Wednesday, October 09, 2024

Rachel Cusk

 


I've written about Rachel Cusk before on the blog, but having recently finished another of her novels -- Kudos -- I wanted to offer some additional commentary. 

Cusk seems to have been located within the contemporary genre of auto-fiction: that space carved out, most notably, by Knausgaard. And to a certain extent, that is right: the thin line between character and self is certainly blurred. 

But I think Cusk has developed her own literary space, too: her narrative style -- which has a primary character recount the story of another, more tangential figure -- is very effective. Often, her way of constructing this sort of narration reads like a novel by Sebald: the central character speaks to the reader about a story involving a second character, whose story is invoked by way of memory, or by way of Cusk's signature "he said" or "she said" construction, which regularly appears in the midst of an extended sentence. 

Like Knausgaard, Cusk takes as her content the banal or the expected, but she has a way of universalizing it: of turning it into something existential, or transnational, or profound. Cusk does this in the most unassuming fashion: she recounts a dialogue between one character and another -- and then, before long, the discussion has assumed a quiet gravity, a sense in which what's being discussed between the characters is actually an exchange between the reader and the ideas being invoked. 

What Kudos is about seems beside the point: it is a novel comprised of a series of discussions, which reveal a range of characters, who are themselves ephemeral. This is a novel about ideas, and the ways we, as people -- as characters -- interact with them. There are not many books like this one, and I heartedly recommend it -- as a fresh angle into what literature can be. 

Sounds like Lionel at her best …

 … Lionel Shriver and the Resistance to Satire. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Well, Bob is in a class by himself …

 

Author Geoff Dyer on Bob Dylan: ‘The songs pour off his records like they’re written in my soul from him to me’.

Learning to look at any empty sky …

 … Were all stars to disappear or die…

Blogging note …

 I am currently in a rehab facility. This involves going to gym and other activities relating to my getting well. Friends and family come to visit from time time. I will blog when I can.

Place your bets …

 … Here are the bookies’ odds for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Sunday, September 15, 2024

Just so you know …

 I happen to be in the hospital. My legs sort of gave out yesterday and the aide who cleans my apartment called the ER people. Seems there were some serious issues. But I appear to be on the mend.

Friday, September 13, 2024

Karl Ove Knausgaard

 


I've written before on the blog about Karl Ove Knausgaard -- in particular about his seasonal quartet, which, taken together, amounts to an excellent read. I've also written about his essays on Edvard Munch, which have lots of interesting things to say about that tormented painter. Recently, I've made my way through another of Knausgaard's works of non-fiction, In The Land of the Cyclops, a collection of essays focused on philosophy, literature, and art. 

I should say at the start that, for me, Cyclops doesn't hold a candle to the seasonal quarter: I recognize, of course, that they are different in terms of tone, structure, and objective, but there was something about Cyclops which felt less convincing: as if this were just one man's sense for a book or painting. And it is. But in other essays or reflections by Knausgaard, that sense, that observation, assumes an oddly universal quality: and while Knausgaard may be writing about an apple, say, or a trip through Norway, the effect is one of transcendence: as if that journey, that piece of fruit, were the center of the universe. This experience was often missing from Cyclops.

That said, there are essays here which are to be celebrated, including those on Cindy Sherman and Gustave Flaubert. Another, on the Norwegian novelist, Knut Hamsun, features a number of unexpected and illuminated insights. Don't get me wrong, there were moments of revelation in some of these essays, and I walked away with a greater understanding, say, for Sherman than when I started the book. But I was expecting something more: perhaps more intimate, perhaps more lasting. Still, I'll continue to read Knausgaard because I think his approach to writing and to the contemporary moment is something worthy of exploration.

Monday, September 09, 2024

Sunday, September 08, 2024

Friday, September 06, 2024

I have been sick in bed all day …

 … hence blogging has been spotty. Please bear with me.

On Henry James

 This is too good -- from the LRB

"Imagine a typical Jamesian plot (or imbroglio as he preferred to call it, ‘plot’ being a ‘nefarious name’): an innocent American comes to Europe and is befriended by a Europeanised American and an older European woman (almost certainly a contessa or a princess, but titles are optional). The innocent American falls half or three-quarters in love with the contessa, and/or a shade homoerotically with the Europeanised American, or with the relationship between the two. Much conversation follows, and much ‘flirtation’ as we might be tempted to call it, in which the American is ‘seduced’ (culturally) by his hosts and maybe wants to be ‘seduced’ (physically) by the ambient culture. (Are you noticing all these adverbs and inverted commas, by the way?) Then the American sees the contessa with the Europeanised American arm in arm in the park or, perhaps, in the Soane Museum, when they have said they will be elsewhere. And at this point the climax of the Jamesian imbroglio occurs, a point of recognition at which a more vulgar author might have the Innocent American exclaim: ‘OMG. They’re fucking?’ At that moment the ‘centre’ does not hold, realising as it does that what it had admiringly thought to be the case is, ‘really’, not the case at all. James talks of the ‘original grossness of readers’. But there is an ‘original grossness’ at the heart of most of his exquisite fables: there is a thing going on, and probably a dirty thing, that the people in the fiction won’t or can’t see because their window is smeary or they are looking in the wrong direction."


Civics 101…

 … Required reading before the November election

Altered consciousness …

 … The singular sleuth and his “seven-per-cent solution”

Something to think on …

You cannot imagine at all how much you interest God; He is interested in you as if there were no one else on earth.
— julian Green, born on this date in 1900p

Let us pray …

 … to the Little Flower —Miraculous Invocation to St. Therese

Thursday, September 05, 2024

Cromwell and English History...

...There's more still to say about the period between kings 

A poem …

Your Octopussy


With eight arms I could love you better.

You could call me your Octopussy.

With eight arms things would go swimmingly.

And how intriguing, if we would boogie.


If I was a blow-fish I could do it better.

Of any sex-fish I could do it best.

With ocean beings it's much more juicy

In fact, in fiction, and in jest.


With a fish tail you could catch me better.

Reel me in hook, line, and sinker.

Could you love me transmogrified?

We all do change, with a flop, and a whimper.


Never a dull moment when your out to sea.

For now, be happy with your Octapussy.

                                            by Jennifer Knox


Love,