1 hr 47 minutes of literary mumblecore for your listening pleasure
Chaotic Good, officially published July 17, is available via Asterism or Bookshop or Powell’s or B&N or Amazon.
I started listening to the Beyond the Zero podcast in September 2022 after Avner Landes and Marcus Pactor announced their appearances, and then I listened to Adam Levin’s appearance, and then I started going through the archives and listened to writers I had heard of, and then I just started making my way through the complete archive from the beginning. In a special episode toward the end of 2022 in part naming books that guests were looking forward to in 2023, Adam Levin mentioned Chaotic Good, and soon after, in early January, Ben from BTZ DM’d an invitation to appear on the show. Very exciting but it took six months for a print edition of Chaotic Good to exist and then make its way to Melbourne, and during this time I listened to every episode, setting myself a BTZ completism goal before we talked. I loved getting a sense of writers’ sensibilities, hearing how they talked about books, how opinions ran contrary or jibed with mine, but mostly I wanted to hear about books I’ve never heard of — that is, I wanted to learn. And the show is maximally effective on the learning front. I’ve spent way too much money on books thanks to BTZ and, as mentioned on the show, I really do plan to limit myself to one new book a month until I’ve made my way through the stack of recent purchases.
Ben posted the interview on July 13, 2023, four days before the publication of Chaotic Good but I didn’t necessarily want to appear on the show just to hype the book. I’ve always had an evangelical instinct and wanted to spread the good news about as many great books as I could.
Ben teaches kids with special needs, who often do better with highly structured environments, and writers in a way have special needs that benefit from appearing on such a highly structured literary podcast show — the questions are nearly always the same, so I was able to write down book titles in advance, fearing having my mind go completely blank when faced with inevitable questions about my gateway or desert island books.
At one point I preconceived that I’d position my final “desert island” selections not as my top ten all-time favorites but instead a little island chain of books that were like desert islands themselves, out there surrounded by endless water, rarely mentioned or talked about, but which in my reading experience have risen far above sea level and amount to idyllic solitudinous paradise for so-called serious readers.
So, as a supplementary extension of my recent BTZ appearance, I’ve included below some textual impressions of the Desert Island selections I mentioned on the show:
The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas (Translated by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes), Archipelago Books
A masterpiece, among the best short novels I’ve read. Essentially three stories, classically constructed or at least perfectly so: an introduction (the woodcock story, clearing out turnip rows), a highpoint (Anna and Inger and the boat on the lake), a fall (Jorgen/the resolution). Other than the first few short chapters introducing the brother and sister and their world, I was entirely engaged and engrossed. Had a similar experience with The Ice Palace, probably the last pre-pandemic novel I read — I had trouble acclimating to the language, the translation, the world, poetic bursts, but it ultimately took off and came to life. This one too — once the woodcock appeared and Mathis set out looking for work, it was on. Reminded me somewhat of Hamsun’s Pan, the same sort of psychic charge but without lurking unreliable mysticism. The author seems absent but fully inhabits the few characters and the world, which again is supported in my imagination by Hamsun, particularly Growth of the Soil, although this is probably one of the best short novels focused on what today would be called an autistic or neurodivergent character — in the novel Mathis is called Simple Simon. Anyone with experience of autism will recognize his behavior. But it’s not all pathological difficulty with interpersonal interactions and a preference for the world of his imagination. His experience of nature, particularly his love for the woodcock or time rowing on the lake, his extreme sensitivity to the natural world and his innocent curiosity and desire to connect, infects the reader, or at least I’ve felt like the novel has sharpened my perception, pretty much the highest possible accolade for a work of art.
A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti (translated by Fionn Petch), Charco Press
Loved this — came to it with low/no expectations other than a short book/essay about music and came away very much in love with the mode of expression/approach, the associative talent, the unpredictable turns, the willingness to cross-reference The Beatles, The Stones, The Who with Bach, Glenn Gould, Jackson Pollock, Rothko, John Cage, Terry Riley, introducing me to a composition for metronomes for example and an organ so powerful it compelled an avalanche that destroyed it (the only part of this that read like fiction). Like Markson to a degree, a major reference work, with slips of first-person, but more so a mystical spiritual ineffable unfuckwithable perfusion of enthusiasm for all human efforts to translate the tsunamis of the sun known as the music of the spheres. Flawlessly translated — the prose seemed absolutely audio-visually aware and worthy of the subject matter.
The Weight of the World, Peter Handke (translated by Ralph Manheim); FSG, 1984
Top-notch perception enhancer. Some of the entries in this were used in Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire,” when the pony-tailed angel dudes relay the thoughts of people sitting on the subway etc. The official summary: “A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records — both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations — the details of Handke’s daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977. Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke’s passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death.” Recommended for fans of Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights.
