Recent Purchases/Borrowings

[Heteronym]

Enrique Vila-Mata - Bartleby & Co. (translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne)

Is this book related in any way to Herman Melville's sublime short-story, "Bartleby?"

The Annual Lisbon Book Fair has started and I spent more than I expected; and I can't resist going there again For now I've acquired:

• Asleep in the Sun, Adolfo Bioy Casares
• The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares (decided it was time to read it after Stewart's recommendation)
• Todos os Fogos o Fogo ("All the Fires the Fire"), Julio Cort?zar
• Hauntings, Vernon Lee (I seldom read English books in translation, but this was a bargain)
• Sarajevo Marlboro, Miljenko Jergovic
• Cora??o Duplo vols. 1 & 2 ("Double Heart"), Marcel Schowb
• Contos da Selva ("Jungle Tales"), Horacio Quiroga
• The Motion Demon, Stefan Grabinski

Quite a few haven't been translated in English. English-speaking readers should set up a lobby in favor of Quiroga and Schowb translations because they're very good.

[nnyhav]

[...]Anyway, I've come back after a couple of days away and now have the following books:


[...] Little Big, John Crowley

Couldn't wait for the Silversary? (he has a blog, the ancillary stuff bookending April may be of interest) (and my take, unspoiling, but there's an interesting intersection with my most recent reading, Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot, which I must mull) ...

(reader's block ... know that feeling) (now, buyer's block, that's another story)

[Beth]

I am reading A soldier of the great war by Helprin and like it so far,the prose is beautifull ans simple.Quite a surprise.

Ah! A Soldier of the Great War is one of my all-time favorites. Hope you enjoy it. Lots of laughs and great ironies within a beautiful story.

Returned last Friday from a trip and brought back several new volumes:

Penguin's Great Loves box set
Arthur & George - Julian Barnes
Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann
The Mermaid Chair - Sue Monk Kidd (possibly a joke)
Cliffs - Olivier Adam
Secret - Philippe Grimbert
God's Own Country - Ross Raisin

[saliotthomas]

Helprin was a great surprise,i also got City in winter and order Pacifique stories.I shall follow his work closely.My father will be greatly please for it is the kind of book he is very fond of.

i got
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
Colin Thubron - Shadow of the Silk Road
Michel foucault_dires-a series of lectures

[Stewart]

Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

Almost a little bit of synchronicity on our part as I've just returned from a lunch-hour jaunt to Waterstones, returning with The Sorrow Of War by Bảo Ninh, which a couple of encomiums on the back compare to All Quiet On The Western Front, albeit a modern Vietnamese version.

Also picked up in the trip were:

• Jamilia, Chingiz A?tmatov
• The Ministry Of Pain, Dubravka Ugresic
• In?s Of My Soul, Isabel Allende
• Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, V?tězslav Nezval

[nnyhav]

No buyer's block today:

Paul Verhaeghen, Omega Minor (trans Paul Verhaeghen ) [is this the next Discovery of Heaven?]
Raymond Queneau, Elementary Morality (Philip Terry) [his last book, intro David Bellos; I had no idea it was available]
Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project [the only one I'd expressly gone for]
Juan Goytisolo, Makbara (Helen R. Lane)
Hermann Broch, The Guiltless (Ralph Manheim)
Thomas Bernhard, The Loser (Jack Dawson)
Georgi Gospodinov, And Other Stories (Alexis Levitin & Magdalena Levy)
C?sar Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (Chris Andrews) [intro Roberto Bola?o]

[Stewart]

No buyer's block today:

Paul Verhaeghen, Omega Minor (trans Paul Verhaeghen ) [is this the next Discovery of Heaven?]

Discovery Of Heaven is Harry Mulisch, isn't it? He's a name that's been on the periphery for me (perhaps he needs his own thread) since I read a review of another of his novels. I've no idea what DoH is about, but, based on your question - which was no doubt rhetorical and therefore cancels out what I'm writing - it's either a Holocaust novel or it's Pynchonesque.

Raymond Queneau, Elementary Morality (Philip Terry) [his last book, intro David Bellos; I had no idea it was available]

I think I spotted it today, a colourful looking hardback. I've not read any of his other stuff. Oulipo, isn't he?

[nnyhav]

Discovery Of Heaven is Harry Mulisch, isn't it? He's a name that's been on the periphery for me (perhaps he needs his own thread) since I read a review of another of his novels. I've no idea what DoH is about, but, based on your question - which was no doubt rhetorical and therefore cancels out what I'm writing - it's either a Holocaust novel or it's Pynchonesque.

Yes, Mulisch (and yes he deserves a thread whether or not he needs one). And actually, in this case, not either/or but both. Recommended (it's one of Complete-Review's Best of the Best). For me there's the added frisson of one of the characters being based on a chessplayer I followed. (Oddly, I've just now once again picked up the book I left off then.)

I think I spotted [Queneau's Elementary Morality] today, a colourful looking hardback. I've not read any of his other stuff. Oulipo, isn't he?

Yep. Though I got it in paperback (Carcanet). And I've read all his other stuff that's been Englished. Except Exercises in Style. Self-imposed constraint. (Speaking of stuff I'd left off, I'm working my way through the Oulipo compendium as well.)

[saliotthomas]

C?sar Aria, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (Chris Andrews) [intro Roberto Bola?o]

That seem very interesting,i shall try to get it.

It's funny because Queneau is mostly seen in France as a "young adulte" writer,because of the film adaptation Zazi dans le metro.A mistake often brough with popularity of one work.Cinema is certainly good for the finance of a writer but terribly reductor as for the range of his work.

