Strung like a catgut lute

On the phone just now, I was so anxious that I called my mortgage broker by the wrong name. Last night, I was waking up every hour or two. When I saw him last evening, monshu was in such a dark mood you'd think he'd been mugged. On top of it all, I still have water trickling into my bathroom.

Someone let me know when the fun part starts.

Reading to sleep to read

In dealing with my anxiousness, I'm trying to spend less time playing solitaire or mindlessly reloading LJ and more actually reading books. As a result of this, I've finally finished off Vivir para contarla. I know what you're thinking: Didn't you start that like a year ago? The answer is "yes", but in my defence I pretty much set it aside from November until the week before last when I picked it up again. Of course, the damn thing ends on a cliffhanger of sorts ("I went to Geneva for two weeks and it ended up being two years. The End.") so I'll be looking forward to the next installment, if it ever comes. It also piqued my interest in La hojarasca, which I got for Christmas, but I'm not sure I want to tackle García-Márquez-does-Faulkner-in-Spanish just yet.

Flann O'Brien is still on my nighttable even if I've given up An béal bocht for the time being. I'm getting near the end of At Swim-Two-Birds and savouring every page; it's a glorious literary achievement, one that makes you feel you've come across the work of a singular genius. I could listen to the Phooka and the Good Fairy debate kangaroos all day! For better or worse, though, it's a big fat lovely hardcover book that I don't want in my bag getting scuffed and weighing me down.

That means something else for the train, which is why I picked up Perihan Mağden's The messenger boy murders. It's something else, alright--Christ almighty, what an annoying book! I want to find the authors of the reviews I read that steered me to it and force them at knifepoint to explain themselves. The back cover blurb calls it "a swift, darkly comic and entertaining novel about the multiplicity of human character and our exasperating yet essential flaws and contradictions." Translation: Pseudo-literary wankery. The "plot" is a postmodern hash of a detective novel with a passive misanthropic narcissist of a narrator who spends all his time in drinking, sleeping, and pretentious philosophising while various characters arrive regularly to feed him new revelations. (Pretty much everything I hate about Haruki Murakami without any of the compensations.) Halfway through, I couldn't stop thinking about how awesome it could've been in the hands of someone who can write the shit out of this sort of set-up like Witold Gombrowicz.

So why did I read it to the end? Sheer bloody-mindedness. I don't even have the excuse that I did with The white castle that this is Orhan Fucking Pamuk who blew me away with My name is red so there must be some redeeming quality to it. It also helped that it was only three-quarters the length of Castle. I try not to give up on a novel before page 100, and this dog only had 118 pages total. That's about as far as I got into Bakis' Lives of the monster dogs before I concluded that that author's irritating conceits and Mary-Sue-ish narration were more than I could bear. Also, there was some endearing whimsy on a train at the onset which turned out to be a complete red herring. As far as that sort of thing goes, I would've been infinitively better off rereading The man who was Thursday.

So what with the disappointed of Pamuk's Snow and de Bernières' Birds without wings plus the utter hatefulness of Unsworth's Rage of the vulture, my track record isn't too great for Turkish authors and settings. Anyone have some useful correctives in mind?