January 28, 2018

From The New York Times (Robert Coover on "What books are on your nightstand?"):

“The Blue Guitar,” by John Banville, “The Accidental Mind,” by David J. Linden, “4 3 2 1,” by Paul Auster, several issues of Dædalus (currently reading the “Russia Beyond Putin” and “The Changing Rules of War” issues, but there are others in the stack) and “Zero K,” by Don DeLillo. Just finished Richard Powers’s brilliant “Orfeo.” Masterpiece.

From The Guardian (Salman Rushdie on "The book I am currently reading"):

I recently visited the old mansion where Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks was set, that great house with the words “Dominus providebit” inscribed over the front door, and was immediately inspired to download the novel on to my iPad and plunge in. The pleasure of re-reading Buddenbrooks was so deep that I resolved to embark on a year of re-readings, which is why I now find myself about halfway through the first book of Don Quixote, in the terrific Edith Grossman translation. This is proving to be a more complicated encounter. On the one hand, the characters of Quixote and Sancho Panza are as beautifully realised as I remember them, and the idea of a man determinedly seeing the world according to his own vision, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, feels strikingly contemporary. On the other hand, how many more times are the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance and Sancho going to get beaten up and left in pain in various roadside ditches? The “greatest novel ever written” – I voted for it myself once – turns out to be just a little bit repetitive. To make the reading easier, I’m breaking it up and reading other books by other authors after every couple of hundred pages of Cervantes. At present, that interposed book is David Grossman’s wonderful A Horse Walks into a Bar.

From The Guardian (Salman Rushdie on "The book that influenced my writing"):

When I was starting out, long before I published anything, I fell under the spell of Pynchon’s mammoth novel Gravity’s Rainbow. I wrote an entire draft of a novel called The Antagonist, set mainly in Ladbroke Grove, which was such an obvious pastiche of the mighty Tom as to be unpublishable. Fortunately, I worked this out in time, and never submitted it. The typescript now languishes among my papers in the archives of Emory University in Atlanta, where scholarly masochists can read it, if they must. These days I have, I think, shaken off Pynchon’s influence. However, thanks to a favourable review I wrote of one of his later novels, I was able to meet the famously invisible man. I had dinner with him at Sonny Mehta’s apartment in Manhattan and found him very satisfyingly Pynchonesque. At the end of dinner I thought, well, now we’re friends, and maybe we’ll see each other from time to time. He never called again.

From The Guardian (Salman Rushdie on "The book that is most underrated"):

Juan Rulfo’s only novel, Pedro Páramo, is recognised as a classic in the original Spanish, but many English-language readers seem unaware of it. This is the novel Gabriel García Márquez read so many times he claimed to have memorised it, and in Rulfo’s phantasmal Comala we clearly see the origins of Macondo.

From The Guardian (Salman Rushdie on "The book that changed my mind"):

I can think of books that made little explosions in my mind, showing me literary possibilities I hadn’t dreamed of until I read them. James Joyce’s Ulysses was one such book. Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions (Ficciones) was another, and three stories from that collection, “Death and the Compass”, “Funes the Memorious” and “The Garden of Forking Paths” have never left me, and still help me to think about what I’m doing, or might do, or should never try to do.