On Reading

2012, A Reader's Eye View

2012 is proving a far less prolific reading year for me than 2011, even more so than I had planned. I knew that reading Proust would severely limit the number of books I read but I have also slowed down considerably in the number of pages read. There are a number of reasons for this. Proust, as his readers will know, demands greater attention than most. Last year I noted how much my reading slowed down while reading The Book of Disquiet and Proust is having a similar effect. Sentences are long and complicated, and the ideas propounded in one are altered by the next in a way that will give the inattentive reader a sense that he has lost his place.

So at this point in the year, after almost two months, I have read one book in it's entirety (The Savage Detectives) and am almost through five of the twelve volumes in my edition of In Remembrance of Things Past. (Half way through The Guermantes Way). At this point last year I had twelve books read, so the difference is pronounced.

Of course this hasn't stopped me buying books and I have added the first two books of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet to my 2012 TBR shelf and am planning to contribute to a Muriel Spark Reading Week. Spark is one of my favourite writers and I hope to read a novel Robinson and a volume of short stories, The Go Away Bird. They are both short.

How I will tackle the other books on my TBR shelf I don't know but I'm hoping that my reading accelerates as the year progresses.

Within a Budding Grove (Second Post)

Within a Budding Grove

In Within a Budding Grove Proust builds on Swann's Way, subtly reworking events and perceptions from different angles. One of the pleasures is recognizing some of the parallels. It was only when rereading two of my posts that one of them struck me, and maybe it can stand as an exemplar.

I've quoted at length from the scene at the party in Swann's Way, which is the big social set piece in this book. Part of this quote was about monocles and he described one as"an accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of his aquarium, a part intended to suggest the whole..."
In the big social set piece in Within a Budding Grove, as I quoted here Proust describes the dining room of the Grand Hotel as becoming, when lit, "an immense and wonderful aquarium." 

Iggy Proust

"We must lay aside all hope of going home to sleep in our own bed, once we have made up our mind to penetrate into the pestiferous cavern through which we may have access to the mystery, into one of those vast glass roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare into which I must go to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of the city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menaces, like certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross."

From Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, rendered into English by C Scott Moncrieff.

As an addendum to the last post. I don't think I need to point out the subtext here.

Within a Budding Grove (First Post)

Within a Budding Grove

I'm now finished the first four books of my twelve volume edition of Remembrance of Things Past, more slowly than was my intention but also more quickly at times than it feels like being read. There is a leisurely pace to Proust's sentences and they open up more readily, I find, when read slowly. The long sinuous threads can also get completely lost if you try to read too quickly.

The book is broken into three sections - Madame Swann at Home; Place Names: The Place; and Seascape, with Frieze of Girls. It grows ever more apparent that the major driving force of the novel is an exploration of sexuality, and more particularly, homosexuality. Although professing heterosexuality there are many hints and ellipses that seem to point to a strain of homosexuality in the narrator. His fascination with Gilberte Swann and her mother Odette at times seem simply ruses to penetrate M Swann's household. Proust himself was gay and Marcel, the narrator, is very much based on Marcel, the novelist. He is however, a self professed heterosexual in this novel. The tension between these poles is perhaps the most volatile and interesting element in the novel. It makes one feel somewhat ambiguous about Marcel's attempts to connect directly with his memory - it feels that there is a lie sitting in the heart of his rhapsodies of remembered sensation. But is the book really lying or is it inviting us to read THROUGH the story.

The Discreet Charm of Marcel Proust

À la recherche du la Bourgeoisie


I didn't expect to find a possible inspiration for Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but Proust can be every bit as scathing as Buñuel in his descriptions of the foibles of the failing aristocracy.

The Savage Daughters

King Pelias just before being hacked apart and killed by his daughters.

Further thoughts on The Savage Detectives

Having completed the group read of The Savage Detectives and my earlier response to the book, reading other blogs from the readalong has led me to think further about it and to consider elements that were not mentioned in my earlier blog post.

