Conversational Reading

Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
With the James Wood review in this week's New Yorker, it's official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the... »
Are People Starting to Tire of the Franz?
The new book isn't getting very good reviews. And this review even started out with a meta-critique of Franzen the media... »
On the Importance of Not Making People Loathe Literature
Maybe this is why I've generally found Simon Critchley's philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull... »
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of... »
See Attacks, Vicious
Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard. In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we... »
Review of Varamo
The next installment in the great Aira invasion of the North American continent is upon us: Varamo. My review has just... »
Explanation
AO Scott on Patience (After Sebald): So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of... »
I Wouldn’t Have Guessed That
Lev Grossman talking about reviewing books is a little like that 50 Shades of Grey person talking about bring an author. Here,... »
More on Bolano’s Journalist
The LARB has a sharp review of The Femicide Machine, plus an interview with author Sergio González Rodríguez. This caught... »
Someone Save Criticism from The Atlantic
It's amazing that in 2012 The Atlantic can still publish something so clueless as this. Titled "Could the Internet Save Book... »

Jeff Waxman: Not only do I not think HHhH is bad, I think it's pretty dam
vfrancone: I am halfway through HHhH right now and I don't think it is
Richard: I have become a big fan of Simon Critchley, and of Tom McCar
James: I've had the original edition standing by for just such an o
Edward Champion: This can never be overstated. George RR Martin blurbed Lev.
Sawn: This is a similar theme to the Atlantic article about all th
Travis Godsoe: That's a great review, Scott. It brought back the mysterious

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus March 5, 2012
With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inv […]
Dogma by Lars Iyer March 5, 2012
A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men […]
Mercè Rodoreda and the Style of Innocence March 5, 2012
The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two rec […]
The Clarice Lispector Roundtable March 5, 2012
Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) […]

YFTS: The Redemtion of Sympathy

In my reading, the point of Deza recalling that awful story his father told him about Ronda–where the fascists baited a man like a bull as they murdered him for sport–the point of that was to compare Tupra’s actions in the restroom to what those fascists did to their prisoner. And I would say the comparison is not altogether invalid. I came into that scene wanting to see Rafita get what was coming to him, yet I came out of that scene wishing he hadn’t gotten what Tupra gave him. And I think this is a crux of this book. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: The Perils of Dancing

So a few more comments about last week’s section, pp. 122 – 201. I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to page 194, which I think contains a rather pivotal moment. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: And Now We Venture Into the Ladies' Room, and Into the Mind of a Vengeful God

I’m sure everyone was very tickled by the restroom scene–I know I was. In a very broad sort of way, this scene made the book feel very real to me in a way that all the talk of the Spanish Civil War, 9/11, Bill Clinton (yes, he was in there), government surveillance, James Bond, and all that other “real world” stuff just didn’t. The restroom felt so prosaic: if Marias was going to take Deza into a public restroom there’s nowhere he wouldn’t take him. It just opened the book’s world up for me in a way it hadn’t been previously. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: What About the Bosses?

Daniel Hartley has a highly worthwhile post on vol 1 of Your Face Tomorrow. Therein he brings up an excellent point that, I must admit, I had ignored until he mentioned it . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: Favors, and The Return of the Socks (!)

For those of you who remain with me, we are now just beginning “Dance,” the first section of volume 2 of Javier Marias’ long book (schedule here). As was probably not a surprise to most people, we discover that the young woman following Deza into his apartment at the end of vol. 1 was in fact Perez Nuix, who has an intriguing request to make of him.

I was struck here at how Marias sets up this request

. . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: Some Thoughts After Finishing the First Volume of Your Face Tomorrow

One starts Your Face Tomorrow filled with foreboding. How else to read the opening segment, a section that lets us know that everything we will read in this book has all been said and done, that it has all already happened to our protagonist, one Jacobo Deza (or Jacques, or Jaime, or . . . like Deza, so many characters in this book have multiple names). Moreover, the book begins with Deza telling us that, knowing what he knows now, he rues the act of opening one’s mouth. And then, were that not enough, the opening section ends . . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: Magaret Jull Costa Responds

Here are the responses to the questions posed earlier this week to Margaret Jull Costa:

Neil: One of the many pleasures of reading the novel was how there seemed to be a constant translation taking place in Deza’s head between English and Spanish and back to English. How did translating a character who already is constantly translating and playing with both languages affect your work on the novel? Did it add another layer to your translation? How was it different translating this than other books that may not have been as concerned with the differences and respective peculiarities . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Levi Asher vs Javier Marias

I say Marias wins.

Levi Asher, LitKicks:

Give me the choice of saving for posterity either the entire Twitter archive or, say, the combined works of William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace and Joyce Carol Oates. Well … sorry to William and David and Joyce, but it’s an easy choice for me. I’ll keep the cloud.

Javier Marias, Fever and Spear:

Talking is probably the biggest waste of time amongst the population as a whole, regardless of age, sex, class, wealth or knowledge, it is wastage par excellence. Almost no one has anything to say that their potential . . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: Margaret Jull Costa Interview

MJC: The long sentence that is so characteristic of Javier’s style first occurs in The Man of Feeling. The sentences and the novels have grown longer and longer since then, mainly, I suspect, because his novels have moved away from plot (although there always is a plot) towards the dissection of ideas, feelings, words, motivations. His sentences have the shape of a thought, full of buts and perhapses and then agains. The style in Your Face Tomorrow is the latest stage in that development–less plot and more thought. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

YFTS: I am Myself My Own Fever and Pain, and Dogs Have 18 Toes

Before we get started on this week’s discussion, a few housekeeping items.

First off, remember that on Monday we’ll be joined by Margaret Jull Costa, translator of Your Face Tomorrow. She’s graciously agreed to answer questions in the comments, so think up some good questions over the weekend and be ready with them on Monday. This week we read pp. 234 – 316, and next week we’re going to be finishing Vol 1. Congrats to everyone who has made it this far! I hope everyone is enjoying the book. I am. Remember, you can see the full schedule continue reading, and add your comments

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.

The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)

The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)

Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)

Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)

A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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