BritLitBlogs

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to him.

Last summer, Blumenbach finally reaped the benefits of his efforts when the novel was released in Germany to great critical and commercial success, and he was awarded the Hieronymusring for Exceptional Achievement in Literary Translation, as well as the... read more

Today is the second day in the 38 Plays: 38 Days challenge to read a Shakespeare play every day for the next thirty-eight days. This evening I shall be pleasuring myself with The Taming of the Shrew (which is online at e.g. Project Gutenberg; I'm using The Oxford Shakespeare).
Wikipedia's synopsis reads:
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1594.

The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a drunken tinker named Sly is tricked into thinking he is a... read more

At the launch event for Best European Fiction 2010 a few weeks ago, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse made some wonderfully cutting and dismissive remarks about crime fiction.
Here, exclusively for ReadySteadyBook, Jon expands on his thoughts about what he calls the "pornography of death":
Literature is basically a personal, and at the same time universal, asking into the fundamentals of existence, made possible by the aesthetic possibilities of language. The more personal it gets, the more universal it becomes. When literature gets private, it looses its quality, as it does if it ends up as universal in... read more

Christopher Reid will be reading from The Song of Lunch, A Scattering and perhaps others at the Wapping Project bookshop, London, E1W 3SG, this Thursday, 4 March, at 7.30. The space is small; to ensure a place, email lydia.fulton@mac.com (via SonofaBook; thanks Charles!)... read more

A quick ReadySteadyBook round-up...
The latest three book reviews:
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett Erasure by Percival Everett
The latest three articles:
interview with Mark Fisher, author of 'Capitalist Realism' False quantities: on Martin Amis’s hobbyhorse 1984: Minitruths and Maxiluv
Three from me on Shakespeare:
A question suggests itself: Derrida, Shields and Capitalist Realism King Lear, madness and my grandmother Hamlet and I... ... read more

The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation has landed "with essays on Nobel laureate Herta Mueller, Jonathan Swift, Per Petterson, and more, plus 19 reviews, includin William Gaddis, Jose Manuel Prieto, and Gilbert Sorrentino, and interviews with David Shields and others."
They also have an all-new blog: "The Constant Conversation [has] a group of contributors drawn from TQC's ranks, the site delivers book news, reviews, and fresh links every day."... read more

Here is further proof that the books which tend to delight me most are not new titles but reissued editions of lesser-spotted works.  As with Emanuel Litvinoff’s Journey Through a Small Planet, here we have a skinny book with a funny name, a title I didn’t know by an author I’d never heard of, which turns out to be just wonderful.  This book, Vizinczey’s first novel, was initially self-published, but went on to become such a success that when it was first translated into French in 2001, it stayed in the bestseller charts for over a year – but hey,... read more

I disliked Joshua Ferris’s debut novel Then We Came to the End, though surprisingly, the withholding of my approval didn’t seem to harm its global success.  I decided to read his next book anyway, partly because I began to wonder if everyone else was right and I was wrong last time, and also because Ferris’s interest in fiction about work chimes with my own.  (A foolish motive, like buying a book because it’s been praised by a writer you like: and I’ve done plenty of that too.)  Plus, I got a free copy, and read it during my blog sabbatical... read more

Comedy is hard to do, or hard to do well.  A dramatic story, or a thriller, that doesn’t quite work is just dull or frustrating.  But comic writing that’s just a few degrees off is an embarrassment, an abomination, a horrible negative image of what it purports to be.  I knew from my student days that Julian Gough could turn an amusing lyric with his pop band Toasted Heretic, but had been frankly put off his novel Jude: Level 1 by the quote on the front which promised “a cross between Flann O’Brien, Father Ted and Morrissey.”
Jude: Level... read more

One of the ways I find out about forthcoming books these days is via Twitter, where many publishers have an online presence: and where Penguin have several.  Last year some of their people were talking about a new novel from an Irish writer I hadn’t heard of.  What struck me, and made me want to read it, was its snazzy design – like the US edition of Bolaño’s 2666, or early editions of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, this is a novel published in separate volumes inside a slipcase.  But is this an enhancement to the content, or a gimmick to distract... read more

