subtracted from language

Ducking away from Praed and Cambridge for one day, I post my annual mash-up of some authors I've read this year. Thank you to everyone who read Pykk in 2013, thanks to everyone who commented. You have my gratitude.

Most significantly, what Merleau-Ponty and Bergson share is an ontology of shoes. Don't they look sweet," he answered with a sudden DREAM OF JOY developing his bust as far as possible towards the east and these vapour-ghosts vanished from before him with grand hoods of light around their faces, top and sides; but country-folks despised the firmament of forms. More significant is the "transcendence" of Aesop, my dog, that I afterwards shot, then the jingling of a buckle against the stones gave a little laugh of satisfaction off the island for two nights and days, with a sudden epilepsy of planet-struck fury. Even the term "alleged deception" caught the physically weak Schulz and held him to the extent of evading the adoption of a style, self-possessed as he may seem. That being qua being is subtracted from language is like the poisonous fangs of the serpent, unless extracted from its burning crypt of chastisement by the lack of resemblance in Rembrandt's portraits. What must resemblances resemble?

(Elizabeth Grosz: Architecture from the Outside; Mary Gaunt: Kirkham's Find; Garnet Walch: Australia Felix, or Harlequin Laughing Jackass and the Magic Bat; Samuel Beckett: Watt; John Cowper Powys: Weymouth Sands; Ada Cambridge: Thirty Years in Australia; Lars Gustafsson, tr John Irons: All Crazy Small Objects from his book A Time in Xanadu; Maurice Blanchot, tr Ann Smock: The Writing of the Disaster; Knut Hamsun, tr W.W. Worster: Pan; Louisa Atkinson : Gertrude, the Emigrant Girl: A Tale of Colonial Life; Caroline Leakey: The Broad Arrow; Charlotte Barton: A Mother's Offering to her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales; The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey; Geoffrey Hill: Collected Critical Writings; Catherine Martin: An Australian Girl; Jerzy Ficowski, tr. Theodosia Robertson: Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biography: Nick Land: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism; Alain Badiou, tr Nina Power and Alberto Toscano: Badiou on Beckett; Amanda McKittrick Ros: Irene Iddesleigh; Hélène Cixous, various translators: Stigmata: Escaping Texts.)

a massless particle passes through the void

It's Christmas Eve. Thank you to all the year's visitors and commenters and may the owner of that Russian spambot give the poor overworked thing the night off.



A 2012 memorial mash-up.

We all begin well, for in our youth a massless particle passes through the void preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word we. "The principle of subjective inwardness is a wily creature and resembles a bedrock poverty, like falling against many armies or a great horseman in a potatoe," quoth the housekeeper. For of a very troth, there are thousands of little heaps of crumbs that were once granite boulders. Salt was born of a yearning for unilateral Mildred, whom everyone tried to amuse, whom everyone tried to please; that pretty creature in the drawer of a sublet room. I have known that cave since I was eleven, yet furtive birds (wrens and rails, for example) have only one secret, valid within its own framework, like a painted death. This delightful residence was situated on a small manuscript for the benefit of senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may run at once through the convent, beating on a lawyer who suggested both a cat and a geranium. This is very disquieting; if there was one thing we thought we could depend on it was a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, I languish thus, drooping and dull, as if I were in a dusky and tempestuous night having a read of what her mother would have called a Book.

The authors.

Gertrude Stein: The Making of Americans / Rae Armentrout: Chirality / Simone Weil: The Need for Roots, translated by Arthur Wills / Hegel: The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree / Aelian: On the Characteristics of Animals, translated by A. F. Scholfield / Jorie Graham: The Geese / Marguerite Young: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling / Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer / George Gascoigne: Dedicatory Epistle to 'The Posies' / John McPhee: Basin and Range / John Berger: Seker Ahmet and the Forest / Thomas Pynchon: V. / Baudelaire: The Old Woman's Despair, a prose poem translated by Michael Hamburger / Adrienne Rich: Leaflets / Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan and Isolde, translated by A.T. Hatto and revised by Francis G. Gentry / Lyn Hejinian: The Book of a Thousand Eyes / André Breton: Arcanum 17, translated by Zack Rogow / Gilgamesh, translated by N.K. Sandars / Ann Radcliffe: The Italian / Graham Robb: Balzac / Henry Adams: Democracy / The Letters of Abelard and Heloise translated by Betty Radice / Miguel Angel Asturias: El Señor Presidente translated by Frances Partridge / Walter Murdoch: On Sitting Still / Charlotte Brontë: Vilette / Gilles Deleuze: Desert Islands translated by Mike Taormina / George Herbert: Dullness / William Drummond of Hawthorne: Sonnet / Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot

this purpose we take

Twelve months ago I finished the year by posting a list of favourite quotes poached from books I'd been reading and the year before I did the same, but this year I have so many candidates that instead of choosing favourites I'm going to take the first sentence of the first book I finished in January, and a sentence from the book I'm reading now, and between them I'm going to put fragments from the rest of 2011 and see what comes out -- like so -- and Merry Christmas, by the way, and a relaxed Boxing Day in retrospect, and a Happy New Year -- so -- starting with The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt --

Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centred around this secret in me from which I am separated and which is like my own separation, a precise spot that a human sometimes enters rolling bales of hay, bowing and scraping and flourishing his hat left and right. Dust is plural: infinite dust. This structure we shall call the metaphysical purport of all intuitive revelation of being; and this is precisely what we ought to achieve and disclose by lengthy supplications at passers-by. One of them breaks out in a low howl every time he senses the potential largesse of a deep and complex thing propped up with a stake in the middle. The primitive mind sees disorder in itself and enlists every discipline to keep from contaminating the world. We, says Levi-Strauss, see all disorder outside ourselves, in the world and in other people; our anxiety is that they will contaminate us, a phenomenon that one American commentator rightly saw as "such an unaffected tribute of admiration as few other authors have ever obtained." My own literary work on the contrary was always done as quietly and methodically as a partly dismantled giraffe. People who expect sentiment from children of six years old will be disappointed, and will probably teach them affectation which can only sweat and stare at its own hooves -- a scrawled-over bit of paper becoming a person with a past and a future! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being the Englishman, who made his name training bees, who walked about the countryside covered with them, even to his face and hands, and caressed them and let them drink from his eyes. Children at this age give us no such information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the sheer quantity of his reading. Reading has not merely deformed his imagination, it has put it in a Drawer. You are to note, that in March and April he is usually taken with worms, in May, June, and July, he will bite at any fly, or at cherries, or at beetles with their legs and wings cut off, or at the pet of the household, thrusting Sir Christopher's favourite bloodhound of the day, Mrs Bellamy's two canaries, and Mr Bates' largest Dorking hen, into a merely secondary position for four years, at the end of which he died in excruciating pain from cancer of the jaw as his facial bones disintegrated. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art. For this purpose we take a scrap of paper and we write the truth down: "Here is the chalk."

(Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion translated by John Gregg; Cole Swensen, Anamorphosis from Ours and also The Invention of Automata from Goest; Ruth Stone, her poem Always on the Trains from In the Next Galaxy (Stone died this year and one of the obituaries quoted that same poem); Samuel Beckett, The End; Brenda Shaughnessy, Epithalament from Interior With Sudden Joy; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness translated by Hazel E. Barnes; Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary translated by Richard Sieburth; Macedonio Fernández , The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) translated by Margaret Schwartz; Virginia Woolf, The Years; Guy Davenport, What Are Those Monkeys Doing? from his book of essays, Every Force Evolves a Form; Michael Slater, Charles Dickens; John Ruskin, Praeterita; Jean Sprackland, Tilt, a poem from the book of the same name; Maria Edgeworth, Belinda; John Cowper Powys, Maiden Castle; Charles Lamb, Oxford in the Vacation from the Essays of Elia; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; Susan Sontag, DQ, an essay from Where the Stress Falls; Emily Dickinson, You Cannot Put a Fire Out from her Complete Poems; Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; George Eliot, Mr. Gilfil's Love Story from her Scenes of Clerical Life; Barbara Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius; Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa translated by Richard Zenith; Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? translated by W. B. Barton, Jr & Vera Deutsch)

with fantastic garlands

Over Christmas, inspired by the Arizona desert outside the back door, and by the news of Emily Martin's Paper Doll Primer, I decided to present the world with Great Works of Literature interpreted by a Barrel Cactus.

