Aint No Right

farrellgirl99 wrote:

jptm wrote:Say Larry, have you read anything from Michel Houellebecq? I think his stuff is right up your alley...

Les Particules élémentaires would be a good place to start.

chaos wrote:

farrellgirl99 wrote:

I got hooked on this book and read it in one sitting on a Saturday several years ago. I have read a couple of other books by Michael Cunningham, but nothing compares to The Hours. He does a fantastic job with his luminous prose, intricately weaving together the narrative strands and observational details of his slowing unravelling characters.

nausearockpig wrote:I just finished this:



It was somewhat disconcerting hearing that he was murdered as I was reading the book he wrote...

Larry B. wrote:Hey! I hadn't heard of him before. I just checked my collection of e-books and I do have that book and Platform. I'll give your recommendation a go!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 28300.html

Updated March 31, 2013, 10:14 p.m. ET
'Finnegans Wake' Is Greek to Many; Now Imagine It in Chinese
Translation of Joyce Novel in Works for Years Sells Well to Readers Craving a Challenge

BEIJING—"Finnegans Wake" has bedeviled readers for decades, but few can claim the toil and triumph it has given to Dai Congrong.

Ms. Dai spent eight years translating into Chinese the 1939 James Joyce novel that the author's own brother described as "unspeakably wearisome." She endured low pay, a skeptical husband and the continued demands of her teaching job. That is on top of deciphering sentences like this: "Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface."
...
A newly affluent nation that prizes black Audi sedans and Louis Vuitton handbags has made a literary status symbol of what may well be English literature's most difficult work. Thanks in part to a canny marketing campaign involving eye-catching billboards and packaging, "Finnegans Wake" sold out the first, 8,000-volume run shortly after it was released in December. The book briefly rose to No. 2 on a bestseller list run by a Shanghai book industry group, just behind a biography of the late Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's modern-day boom.
...
The appetite for Joyce's most challenging work comes from a real hunger for demanding literature. A Chinese writer, Mo Yan, last year won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for a Chinese national. But his victory only underscored China's lack of a global profile in the printed word. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution suppressed China's rich literary heritage. Continued government censorship and the lack of emphasis on reading for pleasure in the schools haven't helped.
...
"Finnegans Wake" famously begins midsentence. It defies conventional narrative structure. It offers 10 different words referring to thunder, each at least 100 letters long, such as "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" Experts are still arguing, but many believe it takes place during a shifting dream or dreams, and it involves among many other matters a bar owner and his family and an unspecified sexual transgression in a park.

chaos wrote:This is a just a FYI (I haven't read the original version, let alone the one in Chinese).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 28300.html

Updated March 31, 2013, 10:14 p.m. ET
'Finnegans Wake' Is Greek to Many; Now Imagine It in Chinese
Translation of Joyce Novel in Works for Years Sells Well to Readers Craving a Challenge

BEIJING—"Finnegans Wake" has bedeviled readers for decades, but few can claim the toil and triumph it has given to Dai Congrong.

Ms. Dai spent eight years translating into Chinese the 1939 James Joyce novel that the author's own brother described as "unspeakably wearisome." She endured low pay, a skeptical husband and the continued demands of her teaching job. That is on top of deciphering sentences like this: "Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface."
...
A newly affluent nation that prizes black Audi sedans and Louis Vuitton handbags has made a literary status symbol of what may well be English literature's most difficult work. Thanks in part to a canny marketing campaign involving eye-catching billboards and packaging, "Finnegans Wake" sold out the first, 8,000-volume run shortly after it was released in December. The book briefly rose to No. 2 on a bestseller list run by a Shanghai book industry group, just behind a biography of the late Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's modern-day boom.
...
The appetite for Joyce's most challenging work comes from a real hunger for demanding literature. A Chinese writer, Mo Yan, last year won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for a Chinese national. But his victory only underscored China's lack of a global profile in the printed word. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution suppressed China's rich literary heritage. Continued government censorship and the lack of emphasis on reading for pleasure in the schools haven't helped.
...
"Finnegans Wake" famously begins midsentence. It defies conventional narrative structure. It offers 10 different words referring to thunder, each at least 100 letters long, such as "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" Experts are still arguing, but many believe it takes place during a shifting dream or dreams, and it involves among many other matters a bar owner and his family and an unspecified sexual transgression in a park.

nausearockpig wrote:that was a really good read.

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization.

Wildly inventive, darkly comic, startlingly poignant — this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best, playing with time and history, telling a story that is breathtaking for both its audacity and its endless satisfactions.

Winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and Canada's Governor General's Literary Award, a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems....

It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky.

Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bus, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner. It is a thrilling achievement for someone still in her midtwenties, and will confirm for critics and readers that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.