NYRB I've Read This Year

I've posted these squibs over at the 75 Book challenge, but, having just discovered this group I figured I'd post them here as well. I take NYRB, The Dalkey Archive, and Shoemaker & Hoard to be the holy trinity of American publishing.)

A Way of Life Like Any Other by Darcy O'Brien

Whether it's Jane Austen's shires or Patrick O'Brian's ships, it's never a bad idea to set a novel in a clearly defined, tightly constrained and constricted world. That's one reason Hollywood has been such a fruitful subject. From Nathanael West through F. Scott Fitzgerald and Michael Tolkin, Hollywood has proven fertile ground for authors taking a break from their screenplays, or, as in the case of Darcy O'Brien, taking a break from his professorial duties at Pomona College ( less than an hour, traffic permitting, from Hollywood and Vine). The gossip and glamor, the grime and grief of the place have fired many a writer's imagination—or perhaps it's the journalist that's inspired, since when dealing with the capital of glitter, "you can't make this stuff up." In O'Brien's case, the autobiographer comes into it too; he may have turned himself into a scholar, but he was born into Hollywood royalty, son of George O'Brien and Marguerite Churchill. They were Hollywood royalty, however, who were soon deposed, and that's what, for the most part, O'Brien writes about: the formerly famous and their uneasy relationship with real life. He gives us the story through the eyes of a boy and young man, moving, finally toward independence from his train-wreck of a family. With a skillful blending of farce and comedy, tragedy and wit, O'Brien has given us a delighful addition to the short shelf of essential Hollywood novels. (And don't skip over Seamus Heaney's excellent introduction.)

Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary.

If there's anyone who still doubts that male authors can create vibrant female characters Joyce Cary's Herself Surprised should be enough to dispel that misconception. It is a masterpiece of humanism in the way that Yasujiro Ozu's films are: the characters, that is, are human beings and are neither condemned nor exalted for being so, even as they live lives comprised of actions which run the gamut from those worthy of condemnation to those which exalt the doers and all around them. So attractive, in its Moll Flandersesque blowsiness, is the voice of Cary's first-person narrator Sara Monday that one does not feel over-eager to examine the other two pieces of the triptych, narrated, as they are, by others whose voices, one doubts, can be as vivifying. But no, with an artist like Cary at the controls one is certain that those characters, too, will be brimming with life.

I'm currently reading, and loving, Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge.

dcozy - thank you for the review of "A Way Of Life". I have just received it from NYRB and it is now on the top of Mount BTR.

dcozy, Unforgiving Years was one of my favorite books last year. Check out his The Case of Comrade Tulayev too.

dcozy, I truly enjoyed A Way of Life, Like Any Other as well when I read it this year! Just curious as to the other essential Hollywood novels on your short list, as I have mostly avoided the genre?

mrspenny, you are in for a treat!

dcozy, thanks for the post. I have put a A Way of Life, Like Any Other on my wish list. I have never been a fan of Joyce Cary's (a intellectual failing on my part I know). If I run across a cheap copy of Herself Surprised, I may give Cary another try. In the past, I have found that authors whom I did not like on my first attempt, I subsequently came to appreciate highly once I had entered another chapter (or decade) in my own life. Robertson Davies was one such writer. I simply didn't get the point when I was in my late teens and early twenties. I revisited his work when I hit my mid-thirties. Eurecka! He suddenly made lots of sense. I'm unfamiliar (or at least I think I am) with Shoemaker & Hoard. I shall google them directly. (Isn't it wonderful how google has become a verb? I wonder when it will make it into the OED supplemental?)

Thus far this year, my favorite NYRB work is The Ten Thousand Things - a wonderful book.

#3 rebeccanyc, I'll have to check out Unforgiving Years.

Limiting it tp this year I have read: The Dud Avocado, The Pilgrim Hawk, Sunflower, The Slaves of Solitude and A Time of Gifts, I am only part way through Names on the Land and The Go Between.

Trying to pick favorites between those would be odd since they are so different. Sunflower was almost so otherworldly as to be difficult to describe. A Time of Gifts is perhaps the best discovery. I will want to read all Fermor's other prose- but perhaps spaced out over a few years.

I will have to look at Cary the next time I am in a bookshop. The Ten Thousand Things has also caught my eye and I am glad to know you enjoyed it.

Marise:

Nathanael West's (I almost typed Hawthorne's) The Day of the Locust is, without a doubt, the greatest Hollywood novel ever. And it's just the sort of thing NRYB might republish. Perhaps they'll get around to it soon.

