Indeed it goes a long way to explaining why I chose to re-read Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves in addition to Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel just before term started - both texts on our English A1 course, but encountered in Part 4, a segment we do our best to avoid teaching too directly so students have a chance to come up with genuinely independent readings. (Well, we hope they're genuine, but who can tell?)
The Mishima has an odd, engaging simplicity about it which, considering how loopy the writer was, is clearly misleading. The fun lies in identifying the potential loopiness shining through the cracks, as it were.
That's the nice thing about teaching literature. Its craziness helps keeps one sane. Well, sort of. Maybe.
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In the last few months, the book I've decided is most likely to be a modern classic (in my own decidedly biased view) has been Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It stands, with its somewhat thematic accomplice, Chabon's The Final Solution, as one of the most perfectly realised works of alternate history detective fiction.
Chabon is one of the few authors who give me a sense of literature in the John Carey sense you've quoted. I keep wanting to whip out my notebook and copy whole chunks of the stuff. Then I laugh, because it's all in the book already in my hands.
The copying chunks bit and attendant realisation is eerily familiar.
And reminds me of the odd pleasure of typing out passages & poems for 'unseens'. I almost imagine I'm the one who's writing the thing and it takes me ages as I keep stopping to savour what's making its way onto the paper.
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