I Want My Personal Pan Pizza
So, my reading in Berlin, especially compared to the clip I was maintaining in Portland, is quite down, but in the spirit of rehashing, I did read a couple of books in English while I am here:
The Armies of the Night: Norman Mailer's masterpiece. Found it at random at the parents' house (neither of them, according to Mother, though, have read it). Decided to take it for the plane ride, since I needed something readable, and had never read any Mailer, and it won both a Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and the seems like, something, you know?
Really is a super book though. Very enjoyable, but also intellectual engaging. It's about the first march on the Pentagon against the Vietnam war in '67, during which Mailer was arrested for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. Contains a whole lot of discussion over the problems with such things, starts to get into a little bit of why the Civil Rights movement was the last even vaguely effective protest movement in the US. Book certainly has provided influence into my own ideas about political impotence, opting out, and intellectual tourism.
Identity: Milan Kundera's novel from 1998 (translated from the French). A friend of mine had it here, it was short, Kundera is notoriously easy to read (he's like the Czech Tom Robbins, or something like that), and I'd only ever read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I thought was rather good. I've also read Kundera's The Art of the Novel, his book of essays about writing novels, which has given me the sense that I've read more of his novels than I actually have.
At any rate, Identity is pretty much terrible. Really bad. Not recommended, except that it only takes a couple hours to read, so it wouldn't really waste that much of your time. No reason to go into details. Find a couple of hours, read it, and then email, explaining why you are in absolute agreement with me about how terrible it is.
Blue of Noon: Georges Bataille's 1935 novel (translated from the French (and, incidentally, I was friends with a guy here at the Institut that was from Italy, and we were talking on occasions about Literature, and the only Italian novel that I could come up with that I've read is Svevo's Zeno's Conscience - is it really as bad as that? Do we really not read any Italian literature in the US, or am I just missing obvious examples?)) starring one of the more vile lead (male (of course male (and I've been having some interesting discussions of late about the problems with the male-dominated world of fiction (and been working with this notion that what we know as fiction in the academy, or the west, or whatever, is a painfully shallow slice of this one genre of existentially angst-ridden male characters, but it seems no way to access the other paralell universes in our vicinty wherein an entirely different wing of the Library of All Possible Books is "all the buzz")))) characters that I've read in quite a while. Actually havenÄt finished this one, not sure that I will or not. Seems like maybe its an important book though? I don't know a whole lot about the context, and George Bataille's wikipedia page is on the other side of the firewall.
The Armies of the Night: Norman Mailer's masterpiece. Found it at random at the parents' house (neither of them, according to Mother, though, have read it). Decided to take it for the plane ride, since I needed something readable, and had never read any Mailer, and it won both a Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and the seems like, something, you know?
Really is a super book though. Very enjoyable, but also intellectual engaging. It's about the first march on the Pentagon against the Vietnam war in '67, during which Mailer was arrested for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. Contains a whole lot of discussion over the problems with such things, starts to get into a little bit of why the Civil Rights movement was the last even vaguely effective protest movement in the US. Book certainly has provided influence into my own ideas about political impotence, opting out, and intellectual tourism.
Identity: Milan Kundera's novel from 1998 (translated from the French). A friend of mine had it here, it was short, Kundera is notoriously easy to read (he's like the Czech Tom Robbins, or something like that), and I'd only ever read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I thought was rather good. I've also read Kundera's The Art of the Novel, his book of essays about writing novels, which has given me the sense that I've read more of his novels than I actually have.
At any rate, Identity is pretty much terrible. Really bad. Not recommended, except that it only takes a couple hours to read, so it wouldn't really waste that much of your time. No reason to go into details. Find a couple of hours, read it, and then email, explaining why you are in absolute agreement with me about how terrible it is.
Blue of Noon: Georges Bataille's 1935 novel (translated from the French (and, incidentally, I was friends with a guy here at the Institut that was from Italy, and we were talking on occasions about Literature, and the only Italian novel that I could come up with that I've read is Svevo's Zeno's Conscience - is it really as bad as that? Do we really not read any Italian literature in the US, or am I just missing obvious examples?)) starring one of the more vile lead (male (of course male (and I've been having some interesting discussions of late about the problems with the male-dominated world of fiction (and been working with this notion that what we know as fiction in the academy, or the west, or whatever, is a painfully shallow slice of this one genre of existentially angst-ridden male characters, but it seems no way to access the other paralell universes in our vicinty wherein an entirely different wing of the Library of All Possible Books is "all the buzz")))) characters that I've read in quite a while. Actually havenÄt finished this one, not sure that I will or not. Seems like maybe its an important book though? I don't know a whole lot about the context, and George Bataille's wikipedia page is on the other side of the firewall.
3 Comments:
I agree that there's something eventually overbearing about the excessive maleness of perspective you get in literature, plus film, television, music, stand-up comedy, and probably a bunch of other mainstream forms of expression that I have much less exposure to. Essentially because most of that existential angst seems to boil down to "why won't the prettiest girls sleep with me". Obviously there's a lot to say along those lines but I don't feel like going into enough detail to defend that position.
Information about enrolling in Pizza Hut's Book It! program, which will probably give you a personal pizza for Armies of the Night if you can pass yourself off as a sixth-grader, can be found here.
I can lend you Toni Morrison's Beloved, Pete, if you haven't read it yet. I remember liking her novel Jazz a lot (back in '03, maybe?) too, though I don't have a copy of that.
I haven't read many other novels by women. If you like graphic novels, though, the first ports of call would be Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel.
I actually read "Identity" back in college, after reading and liking "Unbearable Lightness." It was for a short paper in a course on Eastern European literature, to be written in the style of a book review. (We got to pick which book; "Identity" was short and recent and presumably on the library shelf.) I remember very little about the book itself, but my angle for the paper was that it was a short, enjoyable, summer-appropriate Kundera novel, so I liked it that much. I noted that the dialogue sounded like it was spoken not by real people but rather by characters out of a Kundera novel.
Do I remember a scene where an advertising executive shows his coworkers a slide of a self-fellating fetus in utero, describing it as an ideal image of human desire?
I've read Jazz - it's really good. Enjoyed it a lot. I actually tried, not long after having read Jazz, to read Beloved, but couldn't do it. Well written and all, but I never gotr more than about half way through. Something about the ghost-story aspect of it just kept pulling me too far out of it.
Yeah, the fetus thing is from Identity. It's very Kundera - though its really not a good thing at this point, for the book. Especially, given my current level of aggravation with male-driven fiction, the voices given to the female characters were just too much to stomach.
Yeah, it'll be a while before I have a functional thesis about what I think about women in fiction/film/etc. Maybe being in graduate school for writing will help though. I'm excited to read Miranda July.
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