Click on these links for the images:




Page One




Page Two




You'll find the barrel cactus on page one, along with six of its fine costumes, all rendered in exquisite and extraordinary detail. There are five more costumes on page two. The images will be scaled down at first. Mouse over them and your cursor should turn into a magnifying glass. Magnify. Right click and save. Print. Colour them in if you like. Those oval fruits on top are yellow in real life, but suit yourself.

Cut out the cactus and glue it to cardboard so that it doesn't fall over. Cereal box cardboard is about right. You don't want the poor thing too thick otherwise the flaps will fail and the costumes fall off. Cactus nudity is not what we're going for here.

If you prefer, you might like to buy a roll of magnetic sheeting, and turn your cactus into a dressable fridge magnet. There are hobby shops that will sell you small quantities of this sheeting, but it's cheaper if you can find a supplier. Look in your Yellow Pages, or regional equivalent.

Then thrill, if you will, at the succulent's postmodern take on Lady Macbeth. Out, damned spot! Godot is, of course, imaginative, but we've taken our cues from the rest of the play and presented what we hope is a reasonable insight into the rôle.

The nature of the Ophelia costume might not be immediately apparent. It's a head-wreath of flowers. "There with fantastic garlands did she come." One flap should be hooked over the cactus between Fruit One and Fruit Two (I'm counting left to right) and the other left to rest against the side of the body below Fruit Three. Throwing the doll into a bath or, if you have one, a nearby brook, will make the performance more compelling.

Let me know if the links give you problems.

the product of this fascination

Twelve months ago I published a list of ten favourite quotes, all of them from books I'd read that year. This week I decided I'd publish a list for 2010. I've left out Proust again, deliberately, along with everything I've already excerpted onto this blog (and I think I've already used my favourite pieces of Ruskin, so no him, and no Ernestine Hill -- and no Anita Brookner either, because I've decided that her intelligence (which nobody can deny) doesn't come across well in quotes. In her books she's thoughtful but in quotes she sounds arch or non sequiturial. You can't tell the quality of an author through their quotes. Henry James quotes badly. Like trying to quote a cloud. His moments need masses behind them).

The moment was gone by; there had been no ecstasy, no gladness even; hardly half an hour had passed, and few words had been spoken, yet with that quickness in weaving new futures which belongs to women whose notions have kept them in habitual fear of consequences, Mrs Transome thought she saw with all the clearness of demonstration that her son's return had not been a good for her, in the sense of making her any happier.




My griefe, quoth I, is called Ignorance,
Which makes me differ little from a brute:
For animals are led by natures lore,
Their seeming science is but customes fruit;
When they are hurt they haue a sense of paine;
But want the sense to cure themselues againe.

And euer since this griefe did me oppresse,
Instinct of nature is my chiefest guide;
I feele disease, yet know not what I ayle,
I finde a sore, but can no salue prouide;
I hungry am, yet cannot seeke for foode;
Because I know not what is bad or good.




Hence the predicament of the poor after self-preservation has been assured is that their lives are without consequence, and that they remain excluded from the light of the public realm where excellence can shine; they stand in darkness wherever they go.




It would be easy to enumerate many important and splendid gifts in which Butler as a novelist was deficient; but his deficiency serves to lay bare one gift in which he excelled, which is his point of view. To have by nature a point of view, to stick to it, to follow it where it leads, is the rarest of possessions and lends value even to trifles.




For human intercourse … is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence … [Fictional characters] are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.




Throughout the seventeenth century we find a deepening fascination with the complexity of the ego, complexities not to be disciplined or even negated in the interest of immediacies of religious encounter, but on the contrary to be mapped and cultivated for their own sake. The prose novel, whose beginnings are so characteristically those of the fantasy journey, or of the epistolary dialogue, is the product of this fascination. And many of its early triumphs … directly embody the techniques and rhetorical conventions developed in previous periods of religious ethical introspection.




