Nonsuch Book

book lust: letters to his neighbor by marcel proust

Even those infamous cork walls could not protect the delicate author from all the disturbing noises of the outside world, especially not from the dentist that lived above him. Lydia Davis translates these letters that he wrote to his neighbor that detail in infinitely polite language, hopefully as humorously as the teasers promise, yet more mortal suffering at the hands of an insensitive world. Very excited about what promises to be the most entertaining letters of complaint I have ever read.

Madame,

I have been wanting for a long time to express to you my regret that the sudden arrival of my brother prevented me from writing to you during the last days of your stay in Paris, then my sadness at your leaving. But you have bequeathed to me so many workers and one Lady Terre—whom I do not dare call, rather, “Terrible” (since, when I get the workers to extend the afternoon a little in order to move things ahead without waking me too much, she commands them violently and perhaps sadistically to start banging at 7 o’clock in the morning above my head, in the room immediately above my bedroom, an order which they are forced to obey), that I have no strength to write and have had to give up going away. How right I was to be discreet when you wanted me to investigate whether the morning noise was coming from a sink. What was that compared to those hammers? “A shiver of water on moss” as Verlaine says of a song “that weeps only to please you.” In truth, I cannot be sure that the latter was whispered in order to please me. As they are redoing a shop next door I had with great difficulty got them not to begin work each day until after two o’clock. But this success has been destroyed since upstairs, much closer, they are beginning at 7 o’clock. I will add in order to be fair that your workers whom I do not have the honor of knowing (any more than the terrible lady) must be charming. Thus your painters (or your painter), unique within their kind and their guild, do not practice the Union of the Arts, do not sing! Generally a painter, a house painter especially, believes he must cultivate at the same time as the art of Giotto that of Reszké. This one is quiet while the electrician bangs. I hope that when you return you will not find yourself surrounded by anything less than the Sistine frescoes... I would so much like your voyage to do you good, I was so sad, so continually sad over your illness. If your charming son, innocent of the noise that is tormenting me, is with you, will you please convey all my best wishes to him and be so kind as to accept Madame my most respectful regards.

Marcel Proust

Due out from New Directions on August 22, 2017. Not just for drama queens and those with pesky neighbors. Full description here.

book lust: love hotel by jane unrue

Via New Directions in my inbox this morning comes this atmospheric cover design and intriguing blurb:

"Working on behalf of a cunning and mysterious couple, a woman embarks on a haunting search for a stranger (a child? somebody’s lover? a ghost?), undertaking a perplexing, dangerous, and apparently timeless journey that originates on a secluded country estate and leads deep into the center of the city. Love Hotel explores a heartbreaking and nightmarish world of unrelenting excess, impossible convergences, undeniable urges, and inexorable loss. Jane Unrue’s writing, beautifully cunning and mysterious, twists and turns and lures the reader on with an erotic magnetism of its own." 

The pitch comes with a comparison to Turn of the Screw and promises of leaving one "unsettled, disturbed, and amazed." And this excerpt:

Day 1
Immediately striking was the silence
no faint music
how lightning inducing a feeling of
One morning a man and his wife were working in the hay.
I felt none of what I had imagined feeling before I left my apartment building
None of what I felt when I got on the train.

And a mention of an author event in New York tomorrow. This is the most interesting book-about-love plug all day. Any Unrue fans out there? Good reading match for me?

book lust: mr. gwyn by alessandro baricco

Saw it in the bookstore. The design caught my eye. One of those books that feels good in the hands. Then I saw someone on the beach reading it. Then received a promotional email from McSweeney's about it. Then looked about and saw that Complete Reviews, a trusted opinion, thought well of it. Think it may be my next acquisition. Anyone read this yet?

"After celebrated author Jasper Gwyn suddenly and publicly announces that he will never write another book, he embarks on a strange new career path as a “copyist,” holding thirty-day sittings in a meticulously appointed room and producing, at the end, brief but profoundly rich portraits in prose. The surprising, beautiful, and even frightening results are received with rapture by their subjects—among them Gwyn’s devoted assistant, Rebecca; a beautiful fabric importer; a landscape painter; Gwyn’s own literary agent; two wealthy newlyweds; a tailor to the Queen; and a very dangerous nineteen-year-old.

Then Gwyn disappears, leaving behind only a short note to his assistant—and the portraits. As Rebecca studies his words, she realizes that the mystery is larger than the simple fact of Gwyn’s whereabouts, and she begins to unravel a lifetime’s worth of clues left by a man who saw so much but said so little, a man whose solitude masked a heart as hungry as hers."

book lust: the albertine workout by anne carson

The new Muriel Spark offerings at the New Directions website drew me over there yesterday where I saw this lust-worthy offering that is sadly not available until June 25. ND provides the briefest of summaries:

"The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson’s research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu."

Well. That should be enough. But it is not. So I went looking about some more and found this Anne Carson reading at The Center for Fiction.