A Time to Love and a Time to Die by Erich Maria Remarque (Translated by Denver Lindley), 1954
Teleportive WWII novel, top-notch dramatization of the complexity of humanity, formal and thematic excellence throughout. It’s about a German soldier who leaves the Russian front during WWII as the tide is turning for the Nazis and goes on furlough to his home city for a few weeks. He can’t find his parents in the bombed-out ruins and runs into an old classmate, a comely young woman, and falls in love as, every few days, air raid sirens sound and buildings rise into the air as all hell breaks loose. A completely absorbing reading experience, couldn’t put it down, woke up early to read with coffee, that sort of book. Few reviews on Goodreads in English — many in Arabic, Russian, and maybe Romanian.
Super-conventional form perfectly done, always patiently pushing ahead, therefore it feels like an organic/natural/real (ie, not imposed by the author) plot, the procession of days as a soldier’s on leave for a few weeks “between death and death,” the first bloom of love as everything around the lovers not so much withers as it explodes and incinerates; everything super-charged by the potential arrival of devastation from above, the inevitability of horror (“a howl arose, increasing until it became maddening and unbearable, as though a huge steel planet were plunging straight at the cellar”) and gruesome scenes of, for example, a five-year-old girl impaled on a shattered staircase. Streaks of gnarly description, always utilitarian and accessible prose, never clipped or degraded or showy — the tone is perfectly centrist, flowing, poetic at times, but best of all it disappears and yields to visions of this shattered German city, its inhabitants trying to survive, everyone living not so much under the thumb of the Nazis but more so under the rule of Luck. As with his famous WWI novel and every other WWII- and Holocaust-related novel or memoir I’ve read, survival always depends on luck.
But this earns my highest praise more so because it so naturally detonates Literature’s primary payload: it dramatizes the complexity of humanity more clearly than most novels I’ve read. Not all Germans are anti-Semitic monsters intent on taking over the world and eradicating their racial inferiors. The novel depicts arch-evil types, superhuman thoughtless automaton murderers in the S.S., as well as devastated, philosophical citizens who hide Jews — and other well-characterized characters most concerned with self-preservation during the worst of times. Toward the end, it’s impossible not to root for the hero Ernst even though he’s fighting with the Nazis — he’s an absolutely 3D sympathetic free-thinking human being in an extraordinarily difficult situation trying to stay focused and survive even as the guts of a new recruit splatter all over him after catching a flung grenade in the stomach.
Everyone’s read All Quiet on the Western Front but it seems like few have read the author’s other novels, most of which were semi-recently re-published in attractive modern paperback form. The title of this one probably in part accounts for it being previously totally unknown to me — it seems like an Ian Fleming/James Bond ripoff by way of The Byrds’ appropriation of biblical verses. Alternate titles could have been “Switzerland” (not reduced to rubble and therefore often mentioned as an ideal place to escape to, although it seems impossible to get to), “An Eden in Hell” (good assonance, bad pun — suggests a few of the spots where Ernst and Elisabeth take mental, spiritual, physical refuge and just live a normal life for a few moments), “Shelter from the Storm” (novel was published in 1957, pre-dates Dylan’s song by almost two decades) — the actual title seems a little too sentimental and monumental, a little too B-movie?
Here’s a fantastic passage where our hero Ernst and his future wife Elisabeth are sitting on a hill in a wooded area where the trees are covered in strips of tin foil that fall before air raids to jam and distort radio transmissions:
“The trees around the clearing were covered with strips that fluttered from their twigs, twisting and sparkling in the breeze. The sun broke through the mountainous clouds and transformed the woods into a glittering fairyland. What once had fluttered down in the midst of ravening death and the shrill noise of destruction now hung silent and shiny on the trees and had become silver and a shimmering and the memory of childhood stories and the great festival of peace.”
“Oh man” I said as I finished it, but I don’t want to spoil the end for anyone.
Also, I haven’t seen the old cinemascope rendition, “photographed where it happened,” but this trailer makes it all seem pretty cheesy.
See also this post on some other Remarque novels.
Garden, Ashes, Danilo Kis (William J. Hannaher, translator)
I’ve read it at least four times, once aloud while the passenger in a car from NYC to Iowa. Easily the finest semi-erotic epileptic fit ever. Like Bruno Schulz but maybe a bit better than Schulz since it’s written well after WWII but is set before it. Not to hype it too much but maybe it should be required reading for all human beings who read for everything other than plot, like lists that go on for six or seven pages . . .
A Balcony in the Forest (1958)
Translated by Richard Howard
Sumptuous prose, never over the top, steady, flowing, so clear its perception verges on surrealistic swervy poetry. Gracq might just be the supreme poet of anticipatory anxiety, and seclusion in a dense forest with the pulse of bombs on the horizon like heat lightning is therefore maybe his ideal setting. As in The Opposing Shore, nothing much happens, which is the point for ninety-five percent of this as our man Lt. Grange (le focus of le novel’s close-third POV) waits for the Germans to come through the forest near the Belgium border and raid the blockhouse in the trees where he and three subordinates are stationed. There’s a little forest sprite in this — an innocent widowed proto-hippie sexy child — who might turn off folks turned off by male writers writing about sexy little sprites, but Mona worked for me because she emerged from the forest and seemed descended from the sexy little sprite in Undine, a myth I read a few months ago about a lady o’ the forest who’s equal parts woman and brook. It’s gripping toward the end as the war (early WWII, 1939) ramps up, but the prose is what happens in this one. Let’s just say that not in a long time have I thought about starting a book from the beginning as soon as I finished it. Felt it was perfectly weighted, paced, perceived. Can’t recommend it more highly to anyone who appreciates it when tip-top prose sans empty experimentation supports masterful evocation of a world and character/theme/forward propulsion. Language in this seemed always at the level of Salter or Updike but with a surrealistic sheen that elevates it. Ordered four more short Gracq novels as a result.
