I’ve been on a Herta Muller jag recently having read The Appointment,The Land of Green Plums, Traveling On One Leg and now Passport. I read her for her extraordinary language constellations and patterns–that intensely beautiful and encoded lexicon, her ability to render in a sensate narrative life under the likes of Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator. Deeply affecting, alarming, troubling, but also poignant, engrossing and deeply satisfying.
I find myself spending a lot of time with Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard these days. What a bewitching and riveting thing it is–not a book at all it seems–something utterly transfixing.
The Conference of the Birds, Peter Sis’s adaptation of the 12th century Persian poem. I can spend days on a single page.
I’m also reading Erik Ehn’s The Saint Plays. After Stein he is certainly my favorite saint writer!
And lastly, The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes. The perfect book to dip in and of I find. For those of us *always* preparing a novel, it serves as profoundly consoling form of company. This was completed just a short time before Barthes’ death and includes eight plans for the novel that remained unwritten in him.
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Always like to see what others are reading/recommending. Never heard of the Barthes book, and plan to give it a look. Also will give Muller another try (i guess I wasn’t in the mood first time out).
Comment by Zisi Lerner — January 20, 2012 @ 8:11 am