According to reviews, this novel bridges the gap between poetry and narrative. Clearly, I thought I was going to hate it. The introduction did not help; speaking of Levy, the writer says:

“. . she was a writer as much at home within the fields of visual and conceptual art, philosophy and performance as within that of the printed word. She’d read her Lacan and Deleuze, her Bartes . . Like the emotional and cerebral choreographies of Pina Bausch, her fiction seemed less concerned about the stories it narrated than the interzone (to borrow Burrough’s term) . . . “

Oh god! “Less concerned about stories,” as if that makes you a better writer! GOD. i am glad I did not give up however, because SWIMMING HOME turns out to be rather a lovely novel.

It tells the story of a family who arrive for their vacation in a rented house in France to find another lady there, who says she has confused her dates, and thought she had the house rented. They invite her to stay, and it slowly becomes clear that the lady is in fact there because the father in the family is a famous poet, with whom she is in love. The lady and the poet have a sort of melancholy half-baked affair, and the story ends rather sadly. It’s an interesting plot, with really gorgeous writing. Here is the lady and poet on the way to a hotel:

As they strolled down the Promenade des Anglais in the silver light of the late afternoon, it was snowing seagulls on every rooftop in Nice. She had casually slung the short white feathered cape across her shoulders, its satin ribbons tied in a loose knot around her neck.

And here they are in the elevator up to their hotel room:

She stared at the multiple reflections of Joe’s sweating arm around her waist, the green silk of her dress trembling as they saild silently in the lift that smelt of leather to the third floor.

The book has some light hearted moments, also, as when the poet becomes annoyed with a friend who is acting horrified about someone else’s behaviour. The poet says: “It’s rude to be so normal, Mitchell,” which I found strangely hilarious.

What most impressed me was the author’s ability to weave the various poetic elements in and out of the story, with multiple complex repetitions, in a way that seemed entirely natural and in service to the plot. Really remarkable writing.

This is a book about the Harvard experience by someone recently graduated from Harvard. It begins well; here is the first description of the central character: “Penelope Davis O’Shaunessy, an incoming Harvard freshman of average height and lank hair,” which I found entertaining.

Thereafter, it goes down hill. That period of early adulthood has been covered, and covered well (BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, OF HUMAN BONDAGE, etc etc and ETC), so if you’re going to do it you better have something new to add. Unfortunately PENELOPE does not. It’s such a basic story, with such routinely ‘comic’ moments, that after a while I started to wonder if there was some much larger joke that I was missing.

It’s a heroic moment for this blog! Somehow, it appears that without planning to, I have just read eight books in a row by women! This has never happened before. Nothing even close – last year hardly a third of the year’s books were by women. I’ve felt guilty about it, but not guilty enough to make a change. I guess it’s because in the past I mostly read dead people, and most women currently dead were too busy with the misery of cooking and cleaning and having mountains of babies to have time to write while they were alive. But now that I’m reading living people, women with labour-saving devices and birth control are showing up in my library. Well done feminism.

GONE GIRL is a brilliant page turner. I went to bed at 9.30pm, thinking I’d do a little reading, and when I looked up again it was 1.30am. I never read thrillers – I probably haven’t read once since I was completing my father’s bookcases as a teenager – and I’m glad I gave this one a chance. The next night I went to bed at 8.30pm, because I knew what kind of book I was up against, and finished it before midnight. My eyes are fiery pits. Totally worth it.

In the best tradition of thrillers, and of real life, a woman disappears. The story is then told from two perspectives: her husband, after her disappearance, and the woman herself, Amy, through her diary before she disappears. The diary suggests that she is a fun, relaxed woman, who was growing increasingly afraid of her husband. SPOILER ALERT Then the husband’s story continues in the same time frame, but we are suddenly introduced to Amy in the present – because she isn’t dead, but she is framing her husband! Okay, when you write it down it doesnt sound that interesting, and yet somehow it is.

This is partly due to the fact that you genuinely like Diary Amy, and then real Amy explains how carefully she conducted a persona she has total contempt for; the ‘cool girl’ that is what women think men want. She says:

I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. . . And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.”

So it’s a sort of generally feminist idea that you can agree with, but it’s twisted in awful ways against you.

It’s also rather well observed. Try: “Sleep is like a cat: it only comes to you if you ignore it.” Or “People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.” Here are two points I’v always agreed with.

And here’s a fine description: “The waitress, a plain brunette disguised as a pretty brunette;” and another: “She’d French-braided her limp hair and clipped it to the back of her head in a rather poignant updo, and she wore lipstick.” Poignant updo! For some reason that kills me.

Having said how much I loved it, I have to confess that I didn’t quite buy the ending. And I notice that in the best tradition of pulp, I am already forgetting it; it’s passing through me like meat that is off. And on that disgusting note, I’ll go to bed with my new novel. Also by a woman!

