A Death in the Family - day 2

There's a good passage in  A Death in the Family which explains that when you are grown up (i.e no longer a child , no longer striving with wonder, activity and boredom), you have the measure of things - the framework in which your life exists, and "that is when time begins to pick up speed" and begins racing through our lives - "before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty ..." The consequence is, as he says when he sees his father both from the perspective of the child he was and the adult now older than his father at that time:


"...on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2012-03-01). A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (My Struggle 1) (p. 10). Random House. Kindle Edition.

The image of time blowing these rock like chunks of meaning is a strange one, located in the fact that the father he is/was observing is wielding a sledgehammer to break rocks and widen their vegetable garden. Shades of Ozymandias, or that riddle in the Hobbit. How can something so insubstantial and ethereal break so much apart.

Every so often.. Freedom from Fear - The American people in Depression and War 1929-1945 Day 3, A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (My Struggle 1 Day 1

Every so often the faintly discernible thread that links the reading of one book with the reading of the next is cut by something external - it might just be a change of venue, or even an abrupt change of mood where what you wanted to read yesterday suddenly becomes distant and boring, or it might even be (worst case scenario) a slow growing disillusionment with a book, a creeping sense that this really isn't worth the effort of plodding through, a narrative that gradually condemns itself with weary banal slow (very slow) steps, as you spend more time wondering whether it's worth finishing, especially if you have put hours and hours of reading effort in.  It's like climbing a promising hill, nice path, interesting prospects on promise only to peek over the top at yet another steeper hill lost in mist and drizzle, with no relief or end in sight.

For me two days ago it was just being in a different place, a long drive up to Retford for the funeral of my best friend,  and picking up a huge unwieldy book  called Freedom from Fear - The American people in Depression and War 1929-1945, starting it, and being completely transported into the desire to know what happened in this huge country, to make it what it is today, along with a not quite random secondary desire to maybe pick up Boardwalk Empire again - I think we left off watching about episode 4 or 5.  It means I abandoned The Point, although I will go back and read those stories, perhaps in parallel.

Then back home, sitting at the table in the kitchen reading the Guardian review, I found a book review of the second book in a series by Karl Ove Knausgaard: A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (My Struggle 1), a review that made me turn to my Nexus 7, charging quietly on the computer desk behind me,  and, since it was reasonably priced, buy it immediately, and then begin to read it, and realise  certainly from the first two pages, that this was a good decision.

So there I am with two new starting points, the Dostoevsky looking less attractive now, though I think I might gallop through Notes from the Underground again, but now as then I find his vituperative, twisted character strangely uninteresting, a mouthpiece for views and prejudices that don't really sit very easily in my life. It feels like a very nihilistic text. And then alongside, a difficult parallel read again ( I'm keen on parallel reads, sometimes linked, sometimes not, one book enriches another if only by giving you a change of style and track) of Rowan Williams book about how Dostoevsky (probably) can show and teach us a lot about faith and belief, once you separate put the rabid nationalism and obviously ridiculous poses. I'm beginning to prefer Chekov to Dostoevsky, and, possibly, Tolstoy.

Charle's D'Ambrosio, The Point & other stories

Ever since I been listening to the New Yorker short fiction podcasts I've been meaning to buy some of the authors I had never heard of before. Started with The Point, the tile story of which is read here: The Point. I'm already having a break from the Dostoevsky, but yesterday was a busy day, and the second story in this collection was the one I read: "Her Real Name".  Just like when I listened to the podcast of "The Point"  I was a little uncertain about the voice, but then got swept into this hot, dusty elegy, with its contrasting ending out on the water, black and cool at night.

It felt quite long, maybe because I wanted to finish it before I went to sleep, but I didn't want to rush the reading. It's about 40 pages long, so say 12,000 words - a substantial length for a short story, there's plenty you can pack in. And there you are, another strange story absorbed, another set of images, quite strong at the moment, but how long will they last? The Point itself is fairly unforgettable - I think I may have listened to it twice (or else it made such an impression on me that I just think I've listened to it twice). When I first listened I had to break off h ten or fifteen minutes in and I wasn't that happy with the story, wasn't sure if I would go back to it.  But I did - I started again, and got involved in that narrator's voice - a thirteen year old boy, somewhat unbelievable, but somehow believable.

Dostoevsky - Language, Faith and Fiction

From sexy cult to  the ex- Archbishop of Canterbury's book on Dostoevsky is a big step, but Dostoevsky has had a huge impact on me and my reading from teenage years onwards. I'll probably start rereading Notes from Underground just to get all Dostoevskyied up.  And spelling that name - it's so easy if you break it down
Dos     (2 more syllables)
toev  ( a russian toe)
sky (as in reach for)
There are plenty of alternative spellings - Penguin go for "Dostoyevsky", but that adds an extra complexity, so I'm sticking with the simplest, and if it's good enough for the Archbishop of Canterbury than it's good enough for me. 