 

 A HINGED post pointed me to the art work that Kim Anno has created for the book. Look under the book "sleep" here.

phantoms on the bookshelves by jacques bonnet

 A phantom on a bookshelf is simply a marker that in a formal library setting indicates where a book has been removed, and in a private library may signal either a missing book or a space saved for something that is hoped for but has yet to be acquired. When you look at the charming design of the book cover above, you see hand-sketched phantoms conveying an informality that is a perfect match for the contents within.

Nearly three years ago, Anthony posted on this slim volume, and I immediately added it to my wish list. And promptly received it just this Christmas. Appreciating the beauty of receiving something so long wished for that you forgot you wished for it, I read it just a few days after receipt so that I did not forget that I now had it. What I found was not just a celebration of reading, but an intimate portrait of Bonnet's mind, a myriad of thought paths he has traveled, physically arranged upon his shelves. The life of Bonnet's mind is not that of every reader to be certain, as evidenced by his private library of over 40,000 volumes, 

“not one of those bibliophile libraries containing works so valuable that their owner never opens them for fear of damaging them, no I’m talking about a working library, the kind where you don’t hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results from keeping everything you have ever read including paperbacks and perhaps several editions of the same title -- as well as the ones you mean to read one day."

Bonnet pays little heed to the monetary value of his books. He acknowledges the means it takes to acquire and house them all properly, but he also admits that his added marginalia immediately devalues many of his treasures making them virtually worthless to the gently mad folks we might encounter in a Brisbane book. He instead dwells on the personal importance of each book he owns, the starting point of one line of thought that led to one book and then another, but also defends the keeping of those earlier reads as something one returns to when one's thinking changes. He recalls a few instances of having no memory of a book read long ago and also of re-reading a beloved text and having no idea what appealed to him on first reading, the proof that our emotional connections to books often outweigh a literal connection to content.

This book is often discussed as having helpful cataloging suggestions, but the librarian in me bristles a little at that notion. I don't believe that Bonnet ever makes any pretense about establishing formalized rules for organizing the bookshelves, but instead, emphasizes that each person must judge their own needs. He includes Georges Perec's "brave attempt at listing the possible methods of classifying one's books," but concedes that even Perec was well aware that "none of these choices is satisfactory on its own" and that "in practice, every library is arranged using a combination of these methods." The laws of classification that govern public libraries have no place for Bonnet and others like him who recognize that no arbitrary classification system's importance will ever supplant the far greater needs of knowing where your books are in the moment you need to find them.

My favorite section of the book comes late in, and adresses the topic of real people and fictional characters.

"Authors are just fictional people, about whom we have a few biographical elements, never enough to make them truly real people. Whereas the biography of a literary character, even if it is incomplete - and explicitly so - is perfectly reliable: it is whatever its creator decided. So are his or her acts and words."

He goes on to illustrate that although Victor Hugo may have exhaustively chronicled his entire life, with an emphasis upon his sexual exploits, these journals are more of a fiction than his novels in many ways. He makes reference to Pierre Bayard's assertion that Holmes was completely on the wrong track in the Baskervilles affair, an offered proof that fictional characters are as flawed as real people and their choices and thoughts may and should be questioned in the same way. Bonnet also has some fun with the fact that real people may hide behind a pen name, a means of constructing a fictional identity for themselves.

This all points to the idea that Bonnet, in offering his own (real) story to us is a bit of a fiction as well who merely points us all to our own bookish realities. Of what we seek from our books, of how their physical organization illustrates the workings of our individual minds, of what we have pulled and what we wish to see where those phantoms reside on our shelves. This book is like a wonderful cocktail party where the conversation is rich and the company charming. It took far longer to read than its small size would suggest because the many books it points to needed to be investigated as I went. It creates wishes. Just loved it.

book lust: stoner by john williams in limited edition hardback

 

Last month, this lovely popped up on the Vintage Books Design Tumblr (a seriously drool-worthy destination), and the post informed us that:

"Next month, Vintage Classics will publish a special clothbound edition exclusively for Waterstones, with a design that incorporates woodblock printing and vintage american type."

I've been stalking the Waterstones site and Google searches like the madwoman I am, and have yet to see it pop up. This book is extraordinary, and since I loved it before the (deserved) mainstream adulation of late, I feel like I deserve this beauty in a bookishly bratty kind of way. Help me find it? 

book lust: penelope fitzgerald by hermione lee

Hermione Lee's upcoming biography of Penelope Fitzgerald has been talked about for some time, but now as the publication date draws nearer (November in the UK and December here in the states), I find myself getting somewhat obsessive about its possible contents and Lee's approach to the writer's life. It just won't do in some quarters to be a fan girl for a biographer, but there I am. Lee is an extraordinary writer and crafts biographies that blend biographical detail with literary criticism in a way that is both revealing and relevant. As she offers in this Paris Review interview:

"I’m very interested in that idea of secrets. Edith Wharton says, in a story, that a woman’s life is like a great house full of rooms, and you never get to the secret room. I’m fascinated by these no-go areas, these secret places of reserve. At the same time, I’m extremely inquisitive and curious. Perhaps that’s temperamentally why I’ve been attracted to biography. I want to penetrate those secret places, find out everything, and be completely ruthless. It’s paradoxical—I wouldn’t want it done to me, yet I’m very keen to do it to other people. And the thing that attracts me to these people is their secret self."