Having just read Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, I moved on to another old friend, George Eliot’s MIDDLEMARCH. Apparently I am having some kind of literary high school reunion. While PERSUASION gets better as it and I age, I am really sad that the same can’t be said for MIDDLEMARCH. It’s one of these disturbing cases where either I am changing or the novel is; and I suppose grim old reality demands that it is the former.

Now, my recollection of this book is of a heartbreaking romance between an idealistic young woman and a handsome young artist, who are divided for much of the novel by their high standards and fine ideas. This is certainly one plot line, but it’s the stupidest. I guess somewhere since high school I decided that suffering for your ideals is kind of dumb. The far, far, far better plot line is around a second couple who also live in the village of Middlemarch: the doctor Lydate, and the lovely young lady Rosamund.

When Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch, he is determined to become a great medical researcher, and is clear he does not have the money to marry. Then he falls in love with the beautiful, silent Rosamund, and somehow falls into marriage. He promptly runs out of money and begins a slow and awful decline away from the great man he meant to be towards a comfortable provincial GP. As Eliot explains:

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and se our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

God, that’s depressing.

And so is this:

For in the multitude of middle aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.

George Eliot was a woman, and like many female Victorian novelists, she was not fond of the ‘sweet-innocent-virgin’ model of femininity. Rosamund’s beauty and modesty are nothing short of a trap, and Eliot is clearly much more fond of the young woman who is part of the third couple in the book, Mary. Mary is not sweet or innocent, nor very pretty, and she is a little sharp tongued:

At the age of two and twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavour of resignation as required.

I found this hilarious. And here’s an equally entertaining description on her young man, Frank:

He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.

On thing I love about Victorian novelists is that they are never shy to lay it out for you. There’s no ‘I think,’ or ‘in some cultures,’ in the nineteenth century, they like just to be BOOYAH: Here’s the truth! Here’s a great one:

Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.

Or

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

Or

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency . . . If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

What can one possibly say about this book? It’s as close to perfect as you can come without burning your fingers.

This is probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve read it, and it’s still charming, and soothing, and somehow rather encouraging. It tells the story of one Anne Elliot, who in her youth was convinced that she should not marry the man she loved, because he was so very poor. As an older woman (like late 20s, but that was old in the early 1800s) she meets him again, and somehow they get back together.

Morons, usually men, think Austen writes romances. I think she writes books about how to live. It’s nice that she gets her man, but what is really moving about this book is the courage and elegance with which she lives out her bad choices before he comes back. And this is where Austen is comforting, and even inspiring, for we may or may not get our man, but we will all most certainly make bad choices and have to live with them.

Commenting on this novel reminds me of my friend, a young playwright, who was sitting next to an elderly man at a play by Arthur Miller. During intermission he was flipping through the program, and seeing a rehearsal photo, realised the elderly man was ACTUALLY ARTHUR MILLER. So when my friend told me this story, I was like: OMG! Did you talk to him? What did you say? And my friend was like: I didn’t say anything! What could I say? Nice work on DEATH OF A SALESMAN? I enjoyed THE CRUCIBLE? He’s bloody ARTHUR MILLER. And my awkward friend, who spent the entire second act gazing out of the corner of his eye at ARTHUR MILLER, reminds me of me, trying to blog about bloody JANE AUSTEN.

Further to my post VS NAIPAUL: I HAVE A LOT OF ISSUES, I bring you VS NAIPAUL: I’VE STILL GOT A LOT OF ISSUES, AND THEY’RE THE SAME ISSUES, AND THEY MAINLY ABOUT MY DAD AND ABOUT SEX.

This book tells the story of a young man from India who has a difficult relationship with his father, and who goes to England to study. This emigration was clearly a deeply formative event for Naipaul in his own life, and he writes about the cultural disjunction with sympathy and insight.

In England, receives a letter from a girl from southern Africa in response to some stories he has published which goes as follows:

At school we were told it was important for us to read, but it is not easy for people of my background I suppose yours to find books where we can see ourselves. We read this book and that book and we tell ourselves we like it, but all the books they tells us to read are written for other people and realy we are always in somebody else’s house . . .. .

He decides to marry her and move to Africa with her. He explains that in some way he simply trusts her:

. . .if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then youhave to believe in your luck or your star or you will die.

After twenty years or so, which are passed over cursorily, he decides he is tired of her and leaves again for Europe.

I found much of this book in fact to be strangely cursory, a sort of half sketching out of half a life. In traditional Naipaul fashion, the energy only really picks up once he starts being creepy about women. Here is as a student visiting a prostitute, one of very few detailed scenes in the book:

He didn’t consider her face. He just followed her. It was awful for him in the over-heated little room with smells of perfurme and urine and perhaps worse. He didn’t look at the woman. They didn’t talk. He concentrated on himself, on undressing, on his powers.

