Spring 2011 Big Read: Life A User’s Manual By Georges Perec

Marketing the Bolano
This caught my eye, mostly since I just got through delivering a paper on precisely this topic. Javier Calvo: The other day... »
Gaddis in the NYT
It's nice to see Gaddis's letters reviewed in the Times, even if this review is symptomatic of that paper's decline. Kinda... »
Technology!
It's almost as though they learned nothing from the past decade. For the moment, data about how well MOOCs work are diffuse... »
On the Road
Traveling this week. Blogging might be a little light.... »
Gombrowicz’s Kronos
Witold Gombrowicz was a strange guy. Kronos, apparently his last unpublished text, sounds like an especially strange book. ... »
Not a Concern That I Have
We seem to be in a weird place right now vis a vis books. For the most part, Jaron Lanier comes across as non-alarmist... »
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Somewhere at the intersection between the social sciences and literary criticism we find Franco Moretti's writing on... »
All for the $$$
Obviously I get the point of why things like this are necessary, and to the extent that artistic endeavors can make a good... »
Synesthesia in George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time
A nice review of George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. It's really nice to see this book continuing to be... »
Just-in-Time Capitalism
Hard to out-Jameson Jameson. In Post-Postmodernism, Nealon argues that culture has changed since Jameson’s 1980s, and... »

beamish13: Surprised you didn't mention that the author of that piece i
vfrancone: I've been reading the Diary for about a month while in betwe
Paula McGrath: I found Barthes' Preparation of the Novel very affecting, lo
Sawn: The link is to the amazon page, do you have a link to the en
Padraic: "midfielder in a large pool of emerging and longstanding cri
Edward Champion: Here's your six word answer: "Reading almost never makes me
Tom: Didn't Tanenhaus call FREEDOM a "masterpiece of American fic

Fall Read: The Tunnel by William H. Gass

A group read of the book that either "engenders awe and despair" or "[goads] the reader with obscenity and bigotry," or both. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Summer Read: A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

Fans of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo: A group read of the book that went from Xlibris to the University of Chicago Press. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov March 6, 2013
Pevear and Volokhonsky’s ambition in bringing Leskov and all his stylistic peculiarities into English is impressive, and all the more so for how it contrasts with their previous role as translators of Russian. The pair are justly famous for their renditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists; their editions of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punis […]
Middle C by William H. Gass March 3, 2013
What distinguishes Middle C from his other fiction, then, is not the that Gass’ protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, spends nearly a lifetime deflecting the dangers and horrors of life itself, but the ways in which the novel’s narrative voice buffers him from the responsibilities of being a protagonist at all. In this, the tale of his life, stretching from the Blitz […]
The Field Is Lethal by Suzanne Doppelt March 3, 2013
This is a strange, engaging book that does not offer up its material to the reader without a struggle. Much of its strength comes from its juxtapositions, not only of idea with idea, word with word, phrase with phrase, but also text with image, image or text with white space, and in a larger sense, the abstract with the concrete. Doppelt is interested in how […]
70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola di Grado March 3, 2013
You can tell that Viola di Grado has a unique voice from the first line of her novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool: “One day it was still December.” If this line seems a little puzzling, the next one puts things in (ironic) perspective: “Especially in Leeds, where winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before.” […]
Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scalon March 3, 2013
Plath’s ghost haunts the pages of Scanlon’s book, a non-linear narrative that hinges around Lizzie, a bright liberal arts student from Barnard and aspiring actress who has much in common with Plath’s protagonist. We’ve fast-forwarded forty years to New York in the early 90’s’; like Esther before her, Lizzie has come from the provinces to make a name for hers […]
The Available World by Ander Monson March 3, 2013
What happens to all the old, new things after two or three new, new things replace them? And what of the ideas and memories of which they are ultimately extensions and souvenirs? This is one of the larger questions, really, that Ander Monson poses in his most recent collection of poems, The Available World, though he does so in varying shades of subtly and e […]
The Whispering Muse by Sjón March 3, 2013
There is something immediately seductive about Sjón’s The Whispering Muse. The narrator, a peculiar old Icelander named Valdimar Haraldsson, receives a letter from an old acquaintance, inviting him on a sea voyage aboard the newly launched merchant ship, the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. Haraldsson, who has long been cooped up in his shabby Copenhagen apartment, r […]
Wolf and Pilot by Farrah Field March 3, 2013
When Farah Field announced the opening of Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Field and Jared White’s pop-up shop the only all-poetry bookshop in New York City) two Februarys ago on her blog Adultish, she wrote this: It is kind of an anti-capitalistic act because no one could ever pay what poetry is worth. This sentiment is exactly true ofher new book, Wolf and Pil […]
The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht March 3, 2013
Unless he is John Keats, a poet’s letters seldom stand alone as literature. They might hold our attention as gossip (Lord Byron), psychiatric case study (Robert Lowell) or the after-hours thoughts of a combative poet-critic (Yvor Winters), but few could be pleasurably read without the additional scaffolding provided by the poetry. Even Marianne Moore, one of […]
Kind One by Laird Hunt March 3, 2013
Readers who go into Laird Hunt's Kind One looking for kindly characters are presented with an array of unlikely candidates. It simply cannot be Linus Lancaster, a farmer with delusions of grandeur (his farm is named Paradise) who beats his wife Ginny, rapes his young female slaves Cleome and Zinnia, and whips Alcofibras, the slave who tends his garden, […]

