Book Recommendations

[yellowish haze]

Just started reading this one:

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bestseller Simmons (The Terror) brilliantly imagines a terrifying sequence of events as the inspiration for Dickens's last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in this unsettling and complex thriller. In the course of narrowly escaping death in an 1865 train wreck and trying to rescue fellow passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish figure named Drood, who had apparently been traveling in a coffin. Along with his real-life novelist friend Wilkie Collins, who narrates the tale, Dickens pursues the elusive Drood, an effort that leads the pair to a nightmarish world beneath London's streets. Collins begins to wonder whether the object of their quest, if indeed the man exists, is merely a cover for his colleague's own murderous inclinations. Despite the book's length, readers will race through the pages, drawn by the intricate plot and the proliferation of intriguing psychological puzzles, which will remind many of the work of Charles Palliser and Michael Cox. 4-city author tour. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From

The New Yorker

 

The New Yorker

In this creepy intertextual tale of professional jealousy and possible madness, Wilkie Collins tells of his friendship and rivalry with Charles Dickens, and of the mysterious phantasm named Edwin Drood, who pursues them both. Drood, cadaverous and pale, first appears at the scene of a railway accident in which Dickens was one of the few survivors; later, Dickens and Collins descend into London�s sewer in search of his lair. Meanwhile, a retired police detective warns Collins that Drood is responsible for more than three hundred murders, and that he will destroy Dickens in his quest for immortality. Collins is peevish, vain, and cruel, and the most unreliable of narrators: an opium addict, prone to nightmarish visions. The narrative is overlong, with discarded subplots and red herrings, but Simmons, a master of otherworldly suspense, cleverly explores envy�s corrosive effects.
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[Doctor Munoz]

Bioy Casares is somehow shadowed by his friend, the giant Borges, but he was a great fantasist in his own right. This novella is his most famous work, and for many his best. However I think that some of his later work is still better. In anycase, a haunting story about a man stranded in a desert island, that may be not that deserted. A story about loneliness, love and inmortality, actually bubbling with ideas. Written in 1940, it is a classic of fantasy in Spanish, but not very well known in the English-speaking world. That changed a little when a character in "Lost" appeared on screen reading Bioy's book.

[Daisy]

From Toby Green’s review, published in the Independent on 29 June 2007, of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray:

Creative genius can at times be connected to crisis. Some of the most pathfinding literature and philosophy of the 20th century emerged from disaster. The most insightful work of Achebe, Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn would not exist were it not for the debris of massacres. No one reading this new book about “apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia” can be under any illusion but that this is also a time of crisis. Indeed, one of John Gray’s supreme qualities as a thinker is that he is bereft of illusions.

Stripping away the meaningless verbiage which swaddles so much analysis, Gray discerns an underlying structure of thought (or lack of thought) in the political landscape. This is the refuge in fantasies which derive either from apocalyptic religion or from secularist utopianism. Such fantasies, he shows, drive the neo-conservative agenda and are the true origins of the crisis faced today.

At first, this analysis may not appear original. Gray is hardly alone in drawing attention to the influence of the apocalyptic Christian right in America. The most disturbing instance came in October 2003, when under-secretary of defence William Boykin declared that the enemy in the “war on terror” was “a guy called Satan.” As Gray notes, instead of this remark heralding the end of Boykin’s career, he continues to work at the Pentagon.

Gray’s importance, however, lies in tracing the connections of thought rather than in outlining the detail of politics. Black Mass shows the intellectual linkage between today’s religious rhetoric and movements as diverse as the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins and the Nazis. His deep insight is that the underlying structure of modern politics derives from Christianity, and that the return of overt religious language to politics is merely the renewal of a latent characteristic.

There is much here to stir controversy. When British politics subsists within the parameters of secularism, the idea that this secularism is derivative of Christianity is highly provocative. Yet the argument is meticulous and persuasive. Gray shows lucidly how the secular utopian projects of both communism and Nazism were vehicles for religious myths.

