Category: Books

Mass-market Monday | Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi

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The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller. Penguin Books (1964). Cover Osbert Lancaster. 248 pages.

From Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi (1941):

At Arachova Ghika got out to vomit. I stood at the edge of a deep canyon and as I looked down into its depths I saw the shadow of a great eagle wheeling over the void. We were on the very ridge of the mountains, in the midst of a convulsed land which was seemingly still writhing and twisting. The village itself had the bleak, frostbitten look of a community cut off from the outside world by an avalanche. There was the continuous roar of an icy waterfall which, though hidden from the eye, seemed omnipresent. The proximity of the eagles, their shadows mysteriously darkening the ground, added to the chill, bleak sense of desolation. And yet from Arachova to the outer precincts of Delphi the earth presents one continuously sublime, dramatic spectacle. Imagine a bubbling cauldron into which a fearless band of men descend to spread a magic carpet. Imagine this carpet to be composed of the most ingenious patterns and the most variegated hues. Imagine that men have been at this task for several thousand years and that to relax for but a season is to destroy the work of centuries. Imagine that with every groan, sneeze or hiccough which the earth vents the carpet is grievously ripped and tattered. Imagine that the tints and hues which compose this dancing carpet of earth rival in splendor and subtlety the most beautiful stained glass windows of the mediaeval cathedrals. Imagine all this and you have only a glimmering comprehension of a spectacle which is changing hourly, monthly, yearly, millennially. Finally, in a state of dazed, drunken, battered stupefaction you come upon Delphi. It is four in the afternoon, say, and a mist blowing in from the sea has turned the world completely upside down. You are in Mongolia and the faint tinkle of bells from across the gully tells you that a caravan is approaching. The sea has become a mountain lake poised high above the mountaintops where the sun is sputtering out like a rum-soaked omelette. On the fierce glacial wall where the mist lifts for a moment someone has written with lightning speed in an unknown script. To the other side, as if borne along like a cataract, a sea of grass slips over the precipitous slope of a cliff. It has the brilliance of the vernal equinox, a green which grows between the stars in the twinkling of an eye.

Seeing it in this strange twilight mist Delphi seemed even more sublime and awe-inspiring than I had imagined it to be. I actually felt relieved, upon rolling up to the little bluff above the pavilion where we left the car, to find a group of idle village boys shooting dice: it gave a human touch to the scene. From the towering windows of the pavilion, which was built along the solid, generous lines of a mediaeval fortress, I could look across the gulch and, as the mist lifted, a pocket of the sea became visible—just beyond the hidden port of Itea. As soon as we had installed our things we looked for Katsimbalis whom we found at the Apollo Hotel—I believe he was the only guest since the departure of H. G. Wells under whose name I signed my own in the register though I was not stopping at the hotel. He, Wells, had a very fine, small hand, almost womanly, like that of a very modest, unobtrusive person, but then that is so characteristic of English handwriting that there is nothing unusual about it.

By dinnertime it was raining and we decided to eat in a little restaurant by the roadside. The place was as chill as the grave. We had a scanty meal supplemented by liberal portions of wine and cognac. I enjoyed that meal immensely, perhaps because I was in the mood to talk. As so oft en happens, when one has come at last to an impressive spot, the conversation had absolutely nothing to do with the scene. I remember vaguely the expression of astonishment on Ghika’s and Katsimbalis’ faces as I unlimbered at length upon the American scene. I believe it was a description of Kansas that I was giving them; at any rate it was a picture of emptiness and monotony such as to stagger them. When we got back to the bluff behind the pavilion, whence we had to pick our way in the dark, a gale was blowing and the rain was coming down in bucketfuls. It was only a short stretch we had to traverse but it was perilous. Being somewhat lit up I had supreme confidence in my ability to find my way unaided. Now and then a flash of lightning lit up the path which was swimming in mud. In these lurid moments the scene was so harrowingly desolate that I felt as if we were enacting a scene from Macbeth. “Blow wind and crack!” I shouted, gay as a mud-lark, and at that moment I slipped to my knees and would have rolled down a gully had not Katsimbalis caught me by the arm. When I saw the spot next morning I almost fainted.

Best Books of 1975?

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Previously:

Best Books of 1972?

Best Books of 1973?

Best Books of 1974?

Not-really-the-rules recap:

I will focus primarily on novels here, or books of a novelistic/artistic scope.

I will include books published in English in 1975; I will not include books published in their original language in 1975 that did not appear in English translation until years later. So for example, Thomas Bernhard’s Korrektur will not appear on this list because although it was published in German in 1975, Sophie Wilkins’ English translation Correction didn’t come out until 1979.

I will not include English-language books published before 1975 that were published that year in the U.S.

I will fail to include titles that should be included, either through oversight or ignorance but never through malice. For example, I failed to include Dinah Brooke’s excellent 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home in my Best Books of 1973? post because I didn’t even know it existed until 2024. Please include titles that I missed in the comments.

So, what were some of the “Best Books of 1975?”

William Gaddis’s novel J R, one of the greatest 20th c. American novels, was published in 1975. I’ll make note of it first as an artistic ballast against the commercial list I’m about to offer up: The New York Times Best Seller list for 1975.

James Michener’s 1974 novel Centennial dominates the NYT list through winter and spring of 1975 (save for a brief one-week blip when Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened published in paperback). By the summer, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers rose to the top of the bestseller, the first novel of 1975 to do so. Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime competed for the top slot throughout the fall of ’75, with Agatha Christie’s final Poirot novel Curtain taking over in the winter.

My sense is that of these bestsellers, Ragtime‘s critical reputation has probably endured the strongest. The editors of the NYT Book Review included Ragtime in their 28 Dec. 1975 year-end round-up, along with Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga and V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas. 

William Gaddis’s J R won the 1976 National Book Award for fiction; Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory took the NBA for nonfiction; the NBA for poetry went to John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Walter D. Edmond’s Bert Breen’s Barn won the NBA for children’s literature. NBA finalists that year included Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Vladimir Nabokov’s story collection Tyrants Destroyed, Johnanna Kaplan’s Other People’s Lives, Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher. (Robert Stone’s excellent 1974 novel Dog Soldiers won the 1975 NBA, if you’re keeping track).

If Bellow was sore about losing the NBA to Gaddis, he could console himself with the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Literature (for Humboldt’s Gift). The 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Eugenio Montale “for his distinctive poetry, which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life without illusions.” Montale did not publish a book in 1975.

The 1975 Booker Prize shortlisted only two of eighty-one novels (both published in 1975):  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust and Thomas Keneally’s Gossip From the Forest. Heat and Dust took the prize.