One of the themes that I found in The Savage Detectives and which I don't recall seeing in any of the other posts was the relationship between fathers and daughters. I had meant to address this in my earlier post but (like a number of other intended expositions) it fell by the wayside.

The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño

This reading of The Savage Detectives was for a group read hosted by Rise and Richard. This was my second time reading The Savage Detectives and it has been an interesting ride, finishing on Friday Night/Saturday Morning at 4.30 after reading the final 250 pages. I'm only managing to get to this post up now as it was even more incoherent last night than it is now. I hope it will contribute something to the discussion of the book.
(This also needs a SPOILER alert - I ramble all through the book in this post and may give away more than some people who have not read the book would wish to know,. )

When I last read it it was my first experience of Bolaño but now, having read a few, it was interesting to see how it interacted with his other books. In fact it started at times to feel like you could see the writer's mixing the elements in his alchemical lab, trying to get the formula right.

Poets, Geometry, Nazis, Students, Germans, Mexico, Barcelona, Giants, Books, Murder &c ...

Leonard Cohen - New Album Stream

After the tasters, the main course!

Dip your ears in the stream below.

Bicycle Thief

The Bicycle Thief - Vittorio De Sica

Inspired by the serendipity of a free month on Netflix and a 'foreign' movie reviewing meme on a couple of good blogs I follow (here & here) I decided I would watch some films and write something about them. I thought that I would pick a 'classic' I had never seen to start the ball rolling.

The classic is The Bicycle Thief (a.k.a. Bicycle Thieves). The film is set on the grim streets of post war Rome. Men swarm up an anonymous looking stairs in a high rise building as the credits roll and then fallback as a cigar smoking functionary emerges, descends and calls for Ricci. Someone has to run over to get Ricci who is not paying any attention. When he gets over he is told "You'll hang posters", handed a slip and told to go to the employment office. Disbelievingly he says "My god, a job."  But there is a catch. He will need a bicycle and his is in the repair shop and money will have to be found to redeem it.

"sharp instruments and lynched messiahs"

Kill yr Idols

I've taken a break from In Search of Lost Time in order to read The Savage Detectives for next weekends readalong. After reading the passage below, from The Savage Detectives, I'm now desperate to prove I'm not desperate by finishing In Search of Lost Time.
The following quote is from The Savage Detectives. The call to Kill Yr Idols is from Sonic Youth.

Show Me The Place

Old Ideas, New Songs

Found another track from the new Cohen album, available at the end of the month. Enjoy.

Show Me The Place

Perhaps I should reread a Cohen novel and write about it to coincide? I will if I can find the time.

Swann's Way

Swann's Way - Marcel Proust


In which our author remembers his obsessive love for his mother and how it coloured his days and more particularly nights  - How the visits of M Swann affected this - How M Swann was plucked from his life as a jaded socialite by the firm hand of a musical Cupid and the treacherous journey that ensued - How the narrator found in Swann's daughter a vessel for his attentions - and much else besides...

It's not often that you read a book that gave birth to an adjective - I can now understand Proustian as something more than a set of preconceptions. Like the molecules that stimulate the olfactory system, and sometimes memories, Proust's sentences (building slowly and leisurely,  clause following clause, exploring the least sensation and smallest moments in high seriousness) are complex constructions. At first I was tempted to apply the adjective Prousty, finding the writing and subject matter overly precious but gradually the book wove it's spell and started to reveal a guiding intelligence which was as much at home in irony and satire as in rhapsodic remembering of the smallest twitch of a swooning adolescent.

Fellini's Swann

Swann in Love La Dolce Vita

As I read the following description I was forcibly reminded of Marcello in La Dolce Vita. His intelligence, his social mobility and his moral and spiritual decrepitude mirror those of Swann.
When Marcello sees the young waitress who appears as a chink of light in the turgidity of his life he describes her as like an angel in a painting. I must watch the film again to see how the parallels play off each other.

