Tag: Literature

All men’s failings I forgive in actors; no actor’s failings will I forgive in men. – Goethe, Wilhelm Meister

Epigraph to Mephisto, by Klaus Mann

Cities and Memory 3 – Zaira – Italo Calvino

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Cities & Memory 3
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino

Evocative Descriptions, Three Selections

By the time I graduated from college, however, funk was in decline and my listening was at a dead end. Dan and other friends had spent their college years listening to the Clash, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Gang of Four, and R.E.M. They tried to turn me on to these and similar bands, and while I recognized a certain vitality in this music, I could never identify with it. The smart lyrics and melodies could not atone for the frenetic and clunky rhythms, which offended my funk drummer’s ears. It sounded as if this music was being played by people whose glasses were slipping off their noses.

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful Of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer’s Life
Jacob Slichter

Rahel put on her sunglasses and looked back into the Play. Everything was Angry-colored. Sophie Mol, standing between Margaret Kochamma and Chacko, looked as though she ought to be slapped. Rahel found a whole column of juicy ants. They were on their way to church. All dressed in red. They had to be killed before they got there. Squished and squashed with a stone. You can’t have smelly ants in church. The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast, or a crisp biscuit.

The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy

So the phone was left on the little three-legged table beside the sofa, as unsteady as a spider on an ice cube.

Anxious People
Fredrik Backman

Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century

Over the last hundred years African writers have written of their lives, experiences, culture, history and myth; they have written in diverse forms, styles and in many languages. They have been published widely on the African continent, in Europe, the Americas and Asia. They have written in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Swahili, and in many other indigenous languages. And they have written with extraordinary originality, flair and great integrity. Nonetheless their work as a corpus deriving from the African continent remains largely unknown and uncelebrated.

To mark the beginning of the 21st century, and encouraged by Professor Ali Mazrui, the Zimbabwe International Book Fair launched the international compilation of “Africa’s 100 Best Books.” This project was organized in collaboration with the African Publishers Network (APNET), the Pan-African Booksellers Association (PABA), African writers’ associations, book development councils, and library associations.

Nominations were sought throughout the African continent and internationally. A comprehensive list of all nominations was published at the ZIBF in August 2001 and during the course of the following year regional panels compiled their own short lists of 100 best books. Closing date for nominations was 30 September 2001.

A jury made the final decision from the short list and the final list of “Africa’s 100 Best Books” was announced on February 18, 2002.
…
In the table below, ** indicates a top twelve title.

Columbia.edu

LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

Asare, Meshack	Ghana	**Sosu’s Call	Sub-Saharan Publishers
Al-Homi, Hayam Abbas	Egypt	Adventures of a Breath	Atfalna
Mungoshi, Charles	Zimbabwe	Stories from a Shona Childhood	Baobab Books
Tadjo, Veronique	Côte d’Ivoire	Mamy Wata et le monstre	Nouvelles éditions ivoriennes

CREATIVE WRITING

Continue reading “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” →

Reading War and Peace in Leningrad, 1942

Spring, Leningrad, 1942 – “though the word ‘spring,”‘ writes Russian literary critic Lidiya Ginsburg in her memoir, Blockade Diary, “had an odd ring to it. The bread ration had been increased, trams made their diffident way along frozen streets. The Germans had halted the bombing raids, but were shelling the city several times each day. The strongest and most vital people had already died – or had survived. The feeble went on belatedly dying. The word ‘spring’ had an odd ring to it.”

As she tells us in this slender but powerful volume, though “the thirst for information was fearful,” with people crowding around street-corner loudspeakers several times a day, the besieged Russians of Leningrad longed for other sorts of “information.” Ginsburg writes:

During the war years, people used to read War and Peace avidly, comparing their own behaviour with it (not the other way round – no one doubted the adequacy of Tolstoy’s response to life). The reader would say to himself… so then, this is how it should be. Whoever had the energy enough to read, used to read war and Peace avidly in besieged Leningrad….

Tolstoy had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war. He also spoke of how those caught up in this common round continued playing their part involuntarily, while ostensibly busy solving problems affecting their own lives. The people of besieged Leningrad worked (while they could) and saved (if they could) both themselves and their loved ones from dying of hunger.