Both ideologies held that after a great struggle the optimum social organisation would emerge for a chosen people –proletarians for the communists, Aryans for the Nazis. In this process there was a redemptive quality to the violence, which was an essential part of the process of revolution which accompanied the change.

This may seem a long way from Christianity but, as Gray shows, the concepts of an “end time” and of a final struggle leading to harmony are central to early Christian theology. Furthermore, “the very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion”. Thus the ideas of the most brutal atheistic regimes of the 20th century derived their imagery from religious thought. . . .

Gray is unusual among contemporary Anglo-American philosophers in recognising the primary role of the passions in forming ideas. He is a compelling writer, dismembering his targets with surgical irony.

[vegetable theories]

Thanks for this recommendation !
I read Straw Dogs, an earlier book by John Grey and was really impressed.
He seems to upset a lot of liberal humanists (and I'd call myself a liberal humanist) because he's critical of the idea of progress, or inevitable progress. They seem to think that he's saying that there's no point to political struggle, but I don't think that's his message at all. If anything, his writing makes me think that we should take nothing for granted, but be constantly vigilant.
Also, the way that the religious/secular debate has become so polarized makes his writing more refreshing because he's neither for or against religion. He just seems to think that, like violence or sexual desire, it's pre-programmed into humans.
Ofcourse I may be misrepresenting his ideas because I've only read the one book, but do I intend to read Black Mass. It looks really interesting.

[Cyril Tourneur]

Hermann Ungar 'The Maimed'



Review
"The Maimed" takes us to a bizarre interwar Prague populated by petty bureaucrats who are all unraveling inside. -- The Prague Post

David Lynch and Patrick McCabe fans will fall right into this marvelously dark and psychotically twisted tale. -- The New Pages

The Maimed is a great work. Subtly written, well-constructed. Kudos to Kevin Blahut for an excellent translation. -- Christopher Lord

This is an absolutely riveting tale ...The translation by Kevin Blahut is fine. The design of the book is ... gorgeous. -- Ralph Magazine

Ungar’s "The Maimed" captures the suffocatingly claustrophobic life of Franz Polzer, a life haunted by lies, deceit, brutality, blackmail ... -- Education Digest

[A] superlative introduction to an author whose small oeuvre’s long absence from translation seems unforgivable. -- Hyde Park Review of Books

[O]ne of the most provocative novels I have ever read. -- Thomas Mcgonigle, Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2002

a sexual hell, full of filth, crime and the deepest melancholy, but nevertheless the digression of an inwardly pure artistry. -- Thomas Mann

great and terrible, alluring and repulsive ... unforgettable, although one would like to ... flee the evil sense of oppression it creates. -- Stefan Zweig




Franz Polzer works in a bank, noting and filing papers. He speaks to no one, goes from his room to his work, and then back to his room. He eats a simple meal prepared by his landlady, the widow Klara Porges. He then sleeps, gets up and goes to work, arriving at exactly the same time he has for the last seventeen years.

But the widow craves affection, finally gets him to take her for a walk, and then seduces him --- much to his shame. Meanwhile, he meets with his friend Karl Fanta who has turned from being a handsome young man to a cripple who has lost both legs and one arm.

Karl whispers to Franz that his wife Dora is plotting against him, wants to steal his money, has hired on an attendant to kill him and take the inheritance. To get away from his wife, Karl (and the attendant Sonntag) move into Franz's apartment. At that point, everything falls apart.

Well, not really. Like a Kafka novel, everything has been falling apart from the very beginning. Franz Polzer (the word means "weenie") worries about his fellow workers in the bank laughing at him; he worries about the widow stealing sheets of paper from him; he worries about how yellow and hairy she is; he worries about a hole in the knee of his best pair of pants; he worries --- as all good neo-schizophrenics must --- about worrying.

