To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (09/09)

Women are nursemaids to arid, egotistical men. Spare our egos, oh ambiguous mothers with your mercurial, unnamable emotions, your weird, fluid perceptions of homey objects and their significances of feminine loss and ambivalence.

Any dinner table is a battleground of submerged moods. I ask for such pittances—be my ally in mollifying Mr Tansley’s wounded preening—and am frustrated. I want only to examine the lovely, symbolically fraught topography of the fruit bowl, but my spitting demon of a little girl snatches a pear and ruins the ensemble!

What do you feel I feel about my husband’s tyrannical feelings? Answer in wet metaphor.

Heavy sea musk stains the draperies in the shifting flow of seasons. See me write about absence.

He wanders the beaches seeking philosophic consolation in tidepools and the dumb white fringed humps of waves, while Mrs Van Beek's stout, aged ass rests itself on a barstool after a day's knocking about in cupboards dusting his collected editions of this or that.

The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple (08/09)

India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul (07/09)

Dated, dated. Beautifully written, but dated. India’s problems are a product of primordial, stagnant ‘Hinduism’, which accommodates a millennium of invaders with quietism, passivity, and religious resignation. ‘Hindu culture’ is held to be a thing, a step or two above the African night, but well short of Western can-doism, the flux of modernity, of civilization, that Europe defines. I’m reading this beside Said’s Orientalism: how far we have come in only 30 years, perhaps because of Said’s seminal essay? See how scholarship matters.

But I picked up some history along the margins: the Emergency, of course, and the India-Pakistan and India-China wars, too.

This country is weirder than I could have expected. Where else do people threaten to immolate themselves in protest of the Miss World beauty pageant being held in Bangalore?

The Human Stain by Philip Roth (07/09)

My last Roth for a while. Time to move on to non-fiction. Remedy some of my ghastly ignorance.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (07/09)

So that's why Faulkner's famous.

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth (07/09)

Roth is not an economical writer. His paragraphs meander from association to association. He starts off discussing one character in the present and ends analyzing the death of another character's mother thirty years ago. Scenes are repeated throughout the book with slightly different emphasis. Time and perspective are in constant flux. This is especially true of later Roth, 1990s' Roth, which is when, in his 60s, he came into his own.

Also, you're never at a loss to identify the 'idea' of a later Roth novel. He repeats his thesis over and over, as he did in American Pastoral. The only unity in the life of Mickey Sabbath is incoherency. There are no explanations.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (06/09)

A talented, arrogant young man wanders around the Norwegian capital attempting to write philosophical articles for local periodicals, having absurd run-ins with people on the street, and gradually starving to death. One by one, the young man's ideals are stripped away by means of the hunger - his moralizing fades, his presumptions dwindle down to occasional outbursts. He is a more tolerable person by the end of the novel. The book resembles Crime and Punishment in many ways, but less convoluted and messy and with no didactic moralizing lurking under the prose. An elegant thing, but less stirring for all its being well-crafted.