Petrarchive – book club thread

*evinced, not evicted

Oh and because this is an imageboard, this guy can cum more than Peter North, what the fuck McEwan?????

OP here, forgot to mention I’m trans

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n08/colm-toibin/dissecting-the-body

Good piece from Colm Toibin on this novel. He quotes the passage referenced in >>10736. When I was reading it I had the vague sense that this was situated just around the same time as Larkin's Annus Mirabilis and Toibin confirms as much.

Reading Rayuela by Cortazar (en espanol! (no tengo enie)). Pretty interesting so far. Reminds me a bit of The Waste Land and the likes.

Finally finished A Passage to India. Good final part. Not sure why this was a tricky book for me, nor why I didn't love it. Perhaps to be set on the shelf to gather friendly dust and then be picked up with a sneeze to be read again at another time in my life.

finally reading bifo Berardi heroes after a friend rec'ed it to me months ago. very topical for me with that Zendaya school shooter movie and all the other o9a stuff

Read an early minor Hardy novel, "A Pair of Blue Eyes". Not his best work, only really worth reading for the Hardy completionist, but it has its moments.

One bit where one of the main characters, a know-it-all literary critic, finds himself clinging on to the edge of a cliff, inspires a listing of all the other large cliffs of the island of Great Britain. Then subsequently when the hapless man realises he's face to face with a trilobite fossil, he starts to review in his mind the millions of years of history since that animal lived, including dinosaurs, cavemen, and so on. It's quite entertaining stuff - I think it's intended as a bit of a satire of the dramatic setpiece as you might find in Dickens or similar. In the end though the crisis is resolved in extremely conventional style - the heroine strips off her undergarments and knots them into a rope, hauling the critic up from the precipice, at which point he falls into her arms and they admit their love for one another. Someone less fond of Hardy and/or the Victorian novel would probably find this quite irritating. (Elfride, the heroine, also dies suddenly and for no earthly reason in the last few pages of the book: an extremely annoying resolution to a 400 page novel).

Certainly the book could have been 50 or 100 pages shorter overall and been better for it. In the end its main flaw is that the heroine is so much less interesting than his later creations, like Tess or Bathsheba. At the same time the young rural-boy-on-the-up Stephen Smith is an obvious forerunner of Jude and almost as luckless in love. And some of the same ideas are present too, such as the question of whether a woman is married in a natural or rightful sense to a man who has 'carried her off', even though the carrying off here is so much more trivial than the equivalent event in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Ultimately although I can hardly recommend this novel I think it is worthwhile to sometimes read the lesser works of great writers. It is reassuring to think that they were not born with the ability to write great novels, that they worked at their art.

Please, read Giovanni Papini.

Reading The Decameron, 2013 Rebhorn translation. Started after seeing the Pasolini film. So far: a gem, very punchy and funny in a way that surprises me given its age. Reading translations always makes me paranoid that I'm losing literary merit that was there in the original text, which I probably am.

Hard for me to keep a good reading habit these days-- it is an effortful activity, and often I am suffused with a deep sense of pointlessness that makes exerting effort difficult. Oh well.

I read Sebald's Austerlitz for my book club. It's very good. My main gripe is that I found myself questioning the plausibility of the memories he recovered. I certainly doubt I could do that with my own childhood, but then I wasn't a traumatised Kindertransport child whose identity got overwritten.

Nonetheless the most chilling and effective aspect of this book is the way the holocaust lurks in the absences and the unsaid. In this way it is the most effective testament I can imagine to the vanished masses, the families, villages, nations blotted out of existence. Auswitz doesn't so much cast a shadow over this novel as exist somewhere outside of it like a black hole.

if the person who recced me the Berardi reads this somehow bc im too pussy to text u, I gave up bc this month i remembered I was raped and it's been a disturbing month. now im reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles

>>10851
maybe not the best choice given the circumstances

>>10855
it's weirdly comforting

I started reading Robert Caro's LBJ series. I got it on amazon and when the box arrived it was cut open on both sides and broken, so I assume someone realized it was only books and was like damn it.

Lately, I have developed quite an interest in Japanese literature (XX-XXI centuries) without being aware of it. Svastika and Kappa are among the best books I've read this year. Some of Dazai's short stories were quite memorable, too.

Right now I'm reading Breasts and Eggs, by Murakami. After finishing Heaven, I thought: "I must read more of this author." So far, I'm enjoying it. (As a sidenote, I mistook her for Kawakami, and I ended up reading Sensei no kaban, a story that I didn't find compelling.)

