Shirley Hazzard

 

Let me say at the start that I found The Transit of Venus to be a very difficult book. Its author, Shirley Hazzard, writes with unusual detail, but everything is qualified: the sun is hot, and yet, it shows signs of abating; the motor is loud, and yet, it could be slowing. The effect is a cascade of description, of approximation: whether of emotion, circumstance, or geography. But it all leads, in a way, to nothing: because all that qualification, very little in this novel is certain -- not even its ending. 

At its core, The Transit of Venus struck me as a novel about, well, about adultery. You dress this up a bit and argue that the book's about relationships or the dynamics of marriage. But I think that would be going too far. Really, this is an extended meditation on the nature of the affair: about how it evolves and collapses; and about how some find their way to it more often than others. 

But for a novel about adultery, there was surprising little sex or sexuality; and more than that: there's surprisingly little emotion. The characters in Transit undergo hardship; they engage in travel; they grow old. And yet, throughout, I never understood how they truly felt: there were long passages that evoked very little emotion, despite their having been built on a complex web of events cast as part back as the characters' youth. 

If The Transit of Venus takes as one of its themes the idea of growing old -- as a person, as part of a relationship -- that passage of time was not always well marked: unlike, say, The Old Wives' Tale, which chronicles the impact of time and history on two sisters, Transit rarely accomplished this: we are told that the sisters have grown older, but they seem still to be struggling with the same issues, with the same unresolved circumstances from their youth. (They are still engaged in adultery or seeking to find their way to it.) 

The culmination this novel in its final two chapters did speak to at least some of its magic: here, Hazzard manages to brings portions of the plot full circle, resolving a number of arcs, and clarifying the uncertainty tied to several interlocking relationships. And good for her: this was well done. But for me, it was all too late: after more than three hundred pages of struggle and adultery and more struggle, I'd expected an emotional release, clarity; instead, it was more of Hazzard's qualified narrative style, coupled with oddly detached personalities.   

Hapy birthday …

… Mel Brooks at 100: A Century’s Worth of Laughs (Hat tip, Dave Lull}

Tarjei Vesaas

 

In a recent edition of Granta, Karl Ove Knausgaard reviewed -- and recommended -- the work of Tarjei Vesaas, the Norwegian author nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize. Needless to say, I'd not heard of Vesaas, but having finished The Birds, I can confidently say: Vesaas strikes an unusual, and successful, balance between the calm and the anxious, between independence and belonging. 

First published in Norway in 1957, The Birds tell the story of a brother and sister -- Mattis and Hege -- living in a remote corner of the country. Mattis, who has a cognitive impairment, is dependent on his sister, who spends the majority of the novel knitting sweaters to generate sufficient money to support them.

Mattis is intellectually disabled, but he is not defenseless: indeed, his physicality -- his power and agility -- marks his character and movements. Mentally, Mattis is not entirely disabled: his thoughts emerge at all moments, but they tend to be truncated or selfish, or shared without sufficient context. The result is a reliance on Hege and the sense that Mattis will never advance beyond his current station. 

As the novel progresses, it is clear that Hege -- for her own part -- has changed, and that her relationship with Mattis has fractured: this is the result of one of the book's great ironies: that Mattis brings into their home the man who will become Hege's lover. 

That fracturing results in a question Mattis must ask himself: whether he belongs in this new world, or whether his dependence has run its course. Ultimately, Mattis sets a test -- a tragic test -- for himself, leaving his future to something approaching fate.

This short novel generates an immediate emotional response, and the foreshadowing that Vesaas develops -- by way of a secondary plot involving birds -- is very well done. I don't know enough to say whether, as Knausgaard suggests, this is the "greatest Norwegian novel," but I can say that it operates on a number of levels, and that its culmination is one I won't soon forget.

