2007_03_01_archive

A song for BS Johnson

The Pernice Brothers, a band I quite like a lot, has a song called BS

Johnson on Live a Little, their latest LP (which I have yet to hear).

The chorus goes:

You were gone by 42

There'd be no rigid form for you

Jammed into a plot where you never would fit

A tiny manuscript with a hole cut in it.

You can hear how good it is on the band's AV page. The LP also reworks

Grudge Fuck, one of Joe Pernice's best songs, written when the band

was The Scud Mountain Boys. The original is much better.

at 9:43 PM 0 comments

Bookshop chat

This is a 15th Century bookshop in Lewes, north of Brighton, called,

er, The 15th Century Bookshop. Lewes is an oasis in philistine

southern England. Virginia Woolf owned a house a hundred yards or so

away from the High Street, where this picture was taken. And, this

week, on a stall outside another bookshop nearby, I saw copies of

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Delillo's Mao II and a book called

Torture in the Eighties. Unfortunately, I had to report the shop to

the authorities for failing to display the obligatory tattered Penguin

edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

at 8:24 PM 0 comments

Applying restraint

I've just read All Whom I Have Loved, the latest Aharon Appelfeld

novel to be translated. Like all his books, the simple rhythm of the

prose makes it easy to continue reading. Aloma Halter's translation -

despite the awkward title - has the quality of invisibility achieved

by Dalya Bilu, the best of Appelfeld's various collaborators. It is

also easy to regard him as "an interesting minor novelist". The limits

of his novels, their silences, suggest a lack "more important" or

"ambitious" novelists have the ability to fill. The latest novel is no

different. It is narrated by Paul Rosenfeld, a nine-year-old boy,

living in the aftermath of his assimilated parents' divorce and the

shadow of growing anti-Semitism in 1930s Europe. We've been here

before in his two best novels, The Age of Wonders and The Healer. And,

as in both of those novels, there is an idyllic holiday with the

mother while an artistic father flails about in a culture increasingly

hostile to Jews. For these reasons, All Whom I Have Loved seems

contrived. Yet I still find it exhilarating to read a novel with such

restraint. Nothing is psychologised. The boy reports what happened

without a controlling knowingness, without any sentences reporting the

thoughts and feelings of anyone except himself. In reading novels by

Appelfeld, the world becomes mysterious, frightening and wonderful all

at the same time. Imagine what contemporary fiction would be like if

this constraint was applied universally.

at 3:02 PM 0 comments

April 2007 February 2007 Home

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My Shelfari Bookshelf

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

email address

Please contact me, Stephen Mitchelmore, at steve dot mitchelmore at

gmail dot com

Literary and other links

* British Literary Blogs

* ReadySteadyBook blog

* Spurious

* Book Depository: Editor's Corner

* The Literary Saloon

* The Existence Machine

* The Reading Experience

* Scarecrow Comment

* Guardian Books Blog

* The Quarterly Conversation

* KCRW Bookworm

* BookForum

* wood s lot

* Mountain 7

* Todd Colby's Glee Farm

* Three per cent

* Tales from the Reading Room

* The Bibliophilic Blogger

* The Penguin Blog

* TLS: Peter Stothard

* Mary Beard

* Nomadics: Pierre Joris

* Lenin's Tomb

* Dispatches from Zembla

* Waggish

More literary blogs

* Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella

* The Best of New Writing on the Web

* John Self's Asylum

* Anatomy of Melancholy

* The Truth About Lies

* Nigel Beale: Nota Bene

* Thomas McGonigle's ABC of Reading

* Vertigo: Collecting WG Sebald

* Un Arbre dans la Ville

* The Wooden Spoon

* The Joyful Knowing

* The Reader Onliine

* In Abstentia Out

* Jacob Russell's Barking Dog

* eNotes Book Blog

* Diderot's Diary

Book buying

* *Steve's Wishlist*

* The Book Depository - Cheap books and free delivery

* Booksprice - price comparisons

* Abebooks

Favoured author sites

* Maurice Blanchot

* Thomas Bernhard (German equivalent)

* Gabriel Josipovici

* Peter Handke (German equivalent)

* Princeton Dante Project

* Proust: Temps Perdu

* The Kafka Project

* Charlotte Mandell

* Noam Chomsky

* John Pilger

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