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Just one post from me to close out the final two months of 2025. Offline (which is most of where I’ve been), I spent these months on a paper deadline, moving out of Boston after my temporary residency, managing a home remodel, and doing a bit of winter break travel. Not much time for reading, so I only read three short books across two months. Expect a similarly lean next couple of months—I will be traveling internationally for a month between January and February and might compile those months into one reading post as well. Maybe I will finish at least one book!
Hope you’ve all been having a nice winter season and enjoying a break, or time with friends or family. :)
The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
Translated by Jack Dawson
The Loser is a stream-of-consciousness style short novel about three men: the unnamed narrator, Wertheimer, and Glenn Gould (IRL pianist Glenn Gould, 1932 - 1982). All three pen were piano students together in their youth in the world of this novel, and their lives diverged from that point—Glenn Gould off to prodigal fame and an early death by stroke; Wertheimer giving up on the piano and eventually killing himself; the narrator rejecting his musical training, becoming a writer, and attempting to document the lives of his friends.
( Read more... )
I think that the summary of this, much like Mrs Dalloway or Shyness and Dignity, is that such a book is a journey best undertaken when one can read for prose. Ultimately the story does not matter, and the characters are necessary for voice but often peculiarly flat in that theiir relationships exist in retrospect. There’s a weird combination of amazing focus and shallow depth of field, so that perhaps one or two characters approach real, but their sharpness compared to surrounding fuzziness makes htem unreal again. I’m prepared to say that every reader should try something like it—if only to know how else a commentary can look, outside the Austen-shaped bounds of society novels. I appreciate that I’m missing a great deal of this one. Reading it made me think, though. I’ll hold some of its ideas for a while.
Old School, by Tobias Wolff
Old School is an American boarding school novel—from 2003. Written in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, Wolff gives us a semi-autobiographical look at the life of a New England preparatory student in 1960. I find these books quite different from their British counterparts—more cynical, for one, but also more distinctly alien, in that the narrative is positioned as remote and not an invitation into that world. The boys usually leave it, violently, through war and expulsion and running away. They don’t belong there, and neither do you. I don’t quite know why; perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that boarding schools aren’t/weren’t as central in civic and social life here. The quintessential American school setting is a public high school. And this book is not that, it takes place in the near-mythical wilds of a private boys’ school in the Northeast.
( Read more... )
So, I think, this book is for fans of those other more well-known classic American boarding school novels, who want to keep seeing this world. It fits that genre to a tee, and it’s a fair entry for its look at Jewishness, or for asking how an author develops. I don’t quite think it matches them, though. There are probably better modern books on the subject. (And there’s definitely a better modern movie: The Holdovers [2023].)
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Translated by Kenneth Burke
Gustav Aschenbach is a middle-aged widower and author who, inspired by an encounter with a stranger one day, decides to set off on a vacation. He ends up in Venice, where he becomes enthralled by a teenage Polish boy named Tadzio. This obsession grows from observing the boy at their shared hotek, to following his family through the streets of Venice, to making the decision to withhold information about a cholera outbreak in the hopes of being trapped in quarantine with the family. Through all of this, Tadzio and his true opinion of Aschenbach remain enigmatic. Aschenbach is ultimately unsuccessful, and the novel ends with death by cholera—the titular death in Venice.
( Read more... )
Hope you’ve all been having a nice winter season and enjoying a break, or time with friends or family. :)
The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
Translated by Jack Dawson
The Loser is a stream-of-consciousness style short novel about three men: the unnamed narrator, Wertheimer, and Glenn Gould (IRL pianist Glenn Gould, 1932 - 1982). All three pen were piano students together in their youth in the world of this novel, and their lives diverged from that point—Glenn Gould off to prodigal fame and an early death by stroke; Wertheimer giving up on the piano and eventually killing himself; the narrator rejecting his musical training, becoming a writer, and attempting to document the lives of his friends.
( Read more... )
I think that the summary of this, much like Mrs Dalloway or Shyness and Dignity, is that such a book is a journey best undertaken when one can read for prose. Ultimately the story does not matter, and the characters are necessary for voice but often peculiarly flat in that theiir relationships exist in retrospect. There’s a weird combination of amazing focus and shallow depth of field, so that perhaps one or two characters approach real, but their sharpness compared to surrounding fuzziness makes htem unreal again. I’m prepared to say that every reader should try something like it—if only to know how else a commentary can look, outside the Austen-shaped bounds of society novels. I appreciate that I’m missing a great deal of this one. Reading it made me think, though. I’ll hold some of its ideas for a while.
Old School, by Tobias Wolff
Old School is an American boarding school novel—from 2003. Written in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, Wolff gives us a semi-autobiographical look at the life of a New England preparatory student in 1960. I find these books quite different from their British counterparts—more cynical, for one, but also more distinctly alien, in that the narrative is positioned as remote and not an invitation into that world. The boys usually leave it, violently, through war and expulsion and running away. They don’t belong there, and neither do you. I don’t quite know why; perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that boarding schools aren’t/weren’t as central in civic and social life here. The quintessential American school setting is a public high school. And this book is not that, it takes place in the near-mythical wilds of a private boys’ school in the Northeast.
( Read more... )
So, I think, this book is for fans of those other more well-known classic American boarding school novels, who want to keep seeing this world. It fits that genre to a tee, and it’s a fair entry for its look at Jewishness, or for asking how an author develops. I don’t quite think it matches them, though. There are probably better modern books on the subject. (And there’s definitely a better modern movie: The Holdovers [2023].)
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Translated by Kenneth Burke
Gustav Aschenbach is a middle-aged widower and author who, inspired by an encounter with a stranger one day, decides to set off on a vacation. He ends up in Venice, where he becomes enthralled by a teenage Polish boy named Tadzio. This obsession grows from observing the boy at their shared hotek, to following his family through the streets of Venice, to making the decision to withhold information about a cholera outbreak in the hopes of being trapped in quarantine with the family. Through all of this, Tadzio and his true opinion of Aschenbach remain enigmatic. Aschenbach is ultimately unsuccessful, and the novel ends with death by cholera—the titular death in Venice.
( Read more... )
