We had some nice conversation (and productively divergent opinions) about Melissa's selection for August. Let's continue the good and work towards picking up more momentum with my selection for October, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
It is hard to say what this book is; it is not a novel. It is not journalism. It is not an essay. It is not history. It is not poetry. It is not a drama. Yet it is somehow all of these things at once. It is a book of many different and disparate parts, but, like the many different and disparate parts in a symphony, they all work together.
I will warn you: it is not a short book, yet it is not particularly difficult to read. But, it demands that you take it slowly, that you chew each morsel fully before you swallow it and, even after that, you still are left wondering sometimes what it was you just ate, what flavour you just tasted. It is an immensely sad book. It is a book full of liberal white guilt, yet also a book full of pride and power and strength. I come from white trash, and thus it is my book, yet it also deeply foreign to me. It is respectful and exploitative, it is a book of the artist as teller of truth and lies.
Let us read it together, and discuss it together the first week of October.
That is such a lovely invitation to a book, Matty.
ReplyDeleteMatty, my library seems to have two books by James Agee with remarkably similar titles: Let us now praise famous men ; A death in the family, & shorter fiction, and Let us now praise famous men; three tenant families. I'm a little confused.
ReplyDeleteMelly,
ReplyDeleteThe volume that includes A Death in the Family (his novel) and shorter fiction (what it sounds like), is likely the wonderful Library of America omnibus of Agee's work--Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the first half of that volume.
The other--"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families" is going to be just the work under discussion for October, as that is the full title of the book.
No matter which one you, or any one else, gets, make sure it has Walker Evans' photographs in the front. Early editions rightly had Agee and Evans as co-authors, with Agee writing all the words, and Evans taking all the photographs. You need to see the photographs.
I hope this don't seem too, well, confusing. If you find anything with "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" on the cover, it's going to have the whole thing in it--again, with an older and "classic" work, it gets put out in many different editions, some with extra stuff in them.
So, to clarify, we're only discussing the text "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" with Evans's photographs -- but not anything else in the volume?
ReplyDeleteI had no idea this was going to be so confusing; again, this is what happens when a book gets canonized and put out in different editions.
ReplyDeleteHere's a link to the paperback copy of what we're reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Let-Now-Praise-Famous-Men/dp/0618127496/ref=pd_cp_b_1
What's confused Melly is that she's stumbled upon this book, which has the text under discussion, but also about five hundred pages of extra stuff:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931082812/thelibraryofamerA
You're going to find the unexpurgated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in either place!