Who do you read?

Just finished ‘Bel Ami’ by Guy de Maupassant. Before that I read Kafka’s Letter to His Father.

Now I’m reading Elliot King’s ‘Dali Surrealism & Cinema’.

I skimmed and only saw her listed once, but I think a feminist could have a field day in here with the overabundance of references to existential thinkers but little mention of de Beauvoir. Frankly, her novels rank as some of my favorites of all time.

I’d put The Mandarins up against any New Wave film as well ;)

Good call on de Beauvoir. I forgot to mention her, which is ridiculous as she was a real cinephile too.

Bernanos
Camus
Dostoevsky
Flaubert
Goethe
Hostovský
Kafka
Lermontov
Tolstoy
Turgenev

Raymond Chandler, John Le Carre, Milan Kundera, C.L. Moore, Dashiell Hammett, Stendhal. Those are the authors whose entire works I’ve more or less read. I’m not looking at my bookshelf, so I can’t think of what others there might be, off the top of my head.

I should throw in Malcolm Lowry’s “Under The Volcano”. Such an incredible book, though I have yet to see the actual film.

Kafka is the greatest.

Von Kleist!

Nietzsche
Camus
Čechov

The last 10 books I have read are all non-fiction books about filmmaking and writing (I didn’t go to film school so I have to learn somehow). When I’m finished with the 3 projects I’m working on right now, I’m going to go on a reading blitzkrieg. Very good suggestions from everyone

books I am made of:

Uwe Johnson “Jahrestage”, “Speculations about Jakob”
Carlo Emilio Gadda “La cognizione del dolore”
David Markson “wittgenstein’s mistress”
Nicholas Mosley “Impossible object”
Elio Vittorini “Conversazioni in sicilia”
Michel Butor “La modification”
Danilo Kis “Garden, ashes”
Dumitru Tsepeneag “The vain art of the fugue”
William Gass “The tunnel”
William Gaddis “The recognitions”, “JR”
William Faulkner “Light of august”, “Absalom Absalom”
Malcolm Lowry “under the volcano”
Georges Perec “Un homme qui dort”, “La vie, mode d’emploi”
Joan Didion “Democracy”
Thomas Bernhard “The loser”
Samuel Beckett Trilogy
Walter Abish “How German is it”
Max Frisch “I’m not stiller”
Julio Cortazar “Hopscotch”
Mario Vargas Llosa “Conversation in the cathedral”
Ingeborg Bachmann “Malina”
James Joyce “Ulysses”
Adalbert Stifter “Rock crystal”
Knut Hamsun “Hunger”
Vladimir Nabokov “The gift”
Robert Walser “Jakob Von Gunten”

POETS: Friedrich Hölderlin / Arthur Rimbaud / Fernando Pessoa / Forough Farrokhzad/ Osip Mandelstam / Rabindranath Tagore / Charles Baudelaire / Pablo Neruda / Rainer Maria Rilke / Federico García Lorca / Paul Celan / François Villon / William Blake / John Keats / Alejandra Pizarnik / William B. Yeats / Rafael Alberti / Gabriela Mistral / Octavio Paz

NOVELISTS: Thomas Mann / Fyodor Dostoevsky / Yasunari Kawabata / Robert Musil / Franz Kafka / João Guimarães Rosa / Ernesto Sábato / Leo Tolstoy / Gustave Flaubert / Gabriel García Márquez / E. T. A. Hoffmann / Julio Cortázar / James Joyce / Marcel Proust / Natsume Soseki / Albert Camus / Juan Carlos Onetti / Kenzaburo Oë

PLAYWRIGHTS: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / William Shakespeare / Samuel Beckett / Anton Chekhov / Jean-Paul Sartre / Alfred Jarry / Heinrich von Kleist / Bertolt Brecht / Lope de Vega / Georg Büchner

Apursansar added two great suggestions: Ernesto Sabato is such a great and underrated novelist!

And Georg Buchner is not only great for his Plays. His novel Lenz is great too, and it has one of the better incipit I ever red.

so, i defenitely have to check out Natsume Soseki (I confess i never heard about him)

thanks!

Ernesto Sábato is indeed one of the great South American writers, and especially the “Report about the Blinds” is one of the greatest descriptions of paranoia I´ve ever read. His most important novels “Sobre héroes y tumbas” and “Abaddón, el exterminador” are far too little known outside of Argentina, and I think the latter one hasn’t even been translated into English.

I agree with you that “Lenz” is one of Büchner’s best works, and Werner Herzog also mentioned it frequently as one of his favorite books. Some time ago I saw a recent German film adaptation, but didn’t really like it.

