Just finished On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. It's certainly didactic and probably a bit intractable to non Brits. But it's very good, the style is confident, the dramatic ironies are poignant, the characters believable despite their rigid counterpoint (which is to say, their lack of mutual comprehension). The sex is excrutiating as it was obviously intended to be. What's curious is that McEwan is famously an alumnus of the same MBA program as Kazuo Ishiguro and this is a strikingly similar book to The Remains of the Day. In both cases we have the same essential moral – perhaps less didactically and therefore more successfully evicted by Ishiguro - that when it comes to love, inaction can ruin a life just as well as action. (In the case of McEwan's young couple, their life comes to ruin very explicitly on the titular Chesil Beach, the infamous breaker of ships). So one question I am left with is how much this commonality is coincidence, and how much is due to some entanglement at the UEA? I will certainly read more McEwan, Atonement at least. Some people consider him midwit slop for the easily taken in. If this is true then I can only put my hands up and admit I am susceptible.
*evinced, not evicted
Anonymous :
33 days ago :
No.10736
>>10738
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n08/colm-toibin/dissecting-the-body
Good piece from Colm Toibin on this novel. He quotes the passage referenced in >>10736. When I was reading it I had the vague sense that this was situated just around the same time as Larkin's Annus Mirabilis and Toibin confirms as much.
Oh and because this is an imageboard, this guy can cum more than Peter North, what the fuck McEwan?????
OP here, forgot to mention I’m trans
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n08/colm-toibin/dissecting-the-body
Good piece from Colm Toibin on this novel. He quotes the passage referenced in >>10736
Oh and because this is an imageboard, this guy can cum more than Peter North, what the fuck McEwan?????
. When I was reading it I had the vague sense that this was situated just around the same time as Larkin's Annus Mirabilis and Toibin confirms as much.
Reading Rayuela by Cortazar (en espanol! (no tengo enie)). Pretty interesting so far. Reminds me a bit of The Waste Land and the likes.
Finally finished A Passage to India. Good final part. Not sure why this was a tricky book for me, nor why I didn't love it. Perhaps to be set on the shelf to gather friendly dust and then be picked up with a sneeze to be read again at another time in my life.
finally reading bifo Berardi heroes after a friend rec'ed it to me months ago. very topical for me with that Zendaya school shooter movie and all the other o9a stuff
Read an early minor Hardy novel, "A Pair of Blue Eyes". Not his best work, only really worth reading for the Hardy completionist, but it has its moments.
One bit where one of the main characters, a know-it-all literary critic, finds himself clinging on to the edge of a cliff, inspires a listing of all the other large cliffs of the island of Great Britain. Then subsequently when the hapless man realises he's face to face with a trilobite fossil, he starts to review in his mind the millions of years of history since that animal lived, including dinosaurs, cavemen, and so on. It's quite entertaining stuff - I think it's intended as a bit of a satire of the dramatic setpiece as you might find in Dickens or similar. In the end though the crisis is resolved in extremely conventional style - the heroine strips off her undergarments and knots them into a rope, hauling the critic up from the precipice, at which point he falls into her arms and they admit their love for one another. Someone less fond of Hardy and/or the Victorian novel would probably find this quite irritating. (Elfride, the heroine, also dies suddenly and for no earthly reason in the last few pages of the book: an extremely annoying resolution to a 400 page novel).
Certainly the book could have been 50 or 100 pages shorter overall and been better for it. In the end its main flaw is that the heroine is so much less interesting than his later creations, like Tess or Bathsheba. At the same time the young rural-boy-on-the-up Stephen Smith is an obvious forerunner of Jude and almost as luckless in love. And some of the same ideas are present too, such as the question of whether a woman is married in a natural or rightful sense to a man who has 'carried her off', even though the carrying off here is so much more trivial than the equivalent event in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Ultimately although I can hardly recommend this novel I think it is worthwhile to sometimes read the lesser works of great writers. It is reassuring to think that they were not born with the ability to write great novels, that they worked at their art.
Anonymous :
28 days ago :
No.10780
>>11029
Lately, I have developed quite an interest in Japanese literature (XX-XXI centuries) without being aware of it. Svastika and Kappa are among the best books I've read this year. Some of Dazai's short stories were quite memorable, too.
Right now I'm reading Breasts and Eggs, by Murakami. After finishing Heaven, I thought: "I must read more of this author." So far, I'm enjoying it. (As a sidenote, I mistook her for Kawakami, and I ended up reading Sensei no kaban, a story that I didn't find compelling.)
I'm open to recommendations.
Argentine literature is another relatively new area of interest for me (I'm not sure if national criteria are the most desirable or precise...). Marechal's Adán Buenosyares was quite a ride... Planning to read El banquete de Severo Arcángelo or Antígona Vélez next. A friend gave me a copy of Sin rumbo, by Cambaceres. Having read Potpourri and En la sangre, I don't think I will enjoy it as much as he did. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Btw, >>10780 is right. He is, imo, one of the best short-story writers.
Please, read Giovanni Papini.
Reading The Decameron, 2013 Rebhorn translation. Started after seeing the Pasolini film. So far: a gem, very punchy and funny in a way that surprises me given its age. Reading translations always makes me paranoid that I'm losing literary merit that was there in the original text, which I probably am.
Hard for me to keep a good reading habit these days-- it is an effortful activity, and often I am suffused with a deep sense of pointlessness that makes exerting effort difficult. Oh well.
I read Sebald's Austerlitz for my book club. It's very good. My main gripe is that I found myself questioning the plausibility of the memories he recovered. I certainly doubt I could do that with my own childhood, but then I wasn't a traumatised Kindertransport child whose identity got overwritten.
Nonetheless the most chilling and effective aspect of this book is the way the holocaust lurks in the absences and the unsaid. In this way it is the most effective testament I can imagine to the vanished masses, the families, villages, nations blotted out of existence. Auswitz doesn't so much cast a shadow over this novel as exist somewhere outside of it like a black hole.
if the person who recced me the Berardi reads this somehow bc im too pussy to text u, I gave up bc this month i remembered I was raped and it's been a disturbing month. now im reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles
>>10851
if the person who recced me the Berardi reads this somehow bc im too pussy to text u, I gave up bc this month i remembered I was raped and it's been a disturbing month. now im reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles
maybe not the best choice given the circumstances
I started reading Robert Caro's LBJ series. I got it on amazon and when the box arrived it was cut open on both sides and broken, so I assume someone realized it was only books and was like damn it.
Lately, I have developed quite an interest in Japanese literature (XX-XXI centuries) without being aware of it. Svastika and Kappa are among the best books I've read this year. Some of Dazai's short stories were quite memorable, too.
Right now I'm reading Breasts and Eggs, by Murakami. After finishing Heaven, I thought: "I must read more of this author." So far, I'm enjoying it. (As a sidenote, I mistook her for Kawakami, and I ended up reading Sensei no kaban, a story that I didn't find compelling.)
I'm open to recommendations.
Argentine literature is another relatively new area of interest for me (I'm not sure if national criteria are the most desirable or precise...). Marechal's Adán Buenosyares was quite a ride... Planning to read El banquete de Severo Arcángelo or Antígona Vélez next. A friend gave me a copy of Sin rumbo, by Cambaceres. Having read Potpourri and En la sangre, I don't think I will enjoy it as much as he did. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Btw, >>10780
Please, read Giovanni Papini.
is right. He is, imo, one of the best short-story writers.
Booker Prize Longlist out:
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis
Switzy by Emma Cline
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
The Disappearers by Marlon James
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
John of John by Douglas Stuart
All Them Dogs by Djamel White
The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams
inb4 Douglas Stuart wins again