Year: 2014

Certain novels remain in circulation only because their authors are famous for other, much better books. Such is ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS.

The story revolves around Anna Tellwright, a young woman whose father is a controlling miser. She is courted by the local heart throb, Henry Mynors, and agrees to marry him. She is however actually in love with a certain Willy Price, but is such a giant wimp that she never articulates that fact to herself, and so ends up marrying Mynors. Willie meanwhile is disgraced when his father’s financial dealings are revealed, and so the village buys him a ticket to Australia. In despair, he throws himself into a well, and In a bizarre anti-climax, no one finds out about his suicide but assume he is Australia, that country being apparently the same as being dead.

However, there is a visit to a pottery factory, which is interesting. How do you like this, regarding the female potters: “An infinitesimal proportion of them, from among the branch known as ground-layers, die of lead-poisoning, a fact which adds pathos to their frivolous charm.” Not exactly Marx and Engels, is it.

Now here is a book that I thought would break an immutable rule, and be that book that is worse than the movie.

That was my impression for about the first 90%. But then Ishiguro comes for you with a knife, and you realise the whole thing is perfectly constructed, absolutely killer, and has got not much to do with the film at all. Based on the movie, I thought it was going to be a romance; but it’s not. It’s about the absence of romance; about missed chances and love not lost but never found. It reminds me of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, a novel I blubbed through while listening on audio book as I drove across rural South Africa. But that’s another story.

REMAINS OF THE DAY occurs over the course of a few days’ motoring holiday taken by a butler in the 1950s. During the course of the trip he reflects on his life, and tells the story of his many years of service at one of England’s ‘great homes.’ Much of the story involves his former employer, Lord Darlington, who tried to make peace with the Germans before the war, and came to be seen by many as a Nazi sympathiser. Almost at the periphery of the story is the housekeeper, a Miss Kenton, who he spends much time with – in a professional capacity, as he continually reminds us – and who eventually leaves the house to get married. He goes to visit her on this motoring trip, having not seen her in twenty years, and realises at last what he missed out on.

He sits on a pier, at the end, talking to a stranger as the street lights come on The butler begins to talk about Lord Darlington: “He wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. . . I trusted I was doing something worth while. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes.” The stranger tells him he shouldn’t look back, and get depressed, and that the evening is the best part of the day, and should be enjoyed, especially as an older man, who has not much time left. Left alone, the butler thinks to himself:

Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and me, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and me at least try to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.

I sure as hell hope I am making my own mistakes.

This is 800 pages of pleasure. It is an entirely unpretentious, and I can’t believe it won the Pulitzer.

The book tells the story of a young boy who is in the Met in New York with his mother when it is bombed. She dies, he lives. As he leaves the museum, he takes a picture with him – the Goldfinch of the title – and this picture becomes increasingly important to him as his life unravels. The novel follows him onwards to his twenties, and is at every point engaging, interesting, and believable. The characters are so well drawn I sort of feel like I must have met them. There is a bit of a false note at the end, when the author tries to explicitly draw together the various themes: we give our own lives meaning/beauty is a mystery/ etc; but overall a most beautifully written novel.

Strangely, though, I find I have virtually nothing else to say about it. It was fantastic for plot and character, but I don’t think I thought anything new as a result of it. However I won’t complain: a very happy week’s reading. Thank you Ms Tartt.

I see I made no notes or marks in this novel. Usually if I enjoy a book it has quite a few of these, little bit and pieces I find interesting or worth thinking about, and some of which make it into my blog. So this sort of implies that there was nothing much worth thinking about in this novel. Which is pretty much true. But let’s not be a hater! It was still an engaging, plot driven novel, that got me through a rather painful four hour layover in Cairo.

THE OUTCAST tells the story of a little boy whose mother drowns one day when they are swimming together. It is the 1930s, so everyone is stiff upper lip about it to the point of child abuse, and the little boy grows up isolated and sad. There is a neighbour girl who is very smart, ostracized by her family and in love with the boy. The boy is however in love with her older sister. Never mind, you get where this is going: love conquers all, etc.

