Spring Snow -- Yukio Mishima. Still slow going but I haven't given up. Still not sure what Mishima is driving at for the most part. The exploration of subtle motivations is elaborate and mildly fascinating to the point where I'm wondering where it will go. If it goes nowhere I will feel like a tool.
Rings of Saturn -- W.G. Sebald. This a book that garnered effusive praise from a number of big name writers. Hailed as an inventive masterpiece and blurbed endlessly by those who are spoken of breathlessly in high-toned literary journals. I gave up after about 90-ish pages. Sebald was a wonderfully skilled writer who can form a poetic sentence seemingly out of nothing. But the poetry of nothing is still nothing.
Sebald was German (born in 1944 and died in 2001 -- the prototypical lived-and-died-through-the-Cold-War life), so what we have is a translation which is always a bit of a wildcard. Ostensibly a novel following a troubled fellow as he travels along the eastern coast of England, although at times it seems clear that Sebald is writing autobiographically. What follows is a sort of stream of consciousness woven into an intricate web of factual and sentimental relationships. There is no observation too minor from which to build a florid allegory. Given the chance, he would take a random patch of gravel and turn it into an analogy for the sorrow of impermanence. He will sit on a park bench and intensely introspect on the gray skies which will remind of literary reference which caused him to intensely introspect on something similar in the past. He will encounter a piece of ephemera and be reminded of a historical reference hundreds of years in the past that caused him to wring his hands over something or other. Perhaps it is all just very German. The only overall sensation of it all was one of decay. Weird, that someone born into the ashes of post-WWII Germany who lived to see the Berlin Wall fall would be attached to the zeitgeist of decay, but there it is.
There is just so much pretentiousness one can take. The tortured ruminations, the reading of profound meaning into trivialities, the attachment to societal decline -- even the mechanics of it: Sebald will rarely drop a paragraph on you to take a breath, he just keeps going. But Kerouac, he ain't. His thoughts, though genuine I'm sure, don't have enough energy to sustain that. Woefulness does not create energy, it saps it. As I said, the praise from what I will sneeringly call the writerly community is effusive. Which makes sense, because it's written for them; it matches their own pretensions to a tee.
Still, I might be judging unfairly. It is possible that had I stuck it out all the superfluous decoration and sorrowful images would have gelled into something insightful and timeless. If so, it would have been nice to have a hint of it in less than 100 pages. I'm moving on.
Last and First Men -- Olaf Stapledon. A "future history" from back in 1931. It appears to be a vision of the future from the time immediately post-WW1 to some point wherein humanity evolves to its final form. Highly valued by many. I've only just started it but I am deeply impressed by the formal, yet completely readable prose. The subject matter seems kind of an odd mish-mash. He spends a long time speculating about various cultural forces and how they in combination with human nature and happenstance lead to war and it seems like some keen insights might be coming. Then he goes full on I-am-14-and-this-is-deep level fantasizing.
Fair warning: there are deeply racist and anti-Semitic sections. And the Americans are kind of the bad guys. I'm not sure he doesn't fall into the trap of making his future vision really about his opinions on the present. We'll see.
