Some prose books, in alphabetical order.
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by JAMES JOYCE. Read casually, staying in the surface language. But I kept in mind Moretti’s arguments in WAY OF THE WORLD of this novel as a structural failure, compromised between two roads for the bourgeois novel. The end of chapter 4 feels like the end of the work, but instead comes chapter 5, which is aggressively boring and taken up with multiple campus discussions on aesthetics.
BECKETT AND BADIOU: THE PATHOS OF INTERMITTENCY by ANDREW GIBSON. This was the best introduction to Badiou’s use of set theory I’ve read. I used to dislike Badiou’s math philosophy because I couldn’t understand it. But now I can say I dislike it because it is a sophisticated rejection of the vanguard party form. Badiou’s new book on cultural revolution, this interview suggests, will be walking the tightrope of arguing for masses struggling against power without falling into anarchism (how he can manage this, I do not know).
THE BOTTOM OF THE SKY by RODRIGO FRESAN. Really interesting because it works like INVENTED PART except it is really compact, which actually makes the background action easier to detect. My feeling now is that what I first read as a large perceptible gap between story and discourse is actually a switcheroo: the story (the background action which conventionally would be in the foreground) gives way to foregrounded discourse. I impatiently await translations of THE DREAMED PART and MANTRA.
COMPULSORY GAMES by ROBERT AICKMAN. Stories with blackouts, some of them non-alcoholic. Aickman is really curious: he writes Gothic and dark fantasy narratives like an Edwardian modernist. My feeling about the fantastic is that it’s taken on multiple historical functions (metaphors for colonial and domestic violence, romantic imagination, modernization–paradoxically), but I still don’t know what to make of weird tales, their particular mixture of content and style.
CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE by J. MOUFAWAD-PAUL. What I absolutely agree with in JMP’s historiographical presentation here is that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is in one direction a continuity of revolutionary proletarian theory after Leninism (introducing concepts like “party as leading core of the whole people” and developing Leninist concepts like the masses and cultural revolution), and in the other direction a rupture from revisionist lines of thought that crop up after revolutionary gains. The nitty-gritty of the history itself is questionable. Needs re-reading.
DEATH IN SPRING by MERCE RODOREDA. An excellent way to start the reading year, and my first MR. This work, like WAR, SO MUCH WAR and unlike her more realism-driven texts from the 60s, is shapeless yet utterly compelling. A village seen through the eyes of a boy who grows up to be a father; ghastly ritual practices. So a defamiliarization of the adult world and perhaps Francoism, sure. But the parts are more important than the whole here.
FOX by DUBRAVKA UGRESIC. A great contemporary novel that on the surface works like a series of esoteric inquiries into marginal literary figures or the marginal aspects of the lives of central ones. But it parascopes, W.G. Sebald style, into nested narratives about the ultra right after Yugoslavia, the refugee crisis, the fate of art and global capitalism, unexploded ordinance…
LE GUIN novels: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, ROCANNON’S WORLD, PLANET OF EXILE. The last two are early Hainish novels and they were all right stories with cool initial ideas, like a retelling of Icelandic Myth. LATHE is a classic, and the setting is wonderful; the eclecticism of Le Guin’s politics got in the way of my enjoyment.
TRISTRAM SHANDY by LAURENCE STERNE. A romance, not a novel, according to the narrator. And yet foregrounds with scientific thoroughness all of the formal problems of fictitious narrative. Which isn’t surprising because there are prose forms all through the 17th and 18th centuries that we’d call novels and stories no problem–it is the “novel” which has consumed all other discourses (Moretti in MODERN EPIC calls it the apex predator).
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by COLSON WHITEHEAD. This is an amazing novel that literalizes a metaphor in order to ironize it. So the subway locomotives work not just spacially, but temporally, that is, as historical progress that is repeatedly questioned by the level of violence experienced in each southern state. What a great idea: multiple state governments on cotton economies, multiple planter capitalist dictatorships. South Carolina is a liberal welfare regime (with modernist structures that are banks and museums) that practices eugenics; and North Carolina is a fascist state that lynches white race traitors with no hesitation. It is a science fiction novel accepted as lit fic because of how Whitehead compresses space and time in his narration, and his willingness to not string us along by the plot.
Poetry books:
ELECTRIC ARCHES by EVE L. EWING
MY MOTHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER by AJA MONET
ADVANCES IN EMBROIDERY by AHMAD AL-ASHQAR
By JOHN ASHBERY: SOME TREES, RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS, THE DOUBLE DREAM OF SPRING, THREE POEMS, THE VERMONT NOTEBOOKS, SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR, HOUSEBOAT DAYS.
By PHILIP LARKIN: THE NORTH SHIP, THE LESS DECEIVED, THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS.
This was also the year I seriously studied classic texts by Lenin and Mao. Internalizing dialectical materialism has been a paradigm shift in terms of its liberating impact on one’s subjectivity. A way to perceptively work through all of the contradictions in life and society. I won’t go on.
Second Slope 