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Inexplicable Titles
Jumping off of yesterday’s post, it would be cool to put together a list of famously inexplicable titles of books, film, and art.
I’ll get things started:
Cigarettes by Harry Mathews
Plus, it’s an incredible book. Let’s just say master piece.
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- More Bolano: The Return and Insufferable Gaucho New Directions keeps pumping out the Bolanos (under duress, I believe), which means that if you are a devoted fan you've got your work cut...
- Do You Value the NYT More Than the HuffPo? I don't want to get too deeply into this issue, but since I've been covering the NYT's paywall and digital media generally, I thought this...
- Bolano’s Major and Minor Novels I usually try not to quibble with small details in otherwise coherent book reviews, but I've seen this more than once, and it deserves to...
- Forthcoming Titles from Open Letter Chad unveils Open Letter’s titles for summer 2010. Some excellent stuff here. I very enthusiastically reviewed Quim Monzo’s The Enormity of the Tragedy for the...
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Recommended Books 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
The Moon and Sixpence – Maugham did explain it at some point, but it’s inexplicable on the basis of the text alone.
2666
I feel like inexplicable titles are my favorite kind of titles.
I know why it’s called 2666 but it’s a secret.
I know that there’s reference to the number (or close to that number) in Amulet, and that something like 2666 is mentioned elsewhere, and that according to some Biblical interpretation the end of the world is supposed to happen in the year 2666 — but aside from those things, I would like to hear your interpretation!
Gasoline, by Quim Monzo
The Passion According to G. H., by Clarice Lispector
The Gospel According to St. John, by whoever
Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
The Passion According to GH by C.L., and its film equivalent would be l’Eclisse/ the Eclipse by Michaelangelo Antonioni.
The Lime Twig by John Hawkes
Explanation for Hawkes title: a lime twig is a twig sprinkled with lime in order to entrap birds; birds can be found throughout Hawkes’s fiction as metaphors for victimization and innocence. The novel is about various schemes, thugs, and victims involved with the English horse racing scene done in parody noir. An inference is that not only characters in the novel, but also readers are trapped in Hawkes’s nightmarish vision, or lime twig of a novel.
One of my favorites: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jalousie