Lady Chatterley’s Brother

The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Life Pereccalled “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future.

Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:


Translate This Book!

Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating Life Perecread" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle for 99 cents.

Spring 2011 Group Read

Life Perec

Spring Read: 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.

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Interviews from Conversational Reading

New Books
See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.


Group Reads

Last Samurai

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.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

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

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

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

  • In Red by Magdalena Tulli December 5, 2011
    In Red is Tulli's most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot "movement," and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might fi […]
  • Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski December 5, 2011
    Early in Show Up, Look Good, Mark Wisniewski’s second novel, newly single Michelle meets up with an old friend, Barb, from the Midwest. Michelle has already been portrayed as a woman who attracts all variations of awkwardness and bad luck: she’s awakened to find her ex, Thom, “having his way, well, with a marital aid,” agreed to bathe an old woman as part of […]
  • An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori December 5, 2011
    Gregor von Rezzori’s fictitious city Czernopol exists at the edge of civilization, on the border of memory and invention, lying “somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe.” In reality it is Czernowitz, in the region known as the Bukovina, ceded by the Ottoman Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1775, then after World War I part of Romania […]
  • 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami December 4, 2011
    The publication of 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s biggest, most ambitious novel to date, seems to have brought his career full-circle. This is not simply because the book has widely been posited as Murakami’s Brothers Karamazov—that is, an attempt to write a meganovel summing up his life’s writing—but even more because of the trajectory Murakami has taken as a writ […]
  • Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen December 4, 2011
    Ordinary Sun at times feels like listening to confession in a parallel universe, a world with all the guts displayed on the outside, and the underworld on top. Make no mistake though: there is no otherworld. Henriksen’s world is this world. Who doesn’t recognize her own kind in lines like these, from “Corolla in the Midden”: “I do not dream. I just watch / f […]
  • Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski December 4, 2011
    Though sometimes referred to as a Modernist, Kaplinski’s poetry often has the feel of a classical, and older, poetics. The poems have a gravitas; they do not mock, toy, or play with the reader. They invite the reader to eavesdrop on the thoughts, remembrances, and philosophy of a person as they flicker and flow. This contemplative, philosophic strain is pres […]
  • Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff December 4, 2011
    A martyr is not necessarily a saint, in any case, and those who knew him didn’t turn to him for saintliness. He was spellbinding, an electrical jolt for the psyche. An encounter with him, as a colleague or as a mentor, could be life-changing and endlessly rewarding. Warts and all, the real man carries far more interest than the photoshopped one Loseff gives […]
  • From Fiona and Ferdinand by Josef Haslinger December 4, 2011
    On the day of Bachmaier’s funeral there were two messages from my mother waiting for me on the answering machine. In the first one she asked me to call her back, in the second she said that the village was in an uproar: I was to come at once. Calls from my mother were rare. […]
  • Self-Portrait of an Other by Cees Nooteboom and Max Neumann December 4, 2011
    As hard as you look at it, Max Neumann’s paintings don’t reveal much about his method, but two recent English-language publications imply that he must enjoy collaborating with luminaries of world literature. AnimalInside, reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation's issue 25 by Christiane Craig, brought Neumann together with László Krasznahorkai, the presti […]
  • Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares December 4, 2011
    Someone once noted that it’s easy to have virtue when facing adversity but the real test of character comes when one is given power. To test this aphorism, one need look no further than Gonçalo M. Tavares’ novel Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique for evidence of how power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. Tavares is a prolific writer from Portugal who […]

Read Marias As Quickly As Possible

That’s Andrew Seal’s advice for budding readers of Javier Marias:

My advice for reading Marías is to read him as quickly as possible, with as few breaks as possible. Despite a moment in All Souls where the narrator refers to his “general state of disequilibrium,” what marks Marías’s prose is an extreme sense of total equanimity, in fact a very powerful sense of equilibrium, of minute adjustments within a sentence or paragraph—even within a thought—that are constantly calibrating, correcting, reconsidering. This is not a prose style which one feels pleasure from by just reading a few pages at a time (although some of Marías’s individual set-pieces—like the scene in A Heart So White where Juan meets his future wife, or the scene in All Souls where the narrator eats at the high table—are so good that they do provide just that immediate jolt of pleasure); it is a pleasure that one must adjust oneself to, and that adjustment takes time.

I’m not quite sure if our preordained pace of 60 – 70 pages per week for Your Face This Spring later in March quite holds to Andrew’s advice, but if you want you can try and read the week’s entire segment in one day (or just go on ahead of everyone . . .).

Andrew also offers a little more advice: if Marias’s first sentences strike you at impossible opaque, just keep going:

This all may be an odd thing to say about an author who is famous (or relatively famous) for the nonpareil fireworks of his opening lines, lines which are almost obscenely deft at leaping over expository throat-clearing and knocking you immediately on your heels. They are plunging, precipitous, like building a floor under you and knocking it through with the same gesture. “I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests” (A Heart So White). . . .

So it is rather strange that an author who could fire off these lines without preamble might be so resistant to giving other immediate pleasures—although the prose is always very good and often very funny, I don’t think one can successfully read Marías often just for the joy of a single page, or of a single paragraph. The effects are generally cumulative, even concatenating, almost always the product of something one has just encountered and something that is buried many pages before (or perhaps even in another of his books).

Reading all this is really keying me up for the Marias read starting later this month. We start with Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear on March 21.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

  1. The Extemporaneous Javier Marías Author signings tend to be a crapshoot, but Andrew Seal claims to have seen a great one with noted Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who must...
  2. Javier Marías Article on Javier Marías over at The New Yorker. An op-ed by Michael Chabon may pop up now and again, but it is hard to...
  3. Why Read? (cont) Well, now that I see that Salon is in the ring on this little discussion that started with Dan Green and Leonard Bast, I’d just...
  4. Marias in NYRB You’ve gotta be a subscriber to access it, but the NYRB has a lengthy essay considering no less than 8 of Marias’s novels. Here’s a...
  5. Your Face This Spring Okay, let’s do this. Starting this spring, I’m going to read Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Whoever wants to join me on this...

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1 comment to Read Marias As Quickly As Possible

  • philq

    Have you noticed that Marias did a 2-part interview on Bookworm over the past two weeks?

    part 1:
    http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw100218javier_marias_part_i

    part2:
    http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw100225javier_marias_part_i

    Also I really love Marias and I’m glad he’s getting more attention. I became really obsessed with him a few years ago and devoured his books. I would recommend reading him in this order:

    1) A Man of Feeling. It’s very short and less intimidating so you can dive in and get used to his style.
    2) All Souls. I like this book the least of all, but it’s easy to read and it’s necssary background for…
    3) Dark Back of Time. This book is so amazing but requires All Souls to make sense. He was accused of writing a roman a clef in All Souls and he wrote this book to defend himself. The comparisons of book collectors and homeless bums all tramping around the city together are gorgeous.
    4) And now dive into Your Face Tomorrow and all the rest.

    Just my 2 cents of course.

    Phil

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