I want to check it out mostly for Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis!
Recently finished books?
- Thread starter Mirabell
- Start date
Hamishe22
Well-known member
Frédéric Mistral Poet and Leader in Provence by Charles Alfred Downer
Reading this book was a weird way of familiarizing myself with Frédéric Mistral, as I couldn't manage to find any of his works for myself. This is not a book by Mistral but an academic dissertation on Mistral which deals with him as both a philologist and a poet. Of course, Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in both capacities. As a philologist, it's intriguing and interesting to read about his role in preserving the language of Provençal, but inevitably, due to the march of time, the science is not similar to what Mistral was doing at all. As a poet, the weirdness got much worse as I was reading the works of him in the form of a close reading and detailed analysis rather than the poems first, which felt bizarre and even to a degree wrong and perverse. Still, I feel like I have gleaned enough to say that the poems are definitely not bad but not very great either, and feel like run of the mill classic poetry. As much as I'm allowed to pass judgment, I'd say Mistral is a Nobel laureate who's not objectionable but one than has time has mostly left behind.
Reading this book was a weird way of familiarizing myself with Frédéric Mistral, as I couldn't manage to find any of his works for myself. This is not a book by Mistral but an academic dissertation on Mistral which deals with him as both a philologist and a poet. Of course, Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in both capacities. As a philologist, it's intriguing and interesting to read about his role in preserving the language of Provençal, but inevitably, due to the march of time, the science is not similar to what Mistral was doing at all. As a poet, the weirdness got much worse as I was reading the works of him in the form of a close reading and detailed analysis rather than the poems first, which felt bizarre and even to a degree wrong and perverse. Still, I feel like I have gleaned enough to say that the poems are definitely not bad but not very great either, and feel like run of the mill classic poetry. As much as I'm allowed to pass judgment, I'd say Mistral is a Nobel laureate who's not objectionable but one than has time has mostly left behind.
tiganeasca
Moderator
This entry offers a small number of Mistral's works, some of which are in both French and English translations. You can also find some other scattered bits here and here.
Hamishe22
Well-known member
T
Thanks!
Stevie B
Current Member
I'm a Laura Linney fan as well. As far as Olympia Dukakis is concerned, I'm old enough to remember when she came to national prominence for her role in "Moonstruck" as well as for being related to Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. These two things coincided with one another one year. The dud candidate might have won if he had Olympia's spitfire personality. Also, he needed to learn that one shouldn't wear a dress shirt and a tie during a photo-op riding in a tank.
Last edited:
Raymond Chandler - Playback (++) The Kingdom of this World- Alejo Carpentier
Marvelous. I bought this and two other newly translated Carpentier novels a few weeks ago. I'm impressed by the structure. It is a short novel, but every few chapters, he shifts focus to other characters and then circles back to Ti Noel, the protagonist. The novel details the messiness of colonialism and liberation and sort of deflates the naive idea that liberation leads to utopia. Of course, this is a foundational magical realist text and I appreciated those flourishes. A novel that I can tell will need more re-reads to fully understand its workings.
Marvelous. I bought this and two other newly translated Carpentier novels a few weeks ago. I'm impressed by the structure. It is a short novel, but every few chapters, he shifts focus to other characters and then circles back to Ti Noel, the protagonist. The novel details the messiness of colonialism and liberation and sort of deflates the naive idea that liberation leads to utopia. Of course, this is a foundational magical realist text and I appreciated those flourishes. A novel that I can tell will need more re-reads to fully understand its workings.
Stevie B
Current Member
Are you suggesting that George Bush didn't create a utopia when he sent U.S. armed forces to liberate Iraq?
By the way, The Kingdom of this World is the only Carpentier book I've read. I spent two summers in Haiti during my grad school years, and this is one of the titles I read during that time. Do you have any recommendations for another book by the Cuban author?It is the first book I've read by him. The other two I bought were The Lost Steps and Explosions in a Cathedral. Haven't read them yet.Are you suggesting that George Bush didn't create a utopia when he sent U.S. armed forces to liberate Iraq?
Phil D
Well-known member
El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) is one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've ever had. I've never understood why it isn't more famous in English. Spectacular novel.
Stevie B
Current Member
I just checked and Penguin recently released a new translation of this book that includes a forward by Alejandro Zambra.
Phil D
Well-known member
Great to hear it's been re-translated. I'm a little surprised they kept the previous English title, rather than going with something closer to the Spanish. Zambra could hardly be more different to Carpentier as a novelist but I'd still be interested to know what he's got to say about it.
