Early 2015 reading updates

It's no secret that when you have a huge task ahead of you, it can feel like a terrible chore or burden, even if -- in the moment -- whatever it is it that you are doing brings pleasure or wisdom or at least a feeling of accomplishment.  That's kind of how I feel about my reading list at the moment.  I've actually knocked off quite a few mid-length books and some shorter ones.  This was a stretch where quite a few were coming off the To-be-read-and-discarded list and so far, they have basically lived up to or down to expectations.  What was a surprise is three or four "classics" that I assumed would be keepers but really didn't care for and/or certainly don't imagine I'll read a second time, so there is no reason to keep them, particularly in advance of another move.  Probably the single most surprising* is Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but I also assumed that I would be fairly attuned to Dinesen's Winter's Tales and Bowen's A House in Paris.  But I really wasn't, so I now have slightly more room on the shelves for other things.

I think even getting through this list as far as I have (and the previous ones as well, particularly the Russian lit one) is a pretty significant accomplishment, but there doesn't feel like a natural end to it.  It will just grow onwards, since there are far more good-to-great novels than one could read in a lifetime.  This point was really driven home just this evening as I was looking at 20 or so rows of a dozen or more shelves of literature over at Robarts -- tens of thousands of books, many of which are well out of fashion.

I myself must own close to 1000 books, and I have gotten it down to maybe 600 that I clearly plan on reading or rereading.  I should just about get through that in 20 years at my current rate, which might drop off a bit if I start watching classic movies with my children as they enter their teen years.  It can be a bit too much when thought about in those terms, i.e. trying to cover all aspects of "literature."

It is more useful to think about it as finally getting around to reading those books that have a proven track record, as well as a few quirky, unknown books that I have carted around for years.  I am particularly looking forward to Maugham's Of Human Bondage as an example of the former and Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket of the latter.  I'll certainly blog about the supermarket book if it lives up to my expectations. I've generally been pretty good at tackling massive series and ambitious books, though it does seem to work out to only one such set per year: Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time back in 2006, Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy two years ago, Proust last year, Dos Passos's USA Trilogy in about a week and Musil's The Man Without Qualities probably in a couple of years.  I'm actually pacing things out differently than I used to, but should over time manage to get through the complete works of quite a number of key literary figures -- DeLillo, Faulkner, Mahfouz, Narayan, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and so on.  Steinbeck is lower but still in the mix, along with Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez.  But it does get wearying at times to the point where it feels like a second job.

At any rate, this post will be on the long side, as I wrap up some thoughts on what I have read so far in 2015.  I expect there will be some SPOILERS, so tread carefully if that bothers you.

I was pretty happy with von Rezzori's An Ermine in Czernopol once I finally got to it.  The long delay didn't spoil anything.

In contrast, I think I would have liked Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus more had I actually read it back when I bought it, almost certainly 15+ years ago.  I really did like the first two sections, but was not at all sold on the last third of the book.  By no means a failure, just not as good as I had hoped.

Machado De Assis The Alienist was fun and short (or mostly fun -- one story was about a slave who was caught and returned to her master -- that was mostly pathos).  The notes were helpful in establishing his place in Brazilian society.  This unofficially kicked off my undertaking to read a number of short story collections (also Kafka, Chabon, Dinesen and now Lethem).  Probably the best stories were "To Be Twenty Years Old!" and "A Chapter on Hats."

I've already discussed how disappointed I was with As I Lay Dying, so I'll just let that lie.

Perhaps I am even more surprised that I wasn't that taken with Bowen's The House in Paris. The structure is fairly similar to Three Days of Rain (the play). Present, then long flash-back to explain the present situation, then back to the Present to wrap things up.

SPOILERS

I ended up not liking this very much. I did like the first "The Present" section but that was about it. It's hard to pinpoint exactly the problem, but really much ado about a fairly pedestrian affair and a number of high-strung characters that didn't seem particularly believable.  Also, this was one of several Modernist novels to have some distracting comments on the status of Jews in Europe.  I do understand that this was viewed very differently in the early 20th Century, but the whole racial legacy of the Jews making all their intermarriages with gentiles impossible is tough to read now.  (This is also a bit of an issue with Nightwood, even though Djuna Barnes is fairly sympathetic to the outcasts of Europe.)  One could certainly argue that for all kinds of reasons, the trope of Jew as Other is becoming more prevalent in modern-day Europe, though I think you would be hard pressed to say it had the same relevance in major North American cities, which is of course where I am coming from.

Anyway, basically the "undeserving" and high-strung Jewish man ends up seducing a young woman, who is best friends with his finance.  After their encounter, he commits suicide and of course she becomes pregnant.  She has the child (the boy Leopold from The Present section) but bundles him off with another family.  What's a bit more surprising is that when she backs out from seeing the boy in Paris, her husband decides to take the boy after all and there is still the chance of a somewhat delayed and surely fraught but perhaps successful reconciliation.  But it is fairly clear that she is not a particularly stable or even deserving individual (compared to her friend).  In this she reminds me of the Robin character in Nightwood.  So I found the first section and aspects of the third section to be of interest, but wasn't at all interested in the middle section covering the Past.  So this is not a book I expect to return to.

