Dueling translations

I managed to finish reading Faulkner's Light in August by the end of August, with just a day to spare (only 8 years late according to Oprah's schedule for her summer of Faulkner, not that I had signed up for that or anything).  So now I turn my attention to Proust.  I have been carrying around these tomes for many years, and I have read the introduction and first few pages a few times, though I always knew I wasn't quite ready to start.  Now I finally am...

The introduction mostly discusses the need for a new translation (this the the early 80s updating of the Scott Moncrieff translation from the 1930s).  Essentially there was a major overhaul of the text of À la recherche du temps perdu by the French publishers in the 50s, and this was an attempt by Kilmartin to update the translation to this new text, starting from Moncrieff's version.  Now the French publishers have continued to update/correct the text, and perhaps it was inevitable that they would issue a "definitive" version in 1987.  In short order, Modern Library issued a translation by D.J. Enright that used the Moncrieff-Kilmartin as its starting point.  (Penguin is going a different tack, with a different translator for each volume.  This strikes me as a terrible idea, and I have no interest in these translations.)

My gut feeling is that the improvements to the text between the original and the 1954 version are crucial, and must be incorporated into the final translation, but that the improvements from 1954 to 1987 are much more subtle and only a marginal improvement (with some critics clinging (stubbornly?) to the 1954 version).  What I do think is important is that Moncrieff serve as the base.  Essentially all English mono-linguists have come to Proust through Moncrieff or a revision of Moncrieff, and I don't see any good reason to break with this tradition.  More to the point, I know I'll never have the time to read a second translation of Proust, so it's either stick with the Moncrieff-Kilmartin that I already have or switch over to Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright.  But Proust for me is the silver-colored three volume set of Moncrieff-Kilmartin, so the issue is settled fairly easily.

I feel even more strongly about when studying the Bible as literature, one needs to use the King James Version, since that is the version that influenced 400 years of English literature.  I think I have mentioned this before where a professor decided to use the Revised Standard Version in a class literally titled The Bible as Literature.  Now I suppose the RSV came out in 1901, but I still don't see it having the cultural impact of the King James Version -- and I still stick to my guns that the professor was simply misguided in his approach.  But I guess you just can't be too precious about this.  Shakespeare wasn't influenced by the King James Version, since he had written all of his plays before it was issued in 1611 (aside from possibly The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (written with John Fletcher)).  More to the point, Shakespeare would have been influenced by the version that he was available when he was a child and young man (most likely this would have been the Geneva Bible).  I was particularly curious about Faulkner, since his books are just infused with Old Testament values of vengeance and over-the-top spirituality.  It turns out his copy of the Bible was a Holman's Edition Bible (though the version Faulkner would have had seems to basically be a minor variant of KJV).  Melville is perhaps the other American author that immediately springs to mind when I think of being deeply influenced by Biblical themes and language, and he clearly was brought up on various editions of the KJV Bible.

Now you can take this too far (only reading texts that other writers would have had access to/been influenced by).  Most 20th Century readers of Dostoevsky (and Tolstoy) came to him through the Constance Garnett translations, but there are some problems with her approach.  She did flatten the language a bit.  In those cases I have really investigated, the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations have always been the best,* though for old times' sake, I'll hang onto my Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment.  Indeed, whenever I fit Crime and Punishment back into my reading schedule (2020 perhaps?), this might be another time where I actually read two translations back-to-back (I did this for Bulgakov's Master and Margarita as well), which can be rewarding, if exhausting.  But normally you don't have time for this level of effort -- and it makes you think too much about the fact that you can't access the original, which can be a bit depressing.  There is no chance that I will ever read Russian, but if I have all the time in the world and do revisit Proust, I would go ahead and read (in French) one of the corrected versions from Gallimard that came out in the 90s.  But not the one that essentially doubled its length by including all textual variants -- life is definitely too short for that!

There are lots of nooks and crannies of literature where I just don't have a strong opinion** -- the best translation of Homer?  Of the remaining Greek plays? Or Virgil?  I try to just pick one and then not get too fussed about it.  I definitely am not going to keep seeking out multiple translations of ancient texts, though Homer is "important" enough that I will try to read both the Lattimore and Fitzgerald translations and see if I can settle on one.  (Notice that again, I will stop with translations that were current (or at least around if just a bit dusty) from my days at university and generally not take too much interest in more current ones, with the exception of Pevear/Volokhonsky and Grossman's newish translation of Don Quixote.)

