what I’ve been reading lately:
-
Life: A User’s Manual by Georges PerecTranslated by David BellosDavid R. Godine, 1987 (originally published in French by Hachette, 1978)
This book is sprawling, encyclopedic, full of lists, and wonderful. It’s the story of the life of a Paris apartment building, but seen with the focus of an elderly inhabitant, the painter Valène, who’s decided he wants to make a painting of the building and the people who live in it. The opening epigraphs, by
-
The Sadness of Men: Photographs by Philip PerkisThe Quantuck Lane Press, 2008
Max Kozloff, in his introduction to this book of Perkis’s photographs, writes that these images are “pauses extracted from the current of ordinary viewing,” and also notes the way that often, what’s significant in a picture is “usually though not always set apart by a view through an aperture or enclosure” (p 9). It’s this
-
Hood by Emma Donoghue Alyson Books, 1998 (originally Hamish Hamilton, 1995)
Cara Wall’s at the center of this book, except her presence is also an absence: she’s dead, so her voice isn’t here, only in snippets of remembered conversations, or imagined ones. Her girlfriend reading the death notice she’s put in the newspaper: W A L L, suddenly, Cara, beloved daughter of Ian and Winona. How
-
Talking in the Dark by Billy MerrellPUSH (Scholastic), 2003
This book’s a “poetry memoir,” and for that, I like it, though sometimes it feels like too much narrative, not enough image. Merrell writes about childhood, growing up, coming out, falling in and out of love; much of the book is about relationships, whether romantic or friendly or familial. I loved, in the first section,
-
Fidelity by Grace PaleyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
I like Grace Paley’s poems, how conversational they are, and how the best ones are full of a strong voice, or a sense of place. I like the way her New York poems, like the one on page 15, which begins “a new york city man is,” are perfectly observed city-moments, this one a man
-
Notes from the Air by John Ashberyecco (HarperCollins), 2007
“Vetiver,” the first poem in this collection, is one of my favorites: the slow grace of it: image, image, image, motion, the shift from the first stanza to the casual “Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand” of the second (p 3). “The Ice Storm” is a poem in which to feel
-
The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World by E.L. KonigsburgAtheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007
Reading a kids’ book after reading Proust felt funny, and I’m not sure I have anything to say about this book, other than that I read it in two days and stayed up past bedtime to finish it. Parts of this book—the mystery of it, the friendship between children and an eccentric old woman—reminded me
-
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinRevised by D.J. EnrightModern Library, 2003 (this translation/edition originally Chatto & Windus, 1992)
I’ve been reading Within a Budding Grove slowly over the past few months, in ten-page snippets on the train, sprawled on the floor, stretched out in bed. What I like best in Proust are the lyrical passages, the images, full sentences like this one: I encountered no one at first but a footman who after
-
Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, trans. Luc SanteNew York Review of Books, 2007
I read this book in March but forgot to write about it at the time: it’s a collection of short news items by Fénéon, published anonymously in a French newspaper in 1906. They’re mostly police-blotter items, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, often worded in a clever or interesting way. On page 85, for example: “”M. Jules
-
Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki trans. Meredith McKinneyPenguin Books, 2008
Beautiful images: a “vast inkwash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows,” the blue of a celadon plate, the yellow of mustard-blossoms. A journey in vignettes and inaction: a painter walks through the mountains, stays at an inn with a hot spring, flirts with the daughter of the innkeeper,