Varamo by César Aira (translated by Chris Andrews, whose work you should be familiar with). Forthcoming from the good people at New Directions.
I’ve been wanting to read some Aira since some readers suggested him (in the comments for this post where I bashed on Chad Harbach’s novel).
Anyway, details:
Check out literary mugshots at The Composites. (H/t to ‘klept reader JESCIE for pointing me to this cool site; yes, we know The Believer did a similar thing a few years ago).
D.H. Lawrence in his long essay Apocalypse:
Now a book lives as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, it dies at once. It is an amazing thing, how utterly different a book will be, if I read it again after five years. Some books gain immensely, they are a new thing. They are so astonishingly different, they make a man question his own identity. Again, other books lose immensely. I read War and Peace once more, and was amazed to find how little it moved me, I was almost aghast to think of the raptures I had once felt, and now felt no more.
Gail Jones’s Five Bells is new from Picador:
On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water.
But just as Circular Quay resonates with Australia’s past, each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere. Each person is haunted by past secrets and guilt. Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin, and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China’s Cultural Revolution.
Told over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives that come to share not only a place and a time but also mysterious patterns and ambiguous symbols, including a barely glimpsed fifth figure, a young child. By nightfall, when Sydney is drenched in a summer rainstorm, each life will have been transformed by the events of this day
Biblioklept 