Atomik Aztek by Sesshu Foster, City Lights, 2002
Audacious, bodacious, hyperenergetic, imaginative, imagistically generous, interacting alt-realities, porous borders between eras. Reminded me of Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle), ultraviolent voice-driven Vollmanny pyrotechnics, Ishmael Reed (Flight to Canada, Mumbo Jumbo), with mucho spanglish, vato. Slaughterhouses and sacrifices. Really dense at times — sometimes hard to read before bed therefore. A few hundred hard returns, especially in long stretches of paragraphless dialogue, would’ve made this more accessible without too much compromise? Dozens of LOLs and snickers/sounds thanks to aforementioned audacity. Great lists. Riveting battles between Aztecs and Nazis. Unannoyingly political, with suggestions of Mexican immigrant life in LA and American Empire. Really just a fantastic historical inversion, high concept that keeps the bar really high for maybe 170 of its 203 pages. Felt like the end sort of fizzled, but I may have missed something and should probably go back and investigate. Highly recommended to most literate human beings, especially those up for something a little challenging but wholly rewarding and inspiring. Winner of The Believer’s 2005 Book of the Year. I remember reading about it back then and immediately forgetting about it. Don’t make the same mistake I made, ‘migo. Despite the unexpectedly semianticlimatic ending (I really expected the Aztex would drop an A-bomb on the Nazis or something super-sensationalist like that), it’s still the most enjoyable novel I’ve read in a while. A total mindfugg. See also ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League by Cleo Birdwell (Don DeLillo)
In the late ’70s, after writing a nearly perfect early masterpiece/distillation of his sensibility and style in End Zone, and then the amusing maximalist funhouse of Ratner’s Star, which he considered his favorite novel and hardest to write, and then Players, probably his most formally unconventional/artsy early novel, it seems like DeLillo wanted to sell-out and make some money and so there’s a comparatively underdone/silly thriller (Running Dog), and then this one under a pseudonym after his primary publisher essentially rejected it, a novel that’s really straightforward, mostly linear and episodic, following the narrator’s first season as the first woman in the NHL with the New York Rangers, interspersed with occasional descriptions of the good simple life growing up in small-town Ohio.
The title relates to a TV commercial the narrator agrees to appear in but then quits on as filming begins, thinking it too stupid, which jibes with the idea that this is DeLillo’s comic commercial sellout, something he ultimately believed too silly and stupid to publish under his own name. But I think this one is pivotal for DeLillo in that it leads to White Noise, wherein he ultimately fuses (and refines) conflicting sensibilities — the silly and the serious (“the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints,” per the end of WN’s first paragraph). This is DeLillo putting all his weight on the sillier sensibility, having fun, not worrying too much about the language (few to no weighty sentence fragments and/or short phrases and single words strung along at the end of sentences; the general RPM, the energy and pace of the sentences, is also higher than usual — feels quickly handwritten like one of Cleo’s letters instead of typed?) but also incapable of writing weak or shaggy or unclear sentences, unable to write poorly but also unwilling in this case to let his competing dominant instinct for headiness gain much ground either.
In this one, there’s no attempt at grand statement or metaphysics, there’s a ton of conventional dialogue that’s usually engaging, rangy, playful, and uncharacteristically intelligible for DeLillo (characters don’t speak past each other as in Players, for example) and usually it’s just two characters together talking since most scenes are intimate encounters between the narrator and her many suitors so it’s clear most of the time who’s speaking. Since this is essentially a comic novel, some of the underbaked characters are more forgivable than in his more serious novels, but this one also has some of DeLillo’s most thorough and memorable characterization. The scene in Glenway’s tiny spartan apartment is probably one of the funniest, clearest I’ve read by DD, as well as the seduction by the smoking French Canadian coach speaking French to her.
In the context of the late ’70s, you also have to consider how this emerges from a decade of sexual liberation and the rise of feminism, not to mention the mainstream popularity of men’s mags like Playboy and Penthouse (with its famous “Forum”). And this came out in January 1980, the year the US hockey team beat the CCCP in the winter Olympics, in my life the highpoint of interest in the sport. But I would definitely avoid this if you’re just looking for a good hockey book.
So: a pivotal DeLillo novel in a way, in that it’s a distillation of one side of his instinct, the accessible, silly, bawdy, rangy, playful, zany, outrageous side, descriptive and well-phrased language but not pared down with every sentence perfect, hefty, honed. He must have been working on this at the same time as The Names (1982), which to me seems like everything this novel isn’t. Comparatively The Names seems totally pretentious, intentionally opaque, signaling but not really signifying, excessively concerned with identifying the pattern and discerning its meaning (DeLillo’s thesis?), just as much pathological apophenia (“seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”) as salubrious literary association, insightful assembly/interweaving of disparate everything into a text unified by a single sensitive consciousness uniquely (and often deftly) able to approximate in language the true complexity of existence. The Names is a realist(ic) elaboration of the exaggerated, playful, maximalist silliness of deciphering the star code to fill the void core in Ratner’s Star. There’s mention of meaning in this one’s brief intro section but it comes with a funny acknowledgment that this memoir propagates less meaning than life itself.
