31 December 2010

Clandestine in Chile (Gabriel García Márquez)






















The plan was to film an underground documentary on the increasingly desperate situation in Chile after twelve years of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. I had been unable to get the idea of making this film out of my mind. I had lost the image of my country in a fog of nostalgia. The Chile I remembered no longer existed, and for a filmmaker there could be no surer way of rediscovering a lost country than by going back to it and filming it from the inside.


Gabriel García Márquez faithfully transcribed Miguel Littín's voice in Clandestine in Chile (trans. Asa Zatz), a book of reportage. Littín is a Chilean filmmaker living in exile, homesick and determined to come back to shoot his documentary. To do this he was forced to impersonate a new identity, as a Uruguayan businessman. The transformation was complete: his physical appearance, his accent, and his family history and emotions were calibrated to another person's. This book turned out to be dedicated not only to exposing life under dictatorship but to describing a voluntary "identity crisis" and the large amount of risks a person is willing to undertake in order to practice his art (filmmaking) for purposes he believed were noble. Was it all worth it?
 
Santiago has always had street vendors but I cannot remember ever having seen as many as now. There is hardly a spot anywhere in the business center where they are not standing in long, silent ranks, selling everything imaginable. They are so many and so diverse that their presence alone reveals the social drama. Side by side with a physician who is not permitted to practice, a destitute engineer, a woman with the air of a duchess who is trying to dispose of her wardrobe from better days at any price, there were orphaned children peddling stolen goods and housewives offering homemade bread. Most of these once successful professionals have lost everything but their dignity. Standing behind their wares, they continue to dress as though they were in their former offices. A taxi driver, once a wealthy textile merchant, took me on a tour of half the city that lasted several hours, and at the end he refused to charge me.

The social drama that Littín witnessed was the drama of ordinary people coping with a changed political and economic circumstances. Daily life under the Pinochet regime was, at surface, a veneer of good times, perhaps just as good as life outside Chile. But deep inside was raging silent protest. There was a persistence for ordinary people to continue existing, always hopeful that a better living condition awaited them, because they remember the benevolent past, and it was enough for them to go on. Littín's account of his clandestine shooting was permeated with feelings of nostalgia. Surprisingly, the main pathos of the story derived not from the filmmaker's film rushes but from his living a double life in disguise. While pretending to be someone of different profession and nationality, Littín was unwittingly recapturing his own identity in the pictures of the country he was taking. The documentary which was ostensibly meant to bring to light the injustices of military dictatorship became the same document that eulogized the country of a man dreaming, of the past and the lost possibilities.

In the book's preface, Francisco Goldman said that the book had acquired an extra-literary life after publication, perhaps even eclipsing the actual film made of it. The author being no less than García Márquez who is no stranger to power, and the subject matter being the strongman Pinochet, the conception of the book was far from neutral. Fifteen thousand copies of the book were burned in Chile to stanch any possible damage it may bring to the regime.

Goldman also mentioned that the book never really produced a memorable scene or image that depicted the horrors of the military rule. This is debatable. It did seem that the narrative style of the book, which stuck to the individual voice of Littín, had filtered the horror to the extent that one reads a dry recounting of socio-political and historical events, not an anguished litany of abuses. García Márquez's nonfiction was consciously written in that style, as he explained in his introduction. In a way, the novelist acted as film editor to Littín's director, cutting out extraneous scenes from a very long interview, trying to work with what footage was available, and producing a whole picture out of the whole intrepid project of an exiled man – filmmaker, citizen, son – going home. The editor constrained himself with faithfulness to the vision of the filmmaker. His stylistic decision certainly did not give full dramatic mileage to the horrors of history which were somehow dampened by the nostalgic voice of his subject. Goldman added that one only need read Roberto Bolaño's novels Distant Star and By Night in Chile, in order to come face to face with evil perpetrated under Pinochet's rule. I agree. These two novels about Chile provide a richer canvas for understanding the uses and misuses of art for political ends.

Bolaño's immediate concerns in Distant Star and By Night in Chile are the heinous crimes perpetrated by writers in the name of literature and the collaboration of the Chilean literary establishment with the totalitarian regime. He employed in his fiction the registers of both the journalistic and the poetic. Like García Márquez, the journalistic was used to report objectively on unspeakable crimes. But Bolaño's treatment argued for an ethical dimension of literature, hence a more powerful discourse of evil was essayed. The merger of the journalistic with the poetic allowed Bolaño to dramatize his scenes and represent evil and its relationship to literature and politics as both palpable and paradoxical. His passionate engagement approached that of Littín's belief in his artistic enterprise.

