Solzhenitsyn, Jelinek

Since my last post, I've read two issues of Eclectic Reading, an issue of The New Yorker, and an issue of The New Scientist. I also read two books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Cancer Ward, depressing but impressive, and The First Circle, which I enjoyed less. Solzhenitsyn has the Russian eye for the telling detail, like Tolstoy, like Grossman. Both books were, of course, withering denunciations of the Soviet state.

I also read several of Elfriede Jelinek's novels. I had read Women as Lovers earlier, but now I've read The Piano Teacher, Lust, Greed, and Wonderful, Wonderful Time. They also are harshly truthful, and about realities of life that are in themselves harsh -- mental illness, sexuality as power, etc. This is not the idea of Austrian culture that I have had, possibly as a stereotype, until now.

Finally, I read Intellectual Character by Rittchard, which I enjoyed less than the gripping other teaching book, but was useful nonetheless.

Jelinek, Le Clezio, Pierre

I read four novels from Elfriede Jelinek since my last post: Women as Lovers, Piano Teacher, Lust and Greed. If found them for the most part hard to read, except for piano teacher. I found that Jelinek certainly describes sex explicitly for serious literature, although it was not offensive. In Women as Lovers and Greed, I found the experiments in structure made it harder to read, although these experiments at least served the content., unlike Pierre's Vernon God Little and Dia'z Wondrous Brief Life of Oscar Wao, which did not. Le Clezio wrote an extraordinary book on hunger as the sensation which defined World War II, both in camps and in occupied countries. La ritournelle de la faim was certainly effective and limpid in its style. I had, of course, Hamsun's Hunger on my mind the whole time, but the overall feel of the book was totally different. I didn't like DBC Pierre's novel. I thought it was contrived, and I can certainly tell there is a fashion for what people think are new voices, but actually are superficial misuses of stream of consciousness and vernacular speech.