What are you currently reading?

[Mandryka]

Fishing in the Maritime Provinces of Canada

In fact Canada has a potentially important place in Absalom Absalom -- I say potentially because I don't know enough history to really understand why Faulkner made it so. Quentin's Harvard roommate Shreev is Canadian, and he's right at the heart of the second part of the novel.

[JBS]

In fact Canada has a potentially important place in Absalom Absalom -- I say potentially because I don't know enough history to really understand why Faulkner made it so. Quentin's Harvard roommate Shreev is Canadian, and he's right at the heart of the second part of the novel.

Canadian based smugglers, spies, and arms/ammo traders had quite a lot to do 1861-65. Especially along the border, and in the Maritimes. Is Shreev's hometown specified? (I've yet to read it.)

[Mandryka]

Is Shreev's hometown specified? (I've yet to read it.)

Not as far as I remember. One standard comment is that Faulkner wanted someone from a culture which wasn't involved in the war to provide an independent view. But I'm not sure how plausible that is. The whole novel is totally enigmatic and undecipherable.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

I believe you; I've heard other Russian authors disparage Dostoevsky's prose (Nabokov, for instance), and I'm not averse to the idea that certain authors may benefit from translation. Crime and Punishment was one of the first "serious" novels I ever read and it holds a special place in my heart for that. I'll defend it no further than to say that

Thank you for your feedback on Thoreau. I really am excited to read Walden.

Great novel, and great, lively characters. I specifically like Svidrigaïlov – nihilistic and wealthy former employer and former pursuer of Dunya. He appears to have some occult ability too.

[vers la flamme]

Great novel, and great, lively characters. I specifically like Svidrigaïlov – nihilistic and wealthy former employer and former pursuer of Dunya. He appears to have some occult ability too.

"I'm going to America." One of the best parts in the book. Svidrigaïlov is my favorite character too, along with Porfiry Petrovich, whose interrogations made me feel like I was guilty of murder.

[San Antone]

Not as far as I remember. One standard comment is that Faulkner wanted someone from a culture which wasn't involved in the war to provide an independent view. But I'm not sure how plausible that is. The whole novel is totally enigmatic and undecipherable.

Cleanth Brooks has written that Faulkner included Shrevelin McCannon as someone with "myths about the South compounded out of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Strange Fruit."

He goes on to give his interpretation of the purpose of the converstion between Quentin and Shreve:

"For the novel Absalom, Absalom! does not merely tell the story of Thomas Sutpen, but dramatizes the process by which two young men of the twentieth century construct the character of Thomas Sutpen.  Fascinated by the few known events of his life and death, they try, through inference and conjecture and guesswork, to ascertain what manner of man he as.  The novel then has to do not merely with the meaning of Sutpen's career but with the nature of historical truth and with the problem of how we can 'know' the past."

"The past always remains at some level a mystery, but if we are to hope to understand it in any wise, we must enter into it and project ourselves imaginatively into the attidues and emotions of the historical figures.  Both of the boys make this sort of projection, though one would expect it to be easy for Quentin and difficult for Shreve.  Actually, it does not work out this way, for Shreve enters into the reconstruction of the past with ardor.  He finds it, in his lack of any serious emotional commitment, a fascinating game - inn fact, he consistently treats it as a game, saying 'Let me play now.'"

"The novelty of fitting actual human beings into roles that he had earlier connected only with the stage intrigues hm.  At one point he teases Quentin by saying, 'Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it.  It's better than the theatre, isn't it.  It's better than Ben Hur, isn't it. Quentin on the other hand is too much involved - too fully committed to the problems and the issue - actually to enjoy the reconstruction."

Brooks, Cleanth. 1990. William Faulkner : The Yoknapatawpha Country. Louisiana pbk. ed. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press.

[San Antone]

Here's more on Shreve from a different book:

"Chapter VI moves us immediately to a different time, a different place, a different season, and a new character. Shreve McCannon, a Canadian, is Quentin's roommate at Harvard. Chapters VI-VIII take place as the two of them, sitting up late in their frigid dormitory room, retelling, re-creating, the story of Thomas Sutpen to their mutual narrative satisfaction. Why Faulkner chooses to set so much of Absalom in a land so alien to the land in which Sutpen lived is not completely clear, but obviously he wanted at least one non-southern narrator, one who is not in some way compromised by Sutpen and/or the racial and social history of the South: someone, that is, with some distance on the story, not so directly embroiled in it.

Casting Shreve as a Canadian further removes him from the legacy of sectional antipathy characteristic of the United States; it also opens the closed Mississippi society to outside scrutiny. tiny. Shreve is thus a narrative foil who at times offers a smart-aleck counter-narrative narrative to Quentin's story; his contributions to the narrative at first render the Sutpen saga as a comedy that wallows in the cliches of southern popular culture, then yields to its human if not precisely historical "reality." Shreve becomes, in the telling, genuinely moved and tries to contribute to the story's ry's cohesiveness, supplying plot and motive and even character when necessary sary to keep the narrative moving."

— Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! by Joseph R. Urgo, Noel Polk

[Mandryka]

Here's more on Shreve from a different book:

"Chapter VI moves us immediately to a different time, a different place, a different season, and a new character. Shreve McCannon, a Canadian, is Quentin's roommate at Harvard. Chapters VI-VIII take place as the two of them, sitting up late in their frigid dormitory room, retelling, re-creating, the story of Thomas Sutpen to their mutual narrative satisfaction. Why Faulkner chooses to set so much of Absalom in a land so alien to the land in which Sutpen lived is not completely clear, but obviously he wanted at least one non-southern narrator, one who is not in some way compromised by Sutpen and/or the racial and social history of the South: someone, that is, with some distance on the story, not so directly embroiled in it.

