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Iris Murdoch: The Sea, the Sea

July 2, 2008

Trevor reviews Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize winning 1978 novel, The Sea, the Sea.

Imre Kertész: Liquidation

July 1, 2008

Trevor reviews Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész’s 2003 novel, Liquidation, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson.

Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children

July 1, 2008

Trevor reviews Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece, Midnight’s Children, as part of 2008’s Best of the Booker shortlist.

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Episodes of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast: discussions of books and authors, shaped by curiosity, rereading, and the pleasures of talking things through.

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Host with @bibliopaul of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast. Reviews of books and film. Judge of the 2017 Best Translated Book Award.

Muriel Spark’s fifth novel felt like solid ground

Muriel Spark’s fifth novel felt like solid ground after the strangeness of Memento Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well I managed to keep track of this relatively large cast and their various strange goings-on. That doesn’t mean I feel like I entirely have a handle on it! I thoroughly enjoyed it nevertheless.

At the center is a criminal case: Patrick Seton, a spiritual medium, is on trial for forgery and criminal conversion after receiving £2000 from Freda Flower, who still admires him. The prosecutor Martin Bowles has retained Ronald Bridges for his expertise in identifying forged documents. Patrick’s pregnant girlfriend, Alice Dawes, is eagerly awaiting his acquittal so they can finally marry and leave for their honeymoon (assuming Patrick’s divorce goes through—it won’t, if he’s even married). Some suspect Patrick may even be plotting to murder Alice, though no one seems entirely sure why. Alice’s roommate, Elsie Forrest, has meanwhile become enthralled by a priest.

And there are still more characters, all carrying on their own peculiar schemes and entanglements. Again, I’m proud I managed to keep it all straight.

Now, what exactly was I reading? A recurring theme seemed to be influence (spiritual, sexual, financial) and the betrayals that follow from it. You know, the usual day-to-day among London’s bachelors and singles in the early 1960s. Intriguing, funny, and in vintage Sparkian fashion, wonderfully biting.

Next up: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

#MurielSpark #22MonthswithMuriel #ClassicLiterature #Bookstagram #Reading

So many of the books I love reached me through tra

So many of the books I love reached me through translation, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop being grateful for the people who make that possible. Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic is smart, generous, and deeply engaging about the art, difficulty, and joy of bringing Shakespeare into new languages. Out now from @aaknopf #Translation #Shakespeare #AAKnopf #Reading #BookReel

Out today from @uchicagopress, Mary Beard’s Talkin

Out today from @uchicagopress, Mary Beard’s Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. #MaryBeard #Classics #BookReel

Mary Beard gave a series of lectures at the Univer

Mary Beard gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, and I feel fortunate that she has now adapted those lectures into a new book: Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. I am probably someone who reveres the classics a bit too much, and so I was immediately intrigued by the opening of Beard’s introduction, shown in the second picture above.

That was pretty thrilling to me. I love encountering perspectives that help me see more clearly, even if it means-maybe especially if it means-challenging a misguided and myopic view I may hold.

The book that followed was not what I expected, but I found myself glad for that. See, I initially thought it would focus primarily on the ancient texts I love so much. So I was a bit surprised when the book opens with Beard discussing an ancient loaf of bread from ancient Egyptian Thebes. What is a loaf of bread doing in a book about the Classics?

Well, clearly, this is a book about Classics as a field of study devoted to an enormous and varied world, and not narrowly about, say, the shock of the old Greek drama. Given Beard’s career, I should have known better, but I come to this subject as an appreciative dilettante. Maybe my thoughts are helpful to people in the same place.

Now better adjusted to the book, I found myself delighted by the book’s exploratory spirit. Rather than building a straightforward argument, Beard moves through a series of vignettes that show a lifetime spent thinking about the ancient world not as a shrine to greatness but as something messy, surprising, contested, and continually capable of shocking us.

