What are you reading?

[Faust]

/\ this + the Raf Simons comments = a true winning entrance.

[fncyths]

/\ this + the Raf Simons comments = a true winning entrance.

Thanks man!
cheers,

[Faust]

Finished The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. What an incredible book! Highly recommended.

[JSebbe]

ulysses,
new translation came out in swedish some month ago.








ayn rand... where's the vomit-smiley when you need it..

[eleven crows]

Have you read it in English? I'd be interested in the comparison. Seems like it wouldn't work in translation at all.

[laughed]

[galia]

Just finished this


currently reading this


truly magnificent, soulful books. Strongly recommend this author.
I don't think they've been translated in English, but if you read Russian or French you should definitely give it a try

[JSebbe]

Have you read it in English? I'd be interested in the comparison. Seems like it wouldn't work in translation at all.

no, not yet. thought, i read it in swedish firstly before eng.
i'm usually very strict reading in the original language, but this book is as hard as life is..

[jumpoff]

Rest in peace Maurice Sendak. Such a wonderful man.

Loved his interview with Colbert back in January.

[Emel]

[Mail-Moth]

truly magnificent, soulful books. Strongly recommend this author.
I don't think they've been translated in English, but if you read Russian or French you should definitely give it a try

I've read the second one earlier this year ; I second your recommendation.

[droussin]

read this once before and digging back into it again

[croatoan]

Just finished..


and



Thinking it is about time to finally start going through some Lovecraft stuff.

[laughed]

best book i read last year.

big fan of the french stuff that comes out on Dalkey Archive

just got this bad boy today. Mostly a picture book but if you are a fan of art - this is a KILLER book. One of the best books I own. (not my hand in the picture ;) )

[klangspiel]

carlos fuentes passed away earlier this week. one of the more preeminent writers of the mexican / spanish prose and latin american literary history as a whole. the breadth and range of his works is such that they wouldn't be out of place when critically compared to a number of authors of disparate persuasions - anyone from borges, cortazar, marquez right up to donoso and goytisolo, to speak of spanish / latin-american literature alone. if you're someone who's yet to touch base with terra nostra or the death of artemio cruz, then i don't envy you one bit, you literary heathen, you.

big fan of the french stuff that comes out on Dalkey Archive

the last book i picked up from dalkey's french series was eric chevillard's demolishing nisard. chevillard is, for better or for worse, often clumped and discussed within the purview of "post-modern" literature. largely i suppose this having to do more with the formal and structural tendencies that pervade his writings than anything else. his strength, however, i feel lies with his wit - sometimes dry, sometimes buffoonery, but often absurdist in streak and at home with a jarry, an ionesco, or even a beckett - rather than whatever writing or stylistic proclivities that might align him with a particular literary millieu. demolishing nisard is no different in this regard. it is a chock full of funny as hell.

more recently i picked up another dalkey publication - drago jancar's the galley slave, which i can only describe as a picaresque descent into a tenebrous atmosphere that exude paranoia and hysteria at every given corner. now here's a book you could cozy up next to a fireplace with a bottle of vodka or absinthe for an intoxicating evening on your lonesome. the general tone of the book is oddly almost apocalyptic in delivery and exuberance, despite the setting - there's an ominous and brutal "hell on earth" depiction of reality on the portentous brink of, if not already in the urgent throes of, its very own suffocating "end times". this brief editiorial review does offer a cursory outline of the content:

"Jancar’s 1978 novel (part of Dalkey Archive’s Slovenian Literature series) is a vivid, dense, atmospheric tale set in the brutal medieval age of the Inquisition. A hapless stranger in a nameless land flees before the “plague commissars,” who put up roadblocks and interrogate travelers, compel him to take refuge in a town where it seems that his every move is being watched. The land is overrun by forces of suspicion and terror, and the stranger, Johan Ot, is likely hiding some darkness from his own past, revealed in nocturnal ravings that alert the neighbors to a guilty conscience—or an inner demon. “Darkness and flames and blood everywhere, with people always concealing evil intentions,” Jancar narrates in the foreboding voice of the omniscient moral police. The net of the Inquisition tightens: Ot is captured, interrogated, and brutally tortured until he confesses to having “some sort of devil... in me.” Excommunicated from the Church, he vanishes, or is perhaps spirited away by an underground apostate brotherhood, resurfacing amid renegades plotting to bring down the “snot-nosed little emperor,” Leopold. Yet the doomed Ot is again captured and sentenced to become a galley slave “for the rest of his natural life.” Jancar depicts the insidious gloom of this society with the intimacy of someone acutely aware of how the repressive tentacles of an authoritarian regime can rob individuals of their destiny."