thorold is cast by Fortune on a frowning coast in Q3 2022

While some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts,
Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts:
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide
In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?
No, cast by Fortune on a frowning coast,
Which can no groves nor happy valleys boast;
Where other cares than those the Muse relates,
And other shepherds dwell with other mates;
By such examples taught, I paint the cot,
As truth will paint it, and as bards will not:
Nor you, ye poor, of lettered scorn complain,
To you the smoothest song is smooth in vain ...
George Crabbe, The Village (from Bk.1)

Welcome to my Q3 thread!

Q2 was a bit unsatisfactory for me, as a minor injury messed up most of my travel plans (and, after two years mostly sitting at home, travel plans are gold dust these days!), but it did mean that I got a lot of reading done, both at home and as the audiobooks I listen to on my familiar local walks.

I'm hoping to travel more in Q3, at least to spend a few weeks with friends and family in the UK in August, including a trip to Suffolk — hence the George Crabbe quotation. Watch this space to see if I really get there! Other plans are in train for September, but still rather uncertain.

Q2 Reading stats:

I finished 72 books in Q2 (Q1: 41).

Author gender: F: 18, M: 51, other: 3 (71% M) (Q1: 70% M)

Language: EN 38, NL 9, DE 10, FR 10, ES 4, IT 1 (53% EN) (Q1 47% EN)
Translations: 1 from Norwegian, 1 from German

4 books were related to the Q2 "Outcasts and castaways" theme

Publication dates from 1849 to 2022; 21 books were published in the last five years.

Formats: library 0, physical books from the TBR 30, physical books from the main shelves (re-reads) 0, audiobooks 16, paid ebooks 3, other free/borrowed 23 — 42% from the TBR (Q1: 66% from the TBR)

67 unique first authors (1.07 books/author; Q1 1.3)

By gender: M 47, F 18, Other 2 : 70% M (Q1 78% M)
By main country: UK 14, NL 9, FR 7, DE 7, US 7, AU 3, CA 4 and various singletons

TBR pile evolution:
01/01/2022: 93 books (77389 book-days) (change: 8 read, 12 added)
01/04/2022: 84 books (77762 book-days) (change: 31 read, 22 added)
01/07/2022: 86 books (58460 book-days) (change: 30 read, 32 added)

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Although I read a lot more non-TBR books in Q2 than in Q1, the amount of TBR churn was almost the same, and I managed to stick to my plan of reading the very oldest books on the pile: I've read eight from the oldest end of the pile in Q2, so the oldest is now from April 2016 (6 yrs, 3 months), whilst at the end of Q1 there were still three that were more than ten years old. I'm down from 926 days/book to 680, which means that on average I'm reading books I acquire in less than two years, which seems a relatively healthy state.

Q3 Plans

In Q2 I set out these goals:
— attack the old end of the TBR (no, really, this time I mean it...)
— read Ali Smith's new book, when it arrives
— the RG "Outcasts and Castaways" theme read
— Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell for the Victorian thread: I've already started The law and the lady

— Well, I achieved all those, except re-reading North and South. Obviously the first one is ongoing by definition: as long as there's a pile there will be an oldest book on it.

New goals:
— Don Quijote in Spanish — I started this a few weeks ago. On and off, I'm now up to the end of Pt.I, Ch.XXIV, a bit less than a quarter of the way in. It's still fun, but it needs concentration, so it will take a while.
— RG Theme read — Annie is hosting a Slavic Languages theme this quarter, I've got a few books lined up already.
— More Victorians
— More fresh air and travel!

First book of Q3 is another random find from a neighbourhood Little Library: I'd never heard of James Salter, for some reason, but he was obviously a very distinguished American novelist. The UK edition comes with cover blurbs from John Irving — comparing Salter to Shakespeare! — John Banville, Edmund White, Tim O'Brien and Julian Barnes. Clearly the sort of novel one should feel guilty about approaching without taking ones shoes off at the door as a sign of respect...

All that is (2013) by James Salter (USA, 1925-2015)

  

This is Salter's last novel, loosely centred around the life of Philip Bowman, a man who serves as a junior officer in the Pacific in the World War II navy and later becomes an editor for a New York publisher, thus obviously paralleling Salter's own life. It's an odd sort of novel, though, as Salter keeps telling us the detailed back-stories of new minor characters as though they were going to be the central characters of their own short stories, but then dropping them again before anything very important has happened to them. Mostly, all they get from their chapter in the limelight is a meal out, sometimes followed by a night of passion. Occasionally they get to come back later in the book, but rarely as more than an interesting coincidence.

Salter also breaks off from storytelling from time to time to explain the Second World War, or England, or Lorca, or something else we already know about, or to complain that "gay" used to be such a useful little word. But he can probably be forgiven for that sort of thing, given that he was in his late eighties when this came out.

