Bubbles

I recently finished a John Banville’s Kepler, and yesterday began The Infinities, which is first off remarkable for its beautiful deep eggshell blue cover. I’ve read some reviews by readers who find Banville pretentious (because of his vocabulary? because there are Greek gods hovering in the narrative?) but I think he’s marvelous. Take this passage, about a boy getting a clay pipe that blows bubbles: 

"At first he could not get the hang of it then suddenly did. The bubbles hesitated on the rim of the pipe-bowl, wobbling flabbily, then broke free and floated sedately away. They seemed to be rotating inside themselves, as if the top was always too heavy, and the iridescent surplus kept cascading down the sides. Sometimes two of them stuck together and formed a fat, trembling shape something like an hourglass only squatter. They were made of an unearthly substance, a transparent quicksilver, impossibly fine and volatile, rainbow-hued. They popped against his skin like wet, cold kisses."

Citrus

It snows. It has snown. It snew.

Yesterday we put up the tree, and went easy on the ornaments. This morning my mother arrived from NJ. We spent an hour or so waiting for her to emerge, and passed the time watching other families/friends reunite for the holidays. Exiting the baggage area, the passengers from Miami mixed with those from Rome. They were mostly dark and bejeweled, and it was hard to tell who hailed from where, until they opened their mouths. 

Here at year-end I am cleaning out the stubborn gunk of recent reading experiences with John Banville's Kepler, the mathematician astronomer. Banville's prose works like a tonic, despite the book's being set in muddy, moldy middle Europe. 

* *

Tycho stirred and dealt his moustaches a downward thrust of forefinger and thumb. Kepler with plaintive gaze stooped lower in his chair, as if the yoke of that finger and thumb had descended upon his thin neck. 

“What is your philosophy, sir?” the Dane asked. 

Italian oranges throbbed in a pewter bowl on the table between them. Kepler had not seen oranges before. Blazoned, big with ripeness, they were uncanny in their tense inexorable thereness.

from Kepler

* *

Thanks to Colette Copeland for this linen collage.

a whole sunset on my head

I’ve been lucky so far this year book-wise. I read Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums, which I liked much more than I expected. I hadn’t intended to read it, but my mother had it along at Christmas and left it here. I thought, oh yeah, more literary obscurity from the Nobel Prize folks, but her writing is great. The book is peppered with sentences like this: “On my way home I was carrying a nutria fur cap in my hand and a whole sunset on my head.” (p. 184)

I also read Chris Bachelder’s Bear v. Shark. A few pages in I thought I was going to hate it, being largely a poke at an over-the-top media-drenched society. But it was hilarious. And it answered all sorts of important questions, like “do the Dutch have a culture?” and “does a shark have a neck?”

The first book I finished this year was John Banville’s The Sea. I didn’t like it as much as Athena, but still, he’s an incomparable prose stylist. I’d like to say Banville is a marvel at describing characters, but in fact he’s a marvel at describing everything, from a breeze to a dog’s hind leg.

As for poetry, I have yet to have my socks knocked off but I did hugely enjoy Howie Good’s 5-poem ebook Pig/Iron. You can read it here for free! I can be a hard sell on prose poetry, although I write it myself, and though I didn’t like the first poem that much, I was convinced by the second that I was in good hands.

Now I’m reading Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms, and can only say I’m more than impressed. May I say I feel less alone in the world? May I say “The miracle worker was very tall?”

I guess it sounds like blue skies&black coffee but I’ve read some so-so stuff, too, including some poetry I couldn’t even begin to understand and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which annoyed me and weirdly enough is on the (in)famous list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Goes to show that books need a decade to stew before being propelled to “classics" status.

the smell of worn pennies

I finished John Banville’s The Book of Evidence a couple days ago. I really enjoyed it, mostly because I enjoy despair and self-loathing, especially if it’s couched in a good story by writer with a fabulous vocabulary.

Banville is the saint of sumptuous sentences. Check this out:
“I drank my drink. There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.”

Okay, that’s three sentences. It’s mostly the center one I mean, but also the sequencing - 1) the simple set-up, 2) the sensual ravishing, and 3) the kill-off - is masterful.

I did a somewhat longer gush on Goodreads, but here I mostly want to point out his mastery of the “as if” construction.

1. “I had not thought paper would make so much noise, such scuffling and rattling and ripping, it must have sounded as if some large animal were being flayed alive in here.”

2. “His left eyelid began to flutter as if a moth had suddenly come to life under it.”

3. “She drove very fast, working the controls probingly, as if she were trying to locate a pattern, a secret formula, hidden in this mesh of small deft actions.”

4. “Her pale colouring and vivid hair and long, slender neck gave her a startled look, as if some time in the past she had been told a shocking secret and had never quite absorbed it.”

5. “When I spoke to her the poor girl turned crimson, and winclingly extended a calloused little paw as if she were afraid I might be going to keep it.”

6. “I have always loved that hour of the day, when that soft, muslin light seeps upward, as if out of the earth itself, and everything seems to grow thoughtful and turn away.”

I recommend this book (although Athena is better). I warn you that the murder is horrible and sad. Also, the characters are horrible and/or pathetic. A lot of reviews I read complained the main character was too despicable. Still, I recommend the book to anyone who thinks the “general awfulness of everything” can be redeemed by art.