Leonard Cohen - New Song

School for Books

It's time to send my books to obedience school!

Proust on Giotto's "Charity" & "Envy"

Proust on Giotto
One of the pleasures that the internet can add to reading, is the opportunity, if your attention is arrested by a particularly vivid description of an artwork, or building, to view images of the object thus described. This allows the reader to implement a sort of 'gold standard' to judge the writer's descriptive and interpretative powers. They are 24 carat in this instance, I hope you agree.

on "Charity"

"... it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the the Arena beneath the label 'Caritas', and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom in Combray, incarnates that virtue, for it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever  have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say 'handing' it to Him, exactly as a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground level above."

Resolutions 2012

Plans for 2012

Last year I managed to kickstart my reading by setting myself a target of reading 100 books for the year. I made 85 before I had to resort to the works of Roger Ackroyd in order to get over the line.

This year I have been trying to think of a slightly different set of resolutions but had only really decided on reading In Remembrance of Things Past by January 1st. That and a reread of The Savage Detectives for the group read hosted by Rise and Richard. I was intending to try and read the Proust in January but the pace I'm setting means that's not a possibility. Also I'll have to take a break to read The Savage Detectives after I finish the first volume - Swann's Way.

Books of the Year

Books Read 2011

Books of the Year

I discovered one thing when trying to work up this post - I like lists but not making them. Books are hard to compare, they all have different ambitions and suit different moods. They are not the same in memory as they are while being read.
And this year I've been lucky. I've read a lot of good, even great books. I could easily have come up with a top fifty (from eighty five) and all of the books would have earned their place.
But there is only one way to make a list and that's to stop thinking and do it. And so I did. Apologies to all the books that should be in this list but aren't. It doesn't mean I don't love you!
Here's an irreducible top ten (there's fifteen) and if I think for longer the list will grow. They are in no particular order.

Men

Charles Roger Hargreaves

Men by Charles Roger Hargreaves

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
T.S. Eliot (from The Hollow Men)

Given that my resolution for 2012 is to read one of the twentieth centuries greatest novel sequences (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu) it seemed appropriate to end this year by reading another institution of twentieth century writing Roger Hargreaves' roman fleuve encompassing men in all their varieties, shapes, appetites and weaknesses.

I decided to finish my 100 book challenge by reading fifteen volumes and I came away having become blissfully lost once again the colourful world contained in these pages. Some volumes express the mundanity of the quotidian life while others soar into the realms of fantasy.

Here we find Meneer Doodsbenauwd repeating "This is the End" and Unser Herr Unmöglich challenging the basis of physics. These old friends have stood up to many rereads in the past and I am glad to report that they still do. Mr. Barus' meeting with the Giant still provokes a change in character that at first seems impossible but there is nothing impossible in this world. When Herra Fyndinn discovers how to make animals laugh I laughed along, aware yet of the fragility of our understanding of the natural world.

As Senhor Saltitão puts on his heavy boots I felt the weight of history, the armies marching to the Somme, the collapse of the domestic under the weight of the military. Bay Akýllý has to face the fact again and again that being the brightest of his generation is not enough to throw light into every corner. Some questions have no answers. Fætter Dagdrøm shows us how the unfettered imagination can overcome the walls of any prison. Anarchy reigns incarnate. Chinese whispers in his own mind leave Monsieur Étourdi a poor sort of Pegasus, his messages mixed and all the more thought provoking for that.

The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy


The God of Small Things is a rich sprawling family saga focussing on the effect of the 'love laws' on one family. It gives an insight into life and politics in Kerala and is filled with rich, vivid descriptions and verbal inventiveness.

Rahel and Estha are twins, Rahel female and Estha male. They are not identical ("two egg twins") and have the usual complement of fingers and toes but, we are told, they have only one soul between them.  "Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha's funny dream."