On a side note, on the plane from Cairo to Istanbul I was overwhelmed by nausea, and while retching into the sick bag, the man sitting next to me taps me on the shoulder, and says: Maybe is flu? You have snot in nose. I looked at him incredulously, dripping in cold sweat, and he says: What? Is only suggestion.
Then I went back to THE OUTCAST.

This is a book I very much admired, though I did not always enjoy it.

It’s a truly odd little novel, about an old theatre director who has decided to retire to the seaside. Sounds innocuous enough, but it slowly turns into a bizarre meditation on the creation of self, on selfishness, on obsession, and finally – weirdly – on religion.

The book is something of a diary, and the old man appears rather mean and egotistical at first. Then however he runs into the woman who jilted him when he was a teenager, who apparently retains for him some kind of idea of perfect happiness, and he pursues her to the point of stalking, and then beyond, to the point of kidnap. It’s strange and abusive, but it’s also about what it means to truly believe.

So it’s interesting philosophically; but I enjoyed it more I think for the accuracy of its observation, and the beauty of its style, than its actual content. This is Murdoch’s seventeenth book, and it shows. This lady knows what she’s doing. Take this, about a friend of the old man, who pretends to be very loud and brash:

. . . is one of those people who have a strong concept of the life they want to lead and the role they want to play and lead it and play it at the expense of everyone, especially their nearest and dearest. And the odd thing is that such people can in a sense be wrong, can as it were miscast themselves, and yet battle on successfully to the end . .

I can immediately think of several people in this category, probably including myself. The book is also interesting on the nature of the theatre, that being the old man’s profession. Here’s a pretty accurate summary:

The theatre is a place of obsession. It is not a soft dreamland. Unemployment, poverty, disappointment, racking indecision (take this now and miss that later) grind reality into one’s face; and, as in family life, one soon learns the narrow limitations of the human soul.

“As in family life” – hilarious. And here’s an interesting perspective on men in groups:

I confess I went to Peregrine not only for a drinking bout and chat with an old friend, but for male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with thing, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around

And lastly, here’s a charming description of a happy person:

Gilbert exuded the secret satisfaction of one who has come unscathed through a fascinating adventure which he looks forward to gossiping about in another context.

Suddenly in retrospect I think I may have kind of loved this book after all.

I really did not enjoy this book. But I still read the whole thing, in a kind of weird masochistic way, enjoying hating it.

LITTLE FAILURE is a memoir that recounts the experience of a man who emigrated from Russia to the US. He bangs on and on about Russia. Guess what age he was when he left Russia? A) 40 B) 20 C) 7. Yes, SEVEN. He tells us about how he goes to a little liberal arts school to study creative writing, and you just KNOW that the professors there encouraged him to write about his ‘interesting’ background, to the point where he has virtually nothing else to say. It’s totally fakey. I appreciate you need to find your USP in order to sell, but COME ON.

Let me give you a sample of how American he is: “St Petersburg is a sad place. Its sadness lies in a mass grave in its northeastern suburbs along with the 750,000 citizens who died of hunger and German shelling during the 871 day siege.” Imagine saying something like that to someone actually from St Petersburg! What: your city is sad? What nonsense. On the basis of past atrocities, every single big city is sad, and Rome must be a non-stop funeral. It’s just so ridiculous and exoticising I can barely stand it.

But its not even the immigrant bit that annoys me the most; it’s the heavy layer of cheese over the entire enterprise. There is a big set-up at the beginning, about how the author has a panic attack in a New York book store when he sees a picture of some church, and this church is referenced over and over again, so you think something really major is coming: but no, his dad once him in the face there. That’s it. That’s the big reveal. Or try this melodramatic language: “On so many occasions in my novels I have approached a certain truth only to turn away from it, only to point my finger and laugh at it and then scurry back to safety. In this book, I promised myself I would not point the finger. My laughter would be intermittent. There would be no safety”

I don’t know if I am being a huge hater, or what. Perhaps I am influenced by the fact that I just read a great memoir, A MAN IN LOVE, which comparison is making it most particularly painful.