Natsume Soseki is one of the greatest Japanese writers, and I would recommend you to start with his wonderful novel “Kokoro” which has also been adapted by Kon Ichikawa.

You’re right. “Abaddon, el exterminador” has not been translated.
I treasure my Italian translation of "Sobre héroes y tumbas” and “Tunnel”.

Kokoro is available at my favourite local library!
this afternoon I’ll bring it home.

thanks again

Blue, Adam Quan your nom de plum? :)

Right now i am into Neil Perts Masked Rider.

Josh S,

Don’t hesitate. I did at first as well but I’m so glad I picked it up. It’s Hemingway’s voice, through and through. Garden is actually really interesting because he uses his main character David to illustrate a lot of his own thoughts about the process of writing, moreso than any interview I’ve read.

I’m going to pick up A Movable Feast next.

I look at the post-humous books in the same way I look at the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick wasn’t done but he was dead so they handed final cut to Leon Vitali (and I believe partly to Christianne as well) and depended on the long working relationship they had to make sure his vision wasn’t tampered with.

Aaron: I guess that’s true, it’s not like they added any words and as you said it’s still his voice. I actually read A Movable Feast awhile back and I remember it being pretty good.

Have you read any of his other posthumous works?

yesterday I finished Kokoro. Thanks to Apursansar. It was great!
Now I’m looking forward watching the Ichikawa adaptation.

Bukowski and Chopra at the moment.

bukowski is excellent sadie

may i recommed Hollywood and Ham on Rye

I’ve been reading a lot of Bukowski’s poetry these days.

Josh,

No, I haven’t read anything other than The Garden of Eden, which was excellent. A Moveable Feast is next on my list as soon as I can find it used because Chapters wants $36.00 for it and that’s just crazy in my mind. It’s time Canadians got a break on our book prices considering our dollar is basically at par with the US now.

I did read the first few pages of it in the store the other day and I was struck by one line that I think might be the best line ever written:

“All the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter …”

I haven’t been able to get that line out of my head for days.

Aaron: I’ll have to remember The Garden of Eden next time I go on a Hemingway binge. ;)

Also, I should re-read A Moveable Feast now that you’ve mentioned that line I’ve realized that I don’t remember a damn thing. o_o I hope you’re able to find it soon and even more so, enjoy it. :)

I know exactly what you mean Josh. Hemingway has this sort of knack where he can write perfectly about the most seemingly mundane things and I find that I spend most of my time reading him thinking about what he’s not saying. I get lost in the mood of the story and how it relates to my own life and I totally forget what’s going on in the story itself.

When you think about the content of his stories, or the plots (or lackthereof), they sound banal: A bunch of drunks in Paris and Spain, a couple on their honeymoon, a guy with gangrene in Africa, an old guy who can’t catch fish. But, his genius is in his craft and moreover the way he can seemingly draw you into his mind and make you feel what he’s thinking, or his characters are thinking, without even saying anything. I think it may have to do with the cadence of his writing. Terse little lines that cilp along and almost hypnotize you to the point where you’re barely clinging to the story and you’re not really reading anymore as you are experiencing the story.

A perfect example of this is the end of “The Sun Also Rises”, when Lady Brett and Jake are in the cab and she says something about how good they could have been together and then Hemingway interjects this seemingly useless description of a cop directing traffic and then Jake replies with “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so.” Without the bit about the cop, without that pause that forces us to stop for a moment the last line would never have been so weighty, I never would have imagined Jake trying to distract himself by focusing on the cop to try to avoid the harsh reality of their situation. And then he delivers such a heartbreaking line. It’s genius.

Aaron: Wow. I don’t think I could’ve ever explained his work that way, but I do think you are right about those ‘little moments’. I love the brevity of his style, it’s so simple yet that in itself is what makes it unique.

Did you ever read Across the River and Into the Trees by any chance? I tried to get into it awhile ago, but I stopped unfortunately.

I read primary philosophical documents. I am currently working on pseudo-Dionysus’ Corpus Areopagiticum (in the original). I just find his theory of Monophysitism fascinating. Although I generally support Christological hypostasis, Denys’ claim manages to substantiate enough Eutychianism to provide an ineluctable, though sadly apocryphal, literary peroration. I often vacillate between this dyophisitism and Aquinal ontology for my philosophiæ doctor, but recurrently find myself aspiring something a bit more substantial. Perhaps, mimesis in the Western literary canon…? It’s possible, yet I find so many critical theorist sophomoric, particularly Auerbach. It’s so onerous to contrive contemporary erudite literature.

It has been a great decade for erudite literature.

Hardly.