Long summary of book recommendations 7/00

[jill]

Hey,
I didn't try to organize it, but I looked through some book recommendations
from the p-list I have saved, (i have hundreds) and cut and pasted this
together, mostly from the recent ones in early July. I didn't try to save
the authorship of each. Enjoy:

Original request: my personal ad: "M seeks big Book for long sets on beach,
quiet nights.  Likes: Pynchon, D Barthelme, some DF Wallace, 
Later tweak to the thread: Writers not on the academic sanctioned post
grads list:

I enjoyed reading _A Heart So White_ by Spanish author, Javier Marias. 
<<Once again I want to reiterate with 5 *s and 14 canons George Perec's
Life: 
A User's Manual.>>
1) Life: A Users Manual by Georges Perec
2) Discovery of Heaven: Harry Mulisch (*****) One of  the very best of the
living Europeans.
3) Women: Phillipe Sollers 
4) The Wind Up Bird Chronicle: Haruki Murakami
All are big, complex and you can use several of the adjectives used to
describe Pynchon 

Recently I saw a very interesting book on the notebooks of Life A User's
Manual. It was fascinating to read through and to observe a master at work.
For each chapter in the novel there was a mindboggling list of references,
and stuff that's in there all mixed up. Perec is doodling all over the
pages and has endless endless lists, phone numbers and sums on the paper.
He weaves in a number of other literary texts (what's this technique called
? Rifacimento(?)

I'm another fan of "Life - A User's Manual" although I felt throughout
that  I was missing something by reading it in English, not that the
translation  is bad, but I had the impression that there were


hm, neglected modernist classics ... Robert Musil, The Man without
Qualities?
the novel La Disparition, which is written without the letter "e."  Perhaps
more remarkable, it has been translated, also without the letter "e," into
English (A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair).

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artémio Cruz (Mexico). A hard but rewarding
read
José Saramago, The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (Portugal).  Very
simple -or not?
Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak (Basque/Spain). Idem ditto

Since I am Belgian: Louis Paul Boon, Kapellekensbaan.  Was translated into
English.  Is compared to Joyce. Pierre Mertens, Les Eblouissements (the
best Belgian novel ever -whatever that means.  Kai: this one may interest
you for it is about Gottfried Benn.)

If one wants wisdom: Primo Levi (Italy)
If one wants fun: Fernando Pessoa (Portugal)
And I bet you all like Italo Calvino.

Machado de Assis - Philosopher Or Dog
John Dos Passos - several but especially USA
Tibor Fischer - first 3 but especially  The Thought Gang
Arthur Nersesian - The Fuck-Up
Alfredo Vea Jr - The Silver Cloud Café

>1) Viktor Pelevin: Life of Insects
>Talking Dog meets Kafka

Pelevin's _Generation ,P'_
Felipe Alfau's Chromos
Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man

Robert Coover's The Public Burning if there's one book that's perhaps "of"
Gravity's Ranbow's moment, TPB might well be it.

I think the original request came with a no SF clause, but, indeed, as
mentioned elsewhere here, Boris
and Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic

For what it's worth, my list of "If you like Pynchon, then you've gotta
try..." books is follows:
> 1) THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID by Michael Ondaatje
> 2) THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS by Cynthia Ozick
> 3) WEREWOLF PROBLEM IN CENTRAL RUSSIA by Viktor Pelevin
> 4) DOG SOLDIERS by Robert Stone
> 5) THE STEAMPUNK TRILOGY by the p-list's own Paul DiFilippo

Hey, Mr. DiFilippo, if you're out there, am quite enjoying that there
Steampunk Trilogy.  What IS the deal with "steampunk" as a genre?  Queen
Victoria's Bomb (Clark) in the 60's,as I recall, Gibson and Sterling's The
Difference Engine, Moore's League of Distinguished Gentlemen comic book
miniseries, those Japanese Steampunk Detective comics (er, manga) ...

>Warlock, Warlock, Warlock.......
I'll second that.

--William Gaddis, The Recognitions
 --Harry Mathews, The Conversions
 --John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy
--Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

if you've run out of Pynchon, but still want the Pynchonesque, well, then
... besides, Haruki Murakami's
Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum had already been
mentioned, and it seemed that, say, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude were too
obvious.  Might I thus offer th following as well?  While not quite as
Pynchonian as previously mentioned works, nonetheless ...
--Ariel Dorfman, Hard Rain
--Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura
--Andrei Bely, Petersburg
--Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

Hard Rain was some time back for me now, but i recall being entranced by
the narratives-within-the-narrative alone.  The Ark Sakura is a bit like a
Japanese Confederacy of Dunces; Abe is one of those people I tried to keep
up with, went from a certain strange existentialism (The Woman in the Dunes
[also particularly recommended], The Box Man, The Face of Another) to
all-out absurd weirdity (Kangaroo Notebook).  Petersburg is an all-out
neglected modernist classic, a sort of Russian Ulysses, perhaps.  Some 
will no doubt write off The Club Dumas as sort of a pop Eco bestseller, but
I enjoyed it well enough, and I even liked the Roman Polanski adaptation
(The Ninth Gate).

Jeez, who even (here or otherwise) has read, say, Pearl S. Buck, Rudyard
Kipling or Upton Sinclair of late?

"P-list's favourite Vonnegut".
1. Mother Night
2. Cat's Cradle

over at our neighbor's, the Gaddis-L, they're talking a bit about
Bulgakov's _The Master and Margarita_, so I thought I'd pick up a copy, and
I'll be damned...there's a talking cat.

Ed Mendelson's essay; "Encyclopedic Narrative: from Dante to Pynchon,"
(MLN  91: (1976) 1267-1275).  It's worth a look for you near a library.  In
it Mendelson argues that _GR_ stands in a rather elite circle of works
including: Dante's _Commedia_, Rabelais' five books of Gargantua and
Pantagruel, Cervantes' _Don Quixote_,  Goethe's _Faust_, Melville's _Moby
Dick_, and Joyce's _Ulysses_.   



Weird Sci-Fi macabre theme:

joe r landsdales' "electric gumbo" if you can find it. it dont get any
weirder than that. akin to acid at a family reunion,

'The Hollow Earth', by Rudy Rucker. Weird, and with a MD connection to
boot. Also by Rucker : 'White Light', 'The 57th Franz Kafka', TRP-
influenced.

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty's "The Three Armageddons of  Enniscorthy Sweeny."

Try the novels of Jack Womack.  His "Random Acts of Senseless Violence" is
a classic.  His others are quite good as well.  Ambient, Terraplane,
Elvissey, Heathern...

phillip k. dick wrote some of the classics of the genre _Ubik_ and the
nightmarish, acid-influenced _Valis_ are among his best.

Clive Barker's _The Books of Blood"(1-6)_ and _Weaveworld_ and of course
_Atrocity Exhibition_ by Ballard -not exactly sci-fi but very scary, weird
and cold as ice.

I'm also a big Lem fan.  His stuff isn't WEIRD, particularly, but
different.  _Return from the Stars_ is, basically, an argument against
space travel - very interesting, indeed.

K.W. Jeter's  _Dr. Adder_  (a distant relation to _V-?).