I'm open to recommendations.

Argentine literature is another relatively new area of interest for me (I'm not sure if national criteria are the most desirable or precise...). Marechal's Adán Buenosyares was quite a ride... Planning to read El banquete de Severo Arcángelo or Antígona Vélez next. A friend gave me a copy of Sin rumbo, by Cambaceres. Having read Potpourri and En la sangre, I don't think I will enjoy it as much as he did. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Btw, >>10780 is right. He is, imo, one of the best short-story writers.

Booker Prize Longlist out:

The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis
Switzy by Emma Cline
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
The Disappearers by Marlon James
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
John of John by Douglas Stuart
All Them Dogs by Djamel White
The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

inb4 Douglas Stuart wins again

>>10734 (OP)

>didactic and probably a bit intractable
thanks OP, gonna start using that phrase so people think i went to college

>hoity and probably a bit toity
>*adjusts monocle*

>>10773
Still working my way through the Hardys. The most recent one I read was a bit more famous, "The Return of the Native". It seems like for a period of time, maybe in the 1970s or there abouts, this was one of the most famous of his novels, but its star has waned somewhat and now I'd say it's comfortably more obscure than Jude, Tess, Far From the Madding Crowd, and probably also the Mayor of Casterbridge.

Anyway not really in the mood to write a big review but it's quite good, just too slow really. Some of the plus points are the very interesting character Eustacia Vye, who I would say is more morally flawed than any of Hardy's other heroes or heroines, at least in the books of his I've read. The moor is a great setting as well, as evocative as Tess's dismal 'starveacre farm'. The only problem is that you can't write a novel with a moorland setting in the English language without falling under the long shadow of Wuthering Heights, and this novel isn't on par with that one.

I really enjoy the archaeological aspects that suffuse this novel. The whole story revolves around an ancient tumulus grave, the 'Rainbarrow', and there is much contemplation of the ancient inhabitants of this land. Hardy thinks the barrow is Celtic, which is probably wrong, it's probably Bell Beaker, but he couldn't have known that. It's really good stuff and I wish contemporary novelists still had the bravery (or even the ability) to be openly intellectual about things like this.

The ending is too slow for a long time and then too abrupt. This is the exact same pathology that afflicted A Pair of Blue Eyes. It's remarkable that Hardy seemed to work out how to write a good ending two thirds of the way through his career but I'm very glad he did (the end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is probably one of the greatest of any novels).

Overall I will say that this novel is better than A Pair of Blue Eyes, but weaker than all the other ones I've read.

>>11170
meant to say that Eustacia Vye is very much like Hardy's take on Emma Bovary, so if you like that book you might like this one.

Just read JM Coetzee, 'Disgrace'. This is one of the best modern novels I've ever read. Everyone should go and read this book.

>>11202
Classic case: campaigner in South Africa for le freedom, then moves out to Estralia as soon as le freedom has arrived.

>>11029
Breasts and Eggs was written by Mieko Kawakami, not "Murakami". I apologize for spreading misinformation online!

I recently finished *La révolution culturelle nazie*, written by the French historian (and one might say "public intellectual") Johann Chapoutot. While the topics covered are highly complex (at least they seemed so to me, a novice in these matters), Chapoutot presents them in an extraordinarily clear way; thus, the book (which is rather short) is relatively easy to read, without being lacking in information.

Just finished “American Psycho.” A masterpiece of postmodern structure and unreliable narration; the most interesting book I’ve read in a while.

Finished the granddaddy Culture of Narcissism. Great book, so obviously relevant, even if I wanted to critique it, when it hits its stride it's like Paul's own writings in how prescient it is

I read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

Ford (surname) is one of those writers who is less well regarded than their most notable book. No-one ever ranks him alongside Conrad or Woolf or Henry James or T.S. Eliot. But this book always makes all the big lists as if it were every bit the match of To The Lighthouse.

Well I don't think it's all so good as that. But it is worth reading. A fluent and effective deployment of the 'unreliable narrator' device before it got taken to its logical conclusion by Nabokov and then subsequently hackneyed by most everyone since. That said it's been some days since I finished it and I haven't really thought about it once, which is not the experience I tend to have with great novels. There is nothing that compels me to read more of Ford (surname)'s work, and that's alright because no-one else seems to have done so either.