Michael Tolkin's books The Player and The Return of the Player are good fun, too, but much less intense and accomplished than West's visionary work.

rebaccanyc:

The Comrade Tulayev waits in the tottering pile next to my desk. I'll have to seek out Serge's memoirs, too.

urania1:

Shoemaker and Hoard publishes Gary Snyder, Guy Davenport, and David Markson. Need I say more?

Marensr:

The Ten Thousand Things sounds fascinating.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten Locust, about time for a reread of that!!! Haven't read the Tolkin's but now they are on the Wishlist!

dcozy,

You need not say more. The list is impressive. I looked them up on the internet today. They've merged with two other small presses and become Counterpoint Press. Unfortunately, the site provides no backlist. However, I went to abebooks.com and got a fairly good idea of what the list consists. As it turns out, I was familiar; I simply had not paid attention to the press at the time.

(Cross-posted at 75 Book Challenge)

Not published until 1971, twenty-five years after the author's death, and only now appearing for the first time in English (also Russian) translation, Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years is a masterpiece. Structured in four movements, the novel follows four revolutionaries through the horrors of the last century, and watches them grapple not only with physical hardships, but also with their growing realization that the one successful revolution, that in the service of which they have placed themselves, was, even long before the USSR's demise, in fact a dismal failure. That Serge himself was, as Richard Greeman notes in his excellent Introduction, "a revolutionary and an internationalist more or less from birth" allows him to write with an authority that is rare in authors attempting to depict millieu as obscure at those Serge's characters traverse, but the novel is much more than a documentary. It is a work of the highest art.

#5, urania. I agree with you about Robertson Davies -- I tried reading something by him in my 20s, and just didn't get it. But when I read Fifth Business earlier this year (my 50s), I was entranced and hooked, and went on to read the rest of the Deptford trilogy and by the Cornish trilogy.

#6, Marensr, I was so amazed by A Time of Gifts that I went right on to read Between the Woods and the Water, which continues the journey. I also bought two of Patrick Leigh Fermor's other books (also NYRBs), Mani and Roumeli, which I've only dipped into but don't seem to have the richness or complexity of the other two, and A Time to Keep Silence, which was completely different, but wonderful.

I've looked at A Way of Life Like Any Other and not bought it, but your recommendation, dcozy, is encouraging me to look at it again.

#10, dcozy: you should post that well-done review of Unforgiving Years to the book's page. As a user, I always prefer to see reviews on the page rather than having to hunt them down in the "conversations about" area.

also, if you enjoyed The Pilgrim Hawk you might want to check out Susan Sontag's essay about it—originally published in The New Yorker, but reprinted in her posthumous collection Where the Stress Falls.

11 rebeccanyc, I picked up A Time to Keep Silence but sent it to my Mom first since we share an interest in monasticism. His prose is just lovely but I think there is also something of the pre war period he manages to capture as well with a bit of the wistfulness of looking back. Particularly when he describes buildings that he didn't stop in that were destroyed by the war.

13 Thank you sarajill! I will check out her essay. I enjoy Sontag as well so I am curious to see what she makes of it.

#14, Marensr, one of the beauties of A Time to Keep Silence for me was that I have no particular interest in monasticism but was entranced nonetheless. I do have a particular fondness for books about worlds that no longer exist, in particular pre-war (and also pre-WWI) Europe, which is perhaps one of the reasons I was so amazed and absorbed by A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

Edited to see if the touchstones will work!

#15 rebeccanyc, I have been having touchstone troubles as well. I also have a fondness for books about worlds that don't exist any more and especially the periods before and between the world wars. Perhaps that is the other reason I liked Fermor so much.

Do you have other favorite books that cover those periods?

I did read the introduction to A Time to Keep Silence and found it interesting that he apologized for the breech of hospitality in writing about the monasteries he stayed in. I suppose that is a sort of disappearing world as well.

Have either of you read JL Carr's A Month in the Country? It's set in 1920 and the basic plot is that a WWI veteran arrives in a Yorkshire village to restore a medieval fresco in its church. The narrator is the same man recalling that summers events years later, so there is a great sense of time passed and that this is a lost era, which can never be regained. In one of my favorite bits he ponders the disappearance of horses from everyday life and remarks that no one in that place and time could have ever imagined such a thing happening. I highly recommend it; it's a beautiful work.

inge87, I love A Month in the Country! Definitely one of my favorite books.