Edit (12/17/2016): I'm considering writing a separate post on Kafka, where there are quite a few dueling translations.  I'm also trying to decide just what to do for my own reading program.  For myself (and most Americans), the translations by Edwin and Willa Muir (with supplemental material added to The Trial and The Castle) in the 1950s are the ones that basically informed my understanding of Kafka.   

Essentially everyone agrees that the Michael Hofmann translation is considerably better than the previous version of Amerika (aside from the great Edward Gorey cover -- incidentally this site has some of the other great Gorey covers).  

It is more debatable whether the other Muir translations have been truly surpassed by Mark Harman’s translation of The Castle and Breon Mitchell’s translation of The Trial (both published by Schocken), or indeed the somewhat unheralded translation of both by John Williams in Wordsworth Classics' The Essential Kafka.  I think for old times' sake, I will reread the Muir version of The Castle (just as I already reread their Trial last year), and then in a few years I will compare the Schocken and the Worthsworth editions and decide.  The Trial is short enough I could probably read both translations, but I think I would pick only one Castle.

* These debates can get quite heated with some of the translators with a lot at stake getting quite peeved at each other, though that may be nothing compared to their fans!  Here is an interesting article on Russian translations, though the piece suffers a bit from seeming to side too strongly with Pevear and Volokhonsky.  

** Of course I reserve the right to have a strong (if not necessarily a well-informed) opinion on translations outside my area of expertise.  So for instance, Dante should be translated as poetry (of course) and the only one that ever seemed to do the job was by John Ciardi, and I don't see any point in seeking out the newer one by Pinsky (and indeed it seems he didn't get around to translating the entire Divine Comedy!).  Not being able to read Italian doesn't prevent me from deciding definitively on this.

The literature of exhaustion

You don't hear the phase the literature of exhaustion that much anymore, but it seems just as relevant now as it did back in the late 60s when it was coined (apparently by John Barth -- there is a relatively pithy analysis of what Barth meant here).

However, the idea didn't exactly come from nowhere.  Ecclesiastes 1:9 says that there is nothing new under the sun, and this is particularly true for authors.  There are only a very few basic plots when background detail is stripped away and stories are boiled down to their essence.  I think it is hard to tell, but quite possibly some people who might have made fine writers got discouraged by how hard it is to tell an original story.  Successful writers generally didn't let it bother them, though some do dwell on where they fall on the line between homage and theft.  (Those that get unduly hung up could be said to suffer from The Anxiety of Influence (to steal from Harold Bloom) and may eventually get out of the business.)

Some cultural critics, who generally find literature to be pretty frivolous, even on their good days, have claimed that fiction isn't relevant, or that it is disrespectful to still be writing frivolous things in horrible times.  I think this is a fairly stupid line of argument to take, but it was certainly more prevalent right after WWII (see Adorno).  Sometimes the criticism is couched more narrowly -- that words cannot really express the horror of war and particularly of the Holocaust -- and it is disrespectful to try.  We continue to hear that about novels about 9/11 -- and certainly the ones I have read that touch on 9/11 haven't really justified their use of the subject (not that I consider this to be a completely taboo subject).

Anyway, John Barth was probably the most prominent novelist of his day who claimed that conventional fictional forms had been completely played out and that postmodern pastiche was the way forward.  He has his place, but in fact culture moved on, and basically said that -- no, conventional fictional forms still had relevance.  If the cultural amnesia (and general ignorance) that so many people have (not only Americans) has any upside, it is that there is a kind of renewal and a freedom from the past (that would mystify a writer like Stefan Zweig or Joseph Roth).  People can still enjoy novels about couples falling in love, or historical romance, or mystery novels.  The novel as a form seems endlessly regenerative, and not particularly burdened by the past.

If anything, it is the postmodern novel that seems really cliched these days.  Certainly it can be a struggle to read and get into these books and often the struggle just isn't worth it.  I really didn't like Graeme Gibson's Gentleman Death.  I haven't read Barth's The Book of Ten Nights and a Night, but just from the review, I can tell I wouldn't like it. It sounds almost exactly like The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, which I did struggle through and basically hated.  At least 5 or 6 of Barth's recent novels have been about the difficulty of putting words to paper to generate something new.  Honestly, give it a rest (and try something that isn't "postmodern" for a change).