Some random notes: the first sentence in this is straight outta End Zone. It’s a dig on Yalies, and since my wife is a Yalie, I read it to her when I first read it in End Zone and so immediately recognized it when it reappeared here. Also, at one point a cabbie lights up a joint at 4:20 am — this could be a coincidence or DD could’ve been aware of 4:20 way before mainstream America. Per the internet, High Times didn’t note 4:20 until the early ’90s and I don’t remember hearing it until around then either. And then there’s also an exchange early on that seems like it may have influenced DFW’s “This Is Water” speech (his copy of Amazons at the UT Austin archive is apparently highly annotated). Also DFW-related: this is a parade of aggressive, amorous, albeit not totally hideous men, possibly inspiring Brief Interviews with Hideous Men? Unrelated to DFW, it’s funny that the novel’s ideal man is asleep for months in stain-colored jumpsuit-like pajamas, recovering from a wicked case of Jumping Frenchman (a chronic tic expressed as random sudden exaggerated movement as though leaping away from a non-existent donkey kick).
If you’re a DeLillo fan, it’s worth trying to find a relatively inexpensive copy online. I found a first-edition hardcover with a dust jacket in good shape for $45 and consider myself pretty lucky.
A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Translated by James Anderson)
Knausgaard’s second book offers everything I fall for in a novel: authority, execution, audacity, oomph, heft. Other than a 75-page stretch midway where I worried this might have trouble maintaining the standard of excellence it had established, for ~425 nonconsecutive pages I was rapt, riveted, engaged, associating parts (the flood story, in general, is rising drama par excellence — read 35 pages past bedtime one night to finish the section as the water rose) — and I even ultimately gave the benefit of the doubt to that long stretch about Noah’s sister that at first had comparatively seemed rushed and distracted/off the rails thanks to stuff really about the author’s wife. But it recovered in retrospect — by the end of the section it became clear that her love, her family, particularly the mundane daily tasks (cleaning), all gained significance knowing she and everyone with her would drown unless Noah took her aboard ye olde ark.
Retroactive/spective change, with new sections changing perception of what preceded them, is a great strength and major theme of the novel.
Loved following the author’s lead through biblical stories repositioned in a mythic Norway straight outta Growth of the Soil. Would love to have the time to find the Hamsun line the following Knausgaard line reminds me of:
“the seed corn flows over his fingers when he dips his hand into the bag that hangs over his shoulder, with small, even flicks of his wrist it is sprinkled over the land as he walks across it, as if calling something to him all the time, as if this is some mysterious ritual, an exorcism, a prayer for a miracle, and see! a few weeks later it germinates and each cast of the hand can be read and judged.”
I’d suggest reading that one by Hamsun and the My Struggle series before taking this one on.
Loved how he complexified the Cain and Abel story.
“The only things that have always been remembered are the story of the first people who were driven out of paradise and into the valley, the story of the two brothers Cain and Abel, and the story of the great flood. But all the details about these people and the world they lived in were gradually erased. And as each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal, that it represents the true condition of things, the people of the new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting. Thus Cain and Abel became nomadlike figures who lived and operated in a flat, burning hot, sand-filled world, of olive and fig trees, oases, camels, asses, robes, tents, and little whitewashed stone houses. Gone were all the pine trees, all the fjords and mountains, all the snow and rain, all the lynxes and bears, wolves and elk. In addition, all the infinitely delicate nuances in the relationship between the brothers were lost over time, such that only the bare details remained: Abel was good, Cain bad, Abel was a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the soil.”
Dramatizing the complexity of black/white archetypes is something really great lit does best — I don’t like to think about lit/art as something that “serves society,” that’s functional or necessary or useful per se, but Complexity Emphasis is one of the arguments in lit’s defense.
A really slant autobiography of sorts that, stylistically at least, ends where My Struggle begins. Daddy issues herein represented via God/angels interactions with us human folk. The autobiographical parallels crop up in Cain or Noah or the narrator at the end. A story from My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love appears in fictional form: in My Struggle it’s pregnant Linda pissed at Karl Ove for not telling his friend to slow his speedboat down, whereas in this it’s Noah’s pregnant sister pissed at her husband for not telling a driver of a carriage going over a rocky road to slow down. The narrator (not named Karl Ove in this) cuts himself up again with a glass shard as he does in My Struggle Vol 2.
In a totally bold first-person coda that changes what you think about the preceding 450-something pages, there’s a suggestion at the end that the narrator (author of the book you’ve been reading, not Knausgaard himself) is a prophet who might one day saw off his legs but there’s no longer anything to prophesize these days, other than the pleasing benefits of noticing natural daily variation in the landscape (reminded me of the bit in My Struggle Vol 2 about how he only really cares about trees and water and sun).