A great poem …

… by a great poet. Today’s Poem: Dream Song

Will Self

I'd wanted to read the work of Will Self for a while, and recently finished his debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. I should say at the start that this is not a perfect book, and it's not for everyone. Self seems to have set a goal for himself of charting in this collection the strange, the unusual, the unstable. Each of the stories uncovers a certain irrationality -- even, yes, a form of insanity -- but that in itself appears to be in the service of a smaller granule of truth. When Self writes of a psychiatric ward, for instance, he has as much to say about the nature of the psychotic as he does about our crazed attempts to manifest pathologies. Self does this elsewhere, too: his chapter about a philosophy of "waiting" unlocks as much about time as it does about an uncommon addiction to motion. I enjoyed these stories, but I didn't love them: I wasn't always sure about Self's style; it felt rickety, and sometimes predictable. The quirkiness of the stories, like their characters, also felt contrived: evocative, but contrived. There's an urban quality to The Quantity Theory, and an appreciation for London as a caldron of human experience. And for this, Self is to be celebrated. But in the end, I thought that there were other ways, perhaps, to explore the unorthodox, and locating a faint truth under cascades of irrationality seemed formulaic. For a more effective rendering of the insane, or the absurd, see When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut's tremendous rendering of science and psychology amidst the tumult of the twentieth century. 

A poem for this morning …

… … Jill Grossman — Poem

In case you wondered ……

…, THE TOP 10 CLASSIC DETECTIVE NOVELS, ACCORDING TO JEFFREY ARCHER (Hat tip, Jon Caroulis)

Change of address

… for Cynthia Haven's blpg: The Book Haven

John Updike

 

I didn't think too much -- as I recall -- of Rabbit, Run, but now, having returned to Updike, and having finished Rabbit Redux, let me take that all back: at his prime, Updike packed a serious punch. Much, of course, has been written about Updike, but I'd like to focus, in this post, on the quotation from the Sunday Times on the back of the British edition of the novel. That quotation attempts to sell Updike's vision as one in which he "transfigures the commonplace" into something "beautiful." Let's stop there: I don't read Rabbit Redux in that way at all. In fact, I understand the novel as attempting to assert the opposite: namely that there's an unbearable banality to the commonplace, and that boredom and sexuality are what propel the suburban experience in America. Rabbit Redux is less a celebration of the average, the mediocre, and far more an evaluation of the ways they persist, of how they interact. There's lots of intercourse in Updike's world, but much of it is pained; rarely is it ecstatic -- as you might expect from a marketing quotation like the one on the Penguin edition. Rabbit Redux, despite the sales pitch, really is a triumph: a sorrowful, hip, urgent novel composed at the intersection of many worlds: those racial, those violent, those political. The book is a reminder that even the most common moments are subject to external factors, and that while sex may bring two people together, it is rarely enough for them to truly communicate. 

A poem for this morning …

… Birds ( Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

…^Carolyn Kizer — On Rising from the Dead

A song of praise …

… Sara Teasdale, ‘May Day’ (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Antarah ibn Shaddād — “I didn’t start this …

A poem for this morning …

… Unknown —=The Moon that fell from heaven

Robert Walser

 

Robert Walser came to me by way of my enduring interest in W. G. Sebald. Indeed, Sebald identified Walser as a primary influence, pointing to his stories -- Walser's stories -- as an unusual mixture of the historical, the nature, and the "small." 

Published as a collection of vignettes composed on either side of the First World War, The Walk functions as a series of, in Walser's words, loosely connected "sketches." The pieces here are "short chapters" drawn from a range of imagined novels: or perhaps from a single novel. Either way, as Walser makes clear, the only novel he is truly developing -- that is, consistently developing -- is the "book of himself." 

I must say, despite the praise, The Walk left me confounded: I did not enjoy Walser's prose, and I have trouble following his stories. This may have been because of their disjointed quality: they do not always build on each other, and so the effect is of reading the fragment of one story, followed by the fragment of another. And the style, too, left me frustrated: there are moments when Walser writes with unyielding complexity; but there were others when his prose are almost ethereal, barely hanging on. 

For me, The Walk seemed to always be searching for the next aphorism, for the next piece of intellectual beauty. And sometimes Walser delivers. But at others, it's tough going, and the result, despite engaging content, and a focus on history's repeated intrusions -- is a collection with only, for me, a faint pulse. 

"All the songs of singing birds heard by people such a long, long time ago!" 