Phil D
Well-known member
Tayeb Salih - Época de migración al norte (trans. María Luisa Cavero) (Season of Migration to the North / موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال) (++)Chose the Spanish translation after some hesitation because it's much more recent (1999) than the English and seems to correct certain factual errors around culture, such as the Islamic perspective on Christianity and the practice of ablation.
An unnamed narrator returns to his native village in newly-independent Sudan after living in England. An enigmatic novel about postcolonial Sudan (and Africa more broadly), Orientalism, the politics of interracial desire and power, and the effect and structure of 'progress'. The story is complex and mysterious, but with an undeniable underlying vitality and force that draws obvious comparison to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
I can't say I feel like I understood the work and I hope to re-read it in future, but I found it brilliant and fascinating.
Antonio Tabucchi - Pereira Maintains (trans. Patrick Creagh) (Sostiene Pereira) (+)I liked the testimonial style, which invites you as a reader to position yourself as a recipient of the testimony of Pereira, and at the same time to both question its validity and imagine the different possibilities of who it might be fictively addressed to. But this is an overtly political novel, and I found its politics frustrating. The idealisation of France as a liberal country in the 1930s, at a time when France unapologetically held power over an enormous empire, seems to me an example an unfortunately typical European blindness, and my indignation caused me to stop reading several times. I have no doubt that living in democratic France or Britain in the 1930s was much better for most citizens than living in authoritarian Portugal or Italy or Germany, but for racialised populations living outside the metropole, in Senegal or Angola, Cameroon or Mozambique, Vietnam or Timor, I doubt the difference was meaningful. Paris hosted a literal human zoo in 1931!
tiganeasca
Moderator
Ludmila Ulitskaya, "Bronka" and "The Daughter of Bokhara" 
+After being less impressed than I expected by Sonechka, I decided to read these stories in the same volume. I am pleased to say that I enjoyed them much more…enough so that I intend to go back and re-read Sonechka. I suspect I may have judged it too hastily. Bronka and her mother come to Moscow after the war and as a girl, Bronka learns to cope with the dismal reality of life in 1940s Moscow through a taboo love affair. Everyone assumes she is just a confused and directionless teenager who gets pregnant repeatedly by the same unknown man but Ulitskaya argues that she in fact has found love and fulfillment. The emphasis is not on where her path leads so much as on the path, the journey, itself. In "Daughter of Bokhara" Anya devotes her life to her daughter Milya, who has Down’s syndrome. Anya, who knows she is dying, tries to teach Milya how to deal with life, even changing jobs to be near Milya and hunts for a good husband to take care of her. Once she has achieved this, Anya returns to Uzbekistan to die, leaving Milya intentionally and hoping her daughter will forget her. Both stories are powerful depictions of circumstances and fully realized characters. (By the way, in the course of reading about Ulitskaya online, I found this recent short video interview with her in Berlin, where she lives now. Though it—sadly—does not discuss her work and instead focuses on politics, it’s nevertheless well worth the time to listen to her thoughts, I think. There is also a long profile in The New Yorker by Masha Gessen; though it appeared in 2014, it’s a much more in-depth look at her writing.)
Wang Anyi, Baotown +Wang introduces this wonderful book by drawing beautifully conceived, indelible portraits: the boy who wants to be a writer, Picked-Up Feng and his “wife,” Little Jade and Construction’s courting, Bao Bingde's crazy wife, Fifth Grandfather—an old man who wishes he were dead, and Dregs, the little boy who will be his friend. A series of events overtake the village and its inhabitants, allowing Wang to emphasize the value of decency in a largely detached, almost folktale-like, portrayal. The plot revolves primarily around Dregs (the last child of an older couple who exists largely unnoticed by his parents) and Fifth Grandfather, whom he “adopts.” Dregs dies attempting to save the life of Fifth Grandfather during a disastrous flood and when the aspiring novelist reports the story, Dregs becomes a “Youth Hero” and role model for the Communist Party’s propaganda machine. Baotown, previously unaffected by and unaware of national matters (such as the Gang of Four power struggle that is background here), is suddenly squarely in the national eye. Wang's tale is replete with ironies about the way myth and propaganda co-exist in a China at once deeply superstitious and dutifully Communist. This is a delightfully told and thoughtful story; recommended.
