This is book 3 in a 6 part series. It is however not about dragons, or boy wizards, or whatever; but instead the autobiography of one Norwegian man. One might wonder how one can fill 3000 pages with a life not full of fire-breathing fictional characters, but somehow Knausgaard manages it. I read his A MAN IN LOVE earlier this year, which covers his second marriage, and the birth of his children. This next novel goes back in time, to cover his childhood ages six to twelve.

I loved A MAN IN LOVE, which was a very comforting account of wrong turns and missed opportunities. I’m not quite so fond of BOYHOOD ISLAND, perhaps because one childhood is much like another. Thus there is much in the way of learning to swim, pee-ing out doors, finding pornographic magazines, and etc. There is however much about it that is vintage Karl Ove, which I really enjoyed. (So intimate are these books, its hard to think of him by his surname.) For example: Oh, isnt that why shadows get longer in the evening? They are reaching out for the night, this tidal water of darkness that washes over the earth to fulfil for a few hours the shadows’ innermost yearnings. Or, the following, which I’ve been thinking a lot about as I am on a family holiday, so there is much in the way of photography: “It is the era that we take photos of, not the people in it, they can’t be captured. Not even the people in my immediate circle can.”

In A MAN IN LOVE we learn that Karl Ove had a troubled relationship with his father. He does seem a very stern disciplinarian, with very harsh punishments for lost socks. We must recall though that this is all told from the child’s perspective, so I’m not sure how trustworthy it all is. Karl Ove seems to have been something of a wimp. He is scared of normal things, eg., headless men, mummies, but also an array of other things: e.g., “I was so afraid of the hot water in the bathroom.” I”m not sure he’s a totally reliable narrator.

Lastly, I did enjoy once again being immersed in the almost creepy safety of Scandinavia. Speaking of a photo, he says his father is “sitting on a mountainside drinking coffee from the same red Thermos top, as he forgot to pack any cups” What! I thought the lid of the Thermos was supposed to be a cup? I thought that was the point?

I can’t wait for Book 4. Maybe we’ll get some dragons.

THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON is a strange novel, being an action fantasy disguised as a literary novel set in North Korea. It tells the story of an orphan who is sure he is not an orphan, because the terrible treatment he receives from the orphan master is only explicable for him as an attempt to hid his great affection for his son. This sad and weird reasoning sets the tone for what is a very odd book.

The orphan goes on to be in the army, then on a fishing boat, then in a prison mine, then he is the prime taekwondo hero of North Korea, before going on to torture and death. I think it’s supposed to be magically real, but I just found it so unlikely as to be difficult to engage with. However, I do wonder how else one can write a novel about North Korea, a country so utterly improbable that I suspect any story there would not seem probable. The book gives horrible detail on the experience of prison mines, for example, where prisoners are pushed in to the mine, and never let out again at all. They simply come to the gate when they find ore, and are able to exchange the ore for candles and food, but they never seen sunshine again. It’s also horribly comic, as when a Korean movie star sees CASABLANCA for the first time, and asks: “But I do not understand. What is this film glorifying?”

While I did not enjoy the book very much, I did find it interesting to learn about North Korea. I can’t believe such a country actually exists; it seems like some kind of low budget horror movie, not a real place on the map.

This book is full of stuff British culture loves:
– Children who die
– Children with special needs
– Mental illness
– NHS cuts

Basically this child who has special needs dies because of a mistake made by this other child who has a mental illness. Later this child is affected by NHS cuts. I hate to be a hater, but BLAH BLAH BLAH.

This is a marvelous book. Nothing much happens in it – it’s just the everyday diary of a elderly pastor in the Midwest – but I felt like blubbing all the way through. He’s near the end of his life, and knows it, so much of the diary is about the joy of that ‘every day’. He married late, and so his son is very young. Here’s the description:

. . . Your hair is straight and dark, and your skin is very fair. I suppose you’re not prettier than most children. You’re just a nice looking boy, a bit slight, well scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but its your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability.In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye

If we are supposed to get better, and wiser, as we get older, its only through persistent struggle, and this diary is much also about that struggle. He gives us much good advice, such as “Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.” Or:

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilisations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live

Perhaps what gives this book its particular melancholy is the extent to which the pastor has accepted all that is lost. “When I was a young boy I used to get up before dawn every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door. This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it has passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.”

