The Disappeared, 1988 by Ken Unsworth (b. 1931)
The Night Heron, 1935 by Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961)
Reputed Fair, 2023 by Jesse Mockrin (b. 1981)
From New Mutants #25, 1985 by Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Claremont
I kinda sorta lost a big chunk of May this year, and some of the books that arrived at Biblioklept World Headquarters slipped through the cracks. Here, the cliche slipped through the cracks means got piled up in the wrong pile. Ainsley Morse’s and Geoff Cebula’s translation of Konstantin Vaginov’s Goat Song was one of these slipped-crack-wrong-pile titles. The volume actually collects two short novels by Vaginov: Goat Song, and Works and Days of Whistlin. Publisher NYRB’s blurb:
Konstantin Vaginov was an early and exemplary figure of Soviet modernist writing in all its agonized and glorious contradictions. Born into an educated middle-class family, Vaginov came of age with the Revolution. His novels of the late 1920s and early ’30s are daringly experimental and tragically nostalgic, using mercilessly ironic prose to mourn the loss of prerevolutionary intellectual culture. Adrift in the brave new Soviet world, Vaginov’s protagonists attempt to conjure the recent and distant past by stockpiling old books and songs, vulgar baubles and bad jokes, newspaper clippings, coins, and graffiti.
This volume contains two novels: Goat Song features thinly veiled portraits of Vaginov’s contemporaries as they flounder and self-destruct in their new bracingly materialist circumstances. Echoing Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, Goat Song is both a classic Petersburg city text and its swan song: “Now there is no Petersburg . . . the author is a coffin-maker by trade, not a cradle expert.”
Works and Days of Whistlin follows the novelist Whistlin as he unscrupulously mines the lives of his friends and fellow citizens for literary material. His exploitation of human material is a wry commentary on the concurrent efforts to industrialize and collectivize the Soviet economy, at a horrific human cost.
The Cake Woman, 2004 by Paula Rego (1935–2022)
The Essential James Joyce, 1948, ed. Harry Levin. Penguin Books (1969). Cover art by Jacques Emile Blanche; photographed by John Freeman. 550 pages.
I found this book on the street in Shin-Kōenji, the neighborhood I lived in in Tokyo twenty-five years ago. It was, if I recall, stacked on top of a pile of pornographic manga. I may have taken those as well. Happy Bloomsday!
“Fathers”
by
Grace Paley
Fathers are
more fathering
these days they have
accomplished this by
being more mothering
what luck for them that
women’s lib happened then
the dream of new fathering
began to shine in the eyes
of free women and was irresistible
on the New York subways
and the mass transits
of other cities one may
see fatherings of many colors
with their round babies on
their laps this may also
happen in the countryside
these scenes were brand new
exciting for an old woman who
had watched the old fathers
gathering once again in
familiar army camps and com-
fortable war rooms to consider
the necessary eradication of
the new fathering fathers
(who are their sons) as well
as the women and children who
will surely be in the way.
From Moebius’s illustrations for Robert Bloch’s Contes de Terreur, 1975; reprinted in Metallic Memories, 1992.
Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1613 by Cristofano Allori (1577–1621)
NYRB is publishing new English language translations of works by Henrik Pontoppidan. The big boy is Pontoppidan’s opus A Fortunate Man; the much-slimmer The White Bear actually collects two novellas, The White Bear and The Rearguard. All three translations are the effort of Paul Larkin.
NYRB’s copy for The White Bear
The White Bear follows the fate of the odd, gangly, red-bearded Thorkild Müller. Born in rural Jutland and destined for the ministry, Thorkild proves to be a poor student and is assigned to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland. There, with his mythic-looking staff and dogskin skullcap, he becomes known as the White Bear—a beloved legend among the locals and a freewheeling embarrassment to his fellow priests. Grown old, he returns to Denmark, where again his flock adores him while his fellow men of cloth try to tame the “whirling dervish in their midst.” In the end Thorkild mysteriously disappears, presumably back to the snow wilderness of Greenland.
