Conspicuous Consumption

  I've decided to read Virginia Woolf's novels in order this year. I began with The Voyage Out and Night and Day ,  both of which are fine books. One sees, though, why they are probably the least read of Woolf's novels. They are competent and professional, but they aren't Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse . They are good, but that's all. With Jacob's Room , though, we see that the Virginia Woolf of those early novels has at last freed herself from Victorian novelistic convention, and begun to make it new. Start with her decision to make Jacob Flanders, the novel's protagonist, a cypher who we know almost entirely from the impressions others have of him. In this she does something that is perhaps parallel to but different from what Joyce (who she dismissed as an "egotistical self-taught working man," even as she acknowledged his influence on Jacob's Room ) did in Ulysses . In Joyce's work we follow different characters' streams of con...

This is something like the fifteenth book in Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series. One could argue that there was a slight sag in the middle volumes, but the later entries are the strongest yet. I guess it's not surprising that a dedicated writer gets better with years of experience.  After gallivanting to Hong Kong in a recent entry, Harry is back in California, traveling from his Los Angeles hometown to the agricultural center of the state. He's still in the cold cases unit, and he has a new supervisor to lock horns with. Harry's working post-retirement on a contract, and his new boss, who would like to move Harry on into post-post retirement, does his best to make that happen. Harry, of course is not having it, but his adversary remains standing at the end, so no doubt their quarrel will continue. The novel begins with a flashback to the LA riots. Harry and his then partner, Edgar, are called out in the midst of the chaos to a murder victim that turns out to be a Eu...

 This is a forgotten novel by a forgotten writer. I just finished it for the third time, and once again loved the mystery with which it is saturated. What exactly is going on remains mysterious throughout, both to the man we are reading about and also to the reader, who is never allowed to feel smarter or more perceptive than the protagonist. That the reader shares the protagonist's bewilderment adds to the novel's power. There is knock at the door of the house where the bank teller,  Raynard Langrish, lives with his mother. It is Roy Archer, someone Langrish feels he might know . . . maybe. Archer takes Langrish to a boxing match and then for a few pints after the match. The bank teller finds himself exhilarated by the violence he has witnessed in the ring and by the alcohol he consumes. Under Archer,'s spell, Langrish begins training for . . . an emergency of some sort? a military operation? defense against an invasion? a war?—“But is there a war on, sir, or what?” “A wa...

  George Orwell acknowledged the influence of an Ernest Bramah novel on 1984 and maintained that Bramah's  Max Carrados stories were, along with the Sherlock Holmes stories and  R. Austin Freeman's  Dr Thorndyke stories, the only detective stories since Edgar Allan Poe worth reading. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but the Carrados stories, or at least the four of them collected in this short volume,  are fun, though nothing like as good as the Holmes stories. Bramah follows Doyle in that his detective, Max Carrados, is a genius, and has as his foil a partner who is, well, not a genius. Bramah's departure from the Holmes formula is that his genius detective is blind, the twist being that even though he is unable to see, he is astoundingly perceptive.  Will I read more Max Carrados stories (free from Guttenberg)? We'll see.

Pursewarden, one of the novelists who appears as a character in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet , explains to Darley, another novelist who appears, an idea he has about how a novel might be written:  The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of t he future racing towards one. This is an apt description of what Durrell (not Darley), the novelist who has created these characters, has, over the four novels of the quartet, done. Pursewarden also notes that though the structure of the novel would be ambitious, the story need not be anything "very recherche  . . . . Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story." That, indee...

 Sakutaro Hagiwara was, translator Hiroaki Sato tells us, an "'inspirational' poet," not in the sense that he would inspire his readers (though he may have), but in that he depended upon inspiration to compose his poems, at least in his two most important collections,  Howling at the Moon and Blue Cat , both of which are included in this volume.  "Toward my own poems," Hagiwara writes, "at the time of creating them I am nearly blind and myself don't even know what kind of thing I am singing of. . . . I am merely catching a kind of rhythm that flows at the bottom of my heart and unconsciously pursuing the rhythm, therefore at the time of creation my own self is merely something like a half-conscious automatic machine." His work, however, is never simply unadulterated automatic writing: he did revise. He manages, though, to tap into something that cannot be paraphrased into anything less than it is (a message, an argument, a description . . . )....

I read Paradise Lost for the first time a little while ago and enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy the yarns told about the Greek gods, so I thought I'd do a little background reading to see what I had missed. For reasons now obscure to me (the kindle edition was cheap? I liked the Narnia tales when I was of an age to do so?) I turned to C.S. Lewis, a writer who in his religiosity was sure to be uncongenial to me. In these lectures his thinking is indeed uncongenial to me, but not in a way that raised my hackles and made me want to refute it. It is simply that he is arguing from premises foreign to me about things that have little connection to the world in which I live. Too many of the things he focuses on seem like disputes about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a discussion that might be interesting if angels were, you know, real. But of course some of these things were real for Milton and his contemporaries, so perhaps they do need to be addressed. But still . . ...