The American Library Association’s Notable Books of 1975 list echoes many of the titles we’ve already seen, as well as some interesting outliers: Andre Brink’s self-translation of Looking on Darkness (banned by South Africa’s apartheid government), Alan Brody’s Coming To, Ben Greer’s prison novel Slammer, Dagfinn Grønoset’s Anna (translated by Ingrid B. Josephson), Donald Harrington’s The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing toward God, and Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards for 1975 were Doctorow’s Ragtime, R.W.B. Lewis’s biography Edith Wharton, Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

The 1975 Nebula Awards long list is particularly interesting. Along with sci-fi stalwarts like Poul Anderson, Alfred Bester, and Roger Zelzany, the Nebulas expanded their reach to include Doctorow’s Ragtime and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. William Weaver’s translation of Invisible Cities was actually published in 1974 — as was the Nebula winner for 1975, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Significant Nebula Awards shortlist titles published in 1975 include Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Robert Silverberg’s The Stochastic Man, and Tanith Lee’s The Birthgrave. Most notable though is the inclusion of Samuel R. Delaney’s cult classic Dhalgren.

The 1976 Newberry Award went to Susan Cooper’s 1975 novel The Grey King; the Newberry Honor Titles were Sharon Bell Mathis’s The Hundred Penny Box (illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon) and Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings. Other notable books for children and adolescents published in 1975 include Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Brave, and Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World. 

Awards aside, commercial successes for 1975 included Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys, Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed, James Clavell’s Shōgun, Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery, Lawrence Sanders’s Deadly Sins, and Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda.

Some critical/cult favorites (and genre exercises) from 1975 include: Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, Rumer Godden’s The Peacock Spring, Xavier Herbert’s insanely-long epic Poor Fellow My Country, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, David Lodge’s Changing Places, Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife, Gary Myers’s weirdo fiction collection The House of the Worm, Tim O’Brien’s debut Northern Lights, James Purdy’s In a Shallow Grave, James Salter’s Light Years, Anya Seton’s Smouldering Fires, Gerald Seymour’s Harry’s Game, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Glendon Swarthout’s The Shootist, and Jack Vance’s Showboat World.

I’ve only read about fifteen books mentioned here (although I’ve abandoned several of them more than once (I’m looking at you Illuminatus! Trilogy and Dhalgren), so my own “best of 1975” list is uninformed and provisional, and frankly pretty obvious to anyone who checks in on this blog semi-regularly. My picks for ’75: J R, William Gaddis; The Dead Father, Donald Barthelme; High-Rise, J.G. Ballard.

A few sentences on every book I read or reread in 2024

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☉ indicates a reread.

☆ indicates an outstanding read.

In some cases, I’ve self-plagiarized some descriptions and evaluations from my old tweets and blog posts.

I have not included books that I did not finish or abandoned.

Cake & Prostheses, Gerhard Rühm; trans. Alexander Booth

Sexy, surreal, silly, and profound. Lovely little thought experiments and longer meditations into the weird.

Abel Sanchez and Other Stories, Miguel de Unamuno; trans. Anthony Kerrigan

Both sad and funny, Abel Sanchez, the 1917 novella that makes up the bulk of this volume, feels contemporary with Kafka and points towards the existentialist novels of Albert Camus

After World, Debbie Urbanski

Debbie Urbanski’s debut novel After World reimagines the end of humanity—or perhaps the beginning of a new digital existence. The narrator, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, reconstructs the life of Sen Anon, the last human archived in the Digital Human Archive Project, using sources like drones, diaries, and other materials. Drawing on tropes from dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature, this metatextual novel references authors like Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood while nodding to works such as House of Leaves and Station Eleven. Urbanski’s spare, post-postmodern approach also reminded me of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress—good stuff.

Walking on Glass, Iain Banks

Walking on Glass weaves together three narrative threads: an art student’s infatuation, a paranoid-schizophrenic secret agent, and two ancient warriors trapped in a castle playing bizarre games. While the novel has some wonderful and funny moments, Banks’s debut The Wasp Factory is the stronger effort.

Red Pyramid, Vladimir Sorokin; trans. Max Lawton

If you’re interested in reading Sorokin but aren’t sure if you want to jump into the deep end with Blue Lard (or abject hell with Their Four Hearts), the collection Red Pyramid is a good starting place. In her blurb for the NYRB collection, Joy Williams describes Sorokin’s writing as “Extravagant, remarkable, politically and socially devastating, the tone and style without precedent, the parables merciless, the nightmares beyond outrance, the violence unparalleled.”

Ava, Carole Masso

The controlling intelligence of Carole Masso’s 1991 novel is the titular Ava, dying too young of cancer. Ava spools out in an elliptical assemblage of quips, quotes, observations, dream thoughts, and other lovely sad beautiful bits. Masso creates a feeling, not a story; or rather a story felt, intuited through fragmented language, experienced.

Dune, Frank Herbert☉

I have always remembered liking the first half of the first Dune novel and thinking that the book’s pacing, depth, and characterization falls apart in the second half. I thought the second of Villeneuve’s Dune films was so bad that I ended up listening to the audiobook to confirm if there was anything in the original material. The audit confirmed my suspicion that the first half of Dune is good—there’s a dinner scene that’s excellent—but the novel falls apart under its epic ambitions. Herbert is very good at writing about deceit, mind games, spycraft; he’s awful with action, legend, and myth.

Escape Velocity, Charles Portis

Charles Portis wrote five novels, all of which are excellent. He may have a perfect oeuvre. Escape Velocity collects some of his early journalism (he was on the Elvis beat for awhile, and then he covered the Civil Rights movement); there are also some short stories, a play, a few odds and ends. For completists only.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett☆

A brilliant, picaresque satire that follows its absurdly named protagonist on a series of misadventures, washing the surreal in acid social commentary. A Candide for the cable teevee age.

The Einstein Intersection, Samuel R. Delaney

Shambolic and mythic, Delaney’s novel retells the story of Orpheus in a narrative style that mirrors the musician’s dismemberment and fragmentation.

Blue Lard, Vladimir Sorokin; trans. Max Lawton☉☆

I ended up writing seven riffs on this novel this spring. 

Telephone, Percival Everett

I don’t know which version I read, but it was sad.

How to Set a Fire and Why, Jesse Ball

I reviewed it here, writing, that the narrator “Lucia’s voice is the reason to read How to Start a Fire. It’s compelling and funny and persuasive and hurt. It seems authentic, and I admire the risk Ball has taken—it’s not easy to write a teenage girl who is also a maybe-genius-and-would-be-arsonist.”

The Pepsi-Cola Addict, June-Alison Gibbons☆

Loved this one. From my review: “The Pepsi-Cola Addict is a strange and unsettling tale of teen angst that stands on its own as a small burning testament of adolescent creativity unspoiled by any intrusive ‘adult’ editorial hand.”

