Great: I have a dose of miliaria rubra & it's not a Bolivian centre forward, nor something I picked up in Bangkok - it's prickly heat & it's annoying & itchy & mostly on my chest and arms. Even sitting on the balcony in what breeze there is isn't helping. But, anyway. June's book report. First admission - I gave up on my third reading of Gravity's Rainbow about halfway through - I think it was the heat - not enough energy, not enough patience - maybe like learning to fence & Japanese, I'll leave it for later. & don't ask about the font, I have no idea what's occurring. So...
Slavoj Žižek - Violence: Part of Picador's Big Ideas/Small Books series, Violence has Žižek in full-on high/low-culture riffs with his take on institutionalized violence - not so much an analysis of personal or subjective violence but six essays on the violence of economics, the state, politics, ideology, & religion. Sometimes, Žižek is controversial for being controversial's sake, at other times he is brilliantly luminous & forthright. Be good to see someone write a comparative study twinning this with Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down.
Jacques Roubaud - The Great Fire of London: Longer review coming on 3:AM. But for now, think Borges, Sebald, Chinese boxes, & Russian dolls.
Denis Johnson - Nobody Move: This short novel was first published in Playboy. It's Johnson's No Country for Old Men. A lean & mean book with terse dialogue & great one-liners. Johnson's always skated close to the full-blown-thriller pond - I'm thinking Angels & Already Dead - but with this novel he glides perfectly across its icy surface, double-axeling all the way. Almost perfect.
Tess Callahan - April & Oliver: My agent gave me this to read - it's not my usual thing - but I had nothing to spend my early evenings with & thought I'd give it a go. It's an assured first novel, three-dimensional characters (although Oliver is a bit of a dick), an extended-family narrative, a love story with a twist, sometimes gritty, sometimes poetic, it has humour in the right places, just about the right side of sentimentality – I would have nixed last part of chapter 22 - bit too pat metaphorically; overall, a well-written and interesting novel that zipped by in reading - think Jonathan Franzen meets Lionel Shriver. Nice cover.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa - Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories: One of my favourite books of all times - &, yes, I get overexcited when I talk about it. The famous ones are here - "Rashomon", "In a Bamboo Grove", "Hell Screen" - all short-story masterpieces. But my favourites are "The Life of a Stupid Man" and "Spinning Gears" in which the protagonist (a thinly disguised Akutagawa) is spiralling down into madness & suicide - a near contemporary of Kafka, Akutagawa's stories are as psychologically horrific & haunting.
Richard Price - Lush Life: Fantastic, funny, well-observed novel with elements of crime, family saga, & social realism. Not surprising really that the author of Clockers & co-writer for The Wire has spot-on dialogue, characters who step off the page into your thoughts, & plot lines as tight and exciting as a Johnny Thunder's guitar solo. Read Michael Chabon's article in the NYRB for a longer, better, & more thorough review than this one.
Sigmund Freud - The Psychology of Love: I haven't read any Freud since the mid-'80s but I had to read this in the name of research. It includes the famous "Dora" case & essays on sexual theory, the sexuality of children, & the psychology of erotic life. Weird in that, although I've read a few of these pieces before, I knew what the theories were; they've become ingrained in our unconscious - we grow up Freudians, only to challenge the appellation later when we come to know (whether consciously or not) Lacan, Foucault, & Freudbox.
David Peace - Occupied City: You're going to have to wait until my review appears in the Japan Times late this summer. For the time being, check out David talking about the writing of Occupied City here & here.
Right - off to scratch my itches, have a cold bath, apply calomine lotion, drink beer, & read James Sallis's excellent Driver. Next time.
Image - which I love - is by Michał Karcz - it's called Ultima Thule. Check out more of Michał Karcz's work here.
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