Clandestine in Chile did contain some unforgettable stories. At least two incidents in the book illuminated how the Chileans reacted to violent abuses committed under the regime. A few months before Littín entered Chile, an opposition militant and sociologist named José Manuel Parada, along with two other activists, was kidnapped by military. Parada was an officer of Vicariate of Solidarity, which was critical of the government and was working for human rights. A few days after the kidnapping the bodies of the three men were found bearing the signs of torture; their throats were cut. Public outrage led to the resignation of the police commander believed to be the mastermind of the murders. At the end of this recollection, it was mentioned that the name of one of the streets leading to Plaza de Armas, the location of the vicariate, "was erased by an unknown hand and replaced with that of José Manuel Parada, the name by which it is now known."

The second incident told of a man named Sebastián Acevedo who set fire to himself after failing to find help in stopping the torture of his two children. His son and daughter were arrested by the authorities. As a result of this sacrificial act, the public was outraged and his children were eventually released from the torture chambers. Acevedo was able to speak to his daughter before he died. "Since that time," the story concluded, "the people of Concepción have had a secret name for the place of sacrifice: Plaza Sebastián Acevedo."

These stories showed that the laying down of life under the cloud of injustice is a sacred act that people do not take for granted. More importantly, it showed that people under the iron rule are not prevented to commemorate in order to honor those who were killed in the name of freedom and justice. In loud protest lies liberty and in the record of memory lies salvation. This was true for Chile then, and perhaps will be true for countries where dictatorships still prevail and where freedoms and rights are curtailed.

Here is one more passage where the novelist was able to capture Littín's speaking voice, where both filmmaker and editor were closely listening to the travails of another artist singing her soul – the whisper of a sweet song – bitter, tender. The speech evoked the blood of history as being perpetrated by the audience's disregard. We only finally listen when we recognize what we've lost.

I sat down on a bench to read the newspaper but my eyes ran over the lines without seeing them. What I felt just sitting there on that bright autumn morning was so intense that I couldn't concentrate. All at once, the twelve-o'clock cannon went off, the pigeons scattered in fright, and the notes of Violeta Parra's most moving song, "Gracias a la Vida," floated from the cathedral carillon. It was almost too much to bear. I thought of Violeta, of how often she had gone hungry and homeless in Paris, of her unfaltering dignity. The system had always rejected her, ignored her songs, and mocked her rebelliousness. A president had to die, gun in hand, Chile had to go through the bloodiest martyrdom of its history, and Violeta Parra had to die by her own hand before her country discovered the profound human truth and the beauty of her songs.




Clandestine in Chile is the December 2010 book selection of The Wolves (Richard, Emily, Sarah, Frances, E. L. Fay, and Claire). Also read by Stu and Lizzy. Check out The Wolves' lineup for 2011.

28 December 2010

20 December 2010

Favorite reads of the year 2010




2010 favorites


Mon/The Gate/Pa
Piercing
Some Prefer Nettles
Guns, Germs and Steel
Death in Midsummer & Other Stories
The Last Samurai
The Jaguar and Other Stories
The Hare
The Insufferable Gaucho
Blow-Up and Other Stories
Tres
The Wild Geese



Ryan's favorite books »

}



1. Mon by Natsume Sōseki, tr. Francis Mathy

2. The Wild Geese by Mori Ōgai, tr. Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein

3. Piercing by Murakami Ryū, tr. Ralph McCarthy

4. Some Prefer Nettles by Tanizaki Junichirō, tr. Edward G. Seidensticker

5. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

6. Death in Midsummer by Mishima Yukio, tr. Edward G. Seidensticker et al.

7. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

8. The Jaguar by João Guimarães Rosa, tr. David Treece

9. The Hare by César Aira, tr. Nick Caistor

10. The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño, tr. Chris Andrews

11. Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar, tr. Paul Blackburn

12. Tres by Roberto Bolaño, tr. Erica Mena, unpublished translation


Books read in 2010:

http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2010/05/rises-reading-diary-2010.html


16 December 2010

Reading list: Po-mo


"The thing about postmodernism is it's impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern," says the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy. This, however, did not prevent them from compiling last year a list of essential postmodern works of literature.

