Philip Roth: The Biography · Blake Bailey

We are heading for a Roth spring. In April, Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey arrives in bookshops, published by W. W. Norton & Co. I have waited for this official biography for years, ever since I watched Philip Roth Unleashed (2014), a documentary in two parts, part of the BBC series Imagine. Bailey was one of many interviewees and talked about the writing; Roth chose him specifically for the task and gave Bailey all the papers he needed. Last summer when the cover was released, I couldn't contain my excitement: it meant the wait was getting shorter.

Cover photo: Bob Peterson, 1968

Philip Roth: The Biography
By Blake Bailey
Hardback, 880 pages
ISBN: 9780393240726
W. W. Norton & Company

Merry Christmas 2020 | Happy Holidays

Dear blog readers and friends, Merry Christmas to you all!

image by me, appeared on Instagram 25/12/20

Reading journal: Mendelsohn and Gornick

My holiday break has started and these days I carry with me an agreeable stack of books. Not far though, we are in a Coronavirus lockdown in Austria. Some were on my last reading list and I‘m still reading them, others are new ones that will appear on my next two lists. On Monday I received Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by author, critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn. I meant to put it under the tree this year, as a Christmas present to myself, but I started reading it during a coffee break and couldn‘t put it down. It's short and contains three essays, an interesting mix of biographical writing, history and literary criticism, in essence about the writers Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon and W. G. Sebald. If you like books about books this one might appeal to you.

Another book in my stack is an essay collection by Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level. It's my first by her; not the last. It goes down well with coffee and biscotti, as I predicted in my last blog entry.

In the Reading journal entries I have talked about books from a specific reading list but some time ago I felt the need to make changes, to make the journal more random and current. I also needed a category to archive my literary bookmarks. I mentioned once that it was never the idea to comment on all the books on my reading lists. I’m a picky reader and am seldom disappointed with the books on my lists. Sometimes when I truly enjoy a book, all I want to say is I loved this book and nothing else. That, however, hardly calls for a blog entry, using Instagram or Twitter is better.

Bookmarks & journal notes

Books I recently bought:
✔  Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon
✔  The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

... added to my wish list:
✔  The Krull House by Georges Simenon

... prioritised on my TBR:
✔  fiction: Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides by Aeschylus
✔  non-fiction: Trieste by Jan Morris

Bookish joy:
✔  The moment when Margaret Busby, chair of the 2020 Booker Prize judges, announced Shuggie Bain had won and its author Douglas Stuart gave an emotional acceptance speech. When Stuart won I literally screamed out loud for joy, even though I still hadn't read his debut novel. I was rooting for him but was afraid that a white male author wouldn't win.

Podcasts I can recommend:
▶  Back to Shuggie Bain: Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, recently talked to its author Douglas Stuart on their podcast, The Book Club.
▶  And here Leith talks to Natalie Haynes about women in the Greek myths.
▶  In conversation with Eleanor Wachtel of Writers & Company, Martin Amis talks about literary life, loves and losses. A very honest and sincere Amis.
▶  I rejoiced when I saw that Stig Abell, the former editor of the TLS, has a new podcast called Stig Abell's Guide to Reading. (The TLS podcast is not the same without him.) The new podcast accompanies his recently published book Things I Learned on the 6.28: A Guide to Daily Reading. These two episodes are my favourites so far: Modern Literary Fiction with Kit de Waal and English Classics with Sam Leith, the aforementioned editor.

images by me, appeared on Instagram 14/12/20; 12/12/20; 23/11/20

Approaching Eye Level · Vivian Gornick

Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick is a collection of essays, originally published in 1996. This is a UK edition, published by Daunt Books in August this year. Gornick is one of those authors I have followed for a long time but never read. One day I intend to do something about that. I can already picture a stack of her books that have found their way to my wish list: Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, published last year in which she explores rereading, the essay collection The End of the Novel of Love, and two memoirs, Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City. Latte, biscotti and Gornick must be a gratifying combination.

