Paul Bryant > Recent Status Updates

I can’t judge this vast work from 100 pages, it would be like judging Ulysses by reading the first few chapters just before all the real fun starts. Stuff does not happen in Man Without Qualities, but just when you get used to stuff not happening, there is a horrible rape-murder, which has the same effect you would get if you threw a dead cat onto the Christmas dinner table with all the family there.

Well, why not ? I'm not promising to finish this whole gargantuan beast but i will strive earnestly to complete the 700 page Book One. I reserve the right to take holidays from Musil when i need something less brow-corrugatingly philosophical.

I'm only on page 120 of this but I think I can safely say that I'm in the presence of a masterpiece.

On my home page it says "Because you are reading A Life of James Boswell we think you might like All We Are Saying : The Last Interview of John Lennon and Yoko Ono." Can anyone tell me what the connection is between Boswell and John & Yoko? I'm struggling to find one.

It's painfully clear that if there was a MeToo campaign in the 18th century Boswell would have been outed as a principal offender. At the age of 21 already he is letching after every female he meets, such as this chambermaid : " I made her light me to my room and when I had her there, she indulged me in many endearments but would by no means consent to the main object of my ardent desires".

Reading this at the same time as a biography of Stalin made me wonder what if they'd been switched at birth and Joni Mitchell had been the revolutionary who became the dictator of the USSR and Josef Stalin would have been a singer songwriter in the late 60s. The world would sure be a different place now.

Ha haaah!! Haah!! I began (BEGAN) this giant book this morning and am now in the late afternoon at page 644! Impossible? Not really... about half of the pages have only two words on them and a third of the rest just have a photo with no words at all... so you can zoom zoom zoom as fast as you can turn the pages. It puts you in a kind of zzzzzzzzone.....

Most compelling novel I've read for a long time, 4 stars guaranteed, maybe (sharp intake of breath)....no.... could the clouds be parting to disclose... 5 stars?

I've been reading this on and off for months! Must finish soon....

good literature has to take a back seat while I slurp up this septuagenarian's case for the defense to the charge of being one of art rock's greatest jerks. So far he's doing okay.

It's a stroll in the park from now on.

Half way through in my edition - whew. Thing is, I do like this a whole lot, it's just slow going. Turtle crawling through thick mud kind of slow. Something actually did happen, though. Now I think about it, two things actually happened in the last 100 pages. I'm hoping for maybe three things happening in the next 100 pages. That would be nice.

Some progress has been made! I do like this great beast a whole lot but MAN reading it is like eating Christmas cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and mince pies for supper. A radish and a little cucumber would be nice, but no, more mince pies.

868 pages in my edition, so I may be taking a break here and there. It will be like Ross and Rachel in Friends. Thackeray will be yelling "I saw you last night with a slim younger novel!!" and I will be explaining "We were on a break!"

This is beginning to depress me. Hallberg is in love with every detail of his characters' lives and really, a lot of these characters are fairly dull, like the financier Keith lamplighter or his wife Regan. We've seen these people many times before. To adapt Dr Johnson, if you read City on Fire for the story you would hang yourself. I believe there is a story somewhere but it's on the burner behind the back burner.

well, this is turning, surprisingly, into an amiable saunter of a book, like a really slow-paced Robert Altman film where every character has to have a carefully sketched out detail-crammed back story. Sure isn't what you could call plot-driven.

This is coming on like a cooler Bonfire of the Vanities, and I must say I like this guy's know-it-all style.

Talking about Detroit, a certain David Martin, Professor of Public Policy at Wayne State University, says "The folks with the wherewithal to leave, the folks with the jobs... these are the people that have the ability to exercise voting with your feet." Okay, give the professor a grant for further research into his intriguing idea. But please tell him to improve his grammar. This book is stuffed with great stuff!

This is shaping up to be an anti-theory theory of criminality, meaning that Mr Gash thinks every theory about crime by experts and, naturally, every popularly believed view of crime, are wrong wrong wrong. Not that he has a new formerly unsuspected explanation for all crime, he doesn't. Very intriguing.