(no subject)

[proximoception]

57. The Sound and the Fury (2nd)
58. The Book of the Duchess
59. Mrs. Dalloway (2nd)
60. Emerson by John Jay Chapman
61. Antigonick
62. The Dead (3rd?)
63. The Ruined Cottage/The Brothers/Michael (Nth)
64. Red Cavalry
65. I Am - Selected Poems of John Clare
66. Selected Poems of Charlotte Smith
67. Worldly Hopes
68. Things Fall Apart
69. Holderlin's Odes and Elegies, tr. Hoff
70. The Cherry Orchard, tr. Mamet

Antigonick is the first book of Carson's I didn't particularly like.

Things Fall Apart did what I assumed it would but much better than I'd have imagined.

The book new to me I most enjoyed this year was Great Expectations, though My Antonia was stiff competition. Among shorter works I loved Bishop's prose things, especially those tying in with her verse. The evolution of Clare's nest poems was pretty fascinating, too, as were some of the Red Cavalry stories (which Johnson admits he ripped off when writing Jesus' Son - in retrospect I do see it). Best reread was probably The Dead, after that some bits of Blake and Holderlin. Also Shakespeare, The Jew of Malta, Stevens, Bishop, the early books of The Prelude etc.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

What do you think of Sound & Fury? Django Unchained has some interesting images for the Faulkner industry.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think it's great and powerful and confused - there's not a clean separation of matters personal to Faulkner from allegories of the prison-march of history and the individual's quest to be good, for one thing. Since that's true for many readers too it will always be his popular book.

Whereas Joyce's vision is finally coherent, like Woolf's. But Faulkner sometimes surpasses them in depth of feeling. I mostly prefer Suttree, along that line, but McCarthy's debt is pretty glaring, and I'm not sure he comes up with anything as good as Quentin's country adventures.

I also find it an indispensable link in a genre family tree I think about almost as much as Romantic quest or Kafka-Borges-Calvino-Abe microcosmicity. Faust->Peer Gynt->Ulysses->Sound and the Fury->Catcher in the Rye is one the of the most bemusing of indisputable literary lineages. I think Faulkner's Freud-like (or rather Dostoevsky-like) division of the brothers by psychic traits is what makes that so weird: the lies and selfishness get siphoned into Jason, and are replaced in Quentin by a graft of Hamlet. Who's as present in Suttree as he is in Holden, but McCarthy's enough of a Joyce fan that there's still some Peer there, however refracted into unPeerian passivity. In McCarthy it's everyone around you who tells you why you're doing what you're doing, never you. Which is probably a hint he picks up from the Quentin section, where Quentin does his thinking through memories of what others have said to or about him - that traumatized replacement of direct thought becomes a flight from thought itself in Suttree, joined with Peer's eluding of truth, death, women and responsibility.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

(The Hamlet gets into Quentin mostly via Stephen of course.)

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Nice. (Though I still prefer Absalom, Absalom.)

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Me too probably.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's great about Red Cavalry and Jesus' Son As soon as you say it I see it.