And in the final reckoning that was also essential to the war effort, because a living city barred the path of an enemy who wanted to kill it.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett – Review, Summary

“Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school,” says Martin Amis. “On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible, and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes.” This isn’t entirely fair – Beckett was capable of sentences, even paragraphs. Even a 90-page paragraph that comprises the entire first half of this fuckin’ book here, which is about some knucklehead who farts. “One day I counted them,” Molloy says. “Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes.” Have you, friend, ever counted your farts?

The second half features Moran, the world’s worst dad, as he forces an enema up his kid. They wander through the countryside; he’s looking for Molloy, perhaps to interrogate him for some murky reason. He’s a detective? An assassin? Along the way he murders a guy for no real reason. Molloy killed a guy too. Their voices are similar(ly unhinged). The theory goes that perhaps we’ve skipped backwards, Moran is young Molloy, he’s hunting down his future. That is of course a very college seminar thing to say, a very Lit Major theory, and “It is not at this late stage of my relation,” Moran tells us, “that I intend to give way to literature.” But have we? Given way to literature? If so, how many farts did it take?

Good Reads
Alex
4 Stars

Finnegans Wake Enthusiasts

The Most Challenging Book You’ve Ever Read
byu/MadMaxine666 inbooks

tomchaps
I met a guy in 1992 in St. Petersburg (Russia), who had taught himself English by reading the liner notes to old rock-n-roll records. He had a Elvis-style pompadour, but was more of a Carl Perkins fan.

The first actual book he read was Finnegans Wake. He just got a dictionary, went at it word-by-word, and just let it wash over him. Very, very slowly. He claimed to have loved it.

ej_21
one of my favorite recent stories was the book club that spent almost three decades reading finnegans wake: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

flibadab
I took both an undergraduate and a graduate course on Finnegans Wake (different universities), and I loved it. Both professors emphasized that you can’t possible get everything in the Wake, but you can definitely enjoy it.

Death of Ivan Ilyich – Some Quotes from

Apart from the reflections this death called up in each of them about the transfers and possible changes at work that might result from it, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who was dead and not I.

In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there were damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes – all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class.

It was all just as it was in the law courts. The doctor put on just the same air towards him as he himself put on towards an accused person.
The doctor said that so-and-so indicated that there was so-and-so inside the patient, but if the investigation of so-and-so did not confirm this, then he must assume that and that. If he assumed that and that, then…and so on. To Iván Ilých only one question was important: was his case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that inappropriate question.

And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed – none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

And what was worst of all was that It drew his attention to itself not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look at It, look it straight in the face: look at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly.

‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’ he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.

Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy

Love after Love – Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Found in:
Poems of Gratitude (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

Burning Down the Waffle House – The Alchemist – Review of, Summary

What book do you WANT to like but just can’t?
byu/tinuvi3l inliterature

ProudTacoman
Hear me out here…The Alchemist can be the best book you could possibly read…BUT it’s all about timing. At just the right time in your life, in just the right circumstances, with the wind blowing softly toward the southeast, and Capricorn in Venus or whatever…The Alchemist has the potential to be exactly what you need to read at that moment. No, as a book, it’s not elegant, subtle, wise, or necessarily “well written,” but it is a quick hit of affirmation without requiring much time or any thought. In fact, the less thought you give it, the better it works for this. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature!

That magical and rare confluence of circumstances that makes The Alchemist a good book for you is this: You’re thinking about making a major change or decision in your life that you know in your bones is the right one, despite what your research, your smarter friends, the criminal justice system, the people who care about you, and the latest consensus of the scientific community might say. Maybe these folks started talking about pros and cons lists, cost/benefit analysis, and “critical thinking,” but you need none of that. Nine times out of ten, these are the guys to listen to, and you should abandon whatever self-destructive course you’re on, like, yesterday. But you’ve already searched your soul and you’ve decided: You’re going to step out on your marriage. You’re ready to sell all your worldly possessions, give the proceeds to Scientology, and move to Lhasa. You’re going to propose to your ex. You’re gonna burn down a Waffle House. You don’t need the wisdom of the masses. What do you need? You need to talk to the tenth dentist. The one who recommends never flossing and isn’t afraid to call out Big Toothpaste on their “after every meal” conspiracy.

