Suggestions?

I've also been meaning to mention, if anyone would like to suggest a book for the club to read, please mention it at a meeting!  The only restrictions are that the book be "modern" literature (or "modernist" or "post-modern" or whatever you call this stuff), in print and available at the San Francisco Public Library, and not super long.  Ditto for suggestions on format, discussion approaches, etc etc.  See you at the next meeting!

Nathanael West - Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust

August selection: Nathanael West - Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust.  Both are very short and available in one extra cheap and gorgeously designed edition: isbn 9780811218221.  A very accessible (and dear to my heart) selection  after the dense, unyielding morass of Nightwood, which I was pleased to find most folks in the group found basically likable nonetheless, and were able to engage with the plot and characters more than I was able.  I thought the elemental "man vs. nature" themes, impeccably crafted prose-poetry and free association made for a very unique and edifying read in spite of the somewhat incidental plot and character elements.  Fun and enlightening discussion as always, thanks for participating.

First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th century American literature, as unnerving asa glob of black bile vomited up at a church social: empty, blasphemous, and horrific. Set in New York during the Depression and probably West's most powerful work, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column but as time passes he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write in, begging him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed to razor-edged shards by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into alcoholism and a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness.During his years in Hollywood West wrote The Day of the Locust, a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it with F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon (1941) among the best novels written about Hollywood. Set in Hollywood during the Depression, the narrator, Tod Hackett, comes to California in the hope of a career as a painter for movie backdrops but soon joins the disenchanted second-rate actors, technicians, laborers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod tries to seduce Faye Greener; she is seventeen. Her protector is an old man named Homer Simpson. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically The Burning of Los Angeles, and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood premiere, as the system runs out of control.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780811218221

Word of the Day: Pulchritudinous

Found in Robert Walser's "The Marriage Proposal" from the Microscripts collection, which is chock full of bizarre and unorthodox literary vocabulary, but I have to say, not quite as satisfying as the earlier short story collection from NYRB or Masquerade.

Djuna Barnes' Nightwood

Back home and suitably drained after an intense and wonderful discussion of Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser.  Though we didn't delve into his interesting biographical information much at all, divisive opinions on the accessibility of the book led to plenty of analysis of the content, particularly Jakob as a character, plot elements, dreams and passages within the book, and the trajectory of modernity (!?).  A very complicated and compelling book.  Thanks for coming!

Next installment will be Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, a notorious classic from 1936 which has been lurking on my "to read" list for years--maybe it's been on yours as well?  Maybe?  Well, then!  Join us on July 10th at 7 PM at Books, Inc in the Marina in any case.  I'll try to dig up something compelling blurb-wise in the meantime, maybe a slice from the T.S. Eliot introduction once my copy arrives.  By the way, I hear Djuna Barnes is portrayed in Woody Allen's latest film Midnight in Paris....

August: Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
September: Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre

Orwell and Walser discussions

This club will soon be listed on the Books Inc website--seems like a great occasion for an update!?

Last month, Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell was discussed.  Stellar discussion, thanks to all participants.

This unusual fictional account, in good part autobiographical, narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-out of two great cities. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780156262248

Tune in (or drop in) next episode; we'll be discussing Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser on June 12th at 7 PM.

The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.

Walser (1878-1956) left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while producing poems, essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he entered an insane asylum—he remained there for the rest of his life—and quit writing. “I am not here to write,” he said, “but to be mad.”

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780940322219

"The Genius of Robert Walser" by J.M. Coetzee:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/nov/02/the-genius-of-robert-walser/

April 2011--The Third Policeman

Our first selection is The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien.  Discussion is April 24th at 7 PM.

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, and The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9781564782144