Apart from that, it is a beautifully written book. Straight down the middle of the great tradition of American prose-writing of the 1920s and 30s. Lovely clear, plain sentences, dotted with sparkling bits of ornamentation where we least expect them: if Hemingway and Henry Miller had still been around in the 2010s, they would undoubtedly have approved. It's easy to see why Salter attracted such praise, but a bit more difficult to see what he's trying to do with this book. It just seems to be an endless succession of clever men jumping into bed with beautiful women, who seem to get steadily younger as the men get older.

And another German audiobook...
I've read several other books by Kehlmann, including his big success Die Vermessung der Welt and his recent Tyll. This short novel was his third published book:

Mahlers Zeit (1999) by Daniel Kehlmann (Germany, 1975- ) audiobook read by the author

  

It's probably happened to all of us at some point that we wake up after a disturbed night's sleep with the momentary illusion that we've solved one of the great problems of space and time, economics, pure mathematics, or that sudoku we were struggling with yesterday. Unfortunately for the young theoretical physicist David Mahler, in his case the conviction that he's discovered the workaround to the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't go away. There really does seem to be a flaw in the mathematical structure of creation that could be exploited to overcome the irreversibility of time.

Kehlmann gets to play around happily with ideas about whether there really might be "forbidden knowledge", things that the universe doesn't want us to know about itself, and about the very thin line between delusion and holding an idea that goes against all established knowledge, as Mahler races to communicate his idea to the only physicist likely to be able to understand it.

All pretty silly really, but quite fun.

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Obligatory Flanders & Swann link for those who need to revise their Laws of Thermodynamics (That's entropy, man): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYZyipx01tc

>6 thorold: Happy New Thread

Kehlmann gets to play around happily with ideas about whether there really might be "forbidden knowledge", things that the universe doesn't want us to know about itself, and about the very thin line between delusion and holding an idea that goes against all established knowledge, as Mahler races to communicate his idea to the only physicist likely to be able to understand it.

Would this be a more fun take on Banville's Doctor Copernicus? Enjoyed the Flanders and Swann.

>7 SassyLassy: Thanks!
I suspect so — but I’m only just getting around to exploring Banville. The Revolutions Trilogy sounds interesting, anyway.

The Kehlmann book oddly echoed with Simon Raven’s The Sabre Squadron (a 1966 book I very much doubt Kehlmann could ever have come across), also about a fragile young genius called Daniel who discovers something dangerous. I suppose they are both modern versions of a Faust story.

>6 thorold: You piqued my curiosity!
I loved Les Arpenteurs du Monde/Die Vermessung der Welt when it was first published in France but somehow never found another book by Kehlmann I wanted to read. This one might be the one, for me and/or for M'sieur Raton who loves all things around sciences.

>6 thorold: >9 raton-liseur: Die Vermessung der Welt has been on my shelf for twelve years and I still haven't read it! What a shame. Your posts brought it to my mind again, so maybe this was the incentive I needed!

>8 thorold: and >10 MissBrangwen: Too bad, it has not been translated into French and I don't speak German...

>11 raton-liseur: Oh no!

>11 raton-liseur: I think Tyll is the one I liked most — that’s been translated, and it has quite a bit of science/scientists in it, as well as history. F is also available in lots of languages, but I had more mixed feelings about that.

>13 thorold: Thanks for the rec. I've seen this one but don't feel familiar enough with the German folklore to enjoy Tyll as I should. I might have to reconsider now.

And it's the Fourth of July. What better way to help our US friends celebrate than by reducing the number of Canadian novels on the TBR pile ...?

(Well, I'm sure there must be several better ways, but that was how it worked out.)

This one has been on the pile since January 2018. Another last novel, like >5 thorold: — I didn't realise until after reading it that it is actually the second in an incomplete trilogy. I haven't yet read Murther and Walking Spirits, the first part, but it didn't seem to matter much.

The cunning man (1994) by Robertson Davies (Canada, 1913-1995)

  

We're in classic Robertson Davies country here, middle-class Toronto between the 1920s and the 1980s, with a cast of actors, musicians, artists, journalists and High Anglican priests and a mock-Trollope plot involving an Archdeacon at war with a parish that has been overdoing the bells-and-smells. In the middle of it all is our narrator Jonathan Hullah, a physician who believes — as I suspect most physicians do — that he has far better insight than his colleagues into his patients' problems. He attributes this superior ability partly to his reading of The anatomy of melancholy and partly to a childhood encounter with a Native-American healer and some snakes.

As we would expect, there's a strong whiff of Faustian bargains and black magic hanging around in the background, whilst the foreground story is full of people who start out with great promise and ambitious plans and end up in Canadian mediocrity, carving statues of the Queen Mother out of Ontario Creamery Butter. Hullah, of course, learns the limitations of his medical cunning. I don't think Davies can have been very happy when he wrote this, but there's a lot of fine sardonic humour here for the reader to enjoy, all the same.

