Nostalgia for an age yet to come
Its always a wonderful rush of a feeling to read about an author you?ve never heard of in your life who sounds oddly fascinating. I had such a one today with this article in the Times Literary Supplement on a certain Pierre Guyotat.
"what leaps to the eye in his novels astonishes, stuns, shocks and often disgusts: emotionless sexual intercourse, methodical military torture, cruel relationships based on slavery or prostitution, not to mention the strange spellings, displaced accents, eccentric punctuation, ?Guyotatized? foreign terms, barbarisms, onomatopoeic coinings and other bizarre neologisms...."
As I say he sounds fascinating at first glance. Who knows though, he may actually pretty effing dreary. Given the massive book que in my head it?ll probably be years until I ever get round to finding out, if I ever do. But the rush is real all the same. The chase can be better than the kill.
Meanwhile there?s an interesting analysis in today?s Guardian by Noam Chomsky on the growing Latin American/Asian resistance to the hegemony of Pax Bush, which both he and me find heartening. Another world is possible. Man.
But if literary critics can’t persuade you to read new books (or dissuade you from same) then what’s the bloody point of the buggers?
Good point! To be fair critics have often pointed me in the direction of good books, and I’ve followed that way to great enjoyment, but as I said the constant que is such it can sometimes be years after the event……there have been exceptions where the que has been jumped though.