[Bjorn]

I've read one of Mulisch's (Siegfried) and thought it absolutely excellent. And I suppose it's a holocaust novel of sorts, dealing with Hitler from a philosophical/theological perspective rather than the historical one. He could definitely use a thread of his own; I don't think I ever wrote a proper review of Siegfried, though. I've got another of his (The Assault, I think) in my short-term TBR pile.

Just picked up:
The Long Ships, Frans G Bengtsson
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Stewart]

I shouldn't really be allowed near a book store until I've whittled down the unending stacks I've got to something manageable. But then, where would the fun be in that? So

• The Prince, Hushang Golshiri
• Natural Novel, Georgi Gospodinov
• Snow Is Silent, Benjam?n Prado
• The Following Story, Cees Noteboom

They are all relatively small books, so they can fill those couple of hour gaps where starting something bigger just seems, at the time, to be hard work.

[Eric]

I try to cadge books from publishing houses rather than buy them new. I have the perfectly genuine excuse that I want to review them. But that doesn't mean that I don't buy books as well; usually, though not always, second-hand. I was in Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland recently, then a day in Stockholm. Here's what I bought:

• Doktor Glas, Hjalmar S?derberg (novel)
• Gotlands historia i fickformat, Carl Johan Gardell (history / tourism)
• Dikter p? gutam?l, Gertmar Arvidsson (dialect poetry)
• Azalea, Walter Ljungquist (novel)
• V?gsk?l, Walter Ljungquist (novel)
• Vandring med m?nen, Walter Ljungquist (novel)
• K?llan, Walter Ljungquist (novel)

And I was given by the authors:

• Det liknar ingenting, Einar Askestad (short-stories)
• Fr?n en grop i sommaren, Bror R?nnholm (prose poetry)

Bought in Stockholm:

• Efter 30 000 sidor, Thomas Warburton (memoirs of a translator)

You will understand that my wheely bag was rather heavy, those few times I had to actually carry it, as opposed to wheel it along.

The frequent mention of Walter Ljungquist is because he's a neglected author I've wanted to read for about twenty years. The translator Thomas Warburton is ninety years old this year and has translated, among other things, Joyce's Ulysses, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and books by Orwell, Wells, Masters, Conan Doyle, Faulkner, Styron, Djuna Barnes, Henry Green, a play or two by Shakespeare, plus several important Finnish authors into his native Swedish. The name Thomas Warburton is indeed English by origin. Until his 33rd year Warburton was a British citizen, although he has lived all of his life in Finland, apart from a couple of years in Sweden during WWII.

[Stewart]

• The Little Girl And The Cigarette, Beno?t Duteurtre,
• A Dream In Polar Fog, Yuri Rytkheu
• A Journey Around My Skull, Karinthy Frigyes

The first two are ones I've been picking up, putting down for a while now that I felt it was better to just have them. The last has been interesting ever since I first heard about it, being a non-fiction account of undergoing brain surgery in the 1930s.

[Eric]

When in England, buy as the English. Well, maybe they don't buy the books I did:

Charles Morgan: "The River Line"
Charles Morgan: "The Fountain"
Anthony Trollope: "Can You Forgive Her?"

The last of these was in a curious, small, hardback edition, from Oxford Classics of years ago. The title is equally curious, but I couldn't resist the pocket-sized book for ?4, with free coffee stain on the dustcover.

I was toying with the idea of buying Blake Morrison's latest, whose title I've forgotten ("South of the River"?), but thought I could buy that so easily online. But I want to read a book like that, dealing like what it's like to live in contemporary Britain.

[ions]

Oh happy day! In the mail:

Warlock by Oakley Hall
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Deluxe)

YAY! All three look fricken awesome! Had no idea Tom did the blurb on the back of Warlock.

Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with-the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power-the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes “Warlock” one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

-Thomas Pynchon, back of Warlock by Oakley Hall

[nnyhav]

Today's visit to the restocked local used book recycler will burden my shelves for a while:

Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra (trans Margaret Sayers Peden)
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian and Coup de Gr?ce (Grace Frick)
Amoz Oz, A Perfect Peace (Hillel Halkin)
Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa
Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun (Donald Keene)
Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
L.P.Hartley, The Go-Between
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
Manuel Puig, Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages
Ryū Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue (Nancy Andrew)

Other than Fuentes and Desai, of whom I've read one book each this year, and Greene (most of his already read), the above are all new to me.

[Stewart]

Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa

That's one that has interested me since I found out about it. I was surprised to find out he was American as his How German Is It? looked, after a cursory glance, as if it were a German translation, especially as I'd picked it up off a display promoting Germany. Sadly, other than How German Is It?, he's out of print - or perhaps never has been. But, for Alphabetical Africa, I'd be interested in seeing his first chapter, since it's all the letter 'A'.

Manuel Puig, Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages

That sounds inviting.

[ions]

Volume 1 of The Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver. Just Volume 3 to find in hardcover now.
A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis
Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan
and some Evolutionary Psychology to chew on: How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.

[Mirabell]

Volume 1 of The Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver. Just Volume 3 to find in hardcover now.
A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis
Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan
and some Evolutionary Psychology to chew on: How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.

Oh, stay away from Pinker. He's not quite over Chomsky which makes for dreary reading.

And do tell us how you liked the Gaddis. I am myself dipping into the Stephenson again (first time read) and into Gaddis' JR (for a reread).

Hugh MacLennan's name doesn't ring any bells for me. Care to elaborate?

[Stewart]

I went out with the intention of buying Stefan Zweig's The Post-Office Girl, but the shop never had it, despite having a pile of copies last week. So, I plumped for Jean Teul?'s The Suicide Shop, just to give it a shot.