A postmodernist work, according to them, contains at least 2 of the following attributes:

- thick (1,000+ pages)
- the author is a character
- self-contradicting plot
- distrusts/plays with form
- comments on its own bookishness
- plays with language
- pastiche of letters, lyrics, other books, etc.
- reality and fiction are blurred
- includes historical falsehood
- thin (less than 200 pages)
- po-mo progenitor



























61 essential postmodern reads

Kathy Acker's "In Memorium to Identity"
Donald Antrim's "The Hundred Brothers"
Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy
Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine"
J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition"
John Barth's "Giles Goat-Boy"
Donald Barthelme's "60 Stories"
John Berger's "G"
Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser"
Roberto Bolaño's "2666"
Jorge Luis Borges's "Labyrinths"
William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch"
Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch"
Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor"
Stanley Crawford's "Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine"
Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves"
Don Delillo's "Great Jones Street"
Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
E.L. Doctorow's "City of God"
Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D. H. Lawrence"
Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
Dave Eggers's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Steve Erickson's "Tours of the Black Clock"
Percival Everett's "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"
William Faulkner's "Absalom! Absalom!"
Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated"
William Gaddis's "JR"
William Gass's "The Tunnel"
John Hawkes's "The Lime Twig"
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project"
Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
Shelley Jackson's "Skin"
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn"
Ben Marcus's "Notable American Women"
David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress"
Tom McCarthy's "Remainder"
Joseph McElroy's "Women and Men"
Steven Millhauser's "Edwin Mullhouse"
Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"
Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds"
Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor"
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"
Philip Roth's "The Counterlife"
W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Gilbert Sorrentino's "Mulligan Stew"
Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance"
Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II
Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"
Scarlett Thomas's "PopCo"
Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"
David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"
Colson Whitehead's "John Henry Days"


Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/07/the-mostly-complete-annotated-and-essential-postmodern-reading-list.html

11 December 2010

"Dumating ang Takipsilim" (Mark Angeles)


Night Is Upon Him
BY MARK ANGELES


It is such a secret place, this land of tears.
- The Little Prince


Night is upon him
without his expecting it.
And he decides to come back
to the garden, his secret garden—
a glimpse into his own territorial
discovery and embrace;
the garden of tears
which trace each crease
of dried leaves
falling delicately
in autumn season.

But the trees are not there
anymore, the cradle
that rocked him is not there,
the yellow bulbs that bore
the flowers are not there.
Everything is gone except
the red color of his face.

But he does not shed a tear.

He stands in the center
without pursing his lips
or blinking his eyes.

He stands in the center
and watches the waving
sadness taking shape
in the clouds. He watches
the early morning light,
the ceaseless stream
of life begging to escape
from his grasp.
Something seems not right in that place.
His spirit is leaving
from between his chest.
And everything around him
dissolves like his teeth.

Night falls and the wind blows
and the cold washes his face.
All the stars that night
smile at him. Millions
of distant stars smile
at him that night. The night
shines like broken glass
mixed with sand
and dried under the sun.

Night is upon him
without his expecting it
but he knows what it means.




     TRANSLATED FROM FILIPINO

10 December 2010

Conversation about a cathedral, 2

We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.
- 2666


In his last interview for the Mexican Playboy, Roberto Bolaño was asked of his opinion of those who think he will win the Nobel Prize. “I am sure, dear Maristain, that I will not win it, as I am sure that some lazy person from my generation will win it and not even in passing mention me during his or her Stockholm speech.”

I’m not sure what Bolaño meant by a lazy person. Is that the same as a lazy writer? The present laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, is not of the same generation as Bolaño. Nor did he mention Bolaño in his Nobel lecture, though the Peruvian did harbor certain opinions of the Chilean.

It’s interesting nonetheless that two young writers from Peru, in talking about Vargas Llosa’s win, couldn’t help but speak of Bolaño in the same breath.

Bolaño is not of the same generation as Vargas Llosa’s. Bolaño is what came after. We would have to wait until 2020 – at least that’s the year Carlos Fuentes predicted, in his novel, that César Aira will win the Nobel – when a Latin American writer of the same generation as Bolaño will stand on a Swedish podium.

