Author name: eugene

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

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i just finished the first section… what a book! this is the hottest book i’ve read in a long time. very very sexy. whatever your orientation, i think this book would steam you up… to be a young thing around town! …and the writing is so natural… he makes it seem so easy. so far it reminds in a way of frederick ted castle’s ANTICIPATION, not too similar except that fast fast momentum of being young and everything happening at once, the gush to speak. the immediately-recognizable genius *and* likeability of someone like brautigan, though with a much longer, more sustained development. sprawling like a wong-kar-wai film (and i think i think that not just cuz 2666 sounds like 2046) but the coolness and the beautiful men and women, the youth-cult and moral wideness to speak credibly and generously while also truthfully about pimps and crime and prostitution and drugs, the ability to flow the whole mix all together. the underlying (glamourous) sadness. but really he stands alone and apart from all these, unique.

the idea of poetry in it, like how bunuel would speak about the surrealists as being governed by an invincible and strict moral code. an unstateable moral code but one governed by the laws of poetry!

let’s see how section two goes…
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…now reporting from the middle of the middle. i thought that the middle would sprawl too much, but it doesn’t. a long but comfortable narrative, once you’re in it. slowly the story of ulises and arturo becomes revealed. an amazing (and actually: sweet) bit of autobiographical fiction.

constantly reflective about literature, how to live a life of one, its mechanics, the people, the gossip, the magazines, the rejections, the attitude.

to wet yer whistle, to remind you of how yours was once wet… here’s a bit i liked, from p. 184, from the POV of an older professor-type:

“There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. …the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search for Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain ( a paradigm of calm, serene complete literature, in my humble opinion)… Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall.”

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finished it. man–what a book! bradford morrow says, truly, about coleman dowell’s ISLAND PEOPLE, “The kind of novel that can change a reader’s life,”–and this one too! fantastic! it changed my life!

consume.

The Last Novel by David Markson

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this is a little strange: i saw markson read a month ago at the 92nd Y. i’ve loved him for a long time, partly out of a romanticized notion that these books portray of the long-suffering and isolated genius. i was a little surprised to see not someone who was particularly cranky, but someone almost describable as cheery… something struck me: that the protag of these books is definitely a character, perhaps an exaggeration (vonnegut evidently called up markson after the last one, concerned about markson’s ‘mental condition’) but definitely something markson *uses* (as he may also don, of course, some role when reading out in the public) — but my sense was that these characters are more just that, characters, than works of autobiographical fiction. …on the other hand, the *rest* of the book is intensely autobiographical, the detritus and gems — the graph, the mark — of a reading life. so i discovered that markson is both more and less artificial than i had assumed…

i also realized *how much* he is editing and sequencing, even more than i’d thought — they gave out a page of his heavily marked up manuscript — to create his music(al) of the artist’s life.

(i also had the thought, easily wrong and maybe silly to mention, that markson was not, had not been, at least in this last decade, critically or socially or financially ignored. at least not as much as i’d assumed. but that invitations to the right parties and publications (though maybe not grants) had indeed come his way, and that maybe out of stubbornness but more out of some form of integrity, he had refused them. and done so in some kind of shoulder-shrugging automatic way–kind of like how bunuel describes the morality of the surrealist, i.e. impossible to describe but very judging and very exact.)

reading THE LAST NOVEL has all kinds of pleasures: the stumbling on the familiar, the echoes of course, feelings of smugness and admiration for what respectively you knew and what markson knows, the terrible (and yet somehow expectedly so) difficulties of being an artist and of aging both. it goes by fast and can be happily reread.

(here’s something: i’d once thought up a personal category of experience i dubbed the ‘trivially profound’ and had placed there things like sunsets and mountains, those experiences of the ineffable that are deep but with which you can do nothing. those experiences just are, almost impossible to even comment upon. then i realized maybe the word ‘trivially’ was both redundant and misleading. all profundity is un-useable in this way — thus perhaps trivial, but still of course vital, foundational, basic… markson’s work might be like this for me.) (what, of course, auden means too when he says poetry makes nothing happen.)

he said he had vowed after the last one not to do another–but did somehow anyway… that he had one more, at least, in him.

consume.

In Sicily by Elio Vittorini

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a beautiful and opaque book… both more and less than it impresses to be… more, because it *is* a fugue–vittorini actually thought of it more as an opera, but in any case: a beautiful music of characters and basic desires and hopes. less, because its mystery is partly the result of some functional opacity–to hide from fascist censors–so its mystery is somewhat generated by utility rather than an inherent and natural profound ineffable-ness. the result may look the same so it’s eye of the beholder stuff whether that makes a diff to you. …except for the fact that the allegory has no clear signified, a very beautiful allegorical novel.

consume. 

Simply Separate People by Lynn Crawford

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i absolutely loved this one… the sentences seem thought thinking in this one, clever but not ostentatious. character is created by language rather than by event. though, that said, there might, if not for events and circumstance, be only one character. but i loved that character. she was smart and curious and acknowledging of pain and conscious of privledge. an unexpected sincere pleasure.

consume via amazon.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

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best new fiction i’ve read in a loooong time. hidden within its seemingly conventional narrative, is a sprawling style of heartache barely held together by the integrity and personality of the writing. honest and dark.

Island People by Coleman Dowell

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a strung together series of short stories a novel makes, this time. the best book ever. in death-defying sentences and in a tremendous organic and complex structure, this book is an autobiography of the best kind, made completely of true lies, which rewards you with basic insights into the human condish, a now deceased nyc artworld, and one spectacular case-history of schizophrenia.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

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i’d tried years ago and couldn’t get through it. but this time, with my wife’s help, did. a beautifully sustained dreamworld slash alternative reality your choice. a massive accomplishment. i read it after NEVER LET ME GO, which i thought was a similar project, but the latter lost steam i thought as it tried to explain itself after the first third. ishiguro’s always in control though, which is admirable. in this book he lets the dream be its own explanation, which is a purer effort though probably more likely to frustrate. in this one he has some beautiful ruminations on the nature of art and celebrity from the voice and POV of the narrator, a famous pianist.

The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq

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I understand the desire to dismiss this book and this author–but he’s too good a novelist for it. Theo Tait has a great take on him in the London Review of Books here, which also has some juicy biography bits:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n03/tait01_.html
He isn’t always as honest as he purports himself to be, is probably the worst thing you can say about him. His vileness is just there, condemnable, what else to say about it other than maybe it’s simultaneously repulsive and titillating. But the weight, development, momentum he can put into a book is very impressive.

The Street of Crocodiles By Bruno Schulz

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from what i can tell from the intro–though i might be reading this wrong–it’s a collection of love letters. by that: a collection of stories sent to a beloved. with that in mind, there something a little circumscribed about where the stories will go, as if it doesn’t want to reveal too much darkness or allow for bitter feelings–for why advertise *that* to a potential lover?

different from what i expected, which i guess was some kind of collection of kafkaesque stories. instead a very concentrated poetic language. a portrait of a father as dreamer and house-prisoner. nothing happens, more so than kafka, and the proust comparison on the cover is maybe more apt. the description of seasons and his varieties of sunlight are very beautiful.

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