Stalled

[muckefuck]

Some people feel blocked in their writing; I feel blocked in my reading. You see, I'm still plugging away at Das dritte Buch über Achim. I lost all my momentum over vacation and had to build it up again. I was doing pretty well until a couple weeks ago, when I hit a passage so dense that even after rereading it three times I still couldn't figure out exactly what was happening.

I meant to take it along on Sunday, when Nuphy picked me up in his new convertible to take me to dim sum, but in all the excitement I forgot not only the book but also the set of china that's been packed up and waiting in our closet for him since we moved in. A damn shame, since we had plenty of time while lounging on his rooftop deck sipping riesling for him to interpret it for me.

It's not the first time I've asked him for this sort of help, but it is the first time it's been so necessary. The difficulties of 19th-century German novels come from the diction and the sentence structure, but over time I've gotten pretty good at unpacking Schachtelsätze and identifying those few cases where I really have to look up an obscure word rather than gleaning its meaning from context.

Modernist novels are different matter; here it's often a challenge just to figure out who is speaking (or whether they're speaking at all and you haven't fallen into stream-of-consciousness) and you can't rely on a narrative line to carry you through because often there isn't much of one. The characterisations and the ruminations are the point, not just an interesting feature.

So I've been indulging in various easier reads to distract myself. I thought Freya Stark's The valley of the Assassins would be a good choice but the white-imperialist viewpoint rather overwhelmed the female-empowerment aspect for me. I like her writing well enough, now I just need a framework from which to approach it, since I find myself rooting for the shambolic Persian gendarmerie to arrest and prosecute her for her grave-robbing.

For night reading, I have Salonica, city of ghosts by Mark Mazower. Promising topic--what do I really know about the only Ottoman city with a Jewish-majority population?--but despite his qualifications, Mazower doesn't seem to be much of a historian. His transcriptions of foreign names and terms are a mess. He just seems to go with whatever his motley assortment of sources use. I don't think he even knows Turkish (Ottoman or otherwise) given how heavily he seems to depend on secondary sources (some of them 17th or 18th century) for quotes from officials. He seems to play fast and loose with chronology, jumbling up accounts from every era of Ottoman domination. (And given how much the nature of that domination changed over time, this is no small problem.)

I'm doing a bit better with Crescent and star: Turkey between two worlds by Stephen Kinzer--at least now that I'm into the meat of it. His introduction was so laced with gushing superlatives that it was simply embarrassing. Turkey is interesting and worth knowing about without all this foofraw about its incomparable potential and singular destiny and what-not. At least he clearly bothered to learn the language.

For now I've got my hopes pinned on Things we left unsaid by Zoya Pirzad (a translation of her novel چراغ‌ها را من خاموش می‌کنم), which should come in the mail today. Even though he doesn't realise it, wiped recommended her to me and I'm hoping she'll turn out to be everything Şafak was not.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I recommend something fluffy as a mental break, perhaps "Maurice", or "A Room with a View", although if you read the second, I recommend "A View Without A Room", which was the 50th anniversary followup to it. My go-to is usually Jane Austen. Gwyn

[wiped.livejournal.com]

i hope you'll post about the pirzad novel when you read it; i'd be interested to hear your thoughts. i've only read the first few chapters (i still read very slowly in persian) and am thinking of getting the english translation to read alongside it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've read it, and I've been meaning to post, but I wouldn't want to spoiler it for you.

[wiped.livejournal.com]

that's very considerate of you- you could always put it behind a cut, or i could just ignore the post 'til i've finished reading!