The Reading Experience

Recommended Reviews

Kevin Breathnach on Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage:

[Tsuskuru's] story is an allegory of the journey made by the prose in which it is told. It is not a happy story. 

Eugene McCarraher on Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God:

In the life and death of Jesus—resurrection goes unmentioned—Eagleton discovers the most stringent and fundamental rebuke to capitalism, as well as the point of departure for any future revolutionary politics. It is in that crucible of downward mobility that “a new configuration of faith, culture, and politics might be born.” This is unvarnished liberation theology, and here Eagleton returns to the prophetic Marxism that animated his earlier career.

Max Winter on Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters:

Some might say this is. . .not believable, but this would only be if you didn’t want to accept the poetic structure of the book, in which characters are less characters than emblems, and the story less a story than a mathematical equation, about figures allowed to spin around each other in a landscape which sometimes embraces them and sometimes rejects them, committing deeds which posit life and death as contrasting hypotheticals.

Winter here comes to a conclusion similar to the one I reached in my review of the novel, in which I described Johnson's fiction as essentially allegorical.

The Smutty Dickens

Re the previous post, here's a more lengthy discussion of Galdos, via Tom (Amateur Reader) at Wuthering Expectations:

I was surprised at the earthiness of Fortunata and Jacinta, at its
vulgarity.  Victorian English (and American, and for that matter Russian) novels
distort my view of the literary world.  The French, of course, are hopelessly
smutty, we all know that,  but shouldn’t the literature of Catholic Spain, home
of the Counter-Reformation, be as demure as the Victorians?  Well, it ain’t, not
Galdós, at least, who is very much in the tradition of the uninhibited Cervantes
and Lazarillo de Tormes.

The Spanish Dickens

I have read Fortunata y Jacinta, and it is indeed very Dickensian, and very good. Interested readers would probably be better advised to try it rather than the newly translated Tristana:

Benito Pérez Galdós was born in 1843 and he spent most of his life in Madrid, where he wrote an alarming seventy-seven novels, dozens of plays, and hundreds of stories and pieces of journalism. Tristana was first published in 1892 and belongs in the group of novels from his mature period that were classified as “Novelas Españolas Contemporáneas,” all of which were set in present-day Spain and follow the basic conventions and aesthetics of European realism in the wake of Flaubert, Balzac, and the recently translated Russians. In Galdós’s words: “This is the system I have always adopted, to create a complex, heterogeneous, and extremely varied world, providing a broadly-based picture of society at a particular moment of history.”

 

Recommended Reviews

Bradley Gorski on Andrei Bitov's The Symmetry Teacher:

If the premise sounds like John Barth circa 1982, it’s no accident. The borrowed frame both signals a debt to the West and opens the floodgates to Western images. Bitov’s book becomes something of a paean to global postmodernism, an unabashed imitation that gleefully plunders predecessors, with overt borrowings from Borges and Barth, John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as from the early Andrei Bitov, himself a pioneer of Russian postmodernism.

John Clute on Michael Faber's The Book of Strange New Things:

And the story ends, where it had to from the beginning. The Word of God, in the mouth of a caring Christian, is a betrayal. The good caring Christian, having intolerably deepened the stress of his flock, begins his journey back to a world his religion cannot address: as there is no flock left for him there to comfort with saltatory tales to dodge the End with. On planet Earth in this century, the words that Peter still longs to utter into Bea's ear have become wind. Battered in the irrevocable sadness of The Book of Strange New Things, the reader does not look for him to find her, does not really wish him success in his quest to redeem with his comforting male presence those he had abandoned. The reader looks for him to stop breathing twelve-steps into every ear.

 Jeff Bursey on John Domini's The Sea-God's Herb:

His persistence, and success, in promoting what might be called experimental or offbeat works depends, in large part, on the ability to reach back or out to some antecedent work or literary ancestor to shore up his case. The learning is worn lightly. Another sizeable part of Domini’s appeal rests on style. While often plainspoken, there are the occasional fireworks and the intense involvement in the text under discussion.

