Hunger

I read it with relish, I started on Sunday and finished this morning (Tues.) on BART, on my way to work. I felt uncomfortable reading it while having breakfast. I felt deranged while reading it at a full cafe in Berkeley on a Monday afternoon. I walked by two or more cafes, filled with Berkeley students studying diligently for the summer semester. When I finished the book, I wondered if all my readings of such depraved characters were going to drive me to lunacy. I guess we will find out, since I do not see myself eliminating such literature from my reading list any time soon.

Here's one excerpt I found when I randomly opened the book, it is tame, comparatively.

"Not a sound came to disturb me-the soft dark had hidden the whole world from me, and buried me in a wonderful peace- only the desolate voice of stillness sounded monotonously in my ear. And the dark monsters out there wanted to pull me to themselves as soon as night came, and they wanted to take me far far over seas and through strange lands where no human being lives. " -Hunger Knut Hamsun

Here's a New Yorker article on Hamsun from December 2005:

"...Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that "the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’ ” In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city’s Latin Quarter. Several times when I asked about Hamsun’s works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, “He was a traitor!” I’d try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again."

Books read in July

Books I read in July and why I read them.

1. Bâtarde- Violette Leduc

I read this essay in Context, a newsletter which I would pick up for free in Diesel Bookstore. I was seduced into the sensual and emotionally overwrought material this novel/memoir promised to cover. Since the book was out of print, I did not expect to easily come across it, so I kept it in the back of my mind as a book to keep an eye out for. On one of my rare Green Apple visits, I wandered around, and there was Bâtarde, tottering on top of a haphazard, yet standing, pile of books. Thus, there, I purchased it. It took me another few years to get around to reading it. The book's heft and personal subject kept me at an arm's length.

It was not as good as I wanted it to be. But I'm beginning to think this is the theme of my life, perhaps it can be my epitaph: "It was never as good as she wanted it to be." Sadly, I won't have a grave, or a gravestone, maybe it can be carved into a plaque above my favourite haunt.

There are beautifully written moments in this work: including a fantastic passage describing an endive salad and her enticing account of her black-marketing during WWII.
Most of the time, however, I felt mucked down by her barrage of emotional tumult.

I was having lunch at a Chinese restaurant one day, reading the book intently, trying to finish it. A man who was dining next to me asked me how the book was. My answer:" It's like being in a relationship you want out of, but you are committed to the end." That is how I felt about reading La Bâtarde, after 187 pages I felt committed, but I was quite relieved when it ended.

2. A Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

This book has somehow stayed with me despite the great book purge of 2005, when I had to move, and I rid myself of at least a few huge boxes of books. I must have picked it up for free from some giveaway pile because it is a cheap, grungy little paperback. I'm not even sure what could have compelled me to pick it up in the first place. I really didn't know anything about this book or the author. I decided to read it after seeing it in a book called 1001 Books You Should Read Before You Die, which, by the way, I don't agree with all the choices. Since I had Stranger around, I thought I would at least read it so I could get rid of it.

It is not too bad for a dated science-fiction utopian paperback. The dialogue conveys the characters well, but the free-love, cult storyline chippers into martyr-fantasy cheesiness. There are some novels where the writer's desired take on reality gets worn on the page; this novel is such an example.

3. Three Years- Anton Chekhov

I was delusional enough to think I might start reading Don Quixote this summer. So I ambled to my local library to check it out. While I was in the C's, I saw this slim novelette by Chekhov, since I had read another of his small novels (Story of Nobody) I knew I would enjoy it, plus I could read it easily in case the Cervantes fell through (which it did). But I will read Don Quixote before I die, even if I die while reading it. It is my folly, this desire to read the greatest novels of all time. Plus I feel rather embarrassed that I have not read it yet, I can't even believe I'm admitting it here.

Chekhov writes about disappointment and mundane life, but he does it without sentiment. He says a lot in a little amount of pages, it inspires me.

4. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

Again, I was in another public library, this time in Berkeley. I decided that I wanted to read another book by Moravia, on passing through, I came across McCullers' book, and on an impulse I decided to check it out as well. I think I heard of this McCullers' book because it is #17 on the MLA, and as I mentioned before, I'm a sucker for those listed books. For the record, it is not in the 1001 Books, so I think it has lost some of its appeal through time, after all it was published in 1941 when McCullers was only 23.

It does have some juvenile character developments; it feels as though Mc Cullers wanted to bring all the misfits she could imagine together in a sleepy Southern town. The misfits have so much to say that it is bursting right out of them but they are unwilling to listen.

Overall, July was not as productive as I would have liked, hopefully August will be a better read.

La Bâtarde

"You can guess, reader, you have already guessed, it is the end of a love affair, it is the end of tyranny. Love. Love has no end. If it had, it would not be love. We go on loving those we have loved in other forms, or else we begin to cherish in other forms those we should have loved in the past. Nothing changes, everything is transformed."