That is what I most appreciated about Talking Classics. Beard’s defense of the field is not rooted in claims that the Classical world represents some unquestionable pinnacle of civilization. In fact, she repeatedly demonstrates a solid case against that kind of thinking. Instead, she argues for what she calls the “paradoxical newness of classics”: the way these ancient materials still unsettle us, resist us, and expose the changing ways later cultures, including our own, have used and misused them.

#MaryBeard #TalkingClassics #Bookstagram #Classics #AncientWorld

A quick introduction to the newest NYRB Classics.

A quick introduction to the newest NYRB Classics. This is Keith Waldrop’s Light While There Is Light. #NYRBClassics #NYRBooks #KeithWaldrop #Memoir #BookReel

Episode 132 is up! In Our Nightstands, Ourselves @

Episode 132 is up! In Our Nightstands, Ourselves @bibliopaul and I dig deep into our psychology to discuss what the state of our nightstands says about our reading aspirations versus our reading realities. #BookReel #Reading #BookPodcast #ReadingLife #Bookstagram

Marie NDiaye’s latest book in English is her 1996

Marie NDiaye’s latest book in English is her 1996 novel The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, recently published by Vintage Books. #MarieNDiaye #FrenchLiterature #WomenInTranslation #BookerInternational #BookReel

Here’s to those lovely reading surprises, those bo

Here’s to those lovely reading surprises, those books that you start thinking, I will read just a bit, but that sweep you off your feet. That happened to me when I read the upcoming @archipelagobooks release of Jean Echenoz’s Jérôme Lindon. #Reading #ReadingLife #JeanEchenoz #ArchipelagoBooks #BookReel

I’m processing a poem I really loved. Here are som

I’m processing a poem I really loved. Here are some thoughts and passages from David Plante’s The Death of a Greek Lover, just published by @nyrbooks #DavidPlante #BookReel #Poetry #NYRBPoets #NYRBooks

What a beautiful book. David Plante offers a lov

What a beautiful book.

David Plante offers a lovely, painful lament in The Death of a Greek Lover that at once grieves the loss Nikos Stangos, his partner of forty years, and explores how such a loss might be expressed at all. What does writing a poem and releasing it into the world do?

I’m planning to make a reel a bit later to share some of the passages. For now: I loved this book.

#NYRPoets #DavidPlante #TheDeathofaGreekLover #NYRBooks #Poetry

A brief recommendation for Inés Cagnati’s Free Day

A brief recommendation for Inés Cagnati’s Free Day and Crazy Genie, both translated by Liesl Schillinger and out from @nyrbooks. #NYRBClassics #InesCagnati #WomeninTranslation #FrenchLiterature #TranslatedLiterature

Happy May! #Reading #BookReel #Bookstagram #Readin

Happy May! #Reading #BookReel #Bookstagram #ReadingLife #SpringReading

📚April Releases from @nyrbooks I had not heard o

📚April Releases from @nyrbooks

I had not heard of Nancy Lemann before, and Geoff Dyer’s introduction to Lives of the Saints (not to mention my sampling of the first bits of each of the books she has out this past month) make me very excited to get to know her. I already love Riley, and the Carlisle and Fiedler have me excited to contemplate literature and writing! So much to explore and discover in just this one month!

Have you read any of these yet?

#NYRBClassics #bookstagram

In our new episode @bibliopaul and I got to sit do

In our new episode @bibliopaul and I got to sit down with Nick During and Abigail Dunne from @nyrbooks. We talk about the various series at NYRB (Classics, Comics, Contemporary, Children’s, and Poets), get excited by recent and forthcoming releases (including some exciting books just over the horizon). Episode 131 is out! #NYRBooks #NYRBClassics #BookReel #BookPodcast #LitPodcast

A few years back, NYRB Classics published Inès Cag

A few years back, NYRB Classics published Inès Cagnati’s debut novel, Free Day (1973), and last month we got her second novel, Crazy Genie (1976), both in lovely translations from the French by Liesl Schillinger. Cagnati wrote four novels, and if these first two are any indication, I really hope we’ll see the others soon!

