Literary News

bendk said:
Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85
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Here is something odd: about a month ago, quite out of the blue, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to read Roth, a writer I had never read. I had read most of Updike, much of Bellow, but nothing of Roth. What implanted this urgent desire in my head? I cannot recall hearing his name mentioned or seeing a book of his out of the corner of my eye as I wandered through a bookstore. But I suddenly felt I must drop everything and read Roth. I began with Sabbath's Theater, and then turned to his earlier work. When I discovered, a few days ago, the news that he had died, I felt outraged beyond all proportion. I offer the following speculation: during the last month of a writer's life--a prolific writer of great power--his dying consciousness sends out waves across the planet, to which certain individuals are receptive. This is the third time I have experienced this phenomenon. I am curious to know if anyone else has experienced something similar.
 
Bleak&#1048 said:
bendk said:
Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85
Click to expand...


Here is something odd: about a month ago, quite out of the blue, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to read Roth, a writer I had never read. I had read most of Updike, much of Bellow, but nothing of Roth. What implanted this urgent desire in my head? I cannot recall hearing his name mentioned or seeing a book of his out of the corner of my eye as I wandered through a bookstore. But I suddenly felt I must drop everything and read Roth. I began with Sabbath's Theater, and then turned to his earlier work. When I discovered, a few days ago, the news that he had died, I felt outraged beyond all proportion. I offer the following speculation: during the last month of a writer's life--a prolific writer of great power--his dying consciousness sends out waves across the planet, to which certain individuals are receptive. This is the third time I have experienced this phenomenon. I am curious to know if anyone else has experienced something similar.
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I have long felt there is a huge labyrinth or gestalt between elements of fiction and its creators and absorbers, inexplicable, preternatural, but consciously derivable and chartable.
 
I read Portnoy's Complaint in my twenties. I remember laughing quite a bit and coming away with a positive impression of it. After so many years, I can't recall much else, except a few scenes.


I read the other day that Roth wrote some of his best work when he was in his 60s and 70s. His personal favorite was Sabbath's Theater. I owned that book at one time, but lost it when I lost my storage unit. It's easy enough to get again. Did you like that one, Bleak&Icy?

I also read a long time ago that he was a bit of a jerk in real life. One of those 'don't confuse the work with the author' types.
 
Bleak&#1048 said:
bendk said:
Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85
Click to expand...


Here is something odd: about a month ago, quite out of the blue, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to read Roth, a writer I had never read. I had read most of Updike, much of Bellow, but nothing of Roth. What implanted this urgent desire in my head? I cannot recall hearing his name mentioned or seeing a book of his out of the corner of my eye as I wandered through a bookstore. But I suddenly felt I must drop everything and read Roth. I began with Sabbath's Theater, and then turned to his earlier work. When I discovered, a few days ago, the news that he had died, I felt outraged beyond all proportion. I offer the following speculation: during the last month of a writer's life--a prolific writer of great power--his dying consciousness sends out waves across the planet, to which certain individuals are receptive. This is the third time I have experienced this phenomenon. I am curious to know if anyone else has experienced something similar.
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Now that you mention it- i recall a similar thing, sudden inspiration to reread lots of Tanith Lee the week before news of her passing.
Something like your theory flashed through my mind then too.
 
Something similar happened to me with H.R. Giger.

I finished watching Jodorowsky's Dune in 2014; it featured a very old-looking H.R. Giger and, as I was about to take a shower after I was done with the documentary, I thought: "How longer can Giger live, given how old and sick he seems?".

I checked Wikipedia after I took that shower and I learned he had died either that very same day or the day before.
 
bendk said:
This doesn't particularly interest me, but it may be of interest to others.

Return to Middle-earth
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As a die-hard Tolkien fangirl completist who already has both the American (HMH) and UK (HarperCollins) hardcovers of this book in-hand, I can tell you it's not worth the trouble for any but the most ardent devotees.

Hostetter does a decent job, I suppose, of ferreting out tidbits of general reader interest from Prof. T's later essays and jottings, but presents them in such a piecemeal fashion and with such odd editorial choices that it's not a very satisfying experience to read them. He's the head of the Tolkien Linguistic Fellowship, but for some strange reason has decided that no one is interested in more technical linguistic details, so any reference to these matters is excised from the already excerpted or fragmentary writings included in this volume. This is perhaps because much of this material has already appeared in print in Parma Eldalamberon, which is now available on Amazon I believe, or maybe a further volume is planned which focuses on the Elvish tongues exclusively, though I doubt that.

It's basically a hodge podge of miscellaneous quasi-metaphysical and cultural trivia; sort of like an addendum to both vols. 4 and 12 of The History of Middle-earth.
 
New Cormac McCarthy:

This is a surprise. It seems almost like the opposite of The Road, in that that book was simple and deep simultaneously. This new book does not seem simple at all. And the narrator of this video has made me suddenly wonder. Did I act prematurely? Should I have preordered this book? Was that a mistake?
 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction


Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz – fabulously funny visions of an afterlife



In interviews, Toltz has namechecked such leading miserabilists as the aphorist EM Cioran and the misanthrope’s misanthrope Thomas Bernhard, while one of Here Goes Nothing’s epigraphs is from the more obscure Peter Wessel Zapffe, who took philosophical pessimism to its death-metal extreme. An engagement with the great “No” to life is clearly part of his intellectual apparatus, but Toltz is too much of a humorist to throw his weight fully into naysaying, andraises wisecracking to something like the status of a worldview.
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