Unfortunately, Joseph Heller's last completed book: Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man falls directly into these tropes of how hard it is for an author (particularly an old author with presumably not much time left on earth) to actually write anything.  So he starts and stops 5 or 6 different story lines but never gets much past the first page (and often just the title).  I realize this is a genuine problem for creative sorts (and one recently explored by Alan Bennett in The History of Art, which I might go see this season), but it is not that interesting for outsiders to read about.  This truly is exhausted (and exhausting) literature -- the equivalent of the last bit of toothpaste squeezed out onto the toothbrush.  I hope I have the sense to hang it up rather than writing such self-pitying stuff.  (Even if it is Eugene Pota doing all the self-pitying and not "Joseph Heller" it might as well be Heller from where I stand.) Perhaps it will pick up, but I'm not really expecting that.

One thing that is a bit interesting is that Pota is obsessed with older artists that were still creating late in life, so perhaps I will get more examples for my list of last works as they are sprinkled through the text.  So far he hasn't brought up Matisse, who in his old age was a lot more inspired than Pota, to be sure, so he might avoid that particular comparison...

Edit (March 2023): I've been working my way through The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi, which is very much in the same vein as the Heller book, though in this case there is a biographer who is following around an old writer (clearly a bit of a dig at V.S. Naipaul) who spends his time bemoaning his decrepitude.  So far it isn't nearly as clever (and clearly not as unique) as it thinks it is.

7th Challenge - 1st review - Nikolski

As explained briefly in the other post, I happened across this book -- Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner (translated by Lazer Lederhendler) -- in the Toronto Library book sale and scooped it up for $1. So this is a somewhat random pick for my first review of the 7th Canadian Challenge, which seems appropriate given that the novel celebrates randomness and chance. (Dickner is perhaps attempting to be the French-Canadian version of Paul Auster).

The plot, such as it is, involves three main characters -- an unidentified character (probably male) who works in a used bookstore (S.W. Gam) in Montreal, a half-brother Noah who comes to Montreal to learn anthropology (or was it archaeology?), and Joyce, who is vaguely tied into the others through her Uncle Jonas.  The structure of the novel has some surface similarities to Rene Clair's Le Million or Orphuls' La Ronde in the sense that every character meets at least once and this odd three-part book is passed along from one character to the next.  Where it is a bit different is that the meetings are generally brief and for the most part don't have lasting consequences.  However, there are a few secondary characters that also link the characters, and the interactions between these characters and other main three characters are more life-changing.  I'll go into a few of these, but that will require detailing the plot, such as it is, so I'll mention a few other things before going into spoiler mode.

I thought this novel was going to remain mostly set in 1989 or the early 90s, and I think I would have preferred that.  This novel ended up stretching over a much longer period, and most of the characters would drop out in the meantime while the novel followed Noah or Joyce (but mostly Noah).  It ended up feeling pretty episodic, and it became hard to care about most of the characters, particularly Joyce.  The novel skates on the edge of magic realism, and I've come around to the idea that this generally doesn't work for novels written by Americans nor Canadians.  Dickner thinks he is pretty clever fellow, but some of his conceits aren't really that clever: Joyce's family tree has some pirates and she joins up with hackers/software pirates, for example.  The one that really takes the cake is that the bookstore clerk is semi-frightened by his furnace, which he names The Beast.  This ancient oil furnace was built by the New England firm of Levi Athan.  So if you think that is particularly clever, you will probably like the novel.  If you think that kind of thing is over-the-top, you won't.  It really wasn't my cup of tea, which is too bad, as it had the makings of a really good novel had it more or less confined itself to the three characters exploring Montreal of the late 80s and early 90s and finding their way in the city.  That would have been a book I would have enjoyed a lot more...

