Going on Hiatus

After a good deal of thought, I've decided to cease club meetings for the time being following next month's W.G. Sebald discussion (July 21st).  It's been a great 2.5 years!

Thanks for the love and support!

W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn

Sunday: Varamo by Cesar Aira discussed at 6 PM!  Still gotta finish it.

Next month, weird meeting time because I have an engagement on the 2nd Sunday.  Let's try the 3rd Sunday, which should be nice because this book could prove a little on the challenging side, perhaps?  W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn.  Discussion = 6 PM July 21st at Books Inc Opera Plaza.

And, as with many books, I found out about this fellow through music.  The Caretaker's Patience (After Sebald), which is a soundtrack to a movie about W.G. Sebald, which I haven't seen.

"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780811214131

César Aira - Varamo

I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors; which is to write upon nothing; when the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen still move on; by some called the ghost of wit, delighting to walk after the death of its body. - Jonathan Swift

Tonight: discussion of Hunger by Knut Hamsun ensues in earnest at 6 PM at Books Inc Opera Plaza.  New spot, new time!

Next month: Varamo by César Aira.  Never read it and don't know jack about it, but it's short, probably bitter and/or sweet, and very recent.  Thanks to my colleague Greg from SFPL for the recommendation!  (Meeting = June 9th at 6 PM)

Unmistakably the work of Cesar Aira, Varamo is about the day in the life of a hapless government employee who, after wandering around all night after being paid by the Ministry in counterfeit money, eventually writes the most celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Boy. What is odd is that, at fifty years old, Varamo hadn t previously written one sole verse, nor had it ever occurred to him to write one. Among other things, this novella is an ironic allegory of the poet s vocation and inspiration, the subtlety of artistic genius, and our need to give literature an historic, national, psychological, and aesthetic context. But Aira goes further still converting the ironic allegory into a formidable parody of the expectations that all narrative texts generate by laying out the pathos of a man who between one night and the following morning is touched by genius. Once again Aira surprises us with his unclassifiable fiction: original and enjoyable, worthy of many a thoughtful chuckle, Varamo invites the reader to become an accomplice in the author s irresistible game.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780811217415

New Book, New Meeting Location

Tomorrow is our last meeting at Books Inc. Chestnut Street!  We're moving to Books Inc. Opera Plaza for our May discussion, which will be on May 12th at 6 PM.  Thanks to Books Inc. Chestnut Street for two years of extreme hospitality.

Tomorrow's book is J.G. Ballard's High Rise and the discussion is at 7 PM at 2251 Chestnut St.  The title for May is Hunger by Knut Hamsun and will be hosted at 601 Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco.

A true classic of modern literature that has been described as “one of the most disturbing novels in existence” (Time Out), Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets, struggling on the edge of starvation. As hunger overtakes him, he slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose, as he loses his grip on reality.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780374531102

2nd Anniversary

I wanted to recap all the books we've read since April 2011.  Thanks for participating!

J.G. Ballard - High Rise (current title; to be discussed April 14th, 2013)
Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory
Philip K. Dick - Valis
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Gertrude Stein - Three Lives
Kobo Abe - The Box Man
Andre Gide - Lafcadio's Adventures
Herman Melville - The Confidence-Man
Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Andre Breton - Nadja
J.P. Donleavey - Ginger Man
Virginia Woolf - Orlando
Georges Bataille - Story of the Eye
Samuel Beckett - Watt
Richard Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis & Other Stories
Raymond Queneau - Exercises in Style
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
Nathaniel West - Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
Robert Walser - Jakob Von Gunten
George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman

J.G. Ballard - High Rise

Hello--hope you dug The Wasp Factory.  We'll discuss it on Sunday at 7 (yeah, back to the normal meeting time).

Next month, how about J.G. Ballard's High Rise?  I've read a few from this fellow and thoroughly enjoyed them, hope this is no exception!  April the 14th at 7 PM!

"Harsh and ingenious! "High Rise" is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind."--Martin Amis, "New Statesman."
http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780871404022

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

Hello.  Hope everyone is enjoying or enjoyed or will enjoy VALIS as much as I did!  Don't forget, we'll meet at 5:15 PM instead of 7 PM this Sunday, February 10th.