Approaching Eye Level
By Vivian Gornick
Paperback, 176 pages
ISBN: 9781911547648
Daunt Books

№ 24 reading list: rereading the classics

My autumn term is about to start and I would like to share this reading list before I get busy. A rereading of classics characterises the list. At the start of this summer, when facing restrictions due to the pandemic, I felt the urge to reread certain books, preferably on a bench in a castle garden nearby. I have finished Edna O'Brien's memoir, Country Girl, and highly recommend it. She is a wonderful storyteller. The story takes off when she leaves Ireland and writes about life in sixties London, about literature and writing. I often found it difficult to put the book down.

№ 24 reading list:

1  Country Girl · Edna O'Brien
2  Lee Krasner: A Biography · Gail Levin
3  Museum Activism  edited by Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell
4  The Varieties of Religious Experience · William James
5  One Hundred Years of Solitude · Gabriel García Márquez *
6  Crime and Punishment · Fyodor Dostoevsky * [audiobook]
7  War and Peace · Leo Tolstoy *
8  Sense and Sensibility · Jane Austen *
9  Independent People · Halldór Kiljan Laxness *

* Rereadings.

These days War and Peace is my bedtime reading - one of my favourite novels. I don‘t understand those who complain about its length. The chapters are short and I always want to read 'just one more'. By accident, I stumbled upon an audiobook of Crime and Punishment, my first audiobook ever. I truly enjoyed it; the narrator was great. Independent People is written by Iceland‘s only Nobel Laureate. When hearing an Icelandic actor narrate it on the radio there was no turning back. Laxness had to be on the list.

Speaking of Nobel Laureates: On my birthday in July, my oldest gave me this beautiful hardcover edition of Márquez's book. A few years ago, I decided to reread his book Love in the Time of Cholera. I loved reconnecting with it but about 150 pages in my interest faded. I realised I had changed as a reader and the story no longer appealed to me. I was a bit worried the same would happen with One Hundred Years of Solitude but, fortunately, it didn‘t.

A few words about the book by William James (Henry‘s older brother). I didn‘t know anything about it until I listened to a wonderful episode on The Backlisted Podcast. Their guest was John Williams of The New York Times Book Review and they were talking about this book, which contains lectures given by James at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. This is an interesting book, a little dry in the beginning but improves when you reach the third chapter.

I would like to thank Routledge for the museum studies textbook on the list, which deals with the notion of activism as part of museum practice. Apart from the introduction by its editors, the book contains 33 articles by more than 50 scholars in the field. Through my studies I have become aware of the editors' research; in a course on the spring term, we even read a chapter from this book.

Museum Activism, published by Routledge / Instagram

These days I‘m enjoying the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival. This year, due to the pandemic, all events are free online. What a feast for book lovers! My list of books-to-read is already longer and I'm particularly interested in Shuggie Bain, a debut by the Scottish author Douglas Stuart. It is longlisted for the Booker this year and in mid-September we will know if it makes it to the shortlist. At the beginning of the festival, the aforementioned John Williams talked to Stuart and other authors for The New York Times Book Review and this week there was another event featuring Stuart. He strikes me as a sincere writer; someone to watch in the future.

Strange Flowers · Donal Ryan

For more than two months I have been waiting to share this cover with you, which I find incredibly beautiful. The colour palette adds to it an autumnal quality. Strange Flowers is a new novel by Irish writer Donal Ryan. No one forbade me to share the cover sooner; I was the one who wanted to wait until publication day. The story begins in 1973 when the twenty-year-old Moll Gladney steps on a bus one morning and disappears. Five years later she returns, not alone, which changes the life of her family forever. I have only read one novel by Ryan and intend to read them all. His writing style appeals to me. As I have mentioned before, I like Irish writers.

Cover illustration: Owen Gent

Strange Flowers
By Donal Ryan
Hardback, 240 pages
ISBN: 9781784163044
Doubleday

№ 23 reading list: The Dolphin Letters

I cannot remember when I first heard of Elizabeth Hardwick - it must have been in relation to her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal (1974) - but it wasn't until 2018 that I read her work. Last year I was excited about the publication of The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979, a collection of letters exchanged between Hardwick and her ex, poet Robert Lowell (d. 1977), and their friends. To give you a little backstory: The title refers to Lowell's poem collection that earned him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1974. What made it controversial was that Lowell not only used Hardwick's letters, written to him in a state of emotional distress, but also changed them to fit his narrative. I thought it would take a few weeks to read through 500 pages of correspondence but found myself unable to put the book down and finished it in a few days. When I was done I went back to page 1 and started all over again, reading one or two letters before bedtime.