-Violette Leduc


Maybe, at the end of the day, all I need is a good dosage of this: New Drug Deletes Bad Memories

the rest of June books

Books read for June for fiction-only summer, 2007 with short, very short discussions.

1. Started: 6/8/2007 Finished 6/13/2007
Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov

Mixed into a story of finding one's double, belies some Nabokovian treatises on art and duplicity. The narrator attempts the pefect murder under the guise of suicide. He is perceptually flawed, since he does not have the objectivity to see if the double he has selected can really pass for himself. The authorities reveal his crime as defective. Nabokov somehow entertwins some ideas on literary criticism parallelling with the presses persecution treatment of the murder within the story.

Should you read it? Yes, if you like Nabokov and/or if you like stories of psychologically questionable characters.


2. Started 6/13/2007 Finished 6/16/2007
Contempt, by Alberto Moravia

Obssessive story of a man's loss of his wife's love. The narrator, a writer, sells himself out by writing screenplays instead of the works he was inspired to do. He blames his wife's need for a house and other material necessities which drove him to write for money instead of writing for art. We never know the wife's perspective, all we learn about the relationship is completely based on his interpretation. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that the narrator is not to be trusted, but in fact he misunderstands and misinterprets many scenes.The language obscures the narrator's growing mania, since the story is written in an analytical and detached manner.

Should you read it? Yes, if you like to peer into the dark mind of the psychologically spurious, (see also, above book) and if you like to read about a relationship slowly going to hell.


3. Started 6/17/2007 Finished 6/18/2007
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

Gripping Victorian love story of a unloved orphan (Jane Eyre) and her eventual, but tantalizing falling in love with the Byronic (i.e. tragic & brooding) "hero", Mr Rochester. Along the way, she acquires a good education, develops ladylike qualities, becomes a governess and a teacher, and inherits some money from a long lost uncle.There's a mad woman in the attic which disrupts some marriage plans, and second marriage proposal, just to keep things lively.

Should you read it? Yes, if you like gripping Victorian romances written by previously underappreciated women writers.


4. Started 6/18/2007 finished 6/21/2007
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Nefarious collision tale between civilization and barbarism and the madness that imperialism and colonialism produces. Marlow sneaks up the Congo to track down the elusive and diabolical Kurtz. Classic novel focusing on the construction of "the other".

Should you read it? Yes, if you are fascinated by Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Herzog's Aguirre,Wrath of God and if you want to know the origin of that quote: "the horror, the horror".


5. Started 6/22/2007 Finished 6/23/2007
Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, by Sam Savage

A book eating rat becomes literate and devours classics while holing up in a bookstore. The rat observes humans from afar, and seems to love them despite their foibles. A depressed and drunken science fiction writer gives the rat some moments of happiness and love. All the while, Boston gentrifies.


Should you read it? Yes, if you want to read one of the bloggers' buzz favourite ficiton, or if you like rat tales.

After Dark, Days and Nights

This summer is my read-novels-only season, here are the first two I've read so far. There is no method or order to the books I have chosen to read. I am simply dictated by random book lust, sporadic book reviews I've read, and some books leading to other books.

Alfred Jarry Days and Nights
I read this book a few years ago, but I decided to read again to see if I could make any more sense of it this time around. If it was any longer than its slim 130+ pages, it would've have taken me a month to read it. This contradicts one's intuition, since, on the surface it appears easy to read. The book is broken into a number of very short chapters, but one must be aware of the style which can slacken the reader. Days and Nights is a satiristic autobiography of Jarry's Sisphyean military stint. But acquiring a linear story would be near impossible, since the novel weaves in and out of hallucination and interior streams. The point of reading it, would be to immerse yourself in Jarry's strange, word-ordered universe. It's a work that presages the non-linear, stream-of-consciouness often found in modernist writers: Joyce, Faulker, Burroughs, and etc.


Haruki Murakami After Dark
I have never read any Murakami's books, but I became obssessed with the need to read After Dark when I read a review. What struck me most is the point of view within the book. The reader is a "neutral outside witness" spoken to by a comforting, semi-omniscent speaker. We see it as though we are looking through the camera lens, swooping down on the characters' actions and conversations. Most of what we do learn about the characters are revealed by themselves in conversation. But we never really get to see or understand what motivates the character, or what is happening emotionally within. The characters are likeable, yet they remain opaque. The language is simple but not simplistic and the pacing moves ahead with out feeling rushed; Basically it's a fun to read novel: entertaining, not very thought-provoking and kind of strange.

Here are some real reviews:

After Dark-
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Kirn-t.html?ex=1181793600&en=9bdb0c36525b565a&ei=5070

and on another blog-
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2007/05/rootless-detachment-review-of-after.html
which the reader thought more about the book than I did. I haven't read enough Murakami to agree or not, however I can see some of these points after reading this novel, and I was not really compelled to read another Murakami novel soon, if ever. I doubt I will remember much about After Dark a year from now, except I may remember that is was strange. An excerpt:

"The problem confronting Murakami's readers has always been that, despite his otherworldly talents, he has nothing to say. Nothing of any real interest or significance, at least. Although his stories often hint at a metaphysics of unreality, the books are mostly surface and, unlike one of his professed influences, Raymond Carver, seem to lack any insight into the human condition (or any other condition, really). Instead, they content themselves with cataloging the discontents of the modern age, particularly the alarmingly numerous forms of ennui, all of which, after three or four volumes, begin to bear a striking resemblance to one another.