The pick for next month is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.  Word on the street: it's pretty dark and intense.  Hopefully it proves to be an entertaining/engaging selection.  We'll meet on March 10th at 7 PM.  Don't forget to move your clock hands forward and give me a hug for being on planet earth for 27 years.

 

**Update: I started reading The Wasp Factory and am enjoying it but felt I should post a disclaimer: the book contains fairly graphic depictions of animal and human cruelty.**

 

Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through.

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780684853154

Valis meeting time chage

I accidentally double booked my night next Sunday during the discussion, so the regulars and I agreed to meet at 5:15 PM instead of 7 PM on February 10th at the usual spot, 2251 Chestnut St.  If there's any issues or questions, reply to this post and I'll sort you out!  We'll be back to the normal time next month.

Phillip K. Dick - Valis

Welcome back after a month off... hope everyone enjoyed reading The Sound and the Fury.  We'll discuss it on Sunday the 11th at 7 PM.  I still have a bit left to go, so don't spoil it for me or anything.

For next month, I thought we should try something a bit different--how about Phillip K. Dick's Valis?  This fellow was pretty much my favorite author in high school, but after getting sucked into the whole modernism thing, I feel like I lost the science fiction thread.  Thing is, I feel like the two aren't mutually exclusive, so I think we can swing this thematically.  That meeting will be on the second Sunday as usual, February 10th at 7 PM at Books Inc on Chestnut St.

The first book in Philip K. Dick's final trilogy (followed by The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), VALIS encapsulates many of the themes that Dick was obsessed with over the course of his career. A disorienting and bleakly funny novel, VALIS (which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System) is about a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip Dick); the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser. VALIS is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.
Taking place in the same universe as Dick's soon-to-be-published Exegesis, VALIS is a dense novel, but one that is absolutely essential to understanding the author's off-kilter worldview. Much like Dick himself, the reader is left wondering what is real, what is fiction, and what the price is for divine inspiration.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780547572413

William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury

I'm really into "Three Lives" and I hope you are, really, too excited about reading Gertrude Stein and her "Three Lives," the titular book being ever awful absurd and also actually being really entirely right heartbreaking in one fell stroke, really.  I am with my continual thinking wondering how it is that she does that, making it so ever real absurd and ever so rightly heartbreaking all at once.  We'll completely be having our discussing it at each other now at 7 PM on Sunday, ever for real, with our Gertrude Stein and her mighty present volume of "Three Lives," so won't you come along, now, won't you.

As for next month, we'll be taking a pass because of the holidaze and resuming in January.  For then, Vincent's pick, "The Sound and the Fury" will be the star of the show.  I've never read Faulkner, so I'm in pretty dire straits as a result; not sure how I've even made it this far in life without him, honestly.  January 13th at 7 PM.

 

“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” —from The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and  one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780679732242

Gertrude Stein - Three Lives

Sunday: THE BOX MAN 7 PM.  Let's do this.

I just finished reading Ida by Gertrude Stein in one sitting yesterday, while procrastinating on Ulysses.  I was delighted and appalled in equal measure; her style is ridiculously repetitive, simplistic, and contradictory to the point of absurdity (you may have heard this about her).  Strong outsider vibes emanate--I was reminded of Richard Brautigan, only without the hippie connexion, especially in regards to her treatment of death/interpersonal relationships.  Things just happen, constantly, and for entirely no reason.  That's life.  So you'd better accept it, otherwise you're going to be completely miserable.  Just check out this chapter from Ida for some seriously mental ART--when I read this I laugh/cried for a few minutes flat, though I imagine the effect is less if you haven't just trawled yourself through 5 hours straight of "unreadable, self-indulgent, and excruciatingly boring" prose.  I also happen to be in the position to recommend reading reviews and parodies of Ida, or Stein's writing in general--easily some of the best worst reactions from critics I've had the pleasure of playing witness to.  This writing really drives people freakin nuts, but fortunately that's what we wanted all along.

I understand Miss Stein's Three Lives is a bit less esoteric, so we'll see how that goes for November.  Good luck.  See you on the 11th at 7 PM.