№ 23 reading list:

1  Sleepless Nights · Elizabeth Hardwick
2  The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert

Lowell, and Their Circle  edited by Saskia Hamilton

3  How to Write an Autobiographical Novel · Alexander Chee
4  A Tale of Love and Darkness · Amos Oz
5  Mislæg gatnamót · Þórdís Gísladóttir [Icelandic poetry]
6  To Kill a Mockingbird · Harper Lee [rereading]
7  Museums as Cultures of Copies  edited by Brita Brenna, Hans

Dam Christensen and Olav Hamran

Translated by: 4) A Tale of Love and Darkness: Nicholas de Lange

I would like to thank Routledge for the museum studies textbook on the list, which consists of 17 chapters by leading scholars in the field. It will enable me to keep up with my studies this summer without any deadlines.

Back to The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: If you already know the backstory and are intrigued then you may want to watch writer and critic Hilton Als in conversation with Saskia Hamilton, who edited the letter collection and added useful footnotes. What made this event even more memorable is actress Kathleen Chalfant's citation of three letters by Hardwick. In my copy I have marked many sections, one where Hardwick describes a certain mood in a letter to Lowell on January 13, 1976, when they were back on friendly terms:

... and strangely enough I do feel like writing just now and have fallen into a mood of reading books, thinking, idling about–all that puts one into the frame that makes writing possible and the life of literature beautiful and thrilling.

On the reading list is also Hardwick's Sleepless Nights (1979), a slim novel, partly autofiction, which I have also finished. I think I benefited from reading it after her personal letters, in which one learns about its writing process.

James & Nora · Edna O'Brien

Out today in paperback is James & Nora: A Portrait of a Marriage by Irish writer Edna O‘Brien, published by W&N. This is a reissue of a slim book, originally published in the US in 1981, with O'Brien‘s portrait of Irish writer James Joyce and Nora Barnacle‘s marriage. The timing of its release is no coincidence, just in time for Bloomsday on June 16, celebrated by many fans of Joyce. It's named after the protagonist Leopold Bloom in his work Ulysses, which takes place on that day in 1904.

Cover image: Nora Barnacle and James Joyce by artist John Nolan

Edna O'Brien was awarded the prestigious David Cohen Prize in 2019, given to British or Irish writers for a lifetime achievement in literature. Her first novel was The Country Girls, published in 1960. It caused a scandal in Ireland and was both banned and burned. O‘Brien's large body of work consists of novels, short stories, plays, poems, non-fiction, and her memoir Country Girl.

James & Nora: A Portrait of a Marriage
By Edna O'Brien
Paperback, 80 pages
ISBN: 9781474616812
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Reading journal: Beauvoir & Kafka

I thought it best to sneak in a reading journal entry before sharing more book covers. The book cover entries are tempting because I don’t have to grab my camera and I would like to have some covers on the blog for future reference. If you were worried about the coronavirus pandemic preventing the publication of books, I think you can breathe calmly. Plenty of books are about to hit the shelves and let's hope the content is as promising as the covers.

Reading journal, № 14 reading list, 2 of 7:

· Letters to Friends, Family & Editors by Franz Kafka. This is the first collection of letters by Kafka that I read and own. I was in no hurry to finish it so once I had read enough letters to get a feel for his voice, I read a letter or two in bed. The letters show the reader different sides of Kafka, from his student years in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months at a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924, where he died from tuberculosis. In letters to friends, he is less formal, of course, especially when writing to Max Brod who collected Kafka’s letters after his death, and it is through these personal letters that we see his health deteriorating. A more formal tone characterises the letters to his editors where he discusses manuscripts and even book design and fonts before publication. Perhaps those are more appealing to scholars.

The women in his life, Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská-Polak, Julie Wohryzek, and Dora Dymant, appear on the pages, but the letters to Felice and Milena are available in separate editions: Letters to Felice (I recently shared the book cover) and Letters to Milena. The one thing that bothered me during the reading relates to the book's layout: The notes are at the back instead of appearing in footnotes, which would have been more convenient for the reader. This was especially annoying when reading many letters in a setting and constantly having to look up the notes. [Schocken; translated by Richard and Clara Winston]

· The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir – autobiography, 2nd vol. It's been a while since I finished this one, which covers the years 1929 to 1944, and lately I have been gliding over sections where I had left a mark on the margin. I liked this volume more than the first but have to add that in the first chapters Beauvoir was sometimes too keen on sharing details: It sometimes felt as if she had to mention and describe every person that crossed her path. It happened less as the story progressed and the second world war drew nearer.