But with Sonntag and his knife (he used to be a butcher) and Karl with his nutty ideas about people wanting to steal from him and kill him --- with all these right down the hall, things go from being screwy to being downright scary. Klara Porges gets pregnant, and Fritz, lying next to her in bed, thinks,

The child in her belly was breathing, the living child. Soon her belly would be opened and the child would lie before Polzer, naked, with tubular limbs and deep creases in the flesh at the joints, a girl, with a line between her legs...He did not want it, it should never be.

This meditation on his soon-to-be-born daughter leads him into a threnody on ugliness --- a song that is repeated again and again:

She was ugly and everything was a torment, But everything had to be a torment and everything had to be ugly.

"Everything had to be ugly:" Franz with his "big red hands." Karl with his stumps and suppurating wounds. Sonntag with his blood-stained apron. Frau Klara, with

the swollen belly, her breasts which fell to the side when she lay down, the hairs between them, her fat face, the hands that had grasped all over the bodies of the men.

§ § §

This is an absolutely riveting tale, told with an absolute minimum of detail --- filled with quick, impressionistic sketches. With its repeated horrors out of the daily grind of life, it reminds one of the post WWI art of Weimar Germany known as Die neue Sachlichkeit --- "the new matter-of-factness," or "the new resignation," possibly even, "the new blah" --- with painters like George Grosz, Georg Schotz, Otto Dix, Otto Griebel, and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen.

The Maimed is thus first cousin to Die neue Sachlichkeit. There are no flowers here, no trees, no happy children, no happy people. The characters are trapped in a miserable merry-go-round, desperate for an escape and yet afraid of any escape that is offered to them. One is reminded of Sartre's La Nausée, West's Miss Lonelyhearts, the plays of Eugene O'Neill.

Kafka --- a contemporary --- is merry and bright compared to Ungar. At times, the world of The Maimed is so drab, so bleak, so miserable, so misogynistic that one wants to lay it aside, especially when the cripple Karl starts in to talking about Klara's body,

Her stomach is ugly, isn't it? Covered with folds of fat? You must be able to see it when she bathes...You say she is not very fit. Her breasts, her fat stomach, slap slap, flabby as boiled pork. Just like that, Polzer, slap slap, the mother sow!

But The Maimed works on several levels besides one of naked disgust. There are the tiny details that tear the characters apart (and hold the novel together): the butcher's knife, and the blood-stain on his apron; Polzer's hat that people seem to laugh at; the Saint Christopher painting that hangs over his bed (that falls crashing to the ground); the suit that a stranger buys him; and --- again and again --- "the white part in Klara's hair." These are themes that bind the story tightly, symbols that come banging together at the very end when Klara Porges' head is found, in the stairwell, wrapped on a dirty cloth, chopped off at the neck.

§ § §

This is one of two novels written by Hermann Ungar before he died in 1929 at the age of thirty-six. The present edition contains a brief fragmentary final chapter that the author himself rejected when the book was published in 1923. It should not have been included here; in four pages, it undoes much of the ambiguousness that lends such power to this story of cruelty and unrest and anxiety.

The translation by Kevin Blahut is fine. The design of the book is a gorgeous, subtle work of art all on its own.

[Doctor Munoz]

THE BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS. Script and art by Kim Deitch.

This is the story of Ted Mishkin, a cartoonist that, since his childhood, cultivates the acquaintance of a black cat, a fiend, sleazy and foul mouthed, probably a figment of his imagination but in any case a driving force for him both towards to his success in the animation industry and to alcoholism. So the world get to know Waldo the cat as a screen character akin to Felix, but only his creator knows that there is a, well, real cat behind the "funnies", a cat that lives "at the edge of things", so to speak, only visible for drunkards or madmen.
The sheer scope of this work, (it reads to some extent as an introduction to American animation history) the beautiful lunacy of the drawings, mixing underground proclivities with the half naive half perverse Bettyboopiesque thirties style... I have no real words to express the unique fascination of this graphic novel, a masterpiece of weird narrative.
By the way, Jim Woodring likes Deitch. He said there is so much fun in Deitch comics, a flow of entertainment so thick that feels like horror. Or something on that line.

