Author: Biblioklept

Afterword — Chester Arnold

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Afterword, 2009 by Chester Arnold (b. 1952)

Santa Sangre — Moebius

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Sante Sangre, c. 1982 by Moebius (Jean Giraud, 1938–2012)

Mass-market Monday | Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer

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The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe. Timescape/Pocket Books (1981). No cover designer or artist credited. 262 pages.

While no cover artist is credited, Don Maitz is the artist for this edition of The Shadow of the Torturer, as well as for the other three books in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy. Maitz is credited on the dust jackets of the original hardback first editions (Simon & Schuster) of the series.

The Book of the New Sun is absolutely astounding.

From Peter Bebergal’s 2015 New Yorker profile on Wolfe, “Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius”:

For science-fiction readers, “The Book of the New Sun” is roughly what “Ulysses” is to fans of the modern novel: far more people own a copy than have read it all the way through. A surreal bildungsroman, the book centers on a character named Severian. Trained as a torturer on the planet Urth, where torturers are a feared and powerful guild, Severian betrays his order by showing mercy, allowing a prisoner to kill herself rather than be subjected to his terrible ministrations. He then wanders the land encountering giants, anarchists, and members of religious cults. He eventually meets and supplants the ruler of Urth, the Autarch.

The four books that make up the series are sometimes vexing. A wise reader will keep a dictionary nearby, but it won’t always prove useful. Though Wolfe relies merely on the strangeness of English—rather than creating a new language, like Elven or Klingon—he nonetheless dredges up some truly obscure words: cataphract, fuligin, metamynodon, cacogens. The setting appears medieval, but slowly we tease out that what is ancient to these characters was once our own possible future. A desert’s sands are the glass of a great city, and the creaking steel walls that make up Severian’s cell in the guild dormitory is likely an ancient spaceship. Reading “The Book of the New Sun” is dizzying; at times, you become convinced that you have cracked a riddle, and yet the answer fails to illuminate the rest of the story. Wolfe doesn’t reveal the truth behind any of the central mysteries explicitly, but lets them carry the narrative along. At first, one hopes that they will eventually be resolved. Ultimately, they become less important than Severian’s quest for his own truth.

Stephen Dixon on Thomas Bernhard

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“The Plug,” by Stephen Dixon, was published in the winter 1997 issue of Rain Taxi.

