Reading roundup for the first three weeks (or so) of the year
Including a couple of arresting similes that kind of stopped me in my tracks
The death toll has crossed 25,000 in Gaza. A couple of days back I read Pakistani writer Bilal Tanweer’s moving and persuasive essay, Reading Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ while Palestinians are killed. I think I will never forget the following line:
Like Samsa, the Palestinians too simply woke up on October 7 to find themselves transformed into monstrous vermin.
I read a couple of writer interviews over at
.From the Paul Lynch interview:
[…] if you spend all your time reading nothing else but contemporary fiction, you will have no concept of what the standard is.
From the Rob Doyle interview:
One of the things that seems to happen when you’re a few books into the game — at least, it’s something that’s happened to me — is that you pay less and less attention to what your contemporaries are up to, becoming hyper-focussed on your own unfolding endeavours. I’m not saying I’ve given up reading contemporary novels — I hope I never do — but I don’t keep up with prize shortlists or feel any great rush to read the latest craze. If it still seems worth reading a couple of years or a decade down the line, I might get round to it then.
I noticed in both writers a tension with whatever they regard as contemporary writing and/or its contemporariness. Both have at least a suspicion of the contemporary as it manifests in the work of contemporaries. But both also know that it’s not possible to not be contemporary, and that it might even be worthwhile. Lynch says that with regards to novels, he finds the terms contemporary and historical meaningless, but does acknowledge that his novels ‘begin in the contemporary.’ Doyle says: ‘I don’t want the contemporary writing I read to be dumbed down, but I do want it to be contemporary.’
Being a writer of fiction, must I regard them as contemporaries and, following their own advice/slant, avoid their work for a while? Surely, after the interviews, the only way to decide to read their work is to already accept them as exceptions to the contemporary—or, simply, exceptional. It's a tough position for a prospective reader to be in.
I regard reading contemporary fiction as vital, not so much to develop an awareness of what the standard is but to know what the standards are, and in which directions they are being pulled. The plurality here is crucial. And the standards are always protean.
On January 6, Mint Lounge did a fiction special with stories by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm, Manu Bhattathiri, Diksha Basu, and others. It was heartening to see a newspaper give space to fiction (Mint has published one story each in two subsequent issues too; I wonder if they can become a regular publisher of fiction). I liked all the stories, but Cutting by Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Janani Kannan, was perhaps my favourite. It’s a ‘pattern story’, as George Saunders will tell you. That means a story in which we are given yet another occurence of a thing that happens repeatedly, only this time there is an alteration that is probably going to be life- and pattern-altering.
I don’t remember how I came to it, but I was glad I read James Wood’s 1999 essay on Harold Bloom, Falstaff for Our Times. It offers a fond, though not ingratiating, portrait of the mind of the writer of The Western Canon and The Anxiety of Influence. Through reading it I saw Bloom as someone most invested in preserving the greatness of greats (like Shakespeare). Wood explains:
What is Bloom's argument with most modes of current criticism? In essence, he is saying that the great work is bigger than us, that it is grander than us. He fears that the fight against the dominance of the canon, against notions of "greatness", is actually a way of asserting our primacy over literature, a way of brushing literature out of the way, and replacing it with substitutes. Hence his word, "resentment". He accuses such people of resenting, precisely, the greatness of greatness.
Speaking of the greatness of greatness, I am reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels in readalongs conducted superbly by Simon Haisell at
. I intend to share a monthly newsletter about my reading of the Tolstoy novel, so you will hear from me about that experience soon. But for now, I give you this Tolstoy advice about maintaining your influence in society:Influence in society […] is capital which has to be economized if it has to last.
And, at last, the promised similes.
First, from about the midway point in Ian McGuire’s exceptional novel of Arctic adventure and villainy, The North Water:
The berg is moving at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house-size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe.
Emphasis mine. I didn’t know the word swarf, so the joy of the sentence was compounded not just by the simile, but by the thrill of learning a new word as well.
The second, from quite early in Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, who I think is my favourite contemporary American novelist:
When she was alone, her mind turned inside-out like an envelope.
How immediately available it is to us: the image of an envelope turned inside-out. And yet it is not a thing envelopes commonly do. Or do they? And what does it mean for a mind to be turned inside-out? All these questions, but we understand what is being said. Yes, we understand. We understand because we read the words ‘alone’ and ‘envelope’ and we see an empty envelope and we know that it is there, the similarity, even though it is not easily definable.
See you soon (with an essay on beginning, and spending a month with, War and Peace)!