Are you an intellectual?

I suppose you could characterize this blog as my personal attempt at becoming an intellectual (with all the concomitant eye-rolls and snickers that ensue when someone else makes use of that term) – detailing the books and articles and conversations that I’ve come across while browsing different websites, newspapers and journals here and there (and thus not doing the things I need to be doing to write my doctoral thesis.)

While I obviously don’t include much here about German literature in general, or culture in fin de siècle Europe more specifically, (or, to get right down to it, the interplay between cosmopolity and solitude in Jewish culture in turn of the century Vienna, Prague and perhaps Istanbul) I do tend to think of one of the main requirements of being a literate person is to keep up with public debate, whether it be literary, political or cultural. To that end, I’ve put together these sparse notes of Choses Vues – Things Seen; in order to have something to talk about with other like-minded friends. Now, if only they would actually read this site regularly..

All this to point out an amusing little article in The Common Review about someone who is interested in much the same things as I’ve tried to point out in this site, all the while acknowledging the general laughableness of the whole enterprise.

Pynchon’s got a big-old book a’comin.

Thomas Pynchon has a whopper coming down the pipes, weighing in at a scant 1,120 pages. The best part is his description of the book that showed up on amazon:

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

The above was found at time magazine, on a little article on the difficulty of promoting an author who doesn’t talk to the press. On a slightly unrelated note, I have a first edition of his Mason Dixon on my shelf, right next to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Both have yet to be cracked. My brother, on the other hand, finished both War and Peace and Moby Dick this summer. Guess who’s in grad school studying literature? (Wrong, me.)

Why do people love Haruki Murakami?

For those of you who have been waiting anxiously for a new review from me (ie, my mom). This article in the New Republic may help explain why my critical pen, once so prolific and edifying, has fallen strangely silent of late – I can’t seem to figure out what to say about Haruki Murakami’s latest book of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

That I need to say something is clear, I just can’t seem to come up with anything conclusive. Apparently, other reviewers have run into the same problems:

But stunning statistics and a cult-like following do not prove literary merit. Descriptions of Murakami’s writing rarely help to elucidate the evidence for or against his talent–too often they are either mired in admiration for his mysticism or frustrated by that same attribute.

Franzen schmanzen

Oh how glad I was to read this: a great takedown by Daniel Mendelsohn of Johnathan Franzen’s memoir, “The Discomfort Zone”. All I needed to read was a brief synopsis of the book to know I wanted to stay as far away from it as possible.

After having read a few lukewarm (read, overly polite) reviews, finally someone comes out and gives it a good whack. Mendelsohn’s browbeating is so strong at times that one can’t help but rubbernecking at the accident that is Franzen’s bare-all “personal history”:

Structure, alas, is the least of this book’s problems; the real issue is content: the person whose history emerges in these pages, however haphazardly, is not one you want to know. And — far worse — the inevitable revelations about the real-life sources of Franzen’s fictions that you get here make you reconsider the novels more harshly, rather than more compassionately.

To be fair, I did enjoy The Corrections, and the whole flap with Oprah was amusing, but, as far as I can tell from Mendelsohn, I don’t want to be reading a book of “pronouncements [that] are everywhere marred by the same graduate studenty know-it-all-ness that you recall from the author’s behavior in real life, and which you recognize in certain of his characters — Chip, say, the loathsome pomo hipster academic antihero of “The Corrections.”

National Book Awards announced

The National Book Awards have been announced; when did a new Pynchon novel come out?

 Big names were mostly shut out, including well-regarded novels by Cormac McCarthy, Claire Messud and Alice McDermott. Others bypassed were Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” Richard Ford’s “The Lay of the Land” and Charles Frazier’s “Thirteen Moons,” his first book since “Cold Mountain,” winner of the National Book Award in 1997.

I believe Eric was telling me that the NBA’s are a bit more prestigious than the Pulitzers, given that the former are judged by critics and writers, rather than a host of people from different fields, as with the latter.

Also, take note that Lawrence Wright’s book “A Looming Tower” (reviewed here) is one of the contenders.