Big Books

[version]

That being said, the latest big book I've seen was written by a woman.

Ducks, Newburyport is a 2019 novel by British author Lucy Ellmann. The novel is written in the stream of consciousness narrative style, and consists of mostly a single sentence, running over more than 1000 pages.[2] It won the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize[3] was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

The novel's narrator is an unnamed middle-aged woman who lives in Newcomerstown, Ohio, is married, has four children, and was formerly a college teacher. She was treated for cancer and then quit her teaching career to help in her recovery. She engages herself in cooking. In one incident, the narrator's mother was saved by her sister from drowning in a lake in Newburyport, Massachusetts after she went chasing after ducks. The story narrates various global problems that cross the narrator's mind.[1] A sub-plot talks of a mountain lioness who is in search of her cubs; her adventures punctuate the novel.[5]

 

[Corpsey]

I read a good book comparing Dostoevsky and Tolstoy once by... George Steiner, I think?

Anyway he made much of the comparison between Russia and America, two gigantic countries, only lately "civilised", highly superstitious and philosophical insofar as finding out what they "meant". Europe, by comparison, was over-civilised, weighed down by its history. Europeans knew what they meant.

And I think he argued that the gigantic size of Russian novels and stuff like Moby Dick was too do with that gigantic new world, waiting to be documented and made meaningful.

 

[Corpsey]

Nowadays I think it's also about the novel fighting for attention and significance in a world that has by and large stopped taking it seriously.

 

[Corpsey]

Lucy Ellmann is Richard Ellmann's daughter. So I feel less inclined to sneer than I was before I googled her. Still, sounds like too much hard work to me.

She's American by birth and education though. And married to an American. She's as American as apple pie and 1000 word books about suburbanites.

 

[DannyL]

I'm a big Infinite Jest. It's a great novel. I have dodgy Internet tonight though and am not going to write a lengthy defence on my phone. Have read some other stuff I found dreadful though.

 

[luka]

I'm a big Infinite Jest. It's a great novel. I have dodgy Internet tonight though and am not going to write a lengthy defence on my phone. Have read some other stuff I found dreadful though.

Edmunds keep telling customers he's read it three times, apropos of nothing

 

[version]

IdleRich likes it too, iirc.

 

[luka]

Yeah let's not talk about it'll just upset them again

 

[version]

Anyway he made much of the comparison between Russia and America, two gigantic countries, only lately "civilised", highly superstitious and philosophical insofar as finding out what they "meant". Europe, by comparison, was over-civilised, weighed down by its history. Europeans knew what they meant.

And I think he argued that the gigantic size of Russian novels and stuff like Moby Dick was too do with that gigantic new world, waiting to be documented and made meaningful.

That's a bit like the Alan Moore thing from the 20th century thread, the idea that "America" had no real past so it had to forge something new. Obviously it's not really true though as America did have a past, it just wasn't anything to do with the European colonizers.

I'd be interested to hear what that bloke who wrote the book you're on about would say about Ulysses given it came from a European country. I guess you could point to something about the way Ireland was treated by the English.

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose Ulysses is in part a destructive book, an act of vengeance against the English and the English language itself, even as it exalts in it. Joyce wasn't much for nationalism, hence fleeing for Paris early on and never returning for more than a few days (if that?) to Dublin. His literary heroes were very continental, in general - Ibsen, Dante, primarily.

But the Irish relationship with the English and their imported language is probably what makes Irish literature so verbally rich and experimental. They subverted literature in ways that an English writer wouldn't have been capable of imagining.

Dubliners was one of the first books to hold up an unflattering mirror to contemporary Ireland, or at least I'm going to say it is here and hope I'm not contradicted.

Beckett felt similarly about Ireland, I believe. Found it stifling, provincial, held back by the Church and general philistinism.

Yeats was trying to do something nationalistic with his poetry. Reviving the Celtic myths. Trying to remind Ireland of what it once had been. (Joyce loved some of Yeats's poems - maybe many - but was disdainful towards the whole Celtic Revival.)

 

[DannyL]

He's told me the same thing! Change the bloody record Edmund eh?

 

[version]

I just started Cosmopolis the other day and it's got a similar feel to this stuff. The distant man in his luxury apartment.

Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week, but four times, five. What did he do when this happened? He did not take long walks into the scrolling dawn. There was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call. What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words.

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, in the rotating room at the top of the triplex.

He tried to sleep standing up one night, in his meditation cell, but wasn't nearly adept enough, monk enough to manage this. He bypassed sleep and rounded into counterpoise, a moonless calm in which every force is balanced by another. This was the briefest of easings, a small pause in the stir of restless identities.

There was no answer to the question. He tried sedatives and hypnotics but they made him dependent, sending him inward in tight spirals. Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic. The palest thought carried an anxious shadow. What did he do? He did not consult an analyst in a tall leather chair. Freud is finished, Einstein's next. He was reading the Special Theory tonight, in English and German, but put the book aside, finally, and lay completely still, trying to summon the will to speak the single word that would turn off the lights. Nothing existed around him. There was only the noise in his head, the mind in time.

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

 

[luka]

Nah, de Lillo writes horrible prose. No style. No flair. No glamour. Just doesn't have the touch. Craner is much better than that.

 

[luka]

It's leaden that and it's very pretentious.

 

[luka]

Harrow with a call. For example. That's something Craner could never write. He'd never make such a terrible mistake. He'd be incapable of it.

 

[luka]

And you might say to me but Luke isn't that Craner stuff maybe a wee bit pretentious and I would say it's a performance, he's having fun with it, his brow is not furrowed. There's an important difference there

 

[version]

It's not necessarily the prose. It's what he's talking about. That DeLillo thing reads like Ellis to me, minus the obsessive lists. The listless rich white guy in his 20s.

 

[version]

I read Ellis and that DeLillo thing and the first one Craner posted about the room and it all makes me think of what I was on about in the thread about "the surface".

 

[luka]

Yeah well Craner has always disturbed me and fascinated me with hIs lust for the image. He's willing to be seduced, he wants to be

 

[luka]

Which is why his toilet is full of old Italian vogue magazines