James, Percival Everett☆

James will likely end up on everyone’s year-end “best of”; to be clear it is mine. Everett’s novel joins a shortlist of strong responses to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that includes Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and Robert Coover’s Huck Out West.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon☉☆

The key to reading Gravity’s Rainbow is to read it once and then read it immediately again and post a series of silly annotations on your literary blog and then to read it again a year or two later and then a few years after that to listen to it on audiobook while you pressure wash your house and the shed you built a few years ago (with the help of your father-in-law and brother-in-law) and then repaint the house’s shutters and then invent a few other chores so you finish the audiobook. And then write two more annotation blogs about it, eight years after the first series.

Progress, Max Lawton

The Abode, Max Lawton

I’m the sliverest slightest bit wary to include Max Lawton’s novels here, as the versions I’ve read are not necessarily the ones that will publish—but they are big, bold, ambitious, and strange, and they left an incisor-sharp impression upon me this year. Progress is a “maybe-this-is-the-end-of-the-world?” catalog of horrors; The Abode is a self-deconstructing catalog of catalogs, bildungsroman, a (self-)love story.

Demian, Herman Hesse; trans. Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck

We’ve all had a good great bad evil friend.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson☉☆

I made my family listen to Ian Holm read RLS’s Jekyll and Hyde on a four-hire drive and learned that “Jekyll” is pronounced with a long e and not the accustomed schwa — it rhymes with “treacle” not “freckle.” The book is much better and weirder than I remembered.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez; trans. Gregory Rabassa☉☆

Much, much sadder than I’d remembered. I’d registered One Hundred Years of Solitude 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.

On Homo rodans and Other Writings, Remedios Varo; trans. Margaret Carson☉

I enjoyed my discussion with Margaret Carson on her expanded translation of Remedios Varo’s fiction and letters.

The Son of Man, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo; trans. Frank Wynne

Enjoyed this one. From my review: “Del Amo gives us phenomena and response to that phenomena, but withholds the introspective logic of cause-and-effect or analysis that often dominates novels. Instead, he allows us to see what his characters see and to take from those sights our own interpretations.”

The Stars at Noon, Denis Johnson☉

A reread, but I honestly didn’t remember much about The Stars at Noon other than its premise and the fact that its narrator was an alcoholic journalist-cum-prostitute in Nicaragua. (That’s actually the premise.) It hadn’t made the same impression on me as other Johnson novels had when I went through a big Johnson jag in the late nineties and early 2000s, and I think that assessment was correct—it’s simply not as strong as Angels, Fiskadoro, or Jesus’ Son.

Radiant Terminus, Antoine Volodine, trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman☆

Excellent stuff; a highlight read of the year. From my review:

“Antoine Volodine’s novel Radiant Terminus is a 500-page post-apocalyptic, post-modernist, post-exotic epic that destabilizes notions of life and death itself. Radiant Terminus is somehow simultaneously fat and bare, vibrant and etiolated, cunning and naive. The prose, in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s English translation, shifts from lucid, plain syntax to poetical flights of invention. Volodine’s novel is likely unlike anything you’ve read before—unless you’ve read Volodine.”

Gringos, Charles Portis☉☆

Portis wrote five novels and all of them are perfect—but I think Gringos, his last, might be my favorite.

Lord Jim at Home, Dinah Brooke☆

Loved it. From my review:

“Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses). (I have not read Conrad’s Lord Jim, which Brooke has taken as something of a precursor text for Lord Jim at Home.)”

American Abductions, Mauro Javier Cárdenas☆

Another favorite novel this year. From a riff back in October:

“If I were to tell you that Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel is about Latin American families being separated by racist, government-mandated (and wholly fascist, really) mass deportations, you might think American Abductions is a dour, solemn read. And yes, Cárdenas conjures a horrifying dystopian surveillance in this novel, and yes, things are grim, but his labyrinthine layering of consciousnesses adds up to something more than just the novel’s horrific premise on its own. Like Bernhard, Krasznahorkai, and Sebald, Cárdenas uses the long sentence to great effect. Each chapter of American Abductions is a wieldy comma splice that terminates only when his chapter concludes—only each chapter sails into the next, or layers on it, really. It’s fugue-like, dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish. It’s also very funny. But most of all, it’s a fascinating exercise in consciousness and language—an attempt, perhaps, to borrow a phrase from one of its many characters, to make a grand ‘statement of missingnessness.'”

Attic, Katherine Dunn☆

Truck, Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic is seriously fucked up—like William Burroughs-Kathy Acker fucked up—an abject rant from a woman in prison in the mode of Ginsberg’s Howl. The narrator seems to be an autofictional version of Dunn herself, which is perhaps why Eric Rosenblum, in his 2022 New Yorker review described it as “largely a realist work in which Dunn emphasizes the trauma of her protagonist’s childhood.” Rosenblum uses the term realism two other times to describe Attic and refers to it at one point as a work of magical realism. If Attic is realism then so is Blood and Guts in High School. Her second novel Truck is equally weird, but it was maybe too much for me by the end.

Soldier of Mist, Gene Wolfe

Great premise, poor execution.

Final Cut, Charles Burns☆

In my review, I wrote that Final Cut served up “all the sinister dread and awful beauty that anyone following Burns’ career would expect, synthesized into his most lucid exploration of the inherent problems of artistic expression.”

Wise Children, Angela Carter

An enjoyable and maybe old-fashioned effort from Carter. I breezed through it, and remember it fondly.

Garbage, Stephen Dixon☆

I think Stephen Dixon’s novel Garbage was my favorite read of the year. I don’t know if it’s the best novel I read this year, but it was the most compelling—by which I mean it compelled me to keep reading, way too late some nights. From a thing I wrote a few months ago:

“I don’t know if Dixon’s Garbage is the best novel I’ve read so far this year, but it’s certainly the one that has most wrapped itself up in my brain pan, in my ear, throbbed a little behind my temple. The novel’s opening line sounds like an uninspired set up for a joke: ‘Two men come in and sit at the bar.’ Everything that unfolds after is a brutal punchline, reminiscent of the Book of Job or pretty much any of Kafka’s major works. These two men come into Shaney’s bar—this is, or at least seems to be, NYC in the gritty seventies—and try to shake him down to switch up garbage collection services. A man of principle, Shaney rejects their ‘offer,’ setting off an escalating nightmare, a world of shit, or, really, a world of garbage. I don’t think typing this description out does any justice to how engrossing and strange (and, strangely normal) Garbage is. Dixon’s control of Shaney’s voice is precise and so utterly real that the effect is frankly cinematic, even though there are no spectacular pyrotechnics going on; hell, at times Dixon’s Shaney gives us only the barest visual details to a scene, and yet the book still throbs with uncanny lifeforce. I could’ve kept reading and reading and reading this short novel; its final line serves as the real ecstatic punchline. Fantastic stuff.”

Graffiti on Low or No Dollars, Elberto Muller☆

A weirdo novel-in-riffs that I loved: bohemian hobo freight hopping, drug lore, art. Muller’s storytelling chops are excellent—he’s economical, dry, sometimes sour, and most of all a gifted imagist.