Endo Shusaku, Five By Endo +This short (fewer than 100 pages) collection comprises five stories, each of which is impressive in its own way. "Unzen" tells of a Japanese Christian who visits the Valley of Hell where Christians were tortured in the 17th century. The theme—with which Endo was long obsessed—revolves around his struggle to understand the martyrs’ faith. "Japanese in Warsaw" portrays a group of Japanese businessmen who visit Warsaw primarily for the prostitutes. They mock the city and are uninterested in its history even when they learn that Warsaw residents associate them with a noble Polish priest, Father Kolbe. The story of this priest, who once lived in Nagasaki and who was killed at Auschwitz (and whose death is well worth reading about if you don’t know about it), ends with an eerie revelation. In "A Fifty-year-old Man," Mr. Chiba decides to learn ballroom dancing even as he struggles with his brother's terminal illness and the death of his loyal dog Whitey. The final story is the opening chapter of Endo's novel Deep River. This story (chapter) tells about the death of Isobe's wife, a women he has long taken for granted, and sets the novel’s plot in motion by telling him, "I'll be reborn somewhere in this world. Look for me... find me... promise... promise!" An impressive collection and nice introduction to Endo by those who don’t know his stories.
Simin Daneshvar, Sutra & Other Stories [unrated]Daneshvar (1921-2012), a leading writer of modern Iranian fiction, wrote both novels and short stories. Given her stature, this collection of six stories had the misfortune to be put into English by two people so determined to make a literal translation as to lose the real meaning in the process. As a result, most of the stories were difficult to follow or appreciate—at least for me—hence, I am unwilling to rate the book. I am reluctant to say much because I honestly could not understand much of what happened in them, except on a literal basis. Sentences, even whole sections, often didn’t follow what preceded, making the point of a story often impossible to discern. I cannot disagree with the jacket’s description of her work as emphasizing “themes of sexual and racial identity, the social relations of wealth and poverty, the working of memory and dreams,” but this volume gave me little sense of Daneshvar’s style or quality as a writer. Far too often I felt completely unable to comprehend what was happening, a problem compounded by the translators’ reliance on untranslated words or concepts. There were a couple stories (notably “Childbirth” and “Bibi Shahrbanu”) that I enjoyed, but I cannot recommend this collection to anyone; it gave me almost no understanding or insight into her writing and no way to appreciate her abilities.
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
- This is my first exposure to her work but before I started, I was aware of the extreme opinions people have regarding Donna. I must say that my 16yo self would have loved this book, perhaps even thought it was a masterpiece. But I'm not a 16yo boy anymore. I didn't hate it (I would not have read almost 600 pages if I had), but something didn't click with me. I think the following passage of the book sums up what I think of it:
"People really did like him. No one had known him all that well but it was a strange feature of his personality that the less one actually knew him, the more one felt one did. Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand."
I think, from afar, from a superficial look (as my 16yo self would have) this is an okay book. But I need to touch it, I need to get closer and feel it. I'm no christian you see. I need to see to belive. And the more I entrenched myself into it, the closer I got to the solid figure that seemed real to me from a distance, the more it shaked and failed. And when I finally reached the image and held my hand out to touch it I felt nothing but air. Just air.
- This is my first exposure to her work but before I started, I was aware of the extreme opinions people have regarding Donna. I must say that my 16yo self would have loved this book, perhaps even thought it was a masterpiece. But I'm not a 16yo boy anymore. I didn't hate it (I would not have read almost 600 pages if I had), but something didn't click with me. I think the following passage of the book sums up what I think of it:
"People really did like him. No one had known him all that well but it was a strange feature of his personality that the less one actually knew him, the more one felt one did. Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand."
I think, from afar, from a superficial look (as my 16yo self would have) this is an okay book. But I need to touch it, I need to get closer and feel it. I'm no christian you see. I need to see to belive. And the more I entrenched myself into it, the closer I got to the solid figure that seemed real to me from a distance, the more it shaked and failed. And when I finally reached the image and held my hand out to touch it I felt nothing but air. Just air.
Last edited:
Stevie B
Current Member
I had a very similar reaction to The Secret History as you did. I was never tempted to not finish it, but it always seemed something was missing, like depth. I'm still surprised the novel caught fire like it did with the reading public, but perhaps the book's airiness and simple narrative helps explain it. I had a sense at the time I read the novel that it could perhaps be a better film, but it has yet to be brought to the big screen. I do recall hearing, however, there were at least a couple of false starts (including one where Joan Didion was slated to write the screenplay).
Last edited:
The more I think about what I just read, the more I dislike this book. I feel robbed of my time. And I think a film would be just as bad.
Lima Barreto - The Decline and Fall of Policarpo Quaresma : 2014 translation of Francis Johnson, available only in Kindle format. Last decade of 19th century Brazil, around the period of navy revolt, Barreto writes about the 'neo republican, strong patriotic, all things Brazilian' , your typical modern day traditionalist in Quaresma. Despite his notions of nation and society and the regular set backs, he carries his life and his surroundings in his way. I get a feeling that Lima Barreto is attempting in ridiculing the present state of the country in his 'satirical', mocking way of depiction of his characters. Interesting book, impressed too.