Three short stories comprise Gertrude Stein’s first significant work, each a psychological portrait of a different woman. “The Good Anna” is a kindly but domineering German servant. “The Gentle Lena” apathetically endures her miserable life until she dies in childbirth. “Melanctha” is a young Black woman learning about sexuality and love. Different as they may be, all three women are bound by poverty—and all three face the restrictions of class, race, and sex with resignation.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780451528728

Kōbō Abe - The Box Man

Tomorrow night: Lafcadio's Adventures by André Gide discussion at 7 PM.  As usual, the prediction is that it will be worth the consideration of those to whom it may prove worth considering.  See you there!

For next month (October 14th, 7 PM) I chose The Box Man by Kōbō Abe.  I just finished reading The Secret Rendezvous (while procrastinating reading Ulysses) which knocked my socks off, so hopefully The Box Man is of similar calibre.  I enjoyed Abe's rare ability to find humor and human persistence in the face of absurdity and hopelessness without forgetting about concept, plot, and character development.  Also there's an abundance of erotic medical goings-on (at least in the case of The Secret Rendezvous), something easy to get jazzed about.

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes, combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.
In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780375726514

The Ulysses Book Club

There's a temporary book club organized by my co-worker Tom from Classics I Forgot to Read and regulars of the Modern Lit Book Club which I wanted to draw attention to.  The purpose is to read James Joyce's Ulysses over the course of three meetings, occurring on the following dates: September 20th, October 18th, and November 15th.  Meetings are held at Books Inc in the Marina, 2251 Chestnut in San Francisco at 7 PM.  The idea is to read roughly a third of the book before each meeting.  Fabulous idea.  I'm hoping to pull myself together enough to read this thing and make the meetings, but we'll see.  In any case, I think this club could possibly give Finnegan's Wake Popcorn a run for its money in SF Weekly's "Most Pretentious Book Club" category, if Modern Lit hasn't already given an adequate showing...  On top of that, both Classics I Forgot to read and the present book club will continue normally scheduled meetings on the last Wednesday and second Sunday of each month, respectively (see the post below for information about our selection for September).

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Ulysses has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each chapter has its own remarkably innovative literary style, and the book is one of the great, extended tours de force of stream-of-consciousness narration. It is an essential stop in any tour of English literature.
This marvelous edition reproduces in facsimile the original 1922 text. Today critical interest centers on the authority of the text, and this edition republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text. Equally important, Jeri Johnson's editorial material is acknowledged to be by far the best there is. Her textual apparatus--notes, introduction, stemma of published versions--is unsurpassed. Johnson strikes the perfect balance between what readers need to know in her notes and introduction. Her fantastic explanatory notes begin by giving the time and location of each episode and a description of the correspondence with the episode in Homer being paralleled. In addition, the introduction is a model of scholarship and lucidity, leading the first-time reader through the intricacies of the text.
This edition also includes a full list of errata, a Composition and Publication History, an up-to-date bibliography, a chronology of Joyce's lie, a map of Dublin of the period, appendices reproducing Gilbert and Linati schema (i.e. the tables that set out the symbolic significance of each episode in the novel by title, hour of the day, place of the action), and much more. It is the perfect introduction to the crowning work of modernist literature.

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780199535675



André Gide - Lafcadio's Adventures

The Confidence-Man discussion will be on Sunday at 7, usual spot.  Should be a great jam.

Next month I'm predictably and regrettably going back on my promise not to pick a dead white bearded French male author for at least a few months.  André Gide Lafcadio's Adventures has simply been on my shelf for too long... it was the first thing that sprang to mind when prompted for a selection, so it must be taking up too much head space in these realms.  I'll make up for it next month....  I think Lafcadio should appeal to members of this club for its supposed mystery content, not to mention Nobel Prize-winning authorship, for what that's worth.  Discussion is at 7 PM on September 9th.

Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel laureate André Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures is a brilliantly sly satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the unmotivated crime.
When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that he’s heir to an ailing French nobleman’s fortune, he’s seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio—one of the most original creations in all modern fiction—goes free.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780375713385

Herman Melville - The Confidence-Man

Tomorrow: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler discussion will ensue.  I really enjoyed this one, especially as a compliment to Pale Fire, with both books being very entertaining investigations on writing, art, love, obsession, etc etc...  See ya at 7 PM!

Next month: Vincent's choice, Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, a book which should prove to be quite different from the reputation wrought by Moby Dick and/or Billy Budd, or so I've been told.  I'm eager to indulge as usual, should be a good read.  Discussion is on August 12th at 7 PM.

Herman Melville's The Confindence-Man: His Masquerade was the tenth, last, and most perplexing book of his decade as a professional man of letters. After it he gave up his ambitious effort to write works that would be both popular and profound and turned to poetry. The book was published on April 1--the very day of its title character's April Fools' Day masquerade on a Mississippi River Steamboat.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780140445473

Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Welcome back.  Tomorrow we'll discuss Pale Fire--I hope everyone is enjoying it in some capacity.  I'm oscillating between rapturous epiphany and crushing bamboozlement as well as struggling with a lack of time to devote to it.  Unfortunately, I'll have to take off a bit early from the discussion, so hopefully that won't put a damper on anything.

For next month, let's try some Calvino.  I've read four or five of his works and can definitely vouch for the man, but the present selection, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, is one I haven't read.  Seems like his works tend to fall into either more "standard" charcter-driven narratives (The Watcher) or more Borges-esque examinations of metaphysics and the nature of reality (T-Zero).  Kind of sounds like this one combines these elements... but I can't say for sure.  Discussion is at 7 PM on July 8th at Books Inc, 2251 Chestnut St, SF (the usual spot).

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780156439619

Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire

Interesting Nadja discussion tonight--thanks for attending!  Next month, Vincent's request, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.  I've never read anything by him, so the only information I can divulge is that I'm basically jazzed about the whole operation.  Discussion is on June 10th at 7 PM.

In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780679723424

Andre Breton - Nadja

So next month I promised we'd do Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, but I know I'm going to be (again) hard pressed for time finishing off term papers, so I thought I'd postpone Nabokov to June and do Andre Breton's Nadja next month, a book I know quite well and can be read in a matter of hours. We've been discussing the relative merits/demerits of surrealism lately, so we might as well go to the source! Discussion is May 13th at 7 PM.


Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life.The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work--pictures of various 'surreal' people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja's presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780802150264

J.P. Donleavy - Ginger Man

Still on for Sunday--sorry about the seriously lacking pitch last month for Orlando... since then, I read it and utterly enjoyed it (and I hope you all did too), not that I expect that statement to convince anyone to read it by tomorrow at 7 PM, when we'll have our discussion about it, but hey...

Got to get this one down for J.P. Donleavy because I can feel the busy-ness breathing down my neck for next week... Thanks to Jolee for the suggestion of The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthasar B, but I had to go with Ginger Man for distribution/availability/length issues (sorry!). Should be a good read and accidentally fits the Irish theme happening right now for St. Patrick's Day... Discussion is April 8th at 7 PM.


First published in Paris in 1955, and originally banned in the United States, J. P. Donleavy's first novel is now recognized the world over as a masterpiece and a modern classic of the highest order. Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J. P. Donleavys wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the misadventures of Sebastian Danger-field, a young American ne'er-do-well studying at Trinity College in Dublin. He barely has time for his studies and avoids bill collectors, makes love to almost anything in a skirt, and tries to survive without having to descend into the bottomless pit of steady work. Dangerfield's appetite for women, liquor, and general roguishness is insatiable--and he satisfies it with endless charm.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780802144669

Virginia Woolf - Orlando

Next month, Virginia Woolf's Orlando will be discussed on March 11th at 7 PM. I know nothing about it!


Begun as a "joke," Orlando is Virginia Woolf's fantastical biography of a poet who first appears as a sixteen-year-old boy at the court of Elizabeth I, and is left at the novel's end a married woman in the year 1928. Part love letter to Vita Sackville-West, part exploration of the art of biography, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and entertaining works. This new annotated edition will deepen readers' understanding of Woolf's brilliant creation.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780156031516