Recent Reading

The books I’ve read over the last couple of months include Salamander by Thomas Wharton and Moscow Stations by Venedikt Erofeev (both briefly mentioned here); Robert Aickman’s novel The Late Breakfasters (mentioned here); Kahn & Selesnick’s Scotlandfuturebog (here); Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade (courtesy of the book giveaway at socialfiction); and, in an altogether different vein, a little of Jeffrey Friedl’s textbook on Mastering Regular Expressions. I also finished Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean (previously mentioned here), and read (and geatly enjoyed) Penguin Lost (pictured, left), by Andrey Kurkov, which I liked every bit as much as Death and the Penguin, despite the notable absence of Misha, the penguin in question, from much of the story (necessarily enough, I suppose, his being lost). A few days ago I finished M.P. Shiel’s Victorian Sci-Fi novel The Purple Cloud, and have just started Javier Mar�as’ Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Besides all these, I also read the books shown below, from each of which I present a quotation, as I find myself altogether lacking the presence of mind to rustle up a quartet of pithy reviews…

Who has never harboured suspicions, who has never doubted his best friend, who, at some time in his childhood, has never been betrayed or let down - at school you encounter everything that will await you in the longed-for outside world, the obstacles and the disloyalties, the silences and the traps, the ambushes; there's also always some classmate who says: “it was me”, the first expression of some recognition of one's responsibilities, the first time in your life when to feel obliged to say or to hear: “I have done the deed”, and then, as you grow up and the world seems less worldly because it’s no longer beyond your grasp, you say and hear it less and less, childhood language disappears, is rejected as being too schematic, too simple, but those stark phrases we used to think so heroic never leave us, they live on in certain glances, attitudes, in signs, in gestures and in sounds (in interjections, inarticulate utterances) […] In adult life, which is dominated by words, you never hear a yes or a no, no one says “it was me” or “It wasn’t me”, but you still see them (more often “It wasn’t me” than “It was me”), acts of heroism soon join the list of mistakes - from A Heart so White, by Javier Mar�as, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa.

Captain Ariza’s words continued ringing in his ears: “This isn’t a country for people like you.” He thought perhaps there really was no place for him in the world, no country where he could end his wandering. Just like the poet who had been his companion on long visits to countless bars and cafes in a rainy Andean city, the Gaviero could say, “I imagine a country, a blurred, fogbound Country, an enchanted, magical Country where I could live. What Country, where? … Not Mosul or Basra or Samarkand. Not Karlskrona or Abylund or Stockholm or Copenhagen. Not Kazan or Kanpur or Aleppo. Not in lacustrian Venice or chimerical Istambul, not on the Ile-de-France or in Tours or Stratford-on-Avon or Weimar or Yasnaia Poliana or in the baths of Algiers,” and his comrade continued to evoke cities where he perhaps had never been. “I, who have known them all,” thought Maqroll, “and in many have turned life’s most surprising corners, now I'm running […] without knowing exactly why I let myself be caught in the most stupid trap that destiny ever set for me. All that’s left for me now is the estuary, nothing but the marshes in the delta. That’s all.” from ‘Un Bel Morir’, in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by �lvaro Mutis, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.

Sometimes I am mesmerized by the beauty of our joyous, ugly world. The Bay Bridge, for instance, I love it on that bridge, I love driving to San Francisco in all its modern exuberance, and ugliness. There I seem to see a thousand beings in the world, when I am driving, and I feel the world is wonderful, nowhere is it so wonderful, it is only good, and glorious to be alive. The sheer beauty of that experience is shaking. I see the grey shining towers of the bridge, arcing above, the great X-braces of the steel; the cars, in their hundreds, crossing the bridge in front of me; tail lights, the green light over the Bay, and the shining yellow light coming off the Bay water like phosphorescence. Then, every bolt-head on the bridge seems wonderful, the cars and the lights seem like beings; the light in the sky, the edges of the clouds are beings, the rainwater on the asphalt is a being, the small lights of a plane in the distance, the dark edges of the roadway […] what I experience when I drive over the bridge, when I gulp in like beer the beauty of my existence - the lights on the road, the cars, the trees, the sky. The inner thing, the beauty of that freeway, which makes us realize how marvelous it is to be alive, for one second only, one day, to experience all this. from The Luminous Ground (Volume 4 of The Nature of Order), by Christopher Alexander.

Long before I suspected the existence of the town near the northern border, I believed in some way that I was already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place. Any number of signs might be offered to support this claim, although some of them may have seemed somewhat removed from the issue. Not the least of them appeared during my childhood, those soft, gray years when I was stricken with one sort or another of life-draining infirmity. It was at this early stage of my development that I sealed my deep affinity with the winter season in all its phases and manifestations. Nothing seemed more natural to me than to follow the path of the snow-topped roof and the ice-crowned fence-post, considering that I, too, in my illness, exhibited the marks of an essentially hibernal state of being. Under the plump blankets of my bed I lay freezing and pale, my temples sweating with shiny sickles of fever. Through the frosted panes of my bedroom window, I watched in awful devotion as dull winter days were succeeded by blinding winter nights. I remained ever awake to the possibility, as my young mind conceived it, of an “icy transcendence.” from ’A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing“ in In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land, by Thomas Ligotti.

I should add that I may have never ordered any of Javier Mar�as’ books had I not read Caterina’s endorsement of them; that I very likely wouldn’t have begun reading Maqroll had I missed the glowing review of it at Banubula; and that I likely would never have thought to read The Nature of Order had I not seen it mentioned on-line: evidently, a good deal of my book-buying-&-reading these days is influenced and enriched by what I read in other weblogs…