Galaxies, Barry N. Malzberg

Southern Comfort, Barry N. Malzberg (as “Gerold Watkins”)

A Satyr’s Romance, Barry N. Malzberg (as “Gerold Watkins”)

I really wanted to get into Galaxies, but I couldn’t. Malzberg’s faux-sci-fi metatextualist experiment carries his postmodernist anxiety of influence like a lance tilted against the would-be contemporaries who were more likely to get covered in The New York Times. His metamuscle is as strong as those folks, but you have to tell a story. I preferred the “erotic” novels I read that he wrote under the pseudonym Gerrold Watkins, 1969’s Southern Comfort and 1970’s A Satyr’s Romance.

The Singularity, Dino Buzzati; trans. Anne Milano Appel

From my review of The Singularity:

“Ultimately, The Singularity feels less like a novella than it does a short story stretched a bit too thin. Buzzati adroitly crafts an atmosphere of suspense and foreboding, but the characters are underdeveloped. Like a lot of pulp fiction, Buzzati’s book often reads as if it were written very quickly (and written expressly for money). Still, Buzzati’s intellect gives the book a philosophical heft, even if it sometimes comes through awkwardly in forced dialogue. Anne Milano Appel’s translation is smooth and nimble; it’s a page turner, for sure, and if it seems like I’ve been a bit rough on it in this paragraph in particular, I should be clear: I enjoyed The Singularity.”

Waiting for the Fear, Oğuz Atay; trans. Ralph Hubbell

A book of cramped, anxious stories. Atay, via Hubbell’s sticky translation, creates little worlds that seem a few reverberations off from reality. These are the kind of stories that one enjoys being allowed to leave, even if the protagonists are doomed to remain in the text (this is a compliment). Standouts include “Man in a White Overcoat,” “The Forgotten,” and “Letter to My Father.”

Making Pictures Is How I Talk to the World, Dmitry Samarov

Making Pictures spans four decades of Samarov’s career, showcasing his diverse styles—sketches, inks, oils, and more—through a thematically organized collection. His art, like his writing, emphasizes perspective over adornment, vividly depicting Chicago’s bars, coffee shops, and indie clubs.

Magnetic Field(s), Ron Loewinsohn☆

A hypnotic, fugue-like triptych exploring crime and art as overlapping intimacies. Through a burglar, a composer, and a novelist, it frames imagining another life as a taboo act of trespass.

Body High, Jon Lindsey

A breezy drug novel that’s funny, gross, and abject but tries to do too much too quickly. The narrator, a medical-experiment subject, dreams of writing pro-wrestling scripts, but spirals even further into mania when his underage aunt enters his life and stirs some disturbing desires. Body High is at its best when at its grimiest.

Sunday, Olivier Schrauwen☆

An achievement for slackers the world over. Sunday is a true graphic novel, by which I mean a real novel. Maybe I’ll get to a proper review of it; maybe The Comics Journal will ask me to come back to write reviews again. Anyway. Great stuff, a real achievement to those of us willing to drink a few beers before noon and fail to open the door when neighbors ring the bell.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré☉☆

Perfect book.

Breaking and Entering, Joy Williams☆

Joy Williams’ fourth novel, 1988’s Breaking and Entering zigs when you expect it to zag. It ends up in a place no reader would expect, and I don’t mean that there’s some weird twist. It twists weirdly like life. The sentences are excellent, but so are the paragraphs. Breaking and Entering is very, very Florida, crammed with weirdos and tragedies, farcical, ironic, and thickly sauced in the laugh-cry flavor. I’m not sure exactly where it’s set, but I do know that I do know the general area, the barrier islands, skinny shining strips of weird between the Gulf and the Tampa Bay.

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons

I listened to Simmons’ mass-cult favorites as audiobooks—Hyperion was good; Fall was pretty terrible! But seriously, the first one is a nice postmodernist sci-fi take on Canterbury Tales. 

Three Trapped Tigers, G. Cabrera Infante; trans. Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with collaboration by Infante☆

Language! Language! Language! Bombastic, bullying, buzzing, braying, bristling— Infante’s dizzying mosaic of the fifties at night (and some hungover mornings) in Havana boxes you on your ear before kissing it, your ear, nipping the lobe even, showing off some neat tricks and other twisters of its fat vibrant tongue. A delight.

The Rest Is Silence, Augusto Monterroso; trans. Aaron Kerner

A quick clever slim novel that riffs on literary failure. A nugget from the so-called Latin Boom that surely (don’t call me Shirley!) influenced Roberto Bolaño.

The Obscene Bird of Night, José Donoso; trans. Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, Megan McDowell☆

Heavy and gross, twisted and twisting, I loved Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night–reminded me of Goya’s Caprichos and William Faulkner and Anna Kavan soaked in Salò and Aleksei German’s adaptation of Hard to Be a God. About half way through I realized I needed to go back and put together some of the plot strands I’d missed; I think this novel is more coherent than its surreal and grotesque flourishes initially suggest.

Small dents, big books (tl;dr)

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I usually finish reading a novel if I stick with it for, say thirty-to-fifty pages. However, as is the case with many readers, I suspect, very long novels foil me; or, rather, time foils me. Obligations intercede. Here are some long novels that I had to put aside for another time. From the top:

Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante (775 pages)

If the bookmark I left in Jenny McPhee’s translation Lies and Sorcery is not lying (or ensorcelled), I got seventy pages into it before getting sidetracked with something else. I remember liking what I was reading but also that the book seemed very heavy over my head at night.

The Strudlhof Steps, Heimito von Doderer (840 pages)

I’ve really enjoyed the first fifty pages of Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps (in translation by Vincent Kling). I’ve enjoyed them so much that I’ve read them at least four times over the past three years. The longest I’ve waded into the Steps was to page 99. Again, a slimmer model comes round and I lose my focus—but of the four novels I’ve listed here, von Doderer’s is the one that’s made the biggest impression on me. My bites may have been shallow but I keep going in for seconds.

A Bended Circuity, Robert S. Stickley (637 pages)

Although it’s the shortest novel on this list, my edition of RSS’s ABC feels cramped and constrained. I think the novel would like a bigger home. The pages are too bright, the font too small, the margins too narrow. It’s a cramped reading experience. I suppose I could break down and buy the Corona\Samizdat edition, which may be easier to ease into. Or an e-book? RSS, please agree to an e-book! Some of us have aging eyes. Oh, I got to page 48.

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young (1321 pages)

I cracked into Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling twice this year; once in the Spring and once in the Fall. Maybe I’ll try again in the Winter. I stalled out 78 pages in, at the end of chapter 3.

Mass-market Monday | Matt Bucher’s The Belan Deck

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The Belan Deck, Matt Bucher. SSMG Press (2023; second printing). Cover design by David Jensen. 119 pages.

My review of The Belan Deck.

