Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Anyone who finishes Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game deserves a a little recognition, so let’s start by clearing the floor for samye88:
This is a fictional biography set in the 23rd century, of Joseph Knecht, Master of The Glass Bead Game, a man epitomises the human intelligence and artistic achievement. It is not easily relatable, even for us book people. The sharpest minds here at TLS will appreciate the concept of the elusive Game or many abstractions on music and science better than I do, I’m still grateful that I’ve read it and extracted nourishment from it.
If I see it as a bildungsroman, it has a touchingly magical and winsome quality that greatly satisfies me: Joseph has led a charmed life, for an intelligent boy with admirable intuition, he succeeds all his life, wins over all the important movers/shakers along the way, reaches one height after another until he reaches the highest possible office of his profession before age 40. It is too ‘easy’, too soon, too perfect. And the Castalian way of pure Mind life lived in isolated protection from events of the world, free from struggles of the economy, becomes increasingly anemic and empty for Joseph, who can see the lack with clear eyes and who possesses hidden courage and resolve to transcend, to move from stage to stage...
Some readers comment that the book is dull and they abandon it early or half way. I’d like to highlight that the second short story in The Three Lives - The Father Confessor, is a standalone jewel that should never be missed at any cost!
While we’re enjoying lengthy reviews, HaveOneOnMe’s thoughts about Dennis Cooper’s strange novel The Sluts are also well worth a bit of space:
It’s the kind of book that makes you look on your bookshelf with embarrassed disgust, from all of those books’ - suddenly apparent - phoney civility and decency. A conspiratorial reaction (why doesn’t transgressive literature get more press?; why have I been reading what I’ve been reading all these years?) that’s validated, to an extent, by the fact that Cooper isn’t stocked in any bookshop I’ve been to.
The Sluts is a new millennium epistolary novel comprised entirely of reviews on a gay escort website, instant messages, emails, and faxes. It’s about an escort named ‘Brad’ who is reviewed by several clients on the agency’s review page, but the reviewers’ reviews narratively snowball, by way of each successive review alluding to, contradicting, or defensively falsifying previous reviews: each reviewer claims to have had a “real life” encounter that doesn’t match up (at all, or completely) with the fragmented facts established on the review thread...
The one thing that is common to all involved (including, perhaps, the reader) is a morbid obsession with ‘Brad’ ... Everyone wants to fuck Brad and, also, to kill him. Literally. The murder of the object of desire as the ultimate post-fuck rush; the famous death drive rendered literal and real. Except. Of course. It may not be. Since it’s an epistolary novel in the age of the Internet, so, more so than every before in human history, we are capable of seeing, as Cooper shows, many multiple versions of the same story simultaneously, making reality and truth meaningless and almost beside the point: the point being, the narrative (of The Sluts) simply serves to satisfy a collective desire of the storytellers. And that desire is extremely disturbing.
By way of contrast, here’s a short and sweet review from judgeDAmNationAgain:
Finally finished Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, and what a joy it was - ambitious and broad, and without being affected.
And another from paulburns on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard :
Didn’t get it the first time round many years ago as a yoof. For one thing I don’t think I knew enough history and I was just too young. This time round I just loved it. A magnificent poetic evocation of Sicily in the 1860s (and a very subtle indication of how after the unification the Mafia became so powerful - perhaps.) A thing of beauty it will do your heart harm to miss.
Don’t miss the Visconti film of the novel either. That too will do you a power of good...
Interesting links about books and reading
- Renaissance rap battles.
- A bookstore in Berkeley has been suffering harassment from right wing fools.
- Some people want Amazon to set up their new Headquarters/evil lair in their city. Some people don’t.
- An illustrated guide to organising your books. (Hat tip to Magrat123)
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.
If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading: “shelfies” or all kinds of still lifes with books as protagonists. Now, you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here. Happy reading!
