Thoughts on a Year of Books
2007 Books
The best book I read this year was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, a work that set the tone for my life this year as well as my literary wanderings. When engaging Sebald’s work, it is impossible to tell what is fabricated and what is not. Actually, Sebald’s main character Austerlitz seems more real to me than any of the non-fictional characters I read this year, his melancholy is real and significant, his memories more intense and present than my own. Sebald, the narrator, introduces us to Austerlitz, an historian of architecture who was displaced by World War II, and we follow his story as the narrator discovers it, all the while being presented with beautiful, enigmatic uncaptioned photographs in the text. We find a torn, devastated Europe still capable of bringing forth moments of sublime transcendence.
From Austerlitz, I went on to read three more magnificent books by Sebald, The Emigrants (which was so highly praised by Susan Sontag), The Rings of Saturn, and After Nature, a book of long poems. I wanted to explore more post-war German literature after these works and I moved onto A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke and Thomas Bernard’s book of ultra-short stories, The Voice Imitator. I don’t know whether the beauty of Sebald’s books held me away from the brutal, sparseness of Handke and Bernard, but both books left me cold and hopeless. Handke’s world is without tenderness, heroes or redemption, and no one could escape the unrelenting knife of irony and dark comedy in Bernard. I will continue with Bernard, perhaps moving onto his book Loser. I think I’m finished with Handke.
In terms of short stories, this year has been rich with new literary finds for me as well as with new books from some old favorites. My dear Alice Monro’s book The View From Castle Rock compelled me to seek more information about my history and family, and re-reading stories like The Huntsman and Oysters by Chekhov were welcome studies in how to write simple stories about simple lives with depth and impact. I admit that on my first reading, I could not find much in the stories of Amy Hempel and Richard Ford. Hempel is probably out of my league, and Ford’s characters are so selfish that I couldn’t hang on. On the other hand, I finally got around to Borges’ Labyrinths and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I am sure I will read them over and over. Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths was the first story I have ever read three times before moving on to the next story. The only other work of art that has compelled that from me was Citizen Kane. Herman Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener was a great study in soul sucking corporate culture written all the way back in the mid 19th century. I also really enjoyed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad – with its description of the City of Vanity Fair as a place that is easy to stop and stay without ever making it beyond, a place “at the height of prosperity, and exhibits the epitome of what’s brilliant, gay and fascinating, beneath the sun.” I can see why so many love the parrot and lovely Félicité in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. In closing in terms of short fictions, I was happy to find William Trevor. I will be dipping into his collected stories for a long time to come, including his new book Cheating at Canasta.
Poetry is always on my mind, and I am always glad to find new work that has never crossed my path. I found many great poets this year including Bob Hicok, Joshua Clover, Tony Hoagland, C.K. Williams, and my favorite find of the year W.S. Merwin (though admittedly, I was tardy – Merwin is hardly a secret!!). Admittedly, Clover’s poetry is good only in spurts, and usually you have to go back to your French continental thought and re-read Apollonaire to make much sense of it. Hicok gives a great shattering reading in person, but Insomnia Diary is his only written text that held my attention as opposed to Plus Shipping or his new collection This Clumsy Living. Hoagland’s poetry is great, full of raw passages that are “mean,” to use his word, phrases like “Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness /As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.” I also enjoyed his book on craft, Real Sofistikashun. I am still going to find and read his recommendations on poets and am using his advice in my own work. New Yorker poet C.K. Williams was great to read on the beach in the morning with all of the California lives running by on the sand -- his use of a long, classical line spun with the conventional sonnet works more often than it fails, and he can often paint an entire person with just a few strokes. However, Merwin was the poet that overthrew me this year with his mediations on forgotten languages, the illusions of the everyday, and his earth shattering piece on September 11th, simply addressing the words themselves and showing his true subject only by the date the poem was completed, September 12, 2001.
For novels, I loved Orhan Pamuk’s Snow at the beginning, but ultimately it proved the hardest book for me to complete this year. Its wonderful magical realism was broken by a main character full of melodrama and narcissistic yearning for happiness. I had similar troubles with Jonathon Saffron Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, a clever, heart felt search for family that becomes a little tedious with its overblown textual trickery. After the Foer, I finally, after years, made it to George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a beautiful enough story to queue up Middlemarch as something to read in the future. Admittedly, it reads as a bit quaint in contemporary times. I struggled and eventually gave up on Phillip Roth’s Great American Novel, though I loved Goodbye Columbus years ago and have The Plot Against America on my list for 2008.
All told, I did not read many novels this year besides Sebald and the Germans, only 4. I filled in the gap with non-fiction and plays. I went through a long a prosperous Euripides stage inspired by Mike Kelley’s artwork. I read Medea, Hecuba, The Suppliants, and The Bacchae. Martin McDonough’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Pillowman, and The Lonesome West were delightfully wicked. Missing the Steppenwolf theater company’s production of The Pillowman last year truly is one of my more ignominious failings. I read Stoppard’s Artist Descending A Staircase again, and again, found a much to take from it to my study of visual art. I discovered Ionesco at last with Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, and The Lesson. It is amazing how long it takes me to get around to things.