Mass-Market Monday | Donald Barthelme’s Amateurs

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Amateurs, Donald Barthelme. Kangaroo Pocket Books (1977). No cover artist or designer credited. 207 pages.

I’ve written a few times about my slow acquisition of someone else’s library. This person lives in Perry, Florida, a small panhandle town south of Tallahassee, and I guess he drives into Jacksonville at least once a year to sell books at the bookstore I frequent. I’ve talked to the bookstore’s owner about him a few times. Sometimes, I’ll spot a spine and think, Yeah, his name and address are going to be stamped on the inside cover. And there it was this Friday when I picked up his mass-market edition of Amateurs. His by-now familiar habit of checking off volumes by the same author is on display here too. He also put neat pencil dashes by some of the stories in Amateurs, including my favorite from the collection, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.” He also checked off “The Educational Experience,” which, in this Kangaroo edition of Amateurs, sadly fails to include Barthelme’s collage illustrations that accompanied the piece when it first ran in Harper’s

 

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“The Hatchet Job” by José Lezama Lima, from The Death of Trotsky as Described by Various Cuban Writers, Several Years After the Event—or Before | From G. Cabrera Infante’s Novel Three Trapped Tigers

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A chapter from Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

translated by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with collaboration by Infante

THE DEATH OF TROTSKY AS DESCRIBED BY VARIOUS CUBAN WRITERS, SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE EVENT—OR BEFORE

THE HATCHET JOB

Legend has it that the stranger didn’t ask where he might eat or drink, but only where he could find the house with the adobe wall around it; and that, without so much as shaking the dust of his journey off both his feet, he made for his destination, which was the last retreat of Leon Son-of-David Bronstein: the prophet of that new-time religion who was to become the eponymous founder of its first heresy: messiah, apostle and heretic in one. The traveler, one Jacob Mornard, warped and twisted, and accompanied only by his seafaring hatred, had finally arrived in the notorious sanctuary of the Exile whose family name means stone of bronze and whose frank, fiery features were those of a rebellious rabbi. Furthermore, the old man was distinguished by his haughty and farsighted gaze underneath his horn-rimmed glasses; his oratorical gestures—like those of the men of the Greek agora not of the Hebrew agora; his woolly and knitted brows; and his sonorous voice, which usually reveals to ordinary mortals those whom the Fates have destined, from the cradle, to profound eloquences: all this and his goatee gave the New Wandering Jew a biblical countenance.

As for the future magnicide: his troubled appearance and the awkward gait of the born dissident were sketches of a murderous character which would never, in the dialectic mind of the assassinated Sadducee, find completion to cast, in the historical mold of a Cassius or even a Brutus, the low relief of an infamous persona.

Soon they were master and disciple; and while the noble and hospitable expatriate forgot his worries and afflictions, and allowed affection to blaze a trail of warmth in a heart that had anciently been frozen with reserve, his felonious follower seemed to carry in the stead of a heart something empty and nocturnal, a black void in which the slow, sinister and tenacious fetus of the most ignoble treachery was able to take roots and strike. Or perhaps, perchance it was a mean cunning that looked for revenge; because they say that at the back of his eyes he always carried a secret resentment against that man whom, with faultless subterfuge, he was in the habit of calling Master, using the capital letter that is reserved only for total obedience.

On occasions they could be seen together and although the good Lev Davidovich—we can call him that now, I suspect, even if in his lifetime he concealed with an initial this middle name that spelled yarmulke, and carried false credentials—took extreme precautions—because there were not lacking, as in the previous Roman tragedy, evil omens, the revelatory imagery of premonitions, or the ever-present habit of foreboding—he always granted audience in solitude to the taciturnal visitor, who was at times, as on the day of misfortune, both adviser and supplicant. This crimson Judas carried in his pale hands the manuscript in which his treachery was patently written with invisible ink; and over his thin blueish and trembling body he wore a Macfarlane, which would, to any eye more given to conjecture and suspicion, have given him away on that suffocatingly hot Mexican evening: distrust was not the strong point of the Russian rebel: nor systematic doubt: nor ill will a force of habit: underneath the coat the crafty assailant carried a treacherous hoof-parer: the magnicidal adze: an ice pick: and under the ax was his soul of guided emissary of the new Czar of Russia.

The trusting heresiarch was glancing attentively over the pretended scriptures, when the hatchet man of the Party delivered his treacherous blow and the steely shaft bit deep into that most noble head.

A cry resounded through the cloistered precincts and the sbirri (Haití had refused to send her eloquent Negroes) ran there in great haste and eager to convert the assassin into a prisoner. The magnanimous Marxian still had time to advise: “Thou shalt not kill,” and his inflamed followers did not hesitate to respect his instructions to the hilt.

Forty-eight hours of hopes, tears and vigil the formidable agony of that luminous leader lasted, dying as he had lived: in struggle. Life and a political career were no longer his: in their stead glory and historical eternity belonged to him.

José Lezama Lima

(1912-1965)

“The Story of a Stick (With Some Additional Comments by Mrs. Campbell),” a chapter from Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante

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“The Story of a Stick (With Some Additional Comments by Mrs. Campbell)”

a chapter from Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

translated by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with collaboration by Infante

The Story

We arrived in Havana one Friday around three in the afternoon. The heat was oppressive. There was a low ceiling of dense gray, or blackish, clouds. As the boat entered the harbor the breeze that had cooled us off during the crossing suddenly died down. My leg was bothering me again and it was very painful going down the gangplank. Mrs. Campbell followed behind me talking the whole damned time and she found everything, but everything, enchanting: the enchanting little city, the enchanting bay, the enchanting avenue facing the enchanting dock. All I knew was that there was a humidity of 90 or 95 percent and that I was sure my leg was going to bother me the whole weekend. It was, of course, Mrs. Campbell’s brilliant idea to come to such a hot and humid island. I told her so as soon as I was on deck and saw the ceiling of rain clouds over the city. She protested, saying they had sworn to her in the travel agency that it was always, but always, spring in Cuba. Spring my aching foot! We were in the Torrid Zone. That’s what I told her and she answered, “Honey, this is the tropics!”

On the edge of the dock there was this group of enchanting natives playing a guitar and rattling some gourds and shouting infernal noises, the sort of thing that passes for music here. In the background, behind this aboriginal orchestra, there was an open-air tent where they sold the many fruits of the tropical tree of tourism: castanets, brightly painted fans, wooden rattlers, musical sticks, shell necklaces, earthenware pots, hats made of a brittle yellow straw and stuff like that. Mrs. Campbell bought one or two articles of every kind. She was simply enchanted. I told her she should wait till the day we left before making purchases. “Honey,” she said, “they are souvenirs.” She didn’t understand that souvenirs are what you buy when you leave a country. Nor was there any point in explaining. Luckily they were very quick in Customs, which was surprising. They were also very friendly, although they did lay it on a bit thick, if you know what I mean.

