№ 32 reading list: Woolf, Hardwick & new books

Here is the reading list I promised. Perhaps I should have combined two lists into one because I have started reading books that will be on my next one. And I confess that I'm already looking longingly at books that will be on the list thereafter. One of those is Letters of Leonard Woolf. That would be the husband of Virginia, the man to thank for the access to her personal material, letters, diaries, etc. I enjoy reading letter collections, especially literary ones. Warner and Maxwell's letters on the new list, and in my image above, are gold. Each letter is well crafted and shining through is the mutual respect these writers and friends had for one another.

№ 32 reading list:

1  The Years · Virginia Woolf
2  Virginia Woolf · Hermione Lee
1  A Room of One's Own · Virginia Woolf [rereading]
3  The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick · edited by Alex Andriesse
4  A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick  · Cathy Curtis
5  De Profundis and Other Prison Writings · Oscar Wilde
7  The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and

William Maxwell 1938-1978  · edited by Michael Steinman

On my new list is Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, which I'm about to finish and can highly recommend to all Woolf fans. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Woolf's novel The Years. More on that disappointment later. My blog readers know that Elizabeth Hardwick is a favourite; on the list is a new essay collection and the only available biography of her. Now, let's look at a different list, my wish list.

Left: The autobiographical writing of poet Robert Lowell was published in August;
right: Elizabeth Hardwick on the cover of Darryl Pinckney's new book

The wish list keeps getting longer and I would like to mention two new additions. Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney comes out in October. The book is about his friendship with Hardwick and the editor Barbara Epstein. Both founded the literary magazine The New York Review of Books and were best friends and neighbours on W 67th Street in New York. Memoirs came out in August, a collection of the autobiographical writing of poet Robert Lowell (he was Hardwick's ex). Critics have highly praised it.

A nod to my next reading list

images mine, appeared on Instagram 03/08/22 and 17/09/22

№ 31 reading list: the letters of Bishop & Lowell

Adding Swann's Way to my last reading list (№ 30) was an excellent idea. I'm still reading Proust and cannot understand why I waited so long to read him. His rich prose requires slow reading and I find it best to read 8-10 pages at a time, preferably in the morning. I start my day by reading; I wake up very early with my son, who has to cross Linz and its suburbs by tram to get to school. When he leaves - most people are still asleep - I sit down with coffee, toast and books. These days I start with the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, with the letters they wrote to each other, before turning to Proust and other writers. My routine ends with whatever German fiction I'm reading at the moment.

№ 31 reading list:

1  Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop

and Robert Lowell  · edited by Thomas Travisano & Saskia Hamilton

2  Upstream: Selected Essays  · Mary Oliver
3  Speak, Memory  · Vladimir Nabokov
4  Personal History  · Katharine Graham
5  Ein ganzes Leben  · Robert Seethaler [German]

I'm still reading Der Untergeher (The Loser, № 30), my third book by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. He is such a witty storyteller. I want to read everything by him in German (I think most of his novels and plays have been translated into English). I have never read anything by his countryman Robert Seethaler and now it's time for Ein ganzes Leben which I bought last summer (A Whole Life, trans. by Charlotte Collins).

Cherry blossoms, Antwerp 2011

My current bedtime reading is Personal History, the memoir of the late Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. I started the book a long time ago but held off adding it to a reading list until now. I knew she had devoted many chapters to her family story and upbringing (it's the part of biographies that least appeals to me), so I wanted to get through them first. When her story finally took off I often found it hard to put the book down, but more on that in my next reading journal entry.

images mine, 01 and 03 appeared on Instagram 12/04/21 and 24/04/21

№ 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

Merry Christmas 2020 | Happy Holidays

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

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

№ 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.