I chose to read A FINE BALANCE in part because it had been recommended to me, and in part because it was reviewed as “sweeping and Dickensian”. I love a good Victorian treatment of a contemporary subject, and the subject here was at least in part Partition. I have little/no understanding of the history or politics of Partition, but I know its literature well, being a veteran of such authors as Vikram Seth, VS Naipaul, etc, and as a purely literary event I always find Partition very compelling, and weirdly modern: all these people suddenly cut a drift from their regular lives, and having to start again.

A FINE BALANCE tells the story of four people who all end up living in a small flat together. There’s the owner, a single lady of mature years; the two tailors she employs; and her paid guest, who is the child of a school friend. We move back and forth in time, hearing the story of each person, but the centre of the novel is the time in the flat. The co-habitation in the flat begins out of economic necessity, but over time the four develop into a little family, which is very sweet and touching.

Hold up there, because here is where I started to get suspicious. Why are they so happy? Why are so many threads resolved, and I’m only at about 70%? I HOPE MISTRY ISN’T SETTING ME UP TO CARE ABOUT THESE PEOPLE JUST SO HE CAN MAKE A POINT ABOUT INDIA’S SOCIAL ILLS, IS HE? Oh yes. Oh yes he is. He makes you care about the characters so that when they run into the above social ills, you feel terrible. And he sure lays on the ills/ These four characters experience:
– Caste violence
– Rape
– Slum dwelling
– Slum clearance (ie, you think slum dwelling is bad, but it’s nowhere near so bad as when they won’t let you live in the slum)
– Forced sterilization
– Forced labour
– Religious mob violence

I mean, I’m not playing: this is all in there. And it’s not even that long. At the end, one kills himself, and you feel almost relieved.

That said, Mistry is a talented writer, and its an absorbing book, with entirely believable characters, neatly detailed and overlapping, and many delightful turns of phrase. (Here’s his description of a village: “There, where typhoid and cholera, unchallenged by science of technology, were still reaping their routine harvest of villagers”). So I recommend, but only on a good day when you’re feeling strong and won’t get depressed when imagined terrible things happen to fictional poor people.

Deciding what to read next is difficult. I don’t know personally very many readers who like what I like, so actual people are not much use; even apparently intelligent people will genuinely suggest that you should try THE DA VINCI CODE. Of late I have been using – though I feel like a capitalist lackey – Amazon’s suggestion based on “other people bought.” This is proving very successful, especially when tested against what the Guardian/Telegraph/NYT think. And so I found: A MAN IN LOVE by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I thought I would like it when I saw that Karl Ove’s inspiration was Proust, and like it I do. It’s 6 volumes across about 4000 pages, and his subject is his daily life. And despite the fact that he is not a super spy or international man of mystery, its engaging and charming, and I think I’m going to read it all over the next few years.

A MAN IN LOVE is Volume 2 of his series, which is bizarrely called MY STRUGGLE. It covers his move from Norway to Sweden, his marriage and first children. He gives you a detailed account of absolutely everything, and as with Proust, this is both boring and strangely comforting. The older I get, the more I coming to the conclusion that everyone’s life, when closely examined, is weird and embarrassing, and virtually nobody is leading the life we all feel we ought to be: rational, well thought out, properly managed. So for example, when Karl Ove (one can’t possibly call him Knausgaard) first meets his wife to be, she shows little interest, and he drinks too much and gets cuts from a broken mirror all over his face, and everyone knows why, and it’s horridly awkward. Then when they do get together, he is so happy when she kisses him for the first time that he actually faints. But then he still can’t help ogling women on the sidewalk, even while madly in love.

He explains what has pushed him to memoir: “Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Whereever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether whether what they told had actually happened or not . . . … The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

This is all very well, but sometime it degenerates into this: “I went into the supermarket down in the Metro station by Stureplan, bought a grilled chicken, a lettuce, some tomatoes, a cucumber, black olives, two red onions and a fresh baguette”. No, this is going anywhere. That’s his grocery list. There’s also a good hundred pages on a child’s birthday party during which he is bored. Yes, a hundred pages on a boring party. That takes balls.

