mighty cool. Any other recs for bizarro wacked-out novels such as this?

Well my original recommendation was for something with a lot of gay sex... is this what you're looking for? :lol:

Be more specific!

[Melville]

This review must have vanished. Or I just never posted it here.

132. The Corrections (Franzen, 2001)
Genre: mundane concerns of modern Americans
Rating: 5

Shares a lot of the characteristics I dislike about contemporary literary fiction, and many parts of it felt like standard postmodern hijinks dolloped onto a more mundane, ‘relatable’ story. Franzen’s prose is overwritten, boggy with tedious details and the endless lists that pollute much postmodern fiction. Everything to do with Chip was laden with contrived postmodern tropes: consumerism, cultural studies in academia, quirky humor, ending with a wacky, implausible adventure. It felt almost like a White Noise pastiche.

But the bigger problem is Denise’s story. For most of it, Denise feels only vaguely like a character, wholly amoral and barely cognizant (a recurrent problem in the book’s characterization of women). And her storyline’s blithe attitude toward infidelity is loathsome. The twist toward the end also makes it feel cheap, as if the infidelities were absolved of any moral dimension in order to lend the twist more force.

Franzen does write extremely well about the petty power struggles in the characters’ marriages, however; the section about Gary was the book’s highlight for me. Gary’s flailing battle with his own notions, his hazy muddled feelings, attempts to keep afloat, to control himself and the situation, and his surrender to his falsely doe-eyed wife’s insidious control, allowing him to reassert his falsely assertive control, were all good. And the book wins back some of its losses near the end, especially with the father’s attachment to Chip, which was very affecting.

Quote: Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary – of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?

[Melville]

133. Oblomov (Goncharov, 1857)
Genre: Russian humor. also an ode to the active people
Rating: 4.5

It starts off well, with a humorously lethargic guy never getting out of bed. It keeps on well as he is enlivened by love. But it takes a turn to the obnoxious as he slides back into lethargy and the narration dwells on the wonder—the glory!—of his indefatigably active and productive power-couple friends. They pity him because he's comfortably married and happy without ambition. Condescending bastards.

Quote: Ilya Ilyich Oblomov was lying in bed one morning in his flat in Gorokhovaya Street in one of those large houses which have as many inhabitants as a country town.

[Melville]

134. The Princess Bride (William Goldman, 1973)
Genre: postmodern pastiche, maybe?
Rating: 7.5

A pretty funny mock-old-timey adventure tale. More sarcastic than the movie: rather than the frame story of a lovable old grandpa reading the book to his grandson, here we get an editor (a fictional version of the real author William Goldman) who's abridging the book while telling us how dull the fake-author's original version was, how much he hates his wife, and how his kid is so fat he could roll faster than he could walk. Now that's entertainment.

Quote: "Just because you're beautiful and perfect, it's made you conceited."

[Melville]

135. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Robert C. O'Brien, 1971)
Genre: the travails of hyper-intelligent anthropomorphic rodents
Rating: 7

I just looked at the plot synopsis of this, and the ending is not at all what I remembered. Here's how I remember it going down: Before the rats can implement their ambitious plan of forming a new, enlightened society of rodents, the entire rat colony is gassed by the farmers. The book ends abruptly, in a state of uncertainty. It's unclear which of the characters, if any, made it out alive. Pretty bleak for a kids' book.

[wigwam]

133. Oblomov (Goncharov, 1857)
Genre: Russian humor. also an ode to the active people
Rating: 4.5

It starts off well, with a humorously lethargic guy never getting out of bed. It keeps on well as he is enlivened by love. But it takes a turn to the obnoxious as he slides back into lethargy

oh sweet! i gave up on this when he stopped being cool bu sounds like he becomes cool again so i'll pick it back up

great thread!

[Melville]

oh sweet! i gave up on this when he stopped being cool bu sounds like he becomes cool again so i'll pick it back up
Be prepared for a lot of nothing about him, a lot of aggrandizing of the other two central characters.


136. Waiting for God (Simone Weil, 1950)
Genre: religious meditations
Rating: 4

Raised a secular Jew, Weil became a Christian mystic after experiencing a religious ecstasy in a church, falling to her knees and praying.* She thought that creation is the absence of God's perfection, that affliction brings us to him, that Christianity is radical empathy and shared suffering, that the nails in the cross pierce through creation and connect us all to the divine. Her writing reads a bit like a more devoted, fanatical version of Kierkegaard: a similar emphasis on contradictions and despair, but with none of the irony. Though that description probably underplays the severity of her spiritual masochism, which oftentimes struck me as being inspired less by religious fervor than by an intense loathing of her own physical existence—she thought she was physically disgusting and she drove herself to suffer.

Quotes: If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.

Every time I think of the crucifixion of Christ I commit the sin of envy.



*A philosophy professor told me a different, but uncorroborated story: that Weil converted after reading The Life of Saint Theresa in a friend's attic one night.