The mistress of the Establishment holds no place in our memory; but, rampant on one eternal door-mat, in an eternal entry long and narrow, is a puffy pug-dog, with a personal animosity towards us, who triumphs over Time. The bark of that baleful Pug, a certain radiating way he had of snapping at our undefended legs, the ghastly grinning of his moist black muzzle and white teeth, and the insolence of his crisp tail curled like a pastoral crook, all live and flourish. From an otherwise unaccountable association of him with a fiddle, we conclude that he was of French extraction, and his name FIDELE.




From the Renaissance onward marvels were no longer those from distant lands … curiosities or the relics of saints, but the wonders of the human body and its recesses that had been secret until then.




Magic is the rudimentary form of that causal thinking that ultimately liquidates magic.




For Prospero remains the evergreen
Cell by the margins of the sea and land,
Who many cities, plains, and people saw
Yet by his open door
In sunlight fell asleep
One summer with the Apple in his hand.

George Eliot: Felix Holt, the Radical, Rachel Speight: The Dreame, Hannah Arendt: On Revolution, Virginia Woolf: In a Library, E.M. Forster: Aspects of the Novel, George Steiner: On Difficulty and Other Essays, Charles Dickens: Our School, Umberto Eco: The Infinity of Lists, Theodor Adorno translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor: Aesthetic Theory, Lawrence Durrell: Cities, Plains, and People.

return to me

In December last year the bloggers at The Auteurs Notebook posted lists of "fantasy double features": films that, they thought, deserved to appear together, like Miyazaki's Ponyo and Osamu Tezuka's Legend of the Forest, Part I. I thought: I wonder what it would look like if you used books.

And I dawdled over the idea for weeks until the Guardian book blog beat me to it.

A few suggestions:




Martin Boyd's Langton Quartet and Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time.

I haven't finished the Quartet, but unless the last part is dramatically different to the first, I think this would work. Both authors owe a debt to Proust; and the tone of voice in both cases seems to me similar, being decent, reflective, friendly, settled, British (even though Boyd is not), male, and fairly socially privileged. (Whispering Gums suggests similarities between Boyd and Austen.)




Colette's My Mother's House and Sido, and Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.

The two writers remember their parents, taking particular notice of their mothers. Lucille Clifton's poem oh antic God could be inserted before the main feature to take the place of a short.

… return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother's calling …

Clifton died recently. The Poetry Foundation website has a selection of her work.

For a more dramatic contrast: My Mother's House and The Man Who Loved Children.




Two poems: Cesário Verde's The Feelings of a Westerner and Bysshe Vanolis' City of Dreadful Night.

This double bill was inspired by the Wuthering Expectations blog's investigation of Vanolis, a Scot whose real name was James Thomson. Both poems are narrated by men who feel extravagant and distressing emotions as they walk through large cities; and both were written in the second half of the 1800s.





Daniachew Worku's The Thirteenth Sun and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Worku takes the language of Faulkner's ideas and uses it to describe Ethiopia during the reign of Haile Selassie. You could also pair Worku's book with Williams Sassine's Wirriyamu, comparing the polemic fiction of African anti-colonialism to the pessimistic self-assessment of an African country that has not been colonised. (Calm pessimism is a luxury.)





George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.

You could mix these around with Bleak House, War and Peace, or any of those other books that try to swallow a whole country from the higher parts of society to the lower. A Suitable Boy perhaps?




Hannah Arendt's On Revolution and Melville's Billy Budd.

Arendt draws on Budd as she discusses the intersection between Rousseau's ideas about the native virtue of Natural Man, and the men who saw the French Revolution transform into the Reign of Terror.




Elizabeth Jolley's Lovesong and Alex Miller's Lovesong.

Purely for the titles. I haven't read Miller's book.




The Selected Poems of Gwen Harwood and Jolley's Lovesong.

Music is important to both books, and the two writers share an impressionistic or pointillist method of putting a piece of work together.




Pierre Louÿs' Aphrodite and Jacob's Room, by Woolf.

