Books dcozy Finished in 2017

Teju Cole is, I think, the most interesting writer of his generation. One reason for this is that he manages to blend a very sophisticated aesthetic sensibility with an equally sophisticated political engagement. His masters are, on the one hand, W.G. Sebald, and, on the other, John Berger. Having placed Cole where I believe he belongs in the pantheon, I am a bit surprised that I didn't enjoy his collection Known and Strange Things more than I did.

The essay is a favorite form, and the essays of Cole's I've read here and there have always been stimulating. In fact, several of those previously read essays are included in this collection, and they are just as good as I remembered them. I have to confess, though, that it's those essays, his greatest hits, as it were, that seem to me the best in the collection. It's not that the other essays are not worthy; indeed, several of them are, no doubt, essential for anyone who wants to think seriously about photography. That could be me: I remember my excitement upon first encountering Susan Sontag's On Photography, but Cole's essays seem to me more for the specialist than Sontag's tour de force. It is probably just that, though the reviews, appreciations, memories and other fugitive pieces here collected, though models of their kind, taken together lose some of their power, a slackening I never felt when turning the pages of Open City.

I only hope that, unlike other multi-talented authors who've written superb novels and then turned away from the form—Pankaj Mishra, Ian Buruma—that Cole hasn't decided to abandon the genre in which, thus far (and it's still early days) he's had his most impressive success to date.

Alan Moore's Jerusalem is a maximalist novel in all the best ways. Rich in character, observation, and event, it is equally rich in a philosophy and metaphysics that are informed by cutting edge physics. It is, however, in once sense, minimalist: Almost every one of the 1200+ pages of the novel are set in Moore's hometown, Northhampton, where he still lives.

One quickly sees, however, that the geographical limitations he has imposed upon himself (there are occasional side-trips to Blake's Lambeth) are the farthest thing from impoverishing. Rather, because Moore, like certain cutting-edge physicists, takes seriously the notion that the past isn't really past, that everyone who has ever lived, lives, the Northhampton he gives us is anything but constrained. Indeed, one feels he could have given us another thousand pages set there that would have been as riveting as those he has given us.

One reason for this is that the prose, always rich, sometimes bordering on the baroque, and never amenable to skimming, is well-wrought enough that one finds oneself returning to reread sentences, paragraphs, pages simply for the pleasure of letting the words dance through one's mind again.

One is glad, though, in the end, that Moore stopped exactly where he did because the novel is an exquisite formal object, one in which every one of the many, many threads is neatly, but never glibly or perfunctorily, tied off. It's probably heresy to say so, but it seems to me a pity that Moore, a great novelist (his little-read first novel, Voices of the Fire, is also excellent) wasted so many years on comics.

I continue my traversal of the saga of Lew Archer, and am happy to report that this Ross Macdonald's Black Money is another worthy exploration of the dark side of the California sun.

Eric Haggman's first novel, The Apology, is a thriller, and does one very important thing right: he keeps things moving along. Thrillers are not intended to be read slowly. If one doesn't feel compelled to fly through the pages, then there's a problem. The headlong rush that Haggman largely succeeds in providing, though, is slightly undermined by the implausibilities of the plot (the Vietnamese police investigating the apparent kidnapping at the novel's center include our advertising man protagonist in every aspect of the investigation, including, at one point, handing him an AK47 for his personal use) and the Sax Rohmer-like exaggerations of the evil that, at least for the purposes of the novel Haggman seems to believe, lies at the heart of Asian societies. The Japanese police for example, can't be merely corrupt, but must be one of the most corrupt police forces in the world. The novel ends with the protagonist and his love interest, having moved through Vietnam and Tokyo, in Capetown, and things are left wide-open for a sequel, so this won't be the last we hear of this crime-fighting ad-man.

Japanese police corrupt?! That seriously messes up my Japanese Dream. :)

The Shakespeare Wars is a good introduction to some of the various controversies around the works of William Shakespeare with which scholars, actors, directors, and fans of the bard are concerned.