Crazy Genie is a sad story told by the young Marie, whose voice reminded me of the plainspoken yet profound narrator of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns. From the beginning we come to understand that pretty much the only thing Marie wants is affection from her mother, whom the rest of the community calls Crazy Genie. Her mother, though, is more often than not distant, brushing Marie off, telling her to get out of her hair.

Yet Marie loves her. More than that, Marie simply loves. Starved for love in return she turns to a few pets, forming bonds that sustain her slightly while her mother works endlessly for villagers who can’t believe that a woman from one of the “best” families has fallen so far.

Marie, so often left outside, uncertain of her heritage or what might happen next, is essentially an unreliable narrator when it comes to details. But reading between the lines we understand well enough the ongoing tragedy. And then there’s always Marie’s yearning underlying it all:

“I always wanted to tell her that I was there waiting for her, that I was so happy, so happy that she had come back this night again, that me, I loved her. But her face was full of silence.”

How Cagnati managed to convey a heart so full of love and the desire to be loved amidst so much ugliness…amazing.

#InesCagnati #CrazyGenie #NYRBClassics #FrenchLiterature #WomeninTranslation

My first time reading Peter Taylor. #PeterTaylor #

My first time reading Peter Taylor. #PeterTaylor #ShortStory #AmericanLiterature #BookReel #LibraryofAmerica

Maybe I go a bit overboard when asked about favori

Maybe I go a bit overboard when asked about favorite translations by Margaret Jull Costa. #MargaretJullCosta #TranslatedLiterature #LiteratureInTranslation #SpanishLiterature #PortugueseLiterature

And that cover—from Kay Sage’s The Passage—perfect

And that cover—from Kay Sage’s The Passage—perfection! #NYRBClassics #AdolfoBioyCasares #TheInventionofMorel #MargaretJullCosta #ArgentinianLiterature

Marie NDiaye’s work, which I love, often explores

Marie NDiaye’s work, which I love, often explores the instability of identity and the way women are asked to accommodate. To do this, she has a way of introducing a seemingly straightforward and grounded story that shifts into the surreal, where the narrator seems to always be trying to keep up while their impression of the world gets radically transformed. Her latest to be translated into English (and also just shortlisted for the International Booker Prize) is no exception.

The Witch begins with our narrator, Lucie, telling us that when her twin daughters turned twelve she initiated them “into the mysterious powers.” Lucie comes from a line of powerful witches, though she herself has always been limited. I love how in the first paragraph NDiaye deflates any sense of wonder. For her daughters, these powers are not a source of awe at all. At best they seem ambivalent, but maybe that’s just how they feel about anything coming from their mom. Lucie says her daughters “no more understood the need to care about it or suddenly somehow master it than they saw the interest in learning to cook the dishes I served them.”

From there, the novel moves in series of disorienting shifts, both for Lucie and the reader. Lucie’s husband is suddenly gone, and the initial confusion she feels at the loss quickly becomes acceptance. Her parents, whose relationship seemed exemplary, separate just as abruptly, and her mother’s new partner appears as an already established fact. The world around Lucie rearranges itself without explanation.

The way NDiaye does this made me think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, where long-established facts seem to materialize out of nowhere, and the narrator is left wondering how they failed to notice what has always been true until they simply move along as if it always were true. NDiaye seems to use this technique to explore a survival mechanism. Lucie has little control over what happens around her, and so each shift is absorbed. All the while she has these powers, but the men in her life in particular prefer to not just ignore them but to insist they aren’t real.

#MarieNDiaye #TranslatedLiterature #FrenchLiterature #InternationalBookerPrize

Responding to a comment on my dusty unread books r

Responding to a comment on my dusty unread books reel. After listening, do you have a hankering to read Great Expecations? #UnreadBooks #GreatExpectations #CharlesDickens #VictorianLiterature #BookReels

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