The last interview took place shortly before Bolaño’s death, and one can surmise that Bolaño was sure that he will not win it because “death is certain”, as he wrote between his teeth in Last Evenings on Earth. His first book to be translated in English, Shit Storms By Night in Chile, will not appear until the end of that year (2003). But for the life of him, posthumous fame will certainly not qualify him for any well-meaning award.

Not unless it was decided in Comala.

Bolaño could not have predicted Vargas Llosa’s win. Or maybe he just did. In the last piece in The Insufferable Gaucho (trans. Chris Andrews), in an essay called “The Myths of Cthulhu” (a fascinating essay wherein Bolaño gave a diagnosis of Latin American literature, but really a meandering, perhaps unfinished, yet very snobbish essay, snobbish in a bookish-snobbish way, an essay of the most wicked negative psychology), he differentiated the virtues (vices) of the bestselling writers (Pérez Reverte, Muñoz Molina, et al.) from those no one reads anymore (Puig, Arlt, et al.). In the same essay, he discussed how critics cling to old masters and what this implies for Latin American letters. And how much literature loves power too...

Today I read an interview with a famous and shrewd Latin American author. They ask him to name three people he admires. He replies: Nelson Mandela, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. With that answer as a starting point, you could write a whole thesis about the current state of Latin American literature. The casual reader might wonder what links those three figures. There is something that links two of them: the Nobel Prize. And there is something more that links all three: years ago they were all left wing…. All three have made way for deplorable heirs: the clear and entertaining epigones of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, and, in the case of Mandela, the indescribable Thabo Mbeki, the current president of South Africa, who denies the existence of AIDS. How could anyone name those three, without batting an eyelid, as the figures he most admires? Why not Bush, Putin and Castro? Why not Mullah Omar, Haider and Berlusconi? Why not Sánchez Dragó, Sánchez Dragó and Sánchez Dragó, disguised as the Holy Trinity?

And from there Roberto's own eyelids hit for low batting average.

08 December 2010

Don Q, via Cide Hamete Benengeli


Do we live in the age of translation?

Cervantes, an early instance of greatness in the "history" of the novel, has a ready answer in Don Quixote. The novel is presented as a translation by a Spanish-speaking Moor, from the Arabic of a certain historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, of the history of the knight errant Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. While the unnamed narrator recounts this "translated" history, he constantly reminds us of this fact. At several junctures in the novel, the narrator interjects the (i) translator's and (ii) his own annotations of the Arab's version of the events. In Part II, for example, the narrator interrupts the story to say:

Cide Hamete, the chronicler of this great history, begins this chapter with the words: 'I swear as a Christian and as a Catholic ...'; to which the translator adds that when Cide Hamete swore as a Christian and a Catholic, being a Moor, as he most certainly was, he only meant to say that just as when the Christian and Catholic swears something he swears, or should swear, the truth, and he swears to tell the truth in everything he says, so Cide Hamete was also telling the truth, as if he were swearing as a Christian and a Catholic, in everything he wrote about Don Quixote ... [Part II, Chapter XXVII, tr. John Rutherford]

Ah, the truth! And then Cide Hamete (through the translator, via the narrator) goes on to discuss a seeming "inconsistency" of previous events in the first part of the history, specifically the theft of Sancho Panza's donkey by the convict Ginés de Pasamonte. The inconsistency arises presumably from the "printers' carelessness" that led to the omission of the incident in the publication of the first part of the history. This "has led many people to offer their opinions and blame the printing mistake on the author's poor memory."

It appears then Cervantes craftily introduces a mistake in this long and clumsy history, but its teller (Cide Hamete), its translator, and its narrator are there to set the record straight. The mistake acquires a new kind of significance as Ginés, now a puppeteer and master of a fortune-telling ape, becomes embroiled again in the glorious adventure of our knight errant and his squire.

In an article in The New York Times, novelist Michael Cunningham argues that the act of novel writing is an act of translation: "the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper." The sense of translation here is as an internal interpretation of the novelist's story before finally writing it down. This is for works in the original language. As for translated books: "The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation." Cunningham completes his idea:

Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally, we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of this trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.