Casting Shreve as a Canadian further removes him from the legacy of sectional antipathy characteristic of the United States; it also opens the closed Mississippi society to outside scrutiny. tiny. Shreve is thus a narrative foil who at times offers a smart-aleck counter-narrative narrative to Quentin's story; his contributions to the narrative at first render the Sutpen saga as a comedy that wallows in the cliches of southern popular culture, then yields to its human if not precisely historical "reality." Shreve becomes, in the telling, genuinely moved and tries to contribute to the story's ry's cohesiveness, supplying plot and motive and even character when necessary sary to keep the narrative moving."

— Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! by Joseph R. Urgo, Noel Polk

Yes I've got this book and it was well worth having when I was exploring AA. It's just interesting that Falkner didn't choose someone from the North for Quentin's roommate. There is no voice of The Union in the novel. In a way there is no voice of the Confederates -- though we do get right into the inner soul of  many southerners -- including their racism and their values.

I suppose one thing making Shreve Canadian does is make the book not about the war. It just happens to be set after the war, and recount events which could only have happened in the war and its aftermath. But what it's really about is more general -- how we make sense of the world we're thrown into at birth.

[Cato]

When you read Dostoevsky in the original, his Russian is a very different language from what is spoken now, and its archaic aspect becomes an additional obstacle. Not to mention his ideas. Translators, and the more modern ones at that, speak the same language as the reader, and think as the reader too.

I believe you; I've heard other Russian authors disparage Dostoevsky's prose (Nabokov, for instance), and I'm not averse to the idea that certain authors may benefit from translation. Crime and Punishment was one of the first "serious" novels I ever read and it holds a special place in my heart for that. I'll defend it no further than to say that
 

When I was learning First-Year Russian, the professor remarked in passing that Dostoyevsky was similar to Solzhenitsyn: both had terrible style, but the ideas and the personalities of the authors made the books great.

I was not able to learn much beyond one semester of Russian, so I cannot judge.

[AnotherSpin]

When I was learning First-Year Russian, the professor remarked in passing that Dostoyevsky was similar to Solzhenitsyn: both had terrible style, but the ideas and the personalities of the authors made the books great.

I was not able to learn much beyond one semester of Russian, so I cannot judge.

I cannot know whether Dostoevsky's language was very different from that spoken in his time, but it seems unlikely to me. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, wrote in some invented language, made up words, all this bore little resemblance to the language of his contemporaries. In general, Russian literature is characterised by the sophistication and complexity of language. At the same time, no matter how quirky was the language, for example, Gogol, today it is read easily and with pleasure. What cannot be said about D. and S.

[Bachtoven]

This is quite a good thriller so far.

[AnotherSpin]

When I was learning First-Year Russian, the professor remarked in passing that Dostoyevsky was similar to Solzhenitsyn: both had terrible style, but the ideas and the personalities of the authors made the books great.

I was not able to learn much beyond one semester of Russian, so I cannot judge.

If their ideas are so great, why do the Russians all support their Führer and start wars, one after another?

[Papy Oli]

Started Wuthering Heights.

Finished last night. What a dark, brutal yet completely engrossing novel. 

I'll need a change of reading scenery after that 

[Florestan]

If their ideas are so great, why do the Russians all support their Führer and start wars, one after another?

Goethe and Schiller could not prevent Hitler's rise to absolute power. Asking why Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn could not prevent Putin's rise to absolute power is double standard.

[DavidW]

Dostoevsky has been translated and read around the world.  You might as well ask why people still start wars.

Let us please move on.

[LKB]

Re-reading L. Douglas Keeney's impressive overview of SAC and the Cold  War, 15 Minutes.

[Spotted Horses]

I've read Dostoyevsky in several translations, including the recent P-V and the classic Constance Garnet, and have not found that it makes much of a difference. I read somewhere Probably in the notes to one of the P-V publications) that Dostoyevsky's prose in the original is not elegant, but has a sort of earthy humor throughout. I've re-read The Idiot and The Brothers Karamotsov, and I'll probably read my other favorite, The Possessed at some point.

[Mandryka]

Goethe and Schiller could not prevent Hitler's rise to absolute power.

Well I doubt many concentration camp guards and supporters of Hitler style fascism had read much Göthe or Schiller. They probably had more acquaintance with The Bible though.

[AnotherSpin]

Well I doubt many concentration camp guards and supporters of Hitler style fascism had read much Göthe or Schiller. They probably had more acquaintance with The Bible though.

Of course. Murderers and rapists aren't inspired by books. In the current war, the Russian invaders are getting very good money plus the promises of land and property in occupied Ukraine. Dostoevsky and his "great" ideas have nothing to do with it. As for the Bible, yes, there is plenty of religious bs in Russian military propaganda.

[Brian]

Finally finished Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson's epic one-volume history of the American Civil War. When I got this book I naively hoped it would tell me everything I could possibly ever want to know about the Civil War, but it's only sparked an insatiable curiosity to read everything about it I can get my hands on. If anyone cares to recommend books on the subject, from sweeping multi-volume epics to shorter volumes detailing single campaigns, single battles,  biographies of commanders or political leaders in the era, etc., this is an open invitation to do so.

Seconding April 1865. Company Aitch is a very entertaining memoir by a southern private. Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech, has an unusual focus: domestic and political life inside DC during wartime. I have good memories of the work of Stephen W. Sears.