And The Rearguard:
The Rearguard, on the other hand, is a marriage story. Newlyweds Jørgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jørgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism; Ursula comes from a conservative, upper-middle-class family. At first, as they start their married life in Rome, they each try to change the other’s worldview with arguments and threats, but as time wears on and they wear each other down, it becomes clear there can be no reconciliation. It is a tragic tale of art and idealism, individuality and love.
And the big guy:
A Fortunate Man tells the story of Per Sidenius, a Lutheran pastor’s son who revolts against his family and flees the backwaters of Jutland for Copenhagen. Per is handsome, ambitious, and hungry for the technological future of the twentieth century. He studies engineering and draws up plans for a new port and new canals, for harnessing wind and wave energy to transform Denmark into a commercial giant. Fully persuaded of his own genius, Per first repels and then attracts Jakobe Salomon, a young Jewish woman whose family is eager to underwrite his plans. They fall in love and get engaged; gradually Jakobe opens Per’s eyes to the wider world. Meanwhile, he also falls under the spell of Dr. Nathan, a popular philosopher who rails against the conservative powers that be. But ultimately these powers win out, Per’s relationship with Jakobe founders, and he goes home to Jutland and marries a pastor’s daughter. Though fortunate, he is never happy.One of the last great nineteenth-century novels and Henrik Pontoppidan’s masterpiece, A Fortunate Man anatomizes and skewers Danish society, from the small towns to the metropolis. Paul Larkin’s dazzing translation brings out the wide range and full force of a novel admired by Georg Lukács and praised by Ernst Bloch as “one of the foundational texts of world literature.”
But in the white culture outside, in that creepy world full of precardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavoring to stab; of an enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence. In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting money, for example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying charges from a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.
From “A Journey Into The Mind of Watts,” 1966 by Thomas Pynchon.
(Click to enlarge.)
“Togetherness,” by Thomas Pynchon was published in the vol. 16, no. 12 issue of Aerospace Safety in December 1960. The byline reads “Thomas H. Pynchon” (for Huggles, presumably).
Full text of the article here (for completists only, of course).
My sweetheart and I had sealed our commitment at high noon. My father had raised a cup to our good fortune, issued a stern proclamation against peddlers, bestowed happiness and property upon us and all our progeny, and the party had begun. Whole herds had been slaughtered for our tables. The vineyards of seven principalities had filled our casks. We had danced, sung, clung to one another, drunk, laughed, cheered, chanted the sun down. Bards had pilgrimaged from far and wide, come with their alien tongues to celebrate our union with pageants, prayers, and sacrifices. Not soon, they’d said, would this feast be forgotten. We’d exchanged epigrams and gallantries, whooped the old Queen through her death dance, toasted the fairies and offered them our firstborn. The Dwarfs had recited an ode in praise of clumsiness, though they’d forgotten some of the words and had got into a fight over which of them had dislodged the apple from Snow White’s throat, pushing each other into soup bowls and out of windows. They’d thrown cakes and pies at each other for awhile, then had spilled wine on everybody, played tug-of-war with the Queen’s carcass, regaled us with ribald mimes of regicide and witch-baiting, and finally had climaxed it all by buggering each other in a circle around Snow White, while singing their gold-digging song. Snow White had kissed them all fondly after-wards, helped them up with their breeches, brushed the crumbs from their beards, and I’d wondered then about my own mother, who was she?—and where was Snow White’s father? Whose party was this? Why was I so sober? Suddenly I’d found myself, minutes before midnight, troubled by many things: the true meaning of my bride’s name, her taste for luxury and collapse, the compulsions that had led me to the mountain, the birdshit on the glass coffin when I’d found her. Who were all these people, and why did things happen as though they were necessary? Oh, I’d reveled and worshipped with the rest of the party right to the twelfth stroke, but I couldn’t help thinking: we’ve been too rash, we’re being overtaken by something terrible, and who’s to help us now the old Queen’s dead?
Cover art for ZAP Comix #7 by Spain Rodriguez, 1973
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