SPOILERS AHEAD

I think the most unrealistic aspect of the novel was that Joyce and Noah apparently lived on the same street (and probably in the same building) but had almost no interaction, except perhaps after she had already fled Montreal ahead of the RCMP.*  Given how gregarious her boss, Maelo, was (manager of a fish shop) throwing these big parties every weekend, he would have more or less insisted she show up at least a few times (and Noah would have encountered her).  Instead, Joyce spent nearly all her free time dumpster diving, first for computer equipment (tipped off by the anthropologist Thomas Saint-Laurent (Noah's advisor)) and then for access cards and work IDs.  I do think Dickner sort of wrote himself into a corner here.  He doesn't want to give up the computer pirate angle, but he never really explains what it is that Joyce is up to with this obsessive hacking into corporate accounts.  She passes along passwords to others in her pirate networks, and some of them must be making money off this.  (Dickner does show one time when Joyce doesn't steal the credit card digits off some awful yuppie, so she still has some kind of moral compass.)  He simply can't give a coherent and internally consistent picture of what she was up to (or at least not without risking antagonizing those readers who don't want to empathize with common criminals), so she largely drops out of the novel, despite being the most interesting character.

Noah meets up with his future partner Arizna Lorenzo in the library, where she is doing some compulsive studying of native rights.  She was particularly taken by Maelo's parties and then sort of fell into Noah's life.  While it might have been interesting had her backstory of having a wealthy grandfather backing her research (and later small publishing company) been a total fabrication (sort of a parallel to Joyce's double life), it actually checked out.  After she gets pregnant (and disappears from Montreal back to Venezuela), she eventually clues him in, and he moves down there for several years.  (This chapter (or two) is really not very interesting.)  Finally, a huge storm displaces Noah and his son Simon, and they return to Montreal, while Arizna stays behind.  Actually it is in the Newark Airport (rather than Montreal) that he crosses paths with Joyce, who wants wait it out with Maelo's relatives in the Dominican Republic until things cool off and she can return. Joyce's flight inspires the bookstore clerk to finally travel, but it is unclear where he (or she) will go first, or at least I cannot remember.

The theme of migration and instability runs deep in the novel, with a secondary theme of how random one's parentage really is (taken to extremes here). All the characters seem a bit drawn to atlases and maps (and it is a bit heart-breaking how Noah keeps sending these postcards off to his mother at various places where he thinks she'll be, but never seeming to ever connect). There is a bit of a sense that these characters are salmon that head out and return to some mythical spawning ground (though this is more metaphoric than literal in most cases).  Even the most settled figure decides to uproot (at least temporarily).  However, it is not at all clear why Montreal would be the lodestar rather than further east where the family seemed to get its start.  There are things that I did like about the novel where it tackles these big ideas, but on the whole I didn't think it quite lived up to its promise.

* Actually, this is only the second most unrealistic aspect of Nikolski.  The most unrealistic aspect is that both Noah, who was totally haphazardly educated by his mother as they drove endlessly through the Western Provinces, and Joyce, who was from the Maritimes and also somewhat undereducated, apparently speak sufficient French to get by in Montreal.  There is no hint that they are living in an Anglo enclave.  For instance, Noah might well have gone to McGill, which would have been far more plausible (fees aside).  I can't believe that Dickner fails to address this even once.

Blood work

Had to have blood drawn for testing this morning.  They asked me to fast for 10 hours beforehand, so I wasn't in the best of moods when I set out for the clinic.  The nurse had some trouble with the veins and actually couldn't draw from my left arm (after sticking me) and then I started getting a bit woosy.  So they had me lie down and they eventually got it from the right arm.  She actually suggested that people that used to donate blood sometimes had more problems.  No question I have had problems occasionally giving blood to the point where it is now a bit of a psychosomatic issue and if there is any snag at all, then I really start to feel faint and even get a bit ill (of course, the fasting didn't help).  I haven't been a particularly regular blood donor for 10 or so years, and I think given the problems I have had the last few times, it is time to just skip it.  There are plenty of other things I can do to help.  What I do dread a bit is that I get older and I get one of those illnesses where you do need a lot of blood testing or other blood work.  Well, can't really be helped if that is my fate.

On a more positive note, I will link to a performance of one of Billy Strayhorn's compositions (Blood Count).  This was among the last things he wrote (1967), from the depths of his illness (cancer).  This version should be the one from Ellington's And His Mother Called Him Bill (a tribute to Strayhorn).  I hope that I can find a way to be creative until the very end (and remember that occasionally great art can emerge from tragic circumstances).  I thought U.M.M.G. (Upper Manhattan Medical Group) was from the same time, but it is from a slightly earlier period (late 50s) but is still a nod to the clinic that took care of him periodically.