[yellowish haze]

Review
"[a] hypnotic narrative about the rise of a mysterious, unnamed city." -- San Diego Union Tribune, June 20. 2004

"dexterously braids cords of memory, imagination, and elegaic intensity." -- Rain Taxi, Spring 2004

Product Description


Hailed as one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism, Dreams and Stones won the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize in Poland in 1995. Telling the story of the growth of a great city, Tulli relates its history by entering the lives of the stones from which the buildings and monuments are constructed, as well as the dreams of people and objects interwoven with the city's history. Revealing the inner lives of buildings, mirrors and news-paper -photographs, she explores the design of the city, its growth and its workings. Dismantling the city piece by piece, Tulli reveals a very different metaphysical landscape lying, literally, beneath and around it.

[puppet nonsense]

I'm not sure if they have been mentioned yet, but I would highly recommend both Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, and Only Revolutions. The House of Leaves is a horror story, and it follows several different people involved at different times. The book is a labyrinth and the layout of the book will change depending upon what is happening in the story. For example, sections reversed so you have to hold them up to a mirror, or sections with one or only a few words printed on them during a particularly intense section. Deals a lot with the same kind of unexplained all pervading horror as it seems everyone here likes. Only Revolutions is also a crazy book. It's a love story really, but not some romcom starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock or Jeniffer Aniston. The whole work is written in a sort of prose that reminds me of song lyrics or poetry. Even words that do not exist seem to make sense in context. The book is 360 pages, and you read 8 pages from one side, flip the book over and read 8 from the otherside. This may sound confusing, but each side is the story from one of the two characters views. Hopefully that made sense. It's an awesome book, and I highly suggest it.

[bendk]

Not really a recommendation, because I haven't read it yet, but I think this book looks interesting. I'm going to try to get it through the interlibrary loan system.





Possessed
Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema
by Stefan Andriopoulos

Translated by Peter Jansen and Stefan Andriopoulos
208 pages, 13 halftones 6 x 9 © 2008

Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. Stefan Andriopoulos shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Tracing this preoccupation through the period’s films—as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts—Andriopoulos pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one’s will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler famously portrayed the hypnotist’s seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, Andriopoulos also develops an innovative reading of Kafka’s novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies.
Blending theoretical sophistication with scrupulous archival research and insightful film analysis, Possessed adds a new dimension to our understanding of today’s anxieties about the onslaught of visual media and the expanding reach of vast corporations that seem to absorb our own identities.

[The New Nonsense]

Quote Originally Posted by puppet nonsense

I'm not sure if they have been mentioned yet, but I would highly recommend both Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves,...

That's funny. I was just reading about this book the other day. There's a huge Wiki page devoted to it with tons of info:

House_of_Leaves" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves

House_of_Leaves

I read it back in 2000 when it first came out. However, on my initial read much of the book's hidden content slipped past me, at least the stuff that wasn't obvious. For example, the wiki entry mentions hidden Morse code within the book's paragraphs. The book is a cryptographer's dream. Over the years it's developed a cult status inspiring websites and chat boards devoted to unlocking its secrets. Even nine years later people are still decoding and discovering hidden material within its pages.

A few years ago I read a book called THE CARVER EFFECT by Wolfgang Von Bober (1979). The book details Von Bober's allegedly true experiences while living in an infamous haunted mansion in northern Wisconsin called Summerwind -- probably the most famous haunted house in the state (sadly it was struck by lighting in 1981 and burned down). While reading the book I noticed numerous occurrences mirroring events in HOUSE OF LEAVES. These events were far too specific too be pure coincidence. Therefore, I'm fairly certain Danielewski based his House of Leaves mansion in part on the real-life Summerwind mansion.

I plan to reread HOUSE OF LEAVES soon. I think I'll get a lot more out of it the second time around. It's an incredible book. There's also a companion book to it called, THE WHALESTOE LETTERS.