Raymond Queneau - Exercises in Style

Thanks for the excellent meeting on Sunday--really great dissection of Sartre, good balance of topics and so forth.  Wish I had more time to go into details here, but as mentioned at the meeting, I'm pretty swamped lately and had to look for an easy escape for next month, something not too time consuming or heavy, but still interesting.... so I picked Raymond Queneau's 1947 classic Exercises in Style for October.  The book is one brief and largely incidental two-paragraph story written in 99 different styles such as mathematical, auditory and ode to mention a few.  I'm not exactly sure how we can go about analyzing it as we've been doing with previous and more "conventional" novels, but I think it'll be an engaging book to discuss (and hopefully read bits from together!) nonetheless.  We'll meet on Sunday, October 9th at 7 PM at the usual spot, Books Inc 2251 Chestnut St.

"A work of genius in a brilliant translation by Barbara Wright....Endlessly fascinating and very funny." --Philip Pullman

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780811207898

Nausea notes & questions

As a bit of an experiment, I thought I'd post my notes for Nausea to the blog ahead of the discussion in the eventuality that it might come in handy.  These are the notes I took while reading with just a bit of retrospection, so please pardon the roughness--be sure to reference the text since the quotes are barely snippets.  This is only tip-of-the-iceberg stuff on a novel with incredible depth...

-1st person, diary format: does it work?
-Is this book basically auto-biographical?  To what extent?
-p22: "Some of these days" ... "nothing can interrupt it but all can break it" -- Theme reprised at end of book
-p34 First bout with Self-Taught Man" -is he real or Antoine's imaginary interlocutor/alter-ego?  Later on, when the Corsican punches Self-Taught Man, is Sartre making a metaphor about Antoine's triumph over ego?
-p37 "something is beginning in order to end"... "I like to see that minute pass"  Great!  What is "adventure?"
-p57 Adventure definition (paraphrased): "growing old w/ woman" -element of the passing of time & irretrievability of past.  Connection to Proust?
-p53 another example of lost time (bottom of page)
-p63 Excellent summation of Antoine & Anny, another example of time
-p70 "Must not think too much about the value of history" and "having made love is much better than making it" -do you agree?
-p84 "I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist."  p85 (top): "A right is nothing more than the other aspect of duty."  Do you relate/agree?
-p95 "True nature of the present".... at bottom -any connection to nihilism?
-p117 Categorization of humanists.  Why?  Do you agree?  Does this fit the themes of the book or seem out of place?
-p127 Sartre expounds on the nature of existence: does it hide itself?  Can we only see the ephemera and not the thing in itself?  What is "being?"  Why should we be concerned enough to ask these questions?  Related topics: terror management theory, memento mori, the inability of language to capture essence, Heraclitus ("you cannot step into the same river twice")
-p169 What does it mean to "outlive oneself?"
-Is this basically a love story?  With a person?  With existence?  With both?  Or is it a thinly-veiled philosophy book in the guise of fiction?
-Is the ending satisfactory?

I hope everyone enjoyed this book; I certainly did.  Looking forward to the discussion Sunday!

Sartre: Nausea

Great Nathanael West discussion last night--intense--loved it!  Next round: Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre.  Discussion will be on September 11th at 7 PM.

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist, holds a position of singular eminence in the world of letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, La Nausee (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key novel of the twentieth century and a landmark in Existentialist fiction. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time--the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Roquentin's efforts to come to terms with life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the tenets of his Existentialist creed.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780811217002

Italo Calvino

Stumbled on this great Italo Calvino resource/depository here awhile back, in both Chinese and English.  I've only read a couple of his books so far, but both (Invisible Cities and T-Zero) were utterly amazing combinations of Borgesian logical proofs and "what if?" mysticism, flights of surrealistic fancy a la Michel Leiris, approachably and impeccably written, words for the inner mind.

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.