Just thinking over the books I've read lately, I liked Nabakov's Pnin more than I expected. Generally, Nabokov leaves me pretty cold (which makes it even more surprising I've read 8 of his novels!). At the time Nabokov was writing, it was much easier to land faculty jobs, so Pnin must have been really quite a marginal talent to not have gotten himself a more secure position. Anyway, I wouldn't say this is going to cause me to run out and read the rest of Nabokov next week, but I'll continue my slow plod of one or so a year. Pale Fire will probably be next.
I did enjoy Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering, though I had some trouble understanding the motivation of the main characters. Why did they break into other houses? Not to steal but to impersonate long-term guests apparently. This would make more sense if they were on the ropes with nowhere else to go (like the couple in Detroit, but they have their own house in Florida. I suppose they just wanted to lead a different life. At any rate, I'll try to squeeze in Williams' latest two novels at some point soon. She's definitely less interested in quotidian struggles and is focused much more on environmental collapse, which is what is keeping me up late these days...
Ali Smith's Companion Piece was a quick read, and indeed I read a lot of it on my phone during the set breaks at the various concerts I was at this summer. But it is a weird book. It is set at the tail end of COVID restrictions in the UK, where some people are embracing the freedom while others are still very cautious. (While Smith doesn't say so directly, her narrator may well be of the opinion that Boris loosened restrictions just try to save his own skin politically.) Smith's narrator has a father in the hospital, from a heat attack or some other non-COVID reason, but she needs to maintain a kind of quarantine in order to visit him. Then out of the blue, a former university acquaintance and her family come to crash at her place and she has to flee to her father's flat. I'm not sure I would really want to watch it, but I'm surprised no one has done a contemporary remake of The Man Who Came to Dinner where the critic comes down with COVID and can't leave. (One of my SFYS pieces explored this in a limited way.) Anyway, this part of the book works pretty well, though it just reminds me of all the hijinks of Keeping Up Appearances that would never have happened in the U.S. because it is not as easy (or safe!) to impose on Americans the way that Hyacinth imposed on her neighbours. The other part of Companion Piece was vastly less satisfying, as it was sort of a fever dream about an outcast girl from Medieval times.
I finally wrapped up Death on the Installment Plan coming back from Niagara-on-the-Lake. The ending was quite disappointing, as Ferdinand is crashing at his uncle's house and starting to get sick, and that's it. There is no linkage back to the first chapter where Ferdinand has cone through the war and become a doctor. Given his general lack of talent and gumption, it's all but impossible to understand how this could have come to pass. At any rate, I'm glad to be done with Celine.
The next several books on deck are substantially shorter, and I hope to get through them fairly quickly:
Penelope Fitzgerald Innocence
Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
Martin Amis The Alteration
Ali Smith Public Library and Other Stories
Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent
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