End of summer

For most of the weekend, it already felt like fall, though it dried up and warmed up by late afternoon on Sunday.  We probably have about two more weeks of decent weather, then it will be back to normal, i.e. rainy.  While I am not really looking forward to Vancouver's rainy season, it will be nice to have green grass again.  Most of the lawns around the neighbourhood look parched, as few people own sprinklers and even fewer feel that they ought to be watering grass (a combination of environmental attitudes reinforced by laziness -- or vice versa).  I certainly don't care sufficiently about the grass to buy a sprinkler...

This year the kids were in summer camp here for two weeks and did a bunch of activities, including making tie-die t-shirts, which came out well.  In Chicago, they were in ceramics class and dance class, respectively.  We'll try to make it to the PNE and hopefully up Grouse (via gondola not the Grind!) before the end of summer.  I'm trying to get them back into the swing of things by drilling them on math, and they've been pretty good about reading, so they won't be too far behind once school starts up.  (Just two more weeks now.)

Back to fall.

Best Laid Plans (segueing into Happiness)

As long as I am rolling with the cliches, I'll quickly add a post on the topic of how the best laid plans (come to naught).  Or better yet: Man plans; God laughs.  There is actually a novel on Canadian politics by the title The Best Laid Plans (by Terry Fallis).  I haven't read this or his related novels, but will try to get around to it in the next couple of years (certainly before taking any citizenship tests!).

It goes without saying that it is very hard for most of us to bend life to our will and have things come out exactly as planned.  It may even be more true that even when we get what we thought we wanted, it isn't really quite what we expected, which may lead to even more dissatisfaction.  Not everyone is this sour or jaded, of course, and they have a much more positive outlook on life.  When I step back, I find that I had a decent run, but in general my expectations of life (and of other people) are really too high.

Nonetheless, I often am able to follow through on my plans at least in their basic outlines; certainly more than many people I know.  But the details may not be ideal.  So for instance, we move to escape an increasingly difficult housing situation, then within a few months I've got a new job offer requiring me to move to Europe!  This time around, I have been able to extend our current lease so that we shouldn't have to move twice in a year, but I have a vague feeling that to get the job I really want, I will have to take the job next spring rather than next summer, and that will entail some hard decisions (either living apart from the family for a few months or uprooting the kids before school is out).  This has actually led me to think twice and three times about subscribing to various concert or theatre packages, since I don't want to have to try to cancel or give away tickets that I have paid for.

I also had some tentative plans to take the kids a few places before we left the region, but it looks like my daughter really does suffer a bit from motion sickness, and suddenly I don't think I want to plan a trip to Banff -- and certainly not a drive through the Rockies.  Traveling to Portland is probably out unless we can work it out through the kind of tricky train schedule.  I imagine in another couple of years, she will either be over this or at least will have the self-knowledge that would allow us to work around it, but I think I will have to revise my plans a bit (actually my wife was leaning towards travel to Toronto over spring break anyway so she could really get a handle on the different neighbourhoods there, and now I will be less resistant to this idea).

The underlying reason for the move to Toronto is that if we move before the kids have really settled into school and long(er)-lasting friendships, we won't have to move later when that is harder.  But this assumes that I hold onto a job for more than 5 years (usually I max out at about 5 years, though there have always been extenuating circumstances) and that the family adapts fairly well to Toronto (or for that matter if Canada Immigration doesn't throw me for a complete loop).  In my mind it is the right move, but planning too far ahead carries with it a number of pitfalls.

Actually I saw an interesting exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center last week.  The artwork was poor, but that wasn't the point.  It was essentially a conceptual show about happiness.  In fact, it was called Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show.  This has toured various other small museums including ICA in Philadelphia and MOCA in Los Angeles.  Some of the research that made its way into the show I had heard of before, including that married parents with young children are among the unhappiest of all married couples, though they are even more unhappy with teenage children!  It isn't until children start leaving the nest that happiness returns.  Perhaps if more people acknowledged this rather than pretend that family life is the be-all and end-all, they would be somewhat more content with their lives.  (At least Sagmeister seems to think so. He also points out that mostly married people are happier than singles, with the possible exception of gay males before the AIDS crisis.)

He also has some interesting ideas about breaking up one's retirement years so take mini-sabbaticals throughout ones working life but then to work longer.  (This used to be one of the best things about being a professor, though my understanding is that it is harder and harder to come by in the contemporary, corporate-leaning university.)  He also says that being too rigid about making and sticking to plans is unhealthy.  Having a vision is fine, but then some flexibility is necessary.  This is something I do need to take to heart.

