You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Literature’ tag.
2012/9
Miroslav Krleza: Op de Rand van het Verstand (204p.)
Miroslav Krleza (supposedly the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century) published his proto-existentialist classic The Return of Philip Latinowicz in 1932, six years before Sartre wrote La Nausée, and a classic it is, hence why I now followed up with Op de Rand van het Verstand (‘On the Edge of Reason’ in English), written in 1938, his second of four novels in total. Great title too, especially in Dutch.
The problem with Op de Rand van het Verstand is that after 20 pages there’s nothing new anymore and the reader has understood what this book is about: a tireless (but brilliant) anti-conformist rant, fun for a while, but only a rant in the end, too lopsided to carry the reader through 200 pages of it. Please proceed with The Return of Philip Latinowicz.
2012/8
Mohammed Mrabet: The Lemon (181p.)
In the shadow of Ghent University’s famous book tower (its library really) Oxfam Belgium (part of Oxfam International, an international North-South NGO focusing on alleviating poverty and injustice) is operating a most pleasant bookstore, a visit to which I certainly recommend to anyone happening to be in the neighborhood. All books for sale have been arrived at through donations, and yet time and time again I’m impressed by the quality of their stock, which is on par with any of the other (commercial) outlets for used books scattered throughout Ghent (Belgium).
Long-time visitors to the Mountaintop will remember my infatuation with the great American existentialist Paul Bowles, who aptly titled his autobiography Without Stopping (haven’t read it yet but own a copy). Among the many things Bowles accomplished are a series of translations of oral stories told by Mohammed Mrabet (a painter too) in the Moghrebi language (Morocco), and guess what I found last weekend at the abovementioned Oxfam bookstore, Mohammed Mrabet’s The Lemon, in English (not one of Belgium’s three official languages), hardcover, the 1969 true first edition first print, Synchronicity Jung would have said, Synchronicity The Police would have sung, and I just smiled at the idea of this little gem making it all the way through the donation process to end up in my hands, the hands of a Bowles fan, and the likelihood of it doing so.
As can be expected, given this is a translation of an oral story, The Lemon proceeds at a fast clip, the story being more important than the language. It peters out somewhat unexpectedly at the end, and lastly it reminded me a bit of Paul Bowles’ own (and magnificent) Let It Come Down, man colliding with his (kif-induced) fate.
2012/7
Lieve Joris: Mali Blues (313p.)
Lieve Joris is a Belgian travel writer of international renown, and has earned herself a bigger reputation abroad than at home. She’s hot in France for example, partly due to the innate quality of her writing, partly due to her having written about some of France’s former colonies, such as Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali, which are also the countries she’s traveling through in Mali Blues, of which there is an English translation. Mali Blues contains four stories for 313 pages; the first two stories are great, the latter two just good. The Sahel is where Moor and Black meet, and I suspect some of that must be underlying the recent military coup in Mali as well.
I like travelogues, and have read many (and intend to read more). Joris has her place in that tight-knit group of people writing them (Thesiger, Naipaul, Kaplan, Kapuscinski, Theroux, Raban, Bowles…).
2012/6
Patti Smith: Just Kids (288p.)
The first thing that needs to be said about Patti Smith’s Just Kids is that it is a proper memoir or autobiography (no ghostwriting), which in itself is enough to make Just Kids a stand-out in my burgeoning library of rock. I’m not too big a fan of her music (“Because the night belongs to lovers…”) but Patti Smith has a great pen – period.
In essence, Just Kids is about Patti Smith’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, a love relationship at first (they met as young and aspiring artists in New York City in the 60s), a lifelong friendship until the end (a true love always lingers), the end being Mapplethorpe’s untimely death from AIDS.
Another reason for cherishing Just Kids is that it reads as a veritable who’s who of New York’s music and art scene at the end of the 60s, the beginning of the 70s. It’s also a treasure trove of references to more books (Smith not only has the pen of a writer but the literary background too), movies, and rock albums.
Just very good.
2012/5
Leonard Barrett: The Rastafarians (306p.)
I do realize reading Leonard Barrett’s The Rastafarians is reading in the margin, but while it is fairly poorly written, the question why now a subset of the Black Jamaicans should adopt a religion with as central tenet the divinity of a former Ethiopian king (Haile Selassie) is an interesting one. As an anthropology of Rastafarianism, Barrett’s The Rastafarians is a good book, even including a tally of the different implements to smoke the green stuff with.
