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.

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.