Wisely, author Ron Rosenbaum wastes no time on the conspiracy theories related to who wrote the plays (because it couldn't have been that upstart crow William Shakespeare!). Instead he spends his time, for the most part, examining the discussions, arguments, and debates that arise from the simple fact that we possess no manuscript of any of the plays or poems in Shakespeare's hand. Rather we have versions, and the big question is which version should be given precedence, or how, in a principled fashion, are the various versions, to be used to create a text true to what Shakespeare might have intended. (Reading that sentence you see, of course, the problem: how can we know what Shakespeare intended?)

All of that is fascinating, but the book is marred by three things. First, the various swipes that Rosenbaum feels obliged to take at "theory" date the book badly. Second, the humor that Rosenbaum injects into the book is almost always leaden and predictable, and third, he seems to believe that sentence fragments are somehow more effective than complete sentences. I say he seems to believe this, because it's clear that he can write good English when he wants to, but for some reason often feels compelled to attempt something else.

Still, this is a good primer on what we talk about when we talk about Shakespeare.

The main character in Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name, Elena, continues to evolve away from her past, her neighborhood, her people, except for her friend, Lila, who has taken a different path, but one which, we suspect, will always be tangled with Elena's. As Elena moves away from her neighborhood to a different city, a different world, and as the world moves into the turbulent 1960s, the novel (Ferrante has said she conceives of the four "Neoplitan novels" to be, in fact, one novel) also becomes more compelling, without, at the same time, losing the almost anthropological attention Ferrante pays to how young women from the working class in Italy lived then.

There is certainly no one better to read about London, and even more, those who write about London, than Iain Sinclair. Not only does he, in his My Favourite London Devils, make one want to explore his counter-canon—Roland Camberton, B. Catling, John Healy, Robert Westerby, and more—he makes you want to read more Iain Sinclair. His critical and biographical explorations of these writers and the city he and they chronicle are written in a prose that is always vibrant and always absolutely Sinclair's. One of the few writers of out time who understands the importance of style, and is able to write with style without seeming mannered, Sinclair is among our finest literary essayists.

Pedro Domingos, author of The Master Algorithm, is not just an explainer of machine learning. He is an enthusiastic proponent of it, a cheerleader even (though as he's an important player in the field that's obviously the wrong metaphor). This presents a problem to a reader like me who is suspicious of cheerleaders on general principles, but who in this domain know so little I can't with any confidence evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of his position. As confident as I am that there's a lot I don't know about artificial intelligence I am equally confident that I learned a lot from this book, and now, at least, have an idea what is at stake in the development of AI, and also what we as human beings living in societies don't need to worry about. It's hard to disagree with him that in this area as in others, knowledge is power: the more we know about this important technology the better we will be able to put it to work in service of what we want and need.

(yay Ferrante)

Indeed. I'm part-way through the third now, and they get better and better as they go.

Whoops. Just realized I never posted my squib about the first of Elena Ferrante's Neoplitan novels. Here it is:

Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend is a realist novel focusing on the friendship of two girls growing up poor in Naples in the 1950s and 60s. It is dense in detail, and gives a compelling picture of how difficult it is for ambitious young women to escape from such a place, and also how it is necessary for them to do so. One looks forward to seeing how the two girls we have watched grow in this inaugural novel move through the remaining three books in the series

As detective Lew Archer moves into the '60s in The Goodbye Look the books chronicling his investigations continue to be among the most theory-driven thrillers I've ever encountered, the theory being psychoanalysis. What makes them addictive is Archer's take on the world, Southern California in particular, and the specimens of humanity he encounters there. Lew has a brief affair in this book, and that's something new. Usually we get only vague hints about a broken marriage and women he's no longer with.

By the end of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, three quarters of the way through Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels one sees that she is, of course, right that the four books are really one long novel. Had I stopped reading after the first I would have thought it was a good book. Deeper in, though, the series approaches greatness, not least for the clear-eyed look at Italy during the turbulent '60s.