Being able to spell Dostoevsky is always impressive, should there be anyone to display this talent to. I speak as someone who once wrote a "beautifully suggested" essay on Dostoevsky, and existentialism, but misspelt Sartre as Satre all the way through (way back in the 1970s, Modern European Mind at Sussex University).

So Rowan Williams take is a specifically Christian one, natch, ( I don't think he's read or will read Pedro Juan Gutierrez) and is coming from a deep (as in knows a lot about) theological perspective, most of which is lost on me.  But his reading of Dostoevsky is still accessible and meaningful, as long as you take it slowly. I'm going to use the blog to try and keep track of what he is saying, in the hope of finding what? Enlightenment?  Probably not, just a clearer light shone of the complexities of Dostoevsky.

So lets have a sample of Rowan William's prose. This is genuinely the next sentence I read as I picked up where I had left off this morning.

"What we have here, in fact, is remarkably like a highly dramatized version of the Hegalian Unhappy Consciousness, with a few extra refinements: the self's ideal existence is unattainable, and what is actually experienced in self-awareness is failure and finitude  finitude itself as a form of humiliation"
p19
(my link added for the Hegalian Unhappy Consciousness, should you be unfamiliar...)

I'll come back later and add some more as there are other things to do - and this snippet is, in context (rather unfair just to lift it like this) insightful. I think. I do need to think, and the challenge of having to do that will keep me going.

Dirty Havana Trilogy - Book 2

This collage of the stink and press of poverty with the slightly less confident celebration of  sex and rum continues.  At the moment he is trying to sell a bucket to make 20 pesos, he's starving, his partner of the moment is spending a week with a rich Spanish tourist, so there will be no money or food until she gets back. I'm wondering where it's all going, but that's just the thing, at this level of poverty there is nothing but the next meal, the next sleep, the next day, the next fuck if you're lucky.

Asimov's , The Skiff

Primarily this is a blog about reading but occasionally other subjects creep in - like I'm writing this in the Skiff having signed up for a day a week. Plus I went to meet a business partner re setting up a website and training business, so am now all geared up to learn WordPress, maybe even make a business of it. t

Aimov's is still good hard sci-fi, with enough interest as well as innnovation to make most of the stories intensely readable.  The Fantasy & Science Fiction story that I was reading though turned out to be a bit of damp squib - full of quasi (or real, maybe not quasi) Quaker stuff that I thought was all very worthy, but not interesting to read, and a kind of nothingy ending. There was this simulacrum  of a steampunk kind, that may or may not have had a soul imprisoned in it, and that's just as bad as slavery isn't it. Yes. End of story.

I've started to write  a bit here as well, but the laptop I am using is uncomfortable, hot (literally), and I haven't brought a keyboard with me, so my typing is full of typos.  But I think I might be able to write here. The Ivan and Alenoushka story is taking some different directions - and I'm appreciating just how much sheer plod it's going to take to make it into the novel I want it to be. I'm torn between inventing some action now, or choosing another perspective.  I think the story needs a little bit more suspense in it. What I am trying to get , to practice, is when to introduce the more savage action, that moves the story up a step, rather than the slow psychological approach of, say, a Richard Ford novel ( if he wrote sci-fi that is).  It is quite good writing here, though, I'm in this little self-contained bubble surrounded by people.

Iain Banks

Desperately sad news, delivered with his typical black humour and optimism: http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/a-personal-statment-iain-banks.page

The only writer who has ever created a decent utopia, in the Culture novels - or at least one I would like to live in.  I simply don't know what to say - he says he probably won't last the year, so the last book will be The Quarry.  The best science fiction writer I have read.

Portnoy's Complaint, and all the Books I Am About To Read or Finish or Give Up On.

Finally, finally - I have changed the default font for this blog to Arial, instead of having to reset it everytime I make a new post. It's not a blogger setting - you have to change the default font in Chrome - as set out here.
http://joshwentz.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/change-default-font-in-blogger.html

So the last few pages of Portnoy's Complaint were a bit mad and incomprehensible to me - it felt as if he hadn't run out of rage, just run out of narrative and words. There is a sense in which yes his impotent encounters in Israel neatly tie up, in narrative terms,  his rage at the Jewishness he grew up in, at the goy world he grew up in, and now the "real" Jewish culture that he has jetted into.  That is always the way with novels, - endings are difficult after all those words and all that build up, unless you're Jane Austen or a nineteenth century novelist, in which case endings are literal - marriages, deaths, successes. Modern novels struggle with these because they are too unambiguous, and if we've learnt anything in the 21st century it is that most things are uncertain and ambiguous. The things that aren't - the fundamentalists of any religion or political organisation, the bigots, the simply stupid are mainly just rather upsettingly and fuck-up-the-worldingly wrong.
So what now? I thought I'd make a list of the books that I have to read at the moment, or books that I'm half way through. This  may be a long task, and I might give up halfway, as i have given  up half way in so many of these texts.

