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Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is a 700 page novel about a man who wakes in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact but no memory of who he is or how he got there. On this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers chats with Jim to celebrate the 10th Anniversary Edition of his expansive novel, one of those rare, abundant books that rewards the most careful reading a person can give it.

00:00 A man who does not want his identity back
03:19 Waking in Guanajuato with no memory
03:56 Pessoa, Alvaro de Campos, and the poet of the absent self
11:07 Saramago and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
13:56 Gabriela, the ATM card, and memory in reverse
17:52 Douchebag, the VC who killed his inner self
25:59 Gomez, Raymond, and the money-laundering caper
35:24 Clocks, Proust, and every way to look at time
44:20 Blindness, the doctor's wife, and seeing the contagion
46:17 Seven years, 3:30 a.m., and writing to be surprised
51:41 Abundance, color, and the inner life
01:02:19 Too many books and the hunt for the real thing

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Effingers by Gabriele Tergit is an 800-page German Jewish family saga published by New York Review of Books Classics, and this week NYRB publicist Nick During joins me to talk about what makes it so special.

Nick and I follow three generations of the Effinger family from a watchmaker’s bench in small-town Bavaria to the grand houses and Sunday lunches of Berlin, across about seventy years of German history that ends with the catastrophic destruction of the family and German Jewish civilization in WWII.

We talk about Gabriele Tergit’s documentary style and her 151 short chapters, the way she gives us almost no interiority yet still makes these people feel vibrant and alive. We talk about Uncle Waldemar, the jurist who refuses to convert and decades later sees clearly what is coming. We talk about the remarkable women of the novel, and about the last hundred pages, where the dread finally lands. And we spend time with Tergit herself, a Berlin court reporter and author of Käsebier Takes Berlin (also published by NYRB), who fled in Germany in 1933 and finished this book in exile at a point in time when the world of Effingers and the type of characters that populate it, had vanished.

If you want to read Effingers in good company, follow The Big Book Project on Substack and subscribe wherever you listen. Come read the big books with me.

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a puzzling novel, and in this episode of The Big Book Project host Lori Feathers and guest Chad W. Post take on the first two hundred pages featuring an unreliable narrator, an unorthodox musical prodigy, and the transformation of art making into conformity to a systematized order.

The Big Book Project was created as a forum to share ideas about challenging novels, and today's conversation makes clear that questioning together is far more rewarding than puzzling alone.

Here's a few of the threads that we pull on in this episode: how much should we trust Zeitblom the biographer writing almost fifty years after the fact, insisting on his fabulous recall ability, and probably in love with his subject; Zeitblom's commentary on his own manner of writing Adrian's story; the coded use of Esmeralda's name; and, the twelve-tone system that Schoenberg made famous.
Throughout the discussion Lori and Chad keep returning to the tension underneath it all--humanism set against order, sentiment against system, during the decades in Germany when these arguments carried consequences far beyond music.
We hope that anyone who knows of Doctor Faustus only by reputation will find in this episode a reason to read and discuss it with us. Subscribe and follow along. Share your thoughts in the comments.

#DoctorFaustus #ThomasMann #TheBigBookProject

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(Lori recorded this interview on a different device, and we apologize for the poor quality of her audio.)

For five decades Steven Moore has been one of the most thoughtful champions of the kinds of novels we read at The Big Book Project — the abundant, stylistically ambitious works that reward slow attention. He is the foremost scholar on William Gaddis, the editor who worked alongside David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest, author of a two-volume alternative history of the novel, and a former editor at Dalkey Archive Press. If your bookshelves are groaning under the weight of capacious fiction there is a very good chance that Steven Moore played some role in getting it out into the world.

In this conversation Steven joins host Lori Feathers to discuss his new collection, Last Time "Around": Essays, Reviews, Interviews. They discuss why Gaddis turned toward the nineteenth-century Russians, what W. M. Spackman understood about style that most critics still miss, and why a sense of humor is closer to a sense of rebellion than to mere lightness.

The conversation moves into the question of artistry, that elusive quality that separates literature from fiction, and Steven argues for the kind of close attention that asks why an author chose dusk rather than twilight — the choices that take a second reading to even notice. They discuss the small presses that have come to the rescue of literature, dwindling book coverage, and whether there is still an audience for the big, brainy, erudite novel of the kind that once changed Moore’s life. Toward the end Lori draws Steven into a round-robin, asking Steven to opine on novels by, among others, Lucy Ellmann, Susanna Clarke, Mervyn Peake, Joseph McElroy, Gertrude Stein, John Cowper Powys, and James Elkins.

If you love long novels, dense novels, novels that ask something of you — subscribe to The Big Book Project on YouTube and follow along on Substack. Host Lori Feathers reads the abundant works of fiction with fellow bibliophiles, one extraordinary novel at a time.