After hearing Bob Woodward speak, I read his war trilogy -- Bush at War, Plan of Attack, and State of Denial. You only really have to read State of Denial to know how it all played out, but the other two books fill in all of the White House and Defense Department memos that Woodward somehow finds a way to sift through and present journalistically. I will probably move back in time in a study of the presidents. I followed up the war trilogy with The Agenda detailing Clinton’s Economic Policy and its troubles making its way through congress. The best non-fiction work I read this year was The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, a fascinating study of the personalities on the Supreme Court including Scalia and Ginsberg’s shared affection for holiday parties and opera, Thomas’ zeal for Nascar and RVs, Breyer’s chatty debates, and Kennedy’s forays into international law. Toobin’s hero, however, is O’Conner. I followed The Nine up with Antonin Scalia’s A Matter of Interpretation and Stephen Breyer’s Active Liberty. I am still meditating on them both. At the beginning of last year, Joan Didion’s The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem were great introductions to my new city of Los Angeles.
In terms of literary essays and philosophy, I recommend both The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor and The Struggle Against Inauthenticity by Geoffrey Hartman. Taylor presents the important and compelling thesis that the “Culture of Authenticity,” namely the social engine that aims for individual self-fulfillment driven by a relativistic spirit of individual morality and tolerance, still presents an ethic and a moral system that is open to social tests and liable to the results it produces. Hartman’s idea in The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, in a way, aims at critiquing the same, listless culture, but in Hartman’s view, a culture unable to cope with the Holocaust and the type of authenticity and spirit that the Holocaust asked of its victims in their effort to not be dehumanized. From the ruins of the war, Hartman makes an argument for the essential validity of art and culture to heal social wounds. For literary essays, I probably lean towards Inner Workings by J.M Coetzee rather than The Curtain by Milan Kundera. At times, Coetzee just dazzles with his clarity and his close readings of authors like Naipaul, Marquez, Gordimer, Faulkner, and Celan, and this book contains an essay on Walter Benjamin that was important for me to see. In the world of the visual arts, Benjamin opened up a world of Marxist approaches to art and its history that continue to be overused and over-quoted. It was great to see someone from another field being intelligent and critical in regards to Benjamin, not so much bringing him down but definitely exposing his troubles. The Curtain is worth the read if not for any other reason than for Kundera’s alternate history of the novel, which demands a new reading schedule that includes authors such as Musil, Kis, Bloch, and Gombrowicz. I hope to get around to all of them this year.
The best book I read this year was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, a work that set the tone for my life this year as well as my literary wanderings. When engaging Sebald’s work, it is impossible to tell what is fabricated and what is not. Actually, Sebald’s main character Austerlitz seems more real to me than any of the non-fictional characters I read this year, his melancholy is real and significant, his memories more intense and present than my own. Sebald, the narrator, introduces us to Austerlitz, an historian of architecture who was displaced by World War II, and we follow his story as the narrator discovers it, all the while being presented with beautiful, enigmatic uncaptioned photographs in the text. We find a torn, devastated Europe still capable of bringing forth moments of sublime transcendence.
From Austerlitz, I went on to read three more magnificent books by Sebald, The Emigrants (which was so highly praised by Susan Sontag), The Rings of Saturn, and After Nature, a book of long poems. I wanted to explore more post-war German literature after these works and I moved onto A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke and Thomas Bernard’s book of ultra-short stories, The Voice Imitator. I don’t know whether the beauty of Sebald’s books held me away from the brutal, sparseness of Handke and Bernard, but both books left me cold and hopeless. Handke’s world is without tenderness, heroes or redemption, and no one could escape the unrelenting knife of irony and dark comedy in Bernard. I will continue with Bernard, perhaps moving onto his book Loser. I think I’m finished with Handke.
In terms of short stories, this year has been rich with new literary finds for me as well as with new books from some old favorites. My dear Alice Monro’s book The View From Castle Rock compelled me to seek more information about my history and family, and re-reading stories like The Huntsman and Oysters by Chekhov were welcome studies in how to write simple stories about simple lives with depth and impact. I admit that on my first reading, I could not find much in the stories of Amy Hempel and Richard Ford. Hempel is probably out of my league, and Ford’s characters are so selfish that I couldn’t hang on. On the other hand, I finally got around to Borges’ Labyrinths and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I am sure I will read them over and over. Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths was the first story I have ever read three times before moving on to the next story. The only other work of art that has compelled that from me was Citizen Kane. Herman Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener was a great study in soul sucking corporate culture written all the way back in the mid 19th century. I also really enjoyed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad – with its description of the City of Vanity Fair as a place that is easy to stop and stay without ever making it beyond, a place “at the height of prosperity, and exhibits the epitome of what’s brilliant, gay and fascinating, beneath the sun.” I can see why so many love the parrot and lovely Félicité in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. In closing in terms of short fictions, I was happy to find William Trevor. I will be dipping into his collected stories for a long time to come, including his new book Cheating at Canasta.
