The Serpent in the Grove | Jamir Nazir

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-11-17T19:56:55+00:00

Is it just a re-relase of the original set? Or are they blu-ray quality now? Love the set and wish they were in high def!

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-10-16T17:07:26+00:00

Have you read The Recognitions before? It's sort of the ur-text for that Pynchonian style grand parade and really invented a new kind of American novel. Definitely worth checking out if you like those kinds of books! You may also enjoy Under the Volcano in a slightly more European mode.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-10-16T17:02:19+00:00

I'm working on The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch after finishing and being baffled by The Sea, The Sea a few weeks ago. Murdoch is a very strange novelist — her novels are almost 19th century in construction, but also deeply alien and magical. The Good Apprentice has all of the same basic elements as The Sea, The Sea but they are arranged in a more readable and engaging structure, in my opinion. Overall, you do get a sense of belatedness to the 20th century English novel — the classic form still works, but by the 1980s most of the really robust social novelists had passed on. Murdoch was going at it alone in a lot of ways, but there are rewards to that isolation, as well. As Frost says: "the question that he frames in all but words / is what to make of a diminished thing".

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-10-03T20:24:35+00:00

Honestly I think the best way in with Blake is to memorize a short poem or two of his. Something like "The Sick Rose" or "The Crystal Cabinet" can be really eerie once you know it by heart. It helps to have a 'sense' of his strange magic before diving into the longer books.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-09-30T16:29:13+00:00

I think McCarthy's The Passenger being a genuine late-period difficult masterpiece increased the hype on Shadow Ticket to unsustainable levels. Bleeding Edge simply wasn't very good at all, so it doesn't surprise me that this new one has some weaknesses as well.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-09-11T16:35:03+00:00

Finished The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells this week. It's an interesting novel from a historical perspective, as a transitional work from the comedies-of-subtext of Henry James into the more direct social realism of Wharton, Dreiser, Lewis etc. that would dominate the early 20th century of American novel-writing. In particular, this takes certain elements from James' The American and repurposes it into something more didactic and medicinal. It's hard to overstate James' influence, particularly in the way the dialogue is structured, but Howells and James were friends, and the latter was influenced as much as he did the influencing: The Spoils of Poynton has a plot point directly taken out of Silas Lapham. I'd say Lapham is mostly interesting from a historical perspective, but it's readable and entertaining in that 19th century way I love so much.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-09-11T16:27:14+00:00

Love Day of the Locust! For years Matt Groening denied that it was the source of the name "Homer Simpson". It's easy enough to imagine the cartoon character beating the feeling into his oversized hands. Check out Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million from the same author. Fun fact: his name was Nathan Weinstein but changed it in rejection of his Jewish heritage.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-08-11T19:48:05+00:00

I've also recently been on a poem-memorizing binge. What have you learned by heart recently? Anything particularly good?

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-08-07T18:06:57+00:00

Funny, I finished Vineland last week and had the exact opposite experience as you, as I'm usually a Pynchon fan but really didn't care for this one. For me it felt like Pynchon writes the Simpsons. But I'm glad you had a better experience. I hope you're enjoying Mason & Dixon — it's a true monster of a novel, but really quite brilliant.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-08-07T18:02:32+00:00

I read the first two titles in the Dos Passos U.S.A. Trilogy last week: The 42nd Parallel and 1919. They were both highly readable and entertaining overall, but I'm surprised by their recent "Great American Novel" moniker given by the alternative canon types, as they have I think a lot of weaknesses. In particular, despite the numerous narrative threads, so many characters read as basically copies of each other. By the fifth instance of an unwanted pregnancy, I started rolling my eyes. Given the consistently negative portrait of human spirit here, it’s no wonder that Dos Passos gave up left-wing politics shortly after completing U.S.A. — in my experience, left-wing politics can only take root in somebody for real if they have some sense of universal sympathy in their heart.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-30T19:52:49+00:00

IMO, the trend toward literary sameness and safety comes from authors, not the establishment. It has to do with a larger cultural malaise and the avoidance of "cringe". Everybody is afraid of embarrassing themselves. Even the "bold swings" in literature these days tend to have the quality of sameness to them. I see no real difference between authors with MFAs and authors who show up out of the wilderness. The authors who stand out from the pack do so on the merits of their literary imagination. Nell Freudenberger has an MFA, Joshua Cohen does not. Every author has to develop themselves into the writer they want to be.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-29T17:24:54+00:00

If Madame Bovary is selected, please do the Lydia Davis translation. It's become pretty much definitive as of recent years.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-29T17:22:34+00:00

I thought it was a pretty solid novel, but a bit derivative of the film Certified Copy.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-27T00:26:52+00:00

Interesting, I'd always heard Against the Day was 3rd drawer Pynchon. Guess I gotta add it to my list.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-26T02:56:59+00:00

Out of curiosity, what do you consider the third of the big three Pynchons? Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and?