Finally, he displayed some great big inflatable monkeys with the message that "Everybody thinks they are right."  Most conflict arises not because we cannot understand that others hold different views from ourselves, but that we don't believe that other views are legitimate.  The more strongly held the views, the less likely we are to admit that others can differ from us (since obviously at most one party can be "right").  I would say I have gotten somewhat better in this over the years, though on narrow technical grounds (at work for example), I have a lot of trouble ceding ground to others.

I also tend to be kind of rigid about how I expect people to behave in public.  I really don't like Millennials that violate this -- particularly those who get in my way by not getting off escalators in time or who walk super-slow on the sidewalk because they are so absorbed by their phones.  I find this rude and I genuinely enjoy it when they stumble around or fall over due to their own lack of awareness of their surroundings and their general self-absorption.  Perhaps tellingly, I had my second-to-last lunch in Chicago somewhat spoiled by 4 Millennials who were trying to come into the restaurant at the exact same time I was leaving.  In the end we sort of squeezed past each other, and we all acted a bit dickish.  I overheard them say, Boy he was in a hurry.  From my perspective, first the people leaving a restaurant to get back to work do have the higher priority, and more to the point, I would never expect one person to have to wait for four people to go through a door.  It is just far more efficient to let that person through first (to say nothing of how rude it is to make one person wait for four).  I have no idea what they were thinking, other than they were hungry and perhaps that gave them the higher priority (or that they were a group that could not be split up -- like a funeral procession or the knobs involved in Critical Mass*).

Anyway, we all thought we were in the right and all of us ended up a bit more unhappy from the interaction.  (There was actually a door at Metrotown in the parking garage that ended up with a similar problem of too many people trying to get through in both directions and then more often than not you were left feeling that others were simply rude.)  Just in general, my feeling is that life very very frequently throws up situations that are essentially zero-game solutions where somebody is in fact worse off (this doesn't have to be materially -- it can simply be mentally/spiritually).  Thus, it should not be a surprise that I don't get along that well with all those folks who think that most things in life can be reformulated as win-win (or win-win-win) situations.  I just don't believe that is the case most of the time.  Sociologically, I am very much from the conflict school of thought.

* Certainly CM is a social phenomena that I absolutely despise because of how they claim priority over everyone, including pedestrians and people trying to get onto and use transit; they don't just inconvenience drivers (not that I think drivers should have to wait five or six light signal cycles either...).  I don't know how big the rides are in Toronto, but they seem fairly restrained in Vancouver.  The CM rides are definitely out of hand in San Francisco and Chicago.  I generally have murderous thoughts when these wankers come anywhere near me, and I just have to think that at this point they are setting back any possibility of a pro-bike agenda in the cities where the rides occur.  Frankly, if I were mayor I would probably criminalize mass CM rides and generally break it down so that it never got over 100 cyclists, which would be more or less manageable.

Easy come, easy go

Maybe the title of the post is just a bit off. Some of the books that I left behind on my recent trip weren't "easy" to come by, though most of them were picked up second-hand or as seconds in various bookstores. However, it is true that I parted with them easily enough (though possibly I should have left a post-it saying the books were being discarded -- it's just as likely that some are now languishing in lost and found offices, though I imagine eventually they'll be donated to libraries). In my current reading I have stuck to my plan to alternating between some stone-cold classics that I have never tackled before (Faulkner's Light in August this August and Proust by Sept.!) with books that I am just trying to clear out. For my recent vacation, I only took the latter. I brought 4 books and left them all behind (after reading them), and I actually picked up two more along the way and also left them behind. So mission accomplished. I'll just go into a few details.

I started with a book that combined Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy (a novella) and Midnight All Day (short stories). I didn't like it. I simply couldn't get past the idea that Kureshi simply detested all his characters, focusing obsessively on the fact that these couples were awful people who split up with no concern at all for their children. I honestly don't think writers should write stories where they detest all the characters in their stories. I also just don't think Kureshi really got the details about class correct in Intimacy. Of all the stories, basically only the small vignette about struggling to get chairs home from the store on the Tube ("Four Blue Chairs") was about a relatively normal couple. I also didn't completely dislike the title story. I wrapped this up on the plane from Vancouver to Toronto and left it at an airport gate.

