The end is nigh

Sped through Cormac McCarthy's The road in the plane back from Lisbon and absolutely loved it. It's a post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son travelling through a devastated landscape in which unburied corpses litter the roads and bands of cannibals roam in search of humans to kill and eat. The language is beautiful: the desolation and the dead landscape are wonderfully evoked, and at times it reminded me of Samuel Beckett, particularly the conversation they have with a blind old man, who speaks like a strange prophet.

It's also really scary, more scary than any book I've read for a long time. Two passages actually made me shudder with fright. I'm not sure quite why I had such a strong reaction. I suppose because the world depicted is both horribly alien and completely familiar: everywhere they go the father and son find traces of our own world - an unopened can of Coke, supermarkets and garages, and a complete train sitting in a siding - but the world around them is completely dead, no sun, no animals, no plants, no food except in the few tins they can scavenge. The two very horrible and frightening bits seem particularly upsetting in that context. [19]

Reading/listening/watching

Reading:Cormac McCarthy's The road, Balzac's La peau de chagrin, various stuff on the GDR for an essay, La chartreuse de Parme.

Listening: Kris Kristofferson at the Albert Hall last week, fado music in Lisbon - both terrific.

Watching: I've been away for the weekend in Lisbon, so nothing much. Sleeping Beauty at the ROH tonight, though.

National poetry month

So, I forgot about this last year, and I forgot about this the year before, and I nearly forgot this year, but April is National Poetry Month and this year I'm going to make sure I read some poetry. It's actually an excellent time - just as I'm approaching exams - as it's so much easier to read poetry in little bits, picking it up and putting it down again without getting engrossed in it as I do novels (some novels...). I've signed up for the poem-a-day from poets.org and I'm going to post some poetry on here as well.

Feminist book club - part 1

So, it's my unilateral decision this time - democracy can come later - and I'm suggesting two books, to read over two months, as that gives us all a bit more flexibility, especially those of us with finals in May...

Books one and two are The female eunuch by Germaine Greer and The dialectic of sex by Shulamith Firestone. Anyone interested in reading along is very welcome to, and eventually we'll have a drink and discuss the books. Men are very welcome to join in!

Just a quick post about this excellent article in New Left Review by the Italian communist Rossana Rossanda (what a great name). Beautifully written and the description of her life as a partisan in the second world war is gripping. It's an excerpt from her autobiography, which I'd love to read, but it doesn't seem to have been translated into English, except this extract. Maybe it will be translated into French at some point.

Love and literary taste

A friend brought this New York Times essay to my attention, about whether romantic compatibility goes with shared literary taste. I tend to agree with Ariel Levy that shared tastes are irrelevant: it doesn't matter to me whether my boyfriend reads or likes the same books as me; in fact, it wouldn't matter to me if he didn't read at all. I'd rather share a sense of humour than a taste in music.

Sharing tastes is tremendous fun: one of the nicest things about spending time with my sister is that she's just about the only person I know who shares all my musical tastes. But for someone to live with, make a life with? After a while it all feels a bit like navel-gazing. It's nice to get away from each other now and then, and the things that only I like stay special in part because only I like them.

The fatuousness of this man:
James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).”
is superb. What exactly would be acceptable reading for him, one wonders? Apart from The Magic Mountain, surely a strange choice for a sexually alluring book.

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: the Gospels, Susan Sontag's Regarding the pain of others, Wilfred Loth's Stalin's unwanted child: the Soviet Union, the German question, and the founding of the GDR

Listening: Bobby Darin & Johnny Mercer's Two of a kind, Debussy's Études played by Mitsuko Uchida

Watching: series two of Deadwood. Particularly enjoying the way the relationship between EB Farnum and his servant Richardson is becoming more and more bizarre, like something from a Beckett play.

Catch-up list: what I've read recently

OK, I hate doing this but otherwise I never catch up with myself:

Naomi Segal: The adulteress's child [10]
Cormac McCarthy: No country for old men [11]
Ann Petry: The street [12]
Edith Piaf: My life [13]
Susan Sontag: On photography [14]
Anglo-Saxon verse [15]
Ibsen: Hedda Gabler/A doll's house [16]
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: Selected Poems [17]
Michelle Tea (ed.): It's so you [18]

Small things please small minds

Just (literally, I am on the first page) started reading Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits. He quotes this, attributed to 'an old brigand from Roccamandolfi':
'We are sad, it is true, but that is because we have always been persecuted. The gentry use the pen, we the gun; they are the lords of the land, we of the mountain.'

As a modern-day fictional bandit said, 'I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase; it's all in the game though, right?'

I don't update enough

I am keeping up with my reading, I am, I am... Much better than last year, actually. But I don't update enough.

I finished, and really enjoyed - not sure if 'enjoy' is the right word, but whatever - The hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen, a loan from my friend N. I read Koeppen's book Death in Rome last year and thought it was superb and vicious. The hothouse is about the Bonn parliament in the fifties - which I am just in the middle of studying - and is sour and angry and despairing. The Bonn parliamentarians are the Christians and Social Democrats who have kept their hands clean during the Nazi period but are now middle-aged cynics, working for a public of self-satisfied, apolitical bourgeois. Short, but very powerful, sad and bitter.

It's translated by Michael Hofmann, who is such a good translator of German. His translations never jar, the way they can sometimes, and you can hear the German behind the English without it ever becoming intrusive. [9]