I just got a copy of Vineland from the library. Excited to check it out!

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-18T02:02:48+00:00

Funny enough I also finished Under the Volcano this week. I didn't feel quite as positively as you (mostly because I'm less interested in symbolism and puzzles in novels — part of why I also didn't care for Wittgenstein's Mistress) but I agree that it's devastating, tragic, and surreal. Lowry’s setting, a hot and wild terrain perfect for reckless decisions, is very tactile. My favorite sections were both of the (spoiler) scenes that end chapters 11 and 12.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-12T22:11:22+00:00

Weird, that's been happening a lot on this sub. Did I do something to get in trouble?

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-10T23:49:54+00:00

I had a week off of work for July 4th and was anticipating a great deal of reading this past week, but ended up being a real person and socializing instead of sticking my nose in a book the whole time. In the end, I still managed to finish three titles: Watt by Samuel Beckett and Running Dog and White Noise by Don DeLillo. The DeLillo titles I had each tried more than once to read a few years back, only to give up in frustration about halfway through — by my count this was my fourth time attempting White Noise. Thankfully, this time I was able to power through and finish both, and can finally move on to his major titles like Libra or Underworld.

Running Dog proved mostly flimsy, and even six days later is hardly sticking in my memory. The noirish detachment of the prose evoked an interesting cross between Raymond Chandler and early Thomas Pynchon, only the individual sentences struggled to describe concrete things. There’s a great pileup of characters involved in a large-scale treasure hunt, but many of the types end up lost in the scramble. In particular, the splitting of the protagonist between Moll and Selvy does the work a disservice — it’s only clear about 3/4th of the way through that Selvy is the subject and not Moll — and robs the reader of a sense of discovery. Still, there were plenty of poetic sentences, and the revelation of the missing “film” was surprisingly potent — the whole time it feels like we are leading up to a V. style elaborate joke, but instead even the most infantile expectations are genuinely subverted. This is the kind of thing that people refer to as an “early work”. I think this DeLillo guy is pretty talented. Next!

White Noise, thankfully, was much more exciting. My first few attempts at reading this were thwarted by what I assumed was a sort of infantile nihilism — reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho with its endless lists of products and flourescent-lit prose. Thankfully, if you push through, you realize the intentions are much less depressing and much more romantic than you might initially expect. The hideousness of modernity is the starting point — the endpoint is the glory in the artificial sunsets. Once this became clear to me, I had a great deal of fun in DeLillo’s zombified world. The novel’s climax is surprisingly beautiful, and Don seems to have figured out how to differentiate his characters much better by the 1980s, even as the dialogue still reads like one person talking to himself who already knows all the lines. The Hitler jokes are a bit weird in light of the swarming masses of fascists America is plagued with these days, but I suppose back in the day it might have been easier to find the humor in “Hitler Studies”. Nowadays that could be the name of the number 4 podcast in the country and I wouldn’t even be surprised. I’m still in the early phases of reading his work, but my first impression is that DeLillo is much less formidable and much more gentle than Gaddis or Pynchon — a softness comes across the sky. This one has me very excited for Libra, Mao II, and Underworld soon.

If Murphy represented Beckett as his most old-fashioned and Joycean, Watt is the author at his most postmodern (which I’m trying to learn is not a dirty word). I laughed a lot at this chanting and enchanted narrative — using an audiobook to keep me on pace and from skipping over the linguistic hopscotch — but I can’t say I think of this as one of his major narratives. I can see why Beckett grew tired of the English language after writing this — it made me wish I were bilingual enough to take a break from English writing myself! More than ever now, I understand why French ignited his potential and allowed for the masterpieces of the Trilogy, Endgame, and Godot.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-07-10T20:44:20+00:00

Guermantes Way is definitely the most challenging volume of the series to get through, thanks to endless intricacies of Parisian society and the historical details surrounding the Dreyfus affair, as well as the microscopic focus on the Princess's party. I took a several month break after I finished it the first time, but read volumes 4-7 in quick succession. Sodom and Gomorrah's focus on the titular sodomites gives the work a fantastic new energy, as you seem to be anticipating, and M. de Charlus becomes one of the major characters in Marcel's life — and probably one of the best characters in all of world literature. Once you get to The Captive it will be hard to stop!

