No major news, but I did get through Kurkov's A Matter of Life and Death, basically in one sitting last night. It's almost a joke of a set-up: man hires hit man to kill himself and then discovers he wants to live. It does seem stylistically and thematically to be closer to his penguin novels than The Milkman in the Night or particularly the more recent novel Grey Bees. Anyway, it was quite entertaining (and very short).
I've just started Farrell's Troubles. There's almost too much praise for this novel, but I'm about 50 pages in, and it does seem to be living up to the hype. It's mostly set in a run-down hotel just outside Dublin (the ironically named Majestic) and the action begins in 1919, i.e. the time of the "Troubles" in Ireland. The novel focuses mostly on how the English ruling classes fail to adapt to said "Troubles." I'm seeing some parallels to some of Molly Keane's early novels focusing on English aristocrats in Ireland, such as The Rising Tide or Two Days in Aragon. Time After Time is more directly about the declining English ruling class in Ireland, but was actually written over a decade after Troubles was published, so if anything the influence ran the other way in this case. (The depiction of the hotel and its staff actually reminds me just a bit of Peake's Gormenghast, though I'm not sure this was any sort of intentional homage.) I'm guessing I won't quite finish it this week, though I suppose if I buckle down, I could wrap it up and add to to my best books of 2022 list. I guess I can hold off a few more days, though I will be putting up my best concerts and best theatre posts shortly.
I'm trying hard not to expand this list because so many of them are quality books (and even a few bucket list books), and I definitely don't want to delay getting through Farrell's Empire Trilogy now that I have finally started in on it. Still, I'll probably add Kingsley Amis's Girl, 20 to the bottom of the list. Knut Hamsun is making a strong play to get added a bit higher. I'm mostly interested in tackling Mysteries, but it seems clear I should read Hunger first, so I've put that on hold at the library.
I know I've written on this in other contexts, but it can be so interesting how one can reread a novel and either like it much better or less depending on how experience (and everything you've read in the meantime!) has changed you. On top of that, reading a novel when one is stressed or in a bad mood is a very different experience (and it is a rare novel that can cause one to fully ignore daily stresses). In this short interview with Philip Pullman he says that he wasn't ready for Middlemarch until he hit middle age, whereas he no longer cared for Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, as it was a young man's novel (or set of novels). Personally, I think it is unlikely I will reread Middlemarch and I certainly won't reread The Mill on the Floss, which I strongly disliked, but I hope to reread Durrell and hope I am not so changed I don't like it any more. That is possible of course. There are a few novels I read in my 20s (or so) that had a strong impact on me, but then I really didn't think highly of them later on. I no longer think Morte d'Urban is particularly profound, and I think it next to impossible for the climatic scene (of a gangster in a boat trying to drown a deer) to have happened at all, and then the book kind of unravels. I still liked the first half or so of Bell's Waiting for the End of the World, but then really disliked the way the main character turned, trying to undo everything he had set in motion early on for no real reason that made any sense to me this time through. I still liked but wasn't swept away by DeLillo's White Noise on the second read-through (back in 2018), though I think if I can manage a third read through (now that I have seen the movie) the magic will be back. Crime and Punishment was still a good read but not the close to life-changing experience it was when I was in my teens. (Perhaps because I just have too much life behind me now. And I'm still pretty much alienated from society but it doesn't occupy my every waking moment like it used to.)
However, all is not lost... When I have reread them, the stories of Barthelme, Borges and Carver still stand up for me. I've only reread one Pym novel so far, but it still works for me. I still felt pretty much the same about Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on later readings, though of course it isn't as full of surprises on a second (or third) go-around. The same for Calvino's Invisible Cites, though I haven't had a chance to reread If on a Winter's Night a Traveler...
Oddly enough, I usually react to movies pretty much the same on 2nd and 3rd viewings. The one notable exception being Tati, particularly Tati's Playtime, which grew on me a lot!
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