Really an enjoyable, “rigorous” read, in part because the publisher Archipelago created a beautiful paperback with French flaps and a cover image that syncs with a bit toward the end of the novel.
Loved essayistic bits about how the art historical representation of angels changed over time along with their actual changing state. (Why do immortal angels change? Ahhh. Ya gotta read the book.)
Not touched on in the novel, but it struck me that some of these angels, say the one Ezekiel encountered with wheels, could’ve been ancient outerspace aliens.
Not psyched that the angels’ ultimate evolutionary destination was “spoiled” for me by a review I read on Goodreads — I wish I could’ve experienced this clever little perception-shifting turn toward the end with fresh eyes.
Interesting to compare with Thomas Mann’s mega novel Joseph and His Brothers, which also animates and humanizes a familiar bible story.
Highly recommended for all semi-adventuresome readers fortified with a bit of interest in the early bible stories.
Worth it for anyone who appreciates clear, flowing, steady, smart language (translated from Norwegian by James Anderson, who also translates Tomas Espedal), and who likes novels that make novels seem like infinitely open art forms.
Joseph & His Brothers (1933–1943), Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, translation; Modern Library)
A six-star masterpiece of authority, erudition, execution, insight, wisdom, relevance, characterization, and epic adventure. Move over, The Magic Mountain — this one deserves your reputation and readership. Despite 1492 dense “Everyman’s Library” pages, this one is much more engaging, moving, thematically hefty, and its incorporation of ancient history, mythology, and DETAIL more often boggles than numbs the mind.
There’s an older translation with more biblical language, but this one by Woods flows like Tolstoy’s take on a bit of the Old Testament. It’s Mann, though — you can tell by the gentle irony, massive doses of description, ridiculous depth of knowledge, and of course the old man’s authorial crush on his pretty boy proto-ubermensch, proto-Christ, super-Jew protagonist, Joseph. The story as a whole suggests the story of Jesus, as well as the story of Osiris, but what I found more interesting was the subtle, intentionally ambiguous critique of Nazi Germany — at times Joseph is the arrogant Aryan superman, at times his brothers are the brownshirts, at times Egypt is the aggressive expansionist empire. Toward the end, the story suggests post-Depression-era New Deal programs and Soviet collectivism.
Like all great lit, this one explicitly champions ambiguity. Joseph is thrown into a well by his brothers — a scene that rivals (maybe even surpasses) the one in The Magic Mountain when Hans is lost in the snow while skiing — and sold into slavery, but it’s all ultimately part of a playful “holy game” God plays on the brothers.
Beyond exceptional social, historical, and theological thematic stuff, Mann’s storytelling skills are ridiculous. He’s long-winded at times, sure. He says “in short” and then rips off a meaty summarizing paragraph. But he’s so in control and does such an extraordinary job of orientating the reader I at least never felt lost, never wondered who was talking (I’m looking at you, Proust), always felt right there in the desert with soft-spoken Rueben with his column legs, cross-eyed Leah, Rachel with the beautiful eyes, little Benjamin, on and on. So many characters, all of them with their reinforced distinguishing traits over several hundred pages. Very few women, most of them either idealized beautiful mother lovers or sultry and deceitful witch temptresses, but there are two dwarfs in this. One even gets cudgeled by his master as things almost veer toward comedy. Especially toward the end, it’s good clean fun when the narrator more often directly addresses the reader, but all along you feel Mann leading you through the story, in absolute control of its every aspect, including giving it air and life.
Considering that this extrapolates a few opaque lines in the bible into 1492 pages written over 16 years coinciding with the rise/fall of the Third Reich — considering that this monumental novel about some of the earliest Jews was written while Mann’s country exterminated six million of their mid-20th century vintage and tried to take over the world — this might be a prime example of high-lit heroic insurgency. At times it reads like he’s raising a huge middle finger and directing it at his tragically misguided homeland. But it’s more than that. There’s wisdom, instruction, even a few moments of magic, and hope that it’s all part of God’s plan, even the worldwide horror of WWII.
Anyway, towering literary artistry to the nth degree. Considering how long it takes to read this one, the $40 hardback is totally worth it — plus it comes with one of those snazzy built-in bookmark ribbons. Easily one of the top reading experiences of my life.
Here’s a post on the four major Mann novels in John E. Woods translations.
Oh, while I’m doing this, I may as well include some recently read books I mentioned on the show too:
All of Us Together in the End, Matthew Vollmer
MV’s masterwork? Felt like what he’s been gearing up to write, like his previous books, particularly unpublished novel manuscripts I read ~15-10 years ago, were practice for this memoir. His mom (and her passing) and the weird lights that appear in the woods behind his father’s home give him an intriguing, moving story to tell — and he tells it so well, the mystery of the ghost lights a perfect vehicle for narrative drive, propelling all his usual interests along with it. His parents and family and friends and the region all make for a compelling world for a reader to inhabit. His patented internet/news integration technique rarely seems random or excessive. Affecting and timely and relevant and just the sort of reading experience that could be called “flowing joy.” For the most part felt very excited for him that he’d written this — and it inspired me to raise the game on the thing I was working on at the time. Also highly recommend Permanent Exhibit and Inscriptions for Headstones.