On the other hand sometimes this daily detail is very fun, when he gives you a view of normal life in Sweden. Apparently, normal life in Sweden is mind bogglingly safe and controlled and modern. Karl Ove’s wife looks after the kids while he finishes a novel, and then he looks after them while she finishes drama school, and apparently he is just one of many men with hipster glasses pushing prams around Malmo. He hates domestic work, finds it boring and frustrating in a way I would say that women are not ‘allowed’ to, and as he puts it – re: the pram – “I was bound to it like Odysseus to the mast: if I wanted to free myself I could do that, but not without losing everything. As a result I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminised, with a furious nineteenth century man inside me.” Hilariously, for someone not from Scandinavia, one of Karl Ove’s biggest issues how foreign he feels as a Norwegian living in Scandinavia. Let’s try not to fall apart laughing, but as he puts it: “I know nothing about life here. Everything is deeply alien.” I hope in some later section of this project he has to go STRUGGLE with Mogadishu. I can’t wait to find out.

What I think is interesting, is how one book about a man’s life can be totally different from another. STONER, one of this blog’s favourite books, is all about work and failure; ALL THAT IS is all about sex. Now, my question is, is this a product of the fact that art projects need themes, and so themes are selected; or is it that people’s live themselves, inherently, have different themes? I suspect its the latter.

If so, James Salter’s theme is sex. Here we go:

“They made love as if it were a violent crime, he was holding her by the waist, half woman, half vase, adding weight to the act. She was crying in agony, like a dog near death. They collapsed as if stricken.

I can only say: half vase?

Sex aside, ALL THAT IS is an entertaining book. It covers the life of a man from his time in the Second World War through to his career in publishing and on to retirement. It’s unusual formally, as while it is focused on the central character, it actually very largely a collection of vignettes of his acquaintance, making a sort of kaleidiscope of mid twentieth century America, which I enjoyed and found interesting.

Apparently I have entered the phase of re-reading the books of my youth. Does this mean I am old? No. Probably it is my actual age that means I am old. Anyway, on to an iconic text of my pimply youth: NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell.

As you can perhaps guess by its title, this is a novel of the Industrial Revolution. But, as so often with female authors of this period, it’s wrapped up in a love story. The main character, Margaret, is a young woman living with her parents in the charming countryside in the SOUTH. She helps the elderly, darns clothes, is surprised by an offer of marriage, etc. Then her clergyman father loses his faith, and feels he can no longer preach. Hello modernity! The family are forced to scrape about for a new income, and her father is offered a tutoring position in a large city in the NORTH. It’s called Milton but I think we all know its Manchester. And so begins Margaret’s education in industrialisation. She is horrified by the filth and the noise, but slowly she comes to understand the life, and to value it. It’s an interesting transition, but it’s hard to get past how Gaskell really goes to town with the workforce. Here’s a worker, whose son his going hungry while he is on strike: ” Our lil’ Jack, who wakened me each morn wi’ putting his sweet little lips to my great rough fou’ face, a-seeking a soft place to kiss – an he lies clemmin'”. It’s not nice to laugh at starving children, but what can you do?

Margaret also meets a dark and louring young man, a captain of industry, and it’s very obvious where this is going. It’s not obvious to Margaret though, who is once again surprised with an offer of marriage. I mean: it’s one thing to be demure, it’s another to be a dumbass. Anyway, he is rejected and becomes even more dark and louring, while breaking the strike and leaving the children to clem a bit more. Eventually after much tortured distance, they finally get together.

He clasped her close. But they both kept silence. At length, she murmured in a broken voice:”Oh, Mr Thornton. I am not good enough!”
“Not good enough! Don’t mock my own deep feeling of unworthiness.”

Honestly. I don’t know who has been re-writing this novel in the twenty years since I last read it. I don’t remember it being like this at all.