version

Well-known member
yes, its been a slow going because Ive been drinking a lot as well. But its great. Just finished the section on the history of the chinese people in Mexacli, a town actually founded by chinese immigrants. To escape both persecution and the heat, they built an intricate series of tunnels underneath the city with apartments and clubs and many lived there.
How far through is that? I finally nabbed a copy off eBay recently and the thing's huge. People talk about books being bricks, but this thing really is.
 

version

Well-known member
I read an interview with him about it that was pretty good,
 

catalog

Well-known member
Tempted by Danny's glowing review of Anna Kerenina. I've got a mate who prefers it to War and Peace, but do also know someone else who has War and Peace as their favourite of all time.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
apparently he's a semi serious cross dresser and wrote a book about his female alter ego - dolores


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version

Well-known member
Yeah, I dunno how I feel about that. I've read some criticism and, iirc, he's stopped now that he's written the books so some people feel it was just another project for him and a bit insulting.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I get the impression he's in a bit of a bubble. really knowledgeable about whatever he's researching but completely ignorant of general consensus. Sometimes in Imperial he'll make some near obnoxiously obvious point and reading up on dolores I found this
'I had always imagined femininity as what you’re born with, what’s between your legs,' he said, 'And then I realized: no, it’s a performance. It’s about how you move, all the things you do to get ready.'"[2]
 

version

Well-known member
One of the criticisms I've often seen leveled against him is naivety, genuine or otherwise. He seems to be well-meaning, but makes these weird, clunky observations out of... I don't know what. I don't think it's malice and he isn't stupid. It's difficult to put your finger on.
 

jenks

thread death
Found the end of that really weird tbh. Felt like a real about face from Julia. But lots of amazing observational passages about emotional lives, I thought.
One of my long term projects - I’m reading all her stuff in chronological order. I think she’s a genius - very good at the small and crippling indignities of ordinary life. Some of them I have done as audiobooks- she has very good people reading her stuff - Fiona Shaw, Prunella Scales, Anna Massey - listening to her writing and hearing how meticulous her sentences are is a revelation.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Tempted by Danny's glowing review of Anna Kerenina. I've got a mate who prefers it to War and Peace, but do also know someone else who has War and Peace as their favourite of all time.
Do it. Read both. I was discussing this with a friend who's read them both and we were saying, people talk about reading the classics like it's a chore but it really isn't, in the instance of Tolstoy at least. It's really vivid, really gripping, a page turner, I flew through it at first. It's obviously written with great insight but entertainment seems to have been a primary concern as well. I think it was serialised in a newspaper at first? You get the sense of this rich texture of people's lives and these amazing moments of recognition as well where he nails a little bit of internal process/bullshit that you do.

My mate was saying he must've been hard to be friends with, 'cos he'd spot every little characteristic about you and be using you as literary fuel.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
One of my long term projects - I’m reading all her stuff in chronological order. I think she’s a genius - very good at the small and crippling indignities of ordinary life. Some of them I have done as audiobooks- she has very good people reading her stuff - Fiona Shaw, Prunella Scales, Anna Massey - listening to her writing and hearing how meticulous her sentences are is a revelation.
Oh, maybe I'll try an audiobook of hers then. You can tell it's incredibly well written but its easier to let the plot sweep you away from that. I actually remembered it from that gargantuan list of your lockdown reading last year. That's why I picked it up when I saw it.
 

version

Well-known member
Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour.

It's one of his early ones when he's still doing the whole gonzo thing and it grates a bit, but it's very readable and there are a few touching moments, like him going back to his family's old holiday home in France with his brother, trying to recreate their childhood holidays and eventually realising what he's really doing is looking for his dad who died back in the 80s.

One thing that winds me up is how self-conscious he can be. He does the Hunter Thompson thing whilst poking fun at himself for doing so and it feels a bit like he wants to have his cake and eat it. "Look how cool I am, I know it's not really cool and I'm being silly, but look how cool I am." You get another bit like that where he's wandering around Vietnam and encounters a man who appears to have been caught in a napalm strike, has this crisis of conscience and is all "What the fuck am I doing here writing a fucking book?" but then, of course, the piece ends and he carries on writing his book.
He just ate a massive testicle in the desert.
 

version

Well-known member
Picked up The Pound Era the other day. The way Kenner juggles the different threads and zooms in and out is remarkable. One minute he's giving us an overview of Henry James' view of literature via painting, the next he's plucking a couple of lines from Pound and focusing on individual words - sometimes in the space of a single page. Brilliant.
 

jenks

thread death
Just finished his Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again - reckon it’d be right up a lot of Dissensian’s streets - has a touch of the uncanny, post industrial melancholy, really good writing about shabby bits of England - like an Iain Sinclair who can actually structure a novel.
 
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