I’ve been in a reading funk recently and this memoir turned out to be just what I needed. Nic’s rising youthful enthusiasm for music, achievement of his dreams, and the resultant ambivalence about his career and ultimate switch from drumming to writing, I found it all unsurspringly readable and enjoyable — “unsurprising” because I read his related essay along these lines in Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine ten years ago and definitely thought it should be extended to book length. Nic’s writing in a way emerges from his experience in music, his musical and literary taste seem on the same side of the aesthetic continuum — that is, the way he describes the music he played (“execution, control, tight pop craftsmanship”) syncs with the kind of writing he prefers (“sharp detail, evocation of place, three-dimensional characters, conflict, and scene building”), all of which makes for an enjoyable, insightful, well-observed memoir driven by the author’s 3D-character development as he resolves his inner conflict about his career in music.
Loved its clear, moving, flowing evocations of youthful emergence into music, that fizzing initial inspired spirit, driving around listening to first demos as the world otherwise disappeared (I had a similar experience at sixteen or so after recording original songs on a four-track with a multi-instrumentalist virtuoso friend). Loved it also for how he handles the bits about his old Black jazz teacher coming to his big white house on Country Club Drive in Greensboro, NC, how the teacher thought there was something significant about being welcome there and respected as a teacher, and how the jazz drum teacher reminded me of Jim McPherson, the gnomic genius of a professor at the Workshop who both Nic and I had in different semesters but worked the same sort of magic on us, like a sort of judo master, just barely deflecting the energy and interest we brought to him in a way that let us lead ourselves to the necessary discovery.
I was never in a workshop with Nic and didn’t really get to know him until our second year but I knew Nic was a reluctant former drummer because during our second year in Iowa City I invited him once or twice to jam with me and a poet friend with whom I’d relieve the bends of immersion in fiction writing and recalibrate our aesthetic compasses until controls were dead-set for the heart of the sun. Something like that. Highly rhythmic Sonic Youth/VU/Viola Lee Blues-style jamming that would’ve gone to the next level if Nic agreed to bring his drums down one day. If he’d played with us, there would’ve been another chapter in this wherein he experienced the numen in sound and created music that had no ambition other than to appear in the moment, not even recorded on a phone (phones didn’t do that at the time, 2005-6), not a project, not something for publication, something more like devotional music or innerspace exploration, the achievement of totally sober, tonally altered states. Alas, Nic’s drums stayed in his basement. Little did I know at the time that he had been a touring musician whose band Athenaeum once had a hit song on the radio and who had essentially burned out after that experience and a few years in NYC as a session sideman, mostly playing for major label pop-rock acts.
Loved also the parts after leaving Iowa City, the eerie blessed synchronicity of receiving word from his agent that they had an offer for his first book while his wife was giving birth to their daughter, followed exactly ten years later by a total eclipse, or the chapter about ecstatically winning a point off a former professional tennis player friend, or accompanying his young daughter’s shambling jazz band, or the bit about the fake ID given away when he turned 21 returning after his band’s 20th anniversary show. Loved also the peculiarities regarding tooth-grinding as a sort of drum set he plays inside his mouth and not being able to really hear lyrics (which seemed completely foreign to me).
Really just an enjoyable reading experience, highly recommended to all (no need to be a writer or a musician). I’ll resist the impulse to compare the book with a pop song but the comparison fits – there’s nothing indulgent about this book, nothing really conceivably unnecessary or digressive or “artsy” or divergent. The author was a supportive sideman, after all, not a soloist (not a single mention of Bonham’s “Moby Dick” or Peart’s “YYZ,” eg). The reader, really, is the one he’s backing with this book – even if he’s the one telling the story and all details arise from his life, it’s the reader’s comfort and enjoyment he seems most concerned about, the language always serving the story and moving it ahead one steady beat at a time. (Couldn’t resist that last phrase, sorry!)
All Dag Solstad in English (particularly Novel 11, Book 18)
All Tomas Espedal in English (particularly Love and Tramp)
I Served the King of England, Bohumil Hrabal (New Directions)
The seventh Hrabal book I’ve read and I’ll go ahead and call it my favorite so far among his books. The prose seems like it’s always existed, like it’s just been sitting there waiting for me to activate it with my eyes. It all proceeds so wonderfully, perfectly, consistently surprising and smooth, maybe slipping a little toward the end, could’ve been forty pages shorter and I wouldn’t have minded, but otherwise the straightforward temporal progression of the narrator’s life, his maturation through eras leading up to WWII and Nazi occupation and Communism, there’s a sort of holy foolishness to him that works for Hrabal, innocent youth learning the ways of the world, jibes with other novels with garrulous old good-natured narrators, all of it sort of cartoonish (seems like another obvious inspiration for Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel,” not just Zweig) and fun, exaggerated, the huge salesman with his scales and salami, laying out bills on the floor and then opening the window so they whoosh around and then gather in a corner, the descriptions activating all or at least multiple senses, the tailor with balloon body doubles floating along the ceiling, the garlands of holly and flowers he lays on the stomachs of the sex workers he visits, the general joy so much of it evokes in a reader, rooting for the little fellow even if he isn’t always making the best decisions or even behaves in questionably moral ways, for example profiteering on those stamps. But the perspective is so embedded in the little guy we can’t help but see it how he sees it, a minor player awarded a medal for serving the Emperor of Ethiopia, as though that experience or the experience related to the title is a life-justifying achievement. There’s something beautiful serious and silly about the refrain of the title or his own similar related one. Loved the Steinbeck cameo too. Need to read five or so more to unlock Hrabal completist status.
