So I’ve been busy and “going through it” in a few ways, and as such I haven’t had time to do as much reading as I would like or keep notes on that reading as I go. However, the “books read” list keeps growing and I worry that I will abandon this project if I allow it to reach too intimidating a length. With that in mind, I’m going to try to “reset” by saying a few very brief things about each of the books that I need to talk about, in the hope that I will keep notes on my future reading in a more systematic fashion, having learned my lesson. This probably won’t happen, but it’s nice to dream!

On Creaturely Life, Eric Santner

This is a book about Rilke, Benjamin, and Sebald, so my affinity for it is unsurprising. Santner sees in Rilke an attunement towards the dimension of human life that he calls “creaturely,” those aspects of our life as human that uncannily resemble or repeat that which we see as being proper to “animal” life (as opposed to human life). Benjamin comes in as a means for understanding this “creaturely” dimension as the result (or even residue) of the political processes by which we are formed as subjects. The book then becomes a reading of Sebald’s work as an attempt to engage with this aspect of life and of the lived world. I find Santner’s reading, which I’m too lazy to summarize further, pretty compelling. As I read Sebald, he’s intensely concerned with what occurs on the edges of our regimes of signification. What happens to pieces of our language when the life-practices which undergirded them have disappeared? Conversely, what happens to those areas of both “built” and “natural” environment that we have invested with significance once that significance is made illegible? I think Santner’s reading of Sebald gets closer than any other I’ve encountered to really grappling with the importance of these questions to Sebald. Fun read if you like these writers and enjoy critical theory-ish readings of literature.

Babel-17 and Empire Star, Samuel Delaney

I’m putting these together because I read them in a double-barreled paperback edition. Babel-17 is an odd book, in that it’s a bit less than 1/2 boilerplate space opera with the remainder made up of some delightfully executed experimental attempts to represent the interrelationship of language and thought. This is early in Delaney’s career, and it’s clear that he doesn’t quite yet know how to integrate his more formally experimental passages with the expositional and narrative frameworks into which he is forced by the contemporary expectations for his genre. As a result, you get some awkward shifts between the two modes, but when he’s fully in the swing of the most interesting sections the effect is thrilling.

Empire Star is a “novella”, whatever that means, and is (I think) strictly better than Babel-17, if only because it skips out on some of the padding that I talked about above. There’s some fascinating exploration of viewpoint and narrative linearity, and it’s the first thing I’ve read in ages that immediately prompted me to turn back to the beginning and read it again having experienced the ending. I think both length and quality make Empire Star an ideal Delaney intro, and I intend to recommend it as such in the future. Honestly, there’s enough going on here that I hope to eventually have the time to write about it at length, but for now I should move on.

A Place in the Country, W. G. Sebald

Essays by Sebald, about writers personally important to him. Exceptionally good. Probably the best writing about Walser I’ve ever encountered. If I try to say more I’ll be writing forever.

Flight From the Enchanter, Iris Murdoch

This is a weird little book, and the first Iris Murdoch novel I’ve ever read. It centers around the titular “enchanter”, Mischa Fox, who has a mysterious ability to influence and control others. There’s also a plot about a pair of Polish twins that I found very difficult to parse: they initially appear as farcical figures, which made me inclined to read their portrayal as a straightforward joke about silly bumpkins from the Slavic East, but by the end of the novel are so menacing that there must be something deeper going on. They gradually establish a twisted sort of dominance over one of the main characters, culminating in what is heavily implied to be her repeated sexual abuse. It might be tempting to read this as a crude Frankensteining of different quasiracist tropes, but I think Murdoch is trying to say something about the use of xenophobic expectations on the part of the twins to accomplish their goals. Anyways, the book is pretty funny and perfectly competent, but suffers (at least for me) from the degree to which Mischa Fox seems like a discount Gilbert Osmond. Murdoch’s portrayal of his influential powers is at once both less frightening and more mystical than what James pulls off in Portrait of a Lady, and if the latter looms as large in your mind as it does in mine you will have a hard time getting past this resemblance.

The Damnation of Theron Ware, Harold Frederic

I bought this because it was a Modern Library Classics edition of a book I had never heard of. I don’t regret my purchase, although the back of the book was quite misleading. There, it’s described as a psychological novel about the descent of a small-town preacher into iniquity. This brought to my mind, as I assume it would for many others, the general vibe of a Hawthorne novel. This isn’t that! I’d describe it as a tragicomedy about self-awareness, which includes one of the most delicious dressing-downs I’ve ever encountered as the protagonist has his delusions of elegance and grandeur systematically shattered. If anything, read it for that scene.

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Tom Wolfe is a writer of considerable stylistic talent and acute psychological insight, which makes it much more frustrating that this book falls flat on its face. It’s made up of two essays sharing the general theme of “isn’t it so wacky how white guilt manifests?” This is an interesting and entertaining theme in its own right, and Wolfe gets most of his mileage out of that originary value. The second of the title essays was rather forgettable, and most of what I recall from it is just instances of boring racism. Radical Chic, though, invites further consideration. It’s an account of a fundraiser held by Leonard Bernstein for the Black Panthers, through which Wolfe skewers the pretensions of the NY upper crust to a sort of hip radicalism. This is all well and good, and certainly those pretensions need skewering, but in doing this he seems to completely forget about the Panthers except as scene decoration. The possibility that the Panthers getting money is just a good thing makes no appearance, and this omission is fatal. It dooms the piece to an almost apolitical social satire, and prevents Wolfe from attempting to turn his analytical eye onto the Panthers themselves. In this essay, they have no agency at all, and one would be forgiven for thinking that they do not realize what it is they are getting into. I have a hard time believing, though, that the highly intelligent committed revolutionaries whom he is discussing would not be conscious of the talismanic role that they are playing for the Manhattan elite! Indeed, I’m inclined to think that the Panthers featured in the story are engaged in a complex tactical performance designed precisely to play off those self-comforting instincts among the rich that are Wolfe’s target. I can only guess, though, because this is apparently of less interest to Wolfe than exploring the farcical dimensions of Otto Preminger’s accent. Sad!

My medication has worn off, so I don’t think I’ll be able to churn any more of these out tonight. I’ll post the last six from my backlog tomorrow, hopefully!