№ 26 reading list: Beauvoir, Handke and Lowell

First, the book lover's confession: I have this tendency to go through periods where I read too many books at once, which is probably a form of addiction. Perhaps such periods depict restlessness and escapism, and blaming the pandemic has come in handy. Since last autumn there has been a lockdown in Austria, but with spring arriving - the vaccine too, hopefully - it's time for spring cleaning, to reduce the piles of books. It's going well. I have already read most of the books on the new reading list, which I intended to share in February, but I have been saving one: the 3rd volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography. I conditioned myself to complete certain books before meeting up with her again, this time in post-war France. The volume spans the period 1945 to 1963, when Beauvoir wrote, among others, her feminist work The Second Sex and the novel The Mandarins.

№ 26 reading list:

1  Suppose a Sentence  · Brian Dillon
2  Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader  · Vivian Gornick
3  Force of Circumstance  · Simone de Beauvoir
4  Wunschloses Unglück  · Peter Handke [German]
5  Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder  · Bertolt Brecht [German]
6  The Rings of Saturn  · W.G. Sebald
7  Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate  · Daniel Mendelsohn
8  Life Studies  · Robert Lowell
9  Letters Summer 1926  · Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer

Maria Rilke

Translated by: 3) Force of Circumstance: Richard Howard

As I once promised, I have included on the list Brecht's masterpiece Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, which translates Mother Courage and Her Children (one of many editions available in English). Recently, I was browsing in an Icelandic digital archive, which gives access to articles in newspapers and periodicals, when I came across a theatre critique from 1965. At Christmas that year, Brecht's play was performed at The National Theatre of Iceland and the critic was far from impressed. If you can read Icelandic you will learn that it was mainly the director's fault.

Featuring the Austrian writer Peter Handke on a reading list without saying a few words about him is unthinkable. He received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, which by many within literary circles was considered a controversial decision. Handke's career starts in the sixties but suddenly in the nineties, he becomes controversial when his writings about the wars in former Yugoslavia start appearing. Without hesitation he criticised the media coverage of what was taking place in the Balkans, the language applied to describe events. A turning point was an article by Handke that appeared in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1996, a travelogue about Serbia with a "provocative headline" written by the editors (Icelandic source).

It certainly didn't help Handke's cause when he visited Slobodan Milosevic in prison when the former president was being tried by The International Criminal Court in The Hague. And to make matters worse he attended and spoke at his funeral in Serbia in 2006. However, many argue that nothing in Handke's writings justifies the attacks against him, which allows one to conclude that those who have been the loudest have, in fact, not read his works.

Left: Austrian writer and Nobel laureate Peter Handke;
right: American poet Robert Lowell

Handke's book on the reading list, Wunschloses Unglück, was published in 1972. It's a short, well-written, semi-autobiographical book, prompted by his mother's suicide. Its English title is A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. I recently bought a German edition of Handke's book Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (Short Letter, Long Farewell, published by NYRB) which I will soon include on a reading list. If you speak Icelandic you may be interested in three links I shared in this same entry on my Icelandic blog. They include interesting discussions about Handke and his works on RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.

It is worth mentioning that Handke, in collaboration with the German director Wim Wenders, wrote the screenplay for the 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), including the poem Lied vom Kindsein, which Bruno Ganz recites at its start.

My reading lists do not often feature poetry, but at Christmas a friend in Iceland gave me a Faber & Faber edition of Life Studies by Robert Lowell. It was first published in 1959 and contains confessional poems, e.g. Skunk Hour (dedicated to poet Elizabeth Bishop) and Waking in the Blue, and the prose memoir 91 Revere Street. This groundbreaking collection won Lowell the National Book Award for Poetry. I see myself reading it again and again.

top image by me | writers: 01: Peter Handke by A. Mahmoud via The Nobel Prize | 02: Robert Lowell via Put This On

Reading journal: Whitehead, Baldwin & Brecht

School has started and I'm easing into the term, still taking moments every day to read the books on my latest reading list before the workload increases and deadlines take over. I have finished Patti Smith's Year of the Monkey which, for me, never quite took off, if we can use that phrase for a melancholy memoir that is partly about loss. The presence of the late Sam Shepard on the pages saves it. I'm a fan of Patti's writing, of her 'writing about nothing', as she explains in the book M Train, but here something is missing. The book has been praised but descriptions of dreams and diner food just didn't work for me. I wish she had waited and written about her trip to Australia the year after (among the many photos in the book is one she took of Uluru/Ayers Rock), but then the book would have had a different title.