The Belan Deck, Matt Bucher (Sideshow Media Group, 2023)
A must for David Markson fans. The form is Marksonian, Markson comes up, as does his Author, but the content extends Markson to something at times meta or descended from Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine but otherwise wholly itself, with emissions or entries (not sure what to call all the separate Tweet-length paragraphs) about PPTs, AI (loved the Allen Iverson line), Wikipedia, Google, the San Francisco airport, convergent facts about baseball, the news that Jennifer Egan (who famously published a novel with a chapter rendered in PowerPoint) dated Steve Jobs for a year, and a sense of the contemporary Silicon Valley/San Fran business environment (tech bro on skateboard, respected guru artist-level coder who wears black tees, walks around barefoot in the office, and takes month-long surfing vacations). A short small book, read it in two sittings. Author hosts a podcast that I’ve listened to a few times and liked — at first it was about DFW but evolved to include interviews with esteemed writers such as Christian TeBordo, Adam Levin, and Kyle Beachy (who’s quoted in this).
Mount Chicago, Adam Levin
(Didn’t mention this on the podcast but I should have so I’ll post these longer impressions to make up for the omission.)
The expectation is inexplicable improbable sinkhole, mass tragedy, mass effort to convert detritus of destruction into enormous burial mound memorial, raising the reader up with it, dishing wisdom, emphasizing acceptance and the importance of moving on, all of it spiked with tragicomic, bittersweet, black humor, thanks to its stand-up comedian focal point. Yeah, no. That’s not this. But it is, I think, the setup for a grand joke and key to making sense of this one.
The straight-up irony of hemorrhoid-suffering sit-down writer/stand-up comedian/parrot-owner Gladman’s name may also help put together this one’s pieces, not that it seems fragmentary — my reading experience seemed more sinkhole-ish, or quicksandy, starting with the opening pages that read like autobiographical autofiction. The narrator resembles the author, as do the primary characters Apter and Gladman, but it’s fiction, details are incorrect, he says. From the beginning a strong reliable authorial voice directly addresses us, basically saying don’t trust this, and then proceeds to introduce his teenage acid experience, how he did it some 80-something times but then had three bad trips/panic attacks while tripping in a row and stopped using it.
The rest is not trippy or psychedelic or fantastic, or it is psychedelic in the true trickster patterning thematic-puzzle sense, and in this way — I’d say — it does what it intends to do: undermine expectations. And doing so compels or directs or guides or manipulates the reader into experiencing awfulness and — if willing and able — to make some connections and generate meaning to overcome it (not that this dynamic is explicitly suggested, which to a degree is the novel’s magic trick?).
DFW is often evoked when talking about Levin’s books — and I’d say it’s this aspect that’s most DFW-ian, the willingness to undermine expectations, more than voice or language or syntax or tone. (Also depression/suicide content, I guess.) Infinite Jest‘s original subtitle was “a failed entertainment,” and Mount Chicago is in no way about raising a mountain, or even so much is it a disaster/dystopian representation of what would happen if an enormous sinkhole wiped out the Bean and ICA and thousands and thousands of Chicagoans, including the protagonist’s wife and parents.
Instead, soon enough we’re deep in birdland (Gladman/Gogol sections) or back in high school with some kid (Apter sections) who we’ve learned will eventually be working with the mayor post-sinkhole, progressing through a series of numbered Apter anecdotes, the second or third of which about the rightwing calendars he creates in college seemed to me like the most vivid, engaging, “pleasing” section in the book, that clearly propelled sociopolitical relevance and showed Apter’s character, also showing that Levin when he wants to can conventionally please but for the most part it seems like he’s going for something more difficult and darker, neither conventionally pleasing nor particularly pretty.
The language is always honed and particular and conversationally engaging but it’s never pretty or preening, no lyricism, no offhand descriptions of the weather (I’m thinking of the incredible sky similes in 2666). The overall vibe of the narrative voice evoked an image for me at one point of one of those old naked dudes you see at the gym who’s just come out of the shower and whose balls of brass hang way down and who openly talcums them, who is generally hairy all over and holds gruff staccato court throughout his drying off. Some writers seem like a pair of roving disembodied eyes or bellowing lungs or a punch to the gut or fire in the veins. But this one’s narrative voice goes lower, seems to originate from where the Mound of Venus would be on a man, the pubic area, the lower intestine, the humor derived from the humors — phlegm, blood, bile.