I did a coupla readings for my last novel, Gould, and at one of them a guy in the audience said “Were you influenced by Thomas Bernhard?” and I said “Why, because of the long paragraphs? To tell you the truth, I know he has a great reputation but I started two Bernhard books and I didn’t think he did the long paragraph that well. They were repetitive, a bit formally and almost too rigidly written, and I often lost track of the story in them, and other things why I didn’t like them, although what, I forget.” “No,” he said, “or maybe that, but also because Gould is a character in one of his books too, The Loser. I just thought it was too much of a coincidence that you hadn’t read a lot of him and been influenced,” and I said “Gould? That guy’s name in his book is Gould? I thought I made up that forename,” and he said “Glenn Gould,” and I said “No, my character is Gould Bookbinder and he doesn’t play the piano though I think he does love Bach above all composers and especially the composition Gouldberg Variations,” and he said “That’s another thing. The first part of your novel is about variations of a single theme, abortions, right?–or that’s what you said,” and I said, “So, another coincidence. But you made me interested; I’ll read The Loser.” I didn’t, though, but a month later a colleague of mine asked if I’d ever read Bernhard’s The Loser and I said “Why, because of the long paragraphs, though he only seems to have one paragraph a book, and because of the name Gould, though I don’t know if you know–” and she said “I do: first name, not last name. But I was thinking you’d like him. The two of you do a lot of the same things. The urban settings, dark but comical nature of your characters, their dislike of so many things, though your narrators for the past ten years of your work have been fathers to the extreme as well as loyal husbands, while none of his main characters seem to have children and they never marry either or have sex, at least not in the books,” and I said “This is a double coincidence, your bringing up The Loser and someone at a recent reading bringing it up, or maybe ‘coincidence’ isn’t the right word. And sure, I understand it: Gould, the name, and my love for losers, and the long paragraph, so I’m going to read that book, I promise; the next book I start will be The Loser.” “What’re you reading now?” she said and I said “I forget; what am I reading now? It can’t be too interesting if I don’t know what it is. It isn’t interesting, in fact, so I’m going to buy a copy of his book today.” Usually I put things like this off, or just forget it, but this time I didn’t. I have to have a book to read and The Loser sounded like the one, but more out of curiosity, which isn’t a good reason for me to read a book, than because I was interested in it as literature. So I bought it that day, started it that night, and loved it. There’s my literary criticism. The single paragraph worked. So did Glenn Gould as a supporting character and Horowitz in the background. The book was funny and deep and crabby and dark and obsessive. He had his Gould and I had mine and the coincidence of the two of us using the same name, though his last but first and mine first but second, and intrigued, maybe for the same reason–I don’t know what his is but mine is that I can’t write anything anymore but in a single paragraph–by the long paragraph is, well . . . I lost my thought and apologize for the disarray. I liked it because it was intelligent, or should I say “I also liked it because,” and it was short, though took me a long time to finish, relatively speaking, since my eyes aren’t what they used to be and eyeglasses don’t do what they used to do for me and my body gets tireder faster than it used to and after a long day of work, and every day seems to be a long day of work, only a little of it my writing, I don’t have that much time to read the book, which is the only way I like to read: I want to read it, I want to read him. And after I read it I wanted to immediately read another Bernhard book, that’s the effect the first one had, so I got Woodcutters and read that and loved it and thought it was better than The Loser, funnier, crabbier, darker, more opinionated and artistic, he did things in this he didn’t in the other, trickier literary things: the guy sitting in the chair three quarters of the book, never getting out of it, just observing and thinking about what he observes, like someone out of Beckett’s novels but better, though Bernhard must have lifted it from Beckett, at least spiritually–do I know what I’m saying? Let me just say there was a very Beckettian feeling about Woodcutters. Anyway, after that one I immediately got another one, Yes, and didn’t much like it–it was older Bernhard, early Bernhard, it didn’t take the risks, it didn’t compel me to read, and it had paragraphs, I think, and I got The Lime Works and it was only so-so, and I thought “Have I read the very best of Bernhard or is it that his later works are better than his early ones?” and so got Old Masters, one of the last books of Bernhard, I think, and thought that the best one, again the man sitting in a chair, though it’s a couch in a museum, and it was even more vitriolic than Woodcutters, and next immediately read Concrete and thought that a very good one and I’m now reading Correction and liking it and I will probably read The Cheap-Eaters, without even thinking “early, late, middle Bernhard,” what do I care anymore? I just want to continue to read the guy, though a German professor at Hopkins where I teach told me there are more than twenty Bernhard novels, not all of them translated but all of them to be translated, and I told her maybe that’ll be too many for me to read, but you never know. I asked this woman “By the way, this Austrian writer Stifter, he mentions in Old Masters, he’s not a real person, is he?” and she said “Oh yes, very famous, a traditionalist, not too well known in America,” and I said “Amazing what Bernhard gets away with. Imagine an American writer working into his texts such excoriations of other writers, including contemporaries, which Bernhard does too. And knocking the Academy and prize givers, as Bernhard does in almost all his books: in America writers claw each other to get prizes and, you know, throw up on the hands that pin the medals on their chests and stuff the checks into their pockets. Some of his thoughts are a bit odd and wrongheaded if not occasionally loony,” I said, “but most I agree with. And after reading a lot of him, in addition to all the other similarities people have mentioned–well, really, just two people–and I don’t think the first ever read my work, just picked it up from the reading I gave and what was on the book jacket–is . . . oh, I forget what I was going to say.” I want to end this by saying I haven’t been so taken by one writer since I was in my mid-twenties and started reading everything Saul Bellow had written up till then. And in my early twenties, I read one Thomas Mann book after the other, probably not completing his entire oeuvre but getting close. And before that, when I was eighteen, I read everything of Dostoevski’s that had been translated. And I forgot Joyce and my mid-twenties when I read everything he wrote, though his corpus wasn’t by any means as large as Mann’s or Dostoevski’s. And one last note: Please don’t think I’m writing this as a plug for my own Gould. Or that what I just said in that last sentence is an additional plug. I hate writers who plug their books, who sort of work in a reference to their books, especially the new ones, whenever they can. I only brought up my book because it’s consequential to this inconsequential minor essay on Bernhard and that if I hadn’t written a book called Gould I probably wouldn’t have read The Loser and, of course, after that, another half-dozen Bernhard books. Did I use “inconsequential” right, then? Perhaps even to call this an essay is absurd, though to call it inconsequential and minor isn’t. But I hope I just did what I always like to do and that’s to belittle my own work and show myself as a writer who’s part bumbling semimoron. And also done what I’ve never done in print before, so far as I can remember, and my memory isn’t that good, and that is to plug the work of someone else and write even in the most exaggerated definition of the word an essay. “Exaggerated” isn’t the word I meant, I think, but I’m sure you know what I mean even in my probable misuse of it.

