One colour of book cover is disproportionately likely to contain poison – ten brownie points to whoever knows which one.
Welcome to Issue 6 of the 2PoundPaperback – your weekly dose of book-related insights, book news, and updates on my writing projects.
What I'm Reading:
Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe.
This is Wolfe's second novel and picks up where Look Homeward, Angel ends – with Eugene Gant's flight from his home town of Altamont, and his journey towards Harvard. (If you want some more background on Wolfe, and you're understandably confused as to whether he's the same bloke who wrote Bonfire of the Vanities, see the discussion in Issue 5.)
As with his first novel, we have the patented overheated Wolfe style, which is at turns brilliant and interminable. But Of Time and the River is even longer than Look Homeward, Angel at 1000-odd pages, and even more complicated. The influence of Joyce is, in my opinion, much more palpable. For example, we have a train journey that lasts about 100 pages, and once Eugene gets drunk, the writing goes like this (p77):
'Click, clack, clackety-clack; click, clack, clackety-clack; click, clack, clackety-clack; clackety-clackety-clack!
Hip, hop, hackety-hack; stip, step, rackety-rack; come and fetch it, come and fetch it, hickety-hickety-hack!
Rock, reel, smash, and swerve; hit it, hit it, on the curve; steady, steady, does the trick, keep her steady as a stick; eat the earth, eat the earth, slam and slug and beat the earth, and let her whir-r, and let her pur-r, at eighty per-r!'
But for all that, this is one of those very painful novels that rewards you the more you give to it. I do not, however, have enough to give it at this moment in time. It's been interfering with my rewrite process. If you read Wolfe for more than 100 pages you start cramming twelve adjectives into every sentence.
What I'm Writing:
Manuscript.
In particular, I've been working on structure and I've gone back to an old favourite of mine – Embers by Sándor Márai – for some ideas.
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Issue 6: more Wolfe and poisonous books
Rock, reel, smash, and swerve; hit it, hit it, on the curve; steady, steady, does the trick, keep her steady as a stick; eat the earth, eat the earth, slam and slug and beat the earth, and let her whir-r, and let her pur-r, at eighty per-r!