A poem for this morning …

… Today’s Poem: A Fairy Song

For this mornng …

… Poem in the Shape of the War

Remembering Petrarch …

… Poetry Review: The Sound of Sighs Restored — A.M. Juster’s New “Canzoniere (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this norning …

… Bruce Andrews — Poem

A poem for this morning …

… Alice Oswald — Riddle

A poem for this morning …

… April — by Sara Teasdale

Q&A

… A chat with Marie NDiaye

To the moon …

… America takes steps toward a return to the Moon

A poet worth remembering …

… 'Perhaps Even Pleasure in Difference' (Hat tip. Dave Lull) i wrote a piece about Cunningham many years ago. He saw it and wrote to me and said it was nice to be praised for the things one woukd like to be praised for. i must read him again.

A poem for this morning …

… Patricia Goedicke — Though It Looks Like a Throat It Is Not

Things worth remembering …

… Maxims and Meta-Maxims

A poem fo this morning …

… Philip Lamantia — Thorn of the Air

RIP …

… Remembering Alexander Kluge (1932–2026)

A poem for this motning …

… Charles Wright — The Southern Cross

A classic poem …

… Today’s Poem: March (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this norning …

… Tom Andrews — Cinéma Vérité: A Map Is Not a Territory

FYI …

Today is Lady Day, otherwise known as the Feast of the Annunciation.

A poem for his moring …

…Edward Salem — My Aerodynamics

A poem for this morning …

… Siri von Reis — A Diet of Glass

Vincenzo Latronico

 

I don't typically enjoy novels set in the present -- and that feeling was certainly reinforced when reading Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection. This is a book very much of today, of the contemporary moment: but it doesn't have much to say -- at least in my reading -- because that moment hasn't passed. It's as if Latronico is aiming at moving, but familiar, target, and the result is a book offering a set of predictable observations about a generation that has been analyzed ad nauseam. 

Latronico's focus is a childless couple, who, by the end of Perfection, are approaching forty. They spend their time in equal measures questing and self-congratulating. And they do most of this online -- which is a point Latronico makes repeatedly. It's possible, I suppose, to read this entire novel as a satire, but it was hard for me to avoid the suspicion that Latronico himself expected a pat on the back for all of his detailed renderings of the modern condition: this type of kitchenware, that type of coffee, this family of fonts, etc. Perfection does improve as the novel progresses, but this is only, I think, because the characters have some room to breath, and the descriptions of the objects surrounding them relents.

Perfection does pack a bunch, and it will hit close to home for a subset of urban dwellers approaching forty. But that punch is a temporary one. Had this novel been four times its length, that pain might have been justified. Instead, this is a vignette with a limited number of points to make about a topic that has been endlessly discussed. My preference for novels written decades ago -- before the Internet -- remains intact. Because really, what more can I learn about social media that I don't already know from picking up a newspaper or, worse, from signing on myself?  

A poem for this morning …

… Jane Hirshfield — The Wedding

It would seem so …

… We Need to Rescue Poetry i may start postingsome of mine gere. i don't think it will offend anybody.

A poem for today …

… Bug by Christian Wiman (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Another passing …

… RIP Calvin Tomkins (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

I suppose I must get around to reading this …

… The Unsung Writer Who Influenced Dutch (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Lyn Hejinian … — Province

A poem for this evening …

… To a Thesaurus ( Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Teju Cole

 

After finding myself disappointed by Penelope Fitzgerald's Beginning of Spring, I was eager for something different, for something more complex and textured, and with, well, with far less dialogue. Enter Teju Cole's Open City, a masterful novel evocative of the work of W. G. Sebald. 

Like Sebald, Cole performs a magical feat, bending fiction to its limit: indeed, Open City is a work as much of literature as it is of history, philosophy, and geography. It is a novel in pursuit of all these things. And the result is a book which functions in much the same way as Austerlitz or The Emigrants. Cole pursues extended digressions in order to explore the history lurking just below his narrative: often, of course, that history is painful or distressing. And yet, it is covered by the present, by a geography, a population aware only of itself. 

Cole travels in Open City from New York to Brussels to Nigeria and back. Along the way, he interacts with intellectuals, doctors, revolutionaries, and family. He confronts his memories and is made aware, at anguished moments, of those he's forgotten. Like Sebald, Cole walks: this is his primary mode of exploration, and it is the time it takes to travel this way which allows him to reflect on these cities, these places and memories. 

