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The End of Oulipo?

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The Tunnel

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.
Naked Singularity

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.
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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.
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.
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Your Face This Spring

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

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  • All That Is by James Salter June 10, 2013
    Salter has been described as a master of sentences, but what might be more accurate is his mastery of word choice and metaphor. His sentences aren’t the sinuous architectural behemoths of James or William H. Gass. Many are terse, quick jabs: “The kiss was light and ardent,” or, describing a writer’s opulent house, “It was like a small family hotel, a hotel i […]
  • Birds of the Air by David Yezzi June 10, 2013
    Yezzi’s poems often hint at oblique narratives. Like a detective, he asks a lot of questions. He’s like a mathematician working an inverse problem, deducing inner dramas from externals. His spirit, however, is sympathetic, not forensic. A friend used to say when someone started complaining about another’s failing, “Be gentle. He’s just a human.” Yezzi’s poem […]
  • The Films of Sangsoo Hong June 10, 2013
    Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you’ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” or Joon-ho Bong’s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mash The Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim’s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But menti […]
  • The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim June 10, 2013
    The Iraqi Christ is topical only in the sense of the earliest known newsflashes: the cracked screeds, battlefield reports, and shipwreck stories by the likes of Archilochus, for instance, which remain with us in the form of fragments. These were news before they were ever classical references—indigestible gobbets of event, borne on and on by the flow of tell […]
  • Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin June 10, 2013
    Leonard Tsypkin's short and frenetic Summer in Baden-Baden is a meditation on the morphic and self-defining nature of memory. Tsypkin portrays the sometimes charming but mostly distressing European travels of Fyodor (Fedya) Dostoyevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigor’yevna, and their descent into a woeful situation brought about by the famous author’s […]
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  • Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro June 10, 2013
    Mario Santiago Papasquiaro was no stranger to this kind of manifesto, and his announced the coming of the Infrarealists. “The way in to matter,” they proclaim, “is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes.” And so, in Papasquiaro’s long poem, “Advice From 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic,” we […]
  • A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom June 10, 2013
    Marcom’s new novel, A Brief History of Yes, is less overtly transgressive than its predecessor—less centered on sex than on solitude; on the loneliness left after love is over. Previously, Marcom scaled the peak of what two people can do together, whereas now she digs into what drives them apart. So if Mirror expressed ecstasy, Yes explores ecstasy’s ebbing. […]
  • What Comes Next June 10, 2013
    If you were to ask me what comes next, the best answer is that I do not know. But if I try to reason through the question, I tend to divide the problem into parts. On the one hand, one of these parts, the personal facet, is what’s to come after my present literature. Or, rather, what will I be writing, what will the next books be like, or even more important […]

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The Tunnel Big Read: Final Week

This begins our fifth and final week of group reading The Tunnel. Congrats to those who have made it this far, and best wishes to those who have fallen behind but are determined to see the book through to the end.

If you do persist in The Tunnel, I’d like to ask: why? Are you enjoying the book? Does the Kohler train wreck fascinate you? Is it sheer inertia? Determination?

By contrast, if you’ve quit, what made you give Gass the heave ho?

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  1. The Tunnel Big Read: Week 3 Welcome to Week 3 of our group read of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel. The read lasts from September 30 through November 3. We...
  2. The Tunnel Big Read: The Make or Break Week? We are group reading William H. Gass’s The Tunnel on this website from September 30 through November 3. We are currently in Week 3, covering...
  3. The Tunnel Big Read: Some Questions for Week 1 We are group reading William H. Gass’s The Tunnel on this website from September 30 through November 3. We are currently in Week 1, covering...
  4. The Tunnel Big Read: The Beginning of the End? We are group reading William H. Gass’s The Tunnel on this website from September 30 through November 3. We are currently in Week 4, covering...
  5. The Tunnel Big Read: Questions for Week 2′s Reading We are group reading William H. Gass’s The Tunnel on this website from September 30 through November 3. We are currently in Week 2, covering...

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October 29th, 2012 | Tags: | Category: Fall 2012 Big Read: William H. Gass's The Tunnel

2 comments to The Tunnel Big Read: Final Week

  • Darby
    October 31, 2012 at 11:54 am · Reply

    It’s funny but, for as much as the novel gets rid of novelistic intent, I’m still reading it with the end in mind. How far does he go? How big of a jerk does K turn out to be? How much of a difference will it make on this or future rereads to have a knowledge of all the pieces in play? Where does all this lead? And if nowhere, what do I learn or discover in the process of going so far to make no progress?

    I’m still back in week 4 somewhere, though, so there’s plenty of pages for me to give up on yet ahead of me.

  • Gs
    October 31, 2012 at 12:24 pm · Reply

    I, too, can’t give up on some final, expressible intent; The light at the end of ‘The Tunnel’, as it were. But Kohler’s inexhaustible digging is incredibly distressing. There are occasions when I don’t want to pick up the book again but I do, and end up glad I did.

    I’m about half way through with plenty of threads of ideas, but these threads are all tangled, like an unmanageable ball of yarn, at this point.

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