February 2010
30 posts
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kate atkinson, when will there be good news?
“‘We should start with the aunt.’
‘What aunt?’”
Probably three-quarters of the way through the book, after very loosely-knit but reasonably important events for three main characters in three largely separate storylines, comes the actual orthodox story of detection. Which leaves me unsure whether this is meant to stretch the notion of a detective story —...
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“We have giants or nothing. There are no mediocre writers. It is like the Easter...”
– John Banville on the anxiety of influence as an Irish writer. (via paperbackgirl)
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banville continued
“There is a blackbird on the grass, hurrying by as if by clockwork first this way and that, the very one, as I can attest, that young Adam at the window this morning spotted flashing across in the dawn light. How all things hang together, when one has the perspective with which to view them.”
But the slowness and heaviness of the book are intentional. They’re a product of this...
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banville continued
And why so weighty? Well, there’s this, albeit from the perspective of the book’s other narrator:
‘What he said is that he would not die,’ Adam says, not looking at his mother.
He has a way, I have often noticed it, of going suddenly still, just stopping in whatever attitude he happens to be, as if he were playing that game we used to play as children, Statues, was it...
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john banville, the infinities
“Show me a pair of them at it and I will show you two mirrors, rose-tinted, flatteringly distorted, locked in an embrace of mutual incomprehension. They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one’s eyes.”
Both this and the above in the voice of the narrator, neglected Hermes, the Greek god who presides over all of the action....
“But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place! The lengths we...”
– John Banville, The Infinities | Knopf 02.23.10
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“Jackson’s idea of a shepherd was a rough-bearded man wearing a homemade...”
– Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News | Little, Brown 09.08
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“The decision not to answer the story’s natural question—will they or won’t they...”
– James Wood, in the New Yorker, on Jonathan Dee and Adam Haslett.
And far be it for me to question Wood, a far better reader than I am, but his reading of Dee’s withholding of judgment is considerably different from mine — enough so that I wonder if Dee isn’t better than I give him...
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mankell continued
“A price put on having a state governed by law. I didn’t think it was possible to give democracy a monetary value. If you don’t have a state functioning on the basis of law, you don’t have democracy. We’re on our knees. There’s a scraping and groaning coming from under the floorboards of this society of ours. I’m really worried.” Full disclosure:...
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henning mankell, the man from beijing
“But she liked to sit on board with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, watching her fellow passengers going through the bags of cheap spirits they had bought in Denmark. She sat down at a corner table that was very sticky. Annoyance flared up inside her, and she shouted to the girl who was clearing the tables … . The girl shrugged and wiped it clean. Birgitta Roslin gazed in disgust...
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“‘Maybe we should go on a pilgrimage,’ she said. ‘Do what...”
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hill continued
“I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman’s power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters. The devil is a literary critic, who delivers...
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joe hill, horns
“It did no good to tell himself that it was all in his head if it went on happening anyway. His belief was not required; his disbelief was of no consequence. The horns were always there when he reached up to touch them.”
This, dear friends, is how you pull off high-concept: shepherd your details carefully, and present the outlandish as a fait accompli.
Hill’s an interesting...
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“He began to think of one thing’s relationship to another. This film had...”
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delillo continued
‘Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature. It’s the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war,’ he said. ‘I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to...
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don delillo, point omega
“He was here, he said, to stop talking. There was no one to talk to but me.”
(and)
“News and Traffic. Sports and Weather. These were his acid terms for the life he’d left behind, more than two years of living with the tight minds that made the war. It was all background noise, he said, waving a hand. He liked to wave a hand in dismissal.”
It could be that DeLillo...
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“A man with a bedrock faith in the law, he had prosecuted malfeasance to the...”
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haslett continued
“All day from his office window he could see into the neighboring tower, where workers clicked away at their screens, filling their filing cabinets with endless records of prices and depreciations and liabilities likely to pay, until they no longer noticed the bargain struck between meaningless days and whatever private comforts they’d found to convince themselves the meaninglessness...
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haslett continued
“That’s precisely what’s become so endemic. That cheap, mindless relativism. You’re all awash in it. Of course it’s a pluralist society. So we’re modest. In the big things: religion, metaphysics. We’re non-absolutists. That’s secularism. That’s maturity. That’s what the zealots can’t abide. But this business of opinions. As if the...
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adam haslett, union atlantic
“With the gentle surf, he heard the hum from the air-conditioning vents high on the roof of the hotel, and his brain, once more, ran the stimulus to the ground: the steel smelted from ore mined on some island of the Indonesian Archipelago; forged into sheets on the hydraulic presses of a foundry outside Seoul; shipped across the Pacific to sit on a warehouse in Long Beach where it showed up...
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german continued
“Sam says ‘What would make you feel happy right now?’ Robert and Sam are walking. It’s night. Robert says ‘Nothing.’ He says ‘No, I don’t know. Drinking beer while lying down. Either one of those.’ Robert and Sam walk past a strip club. Robert says ‘I just want to be crying in someone’s arms.’ There is a red light. Robert and...
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zachary german, eat when you feel sad
“A year later, Robert is lying down. He isn’t wearing a shirt. Alison is lying down. Alison isn’t wearing a shirt. Robert is touching Alison’s breasts. Robert and Alison are kissing. Robert thinks ‘I should break up with Alison.’ He thinks ‘No.’ Robert and Alison stop kissing. Robert kisses Alison’s breasts. Alison makes a sound. She puts her...
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“I began to jot down my memories and impressions of Forest Gate when I was...”
– From the writer’s afterword. It’s interesting — it reads like he knows that the book is rough and inconsistent in its tone. But at the same time, that roughness does not detract from the urgency of what he wants to say, or the strangeness of his perspective; in fact, it might be a...
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akinti continued
“I know that must sound weird, going on a fishing trip in the middle of a war, but it’s not like fishing here in England. In Somalia, we fish when there is nothing else to eat. Mostly we were trapped in our homes, because the guns and the tanks ruled the streets. But we still tried not to worry constantly about war or whether we’d ever have a government again. That’s the...
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david akinti, forest gate
“I counted twenty people packed together, like we were in a sauna, with people from all over the world. Twelve of us sat in two neat rows of six. There were eight people standing, trying to look like they didn’t want a seat. I heard at least seven different languages; five people had on white earphones; nine were reading the Metro. On the cover was the face of a sixteen-year-old black...
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mason continued
“Immortal Poseidon’s wrath was implacable — in order for Odysseus to escape from his vengeance once and for all it was necessary that he cease to be Odysseus. What would the cleverest of the Greeks have done in that situation? He would have gone somewhere remote, far away from gods and men and, somehow, forgotten everything, and thereby been himself no more… . Perhaps he...
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“A single fragment is all that survives of the forty-fifth book of the Odyssey:
...”
– Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey | FSG 02.02.10
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zachary mason, the lost books of the odyssey
It is not widely understood that the epics attributed to Homer were in fact written by the gods before the Trojan War — these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history… . The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes, through authorial and managerial oversights, become available to their protagonists. Surprisingly, this has had no impact on the action or the...
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Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise... →
Lee Brackstone’s open letter to Morrissey, soliciting his rumored memoirs.
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Where there’s an entrance, there’s got to be an... →
Haruki Murakami, Pinball 1973
