july 2024

The Magus, John Fowles. 1965. 656pp. Local library.

Quite a ride. Fowles seems to hate this novel, and I guess I’m glad for his foreword, which tempered my expectations. The narrator’s inveterate scumminess certainly requires the reader to steel herself from time to time—or comfort herself that he might at some point collapse under the ever-rising tower of stacked convolutions in the titular millionaire’s “Most Dangerous Game” of the mind. Over the length of the book the novelty wanes somewhat, but the experience is still enjoyable. I’m interested to read the novels that Fowles liked. Possesses, in parts, a powerful undercurrent of what hurts most in the world.

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I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, Sylvie Simmons. 2011. 570pp. Local library. DNF.

Worth a look if you admire Cohen as I do, but a certain tendency toward hagiography and an insistence on cute lyrical references really wore on me here. I called it after The Future.

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Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust, transl. 1982 by James Grieve, original 1913, my ed. 2023. 450pp. Local library. Only technically finished.

Because of my library schedule I had to grind out the last 300 pages of Swann’s Way in a couple of days. This was mid-heatwave in my stuffy apartment. Every day I took several cold plunges in the bathtub. Somewhere in that middle section about the interminable Verdurins and their social travails, I had a fit of desperation. Please, God, I need to read something else, I thought. There were other things going on my life. I needed to enact some rebellion somewhere against obligation. Carelessly skimming the last 20 pages of Swann’s Way was more sensible than quitting my job. So what to say? I think I’m burned out. Maybe in five years, with improved stamina and more skillful reading, I’ll get around to the other six books. I happened to cross-read a French copy here and there, and I found the original French lighter and funnier. I wonder why?

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Selected short stories and poems:

• "Sonny’s Blues," James Baldwin, 1957 (Reread)
• "The Mud Below," Annie Proulx, in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1998 (Reread)

Movies and TV:

• La vie revée [Dream Life] (1972) dir. Mireille Dansereau 
• Face to Face [Ansikte mot ansikte] (1976) dir. Ingmar Bergman, TV version.
• Passages (2023) dir. Ira Sachs

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