November 23, 2017

From The TLS (M. John Harrison on "Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you’d written?"):

The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet. A View of the Harbour, Elizabeth Taylor. The Mint, T. E. Lawrence. Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion. The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson. The Spider’s House, Paul Bowles. Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf. The Madman of Freedom Square, Hassan Blasim. The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane. Fast Lanes, Jayne Anne Phillips. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson. Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys.

From The Economist:

Alibaba describes itself as providing the pipes and cables for all kinds of business. “To some extent we are a utility company,” says Daniel Zhang, its chief executive. “We are trying to provide an infrastructure for digital commerce.”

From Bookforum (Karl Ove Knausgaard on "Experimental Fiction"):

I do admire Infinite Jest and welcome everything that expands the form of the novel, because without someone opening it up for new possibilities, it will certainly die. Concerning Infinite Jest, it is obviously related to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the first (and best!) example of what you call "experimental fiction.” Some strange and unorthodox things are also going on in Cervante’s Don Quijote (the two protagonists reading a book about their previous adventures in the beginning of part two, for instance). But let me put it this way: for me, as a writer, Joyce’s Ulysses is extremely important. But as a reader, "The Dead” is superior—the best thing he ever wrote.

Another favorite of mine is Adam Thorpe’s novel Ulverton. It is experimental in a way—the language changes throughout the book—but this is totally integrated in the story, and you never get the feeling of a writer showing off. The novel is organic, it goes deep into the nature of language and time, but it does so to capture the people who live there, their language and their time.

From The Economist:

Retirement, after all, flattens incomes not by redistributing from rich seniors to poor, but by transferring money to old people from younger, working taxpayers. There will be fewer of them around in the future for every retired person, reducing the role of redistributive public pensions.

From The TLS (Jonathan Benthall on Books of the Year 2017):

I  caught up with the paperback edition of Elias Khoury’s latest novel The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol (MacLehose), superbly translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies with a useful glossary. The original was published in Beirut in 2012 but its treatment of dislocation during the Lebanese civil war was premonitory of the region’s future. Khoury’s spiralling text, richly peopled and enigmatic, projects a distinctive and com­pelling world of perpetual trauma relieved intermittently by love.

China and Islam: The Prophet, the party, and law (Cambridge) is an outstanding ethnography by Matthew S. Erie, a lawyer-anthropologist fluent in Arabic and Chinese. He focuses on the Hui, one of China’s largest Muslim minorities, and on the tensions that arise between their sharia-based traditions and the party-state’s determination to maintain ideological control while accepting that religion cannot be fully co-opted, let alone extirpated, as it develops trade links with Muslims elsewhere.