In the case of the Quixote, a pack bag of postmodern tricks and a vessel of wit, the act of its translation is more assiduously mapped. The translator is translating a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation. Confound the reader! To specify: the translator (Edith Grossman, or John Rutherford, or Burton Raffel, or Samuel Putnam, etc.) is translating a translation (by the unnamed narrator of the Quixote) of a translation (by the Moor who translates to Spanish) of a translation (by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli) of a translation (by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra). And lest we forget, the unnamed narrator is only the “second author” of the history, the “first author” being the one who was telling it right up to the section where the manuscript was supposedly truncated at the end of Part I, Chapter VIII.

In the case of Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", a ménage à trois between the novelist, translator, and reader is compounded by another interest, lost in flames. But that's for another post maybe.

To answer the question posed above, it may be best to quote again an interruption by our narrator regarding the integrity of Don Quixote's written history, demonstrating as it is how the telling of Truth in every History is ever so relative in every telling of it. At every remove, of the novelist from the story, of the translator from the source, of the teller from the tale, and of the reader from the page (not to mention the English translator's remove from the Spanish prose), the accumulation of subjective interpretations and authorial decisions is staggering.

It is said that in the original manuscript of this history one reads that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter his translator did not render it as the Moor had written it, with some sort of complaint against himself for having undertaken such a dry and limited history as this one about Don Quixote, always feeling himself restricted to talking about him and Sancho, never daring to venture out into any digressions or more serious and entertaining episodes; and Cide Hamete added that to have his mind, his hand and his pen always constrained to writing about one subject and speaking through the mouths of so few characters was intolerable drudgery, which yielded nothing to the author's advantage, and that to avoid this problem he had in the first part had recourse to certain tales, like those of Inappropriate Curiosity and the Captive Captain, which stand, as it were, apart from the main story – although the other tales narrated there are events in which Don Quixote himself was involved and which could not be omitted. [Part II, Chapter XLIV]

And then the narrator went on to describe Cide Hamete's justifications for the apparent divergence of style between the first and second parts of the history. The translator and narrator of the Quixote both seem to be acting as apologists for the historian, smoothing out the wrinkles in the narrative, and justifying the choices and style of its composition. Cide Hamete is, at least according to the translator, undermining the very virtues of the history he is writing, stopping short of calling it “boring” in many places. These self-references constitute an assertion of the freedom of the “multiple storytellers” in Don Quixote to comment on the work at hand and play with realism, without which the story will indeed be just an assembly of “intolerable drudgery,” “a dry and limited history.”


I'm presently on page 792 of the book, which I'm reading intermittently since July as part of a group read, at Stu’s Winstonsdad's Blog. Obviously I was waylaid by other books and failed to stick to schedule.

(First posted in early form in Project Dogeared)

05 December 2010

Reading list: Writers' top 10


At year's end, most writers are asked by book sections of dailies and blogs to name their most favorite books read in that year. But then these writers have been reading all their lives; they can't help not to; their genes programmed them to do so. So I guess it will be more interesting to know what they did like in all those reading years of their reading lives. Which books made the deepest impressions, which masterpieces were presumably influential to their own writings.

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books (edited by J. Peder Zane) is a book containing the top 10 favorite books-of-all-time of many writers. You can pick out your favorite writers, or any writer whose reading taste you want to try out, and see which books they love. The writers' top tens are available here:

http://toptenbooks.net/newtotalarchive.cgi

Home page: http://toptenbooks.net/home.cgi

A writer is not what he reads, but some choices are quite personal as to tell something about the writer in question. A reader who looks at these lists may feel a certain sense of validation in knowing that novelist A loves this novel of writer B. John Banville and Peter Carey both included a book by Sebald, and that's enough for me. Claire Messud likes Thomas Bernhard. Great.

It can also go the other way. Aha, this writer likes books of this kind, I figure as much from her own insipid writing. Writers who are essentially "monotonous" in their top 10 selections can be easily spotted: Walter Kirn, Lorrie Moore, Scott Spencer, David Lodge.

Still, others like Jonathan Franzen chose books that are hardly new. Too academic, or too fond of the usual masterpieces: John Irving, Patrick McGrath, Joyce Carol Oates. I prefer writers who venture into underdog territories, who list books outside of the mainstream, like A. L. Kennedy.

Each reader's personal preference for certain genres can make him curious about the works of new writers he's never read before. It's good to know that Norman Mailer and David Mitchell loved Borges's Labyrinths. Fantastic, maybe I should finally try out a book by Mitchell.