I regretted not bringing the car. What’s the point of going by ferry if you don’t take a car? But Mrs. Campbell thought we would waste too much time learning foreign traffic regulations. Actually she was afraid we would have another accident. Now there was one more argument she could throw in for good measure. “Honey, with your leg in this state you simply cannot drive,” she said. “Let’s get a cab.”

We waved down a taxi and a group of natives—more than we needed—helped us with our suitcases. Mrs. Campbell was enchanted by the proverbial Latin courtesy. It was useless to tell her that it was a courtesy you also pay for through your proverbial nose. She would always find them wonderful, even before we landed she knew everything would be just wonderful. When all our baggage and the thousand and one other things Mrs. Campbell had just bought were in the taxi, I helped her in, closed the door in keen competition with the driver and went around to the o
ther door because I could get in there more easily. As a rule I get in first and then Mrs. Campbell gets in, because it’s easier for her that way, but this impractical gesture of courtesy which delighted Mrs. Campbell and which she found “very Latin” gave me the chance to make a mistake I will never forget. It was then that I saw the walking stick.

It wasn’t an ordinary walking stick and this alone should have convinced me not to buy it. It was flashy, meticulously carved and expensive. It’s true that it was made of a rare wood that looked like ebony or something of that sort and that it had been worked with lavish care—exquisite, Mrs. Campbell called it—and translated into dollars it wasn’t really that expensive. All around it there were grotesque carvings of nothing in particular. The stick had a handle shaped like the head of a Negro, male or female—you can never tell with artists—with very ugly features. The whole effect was repulsive. However, I was tempted by it even though I have no taste for knickknacks and I think I would have bought it even if my leg hadn’t been hurting. (Perhaps Mrs. Campbell, when she noticed my curiosity, would have pushed me into buying it.) Needless to say Mrs. Campbell found it beautiful and original and—I have to take a deep breath before I say it—exciting. Women, good God!

We got to the hotel and checked in, congratulating ourselves that our reservations were in order, and went up to our room and took a shower. Ordered a snack from room service and lay down to take a siesta—when in Rome, etc. . . . No, it’s just that it was too hot and there was too much sun and noise outside, and our room was very clean and comfortable and cool, almost cold, with the air-conditioning. It was a good hotel. It’s true it was expensive, but it was worth it. If the Cubans have learned something from us it’s a feeling for comfort and the Nacional is a very comfortable hotel, and what’s even better, it’s efficient. When we woke up it was already dark and we went out to tour the neighborhood.

Outside the hotel we found a cab driver who offered to be our guide. He said his name was Raymond something and showed us a faded and dirty ID card to prove it. Then he took us around that stretch of street Cubans call La Rampa, with its shops and neon signs and people walking every which way. It wasn’t too bad. We wanted to see the Tropicana, which is advertised everywhere as “the most fabulous cabaret in the world,” and Mrs. Campbell had made the journey almost especially to go there. To kill time we went to see a movie we wanted to see in Miami and missed. The theater was near the hotel and it was new and air-conditioned.

We went back to the hotel and changed. Mrs. Campbell insisted I wear my tuxedo. She was going to put on an evening gown. As we were leaving, my leg started hurting again—probably because of the cold air in the theater and the hotel—and I took my walking stick. Mrs. Campbell made no objection. On the contrary, she seemed to find it funny.

The Tropicana is in a place on the outskirts of town. It is a cabaret almost in the jungle. It has gardens full of trees and climbing plants and fountains and colored lights along all the road leading to it. The cabaret has every right to advertise itself as fabulous physically, but the show consists—like all Latin cabarets, I guess—of half-naked women dancing rumbas and singers shouting their stupid songs and crooners in the style of Bing Crosby, but in Spanish. The national drink of Cuba is the daiquiri, a sort of cocktail with ice and rum, which is very good because it is so hot in Cuba—in the street I mean, because the cabaret had the “typical Cuban air-conditioning” as they call it, which means the North Pole encapsuled in a tropical saloon. There’s a twin cabaret in the open air but it wasn’t functioning that night because they were expecting rain. The Cubans proved good meteorologists. We’d only just begun to eat one of those meals they call international cuisine in Cuba, which consist of things that are too salty or full of fat or fried in oil which they follow with a dessert that is much too sweet, when a shower started pouring down with a greater noise than one of those typical bands at full blast. I say this to give some idea of the violence of the rainfall as there are very few things that make more noise than a Cuban band. For Mrs. Campbell this was the high point of sophisticated savagery: the rain, the music, the food, and she was simply enchanted. Everything would have been fine—or at any rate passable; when we switched to drinking whiskey and soda I began to feel almost at home—but for the fact that this stupid maricón of an emcee of the cabaret, not content with introducing the show to the public, started introducing the public to the show, and it even occurred to this fellow to ask our names—I mean all the Americans who were there—and he started introducing us in some godawful travesty of the English language. Not only did he mix me up with the soup people, which is a common enough mistake and one that doesn’t bother me anymore, but he also introduced me as an international playboy. Mrs. Campbell, of course, was on the verge of ecstasy! Continue reading ““The Story of a Stick (With Some Additional Comments by Mrs. Campbell),” a chapter from Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante” →

On Tove Jansson’s odd and touching illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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This fall–just in time for the holiday season–the NYRB Kids imprint has published an edition of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by the Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson. Jansson is most famous for her Moomin books, which remain an influential cult favorite with kids and adults alike. She illustrated Carroll’s Alice in 1966 for a Finnish audience; this NRYB edition is the first English-language version of the book. There are illustrations on almost every page of the book; most are black and white sketches — doodles, portraits, marginalia — but there are also many full-color full-pagers, like this odd image about a dozen pages in:

Here we have Alice and her cat Dinah, transformed into a shadowy, even sinister figure, large, bipedal. Bats float in the background, echoing Goya’s famous print El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The image accompanies Alice’s initial descent into her underland wonderland:  “Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again,” addressing Dinah, who will “miss me very much to-night, I should think!” Wonderlanding if Dinah might catch a bat, which is something like a mouse, maybe, “Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?; for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it.” Jansson’s red flowers suggest poppies, contributing to the scene’s slightly-menacing yet dreamlike vibe. The image ultimately echoes the myth of Hades and Persephone.

All the classic characters are here, of course, rendered in Jansson’s sensitive ink. Consider this infamous trio —

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head.

I love Jansson’s take on the Hatter; he’s not the outright clown we often see in post-Disneyfied takes on the character, but rather a creature rendered in subtle pathos. The March Hare is smug; the Dormouse is miserable.