Let us move on to the reading journal, the last entry for the 2017 reading lists. I know, I know, we have been through this.

Reading journal, № 13 reading list, 3 of 4:

· The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. This novel won both the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and the 2016 National Book Award for fiction, and in 2016 it was Oprah's Book Club pick. Perhaps this has done it some disservice because readers probably expect a literary masterpiece. Despite the grave subject matter, slavery, it's very readable, and I find my mind going back to it. To the story itself, not its characters. My only quibble over the novel was the characterisation, which I didn't find particularly strong. The main character, Cora, didn't make a great impression on me but what has stayed with me is that her story is the story of too many. The title refers to the network of secret routes to help slaves escape to the free states. However, Whitehead uses magical realism and gives it a physical form, which I thought would bother me, but didn't. I haven't read any of his other books but intend to, definitely. He's a good storyteller.

· Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. I wanted to like this book more than I did. Don't get me wrong, I liked it but I didn't love it. The Giovanni character annoyed me (although I did sympathise with him in the end) and I didn't believe that someone like David would fall for someone like Giovanni. This scene, though, has stayed with me, the night they meet at a bar in 1950s Paris:

And he took his round metal tray and moved out into the crowd. I watched him as he moved. And then I watched their faces, watching him. And then I was afraid. I knew that they were watching, had been watching both of us. They knew that they had witnessed a beginning and now they would not cease to watch until they saw the end.

This was my second book by Baldwin (I have since read more) but the first one I read, Another Country, remains my favourite.

· Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan by Bertolt Brecht. This play was the first German text I read after the move to Germany in 2017, an attempt to reclaim some of my vocabulary (there was a time when I read novels in German effortlessly). I didn't get every word but I got the meaning and enjoyed the play, which is set in China. It's a parable play about three gods that come down to earth to find one good person. The prostitute Shen Te is the only person who takes them in when they need a place to stay. Consequently, she gives up her profession and buys a tobacco shop for money they give her. Trying to be good in a corrupt world becomes difficult and she invents an alter ego, her cousin Shui Ta, to be able to run her business. In 1933 Brecht left Nazi Germany and this is one of the many plays he wrote in exile during World War II. His next play on my list is Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children).

image by me, appeared on Instagram 11/11/2017

№ 13 reading list | Happy Holidays

Earlier this week, I promised to share a short reading list - this one is № 13 - before the holidays (I snapped the photo a couple of days ago between the gift-wrapping; you should see how much the hyacinths have grown since then!). At this moment, I'm enjoying a coffee break while leafing through the latest issue, January 2018, of The World of Interiors, which our oldest brought me from the UK. Tonight and tomorrow's desserts are ready and soon we will start preparing our Christmas Eve feast. The Nordic tradition is to celebrate Christmas on this day with a fancy meal, following the opening of presents.

№ 13 reading list:
1  The Underground Railroad  by Colson Whitehead
2  Giovanni's Room  by James Baldwin
3  Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan  by Bertolt Brecht [German]
4  Jane Eyre  by Charlotte Brontë

Last summer I bought a copy of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin and I have been waiting for a more quiet time to read it. If my last blog post escaped you, he has become my new favourite author. Over the holidays, I have made it a habit to reread one classic and this year I chose Jane Eyre. It's been years since I read it and last Christmas I got this beautiful Penguin clothbound edition. It's been staring at me for a year and I swear I can sometimes hear it whisper, Read me!  The other two you may have spotted on Instagram already; Whitehead was part of a book gift from a dear friend in Iceland and the play by Brecht was the first book I bought in German after the move (here is a Bloomsbury edition in English, The Good Person of Szechwan, translated by John Willett). I'm already reading it, but slowly. Very slowly. It's my way to try to reclaim my German vocabulary.

I wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!