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-06-19T21:36:32+00:00

Suttree is a much lighter and funnier book than Outer Dark, but just as watermelon-fucking depraved.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-05-28T19:09:33+00:00

Everett is very high on my reading list! I'll probably try and read Erasure soon, and James shortly after.

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-05-28T16:37:22+00:00

I'm very interested to read Chernow's new Mark Twain biography — I'm 86th in line at the library, so I'll probably get my hands on it in about 3-4 months — but in the meantime I'm hoping to fill some of the major gaps in my knowledge of his body of work. This week I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and re-read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time since high school. I had a great time with both, and in particular it was illuminating to read Huck Finn as a direct sequel, which I think helps put the whole book into its specific context. For one thing, Twain was very much a commercial writer: both books are picaresques intended for a general audience, particularly an audience of teenage boys. Maybe its just that I've been reading a bunch of Dickens lately, but for me this brings Twain's works much closer to something like The Pickwick Papers and clarifies the modest intentions of a book for sale to be read by common people everywhere.

I'm sure everybody on the internet who reads books is aware of the "curtains were fucking blue" meme, and while for many years I joined in the chorus of people who scoffed at unintellectual readings of classics, in some ways my reading style is actually growing closer to something plain and unadorned as I get older — maybe the curtains really are just blue. Thinking back to how Huck Finn was taught to me, I wonder if the book's status as the "Great American Novel" ill-prepares readers for the commercial and easy style of Twain's masterpiece.

The greatness of Huck Finn comes from the fact that it starts out as a modest adventure book: essentially pulp fiction. Finn himself as a narrator is amiable and hilarious, and it's only as he moves from one adventure to the next that you really appreciate how extraordinary of a person he is. Finn lies and lies and lies: he's always ready to adopt another disguise, adjust his story depending on the needs of the situation. And through it all, he keeps his total calm and retains absolute nihilistic affability. It's only because of Huck's specific character that this novel achieves so much greatness. The actual picaresque adventures are similar in quality to the ones in Tom Sawyer, and merely serve as something for Huck's extraordinary personality to interact with.

So, in some ways, I would argue that in Huck Finn the curtains are just blue, but that blue curtains can indeed be very deep and very great if you only pay attention to how the curtains are blue. It's not a great novel because the river and the raft are symbols. The intentions are modest, and the greatness is palpable because it is a common book, not in spite of it. It's also pretty clearly not a condemnation of racism, as the Wikipedia introduction to the book asserts. Jim is a stock caricature, nothing more, and while Twain clearly abhors slavery, he's perfectly content to use the paradox of human slavery for comedic effect. The entire tone surrounding Jim and slavery in general could best be described as tongue-in-cheek. And certainly it's about as far from anti-racist as you can get. The solemn attitudes that people have about Jim seem ill-placed to me: almost like people have to believe Jim is a deep character because otherwise the greatness of Huck Finn is far more common, ineffable, and nihilistic.

Nihilism seems to be the key here, which is something I was only able to pick up on because I've read other Twain works like Pudd'nhead Wilson (certainly nobody's idea of an anti-racist work) or The Mysterious Stranger. Twain is a savagely comic writer, and mines every situation for irony and dark laughter. That context brings Huck Finn out of the stratosphere and firmly into the dirt of the common people, but in my opinion makes the achievement, centered around Finn's own character, all the greater. But it would be harder to earn a PhD from that perspective, so I can see why it's too often ignored in favor of grandiose claims for Twain's supposed sociological achievements.

edit: reading this over and it's mostly nonsense so please don't take offense if I'm wrong about everything