Churchill - biography by Roy Jenkins - half read.  It's a bit massive, Churchill isn't that intrinsically interesting compared to, say, Lincoln (Team of Rivals is a long plod, but I finished that), or Nixon (Jonathan Aitken's biography - one perjurer writes about another - I really liked the irony of that, and it's well written & interesting - Nixon is a fascinating character.

number9garden - Dacid Mitchel - he of Cloud Atlas - picked it up 2nd hand. Really liked

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet  

Incandescence - Greg Egan - half way though this, left off about a year ago as i ran out of steam - going to have toi pick up a complex plot again to finish this.

Dostoevsky - Rowan Williams - the ex Arch Bishop of Canterbury's critical study of Dostoevsky, that I struggle with - I'm going to have to restart this. 

We Yevgeny Zamyatin - started this, but found it fundamentally depressing, in the same way that I found The Handmaid's Daughter fundamentally depressing - so won't finish this - must give it back to its owner.

Then there's two or three more Roth, and two or three more Richard Ford, The English Patient, book 5 or 6 of Game of Thrones , and that's apart from the maths stuff I'm interested in, poker books, new issues of Asimov's and Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Started a story in the latter last night which is strangely compelling (I can't be arsed to think of anything more original to say) - a story of Quakers hiding a runaway slave, but finding that the slave hunter after him is a metal built simulacrum full of cogs and gears - kind of steampunk meets Django Unchained - it's so fantastical, yet it's kept my interest - in fact I 'll finish it now.

And of course the next two books in the Dirty Havana trilogy.
There's probably more lurking downstairs - books that I've picked up somewhere and didn't quite get around to starting, +there's Charles D'Ambrosio's The Point in the post, and none of this counts any of the re-reading I'd like to do.  

Portnoy's Complaint- still about day 7

As he moves from invective and spleen, so we get this warm hearted vision of a tight -knit Jewish childhood, it's the voice of his conscience speaking. It gives balance in a mawkish but genuine sort of way. My mother sometimes says. "You did have a good childhood didn't you?, we were good parents weren't we?"   I can only ever grunt in reply and brush it off.  Yes I was well loved as a child, and except for the over sensitive child's fear and loathing ( I was over sensitive and very bright), it was a great childhood.  But both my parents had no comprehension whatsoever what it was like to be me.  They weren't educated, they weren't intellectual, they had no idea what it was like to be a teenager in the late sixties and early seventies. That wasn't their fault - they had completely limited backgrounds, but it is sad that it caused this huge gap between us - of course I loved them and was loved back, but I could see, from about the age of seven on, that they weren't worldly or experienced, they were naive and guileless in the new riches of that period.

One of the great things about going to Sussex University in the seventies was being to do all sorts of wacky course ( I was in the School of Cultural and Community Studies).  I did an experiential course on Family Therapy, and wrote a dissertation for it based on Alan Garner's Red Shift and my own education far beyond my parent's understanding.  Best image I have though is Julie Burchill saying that when she was writing upstairs ( at least she had an upstairs we lived in a fucking 2 bedroom bungalow - I never appreciated how much it really meant ot be able to be on a different floor until I moved into a house, anyway her mother used to say, of that's so nice that you're practicing your typing.
.

Portnoy's Complaint - day 7ish

Beginning to read faster now, finding the genuinely funny bits every few pages, like flicking through the New Yorker or Private Eye just looking for the cartoons. It's still a great sustained rant, reaching out beyond just the Jewish background. As one of the most famous and most quoted lines in the novel says:


"What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds— as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America— maybe..."

Roth, Philip (2010-09-07). Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage Blue) (Kindle Locations 2802-2804). Vintage. Kindle Edition. 


I like that rage and that ambition, biting the hand that feeds you, not because you don't want to be fed, not because you want it to stop, but because of what the other hand is doing, all the seedy, small time and big time injustices perpetrated by, for example, a cunt like Cameron.  That's always been my fallback position for the Tories, for the right wing - you have to look down on them with ridicule as well as dislike (not hatred - after all that's their trademark, their underbelly darkness).

Portnoy's Complaint - what day 4,5,6?

A terrible failure to write in this blog, which was meant to be daily. Mainly because busy and distracted.  But also Portnoy's complaint is a difficult book to write about, in that it says all that it needs itself. It's not a book with deep layers - it is a hilarious romp through insatiable male sexuality set in a Jewish context. It's the sort of book I'm really glad someone wrote, just to prise out of the woodwork all those repressed and unhappy people who don't like having fun with sex and identity. Apparently it caused outrage in some of the Jewish community, surprise, surprise, but it's pretty damning about Catholics too, and by extension, any guilt laden oppressive religious morality. Of course the sex offends the weaker sensibility - great! They need offending. They're probably musing on the possibilities of a piece of liver even as they complain.  

A lot is made of Roth's misogyny - but it's a COMEDY, and I think it's quite sweet and appreciative of the joys of women's bodies - what man doesn't look around and think about that secret, wet fissure of delights - men like cunts (and breasts, and - well you get the picture), get over it and that's a great thing for everybody.