One writer's worship of the ancient world versus the other writer's sane and smiling glance at ancient-world worship. I would read them in that order too. Aphrodite contains the quintessential decadent line: "It is almost three hours since I arose; I am dying of fatigue," uttered by a character who has spent most of that three hours sitting in a chair or lying down in a bath.




En-hedu-ana's Inana and Ebih and Antar (or Antara, or Antarah, or 'Antarah Ibn Shaddād al-'Absī)'s The Poem of Antar.

Two warlike narrators and a chanting style, at least in translation. (I am thinking of this version of Inana and this Antar.)




Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Grossman's book would not have existed in its present shape without Tolstoy's. He is even faithful to the idea that we should spend intimate time with the leaders of both sides in his story's war. One of the book's daring surprises -- which I am about to ruin for you if you have not read it -- is the sudden plunge into Hitler.




Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast and Christina Stead's The People with the Dogs.

The two authors look at utopias. Theroux approaches the idea from one angle, Stead approaches it from others. His approach is quite clear and driven, hers surrounds the idea like an amoeba and bores into it.




Christina Stead's Letty Fox - Her Luck, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.

Letty is like Moll, sexually pragmatic.




Two short stories: Alice Munro's Runaway and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find.




Ovid's Metamorphoses and Satomi Ikazawa's Guru Guru Pon-Chan.




The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Fernanado Pessoa's Book of Disquiet.




Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines and today's newspaper.

here a foie-gras roll, there a chocolate éclair

Everyone at the moment is making end-of-year lists, so this morning I sat down and made an end-of-year list. Here are fifteen extracts from books I've read this year. They're not ranked, but they're some of my favourites. I've left out Proust because there's too much of him that's quotable, and I haven't repeated anything I've already posted on this blog (this wasn't done on purpose, my mind skipped past those quotes with the hazy idea that they'd "Already been dealt with" - I see this in retrospect), so there's no sign of ER Eddison's monstrous sentence, and nothing from Christina Stead, although if I'd thought of it I might have included the pity speech from The Puzzleheaded Girl, or the storm-sentence from The People With the Dogs.

The last one gives away the ending of Gustav Flaubert's juvenile novel November. Consider yourself warned there.

So:

*


I have seen the end of all this, clearly, in my imagination: the earth transfigured and the gods walking upon it in their bodies' light … It is the earth as we have made it, clearing, grafting, transplanting, carrying from one place to another, following no plan that we could enunciate, but allowing our bellies to lead us, and some other, deeper hunger, till the landscape we have made reveals to us the creature we long for and must become.


*


History was like that - a negative of which one was the print, the positive.


*


Expect a little, confer future and times past with the present, see the event and comfort thyself with it. It is as well to be discerned in commonwealths, cities, families, as in private men's estates. Italy was once lord of the world, Rome the queen of cities, vaunted herself of two myriads of inhabitants; now that all-commanding country is possessed by petty princes, Rome a small village in respect. Greece of old the seat of civility, mother of sciences and humanity, now forlorn, the nurse of barbarians, a den of thieves. Germany then, saith Tacitus, was incult and horrid, now full of magnificent cities: Athens, Corinth, Carthage, how flourishing cities! now buried in their own ruins: corrorum ferarum, aprorum et bestiarum lustra, like so many wildernesses, a receptacle of wild beasts. Venice, a poor fisher-town, Paris, London, small cottages in Ceasar's time, now most notable emporiums.


*


… at this period in his life he had been writing a a particularly prolific amount about the Slavonic Question, emphasizing the God-given role of the Russian people whose vocation it was to free the rest of Europe, the basis of this chosen destiny being, in his opinion, the special, unique nature of the Russian national mentality and character which, amongst other things, was demonstrated in the use of unprintable words pronounced in various ways and with various shades of meaning, which were employed by the common people not, of course, to insult others or abuse them, but to express the subtle, profound and even saintly feelings buried in the soul of every genuine Russian.


*


It was the old dilemma: how was one to be known?


*


It is the ultimate in being homeless when you understand you have no way of cooking a potato.