Invisible Elephants

I have always found it surprising how many believers won't accept this:

And we should remember that the burden of proof is not on the disbeliever to demonstrate there are no gods, but on believers to demonstrate that there are. Believers are not justified in affirming their belief on the basis of another’s inability to conclusively refute them, any more than a believer in invisible elephants can command my assent on the basis of my not being able to “disprove” the existence of the aforementioned elephants. If the believer can’t provide evidence for a god’s existence, then I have no reason to believe in gods.

Aptly Pointing Out

Discussing the peer review process involved in the publication of his upcoming book on Charles Ives, composer/musicologist Kyle Gann notes the pressure on an academic author to quote other scholars liberally or be accused of “insufficient engagement with work in the field.” Gann objects that "apparently if I mention a chord on page 17, and another author mentioned the same chord in a book written in 1994, I’m expected to preface my remark with, 'As Professor X has aptly pointed out….' – lest the reader think I am arrogant enough to speak on my own authority, or – saints preserve us! – that I must not have read Professor X’s book!"

The ritual citing of one's scholarly predecessors surely afflicts literary study as well, and is one of the reasons I myself largely abandoned strictly scholarly writing and don't often read it now unless I can be relatively sure the reflexive acts of scholastic obeisance will be minimal or am sufficiently interested in the subject that I'm willing to overlook them. (And overlook them I do: by now my reading eye almost automatically disregards the strings of tag phrases and extended surveys of "existing scholarship" to seek out the actual argument or analysis the book has to offer.) This egregious practice is separate from the turn away from the "literary" in literary study in favor of historicism and cultural studies that makes me less likely to read academic criticism in the first place, although both are illustrative of the way academic criticism came to be more about securing its own professional autonomy than about literature. Still, New Critics and textual scholars could certainly be as pedantic as critical theorists.

I would not go so far as Gann does, however, in restricting quotation of "work in the field" to the role of "ornament to a piece of writing when the quoted phrase is so striking and memorable that the author couldn’t have come up with anything as evocative himself." Sometimes another critic has provided an insight that has led to a further insight of one's own and needs to be acknowledged. Gann asks "if I can state an idea clearly. . .why would it carry more authority if put into a sentence I stole from another writer?", except quoting an authority isn't stealing an idea but borrowing the authority, and sometimes even the most clearly stated point benefits from that outside authority. Moreover, citing what other critics have said isn't necessarily "to flatter. . .colleagues" but can provide useful context that might help the reader better understand an issue or particular work in a way one's own unadorned remarks cannot.

I often think that nonacademic literary criticism would benefit from increased context of this sort, in particular to make book reviews seem less the equivalent of consumer reports and more the participants in a genuine critical debate about current fiction and poetry. This could be done without pedantry, which does not have to accompany all attempts to think critically about literature.

Recommended Reviews

Scott Esposito on Patrick Modiano:

Part of the allure of an unsolvable mystery is the belief that we will somehow master it; “Suspended Sentences” hums with that impossibility. Modiano’s unconventional accounts of vanished hours show how the urge to solve a long-lost crime, or to reclaim forgotten memories, ultimately leads to inscrutable vanishing points.

Sophie Elmhirst on Kirsty Gunn's Infidelities:

As well as layering and linking, Gunn is pointing out the ultimate infidelity – that of writing itself. . .The effect is diverting. Gunn has announced her own presence as the author and so plays with the notion of writer as adulterer, whose life and relationships are simply there to be mined for art.

Barrett Hathcock on Charles D'Ambrosio's essay collection:

The consistent thread through all the essays is, of course, the authorial persona of D’Ambrosio himself, which comes across as brazenly genuine, a constructed artlessness. His essayistic persona seems exist as having no persona at all, to be completely open and unprotected by irony or schtick or any kind of rhetorical shielding. This makes him vastly different from other contemporary male essayists, be they David Sedaris or David Foster Wallace or John Jeremiah Sullivan, who each deploy various distancing techniques to wink at the reader or to place themselves as characters within their stories.