Christopher Isherwood’s mellifluous name is not heard often these days.  Until a film adaptation by a fashion designer turned perfumer brought this title back into print, all we had readily available were his Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, so this overdue reissue seemed an ideal time to revisit.
A Single Man (1964) is said in one back cover quote to be Isherwood’s “masterpiece”, a claim for once not overstated.  (And if it isn’t his masterpiece, then I’ll be seeking out the rest of his work without delay.)  It tells the story of a single day... read more

I loved J. Robert Lennon’s last novel Mailman – though it didn’t get the attention it deserved – and was surprised to see recently that he published a new novel in March 2009 in the US, which hasn’t yet been picked up by a UK publisher.  Castle, with its (literally) Kafkaesque title, has much to live up to. Castle is a first person narrative by Eric Loesch, who has returned to his childhood home of Gerrysburg, upstate New York, after some time away.  Lennon goes to great lengths – with classic unreliable narrator techniques – to withhold essential elements of Eric’s... read more

At my grandparent’s house there were hundreds of books that ranged from rose gardening to Scottish poetry to three-decker novels by Bulwer-Lytton, all nestled in the arts and crafts bookcases that adorned nearly every room.  Every year I spent entire days at their house reading and absorbing new subjects and consuming 19th century novels.  By contrast, my parents had only several shelves of unread Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and an encyclopedia set that I refused to consult.  Even as a young child with a library card and a voracious appetite for books I remember thinking it was somehow wrong to... read more

In Campo Santo, W.G. Sebald writes about a hike he made – a sort of pilgrimmage, really – in Corsica, the site of some of the last great forests in Europe.  Although the truly ancient forests were already gone, Sebald quoted witnesses and momentarily imagined that the forests had never been cut down. The English landscape painter and writer Edward Lear, who traveled in Corsica in the summer of 1876, wrote of the immense forests that then rose high from the blue twilight of the Solenzara valley and clambered up the steepest slopes, all the way to the vertical cliffs and... read more

In a post that I wrote more than two years ago about the anthology of interviews and essays The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, I said that Ruth Franklin’s essay Rings of Smoke, from The New Republic, “is the outstanding one by a country mile. She discusses most of Sebald’s books and quickly gets to the heart of each one. She is also capable, as [editor Lynne Sharon] Schwartz puts it, of assessing ‘the risks involved in what she sees as Sebald’s aestheticizing of collective disaster.’”  Franklin is Senior Editor at The New Republic and a frequent book... read more

Studio Daniel Libeskind - Military History Museum, Dresden The February 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker contains an article by George Packer about the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945, the topic of W.G. Sebald’s lectures in On the Natural History of Destruction.  The New Yorker online has a summary of the article and a short slide show, but the full text of Packer’s article can only be read by subscribers or in the print edition. Packer is interested in how the city has attempted to recuperate its self-image (was it the guilty party or the victim?) through its... read more

As several readers of Vertigo have mentioned, an “edited” version of Will Self’s January 11, 2010 lecture on W.G. Sebald has been published in the Times Online.  Self touches on several of Sebald’s books and a cast of characters that includes Woody Allen, Albert Speer, Alexander Kluge,Bernhard Schlink, Hannah Arendt, and many others.  It’s a complex, dense, thoughtful, broad ranging and controversial speech that is definitely worth reading.  Here are a few quotes: Sebald is rightly seen as the non-Jewish German writer who through his works did most to mourn the murder of the Jews. To read Sebald is to be... read more

A page from an album of silk designs by James Leman in the Victoria & Albert Museum
Various dates, 1706-1730, watercolor on paper For three entire pages at the start of the last chapter of The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald lists fabulous and wholly imaginary items inventoried in the Musæum Clausum of Sir Thomas Browne, ending, finally, with this fanciful object: ..the bamboo cane in which, at the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinianus, two Persian friars who had long been in China to discover the secrets of sericulture had brought the first eggs of the silkworm over the Empire’s borders... read more