I had different reasons for being somewhat unimpressed with Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek.  While I hadn't really heard much about this book, or the novelist as a matter of fact, the introduction positions her as an author who combines the fine attention to detail of Jane Austen with the wild emotional ride of Bronte's Wuthering Heights.  And if I squint a bit, I can see this.  There certainly is the attention to micro-detail and some fine set pieces when Harriet goes off and works in a shop and interacts with the other salesladies.  Also, the early chapters where Harriet and Vesey find that they have fallen in love through long association of spending summers together as children.  Where it falls down is that Harriet is a fairly dim girl who doesn't outgrow her childhood obsessions, while Vesey is a spoiled boy who becomes a failure as a man, a second-rate actor (if that) in a very middling road company.  I didn't find either of their stories very interesting nor worthy of my time.

SPOILERS

Harriet finally ends up marrying a much older man (this was quite a theme for a number of novelists of this period) and has a daughter.  The daughter is bright, though mostly applies herself to learn Latin and Greek because of her obsession with her teacher.  When Vesey's company rolls into town, she finds herself obsessed with him, and there is a moment or two that threatens to become very icky until she (the daughter) decides she must actually be Vesey's daughter and then tries surreptitiously to support her mother in continuing this age-old affair.  I will say the daughter is probably the most interesting character in the book, followed by her teacher.  A book centred on the two of them would have been far more satisfying to me.  Despite being a complete louse, Vesey attempts to break off the affair and pretends that he is moving to Africa or Brazil to look after his father's business interests.  The novel ends as Harriet is seeing Vesey off, and it is expected that her life will go back to normal, though this is somewhat unresolved.  As I said, there are certainly some nice touches throughout the novel, but I found Harriet totally insipid and Vesey a thoroughly unworthy and (more damningly) uninteresting Heathcliff-figure.

However, this was still light-years ahead of Elizabeth Berg's Open House.  This author is often advertised as a cross between Alice Hoffman and Anne Tyler.  I can't speak for Hoffman, but I have read quite a few Anne Tyler novels, and Berg does not come remotely close.  There's something about how she writes "uplifting" fiction for very privileged (white) characters that is so unappealing.  When her marriage falls apart, the spurned wife's first reaction is to go into Tiffany's and charge, charge, charge to try to get back at her husband.  I'm sure there are some people like that, but I can't relate.  Then she tries to give this bracelet to a homeless woman to go pawn.  I do understand Berg is poking fun at the total cluelessness of this woman, but I found it appalling and had no interest in going along for the ride.  Finally, I just skipped ahead to see if it got any better at all, and what happens but Martha Stewart calls this woman to give her some advice.  This just totally summed up all that was wrong with this book.  I see from the various reviews of other books on Amazon that this general approach is seen in quite a few of her books, so I have stricken Berg off my list of novelists who I will even consider for the To-be-read-and-discarded pile.  It's nice to be decisive and exclusive at times.

After this is was back to a number of short story collections.  I have to admit that Patrick Somerville's The Universe in Miniature in Miniature didn't do all that much for me.  Most of the stories are quirky and vaguely reminiscent of Jonathan Lethem, so I figured I really ought to go back to the source, and indeed I have just started Lethem's new collection Lucky Alan.

Michael Chabon's A Model World was more successful, though I didn't like the title story very much.  It somehow slipped my attention that the second batch of short stories are all about the same set of characters.  A young Jewish boy, his younger brother, and their parents who get divorced for unclear reasons by the 2nd or 3rd story in the group.  They are fairly melancholy and are not that memorable on their own, but pick up some power in the way they are linked.  It's not dissimilar to Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, which is basically a novel in stories.

As for Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales, I thought they were ok, but more were fairy tales or directly inspired by fairy tales than I imagined.  I can't see reading any of them a second time, except for the first story "The Young Man with the Carnation," which is quite a bit like an O Henry story, but with a mixed ending, happy for one couple and sad for another.  I found the opening a bit slow but it picked up fairly quickly.  I also liked how the stories within the story functioned and, in a sense, provided a bit of moral instruction to the author (the "hero" of the story).  A comparable process takes place in Platonov's "The Return," which is a story well worth seeking out.

I found the first chapter of Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters to be a very tedious retelling of the Noah and the Ark story.  I realize there is no way to tell the story literally in a way that doesn't sound absurd, but somehow the tone was so off and Barnes kept layering on one thing after another -- that's why there are no basilisks and no unicorns and so forth.  Maybe what really killed it for me was the combination of the Ark legend with Kipling's Just So Stories (how Noah's beatings gave the zebras their stripes; how hiding from Noah caused chameleons to change their color; etc.).  See Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage for tackling the same legend/myth (including an on-board unicorn!) but somehow done in a far superior manner.

I did slog through Barnes's History, but never really enjoyed it and found the closing "The Dream" to be quite tedious.  This book generally reinforced my opinion that Julian Barnes is a writer who thinks he is far cleverer than he actually is.  While it's been a long, long while since I read it, I am actually revising my opinion of Flaubert's Parrot somewhat downwards in retrospect.  I'm probably also going to strike him (Barnes) off my list and not read anything further by him.

And with that I finally come to Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.  I did find this a lot more rewarding than most of the other books mentioned in this (too long) post.  To do it any justice, it really needs a separate post, so I'll see what I can whip up in the next week or so before it fades too much from memory.

* That is the single most surprising this time around.  From the previous list, I found that Proust's Remembrance of Things Past was just not to my taste at all, and I divested myself of those thick yet elegant silver-spined books for once and for all.