For its diversity and for its inclusion of a favorite, Chad Post's book set gets my vote for the best writer's top 10. The worst top 10 for me is the one by DFW – an easy target. I'm sure DFW got his reasons for his "snobbish" choices.


Chad Post's top ten

1. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
2. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
3. Act of the Damned by Antonio Lobo Antunes
4. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
5. Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec
6. Heartbreak Tango by Manuel Puig
7. VALIS by Philip K. Dick
8. Impossible Object by Nicholas Mosley
9. The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor
10. Cigarettes by Harry Mathews

David Foster Wallace's top ten

1. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
2. The Stand by Stephen King
3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
4. The Thin Red Line by James Jones
5. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
7. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
8. Fuzz by Ed McBain
9. Alligator by Shelley Katz
10. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy


You can also post your own top 10 in the site. I posted mine back in July.

P.S. Also in July, Peder ran a contest where one was asked to submit a top ten list of books inspired by Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual. The Prize: no less than the revised edition of the same book! Well, I won. I submitted two top 10 Life-inspired lists, which I'll share later here.

04 December 2010

Reading list: 10 "best-of" lists


December is the month of the "year's best books" lists. I'll post several of my own later. Meanwhile, here's a short list of lists of the "best _____ of the _____."

There are many canonical lists out there, but the ones here are popular ones. All attempt to rank or list books according to merit or comprehensiveness or their being essential/important. At least some try to cover an international range of books. The recent spate of publications and translations of neglected and forgotten works being brought out by progressive publishers, usually independent, ought to shake up most of these lists.

I've provided ratings for each list. Can I do that without reading most of the books in a certain list? Well, why not? It's a world swirling with ratings.





1. Books of the Century (New York Public Library)

http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/chss/events/booklist.html

My favorite list from among here. Mainly because of its great presentation. I like the categories they used to group the books.

Rating: 4/5 bookmarks


2. The top 100 books (fiction) of all time (Norwegian Book Clubs)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/08/books.booksnews

Released by the Norwegian Book Clubs. Based on the votes by 100 noted writers from 54 countries, so this may be fairly representative of international literature.

And yet every list with The Old Man and the Sea in it makes me wary.

Rating: 4/5 bookmarks


3. Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html

English-language novels only. Voted by Modern Library editorial board. (Don't bother with "The Reader's List" on the right side. The selection of some books there are indicative of malign imaginations amongst us.)

Rating of The Board's List: 3/5 bookmarks
Rating of The Reader's List: 0/5 bookmarks


4. Radcliffe Publishing Course's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century

http://www.listsofbests.com/list/110-100-best-novels-of-the-20th-century

An alternative to the Modern Library list. It falls short.

Rating: 1/5 bookmarks


5. TIME'S List of the 100 Best Novels in English (1923-2005)

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html

English-language novels only. Chosen by two TIME critics. Not as solid as Modern Library’s (#3). Some entries are really just popular. It's obvious the two critics are not reliable taste makers.

Rating: 1/5 bookmarks


6. The 100 greatest novels of all time (The Observer)

They've listed some unusual titles in it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction

Rating: 2.5/5 bookmarks


7. 100 novels everyone should read (The Telegraph)

A bit of an international selection.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4248401/100-novels-everyone-should-read.html

Rating: 2.5/5 bookmarks


8. 110 best books: The perfect library (The Telegraph)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3672376/110-best-books-The-perfect-library.html

Various genres – classics, poetry, biographies, romance, sci-fi, crime, children's books, "books that changed the/your world", history

Rating: 2.5/5 bookmarks


9. Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

Derived from other lists. Newsweek is too lazy and unoriginal to make their own. They include lists from Oprah's Book Club and Wikipedia, so highly questionable. I can't find the link at the Newsweek site, but here's a blog that typed it up.

http://bookslistslife.blogspot.com/2009/07/newsweeks-top-100-books-for-now.html

Newsweek also has its own Top 50. Can't find the link to that one.

Rating: 1/5 bookmarks


10. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

A killer list, so I'm not providing the link. You can search out for it. A list with such a stupendous number of books defies any rating. But I don't want lists playing safe. The whole enterprise is an exercise in futile inclusiveness.

