Year in Reading, 2012 edition.

It’s the end of the year again. My year in reading was strange. I read less than I was hoping to (the second semester within the year just overtook me somehow). I also feel guilty at not having had a more balanced diet. I read comparatively little non-fiction and criticism/theory this year, as you might be able to tell from this list.

That said, it was also a wonderful year of old and new. I picked up a couple of new favourites, and revisited some old ones (something I don’t do often enough). These, then, are the books that left the deepest impressions. I’ve split them up into the newly published, the not-so-newly published, and the re-reads, just because that’s the way it panned out for me.

THE NEW

From the Observatory, by Julio Cortázar, translated by Anne McLean, archipelago books
Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai, translated by George Szirtes, New Directions
The Smoke of Distant Fires, by Eduardo Chirinos, translated by G. J. Racz, Open Letter
Scars, by Juan José Saer, translated by Steve Dolph, Open Letter

Here we have two novels, one poetry collection, and one slender and unclassifiable volume!

THE NOT-SO-NEW

Dead Man Upright*, by Derek Raymond, Melville House
The First Person Singular, by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press
The Walk, by Robert Walser, translated by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky, New Directions
Your Face Tomorrow, by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions

* this is a new edition, but it is an old book.

A crime novel! A novella! A gigantic novel (in three volumes)! And philosophy!

THE RE-READS

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, by Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, translated by Anne McLean, archipelago books
Gasoline, by Quim Monzó, translated by Mary Ann Newman, Open Letter
The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector, translated by Benjamin Moser, New Directions

And to round off, we have a novel, a novella, and one heck of an adventure.

So that’s it from me. What were your notable books of the year?

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Talking The Walk.

Walser’s writing cunningly masquerades irony with self-effacement, and vice-versa; embodied in the figure of the bedraggled walker/poet, an almost baroque politesse spills over into the incongruous, the obsequious, and the disconcerting. Articulated in a language of almost hallucinatory virtuosity, the narrator’s soliloquies reveal a social awkwardness that makes it difficult for him to navigate his environment unharmed; his basic underlying state is fear, and his writing a compulsive flight from that fear. Endless elaborations are delivered with a decorousness W. G. Sebald terms “anarchistic”; they serve to buy time, to delay the inevitable—for while he remains at a safe enough distance from nearly every individual he encounters, disdain and humiliation always seem close at hand, potential threats ready to pounce on him and blot him out.

Conversational Reading points us to this article on Robert Walser’s The Walk over at The Brooklyn Rail. [The Brooklyn Rail, via Conversational Reading]

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Another review of The Walk.

Walser’s writing cunningly masquerades irony with self-effacement, and vice-versa; embodied in the figure of the bedraggled walker/poet, an almost baroque politesse spills over into the incongruous, the obsequious, and the disconcerting. Articulated in a language of hallucinatory virtuosity, the narrator’s soliloquies reveal a social awkwardness that makes it difficult for him to navigate his environment unharmed. His basic underlying state is fear, and his writing a compulsive flight from that fear. Endless elaborations are delivered with a decorousness W.G. Sebald terms “anarchistic”; they serve to buy time, to delay the inevitable—for while he remains at a safe-enough distance from nearly every individual he encounters, disdain and humiliation always seem close at hand, potential threats ready to pounce on him and blot him out.

Andrea Scrima review Robert Walser’s The Walk. [via The Rumpus]

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Edition Additions: So pretty.

As reported yesterday, my copy of the new edition of Robert Walser’s The Walk arrived a day or two ago. It came along with Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp.

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Robert Walser’s The Walk

In his revisions, Bernofsky suggests, Walser “minimiz[ed] the divide between the writing protagonist and the walking protagonist.” But the divide remains, at least at the beginning, and throughout the novel, though the two personalities merge, a metaphysical struggle persists between them. The two roles are introduced separately in the opening pages, as the narrator refers to himself in the third person as first one—“With a kind face, a bicycling town chemist cycles close by the walker”; and then the other—“The writer is nonetheless very humbly asked to be a bit careful to avoid jokes as well as other superfluousnesses.” (Happily, as the latter example shows, Walser didn’t leave all of his thickly layered ironies behind when he left Berlin. The Walk might be read, I think, as a tragicomedy of the tension between irony and sincerity as played out by the contenders, walker and writer.)

[Full review via Three Percent]

I just received this book today, but have been hyped for ages and can’t wait to get to it. For the uninitiated, Robert Walser is definitely required reading.

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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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