Masti Venkatesh Iyengar - Subbanna and Other Stories : Collection of his short stories. Masti Venkatesh Iyengar was one of the major poets/short story writer in Kannada Language in the 20th century. Awarded 'Jnanpith' in 1983, he was a prolific writer, with over 100 books to his credit ( between 1910 to 1985). Most of the stories set around the old Mysore state, depcting various social issues around the mid 20th century. 
Anne Michaels - Fugitive Pieces : Another book around memory and forgetting ( or remembering and recollecting) linking to WW2. Jakob Beer, young polish boy witnessed the killing of his family, before being rescued by a Greek Geologist, living his childhood in Greek islands and migrating to Canada, whose diary has been discovered after his death. Anne Michaels is a poet and her writing , justifies her poetic credentials. Despite the slow events and actions, the strenght of her writing carries the book along pretty well. 
Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Wolves of the Cresent Moon : Pleasantly surprised by the outcome. 3 people whose lives intermingles in the turn of the fate, in the near time Saudi life. One, a highway thief, brom the Saudi Bedouin tribe , who had lost an ear, the other a Ethiopean slave, currently freed who had been castrated and lived as a eunuch during his captivity, and an 'orphan/bastard boy' abandoned in front of the palace at birth, whose one eye has been eaten by stray cats. Book starts with the 'bedouin' man trying to leave the city ( unnamed, arguably Riyadh) arriving at the bus station, unable to decide his destination ( every city is Hell), where he comes across of a dossier containing the details about the orphan child of unknown berth, and over the duration of the night, the story of the boy and the rest unravel to us. Very complex structure of narration, the three participants goes through their 'predatory life' in the society where they are always 'at the receiving end'. The book is banned in the Kingdom, I'm not sure why, but one can understand ( in my limited capacity as an outsider), what the writer is trying to bring forward. The character build with the caricaturistic nature - missing eye, ear, and manlihood - and 'foreigner - orphan - bedouin tribe', 'palace - government office - public place' etc, seems to be cleverly built to that effect. Not a linear narrative, not always follw the clear structure , despite that this book really impressed me. Alexander Blok - Selected Poems : Found in a used book shop. Old 'Progress Publications' hard cover with shiny papers and impeccable print. Translated by Alex Miller. Poems from 1898 until 1919. I liked the early poems, with their imagery, the ideas around love and longings. Also has the longish 'Retribution' and the famous and familiar 'Twelve' on the revolution. In general I thought the translation was decent, until I compared the translation of 'twelve' with the more recent 'Boris Dralyuk / Robert Chandler' translation.
Liam
Administrator
It's funny you should say that, I felt the same way about Fugitive Pieces but in her next book, The Winter Vault, I began to find her style too precious.
Like, by themselves, her sentences (in TWV) were beautiful and poetic, and she created amazing visual images with words, but in the end I felt it didn't amount to much,
I do intend to read her latest novel that's just been out, Held. I love books set around the time of the First World War, they are always tinged with nostalgia and pain.
Anne Carson - If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
"messenger of spring ... nightingale with a voice of longing"
- A book that presents us several compositions (oftentimes incomplete) by our dear, beloved, honey boo and tenth muse Sappho, translated and commented by our dear, beloved, honey boo and eleventh muse Anne Carson. It's a bit sad that most of Sappho's writings are almost unintelligible. Sometimes we just have one single world intelligible or people just mentioning that Sappho said this or did that. At any hate, we have at least some beautiful poems that seems complete. Anne's translation is great and respectful, and her notes show that she really knows what she's talking about. I could read her writings on Ancient Greece without ever getting bored and always wanting to know more.
"...nor will there be a sunlit day that lacks the name of lyric Sappho."
"messenger of spring ... nightingale with a voice of longing"
- A book that presents us several compositions (oftentimes incomplete) by our dear, beloved, honey boo and tenth muse Sappho, translated and commented by our dear, beloved, honey boo and eleventh muse Anne Carson. It's a bit sad that most of Sappho's writings are almost unintelligible. Sometimes we just have one single world intelligible or people just mentioning that Sappho said this or did that. At any hate, we have at least some beautiful poems that seems complete. Anne's translation is great and respectful, and her notes show that she really knows what she's talking about. I could read her writings on Ancient Greece without ever getting bored and always wanting to know more.
"...nor will there be a sunlit day that lacks the name of lyric Sappho."