There are books that can never escape the circumstances of their creation. Suicide is one of them. French artist and author Edouard Levé submitted the manuscript of his novel on October 5th, 2007; three days later his editor at Editions P.O.L. called to tell him that he was utterly captivated by it, and they arranged to meet on the 18th to discuss publication. The meeting was not to be.Hugo Wilcken continues the story at the Berlin Review of Books. Were it not for one outstanding exception, it's hard to imagine an English equivalent of Levé. It's no coincidence that Tom... read more

Typically, cattle are led down a chute to a "knocking box". Here, theoretically, a steel bolt is shot into the cow's brain. "Sometimes the bolt only dazes the animal, which either remains conscious or wakes up as it is being 'processed'." "Processing" continues with wrapping a chain around the animal's leg, and hoisting it into the air. Then, it is moved to a "sticker", who cuts its throat. If the knocking hasn't done its work, then, as one slaughterhouse worker put it: "They'd be blinking and stretching their necks from side to side, looking around, really frantic". Then they move... read more

‘The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence.’ [Psalm 115:17] On one level that is a truism: of course the dead do not praise the Lord – but what does it mean, ‘neither any that go down into silence’? It could be a mere synonym for ‘death’, but Hebrew parallelism often works in more interesting ways, as [Robert] Alter has shown, the second limb enriching and even questioning the first. The Psalmist is perhaps suggesting that silence, the inability or refusal to speak, is a kind of death, a psychological death. Such a psychological death... read more

Brushing away what he has called "the dead hand of modernism", he believes that novels should tell stories, have strong plots and be exciting. He likes to surprise readers.The Daily Telegraph profiles Ian McEwan.

Link via. See also.... read more

Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English.This is a quotation from John Lanchester's new book Whoops! about the crisis of capital as used in a review in this week's Times Literary Supplement. Perhaps it makes sense to a financier but it makes no sense to anyone with a feeling for Modernism, the revivification of art following the petrification of Romanticism; a... read more

Two references to Thomas Bernhard made last month by two of Britain's most prominent novelists are unremarkable in themselves, yet still surprising. Eleven years ago, when I wrote an introductory essay for Spike Magazine, such references by such people were unthinkable. On Radio 3's Nightwaves, following up his impressive and moving lecture, Will Self acknowledges that WG Sebald has strong affinities with "the lapidary monologuing" of Bernhard, yet also different because he moved to England in the Sixties. "If he had remained at home", Self wonders:
might he not have become – at the very least – a German... read more

I learnt the word 'serendipity' in an English class in my first year at secondary school, on the same day that I learnt the word 'masticate' (as in, to chew).  The class itself wasn't particularly memorable but those two words have stayed with me for reasons unknown. Yesterday, after writing my post, I had a serendipitous encounter with Gabriel Josipovici.  Not in the flesh, of course, because that would be weird (and I wouldn't have recognised him anyway), but with his collection of critical essays The Singer on the Shore.  It is a book I first read about online some years ago, when... read more

No, those aren't typos in the title.  Both my reading and my writing seem a little weak this week. (Which clearly doesn't mean that I can resist a word-play when it presents itself.) Whether this is the result of work burn-out, or the continuing cold weather (not so much of an excuse, perhaps, now that we've had a week of chilly blue sunny skies), or the tasks I try to turn my mind to, I don't know.  More likely it is just one of those times, when your brain is on a forced slowdown and fighting against it is futile and self-defeating. Better... read more

"The Fall of the Master Maker, in three volumes. They say it's one of the great classics of history. Lot of boring rubbish," she snorted derisively. "Full of wise Magi, stern knights with mighty swords and ladies with mightier bosoms. Magic, violence and romance, in equal measure. Utter shit." She slapped the book off the table and it tumbled onto the carpet, pages flapping."There must be something you can find to keep busy?""Really? What would you suggest?""My cousins do a lot of embroidery.""Fuck yourself."[--The Blade Itself]It's often said that what makes a story science fiction, as opposed to fiction with some fairly uninspired speculation about science in... read more

