Counterbalance

Reader-Writer Moment #302

I finished Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship and I'm flummoxed. The beauty of it crept up on me and didn't finally make itself known until the end. I find that really great novels do exactly that -- they are less "hey look at me" while you are reading them (you know how that goes, every sentence is so good that you slow down because you don't want it to end, and you worry that the end won't justify the gorgeousness of the beginning, middle and almost end) and instead seduce with with normalcy, with a world that is so fully formed you don't even notice the author's attempt to create it before you. That is wow. That is oh my goodness.  Were I to meet Mr.Tóibín during the Dublin leg of my trip, I would run up and hug him. And then maybe bow. And then beg off to give him as much free time as possible to write another novel STAT.

Who else does complex human relationships like this? And gets it right (a few moments felt forced, a little I don't know if that's really how they'd behave...but perhaps that is my own failing as a reader)?  Who? Who? I've got to know. Franzen in Corrections? McGahern in By the Lake? Banville in everything he's ever written?

Powell's has an excerpt (not the strongest beginning...as I said, it builds on you so don't let this one snippet be your guide) and an interview with Tóibín which leads me to wonder aloud - how did I manage not to read his work for the past...um...ten years?  You can bet I'll be picking up Mothers and Sons as soon as I've got a spare minute.

There's such a quiet beauty to this book and I don't want to ruin a thing by sharing a pivotal scene.  I will, instead, share a funny scene (funny to me anyway and I always wonder if it's just me or genuinely funny, I suspect we're about to find out) in which the perfectly-drawn grandmother is telling her guests about her desire to re-obtain a driving license late in life and how her neighbor down the road just managed to make it happen:

"Didn't I tell you what Kitty Walsh from The Ballagh did last year, and she's so blind she can't see in front of her nose, and that's God's truth. Didn't she go into the eye man the day before her appointment, and she just said she was looking at spectacle frames -- her sister Winnie told me this -- and didn't she look closely at the letters when the door was open, you know, the letters you have to read. She wrote them down and went home and learned them off. So by the next day the eye man complimented her on her sight when she could hardly see the colour of the money she was paying him with. And she driving a Mazda mad all over the country now. Get into the ditch if you see her coming. A red Mazda."

Get into the ditch, indeed. I laughed out loud when I read this passage. And upon re-reading, laughed again. Pitch-perfect, I say. Flat out yum.

Litty Bittys (Because, Yes, They're Itty Bitty)

• The week in reading events is up at LAist. Is it me, or are things just dragggggging along these first few weeks of summer? Is the inference that we read less during the summer? Want to meet authors less during the summer? What gives?
• My ode to Dutton's and the lovely fact that it will continue to exist and then - soon - exist in a better form (if such a thing is even possible) is being crafted and edited and shaped. When it's up at LAist later this week, I'll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, head over to Mark's to shout with glee about the big save of Dutton's.
• I finished Christian Oster's The Unforseen this weekend. It was so yummy and so akin to Grégoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest that I felt a keen sense of déjà vu (in the best way) and an extension of it also.  They share the focus on a woman (one is lost then found, the other is found then lost), attendance at a party in which they are utter strangers, and the ever-pitch-perfect Nicholson Baker-esque musing on minutiae and internal states.  Yum. Double yum.  I experienced many reader-writer moments in this lovely little book. But alas, as with all works in translation, I wonder: what it is like in French? I must secure a copy and find out. More to come.
• Yes, the counterbalance blog header and colour scheme is different. The other one was feeling too -- preppy. Too Martha's Vineyard or similar.  This feels more "it's very hot and so let's tango in the graffiti-riddled streets." No?
• I set off for Ireland in a few short months and realize I've made a paltry dent in my big old pile of recommended (by you!) Irish books.  After my big proclamations about all Irish reading all the time, it seems I should put my money where my proverbial pledge is.  Save a few books I've promised, promised, promised that I'd finish first, expect things to get very green around here in short order. 
• Irish bit: As proof that I intend to make good on my promise, I'm nearly finished with Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship.  There are moments that I love and there are moments that are eh.  The sum total might be good once I've finished it this evening. We'll have to see.

When Writing Means Not Writing

The good news: I'm writing. A lot.

The bad news: Writing a lot means not writing a lot here.

Other news: Impdending wedding requires I actually do more paid work.

However: I'm coming out of my writerly fog, tidying things up, preparing to re-emerge next week.

Let's hope: I've got some interesting things to say.

Until then...

It's Not the Kerouac Marathon that Bugs Me...

...but the terrible reporting of it that drives me nuts.  So it's the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's On the Road. Nice. Fans and friends of Kerouac are "marathon-reading" the book in celebration. Fine. All good.

Yet for someone as important, as influential as Kerouac, you'd think we could get a better closing sentence:

"The stream-of-consciousness novel helped generate the Beat Generation."

I think we can all agree that using generate and Generation in the same 10-word sentence isn't ideal. A better word could have been selected.  More to the point, generate, as used in this context, doesn't really make sense. Could a novel "generate" a movement? Start, inspire, kick-off, possibly. But generate?  And since I'm being overly critical (which should no doubt give you an inside view of the wonderful world of wedding planning woes), even if a book could generate a movement, I don't believe that On the Road was it, all by itself. There were so, so many others that came before and after.  Why simplify, distill, mis-report, for the sake of a 50th anniversary reading-marathon?

Bits & Bobs:

• The Naropa Kerouac festival ends today
• The Naropa blog has some outstanding video footage of Kerouac with Hunter S. Thompson, of Kerouac singing On the Road (a douzy) and other Jack ephemera
• It strikes me as particularly odd (funny, even?) that several children's books are also titled On the Road - perhaps I will stage my own Kerouac On the Road tribute in which I will post and examine the other On the Road books that were no doubt generated by the first one...
• Ah, but now I'm just being crabby.