I find it deeply hilarious when he says ‘it was awful for him,’ as if the woman is having a great time. It’s fascinatingly self-absorbed and unself-conscious. You wouldn’t think it could get any worse, but wait till he starts visiting prostitutes in Africa. These encounters are pretty much the only vivid recollections he brings of his twenty years on the continent. He is introduced to this world by an overseer, who assures him that in Africa eleven year olds enjoy being sexual active and that there is no such thing as underage. Here he is:

Take that little girl we just passed. If you stopped to ask her the way she would stick up her little breasts at you and she would know what she was doing.

So part lovely evocation of fractured modern identity; part Prostitutes I Have Known, it’s VS at close to his worst.

This is a hymn not so much to London as to one corner of London. In this way, it is a book deeply of that city, because no one actually lives in London; one lives in Clapham, or Peckham, or Dulwich. The horrible oppression of the tube keeps London separate and small.

NW tells the story of two women who grew up on a council estate together, and follows them through a few months in their mid thirties. It’s centrally concerned therefore with the issues of one’s thirties, and in particular the question of children. One of the women has already had children, and the other has told everyone she is ‘trying’ – in fact, she is secretly on birth control. Here is her perception of a group of mothers she is at a party with:

. . . women for whom trying is half the fun and ‘you’re next’ does not sound like the cry of a guard in a dark place

She herself is not sure why she is unwilling to procreate

Be objective! What is the fear? It is something to do with death and time and age. Simply: I am eighteen in my mind I am eighteen in my mind I am eighteen and if I do nothing if I stand still nothing will change I will be eighteen always. For always. Time will stop. I’ll never die. Very banal, this fear. Everybody has it these days.

I found this to be sort of profound. Not so much with regard to having children or not having children but just in terms of thinking about one’s life overall.

The novel is engaging and well-observed, but it does have some unfortunate ‘modern novel’ tendencies. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we do :
-randomly jump around from character to character
-have a character become deeply anxious about a minor event in a lame thematic way
-becomes horribly poetic for no reason:

Apple tree, apple tree.

Thing that has apples on it. Apple blossom.

So symbolic. Network of branches, roots.

-totally fail to resolve . This is partly a function of the fact that we jump around so much, but it also on a larger level a failure to handle the child theme. At the end, at a climactic moment, a woman embraces her child, and there is some nonsense about how holding her child makes it all worthwhile, it’s beyond words, etc. I mean: seriously? After all that intelligent discussion of the problem, that’s what you’ve got?

Having said that, it gave me much to think about. How’s this, about lending someone thirty pounds to visit their sick mother:

But already the grandeur of experience threatens to flatten into the conventional, into anecdote: only thirty pounds, only an ill mother, neither a murder nor a rape. Nothing survives its telling

Now I don’t know what she’s on about here. For me the anecdote is often better, richer, and truer than the actual lived experience, which is just a pale shadow of my story about it.

This year is a sad comedown on last. I’ve only read 49 books. However, looking back on the list there was still much to delight. My favourite books of the year:
PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Phillip Roth: a horrifying and hilarious meditation on a young man’s life, mostly as it concerns masturbation
A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens: how did I live this long without ever reading this?
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW by Anthony Trollope: it’s so absorbing, it’s like an anaesthetic for your actual life.

I also enjoyed non-fiction for perhaps the first time ever this year: highlights include STANLEY by Time Jeal and THE GUN by CJ Chivers.

There was little that was dire, but I must mention the horrible BLIND ASSASSIN, by Margaret Atwood. It was totally humourless and utterly forgettable. So forgettable I really can’t tell you want the plot was.

In other bad news I only managed 34% female authors. Gender traitor!

I have put this post together in two minutes, as I am leaving the for the airport, but wanted to post on the last day of this lovely year; but I quite enjoyed glancing at old posts, and meeting myself; it’s like seeing a stranger you only sort of remember.