Ultimately, for me, Open City is a book about immigration and the movement of people: across spaces, across time, across borders. The novel ends with a poignant symbol involving the Statue of Liberty: as beacon both of hope and of injury and despair. In Open City, Teju Cole has delivered something special -- not always perfect, not always realistic -- but special all the same. Add black and white images to this novel, and you'll have chapters (or moments, certainly) approaching the storied works of Sebald. I tip my cap to Cole.

RIP …

… Len Deighton Dies At 91 (Hat tip, Paul Davis)

Good idea …

… How About a Biography of Tom Wolfe? (Hat tip, Dave Lull) i met him once. he and I had been invited to the White House by Laura Bush to talk to some school kids. Nice guy. Quite tall. I was six-one at the time and he had to be six-five.

RIP …

… Susan Haack (1945-2026) (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Tracy Fuad —?Birth

Form in Formless Times …

… Semi-formal verse: Rachel Hadas, ‘Ides of March, MMXX’

A poem for this morming …

… Kaveh Akbar — Mothers I Once Was

RIP …

… Brian Doherty, Historian of the Libertarian Movement, Dead at 57 (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A legendary site …

… Nearly 140 years of history celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in Wilmington at the oldest, continuously operated Irish family-run bar in America ( Htip, Jon Caroulis)

A poem for this morning …

… Farid Matuk — Crease

Inspiration …

… Strange Beauty: On Translating Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Another poem …

… Sonnet variation: Marcus Bales, ‘Detective Story’ ( Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… From “Elegy for the Times”

Q & A …

… A chat with Bsn Yagoda

A poem for today

… Friends of the Library Sale (Hat tip, Dave lull)

Our town ~

… Davis: Philly police and FBI arrest more than a dozen gang members

A quote for the day …

… Quotes To Inspire You

Poetry in prose …

… Lydia Davis — The Dog Man

Just so you know …

… Don’t Know Jack About the Other C.S. Lewis? (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Lydia Davis — The Dog Man

Penelope Fitzgerald

 

I hope readers of the blog will agree that I tend to be generous in my praise of the large majority of books I review here. But having recently finished Penelope Fitzgerald's Beginning of Spring, I'll have to -- temporarily, at least -- change my tune. I was not impressed.

I came to Fitzgerald's work as a result of its praise; indeed, Spring was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But there was very little here which moved me. For a start, this novel about Russia struck me as painfully generic. The sections about Moscow seemed superficial and could have swapped out, really, for any major city: had Fitzgerald set this book in Mexico City or Paris, I'm not sure the impact would have been profound. Nor do I think that executing that swap would have been that hard: the fabric of the novel is not so deeply set in Moscow that it cannot be untangled. 

And more than that: there is far too much dialogue in Spring. And much of it, I felt, was not well staged. It was simply call and response, without scaffolding to surround it. You might argue that artifice is not necessary in a modern novel, but I'd tend to disagree: there's a fine line between a novel and a play, and some of the sections of Spring veered toward the latter. 

Perhaps most disappointing for me were Fitzgerald's characters, who were, for the most part, as generic as their surroundings. By the end of this book, I didn't care much for their revelations, or realizations, or actions. They seemed two-dimensional at best, and without the wholeness that generates that connection between reader and imagined figure. This is a book about an English man named Frank, living in Moscow, caring for his children. That in itself struck me as stilted: Frank, really? 

If there was a connection here with Tolstoy -- which some critics have argued -- that was lost on me, because the most interesting characters in Spring are those with the most incomplete renderings. Frank's caretaker, for instance, seems to have an intriguing arc, but what motivates or compels her remains a mystery. 

All told, this is not a novel I would recommend, and it's one, truthfully, that confused me: the praise it has garnered seems to point either to portions I've misunderstood, or which have simply not moved me. Either way, I'd take a pass on Spring. 