These are the times you call up your old buddy from the shit-kicking days who barely graduated middle school and lives life a quarter ounce at a time. Why him? Because he positively exudes that “hell yeah brother!” pothead wisdom that only holds up for the brief time you’re talking to him, and absolutely crumples under any kind of scrutiny. He doesn’t ask questions. In fact, big questions confuse him and make him kind of aggressive. But he fully and vocally supports anything that doesn’t require him to keep a schedule or figure out the ring inside his toilet bowl. In this tipping-point moment, you need that kind of pseudo-wisdom, just to hear some kind – any kind – of support for your hare-brained scheme. However wound up you are to do what you’re going to do, he’ll wind you up tighter with a bug-eyed rant about putting aside your inhibitions to embrace your destiny. Your personal legend.

Paulo Coelho is your loser buddy, and The Alchemist is his pep talk. Pick up the phone. Burn down that Waffle House. Maktub, bitches.

A Way in the World – Amazon Review of

2.0 out of 5 stars Mythologizing his Existence
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2021
As I said in other reviews, I’m reading through Naipaul. I’m disappointed in the book, yet another attempt by Naipaul to mythologize his own existence, to identify who he is, what he is. I say it is an attempt because the line of thought he pursues to locate himself in his historical context is doomed to failure. His attempt at self-realization goes nowhere, as it does for everybody. It is a common mistake to look backward for some sense of self because there really is no sense of self, in the sense of self-realization, to begin with. It is mythology that we hold on to for dear life, for the abyss awaits those that fail in this endeavor. But the mythology is fiction, and thus we are always sitting on the edge of the abyss.

A Way in the World

Amazon blurb/summary:

The Nobel Prize-winning author—and “one of literature’s great travelers” (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism.

“Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul’s) life and work.”—The New York Times

“Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.”

So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention.

It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

Best Books I Read in 2023 that Weren’t Published in 2023

No order. Selections mine, blurbs via Amazon.

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
Robert D. Richardson
Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature.

A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American families, James struggled to achieve greatness amid the brilliance of his theologian father; his brother, the novelist Henry James; and his sister, Alice James. After studying medicine, he ultimately realized that his true interests lay in philosophy and psychology, a choice that guided his storied career at Harvard, where he taught some of America’s greatest minds. But it is James’s contributions to intellectual study that reveal the true complexity of man.

Blood and Thunder
Hampdon Sides
In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.

At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.

Off the Rails: Aboard the Crazy Train in the Blizzard of Ozz
Rudy Sarzo
A fellow musician’s interesting insight into the beginning of Ozzy Osbourne s solo career and his relationship with Sharon Osbourne. This exciting biography also clears a lot of misinformation and bogus theories circulating around the late, great, guitar virtuoso Randy Rhoads’ life and death. Written by journeyman rock bassist Rudy Sarzo, this is a first hand account of Rudy’s experience on the road with Ozzy and his Blizzard of Ozz band.

Acid for the Children
Flea
In Acid for the Children, Flea takes readers on a deeply personal and revealing tour of his formative years, spanning from Australia to the New York City suburbs to, finally, Los Angeles. Through hilarious anecdotes, poetical meditations, and occasional flights of fantasy, Flea deftly chronicles the experiences that forged him as an artist, a musician, and a young man. His dreamy, jazz-inflected prose makes the Los Angeles of the 1970s and 80s come to gritty, glorious life, including the potential for fun, danger, mayhem, or inspiration that lurked around every corner. It is here that young Flea, looking to escape a turbulent home, found family in a community of musicians, artists, and junkies who also lived on the fringe. He spent most of his time partying and committing petty crimes. But it was in music where he found a higher meaning, a place to channel his frustration, loneliness, and love. This left him open to the life-changing moment when he and his best friends, soul brothers, and partners-in-mischief came up with the idea to start their own band, which became the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

How the Word is Passed
Clint Smith
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
Rutger Bregman
If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It’s a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest.

But what if it isn’t true? International bestseller Rutger Bregman provides new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another. In fact this instinct has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.

From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the solidarity in the aftermath of the Blitz, the hidden flaws in the Stanford prison experiment to the true story of twin brothers on opposite sides who helped Mandela end apartheid, Bregman shows us that believing in human generosity and collaboration isn’t merely optimistic—it’s realistic. Moreover, it has huge implications for how society functions. When we think the worst of people, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics. But if we believe in the reality of humanity’s kindness and altruism, it will form the foundation for achieving true change in society, a case that Bregman makes convincingly with his signature wit, refreshing frankness, and memorable storytelling.