Flowing And Ebbing

After getting quite a bit of reading done on the New Zealand jaunt, progress since can only be termed fitful. I came back with just a couple of chapters left in the Conrad short stories, one section of Dylan's Chronicles and the feeling that I was going to race through the central sections of Mailer's Advertisements for Myself. In the event I've hardly moved forward on the Mailer and it took the best part of a week to complete the other two.

On a more positive note, I raced through Bernard Malamud's Pictures of Fidelman over the weekend. This is an old favourite, a delightfully clever short novel about art and a would-be artist. I first read Malamud at the same time I was introduced to Mailer and was impressed by his ability to do something quite new in every novel, and do it extremely well. Deeply underrated, he seems to me one of the great craftsmen of the novel, almost at the opposite extreme to the driven, inspiration-fuelled Mailer. The problem is that I'm now tempted to re-read him in his entirety and it's just not practical to do so. I had a similar urge with Conrad. I suppose this is all part of growing old and counting down one's time generally.