Friday, January 24, 2025

All the dogs of My Life by Elizabeth Von Arnim

All the Dogs of My LifeAll the Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There were fourteen dogs and they make up the bulk of these stories lightly colored in with her biographical details. Some of her dogs evoke great affection, at least one not so much after he was neutered and lived only to eat and sleep and sadly end his days too soon. Her descriptions are mostly upbeat and witty as she traipses across Europe displaced by war and changing fortunes. One wants a straight forward biography of Elizabeth von Arnim. She's cagey about sticking to the dogs and teasing us with her own life changes. And, my goodness, according to GR, "After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H.G. Wells, then later married Earl Russell, elder brother of the Nobel prize-winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield." But I enjoyed the book.

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1974: a personal history by Francine Prose

href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198530961-1974" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">1974: A Personal History1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a memoir of the seventies centered around the author's brief relationship with Anthony Russo, the co-conspirator with Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers' revelations gleaned during their employment with the RAND Corporation. The topics are dear to me as one who participated in this era, has written about it, and is married to a Vietnam Veteran anti-war activist, and the story is prescient today as we plan our own 2025 actions. I appreciated Prose's honest appraisals of her youthful self ("I tell myself that not everyone is born with a conscience, that our moral sense can develop at any age. We can change. We can change our minds. Sometimes, when people have asked what my novels are "about," I've said, for want of a better answer, or any answer at all, that some of them are "about " how a person develops a moral conscience, or not. Maybe the subject interests me because I feel that my own conscience developed a little late"), as well as her vivid descriptions of San Francisco landmarks and events, the cultural earmarks and topics of the era. She is a talented writer and skillfully structures her memoir.

Two more quotations:

"During a CBS News interview...Ellsberg said that it would hurt the American people to learn "that the men who they gave so much respect and trust, as well as power, regarded them as contemptuously as they regarded our Vietnamese allies...We are the government. The lesson is that the people of this country can't afford to let the president run the country by himself."

"There's a grim fun in listening to Johnson's recorded telephone conversations and Nixon's Oval Office taps. The crudeness and vulgarity, the vindictive nastiness, the childish lack of impulse control shown by the leaders of our country--it's comical and terrifying to realize that these guys were in charge."

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Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

CleanClean by Alia Trabucco Zerán
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

2025 started off poorly in so many ways, and I found it particularly hard to get settled with the right book until I picked up Clean. From the first page, I was hooked on the story, the mystery, the voice of the narrator who speaks to us from a locked room. Estela is a domestic employee accused of murdering the child she's cared for since birth. There is much on class exploitation and domestic tyranny, as well as a devastating scene with a dog, and the translation was flawless.

Now I've picked up Elena Knows also in South America with a struggling protagonist, a possible murder. Am I to start writing thematic recaps like my esteemed GR cohort?

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Thursday, January 2, 2025

U and I by Nicholson Baker

U and IU and I by Nicholson Baker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Nicholson Baker explores his creative process through his obsession with John Updike as he recalls a lifetime of reading John Updike and what he remembers without opening a book for reference. Wonderfully witty and charming and sending me back to read his idol and his idol's idols: e.g. Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Henry James ("The Figure in the Carpet"), Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes and Pages from a Cold Island, Edmund Wilson, BARTHELME DONALD, Nabokov Vladimir and his 3x5 cards for his fiction (Pnin, Glory).
Opening sentence: "On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law's study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap."

A favorite quote:
"Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals." 135

"With dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren't gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can't quite master. Heterosexual male novelists don't for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing and indeed of art, aspre, and this big time grandeur attracts them, but they find much to their perplexity, that they can't internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges."

"They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses by James Joyce, War and Peace, Pnin."



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TOAF (To After That) by Renee Gladman

To After That (TOAF)To After That by Renee Gladman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Published by the Dorothy Project in 2008, this unconventional work is a retracing of the author's journaling, reading, walking and thinking about a novel she was writing in March of 2000.

She is a poet who lives and walks through an unnamed town with her dog Eva and writes in cafes. She occasionally mentions her lover, Frog. She provides a scene or two from the subject novel or novella, After That.

"Inevitably, one kind of reading leads to another kind, and it was this moving from author to author that allowed me to cover ground as to the nature of my tone," she explains and mentions the "undefined flatness of Julio Cortázar's prose" and the simplistic character in The Gangsters by the late French writer Hervé Guibert who wrote To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life about having HIV. Other references:

Marguerite Duras's Two by Duras: The Slut of the Normandy Coast / The Atlantic Man

Peter Greenaway film The Falls
Anna Bailey's "obscure festival" film, Carla and Aïda, about two black lovers not unlike the author and her Frog, and the narrator explores that film in great detail. I could not find the film online.

Michelangelo Antonioni's film of Red Desert..

I enjoyed meandering along with this author, but many puzzles remain and I look forward to further exploration of her readings and other writing.

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Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Pastors and MastersPastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Let's go up to the fire, Miss Bentley," said Mrs. Merry, and leave the men to talk about the newspapers in the cold."

"Why, what a way for your wife to talk in your presence, Mr. Merry!" said Delia.

"I don't suppose wives ought to talk at all in their husband's presence, said Herrick.

"Civilised countries are so artificial," said Emily. "But you should not speak true words in jest, Nicholas. It is not open of you."

"Well, what about us single women, Miss Herrick?"

"Well, I don't suppose we ought to talk at all. I expect we ought to be exposed at birth, or something like that."

"How would it be known at birth which of us were going to be single?" siad Delia.

"That is really clever of you," said Emily. "Though people exposed at birth would be single, wouldn't they?"

"Well,l we were certainly classed by the state with paupers and idiots and children, before we had the vote," said Miss Basden. "I mean we women were."

"And no nice children, or paupers either, and no really sensible idiots, would talk in people's presence, " said Bumpus.

And so writes Ivy Compton-Burnett with her witty, clipped dialogue which makes up the bulk of the book. Pastors and Masters describes the relationships of those involved with a private English school through their conversation. I found it delightful if confusing as I struggled to clarify their connections (see Wikipedia for a who's who). The gist of the book is a promised new novel written by Mr. Herrick, proprietor of the school, who discovers a colleague has also written a new novel and they plan a joint reading where it all falls apart. Most enjoyable.

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