And you’ll want a glimpse of the famous Cheshire cat who appears (and disappears) during the Queen’s croquet match:

Jansson’s figures here remind one of the surrealist Remedios Varo’s strange, even ominous characters. Like Varo and fellow surrealist Leonora Carrington, Jansson’s art treads a thin line between whimsical and sinister — a perfect reflection of Carroll’s Alice, which we might remember fondly as a story of magical adventures, when really it is much closer to a horror story, a tale of being sucked into an underworld devoid of reason and logic, ruled by menacing, capricious, and ultimately invisible forces. It is, in short, a true reflection of childhood,m. Great stuff.

Mass-market Monday | Chester Himes’ A Rage in Harlem

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A Rage in Harlem, Chester Himes. Avon Books (1965). No cover artist or designer credited. 192 pages.

Himes’ A Rage in Harlem is a quick, mean, sharp read. I came to Himes via Ishmael Reed, who wrote of the author in a 1991 LA Times review of Himes’ Collected Stories,

James Baldwin, another proud and temperamental genius, said that if he hadn’t left the United States he would have killed someone. The same could be said of Chester Himes, the intellectual and gangster who left the United States for Europe in the 1950s. He achieved fame abroad with his Harlem detective series, which are remarkable for their macabre comic sense and wicked and nasty wit so brilliantly captured in Bill Duke’s A Rage in Harlem.

Mass-market Monday | Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers

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Three Trapped Tigers, G. Cabrera Infante. Translated by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Avon Bard (1985). No cover artist or designer credited. 473 pages.

A busy buzzy book honking and howling and hooting, I am loving loving loving Three Trapped Tigers—it sings and shouts and hollers. The novel starts with a  polyglossic emcee announcing the parade of honorable horribles who will strut through the novel (if it is indeed a “novel”). Very funny, very engrossing, grand stuff, love it.

Here’s Salman Rushdie, reviewing the novel in the LRB back in 1981 (he’s just fumbled around answering “What is this crazy book actually about?”:

So much for the plot. (Warning: this review is about to go out of control.) What actually matters in Three Trapped Tigers is words, language, literature, words. Take the title. Originally, in the Cuban, they were three sad tigers, Tres tristes tigres, the beginning of a tongue-twister. For Cabrera, phonetics always come before meaning (correction: meaning is to be found in phonetic associations), and so the English title twists the sense in order to continue twisting the tongue. Very right and improper. Then there is the matter of the huge number of other writers whose influence must be acknowledged: Cabrera Infante calls them, reverently, Fuckner and Shame’s Choice. (He is less kind to Stephen Spent and Green Grams, who wrote, as of course you know, Travels with my Cant.) Which brings us to the novel’s most significant character, a sort of genius at torturing language called Bustrofedon, who scarcely appears in the story at all, of whom we first hear when he’s dying, but who largely dominates the thoughts of all the Silvestres and Arsenios and Codacs he leaves behind him. This Bustromaniac (who is keen on the bustrofication of words) gives us the Death of Trotsky as described by seven Cuban writers – a set of parodies whose point is that all the writers described are so pickled in Literature that they can’t take up their pens without trying to wow us with their erudition. Three Trapped Tigers, like Bustrofedon’s whole life, is dedicated to a full frontal assault on the notion of Literature as Art. It gives us nonsense verses, a black page, a page which says nothing but blen blen blen, a page which has to be read in the mirror: Sterne stuff. But it also gives us Bustrolists of ‘words that read differently in the mirror’: Live/evil, drab/bard, Dog/God; and the Confessions of a Cuban Opinion Eater; and How to kill an elephant: aboriginal method ... the reviewer is beginning to cackle hysterically at this point, and has decided to present his opinion in the form of puns, thus: ‘The Havana night may be dark and full of Zorro’s but Joyce cometh in the morning.’ Or: ‘Despite the myriad influences, Cabrera Infante certainly paddles his own Queneau.’

Ubik — Bob Pepper

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Cover art for Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, 1982 by Bob Pepper (1938-2019). Via/more.

Mass-market Monday | Samuel R. Delany’s Empire Star

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Empire Star, Samuel R. Delany. Bantam Books (1983). No cover artist credited. 132 pages.

Although he is not formally credited, the cover artist is Wayne Barlowe. I still haven’t read Delany’s 1966 novella, but I think I might read it this weekend.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part III

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

31. “Sakrete” (first published in The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 1983)

“Sakrete” is a silly little domestic riff about garbage can theft, rats, and an alcoholic trying to work with concrete. It’s not a very good story and I have no idea why it was included in Forty Stories. I do like that it shows a general respect for garbage cans and garbage collection (very interested parties should check out Stephen Dixon’s excellent novel Garbage). Here is the last paragraph, the highlight of the story:

 There are now no garbage cans on our street—no garbage cans left to steal. A committee of rats has joined with the Special Provisional committee in order to deal with the situation, which, the rats have made known, is attracting unwelcome rat elements from other areas of the city. Members of the two committees exchange secret grips, grips that I know not of. My wife drives groups of rats here and there in her yellow Pontiac convertible, attending important meetings. The crisis, she says, will be a long one. She has never been happier.

30. “Porcupines At The University” (Amateurs, 1976)

Another trifle—am I regretting this project, this rereading of Forty Stories? The stories in Sixty Stories are so, so much stronger—and those stories were organized chronologically. Going backwards through these is not really going backwards through time, through the artist’s anti-maturation, but rather just, like, making it more difficult to find one’s place in a book. “Porcupines” is a goof on academia that — and I say this as a compliment — at best reads like an alcoholic’s surrealist riff on a college film. Skip it!

29. “The Catechist” (Sadness , 1972)

This is a good story, “The Catechist.” But also a very Catholic one, without being, like, small-c catholic. There’s a bit of narrativizing here that Barthelme would eventually dispense with in his dialogues, the form that he would eventually settle on for his short stories. I say “settle on” but Barthelme died quite young, or, it seems to me, at 45, quite young—dying at 58. Barthelme died from throat cancer, probably a result of his alcoholism (pure conjecture on my part, this last clause):

The catechist reads from his book. “The candidate should be questioned as to his motives for becoming a Christian.”
I think: My motives?
He says: “Tell me about yourself.”
I say: “I’m forty. I have bad eyes. An enlarged liver.”
“That’s the alcohol,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“You’re very much like your father, there.”
“A shade more avid.”

28. “Lightning” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

This is a great story. Or at least a very good story, unexpectedly so, written a mode approaching near-realism or even near-dirty-realism. Was Barthelme flexing his muscles in the mirror after having read a story by Raymond Carver? Probably not, but I like to imagine it (I imagine his muscles beefier and musclier than they likely were). “Lightning” has a fairly straightforward ( and unBarthelemesque) plot:

Edward Connors, on assignment for Folks, set out to interview nine people who had been struck by lightning. “Nine?” he said to his editor, Penfield. “Nine, ten,” said Penfield, “doesn’t matter, but it has to be more than eight.” “Why?” asked Connors, and Penfield said that the layout was scheduled for five pages and they wanted at least two people who had been struck by lightning per page plus somebody pretty sensational for the opening page. “Slightly wonderful,” said Penfield, “nice body, I don’t have to tell you, somebody with a special face. Also, struck by lightning.”