Marensr, I'm thinking about your question but I went through a mini Central European phase last year and off the top of my head can recommend The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric and The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth.

I second the suggestion of The Radetzky March--quite good.

Oh thanks rebeccanyc and christiguc. I will have to look into these titles/

Inge87, I adored A Month in the Country. I've read it twice. I love those little quiet books that do a lot with what isn't said and what takes place in the small and everyday. Le Grand Meaulnes did that for me as well.

Interestingly enough, I came across the mention of Le Grand Meaulnes while reading The Way I found Her by Rose Tremain.
Now I feel compelled to go look for a copy.
Amazon, here I come!!!!!!

Oh Paola, it is lovely and sort of otherworldly. I hope you will like it.

I am sure I will, Maren.
It sounds like the kind of story I might enjoy.
:-))

P.S. I put it on my Amazon wishlist.

I'm putting it on my wishlist as well. Unfortunately (not really), I need to buy quite a few expensive (this is the unfortunate part) secondary texts for my grand foray through the Mahabharta with my real-time and opposed to virtual-time reading groups.

So have I!

Oh dear. I hope I haven't oversold it.

Urania you have good book groups.

I read through the first two books of Proust on my own (the Moncreiff translation that has been mentioned in another thread) and I wished I had someone to discuss them with.

That said I am going through (mostly American) authors I have neglected with a friend. Next I think we're reading Democracy in America.

Watch out Marensr, I want to read Le Grand Meaulnes now too! If it's no good, you'll have a lot to answer for!

Sorry it took me so long to answer. I have been moving and without internet. It is the price one pays for having so many books that one ultimately has to move them.

Well my consolation with Le Grand Meaulnes that it is short and if you all don't like it it won't have taken much time. I actuallly had one of those magical runs of very good books about the time I first read it. I had read Elizabeth and her German Garden, The Solitary Summer. The Return of the Soldier, A Month in the Country and Le Grand Meaulnes all in rapid succession. I think they all color how I feel about the other books.

Just read A Way of Life, Like Any Other based on recommendations here and elsewhere on LT.

(Cross Posted to 75 Book Challenge)

The genetic make-up of an organism determines every aspect of its psychology and physiology. The differences between men and women at the genetic level are tremendous and tremendously significant. There is such a thing as a DNA fingerprint which can be reliably used to identify criminals. Social science is scientific. "Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise . . . . Reality is the overseer at one's shoulder, ready to rap one's knuckles or to spring the trap in to which one has been led . . . by a too complacent reliance on mere surprise. . . . Reality is the unrelenting angel with whom scientists have agreed to wrestle" (Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science). To each of the above assertions (and others) biologist Richard C. Lewontin says "It ain't necessarily so," and he does so with such panache and wit, that his eviscerations of these commonplaces, collected in It Ain't Necessarily So, are a joy to read.

(Cross Posted to 75 Book Challenge)

As it's the first book I've finished in 2009 it would be premature to say that this will be the best book I read this year, but I feel certain that it will be a remarkable year indeed if I come across anything better than Álvaro Mutis's The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. This is not my first encounter with Mutis's protagonist; I met him first in an earlier collection of Mutis's Maqroll tales. New York Review Books, though, has, in this anthology, augmented those stories with others, and allowed Mutis to add what I take to be new material binding the various accounts together, as well as an excellent introduction by Francisco Goldman. If you have not had the pleasure of making Maqroll's acquaintance, don't wait. These are adventure stories for adults. Set in Majorca, Amazonia, the San Fernando Valley, Malaysia, and elsewhere, told with wit, panache, and profundity, they are what fiction should be—one of the things it should be—and too often is not. Maqroll can stand with any mythic hero one cares to name, but as he's a sailor it is hard to resist the notion that Mutis has given us another Odysseus, another Ulysses.

dcozy,

Are you trying to ruin my 2009 New Year's resolution before I have even started? No more new books I said. Now I have to go order The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. I have just finished reading Edward Lewis Wallant's The Tenants of Moonbloom. Wallant had a gift for tracing the lives of even the most misshapen of people in delicate lines, simple yet deceptively subtle and beautiful. I cried and cheered at the end of the book.

urania1:

Didn't Saint Augustine say something like: "Let me stop buying books, oh Lord, but not yet"?

dcozy,

I thought he was talking about sex not books . . . but a really good book . . . there are some similarities.