The climax of the novel placement-wise and what seemed to me like the representative self-commenting passage is about the extirpation of disgust/ugliness (trying to expel “an opera” of shit from Gladman’s body), on page 486: “Everything seemed disgusted with itself and was made more disgusted by its own expressed disgust and it was all in my head and it was coming out of my head.” And later on page 489, Gladman’s voice, which overlaps in tone and autobiographical details with the narrator’s, says something along the lines of readers want lessons to live by, not stories to live through, to work with.
And that’s really what this is, or how it felt reading — there’s a general patterning of characteristics among author, narrator, protagonists, a sinkhole of a text that sort of telescopes down through character histories, that presents various manipulations (the calendar, the bartender determining what Apter should do with his life, the lecture on behavioral psych), one of which to a degree is repeated a couple-three times, the refrain that “people are terrible and life is meaningless.”
It’s suggested that we the readers agree with this. And as I read more than a couple-three times did I find myself thinking I disagree (ie, we create meaning and people aren’t all terrible), which may be the point (not that one is required). That by presenting the Ugly (by essentially offering a “climax” that involves having to shit while tripping, giving oneself hemorrhoids by pushing too hard, and then after showering and cleaning off seeing your friends orally and manually pleasing themselves on the couch; Gladman ultimately saved by hemorrhoids, staying home instead of going out with his wife to meet Gladman’s family for lunch; Gladman in Paris with his wife’s family not going down for Christmas present opening; most likely intentionally bombing the Bechdel test, let alone presenting gratuitous fellatio; asides aplenty, paragraphs and half-pages about TV shows or whatever, without immediately clear connection to character, plot, or theme, like free-associative expository narrative shit-talking included or stetted by the author for the sake of the novel’s anti- or unconventional craftwork?), the novel challenges or compels or subtly manipulates (like the finger mustache) the reader to reject it, that is, it’s an experience sort of like a bad trip that makes one’s normal regular life beyond the experience of immersion in the world of the book seem beautiful and filled with meaning in comparison.
Put another way, conventional expectations are the setup, the novel itself is the joke, and the reader’s reaction is the punchline?
Loved Gladman’s retelling of “The Overcoat” by Gogol the Russian (not the parrot), which isn’t really about the actual story at all — but that amounts, I now realize, to a meta-fictional/self-critical parable for undermined expectations. Guy asks baker to bake sweetbread or something in the shape of the letter E but then the next day when it’s ready he’s disappointed it’s a capital E instead of a lowercase e, despite smelling and tasting great. Literally, the form isn’t what the consumer expected from the creator. (I need to go back and re-read that section.)
Loved the mayor’s Chicago-accented George Saunders vibe. You can hear the author reading a section involving the mayor about an hour exactly into his Concavity Show appearance: https://greatconcavity.podbean.com/e/…
Loved the Dickensian names (Apt-er, Glad-man, Glib-ner). Apter learns quickly (third definition of apt) and his numbered anecdotes center on profiteering on anti-woke patriotism to support Bernie, and later crypto, and later behavioral psych (the longest or most vivid section about manipulating a student during a lecture to hold her finger to her upper lip like a mustache), and later recruiting Gladman to open a benefit concert featuring all the famous standups and popular bands from 25 years ago (Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, Radiohead, plus Fugees and surviving Beasties reunion), and/or maybe going to work for an LA talent agency. Apter shows aptitude, he’s a quick learner, and his progress often confronts relevance (apt-ness).
Gladman, the standup with hemorrhoids that predictably flare when he sits too long, is of course not necessarily a happy man, even if the worst thing that had ever happened to him before the terrestrial anomaly was his parrot Gogol nearly dying from an injured talon and a bad teenage acid trip. (Glibner is a minor character but it was his name that made me consider the apt-ness of Apter.)
Ultimately, overall, etc, the novel seems FREE — a prime example/expression of freedom from conventionality, without seeming obtusely or obviously formally experimental. There’s a general improvisational indulgent sense (like an all-you-can-eat banquet) that feels natural at the level of its sentences and inspirational overall thanks to a commitment throughout to a redeeming vibe of Fuck It All.
Anti-algorithmic writing for the win.
Some others recently read . . .
Annie Ernaux (Happening, A Man’s Place, I Remain in Darkness, I Write to Avenge My People)
Philip Roth (Zuckerman Unbound, Patrimony, The Facts, The Counterlife)
The Magus, John Fowles
And some books I’m looking forward to . . .
Middlemarch
Trollope novels
The Wolves of Eternity by KOK
Violent Solutions to Popular Problems by M.J. Nicholls
Steinbeck (shorter novels)
The rest of Hrabal to unlock completist status (In-House Weddings, Cutting It Short, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, The Death of Mrs. Baltisberger, Mr. Kafka)
Cormac McCarthy (his first four books)
BTZ-related purchases: Monument Maker (David Keenan), The Salt Line (Shimoni), The Logos (Mark de Silva), Traveler of the Century and How to Travel Without Seeing (Andreas Neuman), Chilean Poet (Zambra), The Kindly Ones (Littell), Too Much Life (Lispecter), Kafka Diaries (Ross Benjamin translation).
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).