It's about six years since I read it, but no resemblances occurred to me, but I might not be the best person to know. But honestly, I don't really think that is the point of the book at all, as may become apparent once you start to read it.

ooh, that's a good book.  It really, really stuck with me more than a concise description of its conceit could possibly suggest.  Dalkey Archive is on my shelf awaiting its turn.

Right now for me I'm playing merry-go-round with Madame Bovary, Brian Rotman's The Semiotics of Zero (part of my ongoing interest in the development of and discourse surrounding artificial perspective in Italian painting) and Foucault's Death and the Labyrinth (on Raymond Roussel).

Do you remember the moment in CATCH-22 when Yossarian is in the hospital, and the officer in the bed opposite has decided to live forever?  His strategy for achieving this is to spend his time doing phenomenally futile and mind-numbingly boring things so that the time seems to last forever.  Gender-political-musicology books might be some of the very best material you could acquire for following this strategy 

By strange coincidence I've just re-read The Third Policeman too (after a gap of 20+ years) with the idea of trying to find an opera libretto in it somehow.  It's much more feasible than I first thought, and with some carefully planned role-doubling in the smaller parts (Mathers/Fox, Finucane/Gilhaney etc) you can get it down to a cast of about 8-10.  Sergeant Pluck is a buffo bass-baritone in the direct tradition of the Police Sergeant from LADY MAC

O'Brien's/O'Nolan's/Myles' collected journalism from The Irish Times is well worth a read, and as they are short pieces they're perfect for "picking up & putting down" reading moments.  "The Catechism Of Cliche" series, "The Brother", "The Plain People Of Ireland", and "For Steam Men" are particularly smirk-inducing.

BTW are there any other enthusiasts for Dan Rhodes amongst us?  "Don't Tell Me The Truth About Love" (one hundred one-page pieces in which lovers share their inner secrets and anxieties) is marvellously cynical stuff.

Chronicles of the Canongate,by Walter Scott.

since I took early retirement  two years ago,Scott has been a major discovery for me(never read him before). I have had great satisfaction and enjoyment from his novels .

I'm in the same position with La Morte D'Arthur

Question to those who read on PDAs - how do you find this compares to reading a book?

Hi Tim,

Could you tell a bit more about that book? I'm very interested. The relationship of the Cold War to European modernism is a very hot topic amongst musicologists at the moment, with many hoping to find parallels in music to the processes uncovered in terms of literature and the visual arts by Frances Stonor Saunders in her Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Yet I've yet to read anything that has found any convincing evidence that this sort of ideology (musical abstraction = opposite of Eastern bloc style socialist realism = 'formalism' as denounced by Zhdanov = positive from Western Cold War propaganda point of view) really did have much effect upon music in the minds of composers, funders, those who ran insitutions, critics, etc. You've looked at these sort of things from an Eastern European point of view, I do so from a Western European one - I'm really interested in your thoughts on this (maybe in a separate thread)? Do other posters here know about the nature of Cold War studies of music and common New Musicological positions as regards European modernism?

It's a very new book Ian - only out last month - and is essentially DF-L's PhD thesis of 1999 in publication (which I've not read). As a bit of probably not irrelevant background, DF-L is a student of Taruskin, and Music Divided is part of the California Studies in 20C Music that Taruskin edits (it's funny, but I think almost all books in that series are former RT students, whose work then appears frequently cited in his own writing...).

It doesn't entirely throw off that background - there are sections on Bartók and serialism, and his reception at Darmstadt, that live down to expectations, for example. And Ligeti's own words are taken a little too uncritically for my liking in some places.

I've not yet finished, but the first half is in the main concerned with Bartók reception within Soviet Hungary, and is valuable in several respects - for the translations of a number of documents and speeches, as well as a reappraisal of composers of the period - in particular Ferenc Szabó. So while I wouldn't necessarily agree with the conclusions wholesale, I would suggest that there is a lot of useful and provocative stuff in here that makes it worth reading.

The question of West = abstraction, East = socrealism is obviously a fascinating one, but should probably be taken off this thread!