No safe landing
4 weeks ago
“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
5 comments:
I found your site while looking for info on Parallel Stories. Thanks for your review! It feels like people are falling all over themselves in an effort to say how wonderful it is. I'm certainly interested in reading it - but with the other door-stop books I've got sitting around here (1Q84, The Instructions, A Moment In The Sun) I'm not sure if I'll ever get to it!
"Parallel Stories is not a disaster on the level of Harold Brodkey's Runaway Soul..."
Runaway Soul is unfashionable, yes; a "disaster", no... unless Beckett's "Molloy" is a disaster. In which case: more "disasters", please! What is a "complete success", in book form, and how much work is required, on the part of the reader, to make this determination... credibly?
I think we read too much (cram/ skim/ stack our conquests on the nightstand) and therefore read too fast and, as a consequence, make too many consensus-abetted snap-judgments.
Brodkey is funny, here, on Beckett (at the 15:00 mark, I think)
http://www.cobra.be/cm/cobra/cobra-mediaplayer/archief/vangisteren/1.703057
Thanks for your comment, Stephen, and for the video link. It's been a decade since I've read Brodkey, and my taste has changed quite a bit in the interim, so it's possible there's more merit to the book than I recall. At the time, I really loved many of Brodkey's early short stories (though not all of them), and so I had high expectations of the book, which may also have affected my opinion.
I will briefly note an objection to the following, however: "I think we read too much (cram/ skim/ stack our conquests on the nightstand) and therefore read too fast and, as a consequence, make too many consensus-abetted snap-judgments." I hope it's clear from this blog that I absolutely don't do this (and, in fact, this post was written in response to a consensus around a book that wasn't borne out by my reading). I've tried to emphasise this here by admitting that I haven't finished Parallel Stories, and to explain why I wouldn't...rather than just skimming/cramming it and describing it as a "masterpiece"...
Emmett, that second part of my comment ("cram/skim") was connected to the first bit in a from-specifics-to-generalities way; I don't think *you've* been cramming and skimming (I haven't been keeping you under surveillance--- laugh), but I do think that Runaway Soul's generally catastrophic dismissal (in America) was owing, in part, to just that.
Ironically, I've recently read praise for Runaway Soul that compared it, favorably, to Underworld... on the basis that DeLillo was supposedly more interested in "global events" than in particulars of character! Ie: the article-writer had not read very much of Underworld!
PS Are you familiar with this one...? In one or two ways it's remarkable:
http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=024M-C0095X0801XX-0100V0.xml
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