Reading list for February 2006
Currently reading
Rudyard Kipling, Collected Stories
Manfred Koch and Angelika Overath (eds), Schlaflos
Richard Powers, The Time of our Singing
Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann - still
Recently read
Paulo Coelho, Der Zahir
Martha Grimes, Fremde Federn and Die alte Damen (double volume)
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha in German
Cormac McCarthy, All the pretty Horses
Just sneaking under the wire to get this posted in February. It's been an eclectic and a disparate bunch.
Cormac McCarthy is either one of the best or the single worst novelist in America today. I really can't decide, so I go and try another book, and another and another and another. This novel is almost lyrical by his dour standards. Imagine: there are at least five commas, and maybe twice that many adverbs in the book. Plus the usual pages of pure Spanish without translation. I really wonder for whom he writes? Quite a good introduction to McCarthy for those who might not know him yet (Blood Meridian is a better novel, but quite horribly brutal).
Schlaflos is a collection of essays and stories about sleeplessness, a little nudge in my own side.
Der Zahir is typically fine Coelho, a meditation on love and obsession, war and peace. He seems to write often about himself; or at least he presents his stories as though they were happening to "the novelist" personality he writes in/about.
Kipling is a delight, so marvellously old-fashioned in rhythm and content (the Raj, don't you know, old boy). They don't write them like that any more, primarily because nobody lives like that any more: we practice a different kind of colonialism, equally brutal but superficially polite, with a depth of hypocrisy that would have appalled the Victorian colonial administrators. The occupation of Iraq will surely not produce a Kipling.
Siddhartha is quite wonderful, like Gatsby a book to be re-read often. The difference between Hesse's sonorous simplicity and McCarthy's tone-deaf plainness is instructive.
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Labels: reading
posted by Udge @ 23:25
3 Comments:
Siddhartha is definitely one of my favorite re-reads. In English, of course.
I read Blood Meridian when I was 19 and it was hard for me to process the violence as literal; I was too naive and green to conceptualize it beyond fiction. I think I would have a much stronger reaction to it now.
Cormac is still one of the best for me. : )
I can't read Cormac McCarthy. I have tried three times. This last time was on my trip to St. John when I found Blood Meridian on the book exchange shelf. I only get a few pages in before something happens, it's like I literally fall out of the book and can't climb back in.
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