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Old Masters: A Comedy

 

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters won't disappoint.

Mr. Sammler's Planet

"It's true that I didn't like your review of Sammler. I didn't dislike it more than other pieces of yours, but I disliked it. It appeared more than a year after publication of the book and I had heard that an earlier and more friendly review had been rejected by the editors, but knowing what gossip is, I did not take this to be fact. It was the conclusion of your piece—"God lives!"—that offended me. You meant evidently that I was a megalomaniac. But this didn't seem to me to be literary criticism."

~~ Saul Bellow to Alfred Kazin, March 20, 1974

the unbearable smell of communal living

"The warm air of May mingled with the odour of people's bodies in the carriage, bringing home to him for the first time in ages the unbearable smell of communal living. He wanted to live, that was now certain. But could someone who had once managed to escape society's clutches find the courage to commit himself again to that pungent stench? Society operates smoothly precisely because people remain unaware of their own smell. The student's stinking socks that haven't been washed in a week . . . [to] . . . the middle-aged man who reeks like a chimney covered in soot. People never hold back when it comes to giving off their own scents. Hanio liked to think he produced no smell or odour, but he could not be certain."

~~ from Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima

to know nothing

"After this last letter, everything changed. After this last letter, Vicente wanted only to know nothing; to know nothing about anything. To be brutally, absolutely ignorant of everything. He wanted to learn what it meant not to know. He wanted to live in darkness. He wanted not to know any more, but more than that, he wanted to no longer know. To no longer know anything. Not even the things he already knew. He no longer wanted to know anything about what was already past and about what might happen in the future. Not to his mother, or to his brother—nor to his wife or his children, or himself."

~~ from The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena

2022 Nobel Prize for Literature

Do you find it fishy that Salman Rushdie did not win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature? In fact, the Swedish Academy chose the knitting needle over the knife as their writing utensil, so to speak, if I heard correctly as a radio program discussed Nobel prizewinner Annie Ernaux's memoir of seeking an abortion in France in the early 1960s. It's worth noting, of course, that the decision could have been made well before Rushdie was nearly murdered on stage in a savage attack.

the list of stolen books

"The fact that she didn't have genuine proof of identity, the way her accent shifted, like her grandfather's, the old guy's strange ideas, their peculiar way of life, even her skill at outwitting alarm systems: all of this suggested that our love affair had been a trick, not a trick performed by two human beings in order to deceive a third, but a product of my own delirious imagination. Except that I wasn't crazy, I had proof that both of them existed: the list of stolen books, Ahmed's testimony (unless he was in on the scheme), and Juana's, and the hospital bills."

~~ from Severina by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

several solitaries of the highest genius

"'That's just it. There never was such a literary world,' I said. 'In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius—a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia's situation now resembles ours—poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.'"

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

Resurrection!

And then a most catholic review of Fight for Your Long Day—"Fight for Your Long Loud Laughs"—cried out from cold and brought light to this writer.

scattered pages

"All during the summer months, I was like a hungry cow eating grass in a valley. There was a public library within five minutes' walk, and also I could use the various college and university libraries of Boston and Cambridge. I browsed from shelf to shelf—sociology, philosophy, poetry, anything that took my fancy. I consulted only my appetite. Shaw, Gibbons, Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, everything in odd assortment . . . the Brontes, the works of Jane Austen . . . the Americans, Hawthorne, Cooper, Poe, Melville, Whitman. I read translations of Plato and Aristotle. Besides what I read thoroughly, I touched scattered pages of thousands of books."

~~ from East Goes West by Younghill Kang 

Asian American literature

 Consider two recent lists on Asian American experience: here and here.

100 from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Discover 100 books to read from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. At a quick glance, Babel, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Hrabal, and Schulz would be my favorites among authors listed here.

On Brexit lit

My contribution to the Daniel Dragomirescu's Contemporary Literary Horizon compilation of statements on the Brexit vote:

In many different ways and in different periods of history, the writer stands beyond the needs of any individual state or nation. We, as contributors to literature everywhere, know that a single day's vote, a "Brexit," cannot capture all of the nuances of all of the literatures to come out of, pass through, or in otherwise relate to England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or elsewhere. Indeed, literature will remain a transient, and we will celebrate it for that reason, whether we are thinking of James Joyce's discovery of Italo Svevo's novels in Trieste or all the famous migrations before or after--Kundera in France, Hemingway in Cuba, Bolano in Spain, or some of today's great European writers--Aleksander Hemon, Joseph O'Neill, to name a couple--who make part or all of their lives in the United States. The state may demand of us everything--our time, allegiance, taxes, prayers, and more--but, as writers, we always live beyond such temporal concerns, recognizing the humanity we share. Best to England, best to Europe, and, of course, best to Daniel Peaceman, living beyond the borders as always.

Alex Kudera, American novelist of Fight for Your Long Day and Auggie's Revenge

 

 

(Although I did not return to Ha Jin's The Writer as Migrant to prepare this statement, I read Ha Jin's  extended essay in 2009 and would consider it an influence among many other books on my thinking about Brexit and how it relates to literature and the lives of literary writers.)

other writers' Slovaks

And, finally, near the end of Journey, Celine arrives at his Slovak beauty, a far cry from the meth-infested psychotic "no-neck Slovak" of Robert Stone's "Helping":

Quite a few fine-looking girls applied for the job. In fact, so many strapping young women of all nationalities flocked to Vigny as soon as our ad appeared that we were hard put to it to choose among them. In the end we picked a Slovak by the name of Sophie whose complexion, energetic yet gentle bearing, and divine good health struck us, I have to admit, as irresistible.

In my imagined, or real, life of a Czech Kudera passing as a Slovak Soska (my father's father's true last name), my first literary sighting of any characters from the old country was late in high school and concerned the Czech girls on the American plains of Willa Cather's My Antonia, a book I remember enjoying very much. And, of course, Stone's "Helping" remains a favorite story nevertheless or because of its Slovak grace and wit.

As is our habit at L.U.S.K., we'll leave it to the next blogger to deconstruct the false binarism between the essential Slovak and constructed Czech in every man, neck or no.

two buck chuck

"You could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt." - Charles Bukowski
— Bukowski Quotes (@BukowskiQuotez) November 13, 2014

peace prize

Louise Erdrich has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

You may not be interested in literature. . .

Within the essay "The Business of America is War," a quotation from Leon Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," inspires me to think that the same idea very much applies to literature.

And then War whispers on, "We invented you, Literature, and don't ever forget it."