Rating: 1.5/5


11. Reading list of St. John's College

http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/readlist.shtml

Pages of great boring stuff. From the site: "The first year is devoted to Greek authors and their pioneering understanding of the liberal arts; the second year contains books from the Roman, medieval, and Renaissance periods; the third year has books of the 17th and 18th centuries, most of which were written in modern languages; the fourth year brings the reading into the 19th and 20th centuries."

I'm stupefied by this list.

Rating: 2.5/5 bookmarks



Image from A Journey Round My Skull.

(Posted earlier in Shelfari)


What happens when poetry fell from the skies?


Poetry is Germany ... Poetry is Chile ...

Poetry from the sky?























This reminds me of the performance art in Distant Star, but in the opposite sense. This one is a real work of art.

 
from Berlin 'bombed' with poetry
Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/31/berlin-bombed-with-poetry


"Poetry rained from the skies on Saturday night in Berlin as 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems by 80 poets from Germany and Chile were dropped on the city from a helicopter.

"Lasting for half an hour, the initiative was intended as a protest against war and a message of peace, as well as a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the independence of Chile. It was the fifth "poetry rain" project from Chilean art collective Casagrande, which has arranged previous poetry bombing events in Santiago de Chile (2001), Dubrovnik (2002), Gernika (2004) and Warsaw (2009) - all cities which, like Berlin, have suffered aerial bombings during their history.

"Organisers say that just as wartime bombings were intended to "break the morale" of the inhabitants of a city, so the poetry bombing "'builds' a new city by giving new meaning to events of her tragic past and therefore presenting the city in a whole new original way"."


02 December 2010

Reading diary: November 2010


I'm inserting a widget from Goodreads so that I don't need to manually add the book covers every time I post my short reviews. Nifty. I just don't think black background complements the virtual shelf well.




Ryan's nov-2010 book recommendations, reviews, favorite quotes, book clubs, book trivia, book lists



Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream by Javier Marías, tr. Margaret Jull Costa

This is hard-going for me. Alas, after five books of Marías, it's still hard to get accustomed to his style. But then the late style is more stultifying than the previous digressive acts. I really liked the first volume (Fever and Spear) and yet this second one capitalizes on the same drudgery. The "Dance" chapter is a long boring set-up, but the suspense in the "Dream" part makes up for it. Needless to say, the concluding chapters of the third volume, "Poison", "Shadow", and Farewell" will make or break it for me.


The Stalin Front by Gert Ledig, tr. Michael Hofmann

A novel of WWII, with lots of combat action. Visceral, powerful writing that makes me think of the war films of Spielberg and Malick. It's one of those books that were neglected in its own time but really deserve a wider readership. NYRB publisher is to be thanked for bringing out these lost gems.

Read as part of the NYRB Reading Week. My full review is found here.


Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden

A fine example of magical realist novel. The story moves between the past and the present and between the worlds of the living and the dead. Imagine ghosts being haunted by ghosts!

It's too bad I don't have anything more to read by Rulfo. He wrote just two books and I already read the other one (The Burning Plain and Other Stories).


The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier, tr. Lorin Stein -- reread

A reread of this memoir reveals several cracks in the exquisite vase but this remains a favorite piece of monologue. The hung-up and pathetic voice of its narrator, a French lover, is near pitch perfect. It's about how Grégoire Bouillier overcame his traumatic relationship breakup and his penchant for wearing turtlenecks.


The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño, tr. Chris Andrews

Seven pieces - 5 stories and 2 essays - by a "mythical" writer. The title story alludes to Borges. It's a posthumous collection but the stories are living stories, not dead, though they are often inhabited by zombies, or I should say zombie-like characters. I loved it. But then I'm partial to everything Bolañese.

Bolaño’s “powerful endorsement” of Andrés Neuman


An online-only excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's essay “Neuman, Touched by Grace” in Between Parentheses (2011, tr. Natasha Wimmer).

http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/A-Powerful-Endorsement

Andrés Neuman, from Argentina, is one of “The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” – the theme of the latest issue of Granta magazine.

http://www.granta.com/Magazine/113
http://www.andresneuman.com/index.html

The magazine is posting a profile of each of these “twenty-two literary stars of the future.”
 
http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Best-of-Young-Spanish-Language-Novelists

All these writers are also profiled in Three Percent.

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/?s=tag&t=young-spanish-novelists

The excerpt is now added to our list of online works of Bolaño.

http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2010/09/guide-to-online-writings-of-roberto.html