The old men get so they can’t stand the competition and they kill off all the young men | From Angela Carter’s Wise Children

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You must remember that there was a war on, when we were born. If we made her happy, then we didn’t add much to the collective sum of happiness in the whole of South London. First of all, the neighbours’ sons went marching off, sent to their deaths, God help them. Then the husbands, the brothers, the cousins, until, in the end, all the men went except the ones with one foot in the grave and those still in the cradle, so there was a female city, red-eyed, dressed in black, outside the door, and Grandma said it then, she said it again in 1939: ‘Every twenty years, it’s bound to happen. It’s to do with generations. The old men get so they can’t stand the competition and they kill off all the young men they can lay their hands on. They daren’t be seen to do it themselves, that would give the game away, the mothers wouldn’t stand for it, so all the men all over the world get together and make a deal: you kill off our boys and we’ll kill off yours. So that’s that. Soon done. Then the old men can sleep easy in their beds, again.’

From Wise Children by Angela Carter.

The Reader — Henri Fantin-Latour

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The Reader (Marie Fantin Latour, the Artist’s Sister), 1861 by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904)

Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy | John Barth

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Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy—these are not the whole story either.

A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naïveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels (by my definition) as Beckett’s Texts for Nothing or Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace—not to mention the great mass of television-addicted non-readers. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art.

I feel this in particular for practitioners of the novel, a genre whose historical roots are famously and honorably in middle-class popular culture. The ideal postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and “contentism,” pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction. Alas for professors of literature, it may not need as much teaching as Joyce’s or Nabokov’s or Pynchon’s books, or some of my own. On the other hand, it will not wear its heart on its sleeve, either; at least not its whole heart. (In a recent published exchange between William Gass and John Gardner, Gardner declares that he wants everybody to love his books; Gass replies that he would no more want his books to be loved by everybody than he’d want his daughter to be loved by everybody, and suggests that Gardner is confusing love with promiscuity.) My own analogy would be with good jazz or classical music: One finds much on successive listenings or close examination of the score that one didn’t catch the first time through; but the first time through should be so ravishing—and not just to specialists—that one delights in the replay.

