Untitled, c. 1955 by Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959)
Heaven, 2020 by Hilary Harkness (b. 1971)
Enigmatic Variation II by Enrico Pinardi (1934-2021)
Redburn, Herman Melville. Doubleday Anchor Books (1957). Cover art by Edward Gorey. 301 pages.
Redburn is as good a place as any to start with Melville, I suppose. From Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Melville in Love,” which prompted me to finally read Redburn:
Melville’s state of mind is revealed…with a purity of expressiveness in the novel Redburn, one of his most appealing and certainly the most personal of his works. He is said to have more or less disowned the book, more rather than less, since he claimed it was only written for tobacco. Whether this is a serious misjudgment of his own work or a withdrawal, after the fact, from having shown his early experience of life without his notable reserve and distance is, of course, not clear. For a contemporary reader, Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast among the vicious, ruined men on the ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in the late 1830s, even meeting with the homosexual hustler Harry Bolton might have more interest than Typee’s breadfruit and coconut island and the nymph, Fayaway. But it is only pertinent to think of Redburn on its own: a novel written after Typee, Omoo, and Mardi in the year 1849, ten years after he left Lansingburgh to go on his first voyage.
Nude Girl, 1910 by Gwen John (1876–1939)
Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake. Ballantine Books (1968). No cover artist credited. 543 pages.
The uncredited cover artist is Bob Pepper, who also provided the covers for Ballantine editions of the other two novels in Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. The covers are actually segments from one painting:
The edition also includes black and white illustrations by Peake (including eight glossy inset pages).
I have no idea how I had never even heard of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy until some point late in 2019. I grew up reading fantasy and yet somehow never encountered these strange, dense books. I consumed them in 2020, pressing extra copies on my son.
From my 2020 reading roundup end-of-year post:
Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake
The first of Mervyn Peake’s strange castle (and then not-castle trilogy (not really a trilogy, really)), Titus Groan is weird wonderful grotesque fun. Inspirited by the Machiavellian antagonist Steerpike, Titus Groan can be read as a critique of the empty rituals that underwrite modern life. It can also be read for pleasure alone.
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
Probably the best novel in Peake’s trilogy, Gormenghast is notable for its psychological realism, surreal claustrophobia, and bursts of fantastical imagery. We finally get to know Titus, who is a mute infant in the first novel, and track his insolent war against tradition and Steerpike. The novel’s apocalyptic diluvian climax is amazing.
Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake
A beautiful mess, an episodic, picaresque adventure that breaks all the apparent rules of the first two books. The rulebreaking is fitting though, given that Our Boy Titus (alone!) navigates the world outside of Gormenghast—a world that doesn’t seem to even understand that a Gormenghast exists (!)—Titus Alone is a scattershot epic. Shot-through with a heavy streak of Dickens, Titus Alone never slows down enough for readers to get their bearings. Or to get bored. There’s a melancholy undercurrent to the novel. Does Titus want to get back to his normal—to tradition and the meaningless lore and order that underwrote his castle existence? Or does he want to break quarantine?
Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon as Medieval Saints, 1920 by Edmund Dulac (1822–1953)
The Enamored Mage (Translation #6), 1965 by Jess (1923-2004)
In the Park, 1924 by Marie Laurencin (1883-1956)
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Translation by Gregory Rabassa. Avon Bard (1971). No cover artist credited. 383 pages.
I am a huge fan of the Avon Bard Latin American literature series. (I do wish, however, they had done a better job crediting the cover artists.)
I listened to One Hundred Years of Solitude on audiobook (narrated by John Lee) last week while undertaking a largish home project. I had read the novel maybe twelve years ago, after several false starts, and enjoyed the audiobook very much, even if the story was much, much sadder than I’d remembered. I had registered One Hundred Years of Solitude in my memory as rich and mythic, its robust humor tinged with melancholy spiked with sex and violence. That memory is only partially correct—García Márquez’s novel is darker and more pessimistic than my younger-reader-self could acknowledge.
You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendia family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is also a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendias (inventors, artisans, soldiers lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride biological tragi‐cycle in circles from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.
Puppy Play Date, 2019 by Salman Toor (b. 1983)
Tuxedo, 1983 by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
V., Thomas Pynchon. Bantam Books, third printing (1964). No cover artist credited. 463 pages.
Although artist James Bama is not credited, you can see his signature on the right side of the cover, just above the horizon.
I reread V. a few years back, concluding my piece with,
The grist, grit, and horror of the big postwar world will cling to the present. Nobody’s stepping down from heaven, or Heaven, and there are no magic words—but there is a kind of love, a loving with your mouth shut, a kind of radical, earnest, transcendent love that Pynchon evokes, soils, and sanctifies here.
Leda Got a Gun, 2024 by Anne Herrero (b. 1984)
Nova, Samuel R. Delany. Bantam Books, ninth printing (1979). No cover artist credited. 215 pages.
Although he is not credited, Eddie Jones is the artist for this marvelous cover to Bantam’s mass-market reprint of Delany’s 1968 novel Nova.
Nova is one of my favorite SRD novels. Let me self-plagiarize myself from a few years ago:
I couldn’t make it through Delany’s cult favorite Dhalgren a few years back, but Nova was easier sledding. The book is a riff on Moby-Dick, tarot, monoculture, and the grail quest. It’s jammed with ideas and characters, and if it never quite coheres into something transcendent, it’s a fun quick read (even if the ending, right from the postmodern metatextual playbook is too clever by half).
Straw Boats, 2023 by Mu Pan (b. 1976)
Biblioklept 