1 THE MAPLES STORIES by John Updike
2 RICH DAD, POOR DAD by Robert Kiyosaki
3 O PIONEERS! by Willa Cather
4 A COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE by Lawrence McDonald
5 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by JD Salinger
6 ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe
7 THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood
8 THE PRIME MINISTER by Anthony Trollope
9 THE SLAP by Christos Tsiolkas
10 THE JOY LUCK CLUB by Amy Tan
11 GEORGE PASSANT by CP Snow
12 TIME OF HOPE by CP Snow
13 THE SADDEST STORY by Ford Maddox Ford
14 AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth
15 THE QUIET AMERICAN by Graham Greene
16 A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens
17 THE GUN by CJ Chivers
18 AN EDUCATION by Lynn Barber
19 A PASSAGE TO INDIA by EM Forster
20 STANLEY: AFRICA’S GREATEST EXPLORER by Tim Jeal
21 NIGHTMARE ABBEY by Thomas Love Peacock
22 THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD by Oliver Goldsmith
23 ANY HUMAN HEART by William Boyd
24 THE WAY WE LIVE NOW by Anthony Trollope
25 LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE by Nancy Mitford
26 THE BLESSING by Nancy Mitford
27 THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford
28 THE RADETZKY MARCH by Joseph Roth
29 MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER by Simone de Beauvoir
30 COMMUTERS by Emily Gray Tedrowe
31 BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy
32 A PRIMATE’S MEMOIR by Robert M Sapolsky
33 CREATION: DARWIN, HIS DAUGHTER AND HUMAN EVOLUTION by Randal Keynes
34 THE LINE OF BEAUTY by Alan Hollinghurst
35 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving
36 THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
37 THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM by Olive Schreiner
38 THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT by Quentin Crisp
39 A CHANGE OF CLIMATE by Hilary Mantel
40 JANE AUSTEN: A LIFE by Claire Tomalin
41 ETHAN FROMME by Edith Wharton
42 CRANFORD by Elizabeth Gaskell
43 FAREWELL by Balzac
44 HOW TO LIVE: A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE by Sarah Bakewell
45 SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END by Diana Athill
46 ZOO CITY by Lauren Beukes
47 BRING UP THE BODIES by Hilary Mantel
48 JOY by Jonathan Lee
49 HOPE: A TRAGEDY by Shalom Auslander

I just finished another Mantel, the Booker winning BRING UP THE BODIES, a highly poetic historical novel. This book couldn’t be more different – in fact it seems to have been written by a totally different person. It’s a contemporary story about a personal drama.

A young man is essentially forced by his father to become a missionary. His father in incensed by his son’s desire to study geology, as he is fiercely opposed to evolution. The young man does not ask for support from anyone, and eventually surrenders:

Because he was ashamed of his father’s stupidity, ashamed of the terms of the quarrel. Because in families, you never think of appealing for help to the outside world; your quarrels are too particular, too specific, too complex. And because you never think of these reasonable solutions, till it is far too late.

An interesting analysis of family life. In Africa, where they go as missionaries, the young man and his wife experience a horrific life changing event. The author is British, so no surprises as to what the event is: oh yes, it’s child abuse. Of course. The British are completely obsessed with paedophilia.

The book flashes back and forth between past and future, and while always engaging, because Mantel is a fine writer, it never quite reaches a satisfying completion or resolution. There is however this great line, which I rather treasure:

Again he twitched at his belt, settling his bulk comfortably, as if his gut were something apart from him, a pet animal he kept.

I know many people keeping that kind of pet.

As with many people I have a particular soft spot for Jane Austen. I’m sure literary critics would disagree, but for me she always seems to be the first really modern woman: standing apart, thinking for herself. She’s the first light on the horizon, and it’s deeply depressing it took that many generations of civilization to spawn a lady like her for us to look up to.

Austen was born into a clergyman’s large family. She remained unmarried throughout her life, and was very close to her sister, only finding some measure of success in her writing fairly late. Not that late, however, as she was dead in her early forties. This detailed and well researched biography exploded a couple of preconceptions I had about Austen.

I had always thought her novels, which are fairly narrow in external incident, reflected the placid world in which she grew up. I was surprised to see that in fact the families she knew well were far from dull, with slave owners, madness, adultery, and so forth. Her closest cousin in fact fled the French Revolution and led a most exotic life, taking her retarded child around the world, absolutely none of which appears in her novels. It is interesting to see that the restrained world she created was a conscious artistic choice, rather than a rural spinster’s necessity.

While her novels’ themes are profound and wide reaching, at the level of plot the novels are mostly romances. It is thus easy to believe that Austen must have wanted to be married. From her letters, it is clear that for a while she was much taken with a young Irishman, and that they were not married only because neither had any money. This seems like it could be rather an awful sad story, worthy of a bad movie (step in Anne Hathaway, horrifying casting in BECOMING JANE). However, her sister Cassandra later made it clear that Jane felt a kind of triumph over married ladies, and in one of her letters she speaks of one of her young sister-in-laws as a ‘poor animal’ who will be exhausted by the age of 30. She knew what she was talking about; she lost four sisters-in-law to childbirth. During this period it was normal to have a baby every eighteen months. Thus, for example, one of these sisters-in-law who married at eighteen had eleven babies before dying in labour at the ripe old age of thirty five. From this perspective, the idea of the poor young Irishman seems a good deal less romantic. How could she have found time to think, let alone write some of the finest novels in the English language, if she’d been pregnant and breastfeeding and surrounded by toddlers for twenty years – if she was lucky enough to live that long at all?

I did not expect this to be my response to a biography of Jane Austen, but all I can say is; THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.