Lest this postmodern synthesis sound both sentimental and impossible of attainment, I offer two quite different examples of works which I believe approach it, as perhaps such giants as Dickens and Cervantes may be said to anticipate it. The first and more tentative example (it is not meant to be a blockbuster) is Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965): beautifully written, enormously appealing space-age fables—“perfect dreams,” John Updike has called them—whose materials are as modern as the new cosmology and as ancient as folktales, but whose themes are love and loss, change and permanence, illusion and reality, including a good deal of specifically Italian reality. Like all fine fantasists, Calvino grounds his nights in local, palpable detail: Along with the nebulae and the black holes and the lyricism, there is a nourishing supply of pasta, bambini, and good-looking women sharply glimpsed and gone forever. A true postmodernist, Calvino keeps one foot always in the narrative past—characteristically the Italian narrative past of Boccaccio, Marco Polo, or Italian fairy tales—and one foot in, one might say, the Parisian structuralist present; one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality, etc. It is appropriate that he has, I understand, been chastized from the left by the Italian communist critics and from the right by the Italian Catholic critics; it is symptomatic that he has been praised by fellow authors as divergent as John Updike, Gore Vidal, and myself. I urge everyone to read Calvino at once, beginning with Cosmicomics and going right on, not only because he exemplifies my postmodernist program, but because his fiction is both delicious and high in protein.

An even better example is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967): as impressive a novel as has been written so far in the second half of our century and one of the splendid specimens of that splendid genre from any century. Here the synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism and magic and myth, political passion and nonpolitical artistry, characterization and caricature, humor and terror, are so remarkably sustained that one recognizes with exhilaration very early on, as with Don Quixote and Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn, that one is in the presence of a masterpiece not only artistically admirable, but humanly wise, lovable, literally marvelous. One had almost forgotten that new fiction could be so wonderful as well as so merely important. And the question whether my program for postmodernism is achievable goes happily out the window, like one of García Márquez’s characters on flying carpets. Praise be to the Spanish language and imagination! As Cervantes stands as an exemplar of premodernism and a great precursor of much to come, and Jorge Luis Borges as an exemplar of dernier cri modernism and at the same time as a bridge between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth, so Gabriel García Márquez is in that enviable succession: an exemplary postmodernist and a master of the storyteller’s art.

From John Barth’s 1980 essay “The Literature of Replenishment.”

Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book — Vincent van Gogh

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Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book, 1888 by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

“Daniela de Montecristo” — Roberto Bolaño

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“Daniela de Montecristo”

by

Roberto Bolaño

translated by Chris Andrews

from Nazi Literature in the Americas

Daniela de Montecristo

Buenos Aires, 1918–Córdoba, Spain, 1970

Daniela de Montecristo was a woman of legendary beauty, surrounded by an enduring aura of mystery. The stories that have circulated about her first years in Europe (1938-1947) rarely concur and often flatly contradict one another. It has been said that among her lovers were Italian and German generals (including the infamous Wolff, SS and Police Chief in Italy); that she fell in love with a general in the Rumanian army, Eugenio Entrescu, who was crucified by his own soldiers in 1944; that she escaped from Budapest under siege disguised as a Spanish nun; that she lost a suitcase full of poems while secretly crossing the border from Austria into Switzerland in the company of three war criminals; that she had audiences with the Pope in 1940 and 1941; that out of unrequited love for her, a Uruguayan and then a Colombian poet committed suicide; and, that she had a black swastika tattooed on her left buttock.

Her literary work, leaving aside the juvenilia lost among the icy peaks of Switzerland, never to appear again, consists of a single book, with a rather epic title: The Amazons, published by Quill Argentina, with a preface by the widow Mendiluce, who could not be accused of restraint when it came to lavishing praise (in one paragraph, relying solely on her feminine intuition, she compared the legendary poems lost in the Alps to the work of Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina Storni).

The Amazons is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages of avant-garde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires.

The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions of the Women’s Fourth Reich—with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its training grounds in Patagonia—and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions about a gland that produces the feeling of love.

Mass-market Monday | William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

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Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner. Vintage Books Edition (1971). Cover photo by Robert Wenkham. 383 pages.

Go Down, Moses is my favorite William Faulkner text (some say it’s a collection of stories, but I think it’s a novel). “The Bear” might be the best thing he wrote. Read the opener, “Was.” 