The Jamaican psyche, at least that of the impoverished Blacks (former slaves originating from Africa’s west coast), is one of fight or flight, fight against or flight from oppression, poverty, racism, and this is precisely where the millenarian and messianic overtones of Rastafarianism come from, a mythical cult which borrowed its symbols, rites, and teachings from various sources, one example being the Bible, the only book available to the Blacks. (Psalm 87, 3-4: ‘Glorious things are spoken of thee, O City of God. Selah. I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there.’) Other ingredients include the supposed superiority of the Black race, and this based upon the (original) high cultures of Egypt and Ethiopia (before the miscegenation of the Black race with the various Mediterranean races), and based also upon the gospel of Marcus Garvey, Jamaica’s own Martin Luther King. Finally, Haile Selassie’s (his other name was Tafari, ‘Ras’ meaning ‘Duke’ in the Amharic language) coronation crystallized all of these lingering shimmers of hope into a lasting religion. Bobby Nesta Marley did the rest.
2012/4
A. P. Tsjechow: Kinderverhalen (235p.)
Kinderverhalen is a collection of short stories by Tsjechow (Chekhov for the English-speaking), and I learn from the internet that this specific grouping of short stories is probably available only in Dutch, and unfortunately not in English (apologies). Kinderverhalen translates as ‘children’s stories’ – in each story, kids play a pivotal role. Some of the stories are just short, some good, none exceptional. Besides short stories, Chekhov mainly wrote plays.
A very thoughtful present by my cousin Piet, triggered by the birth of my son Bodhi.
2012/3
Paul Auster: Sunset Park (308p.)
I won’t be able to say much about Paul Auster’s Sunset Park (his last novel – published in 2010), as all along I either didn’t feel much at all, or if I did, what I felt was here we have a great writer on automatic pilot, writing from habit rather than raw talent, art becoming craft, the veneer of comfort, hear me silly blogger. I did like the backdrop of Sunset Park: the American financial crisis, the mass foreclosing of people’s homes, because of which four young people end up squatting a house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, NY.
By Paul Auster I have previously read The New York Trilogy and Moon Palace. I really liked the latter one.
2012/1
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath (476p.)
I used to score books here on the Mountaintop, as in Alberto Moravia The Conformist 9 Mountaintops, until one night I woke and sat, beads of sweat lining my forehead, in panic at the thought of so much foolishness, the talentless a posteriori bookkeeping of someone else’s a priori talent. I got myself a hand pick (Steinbeck: a han’ pick) and tore apart the cabinet, only retaining the top drawer, 10 Mountaintops, in which I had previously stored away (out of the last four years of reading only) Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and to which I’m now adding John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck busies a colloquial version of American English which might intimidate fair-weather readers not used to reading in English (‘something’ as ‘somepin’’), but it fits the Joad family wonderfully well, a hardened family of sharecroppers forced to flee native Oklahoma (Dust Bowl) during the Great Depression, migrant Okies on the way to California, a tale of unspeakable suffering in times of a changing economy.
Steinbeck himself quoted that “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but maybe even more so The Grapes of Wrath is as powerful an anti-globalization statement (50 years before globalization became mainstream in the mid 80s), as Animal Farm is against communism or 1984 against totalitarianism.
Nobel Prize Literature 1962.
For those who have nine minutes to spare (I think you should): Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello (RATM) in a brilliant live rendition of Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, named after the main character in The Grapes of Wrath.
(Hard times on Wall Street, hard times on Main Street.)
I got this picture out of De Muur, a Dutch quarterly (and literary) cycling magazine, of which I had ordered the January 2011 edition because it contains an anthology of cycling literature, compiled by Arthur van den Boogaard, who is in the picture, together of course with the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, the great John Maxwell Coetzee (in front) – wearing ONCE cycling tights (very 90s again) and riding a Bianchi road bike (no doubt colored ‘Celeste’ (Italian), ‘Selest’ (English), or Bianchi Green for the rest of us – the oldest bicycle company on the planet), both tights and bike on borrow as Coetzee was on a visit to Amsterdam, as a writer, not as a rider.
