Month: December 2021

Of course there were millions and millions of books that I left unread in 2021, but here are a few I hope to carve a space for sometime in the next year:

Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps (in translation by Vincent Kling) has been compared to Joyce and Döblin. I got a copy last month and couldn’t commit to the beast’s size. I was trying to make it through Thanksgiving and the end of the 2021 Fall term—this year I’ve favored short books and comfortable rereads I’ve bookended 2021 with rereads of Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian (such comfort!)—The Strudlhof Steps is long long long.

Also long long long (but not as compressed in its typography) is Pierre Senges’ Ahab (Sequels) (in translation is by Jacob Siefring). I’ve dipped into it a few times since I got a copy back in October, but haven’t been able to make the commitment I need to. I’ll get it in in 2022. (Sample here.)

I picked up Alan Garner’s novel Red Shift based on its cover and a blurb from Ursula K. LeGuin—also, it’s pretty short, and, like I’ve said, I’ve done well with short books this year. Hell, maybe I’ll even squeeze it in. Martin Levin’s 1973 minireview in the NYT:

Mr. Garner jump‐cuts nimbly through English history to underscore (I guess) the continuity of such commonalities as love and aggression. Macey is an early Briton, who talks Clockwork Orange style and lays about him in a hypnotic frenzy with his ceremonial stone axe. The axe‐head later becomes a talisman for Thomas Rowley (a 17th‐century citizen who cements it into his chimney) and for Tom, a young 20th‐century Now person, who sells it to the British Museum.

What links these three? Well, there is the artifact. And the place, a rural locus in Cheshire. Finally, there is selfless love —which seems to have survived the centuries. Macey is a twosome with a priestess in the corn festival, who is tender under some trying circumstances. Rowley’s wife stands by him during the bad times of Cromwell. Tom has tender bicycle outings with a student nurse.

Why three periods in time? Well, why not?

I’ve actually read a few chunks of John Berryman’s biography of Stephen Crane (which spine does not read so clearly in yon photograph above). I’ve been picking my way back through Crane, an underappreciated modernist master. I might not read the whole thing straight ever, but I will read it crooked.

Papa Hamlet showed up at the assend of the summer, by which I mean the very beginning of the Fall 2021 semester. This 1889 collaboritve novel by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf is available in English translation via James J. Conway for the first time ever. Read an excerpt here.

W.D. Clarke’s novel She Sang to Them, She Sang is a strange shape and volume. Also, for the first time in my life, my eyes are kinda fucked up. I have to wear different cheap glasses to see smaller print. This personal fact is embedded in my encounter with Clarke’s second novel.

I read Kobo Abe’s most famous novel Woman in the Dunes, but failed to get past the first ten pages of Secret Rendezvous (in English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter). Woman in the Dunes is the sort of thing that I should’ve loved at 19, 20, 25. Maybe Rendezvous will do it for me in ’22.