annotated oh-nine

I know 2010 started a long time ago but I am running at least three weeks behind so far this year.

The Necessary Marriage by Dumitru Tsepeneag. I've read this three times and it's more and more each time. The meaning of the word inscrutable always escapes me and this book is inscrutable. What this fugal text sounds/reads like in the original must be amazing with the vowel harmonics loaded into hungarian.

Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt. I don't know why more people aren't reading Laird Hunt. He's written four amazing novels and imho is one of the most talented u.s.an writers writing, I wonder if he just reads too continental for usan tastes.

Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez, which I've mentioned before for its singular voice and really provocative thoughts about what a language is.

The Country Where No One Dies by Ornela Vorpsi. The sexuality in this book is intense, not as in sex scenes, but in the way these abject communist characters regard and revile and commit the body, which is often their sole possession. One of my goals is to get my italian on and read this in the original.

what else ...

I read or reread several Bernhard books but loved Lime Works. It's not his best book but you can see Bernhard really starting to embrace the bizarre exaggeration and repetition. I read Extinction and while it seemed a little uncut I could spend a lot of time thinking about that novel thinking about its forerunners. Extinction has some brilliant moments where Bernhard brings a style that illustrates itself even as it comments on its own qualities and maybe becomes something like critifiction.

I also read for the first time early Ondaatje and Coming Through Slaughter is a masterpiece.

I really liked Hunger by Elise Blackwell, especially interesting in that the book is printed with an afterword that discusses its possible flaws. So it's sort of a really good failed novel (in that the main character is unrealized for all those readers who demand such a thing) with a discussion of its failure.

I saw Ionesco's Exit the King in NYC and then Bald Soprano in SFO, the former was one of the most amazing performances I've seen in my life and the second was intimate and hilarious.

I read Austerlitz and then reread Rings of Saturn and while I am not particularly cholic it took weeks for my spleen to get back to normal. If only Sebald could have ...

So many books piled up for me right now but this year I am planning on doing a lot of rereading. Right now I am with Rabelais who is probably the greatest reading pleasure I have ever had. I'm also going back to my other wicked pleasures Swift and the Bible. Plus lots and lots of spanish...