I haven't done one of these since July when it seems I was reading a host of books. Lately, just a few, but lengthy ones. First up the book that some have called the greatest novel of the 20th century:
Including the annotations, about 1,200 pages of fairly difficult prose with occasional bits in Latin, Gaelic, French, Italian and German. A parody of all literature since Homer. Honestly, the only novel that is even vaguely like this one is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman that I read last year. And I have to read Ulysses again pretty soon. Wow.
Including the endnotes, just under 1,300 pages. A few years ago they released a movie with the same title about two hours long. That is a kind of aesthetic fraud--to do proper justice to this long and intricate narrative you would need a movie 50 hours long! A fine and enjoyable story of adventure and 19th century society.
At only 200 pages a mere wisp of a novel compared to the others. This is the third book by Ishiguro I have read and each one impresses with its lapidary clarity. But at the same time, I feel I have to re-read them because there is so much below the surface.
The only American novelists I really enjoy are Tom Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. I had a terrific professor for the English Literature course in first-year university and he assigned The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber which, along with Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony, has stuck with me ever since.
Let's have a little musical envoi. Despite all the compositions he has written in recent years, some of my favorite pieces by Leo Brouwer are the early ones like Elogio de la Danza. Here played by the young Spanish guitarist Mabel Millan. (But yes, she does end with the wrong chord!)
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