MGF: Who I’m Reading Now
Reading now? I just finished Marquez’s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, which blew me away. I can’t believe it took me this long to get to it. Earlier this summer, I read Ron Carlson’s book on fiction craft, RON CARLSON WRITES A STORY. It’s a great behind-the-scenes account of how a great short fiction writer puts a piece together. It’s like taking a class from the guy. Apparently at UC-Irvine, where Carlson teaches, his colleagues give him shit about the title, follow him around the hallways muttering, Ron Carlson walks down the stairs, or Ron Carlson sips from the water fountain. I once went to a reading by the fiction writer Paul Friedman, titled “I Don’t Claim to be Paul Friedman,” and I think he caught a lot of shit from his colleagues too. I’ve learned a lesson here.
I recently finished Michael Czyzniejewski’s short story collection ELEPHANTS IN OUR BEDROOM, which I really enjoyed. I read it in South Africa in a blue bedroom filled with shongololo centipedes thicker than broom handles. Elephantine, at least. I’ve also been trading books with a lot of people, so I’ve been checking out lots of poetry: Elizabyth A. Hiscox’s brilliant and devastating INVENTORY FROM A ONE-HOUR ROOM, Bruce Cohen’s DISLOYAL YO-YO, Jee Leong Koh’s EQUAL TO THE EARTH, Brent Goodman’s THE BROTHER SWIMMING BENEATH ME, Brian Young’s THE FULL NIGHT STILL IN THE STREET WATER, and Keith (KP) Liles’ SPRING HUNGER, which is great populist Alaskan poetry that pairs “mini cheeses squared” with a “moonshine contract,” and that the poet Linda McCarriston called, in praise, “Anything but cool.” I love that. Oh: and this August, I knocked out a wasp nest with my still-unread 9th printing 1937 hardcover copy of ULYSSES.
Tagged: 100 Years of Solitude, Brent Goodman, Brian Young, Bruce Cohen, centipedes, Elizabyth Hiscox, Jee Leong Koh, Keith (KP) Liles, Michael Czyzniejewski, non-fiction, Paul Friedman, praise, press, publicity, reviews, Ron Carlson, Ulysses
Now that you’ve read “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” read Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits”. I, purely as a matter of accident, read them back-to-back and was astonished by how much Allende plagiarized “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Shameful, really. I still like her a lot, though. (One of my favorite South American books was “Hopscotch,” by Argentine novelist Julio Cortazar. It’s a sort of proto-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel before such a genre existed. A thinking man’s meta-fiction book. Along the lines of Nabokov–but owing nothing whatsoever to the Russian. Just parallel development among literary equals at the time.) Fascinating stuff. The South Americans seemed to have outpaced their North American cousins literarily in the Twentieth Century (probably starting with poet Ruben Dario).
Daniel,
You’ve given me a great list to check out. Thanks for this. I’m curious to check out “The House of the Spirits,” if only to check out the similarities.
Of Allende’s work, I’ve read only “Aphrodite,” a nonfiction book about aphrodisiacs. I made the mistake of reading it while camping in Denali National Park, eating only cereal bars, cans of Libby’s corned beef hash, and Stagg Chunkero chili. Reading about oysters and almonds, roast pig and sea urchin, I wept, unsatisfied, often. But the aurora borealis was pretty!
MGF
I love Marquez. “Love in the Time of Cholera” is my favorite by him. I find the elusiveness of Florentino’s grand jestures of love regrettably endearing–the dedicated love-sick puppy…one of my favorite characters in literature to date. I have “Autumn of the Patriarch” chilling on my shelf now waiting to be read.
Currently, I’m reading “Dandelion: Memoir of a Free Spirit” by Catherine James. It’s very playful and engaging read, especially for those who were raised or might live their lives outside what’s conventional. Very heartfelt, humorous book. Great writing here.
Also, I’m finishing “Dies the Fire” by S.M. Stirling. It was suggested to me by a fellow bookworm coworker on the day that I decided to diversify my concrete reading list of mainstream, thriller, women’s lit and creative nonfiction. I’m not generally a fan of Sci-Fi…but this alternative historic novel is a great read. If you can’t imagine a world without the comforts of technology to cushion civilization as we know it, this is the PERFECT novel for you.
Just thought I’d join in the convo. Interesting titles mentioned here. “House of the Spirits” sounds interesting also. I’ll be sure to check it out.
Cheers:)
Anarda Nashai
Thanks, Anarda! My list is growing, and growing! Stirling’s sounds especially intriguing.
MGF
I’m sorry, is nobody going to mention the 1937 edition of Ulysses? You could built an entire (and by entire, I mean four-dimensional) wasp nest with that thing. Read it.
I taught 100 Years of Solitude, and like to pair it with Borges’s “Aleph” or else “Everything and Nothing.” I agree with Daniel about Allende’s liberal borrowing from Marquez, but that doesn’t mean one should read House of Spirits. The movie’s not bad. I also think Rushdie rips off Tristam Shandy (Midnight’s Children) , Alice in Wonderland (Haroun and the Sea of Stories), 1001 Nights (Enchantress of Florence), etc. But I like the way he does it.
Yes: I must get to Ulysses, stinging bugs and all. Love the rip-off (nay: liberal borrowing) list. It would fun to see more of such lists. Thanks, Marcela!
MGF
I only finished “Ulysses” because I took it on a trip with me to Peru and sabotaged myself by bringing nothing else to read. The thing is: I prepared for years to read it. I studied Greek to read the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” (knowing that “Ulysses” was based on the “Odyssey”). I then followed it up by reading 6 different English translations of Homer’s works, followed by a whole bevy of classics from Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In all, it took me about 3 years. Then I finally got to Joyce’s novel–and concluded that he was kind of a phony. Or, at least, not worthy of all the fuss initially made over him. Thomas Wolfe later attempted a “modernization of Homer” in “Of Time and the River” and–to my way of thinking–cleaned the floor with Joyce. Ross Lockridge–author of “Raintree County”–then went on to outdo Wolfe.
Joyce merely benefitted due to Somerset-Maugham’s axiom: “We tend to overpraise long books. We credit them with great depth because it took us so long to get through them.”
Joyce’s book was, in my humble opinion, overpraised because 1) It was long and 2) It was purposefully opaque and abstruse.
One modern scholar made a great observation. In the Middle Ages, all one had to do was be literate to be “a mystery to the masses”. Once reading became a common skill, though, the literary shaman turned to abstraction and intentional abstruseness to simulate the same effect. I think Joyce conned the literary establishment by using that method.
Judged by objective methods, his writing doesn’t bear much scrutiny. (Virginia Wolfe and Gertrude Stein predate his alleged invention of “stream of consciousness writing, so he loses when he tries to pretend he’s “original” in technique. And for sheer beauty of prose, he’s kind of a failure. Just about everyone beats him on that score.) One critic on talking about Italo Svevo’s “Confessions of Zeno” wrote, “As James Joyce’s fortunes fall, he will probably be best remembered for discovering Italo Svevo.”
I agree with that assessment. (He was grossly overrated by 20th Century champions of “free speech,” and granted genius status on the basis of using dirty words in an era when that would get you in trouble. Now that we’re no longer shocked and can judge him on his merits, his reputation collapses under more mature scrutiny.)
Daniel,
Thanks for this thoughtful and lovely assessment. Maybe I’ll simply relegate myself to smelling the book (think: dried asphodels, dried apricots), and read something else.