John Nichols' The Empanada Brotherhood was slight but entertaining, as he relates his early life and career in Manhattan (right before he became a published author and his life changed). He hung out with a random bunch of South Americans at an empanada stand in Greenwich Village in the 60s. While my post-college career was quite different, I can relate to how I hung out with some odd characters, who might well have made an interesting story (if not quite a novel). While it was a little boring reading how pathetically in love he was with this flamenco dancer, I could relate a bit to that, given how I exhausted some of my friends with my stories of the young woman I was pursuing in Toronto in 1994. Appropriately enough, I finished this in Toronto and left it at a bagel place on Spadina.

I had a fair bit of time on buses to and from Stratford, Ont. so I read City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza. It has this weird mix where much of the novel is naturalistic (if maybe just a bit too much Ragged Dick with a twist) but then various saints and indeed the Devil come down and talk with the Mayor (of Barcelona) and the city fathers. I didn't really love it; I didn't really hate it. I managed to finish it on the plane from Toronto to Chicago and left it somewhere in O'Hare.

I actually was quite good in Stratford. Despite visiting a number of bookstores with seconded books, I only bought one (David Foster Wallace's The Pale King in hard cover). There were a couple that I probably would have gotten 10 or so years ago, but now will just read from the library.

Heading into the States, I started All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones. While this is probably the best book from a pure writing standpoint, I do find the stories very depressing. He also wrote Lost in the City, which was also super depressing. I was a little surprised that two stories depart from pure naturalism with one featuring the Devil. I'm not saying that a writer can't do whatever he or she wants, but this seemed a bit out of character. Maybe he is alluding to the idea that so many of the Black folks that moved to DC were really country folks and still had these traditions that meant a lot to them. Anyway, just as in Lost in the City, it seems that people have the choice to move closer to White folks and get ahead in life or to stay in the 'hood and suffer really poor life outcomes (and continue to make poor choices). He tries to reconcile these options a bit in "Root Doctor." Honestly, the only story that I would even claim that I enjoyed was "Adam Robinson acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister," though that also contains a lot of sorrow, as Adam is abandoned by his drug-using mother. It takes a while for his grandparents to track him down and rescue him from the foster home system. I was kind of put in mind of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever where the parents have to cope with the nightmare of their son being a hopeless junky. There are many such grandparents in urban neighborhoods that have to shoulder these unexpected burdens, though it would be too much to say that Adam was an unwanted burden. Where I have a bit of a hard time is that Edward Jones seems to focus obsessively on low-income Black folk who continually make poor choices, and he clearly considers those who move into White circles to be "uppity." So there's really no winning with him. I'm certainly done reading his work and won't be reading any more stories or novels, no matter how well he writes. I left this book with my mother-in-law in Chicago, though I warned her it was a bit depressing.

I wasn't as restrained at Powell's in Chicago and picked up a few books (most of which had to be shipped back to Vancouver). However, I did start reading The Wager by Machado de Assis (generally unknown in the States except for Epitaph for a Small Winner, which I own but haven't read, and perhaps Dom Casmurro, which I'll have to pick up some day). The Wager may also have come out as Counselor Aires's Memoirs and it appears to be the last book he published (so would qualify for my Last Works list). It is definitely an autumnal work, written in the form of a diary. The diarist is an older man who briefly considers courting a young widow, but then steps aside (really without her even knowing of his interest) in favour of a man much closer to her in age and outlook. It is fairly dry and awfully restrained. But it is short, which works in its favour. Somewhat surprisingly, Powell's was willing to buy it back from me, though they wouldn't take an art book (which I ended up donating to the Chicago Public Library).

The final book was one that I picked up in the Toronto Reference Library's book sale - Nikolski by Nicholas Dickner.  This is actually a Canadian book, and I am about to review it for my first book of the 7th Canada Reads Challenge, so I won't go into any details here, but I do here.  It was a fairly quick read, and I had wrapped it up before we got to O'Hare, though in the end I left it in Pearson once we made it to Toronto (en route to Vancouver).  While I probably should have started reading this academic book on mega-cities that I have promised to review, it was simply too difficult keeping the kids under control on the flight from Toronto to Vancouver, so I will just have to read it on the train to work now that vacation is over and I return to "real life" (blah).  Still, it was a good experiment that cleared out 6 books from the basement, so on my next trip, I will plan to bring a few other books that can be left behind.