This post is modelled on Nick Hornby’s monthly column in Believer magazine. The only excuse I can offer is that it is done so shamelessly.
(The columns from September 2003 to November 2004 were, in fact, compiled in a book called The Polysyllabic Spree. At the time I read this I was too young to understand what a bloody great gig this was for Hornby. In the unlikely event anyone from The Believer is reading and Nick is ever late with his copy, hit me up.)
Books Bought (from wordery.com)
The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (trans. John Rutherford)
The Creative Writing Coursebook—Ed. Julia Bell & Paul Magrs
Good Books Left in the Flat I Inherited
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet—David Mitchell
The Remains of the Day—Kazuo Ishiguro
Slaughterhouse Five—Kurt Vonnegut (Also Cat’s Cradle)
Candide—Voltaire
Some translation of Beowulf
The Sense of an Ending—Julian Barnes
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 1—Arthur Conan Doyle
Purple Hibiscus—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Other books
Books Read
Slaughterhouse Five—Kurt Vonnegut
The Silent Cry—Kenzaburo Oe
War Music—Christopher Logue
Tabloid Secrets—Neville Thurlbeck (review forthcoming in Hinchley Wood magazine!!)
The Yellow Wolf—Grant Tarbard (my review on Sabotage Reviews: http://sabotagereviews.com/2015/09/03/yellow-wolf-by-grant-tarbard/)
Books in Process of Being Read
Don Quixote—Cervantes
Ulysses—James Joyce (Gabler edition)
New Life—Dan O’Brien
I can’t help it. I adore books left behind in houses by anonymous people. Just like I adore messages in second-hand books like this:
This is what’s written on the inside of the copy of Ulysses I purchased from abebooks.com. Did you enjoy Ulysses Mark? I hope so. I remain on the hunt for the Christmas ’88 Finnegan’s Wake.
(Incidentally, I have only just learned that AbeBooks, which I love, was purchased by Amazon way back in 2008. Fuck you Amazon. Henceforth, I will try to use Wordery, which offers free worldwide delivery - a perk you’ll just have to forget is probably already factored into their prices.)
I am doing/participating on/etc. the JET Programme which is what has facilitated my move to Nagasaki, Japan at the beginning of August. My apartment has housed a long line of ‘JETs’ - in the semi-epic cleanup I found a ‘Nagasaki Jet Revue 1999’ programme - and my predecessors left quite a lot of good books.
Slaughterhouse Five was great. It’s a powerful book, and short, which in a roundabout way is about the firebombing of Dresden. I believe Vonnegut does get some facts wrong about Dresden (particularly in comparison to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but it doesn’t matter.
Dresden after the fire-bombing: one of the arresting photographs ever taken
Kenzaburo Oe’s The Silent Cry I purchased some time ago but neglected because the opening was difficult. Oe is the 1994 Nobel Laureate for Literature. This novel, which is very highly regarded, is about a couple who’s son is born retarded (as was Oe’s son Hikari). The protagonist, Mitsu, is a translator who’s blind in one eye. The wife has taken to drink, the marriage become sexless. They meet Mitsu’s magnetic younger brother Takahashi, returning from America, and two young disciples of his at Tokyo airport, before journeying to their family home in Shikoku (the smallest of Japan’s four main islands) to finalise a property deal with a Korean supermarket magnate. I’d say it’s both a troubling work and quite Japanese, its plot centrally concerning uprisings preceding the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Korean-Japanese relations, infidelity, disability, the intrusion of modern, urban life into rural Japanese communities and the formation of a football team. It’s a visceral book, full of human sadness and cruelty although it felt to me like Oe did not totally know how to end what he’d unleashed.
Also of great interest to me is The Silent Cry’s relation to the works of Haruki Murakami, who I love. Mitsu recurrently refers to himself as the rat - Murakami’s opening three novels are known as the trilogy of the rat and feature a character with the same nickname. The Silent Cry’s Japanese title, which roughly translates as football in the first year of Man’en (March 1860 - February 1861), is mirrored by Murakami’s second work Pinball, 1973. It is overwhelmingly likely that I will read Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 at some point, particularly considering a new, combined translation, Wind/Pinball, was released in August. I could wait until my Japanese is good enough but I’d probably be waiting about four years.
Christopher Logue’s War Music is “An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad ”. Suffice to say, I won’t be able to do justice to it here. I do a lot of reading in bed and long, narrative poems can be quite difficult to focus on in that setting. But it’s brilliant. I read the Rieu’s prose translation of The Iliad sometime before Christmas and, to be honest, it was pretty boring. Logue, who can’t read Greek, is extremely liberal and daring with his source material. He makes use of almost cinematic cuts (“Reverse the shot.//Go close.”). The imagery is highly original, many of the smilies and epithets modernised but not at all in a forced way. It’s visually interesting, with a lot of free experimentation with typefaces and line lengths:
Patroclus fought like dreaming:
His head thrown back, his mouth – wide as a shrieking mask –
Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind
And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him…
– Kill them!
My sweet Patroclus
– Kill them!
As many as you can,
For
Coming behind you through the dust you felt
– What was it? – felt Creation part, and then
APOLLO! Who had been patient with you
Struck.
It’s difficult on screen (particularly on bloody Blogger) to give due to the visual impact this stanza, which falls across four pages, has. Try to imagine turning the page and seeing "Apollo!" in size 200 font.
War Music was a very enjoyable read, and one I’d like to return to (maybe with a more critical, less sleepy eye). Logue worked on the project for more than 40 years and you can tell, sometimes because of how densely worked it is but more often just because of how good it is. The Iliad, despite being at the foundation of Western Literature, is a surreal, crazy work for the modern reader. Logue embraces this in a way that perhaps conventional prose works just cannot.
Currently, I am double-handing Ulysses and Don Quixote - a hilarious act of literary sincerity and hubris. I have read just 80 pages of the first and 50 of the second so far - leaving a rough total of 1500 to go - although the Don I did just start on holiday. It is entirely possible I will never finish these books (though the Cervantes is funny so I probably will finish that). I am taking it seriously though and reading the Joyce in tandem with Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated - naturally, the “revised and expanded edition”. At the very least, I expect to see benefits of increased arm strength, size and stamina, and to kill a lot of time.
Books definitely to be read after that (are you serious?)
Love in the Time of Cholera—Gabo (bought with me from Britain)
The Temple of the Golden Pavillion—Yukio Mishima (ditto)
Maybe the David Mitchell, set in Nagasaki, though I’d much rather read Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, also set in Nagasaki
Some Ryu Murakami - a ‘Nagasaki author’, in the prefectural sense - he’s from Sasebo. Coin Locker Babies, which sounds dark as dark, has been recommended to me by a teacher at my school
Candide
Wind/Pinball
No comments:
Post a Comment