Reading....Thursday! well, we're getting there....

What did you just finish reading?
A rather miscellaneous stew -- Angels & Insects, by A.S. Byatt: loved the second novella, was left cold by the first one.  
Fraud, by David Rakoff, which struck me the way all his books do: sharply amusing in a very 'This American Life' way, great in a few spots, but why is everyone else shouting about it -- what did I miss?
Hurry Down Sunshine, which I apparently liked a lot more than other people on GoodReads did, but it was nothing spectacular -- more really solid. It was good enough for me to order his book on being a writer in New York, though, so that's pretty good. [Later note: that book was also solid -- and even more obviously a collection of columns, but full of great characters and keen observation. I'd love to read a New York novel of Greenberg's.]

What are you reading now?
This Magic Mountain thing is....not going well. I hate to wash out of ANOTHER big group read (Proust, Infinite Jest, Buddenbrooks, need I go on....?) but for one thing the subtle yet increasing depiction of illness as psychosomatic and patients as lazy is starting to get to me in a triggery way, as I heard that constantly about my depression (and insomnia, anxiety, phobias, &c &c) (and even actual physical problems -- "There's no reason for you to feel numbness in your fingers!" Two years later: near-incapacitating RSI). SIGH. 

Also the translation is bugging the crap out of me. This is partly because it was super-hyped and given all kinds of awards and people trashed it at the expense of the Evil Lady Translator (no no, not Garnett: another one) but a lot of it is just so grating it yanks me out of the book. Examples (from the Vintage paperback):

Hans: "The hair and the nails keep on growing, and for that matter, in terms of the chemistry and physics, or so I've heard, it's a regular hustle and bustle there inside." p 69 (this all the moreso because Joachim goes on about how whacky a term "hustle and bustle" is)

"But then what he said about human dignity, afterwards, it sounded so spiffing, like formal oratory." p 62

"'Tweet!' she whistles at me -- what a harum-scarum! What absolute devil-may-care.'" p 50

"He had held the customs of his forefathers and their old institutions in far higher regard than any expansion of the harbor at breakneck speed or the godless tomfooleries of a great city" p 23

"'She calls it a stirletto -- isn't that capital!'" p 15

"'Yes, it's top-notch, your having come'" p 14

"'Fumigated, that's spiffing'" p 11

It's annoying to read people trashing (Helen) Porter when I keep tripping over those OH I SAY OLD FELLOW HOW TOPPING word choices. I get the feeling Woods is trying to take something colloquially German and (badly) rendering it in equivalent English. Everyone sounds super-British, and it's super-annoying because this translation is supposed to be so up-to-date and fresh and elegant and pithy and non-archaic and whatever. (I was so annoyed by the translation apparently I moved other people on GoodReads to be more defensive of it. IT'S A GIFT, I TELL YOU.) (It's not just when Hans talks, either, as someone there said: a nurse says "Twiddle-twaddle!" Surely, surely, there must have been some better twentieth-century English equivalent of whatever that was. And then, 'hustle and bustle' made A RETURN APPEARANCE, man, I was not happy. I'm guessing it's some kind of German rhyming phrase -- maybe like 'tohu-vohu' in Hebrew? But hustle and bustle? This won like every major translation award. Hustle and bustle.)

-- For a break I turned to Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night, which is like a great big Magic Mountain 'torte with layers of just about everything -- macaroon, buttercream, chocolate, fruit jam, and marzipan' as Victorian pastiche -- murder! whores! bibliomania! secret heirs! forgery! grand estates! Sort of like the Libba Bray books, but with less Mary Sues and more fucking. No no, the prose style is much better than Libba Bray (OK that's not saying anything. Cox is a great hand at Victorian pastiche, let's say that, and I am a terrible snob about that very thing, so it's good). Cox is lengthier than even most of the Victorian writers, tho -- the love interest just entered three hundred pages in. For all that, it's about the same length as Magic Mountain and I think I'm going to finish it much more quickly (or indeed, finish it at all, hah). Expected nothing more out of it than great entertainment, and it is living up to that expectation superbly.

What do you expect to read next?
I might continue to take a break from MM because I'm at that point where just reading it is annoying me and preventing me from connecting with the book. Dan Beachy-Quick's A Brighter Word than Bright: Keats at Work just arrived, which does look spectacular, and is probably about a thousand times more sensible about illness and creativity than Mann, to boot. I also got some le Fanu and Vernon Woods free from Gutenberg, that's that Le Guin translation of the stories about fantastic cities, the Cox sequel The Glass of Time, Wolf Solent, so on and on....

quoted in the GoodReads Thomas Mann reading group

DAVID WOLF: You don’t often write very negative reviews these days but it seems to me those that you have written—such as of House of Exile by Evelyn Juers or The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh—share a theme. In a number of these cases you seem frustrated that the writer is condescending to history or judging figures of the past anachronistically. Do you think that’s a fair observation?

ADAM KIRSCH: I can see what you mean about those reviews. I think that one thing literature can do is make you aware that the past is just as real as the present was to the people who were living it. You have to try to understand it, rather than merely making it serve purposes for the present. There has to be certain humility before the past. I particularly remember that with House of Exile, which is ostensibly a biography of Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich, the author was simply scolding Thomas Mann—asserting that he wasn’t up to scratch, that he wasn’t nice enough. I think that with a writer like that—and Mann is one I particularly love—you have to approach with a sense of humility and willingness to be instructed rather than to just pass judgement.

via

Magic Mann* reading schedule

From here, written by Kalliope:


Week 1: August 12 - 18. 
Read from Chapter 1, “Arrival” (Ankunft) p. 3, until the beginning of Chapter 3 “One Word too Many” (Ein Wort zu viel) p. 81.

Week 2: August 19 - 25. 
Read from “One Word too Many” p. 81, until the beginning of Chapter 4 “Table Talk” (Tischgespräche) p. 158.

Week 3: August 26 – September 1. 
Read from “Table Talk” p. 158, until the beginning of Chapter 5 “My God, I see it!” (Mein Gott, ich sehe!) p 242.

Week 4: September 2 - 8. 
Read from “My God, I see it!” p. 242, until the beginning of Chapter 5 “Research” (Forschungen) p. 318

Week 5: September 9 - 15. 
Read from “Research” p. 318, until the beginning of Chapter 5 “Walpurgis Night” (Walpurgisnacht) p. 382.

Week 6: September 16 - 22. 
Read from “Walpurgis Night” p. 382 until the beginning of Chapter 6 “The City of God an Evil Deliverance” (Von Gottesstaat und von übler Erlösung) p. 458.

Week 7: September 23 – 29. 
Read from “The City of God an Evil Deliverance” p. 458, until Chapter 6 “Operationes Spirituales” p. 521.

Week 8: September 30 – October 6. 
Read from “Operationes Spirituales” (Latin title) p. 521, until the beginning of Chapter 6 “A Good Soldier” p. 590.

Week 9: October 7 – 13. 
Read from “A Good Soldier” (Als Soldat und brav) p. 590, until the beginning of Chapter 7 “Vingt et un” p. 659.

Week 10: October 14 – 20. 
Read from “Vingt et un”(French title) p. 659, until the beginning of “Mynheer Peeperkorn – Conclusion” (Mynheer Peeperkorn – Schluss) p. 729.

Week 11: October 21 – 27. 
Read from “Mynheer Peeperkorn – Conclusion” p. 729, until the beginning of “The Great Petulance” (Die grosse Gereiztheit) p. 813

Week 12: October 28 – November 3. 
Read from “The Great Petulance” p. 813, until the end of the novel in p. 854.



*eternal Heart fan, no apologies