The story is ultimately a romantic comedy, with reporter Edward finally finding his “face”:

People would dig slant wells for this woman, go out into a producing field with a tank truck in the dead of night and take off five thousand gallons of somebody else’s crude, write fanciful checks, establish Pyramid Clubs with tony marble-and-gold headquarters on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. What did he have to offer?

He finds something to offer. This is probably the best one yet in Forty Stories (in reverse, anyway).

Mass-market Monday | Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez and Other Stories

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Abel Sanchez and Other Stories, Miguel de Unamuno. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Regnery Gateway (1956). No cover designer or artist credited; cover image credited to the Bettman Archive. 267 pages.

I wrote a bit about the collection back in February:

A few weeks ago, I picked up Anthony Kerrigan’s translation of Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez and Other Stories based on its cover and the blurb on its back. I wound up reading the shortest of the three tales, “The Madness of Dr. Montarco,” that night. The story’s plot is somewhat simple: A doctor moves to a new town and resumes his bad habit of writing fiction. He slowly goes insane as his readers (and patients) query him about the meaning of his stories, and he’s eventually committed to an asylum. The tale’s style evokes Edgar Allan Poe’s paranoia and finds an echo in Roberto Bolaño’s horror/comedy fits. The novella that makes up the bulk of the collection is Abel Sanchez, a Cain-Abel story that features one of literature’s greatest haters, a doctor named Joaquin who grows to hate his figurative brother, the painter Abel. Sad and funny, this 1917 novella feels contemporary with Kafka and points towards the existentialist novels of Albert Camus. (I’m saving the last tale, “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” for a later day.)

Mass-market Monday | Leslie A. Fiedler’s Waiting for the End

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Waiting for the End, Leslie A. Fiedler. Penguin Books, Pelican imprint (1967). Cover design by Freda Morris. 274 pages.

From a riff a few years back:

Fiedler begins with the (then-recent) deaths of Hemingway and Faulkner. Fiedler uses the deaths of these “old men” to riff on the end of Modernism, although he never evokes the term. Neither does he use the term “postmodernism” in his book, although he edges towards it in his critiques of kitsch and middlebrow culture, and especially in his essay “The End of the Novel.” In parts of the book, he gets close to describing, or nearing a description of, an emergent postmodernist literature (John Barth and John Hawkes are favorite examples for Fiedler), but ultimately seems more resigned to writing an elegy for the avant garde. Other aspects of Waiting for the End, while well-intentioned, might strike contemporary ears as problematic, as the kids say, but Fiedler’s sharp and loose style are welcome over stodgy scholarship. Ultimately, I find the book compelling because of its middle position in its take on American literature. It’s the work of a critic seeing the beginnings of something that hasn’t quite emerged yet—but his eye is trained more closely on what’s disappearing into the past.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part II

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

35. ” Overnight to Many Distant Cities” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

In Hiding Man, his 2010 Barthelme biography, Tracy Daugherty notes that Barthelme’s collection Overnight to Many Distant Cities was not particularly well-received by critics. Reviews were a mix of bafflement and derision, as Daugherty has it, which fits the tone near the end of Hiding Man: a career winding-down—Barthelme a happy father, content with a teaching gig, and committed to a new form for his stories, now pared down to spare and often oblique dialogues. Daugherty relays a detail from a rejection letter from Barthelme’s (one-time) champion at the New Yorker, Roger Angell: “Well, maybe we’ll learn to read you. It won’t be the first time that happened.”

In my estimation, Barthelme’s later stories do not diverge too radically from his earlier work. The techniques may have evolved (or devolved, if you like), but collage and pastiche are still a major mode, domestic themes prevail, and Our Bard is ever the ironist.

Barthelme sprinkles vignettes throughout Overnight to Many Distant Cities (like Hemingway’s In Our Time); its title track, coming at the end of the collection, is a travelogue in vignettes with our narrator and his family visiting places like Paris, London, Copenhagen… The story is essentially a series of anecdotes and arch asides (“Asked her opinion of Versailles, my daughter said she thought it was overdecorated”), and, as Barthelme’s wife Marion disclosed in Daugherty’s book, some of the material was directly drawn from their honeymoon in Barcelona (“In Barcelona the lights went out”). A taste:

In Stockholm we ate reindeer steak and I told the Prime Minister… That the price of booze was too high. Twenty dollars for a bottle of J&B! He (Olof Palme) agreed, most politely, and said that they financed the Army that way. The conference we were attending was held at a workers’ vacation center somewhat outside the city. Shamelessly, I asked for a double bed, there were none, we pushed two single beds together. An Israeli journalist sat on the two single beds drinking our costly whiskey and explaining the devilish policies of the Likud. Then it was time to go play with the Africans. A poet who had been for a time a Minister of Culture explained why he had burned a grand piano on the lawn in front of the Ministry. “The piano,” he said, “is not the national instrument of Uganda.”

Is it essential Barthelme? Of course not. But it’s nice enough.

34. ” The Film” (first published as “A Film” in the The New Yorker, September 26, 1970)

A nice little story that never quite transcends it’s marvelous opening lines:

Things have never been better, except that the child, one of the stars of our film, has just been stolen by vandals, and this will slow down the progress of the film somewhat, if not bring it to a halt. But might not this incident, which is not without its own human drama, be made part of the story line?

I just went back and read the last lines though, and they are also very good:

Truth! That is another thing they said our film wouldn’t contain. I had simply forgotten about it, in contemplating the series of triumphs that is my private life.

33. “110 West Sixty-First Street” (Amateurs, 1976)

An ugly tragic domestic comedy in just over a dozen paragraphs: Paul and Eugenie are trying to get over the death of their infant by going to erotic films. It doesn’t work; they take up cruelty–

“You are extremely self-righteous,” Eugenie said to Paul. “That is the one thing I can’t stand in a man. Sometimes I want to scream.”

“You are a slut without the courage to go out and be one,” Paul replied. “Why don’t you go to one of those bars and pick up somebody, for God’s sake?”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Eugenie said.

32. “Captain Blood” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

So like one of my favorite things that Melville does in Moby-Dick is turn the whole thing into a drama, a play that is taking place in the narrator-cum-Ishmael’s consciousness, with Starbuck and Stubb milling and mulling on various decks, soliloquizing. And while the Captain Blood of “Captain Blood” is no Ahab, he’s still a compellingly goofy brooder:

Blood, at dawn, a solitary figure pacing the foredeck. The world of piracy is wide, and at the same time, narrow. One can be gallant all day long, and still end up with a spider monkey for a wife. And what does his mother think of him?

This isn’t Barthelme at his best—that stock was poured into Sixty Stories—but it’s still the jaunty, boyish fun flavor that I want when I dip into his stuff.