Over the past while I’ve soldiered through the majority of Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: Russia After the Fall, a book I bought on a whim while wandering through the History section of Hughes & Hughes. It’s interesting and all, but relentlessly bleak is only entertaining for so long. I rather stupidly decided to take a break from it to read At Swim-Two-Birds and naturally I haven’t yet managed to get back to it, despite being less than a hundred pages from the end. In my defence the writing is pretty small and he does that thing where a new chapter starts right after the old one ends. (Authors: we need that bit of white space at the end of a chapter. It gives us a sense of accomplishment.)
Speaking of Flann O’Brien: as soon as I finished At Swim I went straight out and bought The Third Policeman, and it was a struggle not to just swipe an armful of him off the shelf. He is magnificent. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Irish writing, but this I can get behind.
Most recently I’ve finished The Dice Man. It’s a very good read with some nice stylistic choices and inventive use of language. It also has that snazzy something I love in countercultural lit from the 70s – after the idealism burned off, but before it started blowing itself.
Finally, on similar lines, a biography of Tim Leary is currently residing in my coat pocket. Unfortunately the writing is determinedly uninteresting, which is practically heretical given the subject matter. Take Hunter S. Thompson’s quote on the jacket: “Tim was a Chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof-prints on all our lives.” That’s more like it. Why couldn’t someone like him have written it?
read O Brien’s An Béal Bocht if you can. short, pointed and hilarious.
He, and those like him, didn’t feel like it?