Meeting Joan Didion.

When I finished Blue Nights, I exhaled deeply knowing things were now different. I’d started it the day before, a copy I’d happened upon, and while I knew there was other writing of hers I’d yet to read to be sure of it, I nevertheless knew I’d tasted something true. The sense of a new era overwhelmed me. Loss, memory, loss, memory. That was my mantra at the time, and Didion sang it back to me more clearly and more devastatingly than I’d known it could be sung. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

More over at the Paris Review. [via The Paris Review]

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Omnivore: Incoming!

Omnivore is a regular report on some of the things that I’ve been enjoying during the week (or thereabouts).

Except this week, it’s not. This week I’m going to tell you about books I’ve just placed an order for. Here’s what’s incoming in no particular order:

• The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, Zbigniew Herbert, Echo Press
• Gasoline, Quim Monzó, Open Letter
• The Restored Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Penguin (Preorder)
• Antwerp, Roberto Bolaño, New Directions (Preorder)
• The Walk, Robert Walser, New Directions (Preorder)
• Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas, New Directions (Preorder)
• The Passion According to G. H., Clarice Lispector, New Directions (Preorder)
• The No Variations, Luis Chitarroni, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Replacement, Tor Ulven, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth, Salvador Espriu, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Blue Nights, Joan Didion, Fourth Estate Ltd (Preorder)
• The Planets, Sergio Chejfec, Open Letter (Preorder)

And a much belated birthday present for someone else.

Incredibly small sample size break-down:

2 out of 12 of the books are in English to begin with (though some may disagree about Finnegans Wake); the rest are Polish (1), Catalan (2), Spanish (4), German (1), Portuguese (1), Norwegian (1), assuming I didn’t make a mistake.

My favourite publisher appears to be New Directions (4), although I do have two Open Letter books (2) in mind that I just couldn’t preorder yet; Dalkey is in second place (3) because they released an excellent, excellent catalogue a week or so ago.

The most expensive book here is The Restored Finnegans Wake, but it looks very pretty and I figured that if it was going to join my library, now is probably as good a time as any with this fancy new edition; there’s a tie for the cheapest book, and they are Antwerp and The Walk, I think because they are both short books belonging to the same series.

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Omnivore: Wishlist.

Instead of telling you what I have read or watched or listened to this week, I’m going to talk quickly about what 2012 in literature holds in store for me in terms of new releases.

I was just doing up my wishlist on the website that I use and here are some forthcoming new releases that I will be looking to acquire in 2012 (in no particular order):

• Sátántangó, László Krasznahorkai
• The Land at the End of the World, António Lobo Antunes
• Almost Never, Daniel Sada
• Varamo, César Aira
• Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas
• Zona, Geoff Dyer
• Monsieur Pain, Roberto Bolaño
• Antwerp, Roberto Bolaño
• Blue Nights, Joan Didion
• Dead Man Upright, Derek Raymond
• The Planets, Sergio Chejfec
• My First Suicide, Jerzy Pilch

Most of these are just new translations of much older works (Dyer, Didion, and Derek Raymond being the exceptions). Some of them were released in the past couple of years in expensive hardcover editions that were too much for this poor student to afford, so these paperback releases are greeted with much welcome. And one of these (Derek Raymond) is simply a re-release with a nice cover, as far as I can tell. Which suits me just fine.

The one I’m probably looking forward to the most is Dublinesque, since Vila-Matas is probably my favourite living writer. (But as they say, here comes a new challenger, and Krasznahorkai is fast climbing the ranks.)

2012 looks like a brilliant year in literature. For me anyway.

Blue Nights reviewed.

Maud Newton reviews Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.Excerpt:

In Blue Nights Didion brings a compelling and paradoxical blend of skepticism, acceptance, and astringent detachment to bear on these trends in psychology — and how they both reflect and shape our own self-images. As in most of her personal writing, she’s highly attuned to these kinds of recursive absurdities, and I would guess she’s also more than a little bit amused by them. But, like the very funny Flannery O’Connor, she depicts the ridiculous with a poker-face. And, as in O’Connor, the comic element of human existence is always the obverse of something much darker.

Hit the link for more.

[via Barnes and Noble Review]

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