Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

There, somebody mentioned Jonathan Franzen. As you might expect, the invocation of this mighty name prompted a thread almost as long as The Corrections itself. It started in fine style with a review from MsCarey:

My two cents’ worth on Jonathan Franzen and The Corrections. The guy can write. There’s a deftness and fluency to his storytelling which is formidable. He has a real gift for evoking character and he is very funny. I could have happily read more about the Lamberts.

It’s not all good. The big and baggy shape of the book suits his story well and generally holds up but trying to shoehorn in every major issue of the time is a mistake (most notably on the cruise ship). And I’m not wowed by his prose in the way that I was told that I would be. I felt at times that the more he wrote the more he obfuscated instead of enlightened. In fairness to the man though, I should say that I read the book in ‘middlebrow’ holiday mode and that’s not a circumstance where I am really paying attention to individual words and he may be a much better wordsmith than I perceived whilst sitting in the garden with an icecream. I confidently assert, however, that at any time I would pronounce the Lithuanian section to be awful. Overwritten, confusing and tedious beyond belief to get through. Even if I had enjoyed this section I would still have been hyperventilating with indignation over Franzen’s decision randomly to select Lithuania as his chosen country to bear a large chunk of the worst of twentieth century history and the resulting satire. An oddly graceless decision, I thought, to name a real country instead of inventing as he does elsewhere in the novel. It suggests a worldview that stops at the US borders. Of course I retract all of this if it transpires that he knows Lithuania/Lithuanians well but until then I just wish I were Lithuanian so I could mail him one of Alfred’s turds.

Churlishness aside, it was a terrific holiday read and worth the price of admittance if in fact I had had to pay for my own copy, which I didn’t.

There followed a wonderful discussion touching on the meaning of middlebrow, Joshua Cohen’s thoughts on Franzen’s self-loathing, unicorn colophons, and many variant opinions on Franzen’s talent. The following from machenbach is the definition of damning with faint praise: “But The Corrections is not, to my mind, an important, significant or original novel; it’s a decent, middling, traditional/conventional novel.”

I hope you don’t mind me butting in myself, but I actually love Franzen and The Corrections. Not unreservedly, but still fervently. Makes me think we should cover it some time on the Reading Group.

Talking of the Reading Group, meanwhile, it’s great to see Lawrence Durrell, a favourite writer from that parish, making an appearance here on TLS. Even if VelmaNebraska gave him a fairly mixed review:

I finished Livia, the second book in Durrell’s Avignon Quintet last night and am reporting back as promised. I’m afraid my ambivalence hasn’t abated: the low-level racism, colonialism and sexism are all still there (and rather ramped up on occasion) and the sections describing Avignon itself are still rather marvellous. And, oh, the silliness: like the author’s alter ego novelist protagonist in a telephone conversation with another alter ego that the fictional one has created. And the brothel scenes with the Egyptian prince. I also had to try very hard to reconcile the idea that the eponymous Livia could be both an enthusiastic Nazi and have a black female lover (and failed, since I wasn’t given any good reason to do so, despite the stolid cod-psy applied to her); I was rather glad that she disappeared half way through. Still, I feel compelled to go on so I’ll return after book three.

Elsewhere, Rex Bowan has been on an “Autumn binge”:

I read Beatlebone by Kevin Barry and The Book Of Numbers by Joshua Cohen.

I enjoyed and admired both, both succeed in creating something that feels new, but I think they both commit something like the same sin. Beatlebone is, by a significant margin, a stronger book than City of Bohane (which read to me like an irony-free version of Last Tango In Aberystwyth).

I also read Around The World In Eighty Days. It has a guidebook quality, with Verne continually setting out what Yokohama is like, or the speed at which a given boat can travel. I would like to read some of the science fiction to see if it is carried over (or hear from TLS).

All opinions on Jules Verne will be much appreciated below the line.

Another Francophone writer has also been attracting the attention of shiels69:

I am a big fan of Georges Simenon (31 Maigret novels completed, 40+ to go!), and I have recently been reading some of his ‘romans durs’ (non-Maigret, dark, psychological novels). I can particularly recommend “The Train”, “Act of Passion”, “The Mahe Circle” and “The Widow”. In the introduction to the latter, Paul Theroux compares the Simenon novel favourably with another book published that year (1942), Camus’ “L’Etranger”. While I think that Theroux is pushing it a tad here, I don’t think that Simenon (possibly because of his prolific output) has been given the critical acclaim he deserves.

Is Simenon still overlooked? I’m not entirely sure. But I do know, it’s hard to praise him enough for producing books as good (and nasty!) as The Mahe Circle.

Talking of good and nasty, meanwhile, a final thought on the start of the new term from Legomaniac:

I’m back at school next week, so desperately trying to read as much as possible before the madness kicks in again.

I wonder if it is just serendipity that finds me reading Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers at the moment...

Interesting links about books and reading

• Since it’s September, why not enjoy this gallery of Big Star images taken from a forthcoming book of photographs of the band?
• I know you already know how great librarians are. But this story will still impress you.
• More proof that the world has turned upside down. A modern poetry book that has sold nearly half a million copies.
• A fine library of various versions of Shakespeare plays, including texts transcribed from early quartos and folios. (Hat tip to Swelter for that one.)

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