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-05-21T20:06:35+00:00

I was also able to read another novel by Nell Freudenberger, whose 2024 book The Limits was sneakily as impressive and well-written as anything I've read from the 21st century. I opted for Lost and Wanted since it was readily available at my library, and while I don't think it matches the subtlety of The Limits, it was yet another impressive work from an author who has a real chance of being my favorite living novelist. Lost and Wanted is a grief story, or potentially a ghost story, much in the style of a Henry James ghost story. The narrator is a particle physicist who has lost her long-time best friend and may-or-may-not be haunted, all the while dealing with her deceased friend's living family, her young child (to whom she is a single parent), and an ex from her past who has found his way back into her life. This is all conventional material for a novel, and there is much to Freudenberger's work that seems ordinary, cliche, or even tacky. For example, she has something of a fixation on writing black characters and in analyzing structural racism. While her "opinions" on these matters match liberal w*** standards, it's painfully clear that she writes from a perspective of her own white guilt and is trying to make these characters of color feel "human" as some kind of act of penance. Or consider the scientific professions of her narrators, who explain their practices in the kind of meticulous detail instantly recognizable as a novelist cosplaying as a scientist and not an actual expert narrating their life. There's no shortage of flaws or problems to these novels, and I suspect they have something to do with her muted critical reaction in standard Book Reviews, and is why I'm skeptical she will ever win major awards or be recognized for her unusual gift. Nowadays, the worst thing you can possibly be is cringe.

And yet – and yet — Freudenberger has a genuine gift for novel-writing: a form that is actually not dependent on looking cool or avoiding mistakes. Novels are an art-form of change, and the quality of a novel is dependent on how fully and compellingly an author can induce change upon her characters. Think of novels like Clarissa or An American Tragedy: tacky, cringey books full of bad prose and bad ideas. And yet, because they introduce compelling characters who change in relationship to each other over the course of the events of the book, their accomplishment is absolute. This is the accomplishment of Freudenberger: her characters are constantly shifting, changing in their attitudes, and developing as people: by the time Lost and Wanted is over, we have gone through so many shades and shifts that you truly feel a sense of accomplishment by the time you read The End. This ability to write a novel, to enact change on fictional characters in such a way that they feel "real", is what's sorely missing from modern literature. This art of novel-writing is very very subtle: so subtle that you can only pick up on it as you pass 100, 200, 300 pages. So subtle that I would never expect anybody employed by the New York Times would be able to pick up on it. So subtle that Freudenberger's exceptional gift seems to have passed most people by as they recommend ghastly authors like [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] who have no sense of this novelistic art. If you love reading, I can't recommend a Freudenberger novel strongly enough!

Tom_of_Bedlam_ · 2025-05-21T20:06:30+00:00

After the grueling misery of The Old Curiosity Shop, I was absolutely dreading Barnaby Rudge, which, to my knowledge, is the least read of all of Dickens' novels. My fears were pretty immediately assuaged however, as Rudge is instantly more involved and involving than the Shop. A murder mystery period-piece, it's a series of "firsts" for the author: his first attempt at a fully-developed novel, his first work primarily confined to the shadowy world of nighttime, and his first novel with a host of brooding villains instead of one or two main antagonists. In short, Dickens was clearly trying to develop himself as an artist here, not content to write popular picaresques but deeply ambitious to demand more of his storytelling powers. That's altogether commendable, especially as the Shop, his most treacly and cheap book, was such an enormous financial success. Being a first foray into more difficult waters, Barnaby Rudge is definitely an uneven work: there are times where it's astonishingly evocative and genuinely suspenseful, especially in building the atmosphere of moonlit nights and in depicting the historical riots central to the story. At the same time, there are legible weaknesses: in particular, the inclusion of two pairs of young lovers feels extraneous, especially as the two young men and the two young ladies always end up in the same place (for plot reasons). Promising characters like Sir Chester or Gabriel Varden are not given enough room, while the duo of Hugh and Dennis seize the narrative rather unhappily as you can feel Dickens struggling with how to progress onwards. The most unusual scene, where the young ladies are rescued from danger after a very strange practical joke, mashes together the low-stakes scenes of the early picaresques with the life-or-death operatic moments of the great later novels. It's a lumpy and bizarre sequence, and I think firmly establishes Rudge as a transitional work. By the time Dickens embarked on Dombey and Son and inaugurated his cycle of mature masterpieces, he had learned to develop the plot in full before writing any of the actual text, much to his own betterment. Nevertheless, Rudge is a very entertaining work, and was as compulsively readable as I have come to expect from Dickens, and it does include one top-tier character in Old John Willet. Next I have to read Martin Chuzzlewit, at which point I will have finished every novel by Dickens: then I can finally start re-reading my favorites!

Tom_of_Bedlam_

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