Holdings 1:4

Here’s what’s going on at The Book Hold.

Svevo, Confessions of Zeno

I’ll tell you what about this book that I don’t mention in my discussion of it: It was a fucking slog. It’s hilarious, witty, and Svevo is doing something fascinating and radical in it—yes, yes, yes. But it was like boring a hole in my skull with a spoon. That’s totally a personal thing, but there it is. Anyway, it’s a phenomenal, mind-blowing work (watch the nineteenth century just completely and totally collapse in twelve pages); I discuss it from the perspective of the ‘literature and fascism in Italy’ series here.

Olga Ravn in translation

Contemporary Danish writer Olga Ravn has three novels in English translation—three novels that have appeared relatively urgently in translation, that is, within two or three years of their original publication. There’s a compelling sense in which they are all part of a single overarching project, and the diverse ways in which Ravn achieves that project through these works is fairly rich and interesting.

• I discuss her 2018 novel The Employees here.
• I discuss her 2020 novel My Work here.

And I’ll put up notes on her most recently translated novel, The Wax Child, as well as on her project generally, in the coming week or so.

Joyce on a first pass

Joyce was one of many first literary loves for me, and I’ve been thinking recently about how Joyce (and, down the road, others) could be made somewhat more accessible to other readers, with the following few ideas in mind.

• It should be possible to appreciate Joyce without having to slog through Ulysses toting six commentaries and three dictionaries.
• It should be possible to appreciate Joyce without having to become—or seem to oneself to become—an expert in the history of Ireland, the Catholic Church, and all of European philosophy, theology, and literature.
• While maintaining these first two ‘reductions’, it should still be possible to appreciate Joyce on a formal level, that is, as signaling a fundamental structural change in the scope and nature of literature.

I’ve outlined the first node on a ‘Joyce on a first pass’ reading trajectory here. We read three stories from Dubliners, that’s it, and we enter immediately into Joyce’s world. I’ll follow this up with ‘first pass’ selections and commentary for Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

Coming up

The Ravn series will be completed soon. The ‘first pass’ series on Joyce will be completed soon. Here’s how it stands with a few other projects:

• I’m devouring Jelinek’s everything. Something will come of it. Every time I sit down to read more Jelinek, I think: This is it, this is writing, this is reading, finally it’s happening, right here, right now, and I can’t get enough of it.
• I’m still processing Morales’ Easy Reading. I think it was one of the best reads for me of the last few years. I want to figure out why. It could just be that I lack an imagination. It could be that it’s just an absolutely astounding work.
• There is an incidental relation between Ravn and Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality that piques my desire (my pathological desire) to cut against the grain. Ravn’s novels and Blecher’s Adventures are all, to put it one way, about our ambivalent relation to the world of objects. That story in both cases is so obviously “what it’s about” that I can’t resist the thought that it isn’t, that it can’t be right. I’m still digesting Ravn and, as part of the Bloc experiments stack, Blecher’s Adventures, and wondering what counter-narratives there might be.
• After taking a sort of blow to the gut from Carmen Laforet’s Nada, I’m flirting with next moves in the Salidas shelf. Cela’s Family of Pascual Duarte and Martín-Santos’ Time of Silence are both in my shorter stack right now. Easy Reading sits on the Salidas shelf, too (“sits on”—more like “radiates outward from”).
• I’ll tell you a secret about Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, and it’s the same deal as Svevo’s Zeno: Roussel’s Impressions is an impressive maneuver, so to speak, in the history of literature, but, fuck me, it is a fucking slog. Let me plead with you, for the sake of your happiness, that you not read Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books before reading Impressions. When you know the flea circus’ bit, the circus becomes unwatchable. I don’t know; Foucault apparently disagrees, he loves this stuff. For more on this general project, see the Contre-voyages stack.