Page by Page

Some of the books I’ve read over the past six months: a back-to-back double Nobel-winners’ combo of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, and Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertesz; about three quarters of Jean Améry’s On Aging: Revolt and Resignation;; Javier Marías’s All Souls and Dark Back of Time; Jean Ray’s Malpertuis, Julian Cope’s The Megalithic European and Aroma, the Cultural History of Smell by Constance Classen, David Honer and Anthony Synott. I ordered new copies of Calvino’s Invisible Cities and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller with the intention of re-reading them, but haven’t got around to that yet. I did, however, read a couple of books recently which had a decidedly Calvino-like feel to them…

The Atlantis of the present day faces many challenges: environmental degredation, ethnic conflict, and economic disparity resulting from decades of isolationism. Situated as it is between Europe and North America, Atlantis has long been regarded as a “sinking island,” in the words of one of its foremost novelists, Adam e’Aea, “not entirely real, even to its inhabitants.” The Atlantean identity, then, is caught in this shifting zone, flooded by foreign values and investment, a world in ellipsis, neither quite post-colony nor cultural centre. It has become the task of the Atlantean novelist to explore this rich, perplexing and emerging interspace.

The outsider’s view of the island has long been shaped by the work of the British poet and novelist Rupert Brooke (1887-1960), especially his Atlantis Quartet (1919-27), which emphasized the mysterious, antediluvian nature of the modern island, a world which, like Brooke himself, barely survived the devastation of the First World War… pp 46-7.

Having read and quite liked Thomas Wharton’s novel Salamander, my curiosity was prodded by Scribblingwoman’s mention of the same author’s more recent work The Logogryph, enticingly subtitled ‘a bibliography of imaginary books.’ I ordered a copy from the Gaspereau Press, and was delighted when a beautifully-printed and bound volume arrived a week or two later. It’s an enjoyable, decidedly librocentric compilation of fable and memoir, affectionately indebted to Borges and Calvino. I particularly enjoyed the account of the literature of Atlantis, as quoted above. Wharton goes on to describe a work by the putative Atlantean novelist e’Aea: a fantastic account of an imagined world in which Atlantis sank beneath the waves millennia ago, but surviving, adapting to underwater life ‘oblivious to and concealed from European civilization and its later manifestations on the American continent.’

A man with an insatiable appetite for dreams dreamed so much that in the building where he lived no one else was able to dream, except perhaps when the dreamer went to the sea or the mountains on vacation. An irritating and impossible situation, and the building’s tenants, all of them people of fine background—professors, dukes, proprietors of construction companies, and an international hit man—made their objections heard. The gentleman’s response was not well-mannered, and the question began to rankle. No one in the building dreamed anymore, and—because that gentleman dreamed entirely in full color, and undertook experiments in three- dimensionality—even the people in the neighboring condominiums dreamed little, and in small format, and in black and white. The dispute ended up in court, where it was determined that the gentleman was involved in illegal use of the dreams of others, and had to put an end to it, since he was falling short of the norms of good-neighborly behavior. But of course it is not easy to persuade someone to restore possession of dreams, or not to appropriate dreams which do not belong to him. The gentleman continued to dream all the dreams in the building, and only the international hit man managed, every now and then, to dream a small, stupid dream p. 201, translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.

Giorgio Manganelli’s Centuria was one of a few titles I’d read about at the Complete Review that I decided to check out for myself. At first, I struggled with this book, which comprises one hundred miniature ‘novels,’ each one originally typed on a single large-format sheet of paper. I found it flat. It wasn’t until I was about a third of the way into the book that I suppose I must have become accustomed to its distinctive rhythm, and began to get into it. By the end, I was entirely converted, and loved it. The way the individual ‘novels’ echo and reflect one another was, to me, faintly but fascinatingly reminiscent of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The book I’m reading now is another Complete Review recommendation: Arno Schmidt’s The School for Atheists, an utterly bizarre, but also beguiling ‘Novella-Comedy in 6 Acts:’

(Tellingstedt. Kolderup House. / Night, around 2 o’clock; (and thus at the foot of 7 October 2014). / William T. Kolderup, dressed in perfectly correct gray, moves slo’ly, on his cane, along the corridors drably beglimmered by half=burned-out bulbs: cold loin garnisht with scrolls of gout-knotted hand; above the aged crouped brow the dustgray hair; (and for a deep breath you’d do well to hold onto a cupboard!) bending, putting=on pants let alone shoes, becomes a ›chore‹ : it is neither easy nor pretty, careering from stammering lad to stumpering codger. - (?) He, however, was only 40 : when one can still betake oneself from immobility to silence on one’s own 2 feet; : ’nd so farther across the pallid floor, (his shado fretfully joins in behind him once again). ? /Latching open the windo; . ? . : (Monolunates must ’parently take a, creaking=neckt, look now & then to see what the stars are up=to) - : - : the moon a face round holey walls. Orion, too, pretty much in the south. West and north oversnared by star-nets : the dainty hypermadness of the Univoid. - ? : m=m; it'd already gone down; (once spoke 2=3 times with a grandson of FLAMMARION; who had still kno’n the old man !) p. 11, translated from the German by John E. Woods.

And besides all those, I’ve bought a few books which I have only lightly skimmed through, considering them more as references than ready reading: Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, for example, and Mario Praz’s Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery,, and A Vision of a Living World, the third volume in Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order series, of which I now have the complete set. And beyond those are the picture-books: Théâtre d’Amour; the István Orosz catalogue which I bought twice by mistake; the Mitelli book I’ve been scanning the guts out of, and a couple of other Italian art-books, of which, perhaps, more anon. And, of course, there is Curiosities of Literature, which I am reading as carefully as I have ever read anything, as I scan, OCR, and manually HTMLify it page by page…