As
spurious has started blogging again (he's been busy – and he'll get busier now for a few weeks, he's marrying a lovely woman, a faintly more conservative philosopher than he but a charming colleen, in September), at a time when I'm getting back to it myself, I'm impelled to echo some of the author's names he's mentioned lately....
Pessoa. I've been reading fragments of The Book of Disquiet the past few months – and I do mean fragments: beautiful bits of writing, but I can never read more than a few pages. A bit like reading Woolf's diaries, or Sei Shonagon's pillow book – I know Pessoa's intent is somewhat different, but I tend to read him in that way. In fact, although I was initially impressed by his complicated smoke-and-mirrors game with identities, I tend to read him as though, well, it's all written by him....
And yes, it would be interesting to go to Lisboa. I hadn't really thought of looking around at the streets Pessoa mentions, but it sounds like an interesting game.
Duras? – I've made friends with Miryam, who teaches French at my university, and who wrote her thesis on Duras. And since I'm reading all of this material on AIDS, including Hervé Guibert's novels, I am reminded that I mentioned that Duras hated Guibert, and wanted her publisher to drop him. But I can't remember just where I read that – and now I'm wondering if I got that right....
I do remember where I read that Duras, especially as she got older, was addicted to amplifying and dramatizing her own mythology, as well as to destructive feuds with other French authors, living or dead. It was Edmund White, blithely (but probably accurately) gossiping about French authorial politics. I suppose it was smart of him to wait until after she was dead – especially given the older gossip that he "had" to leave New York for Paris after he was so careless as to publish Caracole in 1985. Because Caracole was a roman à clef about Susan Sontag and her son, and they didn't like it....
Naipul. While in Sitges, I ran through the books I had and went to buy another; the classy little bookstore only had a few things in English, most of them airport reading. (Susan, of course, would have simply read something in Spanish, or French, or Catalan – sorry, out of my reach.) But there was one interesting set of essays by Naipul – A Writer's People – which was in some ways wonderful (beautiful writing) and in others annoying (he is, though, a rather irritable and judgmental man, isn't he? willing to dismiss a variety of people, especially his competitors, rather easily; and very certain of what constitutes good writing, or a good novel, and that everything else is not good). My impression is that I may come to him again, but cautiously, as though talking to a friend who is rather testy and too easily set off, where you have to watch what you say....
And speaking of rather testy: in a used bookstore with Bennett, I almost fell over a big tujunga edition of Howard Bloom's The Western Canon. I swear it must be a large print edition – well, not really, but it's huge; I'd never read it, and it seemed to talk about a lot of interesting traditional writers, so I thought, well why not try it. Bennett advised me to just put it down and walk away: and dipping into it a bit more, I see why – Bloom really is irascible, a neo-con in some ways (though I'm sure he sees himself as opposed to them) – someone who willfully misunderstands the whole possibility of postmodernism/poststructuralism, as did the more elegant but equally stubborn Gillian Rose. He makes perhaps too much of his own discovery of J, the writer of the first books of the Bible – can he really treat that whole interpretation as so generally accepted as to be the first root of the canon? The rest of the book is alternately brilliant and foolish, and it's hard to know quite what to do with the whole – no wonder the gang at the New York Review of Books despairs of knowing what to do with him.
Fortunately, it was cheap.
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Ah, how could I forget, the most frivolous and most wonderful thing I tripped over in July! Holbrook Jackson's The Anatomy of Bibliomania – one of his great trilogy on books, and by far the greatest: a magnificent pastiche of Burton – how, in fact, could he imitate that grand, demented, blithely accumulative style, and be at the same time slightly, ironically, modern and also utterly antique? Any description would have made me think: no, it can't really be like Burton, and it can't really be readable or wonderful – but it really, really is. His other books are pleasant, but they aren't as amazing as this one. And it goes on and on and on, with endless byways and tangents and unexpected twists, and none of them are quite what anyone would expect and yet none of them are ever boring... this is really something. The art of pastiche....