A poem for this morning …

… Jean Valentine —=Birthday Letter from South Carolina

A poem for this morning …

… Abigail Dembo — The Common Era

Check out your wisdom …

…?Weekly Wisdom Quiz

A poem for this morning …

… James Schuyler — Going

A mjor figure you should know abnout …

… The Eye of Denise Scott Brown

For your reading pleasure …

… March Reviews at North of Oxford

A poem for this morning …

… Kenneth Koch — Ten Films

Our town …

… Davis: Free parking, frequent crime in South Philly

One of the great ones …

… John Milton: Christian Individualist

That’s for sure……

… When newspapers cut book coverage, communities lose more than reviews (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Philip Booth — Night Notes on an Old Dream

RIP …

… Edward Hoagland, Lyrical Chronicler of the Natural World, Dies at 93 ( Hat tip, Dave Lul)

A poem for this morning …

… Gottfried Benn – Rowans

A poem for this morning …

… Diana Garza Islas — from “Section of Adoring Nocturnes”

RIP …

… IN MEMORIAM, ROBERT DUVALL (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Max Jacob — Story Without a Moral

A poem for this morning …

… Sargon Boulus —=Story Without a Moral

Han Kang

 

Let me say at the start: I was not ready for that. I'd read, of course, about Han Kang, who won the Nobel Prize in 2024. But The Vegetarian, which is perhaps her most acclaimed novel, moved in directions I was not expecting. On the surface, this is a book about a woman who decides, seemingly out of the blue, to become a vegetarian. But that decision, over time, masks a related set of challenges involving physical and mental health. It wouldn't be saying too much if I revealed that the first part of the novel culminates with brutal attempts by main character's father -- the woman's father -- to force feed his daughter meat. The book progresses from there, but not always as I'd have imagined. The middle section of the novel includes a disturbing meditation on art, sexuality, and power; it's in that portion of the book that ideas of nature are introduced: these become more pronounced toward the end of novel, when the main character, Yeong-hye, imagines herself as a sort of tree, needing only water to survive. The Vegetarian is a disturbing novel about individual agency, social pressure, and the complex layering underpinning humanity sexuality. There's a lot happening here, and not all of it is pretty or pleasant. Under the polite veneer of Kang's novel -- of apartment living in contemporary Seoul -- is a very dark and unsettling set of circumstances. 

A poem for this morning …

… Today’s Poem: My Heart Leaps Up (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Think about it …

… Are Petrarch’s Love Poems Your Perfect Valentine’s Day Gift? ( Hat tip, Dave Lull)

My patron saint…

… Canticle of All Creatures (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Tory Dent — Ocean Park

A poem for this morning …

… Muin Bseiso –.Fingernail Poem

A poem for this morning …

… Henri Cole – Sycamores

Perhaps we all should bother …

… Why am I Bothering to Read Van Til?

Worth pondering …

… Was Socrates Wrong?

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

 

There are novels which are so well constructed that their content, in the end, becomes secondary. That's certainly the case with The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's triumphant novel of Italian unification. Published in 1957, but taking as its focus events from the second half of the nineteenth century, The Leopard is a celebration of language and style. Lampedusa has a way of describing places, especially, with a complex layering: those places, of course, become characters in their own right. The Leopard, as I understand it, is considered one of the premier novels of modern Sicily: its history, personality, and geography are bound as one, an immovable entity confronting the realities of war and politics. At the heart of the novel is the Salina family: they who start at a princely perch and who end, fifty years later, three widowed women, caretakers of memories and dusted relics. The Leopard is not a perfect book; indeed, it felt too short; but its fabric, its language, and its characters are finely woven. This is a novel about the creation of heritage, memories, and lineage, and about how history stops for no one, not even the wealthy. I knew nothing, really, of Sicilian history during this period, but Lampedusa's language, alone, was worth the read.

Continuing

... 70 million years of history

Ready, set, go ……

… Starting point for my Mark Twain celebration

A poem for this morning …

… Alice Notley – “I’ve meant to tell you many things about my life …

Another passing …

… Allan Massie obituary ( Hst tip, Dave Lull)

RIP …

… The strange death of Swiftian satire. 300 years after Gulliver’s Travels, the right to be offensive has died. A N Wilson ( Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Good for her …

… Lionel Shriver Infuriates the Literary World. That’s Fine By Her. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Another poem …

… The Fish – by Marianne Moore (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Margaret Ross – Macho

A poem for this morning …

… Brian Blanchfield – Smalltown Lift

Curiouser and curiouser …

… Former CNN host Don Lemon arrested after anti-ICE protests at Minnesota church Last time I checked, we had freedom of the press in this country.