Books I Reviewed in 2014

Laura Frost, The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

    (Open Letters Monthly)

Peter Handke, Storm Still (Full Stop)

Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk (Full Stop)

Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (Full Stop)

Davis Schneiderman, [SIC] (American Book Review)

Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered (The Quarterly Conversation)

Gabriel Blackwell, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of

    H.P. Lovecraft (Kenyon Review Online)

Joshua Corey, Beautiful Soul (Full Stop)

John Domini, The Sea-God's Herb (Open Letters Monthly)

Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Full Stop)

Denis Johnson, The Laughing Monsters (Full Stop)

Knowledge of the Original Language

I certainly agree that reviewers of translations "must have knowledge of the original language and culture of the work in order to be able to really evaluate the translation within their review" (Reading in Translation). I would go farther and say that a critic needs to have such knowledge if he/she is to plausibly evaluate a translated work at all, not just the purported quality of the translation. Since the translation is not the book the writer wrote but someone else's version of it in a different language, at best any judgment or interpretation a critic who is less than proficient with that language might make can only be provisional, ideally contingent on a later reading of the book in its own language to back it up.

Of course, reviews must be written anyway, and even if some particularly conscientious critic endeavored to learn a language (or learn it better) in order to substantiate previous claims resting, in effect, on an incomplete reading, this would be an act of self-improvement, not of practical criticism. "Global" literature may be an ideal achievable only as an approximation, but that doesn't make translation less important (arguably more), nor does it obviate the need for purposeful criticism of translated work, although I would argue that credible reviews of translations are more important for building up a long-term critical interest in translated fiction than for bringing transitory attention to any one translated book. I understand that individual translated books must sell in order for publishers to publish more of them, but I also think that the very eagerness to get reviews for translations encourages the bad practices, which come from regarding the translated book as if it were written in English, the participants in the translation panel decry in the linked-to post.

I myself review translated fiction, but I approach the task with an awareness of the limitations of such a review in mind, as I explain further here.

Recommended Reviews

David Abbott on two books by David Albahari:

Since his move to Canada, now with the added layer of immigrant experience, now as an emigrant from his homeland, Albahari has continued to question the exact meaning of writing, to explore the possibilities and limitations of narration and of identity.

Gabriel Blackwell on Sarah Blackman's Mother Box:

That Blackman chooses to investigate this through the form of the tale is only fitting: where the word “story” is derived from a Greek word meaning “knowing, erudition”—very clearly a cerebral product—”tale,” coming from “tell,” requires a body. If the body is changed, the story may remain the same, but the tale will renew itself. In the tales of Mother Box, the body is shown to be as worthy a conundrum as the mind or the soul.

John Pistelli on William Giraldi's Hold the Dark:

At times, Hold the Dark seems like a polemical response to trends in contemporary literature, implicitly judging social realism to be an evasion of the reality that “man belongs neither in civilization nor nature—because we are aberrations between two states of being,” even as the novel’s refusal to explain fully its supernal elements. . .underscores the crude literalism in the fantastical genres with their eminently reasonable “world-building.”

Anticipating Judgment

Sam Sacks on James Wood:

These biases can be exasperating, in part because they make Wood predictable. You sometimes feel you need only read a book’s dust-jacket synopsis to anticipate his glowering judgment or satisfied approbation. More troubling is the frequent tone of moral hectoring. Like all born-agains, Wood cannot really admit the possibility that some readers and writers won’t ever accept his premises, and he seems prone to confronting disagreement with disparagement.

I feel I always know in advance what Wood's judgment will be. If the book in question can be interpreted as an attempt to portray what Wood calls "Mind" (human consciousness), he will approve. If not, he will dismiss it, often in the harshest terms. Within the confines of his established biases, Wood can make sometimes insightful observations, but ultimately those confines are just claustrophobic.