{"id":444992,"date":"2024-05-31T11:43:47","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T15:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=444992"},"modified":"2024-05-31T11:43:47","modified_gmt":"2024-05-31T15:43:47","slug":"two-month-review-season-23-lanark-by-alasdair-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2024\/05\/31\/two-month-review-season-23-lanark-by-alasdair-gray\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Month Review Season 23: “Lanark” by Alasdair Gray"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before we get into the selection for next season, I want to remind everyone to\u00a0vote<\/strong><\/a> in our poll for the\u00a0Best TMR Class<\/strong>. The hypothetical is that you have to sign up for one of these courses being offered based on the books included.<\/p>\n

“Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Death in Spring\u00a0<\/em>by Merc\u00e8 Rodoreda;\u00a0The Physics of Sorrow\u00a0<\/em>by Georgi Gospodinov;\u00a0Radiant Terminus\u00a0<\/em>by Antoine Volodine;\u00a0Four by Four\u00a0<\/em>by Sara Mesa; and\u00a02666\u00a0<\/em>by Roberto Bola\u00f1o<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Dismal Lady Stuff”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fox\u00a0<\/em>by Dubravka Ugresic;\u00a0Monsterhuman\u00a0<\/em>by Kjersti Skomsvold;\u00a0Ducks, Newburyport\u00a0<\/em>by Lucy Ellmann;\u00a0Three\u00a0<\/em>by Ann Quin; and\u00a0Mulligan Stew\u00a0<\/em>by Gilbert Sorrentino<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Laying Brick”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Invented Part\u00a0<\/em>by Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n;\u00a0Tomas Jonsson, Bestseller\u00a0<\/em>by Gudbergur Bergsson;\u00a0Ada, or Ardor\u00a0<\/em>by Vladimir Nabokov;\u00a0J R\u00a0<\/em>by William Gaddis; and\u00a0Same Bed Different Dreams\u00a0<\/em>by Ed Park<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vote now!!!<\/a> Results will be announced on June 13th during the first episode of the new season!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Speaking of the new season, we’re going to dive face first into a book that is a considered one of the great masterpieces of the past fifty years,\u00a0Lanark: A Life in Four Books <\/em><\/a>by Alasdair Gray.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If you’re not familiar with Gray because of this book\u2014which Iain Banks called “the best Scottish literature this century”\u2014you might know him as the author of\u00a0Poor Things<\/em>, which was adapted to the screen by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone, and which is now available to stream. (I’m certain we’ll talk about this movie on the podcast. We all\u00a0<\/em>have opinions.)<\/p>\n

We reissued\u00a0Poor Things\u00a0<\/em>at Dalkey when I was there, and that sent me into a year-long Gray bender as I devoured\u00a01981 Janine<\/em>,\u00a0Something Leather<\/em>,\u00a0The Fall of Kelvin Walker<\/em>,\u00a0Unlikely Stories, Mostly<\/em>, and, obviously,\u00a0Lanark.\u00a0<\/em>Which, at the time, I claimed was one of my ten favorite books. We’ll see how that holds up!<\/p>\n

The Canongate jacket copy reads: “Lanark<\/em>, a modern vision of hell set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination, its playful narrative conveys a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind\u2019s inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s . . . not a lot to go on. Here’s a bit more from a 1985 New York Times\u00a0<\/em>review<\/a> by John Crowley:<\/p>\n

‘Lanark<\/em>, subtitled ”A Life in 4 Books,” begins with Book Three which is followed by Books One, Two and Four. In a rainy, gray, depopulated city called Unthank, something has gone wrong with the sun; it comes up, but never very far, never shining strongly. An amnesiac young man, who does not remember who he is or how he comes to be in this city, has chosen the name Lanark\u2014which he saw printed under a photograph of a landscape\u2014because he does not remember his own. He spends time in a cinema cafe among aimless young people without jobs or families. Around him, people disappear, sucked into the sky or the ground without warning. Others suffer from strange diseases with names like twitters, mouths and softs. Lanark has contracted dragonhide\u2014a patch of hard, insensate skin on his arm is spreading. A woman he meets has a worse problem: she opens her palm and shows him the speaking mouth that has appeared there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Crowley\u2014whose wrote the introduction to the never-published Dalkey Archive Essentials edition of Poor Things<\/em> (tune in for details)\u2014goes on to describe more of the plot, but ends with this perfectly TMR-inflected paragraph:<\/p>\n