From “Was”:

Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike’, past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one

this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac’s, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father’s slaves still bore in the land. But Isaac was not one of these:-a widower these twenty years, who in all his life had owned but one object more than he could wear and carry in his pockets and his hands at one time, and this was the narrow iron cot and the stained lean mattress which he used camping in the woods for deer and bear or for fishing or simply because he loved the woods; who owned no property and never desired te since the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as light and air and weather were; who lived still in the cheap frame bungalow in Jefferson which his wife’s father gave them on their marriage and which his wife had willed to him at her death and which he had pretended to accept, acquiesce to, to humor her, ease her going but which was not his, will or not, chancery dying wishes mortmain possession or whatever, himself merely holding it for his wife’s sister and her children who had lived in it with him since his wife’s death, holding himself welcome to live in one room of it as he had during his wife’s time or she during her time or the sister-in-law and her children during the rest of his and after not something he had participated in or even remembered except from the hearing, the listening, come to him through and from his cousin McCaslin born in 1850 and sixteen years his senior and hence, his own father being near seventy when Isaac, an only child, was born. rather his brother than cousin and rather his father than either, out of the old time, the old days.

When he and Uncle Buck ran back to the house from discovering that Tomey’s Turl had run again, they heard Uncle Buddy cursing and bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox and the dogs came out of the kitchen and crossed the hall into the dogs’ room and they heard them run through the dogs’ room into his and Uncle Buck’s room then they saw them cross the hall again into Uncle Buddy’s room and heard them run through Uncle Buddy’s room into the kitchen. Where Uncle Buddy was picking the breakfast up out of the ashes and wiping it off with his apron. “What in damn’s hell do you mean,” he said “turning that damn fox out with the dogs all loose in the house?”

“Damn the fox” Uncle Buck said. “Tomey’s Turl has broke out again. Give me and Cass some breakfast quick we might just barely catch him before he gets there.”

A gifted writer is likely to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles | John Barth

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It goes without saying that critical categories are as more or less fishy as they are less or more useful. I happen to believe that just as an excellent teacher is likely to teach well no matter what pedagogical theory he suffers from, so a gifted writer is likely to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles, not to mention what others take to be his aesthetic principles. Indeed, I believe that a truly splendid specimen in whatever aesthetic mode will pull critical ideology along behind it, like an ocean liner trailing seagulls. Actual artists, actual texts, are seldom more than more or less modernist, postmodernist, formalist, symbolist, realist, surrealist, politically committed, aesthetically “pure,” “experimental,” regionalist, internationalist, what have you. The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories. On the other hand, art lives in human time and history, and general changes in its modes and materials and concerns, even when not obviously related to changes in technology, are doubtless as significant as the changes in a culture’s general attitudes, which its arts may both inspire and reflect. Some are more or less trendy and superficial, some may be indicative of more or less deep malaises, some perhaps healthy correctives of or reactions against such malaises.

From John Barth’s 1980 essay “The Literature of Replenishment.”

Without Even Looking — Nigel Van Wieck

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Without Even Looking by Nigel Van Wieck (b. 1947)

Mid-August riff; some books acquired, etc.

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The last two weeks flew by. My kids went back to school this week; they are attending the same school for the first time since elementary school, high school,my own dear mother, that school, and I am relieved, if only temporarily from driving duties. We are making pizzas in an hour or two to celebrate the first Friday of their school year (we make pizzas every Friday as a nifty fridge clearing activity, but let’s not ruin the sparkle). My own semester starts the week after next and I realize that I need to do something more with my summers now that my children are so much older than they were when they were little children, when I was with them all summer, or if I wasn’t exactly right there with them I was hovering in the background.

I am on track to read fewer novels, or books, or whatever, than I read in July of this year. I finished Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions and liked it very much, or liked the experience or feeling of reading it, whatever that means, and I owe it a proper review. In July I read Katherine Dunn’s debut novel Attic and loved it. I couldn’t find her 1971 follow-up Truck in any of the used bookstores I frequent, so I ended up listening to it on audiobook. Maybe it was the narrator’s narration but I found it disappointing, but I still appreciate its grime and its abjection and its picaresque energy. I also checked out some Stephen Dixon e-books from my library; I read a handful of fucked up stories (a piece called “The Intruder” was especially weird) before digging into his 1988 novel Garbage. I read the first half of Garbage last night and I don’t even know how to describe it—it’s sort of like wandering upon some forgotten gritty 1970s American exploitation film made by an insane but focused auteur. But it’s also very normal in a way I will not explain. It’s uncanny.