On three pages (319-321) spanning the period from 1937 to 1938, war is coming and clearly, the situation has started to affect her mental well-being:

Indeed, I now passed through one of the most depressing periods of my whole life. I refused to admit that war was even possible, let alone imminent. But it was no use my playing the ostrich; the growing perils all around crushed me beneath their weight.

If the Spanish tragedy dismayed us, events in Germany scared us stiff. In September, at Nuremberg, before an audience of 300,000 Nazis and something like a million visitors, Hitler delivered his most aggressive speech yet.

For my own part I was still trying to delude myself, and refusing to face the facts. But the future had begun to open up under my very feet, and produced in me a sick feeling akin to real anguish. No doubt that is why I retain only a misty recollection of this entire year. Nor can I remember anything of outstanding interest in my private life.

When the Germans invade Poland, on 1 September 1939, her narrative becomes a diary that ends on 14 July 1940. On 14 September, for example, she goes to the cinema and reads Portrait of a Lady by Henry James in bed. She doesn’t write daily and nothing at all after the fall of Paris, on 14 June 1940. Despite the war, there is no shortage of discussion of literature and philosophy on the pages, and it should be noted that the book is dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre, who was her soulmate. It's truly interesting to read about life in France, about Paris in wartime; about visits to Café de Flore, on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît, which she and Sartre frequented ('It was our own special resort. We felt at home there; it sheltered us from the outside world.'). In this volume the reader witnesses the birth of the author, but in 1943 her first novel, She Came to Stay (original title L’Invitée) was published. During the war, she also worked on other books such as the philosophical essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas and two novels: The Blood of Others (Le Sang des autres) and All Men Are Mortal (Tous les hommes sont mortels). [Penguin; translated by Peter Green]

It is worth noting that some of Beauvoir's letters, published later, contradict the narrative of her autobiography. Finally, a few words about my copy which I hold dear. It was bought used, released in 1976, and is now so worn that it is falling apart. Gracing its cover is one of artist Matisse's blue cut-outs, Blue Nude with Flowing Hair, 1952.

images by me, appeared on Instagram 08/03/2018 and 11/07/2017

Virginia Woolf Editions

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. 

Do you recognise this first sentence of Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's classic novel? The book was first published on 14 May 1925 by Hogarth Press, which she and her husband Leonard Woolf set up. Her sister, artist Vanessa Bell, designed the dust jacket. My next blog post was supposed to be a reading journal entry but I couldn't get these six old paperback editions out of my head after spotting them on Instagram yesterday - Mrs Dalloway Day. Here we have the covers of Mrs Dalloway, Three Guineas, and Orlando, which I have added to my wish list. If only they were hardcovers.

Mrs Dalloway; Three Guineas; Orlando
By Virginia Woolf
Paperback, 224; 192; 352 pages
Mariner Books

Letters to Felice · Franz Kafka

The Schocken Kafka Library is a collection of thirteen books by Franz Kafka (b. 1883) containing his fiction, letters, and diaries. The collection consists of sizeable paperbacks, tastefully designed where the title font has been adapted from Kafka's legible handwriting. Currently, I only have one of them, the letters he wrote to friends, family, and editors, but have added many to my wish list. Letters to Felice (2016) contains over 500 letters he wrote to his girlfriend Felice, whom he got engaged to twice but never married. They met in August 1912 at the home of Kafka's best friend Max Brod and their relationship was mainly an epistolary one, given that he lived in Prague; she in Berlin. We can thank Brod for access to Kafka's writings today. Kafka asked him to burn all unpublished material after his death, but Brod refused. Kafka died of tuberculosis on 3 June 1924, a month before turning 41. Kafka is buried at the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

Cover design: Peter Mendelsund

Letters to Felice
By Franz Kafka
Edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born
Translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth
Paperback, 624 pages
ISBN 9780805208511
Schocken Books