This ruthlessness yields works through which you can literally hear the voice of the subject.

"Life-writing, a term used by Woolf in “Sketch of the Past,” is made up of different kinds of “true” narratives—biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters, travel writing. These narratives can be thought of as distinct genres, but they can also overlap. Biography is bound to involve other kinds of life-writing. Biography makes use of letters, memoirs, diaries, and so on, and that can be a challenge for the biographer. Writing about Woolf, you are overwhelmed by the voice of that diary, those letters. If you want, as I did, to quote a lot, because you want the sound of her voice to be on every page—in a way, I just wanted to be a ghostwriter for her voice—then the trouble is that you can be overcome by the power of that voice."

So now Lee has added Fitzgerald to her list of subjects alongside Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Elizabeth Bowen amongst others. I'm curious to see what impact this might have for the occasionaly forgotten Fitzgerald in terms of academic regard. I'm curious to see if Lee can expound upon a writer's life in her typically comprehensive fashion when the writer's career began so late and her own works of fiction have nowhere near the heft of a Lee biography. I'm also looking forward to a read that helps unify my thoughts about the work of an author I enjoy greatly.

book lust: neil gaiman's the ocean at the end of the lane deluxe edition

Many of you are reading it and talking about it. I'm reading it. But do you love it this much? "There will only be 2,000 copies printed of this limited, numbered edition of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, each signed by the author, Neil Gaiman. This highly collectible deluxe hardcover, designed and illustrated in full-color by Dave McKean, features a four-color preprinted case, a die-cut silk-bound slipcase, gorgeous endpapers, and text printed on heavy-stock matte paper."

What is your limit when it comes to collectible books?

(via Chip Kidd's website today)

book lust: other people's books

Readers tend to judge others by the books on their shelves. And this is a socially acceptable practice. Don't go through their drawers or their medicine cabinet or their mail, but an even more pronounced form of voyeurism, mentally inventorying every last title in their homes or offices, is just fine. And don't tell me you don't make judgements based upon what you see. That you haven't identified a potential friend or lover by seeing what they read.

A email from the Strand bookstore arrived in my inbox this week, offering a link to an author's bookshelf. Karen Russell. I greatly enjoy her quirkiness and wanted to see what she reads. So I clicked through immediately and found many books I already own and enjoyed plus a few new things to lust after.

 And clicked away from the page feeling more excitement about reading her newest book over my upcoming break. Because I have seen her shelves. 

and i might read...

The lists. Books coming out in 2013. Everywhere. And we all jump on them like the Sears holiday catalogs of old where one might pick out every toy that strikes one's imagination as a prerequisite to happiness. And then play with those received for 5 days before casting them on to the parental pile of frustrated dismay. So I look through all the lists to see what I might read this year, the new and novel that for a few moments (if I do not read attached commentary), I may project every need I may have from a particular book. Until I read that description, those advance reviews, that attraction is perfect, that book lust ideal. The perfect happiness of the uninformed moment.

The book you see above is the perfect example of this. I have no idea whatsoever what this book is about. Coatzee's prose pleases me, the cover art is outstanding, and my Catholic school girl self may take that title and run with any juvenile flights of fancy I might have had (as a nun screamed at me) that Jesus was just as mischievous as a child as me, a thought that evolved with age into "of course Jesus slept with Mary Magdalene." So The Childhood of Jesus goes on the wish list of possibilities.

 Then there is the lure of reading a favorite author in a different genre or format. The upcoming release of Bolano's collected poetry. Or a series of lectures that Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires that span from the Vikings to Oscar Wilde. And the additional appeal of having two go-to books this year that don't consume my attention all at once but provide important dip-ins of intense focus.

 

And whimsy will be required. Really enjoyed Swamplandia! but appreciate Karen Russell's short stories even more. Vampires in the Lemon Grove will be needed.

Favorite authors. I read whatever Gaiman publishes, and just love the title of this one. So The Ocean at the End of the Lane makes the wish list even though I know nothing about it. And The Infatuations because I am completely infatuated with Marias, and am busting out of my skin trying to imagine how his writing from a woman's point of view will play out. His observations of women are so idiosyncratic and so distant that I wonder how he will close that divide to inhabit a woman's thoughts and voice.

 

And finally, there are the books that remind you that you never got around to reading those other new release books years ago that you coveted so much at the time. I was so excited about Exodus when I read, “The final volume in Iyer’s gloomily brilliant trilogy about a toxic friendship between unfortunate philosophy dons, boozing and bitching in the great tradition of Beckett’s double acts.” (The Guardian), but then remembered that I had neglected to read both Spurious and Dogma that I was equally excited about when they were published. So I add three books to the list instead of just the one. And then the new Anne Carson you see above would be so much more meaningful if I read my long-neglected copy of The Autobiography of Red first. Add two more.

What 2013 new releases have you the most (perhaps unrealistically) excited about reading?