I purged about thirty paperbacks last week at my local used bookstore and ordered a copy of the latest Antoine Volodine novel, Gina M. Stamm’s translation of Mevlido’s Dreams. A recent reading of Volodine’s Radiant Terminus left me hungry for more of that sweet gross post-exotic flavor. I went to pick up the Volodine today and ended up with two hardbacks. I admit that the blurb on the back of Thomas Sullivan’s 1989 novel Born Burning sold me; it compared his previous novel to William Gaddis, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut. I also snapped up a first-edition hardback 1985 edition of William S. Burroughs’s novel Queer, which I fear was quite underpriced, although I don’t fear that too much. (All my sweet purged paperback credit is gone!)

I am ready for the summer to end.

“The Rest of the Novel” — Stanley Elkin

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“The Rest of the Novel”

an essay by

Stanley Elkin

collected in Pieces of Soap

For conveying ideas, novels are among the least functional and most decorative of the blunt instruments. (Could this be a universal truth, some starry, operative mathematical principle? Most stars are decorative too, of course, their function merely to peg the universe in place like studs in upholstery, servicing the elegancies, strumming its physics like a man with a blue guitar, fleshing all the centripetals and centrifugals, stringing the planets like beads, some beautiful pump of placement, arranging night, moving the planetary furniture, and fixing the astronomical data, but less useful, finally, in the sense that a handful more here or a dollop less there could make as much of a never mind as corks or rhythm, less useful, finally, than mail or ice cream.) And if, a few times in a way, novels like Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast or Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath come along to legislate, or raise a consciousness or two, or rouse a rabble, to make, I mean, what history or the papers call a difference, why that’s decorative, too, I think, a lip service the system, touching the bases like a superstitious braille, pays art—like, oh, the claims made a few years back for the “We Are the World” folks when it was really the Catholic Relief Services already on site during the Ethiopian famine that did the heavy lifting.

Well it’s not the novelist’s fault. Not that they don’t deserve some of the blame, leaking encouragement like someone paying out line to fish, some of your have-cake-and-eat-its like a little miracle of the loaves. And there are still a few big mouths who stake claims for the ameliorative shamanism of—hark! this is interesting: not the book so much as the writer—the practice of fiction—the loyal, Nutso Art Jerk Groupie, like some devoted cultist, the last Deadhead, say, worrying like holy beads the shoelace on his wrist he thinks is a bracelet making confrontation with an Elvis Presley impersonator.

Isn’t it pretty to think so, though? To take oneself as seriously as one’s readers sometimes do? To believe, if only briefly, and if only by the light off the gloss of the brittlest mood swing, in the justice or even the palpability of one’s cause, to Don Quixote principle, any principle, and raise to the level of purpose what in the final analysis is only what given egos, fashionably or not, fashion or no, frozen in mere season’s hipped au courantness, perceive as beauty. Continue reading ““The Rest of the Novel” — Stanley Elkin” →

Old Man Reading — Vincent van Gogh

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Old Man Reading, 1882 by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

Mass-market Monday | Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes’s P’s Three Women

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P’s Three Women, Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes. Translation by Margaret A. Neves. Avon Bard (1984). No cover artist credited. 136 pages.

Gomes’s only novel got a reprint from Dalkey Archive back in 2012 with a new introduction by translator Margaret Neves, who notes that in “Portuguese, the title of this book is Trés Mulheres de trés PPPés. The expression “p-p-p” means chitchat, bla-bla-bla. Hence, three women and their chitchats. In addition to echoing the narrator’s first initial, the term is lightly condescending to the women, just like P himself.”

Annie Reading — Lucian Freud

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Annie Reading, 1961 by Lucian Freud (1922-2011)