Currently Reading: Chapter II

[mudd]

midnight's children is definitely a re-write of tin drum, but i wouldn't hold that against rushdie as an author.

actually the first time i read tin drum i burned out halfway and gave up. went back to it a couple years later and it just flew by. fantastic book.

haven't read any other grass, though.

m

[Herb Levy]

Have any of y'all who've read Tin Drum more than once read the recent English translation?

It's one of the few works from the second half of the 20th century with more than one English translation & I was wondering if it were improved enough to commit to re-reading the story.

I wouldn't mind if others also noted relatively recent books with more than one English translation here. I know there's a forthcoming re-translation of a Clarice Lispector book that I'm looking forward to.

[grant]

[Wombatz]

Oh. Is that anywhere near his best work? (Love The Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole.)

[surfer]

The Tin Drum - Günter Grass

The "Niobe" Chapter is absolutely brilliant.

A luxuriant wooden woman, green and naked, arms upraised and hands indolently clasped in such a way as to reveal every single one of her fingers; sunken amber eyes gazing out over resolute, forward-looking breasts. This woman, this figurehead, was a bringer of disaster. She had been commissioned by Portinari the merchant from a sculptor with a reputation for carving figureheads; the model was a Flemish girl close to Portinari. Scarcely had the green figure taken its place beneath the bowsprit of a galleon than the girl, as was then customary, was put on trial for witchcraft. Put to the question before going up in flames, she had implicated her patron, the Florentine merchant, as well as the sculptor who had taken her measurements so expertly. Portinari is said to have hanged himself for fear of the fire. As to the sculptor, they chopped off both his gifted hands to prevent him from ever again transforming witches into figureheads. While the trials were still going on in Bruges, creating quite a stir because Portinari was a rich man, the ship bearing the figurehead fell into the piratical hands of Paul Beneke. Signer Tani, the second merchant, fell beneath a pirate’s poleax. Paul Beneke was the next victim; a few years later he incurred the disfavor of the patricians of his native city and was drowned in the courtyard of the Stockturm. Ships to whose bows the figurehead was affixed after Beneke’s death had a habit of bursting into flames before they had even put out of the harbor, and the fire would spread to other vessels; everything burned but the figurehead, which was fireproof and, what with her alluring curves, always found admirers among shipowners. But no sooner had this woman taken her place on a vessel than mutiny broke out and the crew, who had always been a peaceful lot until then, decimated each other. The unsuccessful Danish expedition of the Danzig fleet under the highly gifted Eberhard Ferber in the year 1522 led to Ferber’s downfall and bloody insurrection in the city. The history books, it is true, speak of religious disorders—in 1523, a Protestant pastor named Hegge led a mob in an iconoclastic assault on the city’s seven parish churches—but we prefer to blame the figurehead for this catastrophe whose effects were felt for many years to come; it is known at all events that the green woman graced the prow of Ferber’s ship.

Full chapter: http://www.e-reading.org.ua/chapter.php ... _Drum.html


"Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn’t God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coat-hanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe, can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts."

[nicenick]

odd, hallucinatory, disturbing, hilarious - pretty incredible so far. nice blurb, and excerpt, here: http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=8225

[Charon]

Infinite Jest

[cheerios]

phew finished 2666 a couple of days ago
what a great book so many thoughts swirling around about it right now

picked up The Street of Crocodiles am starting on that now

[Eyjafjallajökull]

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (well, mostly skimming through forgotten passages)
Fakhreddin Azimi, Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle against Authoritarian Rule

[Eyjafjallajökull]

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man

Without the shadow of a doubt a splendid piece of historical record but I readily but timidly opted for something more, say, gladsome and exhilarant to accompany my perusal. Knowing my susceptibility to the ever-lurking specter of depression, reading this without further invoking something to slightly divert my attention -- although this surely is something that ethically solicits us to listen carefully and focused, and I adamantly pursued this kind of Aristotelian ethic or self-pedagogy when I read The Destruction of the European Jews but I fathomed I just couldn't do it this time, and from what I could ascertain thus far it is the mere particularity of the novel form (even though the more I think about it the more evidently spurious my conjecture becomes for I didn't feel the same way about Elie Wiesel for example) that accounts for my inability. There's something about it that makes it all the more terrifying and I'm still struggling to figure out what exactly it is. I have, therefore, arrived at my initial point again, due to the fact that art in the most, ehm, flattering sense is always, as it were, something that refuses to fully close that uncanny, liminal space between representation and experience, translation and interpretation (and thus closer to anything one could genuinely deem an acknowledgment of "our ontological position" or inter-est as Arendt would say) and Levi does this remarkably magisterially. He once again proves that we do indeed not need a supposedly transcendental theory of justice in order to judge and to eventually come to the very same conclusion: Never again.

Anyway, I once again sincerely apologise for forging these ever so unreadable and dreadfully, abashingly personal reviews.

[faster]

Just did the "Little Harmonic Labyrinth" chapter with some kids today, so good & so much fun. I really have to go back and re-read Goedel, Escher, Bach.

[Stevo]

Shantaram fictionalised autobio of an Australian fugitive in India in the early 80s. Pretty compelling read certainly one of best I've read in a while.
Think i had it recommended some years ago so it was familiar when I found it in a charity shop coming back on a trip last year. Read first chapter on bus then managed to lose it down far side of bed. Now refound and finding it difficult to put down.

[grant]

Burroughs / Gale - The Book of Breeething


illustrations and writings exploring Egyptian Hiero, Hassan i Sabah, Curse of King Tut, and so on. all through the vessel of pictograms.

a new favorite.

for example (sorry about lack of pics):

coming forth: legs, mouth, eye

waiting: a hand pointing, a road

for thee: mouth, cup

from old: sheath of wheat, mouth, owl, ejaculating phallus

Any variation of sets and pictures can be used . . . harvest moon over the corn shucks and pumpkins, boy with bare teeth as he jacks off, howling wolf, owl in a tree.

meanwhile, i made a few variations of my own. was fun, and allowed me to connect and build upon a wide-ranging thread of thought.

i somehow interrelated God with hermaphrodites, Darwin as eternal and absolute hermaphrodite, Lacan (names-of-the-father), Crowley and the 11th degree, lettuce, gnosis, sacred sperm, military horses, isis/horus. list goes on. . .

[grisha]

"W, or the Memory of Childhood", by Georges Perec.

[vienna1896]

[cheerios]

W.G. Sebald - Austerlitz

[Eyjafjallajökull]

Probably one of the most challenging books I've read in a long time. I'm still attempting to come to terms with some perceived (!) inconsistencies in argumentation but am confident that they're going to dissolve eventually.

[Antoine]

"W, or the Memory of Childhood", by Georges Perec.

pretty great book, loved this idea of the alternance between the two stories...

[grisha]

there are several of his books translated into hebrew. first book of his i've read was Espèces d'espaces, and this is the third. it was actually first of his books translated, and maybe because the translation is older, or maybe because it's a different (and older) publisher, the translation is really "old school" (lots of this biblical language), so i am struggling at times... still, beautiful book, and his writing is absolutely insuppressible. have three to choose from next, maybe will go with La Vie mode d'emploi, even though it looks rather intimidating .

[aditi]