Turns out New Directions have been issuing a bunch of shorter Krasznahorkai pieces while my back was turned. I love Krasznahorkai but he requires stamina and long-duration reading sessions. Winter is coming. I can settle down for several hours with this and wonder again why he doesn’t have the Nobel for Literature.
SPADEWORK FOR A PALACE, Laszlo Krasznahorkai (UK) (US+)
I got hooked on Jaeggy with I AM THE BROThER OF XX, which it turns out I never wrote about. I need to do that before the end of the year.
THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, Fleur Jaeggy (UK) (US+)
I read REALITY HUNGER in hardback when it came out in 2010. Given where we are now (as painfully elaborated in IMMEDIACY), I wonder how David Shields views this bomb of a book today. When he wrote it, did he see Knausgaard sitting across the timeline, scratching his balls and complaining about having had to drive here with a rental car full of acolytes? Perhaps Shields might have sympathy with something Nik Cohn once said: “I wouldn’t have been so hard on Bob Dylan if I’d known Springsteen was coming.” Maybe Shields has stood before the contemporary publishing lists choked with trauma-narrative’d autotheoretical autofictive slop like Oppenheimer at Trinity. I felt like I needed a re-read: it’s a very entertaining piece of assemblage.
REALITY HUNGER, David Shields (UK) (US+)
Discover more from WARREN ELLIS LTD
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.