It has been a few weeks now since the last meeting of my work book group.  My reticence can be partly blamed on my latest archives assignment (just three to go now!) and partly on the subject of discussion itself.  Crash by JG Ballard was a difficult book to read, a difficult book to talk about and, I anticipate, a difficult book to write about.  The controversial subject matter is well-known. A television producer called James Ballard becomes sexually fixated on the injuries and deaths of car-crash victims after surviving a collision of his own.  During the course of the... read more

This month's recycled SFX review is of The Left Hand of God, by Paul Hoffman. A major marketing push (including what seems to have been quite a big mail-out of ARCs) means that it's had a lot of attention in the fantasy blogosphere over the past few months. Some of the attention - generally, I think, the more thoughtful - has been quite negative.For my own part I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's uneven and a tiny bit smug - having one character appropriate James I's views on smoking ("a habit loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful... read more

Petina Gappah's native Zimbabwe is not just a country at odds with the world, but at odds with itself.  It's problems are legion: tyranny, hyperinflation, superstition, AIDs, corruption, to name but a few; and the causes of these problems are many.  Strange then that Gappah's award-winning collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly, should be at times winsome, ironic and downright funny.  As I read it I was reminded of the introduction to Doris Lessing's This was the Old Chief's Country (1951; 2nd ed. 1964).  In it she wrote something about another African writer who, when asked how he could write comedy about the injustice of... read more

Sorry about Monday but this is what has happened since I picked up  Direct Red - A Surgeon's Story by Gabriel Watson, it's all come flooding back, I promise we'll stick to the book today.
I'd only really viewed the surgical gods from considerably lower down in the food chain, so I was interested to see what life might be like for a woman supposedly on an equal footing but working
'in a world dominated by alpha males...where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment are necessary tools for survival.' Indeed they are, but Gabriel Weston bravely and honestly challenges those pre-conceptions and her own thinking around many... read more

 
I must bring you news of the other 'School' themed reads from our last Endsleigh Salon evening, because I'd hate you to think we'd just languished around wishing we'd been at Malory Towers, or were thankful we'd missed out on the Abbey School and the Morris dancing.
 
The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, very 1970's bohemian with every kind of 'ism' going on which as I recall, having lived through it, must have been at least feminism and pacifism and I'm sure you can think of a few more. The book seemed to be 75% dialogue, a series... read more

 I've been in a wallow of gritty reminiscence since reading Direct Red - A Surgeon's Story by Gabriel Weston so it's time for this photo again to set the scene and give you a Monday morning smile....yes, yes, the hat...I know it's very odd.
It's perhaps a lesser known fact that there was a time when I thought my future nursing career rested not in a staff nurse's uniform but in the operating theatre.
Even I can hardly believe that at the age of twenty-three and that lifetime of wanting to be a nurse, all that saving lives and dedicated patient... read more

It's NTTVBG over at Other Stories today , but I do realise not everyone may have read the book or want to join in with that and Rocky's a little too worn out after yesterday to be much help, so I'm very grateful to Rhys who kindly e mailed this week offering to compile a literary quiz  for future use.
I was in party-planning mode so I jumped at that one and how perfect now that we are four and nearly grown up, to be doing a nice quiet quiz instead of all that raucous musical chairs and pass... read more

Us!Because almost 2,300 posts later, dovegreyreader scribbles is...
Four years old today.
In the absence of anything arriving from the Poet Laureate (I could barely conceal my disappointment) Bookhound settled down to compose an ode of gratitude to you all in celebration of this very auspicious day, because who in their right mind would write 2,300 posts if you didn't all stop by to read them.
I think you'll agree, Carole Anne Duffy will be hard pressed to top this...Roses are red
Violets are blue
We're four today
And that's thanks to you.
by Bookhound. ... read more

I was thrilled with the arrival of this one, but firstly I have to declare in interest in any book that emanates from Long Barn Books because, occupying a seat on the editorial board as I do, there's a chance I may have had a small say in the book's genesis.
So I did read the proposal for Helen Rappaport's latest book, Beautiful For Ever - Madame Rachel of Bond Street -Cosmetician, Con- Artist and Blackmailer and I added my hearty approval to the decision-making process, which all seems light years ago now.
Lured by the promise of beauty, the gullible... read more