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Aug. 22nd, 2009 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionBooks read recently that were not by Borges, Calvino, Kafka or McCarthy:
Notes from Underground: Had previously only read the first section, which I'd liked. I'm now very bored by it, and instead delighted by the second. I think he must have intended to Christianize it but ran out of time. Great luck, it stays human.
Norwegian Wood: Reads like the day content, unanalyzed, that he eventually obsesses into Wind-Up. He seems to know it, since the protagonist's first name is the same there, and there's several passages about both wells and winding up in this earlier one. Likable book, the way "Summer of '69" is a likable song ("Norwegian Wood" not so much, for me). Book and its hero have a curiously passive quality that seems to be common in Japanese fiction, e.g. Soseki's intolerable Kokoro. That too gets explained and battered into something new in Wind-Up.
Miss Lonelyhearts: Yet again, because other books were reminding me of it, like Calvino's Smog. Struck this time by some of the startlingly weird metaphors and a few other cryptic passages. And by its unstated conviction that the suffering of others is too painful to contemplate straight, hence all the ways of going crooked. Its comedy is so strangely pitched between sadism and sorrow, in a way picked up on later by Heller and Pynchon I guess.
An Oresteia: I love Anne Carson. Her Agamemnon I read with respectful interest--it's not really a play I like, in isolation from its sequels. She wakes it up but I wish she'd translate those others. She's always hilarious and provocative with Euripides, though. Her very painful, impressive Elektra I read a couple years ago, published by Oxford, who should be given props for letting her reprint it. Her profile doubtless helped--Zenith's Pessoa and the Blackmores' Hugo, ongoing but cohesive projects, are unhelpfully strewn across different publishers and journals and may never be assembled.
The Cid: Wilbur just translated this. He's still in great form with the rhyme and all, but like the lion's share of pre-1800 classics Corneille doesn't really climb past 'amusing' for me. I reread Wilbur's Misanthrope too and felt much the same thing. Perfectly executed, sure, entertaining, reasonably insightful etc. but I'd trade pretty much all of French drama for anything by Shakespeare or Ibsen. Probably even for Titus.
Notes from Underground: Had previously only read the first section, which I'd liked. I'm now very bored by it, and instead delighted by the second. I think he must have intended to Christianize it but ran out of time. Great luck, it stays human.
Norwegian Wood: Reads like the day content, unanalyzed, that he eventually obsesses into Wind-Up. He seems to know it, since the protagonist's first name is the same there, and there's several passages about both wells and winding up in this earlier one. Likable book, the way "Summer of '69" is a likable song ("Norwegian Wood" not so much, for me). Book and its hero have a curiously passive quality that seems to be common in Japanese fiction, e.g. Soseki's intolerable Kokoro. That too gets explained and battered into something new in Wind-Up.
Miss Lonelyhearts: Yet again, because other books were reminding me of it, like Calvino's Smog. Struck this time by some of the startlingly weird metaphors and a few other cryptic passages. And by its unstated conviction that the suffering of others is too painful to contemplate straight, hence all the ways of going crooked. Its comedy is so strangely pitched between sadism and sorrow, in a way picked up on later by Heller and Pynchon I guess.
An Oresteia: I love Anne Carson. Her Agamemnon I read with respectful interest--it's not really a play I like, in isolation from its sequels. She wakes it up but I wish she'd translate those others. She's always hilarious and provocative with Euripides, though. Her very painful, impressive Elektra I read a couple years ago, published by Oxford, who should be given props for letting her reprint it. Her profile doubtless helped--Zenith's Pessoa and the Blackmores' Hugo, ongoing but cohesive projects, are unhelpfully strewn across different publishers and journals and may never be assembled.
The Cid: Wilbur just translated this. He's still in great form with the rhyme and all, but like the lion's share of pre-1800 classics Corneille doesn't really climb past 'amusing' for me. I reread Wilbur's Misanthrope too and felt much the same thing. Perfectly executed, sure, entertaining, reasonably insightful etc. but I'd trade pretty much all of French drama for anything by Shakespeare or Ibsen. Probably even for Titus.
