James Wood

@jameswood

Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador
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"The Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (who was born in Honduras, grew up in El Salvador, and now lives in Iowa City) should be much better known in the United States. Every book of his I have read in English has been differently original, differently demanding. He is an intense writer, whose short novels take fierce satiric hold of a fictional concept and squeeze and squeeze. His work is political but intimate, and no more so than in this early book, a work of homage to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Edgardo Vega, a Salvadoran professor living in Canada, returns to El Salvador to attend his mother’s funeral. In a bar, he sits and rants, for hours on end, to an interlocutor who has the author’s own name, about everything he finds detestable in Salvadoran life, from the country’s beer to its writers, from its food to its politics. It’s not the book I would recommend to a reader who had never encountered this unusual writer—that would be his great novella “Senselessness”—but it’s an interesting exercise in both imitation and self-exorcism (Castellanos Moya has said that he wrote it, in part, to rid himself of the influence of Bernhard); and if, like me, you are drawn to novelists who are bloody good ranters (Philip Roth being our great American example), you will be likewise drawn to this peculiarly compulsive novel."

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James Wood recommended Falling Awake in Books (curated)

 
Falling Awake
Falling Awake
Alice Oswald | 2016 | Fiction & Poetry
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" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

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Hallo Sausages: The Lyrics of Ian Dury
Hallo Sausages: The Lyrics of Ian Dury
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"When I want to cheer myself up, I think of Ian Dury – the best lyricist in English music, who fused music hall and funk, the first Cockney rapper. The music is always there and the music is very good, but it’s easy to miss the joyous flow of words when you’re listening to it. That’s where Hallo Sausages: The Lyrics of Ian Dury, edited by his daughter, is sublimely useful. Along with great photographs and a tender memoir, it collects the words for all the songs. So you can actually read “Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part Three)”, and get all the brilliant internal rhymes: “Seeing Piccadilly, Fanny Smith and Willy / Being rather silly and porridge oats.” There’s that great exercise in admiration and mockery, “There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards” – people like Einstein and Van Gogh – with its running refrain: “Probably got help from their mum who had help from her mum.” And everyone’s favourite, “Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick” (“Two fat persons, click, click, click”). Who couldn’t love a songwriter who has a song called “Plaistow Patricia”? Actually, my favourite Dury song is not cheerful, but terribly sad, “You’ll See Glimpses”, which takes the form of a letter written by someone who has been locked up because his mind doesn’t work properly. This letter is utopian: the inmate lists everything he would do to sort out “the problems of the world”. It ends: “This has been got out by a friend.” Go and listen to it – Dury doesn’t sing but reads the words, jauntily. Yet it’s profoundly sad, and seems to me as great a work of art as any novel or short story of the last 40 years."

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