Poetry is always on my mind, and I am always glad to find new work that has never crossed my path. I found many great poets this year including Bob Hicok, Joshua Clover, Tony Hoagland, C.K. Williams, and my favorite find of the year W.S. Merwin (though admittedly, I was tardy – Merwin is hardly a secret!!). Admittedly, Clover’s poetry is good only in spurts, and usually you have to go back to your French continental thought and re-read Apollonaire to make much sense of it. Hicok gives a great shattering reading in person, but Insomnia Diary is his only written text that held my attention as opposed to Plus Shipping or his new collection This Clumsy Living. Hoagland’s poetry is great, full of raw passages that are “mean,” to use his word, phrases like “Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness /As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.” I also enjoyed his book on craft, Real Sofistikashun. I am still going to find and read his recommendations on poets and am using his advice in my own work. New Yorker poet C.K. Williams was great to read on the beach in the morning with all of the California lives running by on the sand -- his use of a long, classical line spun with the conventional sonnet works more often than it fails, and he can often paint an entire person with just a few strokes. However, Merwin was the poet that overthrew me this year with his mediations on forgotten languages, the illusions of the everyday, and his earth shattering piece on September 11th, simply addressing the words themselves and showing his true subject only by the date the poem was completed, September 12, 2001.
For novels, I loved Orhan Pamuk’s Snow at the beginning, but ultimately it proved the hardest book for me to complete this year. Its wonderful magical realism was broken by a main character full of melodrama and narcissistic yearning for happiness. I had similar troubles with Jonathon Saffron Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, a clever, heart felt search for family that becomes a little tedious with its overblown textual trickery. After the Foer, I finally, after years, made it to George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a beautiful enough story to queue up Middlemarch as something to read in the future. Admittedly, it reads as a bit quaint in contemporary times. I struggled and eventually gave up on Phillip Roth’s Great American Novel, though I loved Goodbye Columbus years ago and have The Plot Against America on my list for 2008.
All told, I did not read many novels this year besides Sebald and the Germans, only 4. I filled in the gap with non-fiction and plays. I went through a long a prosperous Euripides stage inspired by Mike Kelley’s artwork. I read Medea, Hecuba, The Suppliants, and The Bacchae. Martin McDonough’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Pillowman, and The Lonesome West were delightfully wicked. Missing the Steppenwolf theater company’s production of The Pillowman last year truly is one of my more ignominious failings. I read Stoppard’s Artist Descending A Staircase again, and again, found a much to take from it to my study of visual art. I discovered Ionesco at last with Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, and The Lesson. It is amazing how long it takes me to get around to things.
After hearing Bob Woodward speak, I read his war trilogy -- Bush at War, Plan of Attack, and State of Denial. You only really have to read State of Denial to know how it all played out, but the other two books fill in all of the White House and Defense Department memos that Woodward somehow finds a way to sift through and present journalistically. I will probably move back in time in a study of the presidents. I followed up the war trilogy with The Agenda detailing Clinton’s Economic Policy and its troubles making its way through congress. The best non-fiction work I read this year was The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, a fascinating study of the personalities on the Supreme Court including Scalia and Ginsberg’s shared affection for holiday parties and opera, Thomas’ zeal for Nascar and RVs, Breyer’s chatty debates, and Kennedy’s forays into international law. Toobin’s hero, however, is O’Conner. I followed The Nine up with Antonin Scalia’s A Matter of Interpretation and Stephen Breyer’s Active Liberty. I am still meditating on them both. At the beginning of last year, Joan Didion’s The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem were great introductions to my new city of Los Angeles.
In terms of literary essays and philosophy, I recommend both The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor and The Struggle Against Inauthenticity by Geoffrey Hartman. Taylor presents the important and compelling thesis that the “Culture of Authenticity,” namely the social engine that aims for individual self-fulfillment driven by a relativistic spirit of individual morality and tolerance, still presents an ethic and a moral system that is open to social tests and liable to the results it produces. Hartman’s idea in The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, in a way, aims at critiquing the same, listless culture, but in Hartman’s view, a culture unable to cope with the Holocaust and the type of authenticity and spirit that the Holocaust asked of its victims in their effort to not be dehumanized. From the ruins of the war, Hartman makes an argument for the essential validity of art and culture to heal social wounds. For literary essays, I probably lean towards Inner Workings by J.M Coetzee rather than The Curtain by Milan Kundera. At times, Coetzee just dazzles with his clarity and his close readings of authors like Naipaul, Marquez, Gordimer, Faulkner, and Celan, and this book contains an essay on Walter Benjamin that was important for me to see. In the world of the visual arts, Benjamin opened up a world of Marxist approaches to art and its history that continue to be overused and over-quoted. It was great to see someone from another field being intelligent and critical in regards to Benjamin, not so much bringing him down but definitely exposing his troubles. The Curtain is worth the read if not for any other reason than for Kundera’s alternate history of the novel, which demands a new reading schedule that includes authors such as Musil, Kis, Bloch, and Gombrowicz. I hope to get around to all of them this year.
posted by Ed | 8:18 AM
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