Life Big Read: Reckoning With Perec

I’ve been greatly enjoying reading everyone’s responses to Life A User’s Manual, and if you haven’t done so yet I urge you to register your opinion, regardless of it you read it during the Big Read or at some other point in the past. I’d like to talk about one point that’s come up a number of times in a number of ways–people are largely dividing the book into “stories” and “descriptions,” which is a fair enough way to roughly group the material in Life. I think that virtually everyone likes the stories, and with good reason . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: The End

Per the schedule, we should all be done with Life A User’s Manual this week. How many of you made it to the end, how many of you didn’t, and why did you or didn’t you? I’m curious to know specifically why this book did or did not work for you, because it seems to divide reader-friends of mine like few others . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 5

So here’s a couple of things for you to ponder. Number one, now that we’ve gotten through most of the book, I want to return to one of the very first questions we brought up–do the constraints matter to you or not? . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: The Big Middle

So I think this week in the Life Big Read is the part in which we all take a deep breath and plod through this book’s long middle. The excitement of beginning, along with the momentum of discovering Bartlebooth’s big plan, has peetered out, yet we are not quite into the homestretch yet. Rather we are in the middle, a bit of a muddy trench filled with story after story, description after description, list after list. This, for me, is the slowest part of Life A User’s Manual, and yet, there is much here to thrill. I’ll first direct everyone’s attention to . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 4

From the Operation Paperclip Wikipedia page

This week concurrently with Life A User’s Manual I’ve been reading Beckett’s trilogy starting with Molloy, and I noticed this interesting coincidence of thoughts. They deal with satisfaction, meaning, and hope, items that are certainly of central importance to Perec’s book. My emphasis in both quotes. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: Words as Things

For various reasons, during this week’s reading I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between things and words. Part of this, I’m convinced, is my concurrent reading of the recent book The Information by James Gleick, which is all about the history of language as a medium of information communication and storage. But I also think that my thoughts about things vis a vis words (and vice versa) has to do with this week’s subject-matter. There just seems to be a lot about objects that are heavily reliant on words for their substance, or words that are objects in and of themselves. As to the latter, I think the best example we have is Cinoc’s dictionary of lost words [329 - 330]. Here we see words as things that can be . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 3

Give us your questions and thoughts right here. For my own part, you may have noticed that I didn’t do some summarizing thoughts + a poll last Friday like I usually do. Reason being, I was out of town camping in the woods. But that experience did give me an interesting perspective on Life A User’s Manual. Of course whenever you go camping you have to build a fire, and whenever you build a fire you enter into one of the strangest, most human experiences possible. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: The Best Critic of a Writer . . .

. . . is another writer. And thus I have taken Stephen Mitchelmore’s advice and checked in on Gabriel Josipovici’s sage critique of Life A User’s Manual. I encourage you all to do the same, although it will take a trip to your local library. Here’s the citation: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 2

Give me your questions, your answers for this week’s reading. And I’d like to pull this from last week’s question thread . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: A Better Mousetrap

As I read this week’s section, I felt that what was most coming though was the idea of quests that become traps. I first noticed this in that quote about Bartlebooth that I mentioned earlier this week and which I will reproduce here:

That’s what struck Valene the most, his gaze which did not manage to meet his own, as if Bartlebooth had sought to look behind his head, had wanted to pierce his head to reach beyond it in the neutral asylum of the stairwell with it’s trompe-loeil decorations mimicking old marbling and its staff skirting board made to resemble wood panelling. There was in that avoiding look something more violent than a void, something that was not merely pride or hatred, but almost panic, something like a mad hope, like an appeal for help, like a signal of distress. [142]

We also see this trope in the quest-stories that Perec tells, most notably in the utterly bizarre one about the nanny . . . . . . 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.

The End of Oulipo?

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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