Such homemade structures can be accessible and popular, like the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, or private and obsessive, like a yacht built in a basement. Which is Lanark<\/em>? It is a question to which a purely literary judgment is not a sufficient answer. The book often seems provincial, both in the narrow angle of its vision and the great size of its ambitions. It is a quirky, crypto-Calvinist Divine Comedy<\/em>, often harsh but never mean, always honest but not always wise. Certainly it should be widely read; it should be given every chance to reach those readers\u2014for there will surely be some, and not all of them Scots\u2014to whom it will be, for a short time or a lifetime, the one book they would not do without.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"

Photograph: Murdo Macleod<\/p><\/div>\n

In terms of Gray himself, here’s what he had to say about the origins of the book in a piece fro The<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>Guardian<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>back in 2007:<\/p>\n

And I was still fascinated by adventure stories in more magical worlds like those discovered by Alice, and Gulliver, and HG Wells’s Mr Cavor, who discovered a complex kingdom inside the moon. And I had recently read all I could find of Kafka in the Muirs’ translation, with their introduction saying that K’s struggle with the bureaucracy of The Castle<\/em> and The Trial<\/em> was a modern post-Christian Pilgrim’s Progress<\/em> with no clearly defined pathway or goal. My life, too, seemed like that, and was happening in a city that felt as big and mysterious as Kafka’s Prague. I began imagining a stranger arriving in a Kafkaesque Glasgow that was a modern Hell. Years before, I had enjoyed Kingsley’s The Water Babies<\/em>, in which a small, miserable Victorian chimneysweep is drowned and resurrected in a supernatural world that also parodies Victorian Britain in a way (as I found later) suggested by the last book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel<\/em>. The notion of Lanark and Thaw’s stories being parts of the same book came from The English Epic and its Background<\/em> by EMW Tillyard, published in 1954, discovered in Denniston public library. It astonishes me to think there was a time when the non-fiction shelves of libraries in working-class Glasgow districts had recently published books of advanced criticism!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A nice trip through a dreary Glasgowian version of hell is the perfect bit of summer reading! So let’s do this! As per usual, the dates below are for the live YouTube<\/a> broadcast of TMR, with the podcast version dropping on Apple Podcasts<\/a> and Spotify<\/a> the next day.<\/p>\n

June 13<\/a>: 1-71 (through Chapter 8)<\/p>\n

June 20: 71-129 (through Chapter 12)<\/p>\n

June 27: 130-189 (through Chapter 18)<\/p>\n

July 4: NO EPISODE<\/p>\n

July 11: 190-267 (through Chapter 23)<\/p>\n

July 18: 268-334 (through Chapter 28)<\/p>\n

July 25; 335-397 (through Chapter 34)<\/p>\n

August 1: 398-454 (through Chapter 38)<\/p>\n

August 8: 455-518 (through Chapter 41)<\/p>\n

August 15: 519-End<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Buy your copy today<\/a> and read along! See you in a couple weeks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before we get into the selection for next season, I want to remind everyone to\u00a0vote in our poll for the\u00a0Best TMR Class. The hypothetical is that you have to sign up for one of these courses being offered based on the books included. “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” Death in Spring\u00a0by Merc\u00e8 Rodoreda;\u00a0The Physics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":445002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67426],"tags":[72602,66206,72612,7666,39476,72592,67366],"class_list":["post-444992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-two-month-review","tag-alasdair-gray","tag-brian-wood","tag-canongate-books","tag-chad-w-post","tag-kaija-straumanis","tag-lanark","tag-tmr"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445032,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444992\/revisions\/445032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}