I was also struck in reading it by the great heritage that the Bible has been to the world of literature. This book just reeks of Bible, and I mean that in a good way. Here he speaks about what it will be like to be re-united with his dead wife when he dies: “I have wondered about that for many years. Well, this old seed is about to drop into the ground. Then I’ll know.”

This was Robinson’s second novel, 25 years after her first. I don’t know if she spent all 25 years writing it, but if so it was time well spent. It might have taken a few years just to come up with this:

This morning Kansas rolled out its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven – one more of a very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it.

This is a book that begins as a love story and ends in a bizarre battle against god. This man is having a love affair with this married woman. It’s during the Blitz, and one day the house they’re in is hit. The woman sees the man lying under a door, and thinks he is dead. She prays to God to bring him back to life, saying that if he does, she will give up the affair. He’s not really dead (or God brings him back to life, as you prefer) and so she feels bound to follow through with this strange deal. Two years of suffering on both sides begin. The man is immensely angry with god, viewing him as some kind of love rival (?). This is not even the weird part yet. In a deeply surreal turn of events, after she dies, various miracles begin to occur, associated with her death, leaving the man even angrier at God, who he feels is trying to force him into a life of meaning. But he doesn’t want eternal meaning, he just wants sex. Don’t we all.

Here’s him on the problem, in his own words:

I sat on my bed and I said to God: You’ve taken her, but You haven’t got me yet. I know Your cunning. It’s You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You’re a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy; I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

It’s a very interesting book, giving lots to think about. It’s also beautifully written. Here he is at a tube station at evening: “The man who fed the sparrows had gone and the woman with the brown-paper parcel, the fruit-sellers cried like animals in the dusk outside the station. It was as if the shutters were going up on the whole world; soon we should all of us be abandoned to our own devices” And here he is angry at himself one night: ” . . . my self pity and hatred walked hand in hand across the darkening Common like idiots without a keeper.”

There’s only one weak aspect, where we are treated to an extract from the lady’s diary. This is mushy, emotional, awkward writing, and I fear very much is what Mr Greene, a man of an earlier generation, really thinks women’s internal lives are like. (As the central character of the novel says: “I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical”). I guess we will just have to give him a pass, because really, what a lovely novelist he is.

All success is mystery, but that of SHOTGUN LOVE STORIES is an especially mysterious mystery. It is a story about four male friends who grew up in the same small Wisconsin town, and have remained close into adulthood. It is apparently something of a best seller. Clearly I am missing something because I have already pretty much forgotten what it was about. Basically, blah blah awkward teens, blah blah, marriage, blah blah, one of us is an alcoholic, blah blah, redemption

This is a really strange concept for a book. It tells the story of a woman named Ursula, born in 1910, but it tells it multiple times, with multiple different outcomes, dependent on tiny choices that Ursula makes in her daily life. So for example, in one version she dies in childhood, sucked under by a wave after having gone out too far into the sea; in another, she goes by the back stairs, instead of the front, and is raped, sending her life into a downward spiral; in another, she meets a man and marries him, and in another, she never meets him, and marries someone else. In one life, she chooses one degree, and in another, a different one, and her life spools out completely differently in either choice.

This is an anxious book, if one thinks about it too deeply, because its topic is really all the paths not chosen; and that is always a source of worry and distress – I believe for everyone. It’s very well written though, and really masterful at keeping you interested as you go back and forth on the same ground in different configuration perhaps twenty times. Also, it includes this horrifying and yet informative description of how to prepare calf’s tongue:
“Mrs Glover meanwhile was more than fully occupied with pressing a calf’s tongue, removing the gristle and bone and rolling it up before squeezing it into the tongue press . . .”I am not sure I have ever eaten tongue, and after that sentence I don’t think I ever will. That’s one path I’m very happy not to take.

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.