BIBLIOGRIND
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Archive for A Commonplace Book
January 9, 2012 at 4:52 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I began reading José Saragamo in the 1980s. His narrative style was simple, to my understanding, then, of narrative. When I read him I felt as if a wise man, or else an old man who’d seen much in life, was telling me a story over a cup of coffee, his newspaper cast aside, folded into half. His is the voice of someone who enjoys telling stories, and knows how to move himself, the storyteller, in and out of the narrative in just that way where we get humorous, or black, or critical information, and then as seamlessly as we might imagine, brings us back with a mere caress.
Everyone knows “Blindness” but my favorite of Saragamo’s is “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” — we get the life of Christ, with all that we might have thought was missing, as told by the most cryptic character in all of literature.
january, 2005
“I’ll bet if we met the devil and he allowed us to open him up, we might be surprised to find God jumping out. Pastor still liked to provoke Jesus with these outrageous remarks. Jesus had gradually learned that the best way to deal with this was ignore it and say nothing. For Pastor might have gone even further, suggesting that on opening up God one might find the devil inside.”
– José Saragamo, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ”
December 31, 2011 at 12:39 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Ian McEwan is, perhaps, the most austere of writers, and one who can pack a single sentence with imagery, meaning, and echoes.
december 31, 2011
The furthest stars of the Milky Way were visible, not as a scattering of fine dust, but as distinct points of light which made the brighter constellations appear uncomfortably close. The very darkness was tangible, warm and cloying. Mary clasped her hands behind her head and watched the sky, and Caroline sat forward eagerly, her gaze moving proudly between Mary’s face and the heavens, as though she were personally responsible for their grandeur. ‘I spend hours out here.’ She seemed to wheedle for praise, but Mary did not even blink.
– Ian McEwan, “The Comfort of Strangers”
December 29, 2011 at 4:15 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Hermann Broch wrote what I think is the definitive pre-Hitlerian story of how Germany (and Europe, if you care to take the long view) lost its way, from about the time of Wilhelm II to the running brook that became Nazism. Broch’s THE SLEEPWALKERS is a trilogy that takes place some 16-20 years apart, with interrelated stories and characters. The effect is more than chilling, when set against what we have witnessed since post-WW II Europe and America (perhaps also from a post-colonial world-view).
june 14, 2010
” ‘Yes, you see, Europe has already become a pretty dubious field for the Church. But Africa, on the other hand! Hundreds of millions of souls as raw material for the Faith. And you can rest assured that a baptized negro is a better Christian than twenty Europeans. If the Catholics and the Protestants want to steal a march on each other for the winning of these fanatics it’s very understandable; for there’s where the future of their religion lies; there will be found the future warriors of the faith who will march out one day, burning and slaying in Christ’s name, against a heathen Europe sunk in corruption, to set at last, amid the smoking ruins of Rome, a black Pope on the throne of Peter.’ ”
– Hermann Broch, “The Romantic” (THE SLEEPWALKERS trilogy)
December 21, 2011 at 6:13 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
If you haven’t read Iris Murdoch lately, I recommend “The Black Prince” … truly a wonderful farce that carries you from the first line to the last gasp of its twist-turn ending.
october 8, 2011
‘Bradley, I read such an extraordinary theory about the sonnets –’
“Be silent. So Shakespeare is at this most cryptic when he is talking about himself. How is it that Hamlet is the most famous and accessible of his plays?’
‘But people argue about that too.’
‘Yes, but nevertheless it is the best known work of literature in the world. Indian peasants, Australian lumberjacks, Argentine ranchers, Norwegian sailors, members of the Red Army, Americans, all the most remote and brutish specimens of mankind have heard of Hamlet.’
– Iris Murdoch, “The Black Prince”
December 17, 2011 at 12:40 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I was turned onto this novel by a writer friend, and reading its 100+ pages became a wonderful bath in warm, strange waters. The voice takes you into a story at once meaningful but awful.
july 4, 2009
“Sister Agnes slinks through a gap in the whiteness with a straw basket of underthings that they silently pin up in the hidden world inside the tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets.
Half an hour passes. Wind tears at their work. Sister Agnes aches from reaching. She blows the sting from her reddened fingers. She watches the postulant as the tilting sheets wrap around her and shape her. She watches the girl as she tederly releases herself, as though tugging a ghost’s hands away.”
– Ron Hansen, “Mariette in Ecstasy”
December 13, 2011 at 7:36 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Truman Capote’s writing can be sharp, it can be original; it will make you understand aspects of life and death you had never considered. Capote the man was as much a talker, in his limelight of success, as he was a writer. Talk is cheap; but what happens when we want to step behind the curtain?
august 15, 2011
“When I was young, I wanted to be rich, terribly, terribly rich. My mother, after divorcing my father, married a rich man, but they were upper-middle-class rich, and that’s worse than being poor. There’s no taste in middle-class rich. You must be either very rich or very poor. There’s absolutely no taste in between. I was sent to some good schools, but I hated the rich boys. They had no taste.”
– Gerald Clarke, “Capote: A Biography”
December 8, 2011 at 10:49 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
∞ Commonplace books are things of the past, it seems. Washington and Jefferson each kept one, TF throughout his life. When other, less imaginative, teaching and entertainments replaced books, people stopped jotting down wise or profound words which they could refer to again and again. When I taught fiction writing, I had the class keep a commonplace book for an entire semester. I think 3 of 22 had more than five pages filled. When one kid read something from a comic book, I wanted to hit him.
I’ve now kept this journal of not-so-random wisdom from literature for seven years, beginning in 2005 (in handwritten form), long before I opened my first blog. I want to post those gems, plus the noble stones I find anew as I continue to harvest the great books appearing now and those from the past. I shall leave on the date of my original reading, as I like to remember when, and perhaps where, these words first found me.
It’s fun for a writer to hand-write the words of kin and the masters. I’ve come closer to my own profound thoughts by doing so; and to understand what words feel like on the fingertips, to the eyes, read silently with lips moving, and how they smell on the page.
The mind flares.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I’d like to start with a book I’ve read multiple times; one of the few that has enthralled me to read a second time, much less 4 times. “Mating” is the 1991 National Book Award winner, written by Norman Rush. The story is suggested by experiences he and his wife had while working in Botswana as Peace Corps directors. Rush spent many years writing the novel, and each sentence, in my opinion, is a thing of beauty.
What is particularly unusual about Rush’s narrative is that he assumes the identity of a 30-year-old woman, and after just a few pages, you don’t know the author is a man. A difficult feet. Most women can tell when a man is “writing a woman” but I had asked several women to read this book, and they all agreed: the voice is that of a woman. Enjoy …
december, 1995; october 1999; july 2004; may 2010
“Was something saying I should kill myself posthaste if the truth was that I was going to be mediocre? This was a thought with real pain behind it. To my wreck of a mother mediocre was a superlative—an imputation I resisted with all my might once I realized it involved me. I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was original in an unappreciated way or that I could be original— this later—by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like never watching television again in my life.”
– Norman Rush, “Mating”
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