Ye tibia llowblue.
So far, my resolution to read one French book for every two English ones this year is going according to plan, more or less, although it does mean the number of books I'll get through has dropped alarmingly. I just finished Adam Roberts's brilliant, brilliant Yellow Blue Tibia, which if it hadn't been brought out by a science fiction author would certainly have won some big prizes. How the Booker judges can justify keeping it off at least the longlist is beyond me. It's not really science fiction at all, it's a brilliant study of mass psychology and Soviet Russia, a kind of witty analogy and adventure tale all in one, and personally I find Roberts's wit and irony much more engaging than the cool moodiness of that other literary sci-fi darling China Miéville (though I do quite like him too). I urge you to read it, his narrative voice is just great fun.
(The title, it emerges late in the novel, is a cross-linguistic pun, which is always enough to endear a writer to me. "Yellow blue tibia" is what the narrator, a translator by trade, tells his American friend to say to approximate the Russian for "I love you". In my brief three-month fling with Russian a few years ago, I learnt "I love you" as я тeбя люблю, but presumably based on this book title, you can turn that round and say я люблю тeбя.)
Now I'm a few dozen pages into a book by Fouad Laroui, a Moroccan writer, called La femme la plus riche du Yorkshire. I suspect if you took the set of Moroccan Literature and the set of Novels About Yorkshire, this book would be the one and only intersection. It too has some linguistic playfulness in it - one character, who used to work in a circus as the woman who got sawn in half, gets to say
J'ai été étêtée tout un été
or "I was headless all of a summer". This reminded me of the kind of thing Anthony Burgess does every other paragraph, and which made me fall in love with his books despite how frequently annoying they can be. I am usually attracted to writers who are very exciting on the level of the word or sentence, but often disappointing on the level of the paragraph, chapter or book. See also Joyce, Pynchon, Melville, Guy Davenport, Nabokov. They are not especially good at plotting, and they hardly seem to care about characterisation, but god! they write such beautiful sentences!
My writing's going OK at the minute. I'm 25,000 words into my long writing project (which I am definitely not calling a ‘book’ or anything jinxy like that, it's just a project, a longish project) and knocking out about 500 words a day, although I'm still not writing every day. I don't know how it will end or what my characters want or what the answers are to half the plot mysteries which have come up, or any of the other things they tell you to worry about in creative writing class, but for now I still have scenes I want to write so I'm not going to worry too much until I run out of things to say. Hannah went to Canadia to see her sister for a week, so I was home alone and had planned to get lots done, but somehow this transmuted into sitting at my piano in my pants till three a.m. every night with a bottle of red wine, annoying neighbours with my Tom Waits impression and working out how to play "Inside of You" from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
If you have any book chat or recommendations for me, let me have em.