While this was all well and good when Murakami started his career, with After Dark it seems he has become so enamored of his own abilities that he has ceased to care whether what he has chosen to show us actually matters. Or is even interesting. The more I read Murakami, the less his work resembles genius, and the more it comes to resemble a symptom of autism or obsessive compulsion. As Murakami translator Jay Rubin notes in his biography Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, around the time Murakami finished A Wild Sheep Chase, he began to obsess over his writing, fearing that he might die before finishing the book, a thought he apparently found untenable. His anxiety led to a major overhaul of his life. He quit smoking, began to exercise regularly, changed his diet. Over time, his books have come to reflect this obsession with writing and not necessarily in a positive way. As Rubin explains it, Murakami works not because he has an idea for a book, but because he feels compelled to write. It's suggested that he often sits at his desk, writing whatever comes to mind, until the glimmerings of a story appear. Those who are familiar with Murakami's novels can see this process at work. Often, the first fifty to one hundred pages of his books feature characters loafing around, looking for something to do, a reflection, perhaps, of Murakami's own mental state. The result is a presumably faithful depiction of his inner life with an ironic lack of self-awareness."



Days and Nights. by Harvey Pekar.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993 v13 n2 p257(2)
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction

When the major modernist writers are listed, Alfred Jarry is often excluded, forgotten about, and yet what a tremendous impact on modernism he had. Dadaism, surrealism, and absurdism were all derived from his work. In addition to this, much of his writing is very enjoyable and stimulating to read. Maybe that's part of the trouble: not enough people read him, a major reason being that his books are very difficult to find. Congratulations, then, are in order to Atlas for publishing so much of it recently. Many historians and critics seem to underrate Jarry as a technician and intellect. In his twenties he was already pretty well-read in several areas including science, religion, mythology, history, and contemporary politics. As a very young man he'd already been a coeditor with Remy de Gourmont of L'Ymaginiev, "which published and analyzed ... medieval and popular prints, usually of a religious nature," according to Alastair Brotchie's helpful introduction. The play Caesar Antichrist, Jarry's second book (1895), was illustrated as well as written by him. In it there is a good deal of theoretical information about the discipline or quasi-discipline he created, pataphysics. Opposites and their tendency to neutralize each other, thus, in his opinion, eventually amounting to the same thing, get considerable attention here. Caesar Antichrist claims, "I and the Christ are Janus." In the midst of abstract dialogues involving Christ, Caesar Antichrist, and Saint Peter, Jarry inserts a condensation of his humorous, earthy Ubu Roi play, which was to be performed in 1896 (it had been done with marionettes as early as 1888). This is done not only to shock, but to set up a contrast between it and other sections of the play, in accordance with Jarry's theory of opposites. Days and Nights, Jarry's first novel, appeared in 1897. An autobiographical work, it deals with his thirteen months in the army (he was drafted) and his method of securing a medical discharge so that he did not have to serve his entire three-year stretch. Jarry (he calls himself Sengle here) had a friend who showed him various ways to deceive doctors into thinking he was sicker than he was, such as sticking a thermometer under his armpit to make his temperature appear unusually high. Part of his novel is devoted to criticizing the army and military medicine; a lot of this is funny. Other chapters are devoted to his dreams and hallucinations; Jarry got high a lot on alcohol and drugs, so they are pretty vivid. Jarry comes across as a likeable character, a lot less weird than some accounts of him would lead you to believe. For one thing, his beefs about the military are pretty much like other soldiers' and can easily be identified with. His methods of getting out of work and goofing off have plenty in common with Sergeant Bilko's; that's a definite plus. Alastair Brotchie, whose introductions and notes in both books are quite astute and useful, implies that Jarry influenced James Joyce, an interesting observation. On one hand, Joyce's work can be accounted for without Jarry; he was influenced by French symbolist poetry (as was Jarry) and the pre-1900 stream-of-consciousness work of Eduard Dujardin and George Moore, plus Moore's post-1900 "melodic line" style. But Jarry at least anticipated Joyce in several ways: both employed complex symbolism, both devoted a great deal of attention to interior states, such as dreams, both used sentence fragments and free association of ideas, and both employed wordplay, including neologisms. In any event, very few writers marked twentieth-century literature as strongly as Jarry. His work should be taught in universities along with Joyce's, Eliot's and Pound's, and it should be realized that there is more to his oeuvre than the Ubu plays, as the innovative prose writing in Days and Nights, The Supermale, and Dr. Faustroll make abundantly clear.