Logjammin

Kinski

To be updated whenever I see fit...currently reading Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God.

Kinski

I don't see much point in logging everything I read, so I'll probably just use this log to comment on random books I've read recently. In that spirit...

Spring Snow (1966), Yukio Mishima.

The first novel in The Sea of Fertility tetralogy - a tragic love story set among the Japanese aristocratic classes in the 1910s. I was really looking forward to this one - I was deeply impressed by the author's 1956 work The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and I'd been led to believe that The Sea of Fertility was his masterpiece. I'll reserve judgement on that until I've read the other three, but I was somewhat disappointed by Spring Snow. I found the novel to be often quite clunky and uneven. I felt that the impersonal narrator tended to editorialise too much, with Mishima's ultra-nationalistic politics becoming particularly intrusive thanks to the depiction of foolish and decadent 'Westernised' Japanese. On the plus side, there were many beautifully realised scenes throughout the novel - Mishima is considered a master prose stylist in Japanese, and seems well served by his translators. The novel's conclusion was genuinely moving.

So far, the story of The Sea of Fertility's composition and completion have captured my imagination more than the work itself - Mishima had assembled a private army to protect some 'essence' of Japan, and he commited ritual suicide in front of them once he had completed this tetralogy.

Annoyingly, though Mishima had intended the four novels to be published as a single volume, there appears to be no such volume currently available in English. All four novels are published separately by Vintage. I am reading an out-of-print Penguin edition of The Sea of Fertility which contains all four. I'll review the work as a whole whenever I get round to finishing it!

Kinski

Arrow of God (1964), Chinua Achebe.

The Nigerian author's third novel. I have previously read his debut, Things Fall Apart. That was a more enjoyable novel than this one. Arrow of God has a weaker story, and is less accessible as it really requires some knowledge of Igbo history and culture to get a whole lot out of it.

Kinski

Recent read I enjoyed: She by H. Rider Haggard. Classic Victorian lost world fantasy. Hugely entertaining. Liked it a lot better than King Solomon's Mines*.

Currently reading a bunch of South African novels and Timescape by Gregory Benford. Timescape is incredibly fucking slow. I'll stick up a review of that one whenever I finish it.

*If you want a good laugh check out the dire film adaptation of Solomon's Mines with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone.

Kinski

Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974) and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). Both Booker-winning novels by South African Nobel Laureates; both highly recommended. Still reading other works of SA fiction.

Kinski

This is pretty cool - online annotations for Malcolm Lowry's great novel Under the Volcano.

Kinski

The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell.

A superb speculative fiction which marries the zombie novel with the Southern Gothic tradition. Bell is a pseudonym of Joshua Gaylord. I had assumed that he adopted a penname because, you know, Gaylord, but it turns out that he has also published a novel, Hummingbirds, under his real name. Bell holds a PhD in English from NYU, and apparently has an interest in Irish literature, as he co-authored the critical study A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen, which was published by UCD Press.

Kinski

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.

Acclaimed second novel by the current darling of fantasy literature, the first in his 'New Crobuzon' cycle.

'Twas okay. The novel is impressively imaginative, and some sections are very well-written, but overall it's too long, and has several gaping plotholes. Miéville nevers uses one word when five will do. I hope his subsequent works have been edited more tightly.