The covers of the Europa editions sure are cheesy (but then so are the covers of the thrillers I read, but in a different way).

>14 dcozy:

Yah, there are whole debates about the cover design, how it came to be and what it means... no use detailing unless you happen to be REALLY interested. Tl; dr: they were meant to be ironic but let's remember we live in the world in which Donald Trump is the POTUS. Irony's dead, Brioni.

Seeing as the covers are usually something you look at before you read the book it's hard for me to see how people were meant to get the irony.

But you're right. I don't really want to put any more time into thinking about them, especially when what's between the covers is so compelling.

With The Story of the Lost Child Elena Ferrante concludes her novel in four parts about two girls who grow up in a Naples slum and spend the rest of their lives, in their different ways, dealing with that legacy and dealing with each other. The novels are superb realist fiction in the manner of writers like Balzac and Dickens, and thus give us a view from Italy, and Naples in particular, of what the world was like from roughly the 1950s to the 2000s. Most interesting to me was watching the narrator pass through the radical '60s and '70s, when Italy, and much of the rest of the world, was on fire. If you read one of these books you really must read all four. You'll want to, but more than that, you wouldn't be doing Ferrante's work justice if you stopped after a volume or two.

The protagonist of Run Baby Run novel is an academic criminologist, Bobby Delery, who has left academia in Chicago and returned to his hometown, New Orleans, to assist the police. When one sees that Delery has an immediately antagonistic relationship with the police handling the case he is meant to help with it is hard not to assume we're going to have the traditional template: out-of-touch but brilliant expert trying to work with gritty, uncouth street cops, but oddly the novel becomes something different. The case is solved, but neither thanks to Delery's book learning nor the street smarts of the police. It's solved more or less by accident, and Delery happens to be at the right place at the right time. Along the way we get some diverting views of the always fascinating New Orleans, though as many of the most interesting characters are African American, one sort of wants to see what some African American New Orleans residents would have to say about the novel, considering that the author, Michael Allen Zell, is white. Then again, is he white? Maybe he shares a secret with Bobby Delery.

It's not surprising that Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask is more or less required reading for those who are gay in Japan or interested in gay life in Japan. Mishima's "confessions" seem candid, and they are, at least in Meredith Weatherly's translation, beautifully written, but then one remembers that they are the confessions of a mask, the candid revelations of that which is designed to conceal one's true identity.

Although The Underground Man was one of the most popular of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series, and also the volume that many consider among the best, it seems to me to be, while good, not the most riveting of those I've read, and I've just about made my way through the whole saga. In it, Macdonald employs the standard formula—in short, everyone's related to everyone, and Southern California is rotten and decadent—but the formula is not tired. It's kept alive by Archer's bruised and mordant view of the world he passes through.

Renee Gladman's Event Factory is the opening volume of a trilogy that will, I believe, be centered around and in a place called Ravicka. The protagonist of this volume is a linguist who is visiting this vaguely Eastern- or Central-European—but really, unidentifiable—culture, and whose encounters are only slightly more Kafkaesque than those most of us experience in culture's that remain opaque to us, cultures we can visit perhaps too easily thanks to the convenience of modern travel. Gladman's prose is the perfect vessel with which to communicate the protagonist's disorientaton.

I could quite happily spend the rest of my reading days seeking out and devouring all that Eliot Weinberger has written. His Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, the best book I have read on translation, and in particular the translation of poetry, is rich with Weinberger's wit, insight, and his impatience with fools and the foolish attempts they have made to translate a fragment by Wang Wei, make the book a treat.

just checking in after a long absence.

I was reading Weinberger's translations of Octavio Paz last night, and reached much the same conclusion. The Wang Wei book is one of my favourites, and a huge inspiration.

Nice to "see" you two, Murr, David.

I concur on Weinberger. David, speaking about the problems of translating poetry, and seeing you have several books by William Gass but don't list this one, I'd mention it as one similarly interesting: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Actually, I found it revelatory regarding how to read poetry tout court (not that I've overcome my failings there...)