What are you reading now?

[Joseph K]

Having finished Art: The Whole Story, this has taken its place as my meal-time book of choice:

[vinteuil]

.

Marcel Proust : Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/16/unseen-work-by-proust-announced-french-publisher-the-seventy-five-pages

http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Blanche/Les-soixante-quinze-feuillets

https://www.franceculture.fr/litterature/marcel-proust-les-soixante-quinze-feuillets-lebauche-autobiographique-de-la-recherche-en-librairie

.

https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2021/04/08/les-soixante-quinze-feuillets-marcel-proust-en-petites-pelotes_6075982_3260.html

(well, how could I not?)

" ... Je pense que le texte de Proust est vraiment accessible, même si on n'a jamais lu Proust / ... / J'espère aussi qu'il y aura des personnes qui vont se découvrir une vocation de spécialiste de Proust. Ce serait formidable. Ce qu’il y a de merveilleux avec Proust, c’est qu'il est inépuisable. Même dans les brouillons, surtout dans les brouillons ! Mais c’est vraiment un ouvrage pour tous les lecteurs de Proust. Mon ambition a été de satisfaire le spécialiste le plus exigeant, mais surtout de rendre accessible cette découverte à tout lecteur de Proust et même aux primo-lecteurs. Il y a une transparence, dans le premier chapitre, qui est parfaitement accessible à tous. Après, comme toujours chez Proust, même quand il est très simple, il y a un feuilletage, il y a une épaisseur, il y a une multiplicité de perspectives. Mais ça, c'est avec le temps qu'on s'en rend compte... On a tous, plusieurs Proust, au fil du temps !"

.

[french frank]

(well, how could I not?)

.

Amazing - Tadié says he was waiting 70 years to see these. Not far off, if he was a teenage Proustian.

[Serial_Apologist]

Having finished Art: The Whole Story, this has taken its place as my meal-time book of choice:

So, they did have all-female folk rock bands back then, then.

[LMcD]

Just about to start reading David Starkey's book (yes, I know ...) on Elizabeth I, having now finished watching Glenda Jackson in a most welcome repeat of 'Elizabeth R' on BBC4.

[muzzer]

Long Distance by Penelope Mortimer, on the back of two other novels by her (The Pumpkin Eater and Daddy’s Gone A Hunting) and as discussed in a recent episode of the Backlisted podcast that I will have recommended on here before. She had a real ear for dialogue, coupled with quite piercing insight, and endured all and more that a woman of her generation did.

[Pulcinella]

Just about to start reading David Starkey's book (yes, I know ...) on Elizabeth I, having now finished watching Glenda Jackson in a most welcome repeat of 'Elizabeth R' on BBC4.

But Blackadder did it so much better.

[LMcD]

But Blackadder did it so much better.

Possibly - but at no time did Glenda feel the need to keep asking 'Who's Queen?' 'cos she made sure that everybody knew. I think Baldrick might very well have got the better of Walsingham.

[french frank]

Back to Ishiguro again, I've just finished A Pale View of Hills of which I didn't remember much when reading The Unconsoled. Revisiting it, I'm struck by the nascent ideas which recurred in The Unconsoled, though in slightly nebulous form in the earlier work: particularly the notion that two individuals who interact with each other in the narrative are facets of the same person. And again, the narrative is regularly disrupted so that at one point it is a present, then it goes back into the past - or is it two interwoven pasts?

This was Ishiguro's first novel and he apparently felt it was too 'baffling', but I thought one overlarge hint he introduced was unsubtle in a way that jarred with the otherwise carefully contrived subtleties of the narrative.

On to An Artist of the Floating World to see what similarities/unconventionalities that has. After that, perhaps time to read one of his later works !

[Joseph K]

As well as Catch-22, which has been and is an ongoing read, last night I started Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Despite the fact that it was published in 2007 it still sounds very up-to-date - much more up-to-date now than would have been recognised in Britain at the time, I'd say - with its depiction of capitalists & the ruling class seeing disasters as opportunities to enrich themselves and their friends.

[gradus]

A G Street's Farmer's Glory, not to be missed if writers like Adrian Bell, H J Massingham, Simon Dewes and latterly James Rebanks appeal to you.
I seem to remember him from Any Questions along with that other countryman Ralph Wightman, both I think hailed from Wiltshire and were intended to provide common sense and the balance needed to offset messrs Driberg and Boothby.

[Don Basilio]

Just finished Little Dorrit. Yes, I know Middlemarch is the great English novel, but Little Dorrit has a far greater canvas and would be my preferred choice, or second to Bleak House. I recently read John Mullen on Dickens following a LRB review which knocks on the head prejudices about Dickens' grotesquerie. There are not the tediously virtuous characters as in earlier works. Amy Dorrit just gets on being brave and kind. And there isn't the horrible soft porn gloating over pretty vulnerable women again as in earlier works.

Just turned to Barbara Pym's The Sweet Dove Died again and I have the new Pym biography on order.

[vinteuil]

Just finished Little Dorrit. Yes, I know Middlemarch is the great English novel, but Little Dorrit has a far greater canvas and would be my preferred choice, or second to Bleak House. I recently read John Mullen on Dickens following a LRB review which knocks on the head prejudices about Dickens' grotesquerie. There are not the tediously virtuous characters as in earlier works. Amy Dorrit just gets on being brave and kind. And there isn't the horrible soft porn gloating over pretty vulnerable women again as in earlier works.
.

... Mme v currently half way thro' Little Dorrit. I suggested it because she had recently enjoyed The Way We Live Now and was particularly entranced by the character of Melmotte. How can one not be? And recent resonances, from Maxwell to Greensill are so alive... So I thought that Merdle wd be a good follow-on.

Me, I'm starting a re-read of The Spoils of Poynton. I don't think I had appreciated on previous reads how funny and cruel it all is. And how ghastly all the people are, however 'sound' their aesthetic judgment. And how sound is sound anyway? Can we really trust Mrs Gereth's aesthetic taste?


.

[eighthobstruction]

Just finished Little Dorrit. Yes, I know Middlemarch is the great English novel, but Little Dorrit has a far greater canvas and would be my preferred choice, or second to Bleak House. I recently read John Mullen on Dickens following a LRB review which knocks on the head prejudices about Dickens' grotesquerie. There are not the tediously virtuous characters as in earlier works. Amy Dorrit just gets on being brave and kind. And there isn't the horrible soft porn gloating over pretty vulnerable women again as in earlier works.

Just turned to Barbara Pym's The Sweet Dove Died again and I have the new Pym biography on order.

....I've read Little Dorrit 2 or 3 times....tremendous scope/canvas/reach....agree with what you both say. Just tried Barnaby Rudge and abandoned after about 50 pages (tedious unnecessary description of characters....didn't even get to the Gordon Riots....

[muzzer]

This week’s personal book at bedtime is Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth, which I see is still freely available in spite of its author being cancelled for behaving (sort of) like his subject. I wonder if that in itself is a new genre. The biography itself is meticulously researched and illuminating.