*


They must cook very gently indeed, the liquid not even simmering but merely shuddering.


*


"Any cup?" asked Reggie, questing like a prawn over the groaning board, seizing here a foie-gras roll, there a chocolate éclair.


*


The Master said, "What the gentleman seeks in himself, the small man seeks in others."


*


BOSWELL: "But I wonder, sir, you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing." JOHNSON: "Sir you may wonder."

He talked of making verses, and observed, "The great difficulty is, to know when you have made good ones."


*


Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.


*


Those who strive to account for a man's deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop. Young Marius now acts like a son of Mars, now as a son of Venus.


*


Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about her or his life. Now I think, "That is what they thought at that time." An interim report - that is what an autobiography is. Would Cellini, would Casanova, would even Rousseau, later have agreed with what they said about themselves in those books that we assume is the fixed truth about what they thought?


*


Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.


*


At length, last December, he died, but slowly, little by little, solely by the force of thought, without any organic malady, as one who dies of sorrow - which may seem incredible to those who have greatly suffered, but must be tolerated in a novel, for the sake of our love of the marvellous.

David Malouf: An Imaginary Life, Lawrence Durrell: The Avignon Quintet, Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Leonid Tsypkin: Summer in Baden-Baden, translated by Roger Keys, Anita Brookner: Strangers, Elizabeth Jolley: Lovesong, Elizabeth David: French Provincial Cooking, Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz, Confucius: The Analects, translated by Raymond Dawson, James Boswell: Life of Johnson, Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, translated by Maxwell Stanforth, Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays, translated by M. Screech, Doris Lessing, Time Bites, from the essay Writing Autobiography, George Eliot: Middlemarch, Gustav Flaubert: November, translated by Francis Steegmuller.

This + This

Book mashups. I found the idea somewhere and can't remember where. A meme? Someone's private game? If I locate it, I'll link it.

The Getting of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
(Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom + T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom)
A misfit Australian schoolgirl leads the Arabs to freedom while they bully her.

The Street of the Enormous Crocodile
(Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles + Roald Dalhl's The Enormous Crocodile)
The narrator's father turned into a crab and he was yummy yummy yummy!

The Book of Disquiet Flows the Don
(Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet + Mikhail Sholokov's Quiet Flows the Don)
A group of doomed Cossacks moves to Portugal to stare moodily at trams.

Fantastic Mr Letty Fox
(Christina Stead's Letty Fox + Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox)
An ambitious young fox decides to get married to three farmers and eat all their chickens.

The Sorrow of War and Peace
(Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War + Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace)
A Vietnamese man returns from fighting the Americans so that he may marry into Russian high society.

Life and Fate a User's Manual
(Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual + Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate)
A dissident, a Communist, a university professor, a prisoner of war, a Jew, a platoon of Russian soldiers, Stalin, and Hitler, all live in a block of Parisian flats at 11 Rue Simon-Crebellier.

White Oleander Noise
(Don deLillo's White Noise + Janet Fitch's White Oleander)
An obsessive fear of death makes a teenage girl uncommonly artistic.

The Makioka Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants
(Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters + Ann Brashares' Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)
Four sisters in 1940s Kyoto ease the pain of social and familial upheaval by passing a pair of jeans around.

Finnegans Wake in Fright
(James Joyce's Finnegans Wake + Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright)
A teacher from the big city makes his way to an outback town and is intimidated by the densely allusive language of the local alcoholic kangaroo-hunters.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of the Secrets of Nimh
(J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets + Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH aka The Secret of NIMH)
A group of enterprising rats explains the nature of electricity to a British boy. "It is science, not magic."

And some others that I don't have summaries for:

The Man who Loved Children of a Lesser God
Idylls of King Solomon's Mines
Wise Blood Meridian
Accordion Crimes and Punishment
The Salzburg Tales of Genji
Father and Native Son
Dombey and Sons and Lovers
The Line of Beauty and the Beast
The Death of Witches in Brunswick
The Lord of the Rings of Saturn
The Secret Diary of Francis Kilvert aged 13 3/4
Swann's Way of All Flesh
Bleak Little House on the Prairie
The Portrait of Our Lady of the Flowers