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As we continue reading The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Richard Bailey joins me to talk about Part Two of the novel. Richard is my fellow bookseller at Interabang Books and simply, one of my favorite people to talk to about books, ideas, and the creative process. As we continue to try to understand who Kristian is, the direction and intent of his photography, and the influences on him of the mysterious Hans and the Faustus story, Richard and I discuss, debate, and challenge each other about Kristian’s character and the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. I hope that the discussion enhances your own reading of the novel.

The name Fernando Del Paso was new to me two and a half years ago when author, publisher, and Dalkey Archive Press alum Martin Riker introduced me to Palinuro of Mexico. What a revelation this late Mexican novelist! Here was an author who wrote wildly, exuberantly, and explored consciousness, memory, and the ineffable mysticism of the world in such a compelling way. It didn’t take me any time at all to go out and purchase a second-hand copy of his only other novel to be translated into English, News From the Empire, a thematically different novel than Palinuro, but with that signature, uncontainable writing style. It’s such a pleasure, then, to find a fellow fan of Del Paso, who, like me, wants to foist these novels on adventuresome readers in the US.

Ron Restrepo is one of the most intrepid readers I know, and I had fun talking to him about News From the Empire. We discuss that wonderful style, the novel’s polyvocal narration, and how Del Paso interrogates notions of empire and historiography. I hope that this conversation will persuade you to read this exuberant, funny, and tragic novel. Or if not, perhaps you will enjoy our discussion of the brief reign in Mexico of two European royals: Maximillan of Hapsburg Austria and his Belgian bride Charlotte, the daughter of King Leopold, I, and how Europe’s imperial ambitions in Latin America were debated, at times resisted, and other times poorly implemented, with the United States, France, Spain, and the Church in Rome each exercising its power in pursuit of conflicting interests.

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Chad W. Post, publisher at Open Letter Books and translation studies instructor at the University of Rochester joins Lori Feathers on The Big Book Project to discuss the first 145 pages of Karl Ove Knausgåard's The School of Night. They explore Knausgaard's ouvre, the companion novels in his The School of Night constellation, as well as some of the author's autobiographical writing in the My Struggle series.

Chad and Lori talk about Kristian's ambition and his art; the enigmatic Hans; and, how Kristian deflects all criticism about himself and his work. They dig into Knausgåard's distinctive style and the way his detailed explanations of Kristian's way of seeing and organizing his world is so difficult for other authors to imitate.

Whether you are reading the novel along with us or simply want to hear what Chad has to say about Karl Ove Knausgaard's work, you will enjoy the discussion.

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Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is too much—too many characters, too many plot points, too much chaos—and that’s exactly what makes it extraordinary. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers sits down with Professor Michael Sexton, a devoted reader now on his fourth reading of the novel, to dig into Part Two, Chapters VII through XII.

They talk about the riotous scene where a motley crew of young nihilists storms in to demand money from Prince Myshkin—a scene so over-the-top that Michael confesses he skipped it on previous readings but now finds it devastatingly funny. Lori and Michael explore how Dostoevsky parodies nihilistic thought through these characters and why the women in the room are furious at this attempt to humiliate the Prince and call the scene a madhouse.

They linger on one of the novel’s most complex characters, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, who Michael sees growing into a great comic creation of Dostoevsky across his readings—a woman who ridicules the dying Ippolit for making speeches and then pulls him to her bosom in a moment of devastating maternal tenderness. The conversation turns to a foundational question of the novel: is Prince Myshkin best understood through the figure of Don Quixote or through the tradition of the holy fool? Michael brings in Miguel de Unamuno’s Our Lord Don Quixote and Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote; Lori pushes back, arguing the Prince’s interiority and complexity exceed what Cervantes gave us.

They also discuss Nastasya Filippovna’s shadowy, sinister presence lurking in the background, the theme of doubleness and duplicity as both a motif and a structural principle in Dostoevsky, and Chapter VII—a seemingly throwaway exchange between the Prince and Lizaveta that both Lori and Michael argue is indispensable, written in the style and spirit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Timestamps:

00:00 Welcome & Introduction to This Week’s Reading

01:14 Dostoevsky Is “Too Much”—And That’s the Point

05:14 The Nihilists Storm In: Comedy and Chaos

09:19 Lizaveta Prokofyevna: From Foolish Woman to Holy Fool

15:07 The Prince’s Friends React—Insult and Dignity

18:42 Chapter 12: Oscar Wilde Meets Dostoevsky

22:08 Nastasya Filippovna’s Sinister Shadow

25:58 Don Quixote, Christ, and Prince Myshkin

36:50 Dostoevsky’s Christianity, Russian Nationalism, and Harold Bloom

41:14 The Idiot as One Chapter of a Larger Novel

42:30 Doubles, Duplicity, and Keller’s Confession

45:43 Why Chapter 12 Is Indispensable

Subscribe to The Big Book Project and join the group read of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. New posts every Tuesday and Thursday on Substack. Follow along, leave your thoughts, and read along with Lori and the community.