January Books

The first book I started reading last month was The Lunar Men, by Jenny Uglow: a fine, polybiographical study of an informal but highly-influential group of friends in late 18th-Century England that counted Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood, James Watt and Joseph Priestley among its members, and whose collective achievements in the fields of science, technology and industry could, well, fill a thick book. This excellent volume, though, is as much about the men’s mutual friendships and shared aspirations as it is about their inventions and discoveries…

Next, I read Jean Améry’s At the Mind's Limits, subtitled ‘Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities.’ I first heard of Améry in Primo Levi’s memoirs, but it was only after reading W.G. Sebald’s essay about Améry in his book On the Natural History of Destruction that I felt the need to read his work for myself. At The Mind’s Limits is a book whose subjects (suffering, torture, resentment, estrangement, exile) are necessarily rather bleak and forbidding. Even so, Améry’s patient consideration for his readers means that, even though some of his conclusions may be hard to accept, his contemplations are seldom difficult to read.

After that, I read a volume of short stories by Robert Walser (who I’ve mentioned here once before). There were some luminous moments in these (mostly very short) tales and sketches, but, on the whole, I enjoyed this book rather less than his novel Jakob von Gunten. It was at around this time that I also read, by way of light distraction, Paul Britten Austin’s The Wonderful Life and Adventures of Tom Thumb, as discussed here, only a half dozen or so entries ago.

After the Walser book, I moved on to Adolfo Bioy Casares’s tale The Invention of Morel. I had high hopes for this book, and these were only raised further by Borges’ introduction to it, but, as it turned out, the tale itself didn’t do much for me at all. Most recently, I have launched myself into William T. Vollman’s seven-volume essay on political violence Rising Up and Rising Down. I’m currently about eighty pages into volume three. Vollman was just about my favourite author when I was twenty-one years old: I loved You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories and The Ice-Shirt. After another twelve years or so, having attempted but abandoned Fathers and Crows, for example, and completed, but disliked The Royal Family, I had almost discounted him. Rising Up and Rising Down reminds me much more, I am happy to say, of the excitement I felt when reading those first books of his.

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Posted by misteraitch at February 2, 2004 04:01 PM | TrackBack