Great bunch of reviews... I hope you can resuscitate at least some of your travel plans.

I picked up Tyll a while back based on reviews from people whose taste is simpatico, so hopefully my lack of knowledge about German folklore won't be a hindrance.

>16 lisapeet: Thanks!

Kehlmann re-imagines the Till Eulenspiegel story completely, setting it in the Thirty Years War (and he explains what’s going on there), so it doesn’t really matter much if you don’t know the background. A quick glance at Wikipedia would be more than enough to get started.

Hope you get back to travelling in Q3 before the winter of Q4 closes in on us all again.

>18 baswood: Thanks! I'm working on it...

I finished a couple of books yesterday. The first is a science book I brought back from my Aachen trip last month. I think it caught my eye because the discussion of social insects in On trails: an exploration, which I read in May, left me curious to know more.

Die Intelligenz der Bienen: Wie sie denken, planen, fühlen und was wir daraus lernen können (2016) by Randolf Menzel (Germany, 1940- ) and Matthias Eckoldt (Germany, 1964- )

 

This is partly the scientific autobiography of Randolf Menzel, who has been studying the brains of bees since the 1960s and led a large bee-research team at the Free University in Berlin until his retirement, and partly a (moderately) accessible summary of what we now know about how bees think and how we know it. Although the book is written as a first-person account by Menzel, science-journalist Matthias Eckoldt is credited as co-author and has obviously been responsible for livening up the text and making sure that technicalities are explained for the benefit of any readers who have not spent a lifetime in the field of insect neurophysiology.

From the title, I was rather expecting a book about bee behaviour, but Menzel's particular interest is in reverse-engineering the actual physiological processes that go on in the bee's brain during perception, learning, remembering and communicating. This kind of work is difficult to imagine: the brain is a cubic millimetre in size, and with one and a half million neurons Menzel argues that it is roughly comparable in processing power to a (2016) smartphone, although many times more energy efficient of course. Neurophysiologists can follow a tiny fraction of what is going on inside the brain by probing and staining individual neurons, but doing that whilst the bee is performing its normal tasks seems to be quite a challenge. Even more macroscopic behavioural experiments are far from trivial: individual bees can be tagged with barcodes, or even followed in flight by fitting them with tiny radar transponders, but it clearly took an awful lot of failed experiments and persistence before techniques like that could be made to work, and even more before the right conditions could be found to get useful results from them. But when it does work, it produces some very interesting data, including strong evidence (still contested by some) that bees carry a mental map of their territory in their memory and are not restricted to radial flights to and from the hive.

When I first read about social insects, I was very struck by the idea of a community of bees or ants as a "collective super-organism" of simple, robot-like creatures jointly possessing "hive intelligence". Menzel isn't really persuaded by this sort of argument. For him, bees are individuals capable of modifying their behaviour in complex ways based on their learnt experience, the current situation in the hive, the information they get from other bees (the dance), and what they find in the outside world. Any large community of organisms, even humans, can look like a collection of dumb automata if you study it from far enough away, he argues, imagining the proverbial aliens watching the Frankfurt rush-hour from their spaceship in orbit.

The book concludes with a short essay on neonicotinoid insecticides and the danger they pose to the nervous systems of bees. Menzel also suggests that bees, by virtue of the way they collect samples and amplify concentrations, could be used as sensitive monitors of illegal or accidental releases of toxic substances into the environment.

...and getting in ahead for the Q3 RG theme read:

The street of crocodiles and other stories (1933) by Bruno Schulz (Poland, 1892-1942) translated from Polish by Celina Wieniewska

  

Bruno Schulz spent most of his life as a school art teacher in the Galician town of Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine). He published two collections of Polish short stories in the 1930s, as well as a few uncollected stories, all included in this Penguin Classics collection, together with many of Schulz's own illustrations. His other unpublished manuscripts, said to have included a novel, were all lost during the war, but that small body of published work has been enough to make him an influential writer. Schulz was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942.

I picked this up rather expecting quaint little stories of small-town life in Mitteleuropa, but it turns out to be something quite different. Schulz was clearly heavily influenced by (at least) Kafka, Thomas Mann, and the surrealists, and his stories, although they usually start out from the bourgeois domesticity of the Schulz family in Drohobycz ca. 1900, invariably branch away from realism into dream worlds in which the narrator's draper father becomes a heroic figure locked in a quixotic struggle against the constraints of sanity (on occasion turning into an arthropod or being sent to a Magic-Mountainish sanatorium), the maidservant Adela turns into every kind of female archetype, the narrator seems to switch constantly between adult, adolescent and small child (in one story he is an old-age pensioner who enrols in primary school), and the town itself shifts shape in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

This all comes with inventive (over-)rich visual descriptions, often seeming to borrow techniques from the cinema of the times, and all kinds of dreamlike category-changes, when seasons or places or trains develop personalities, waxwork figures and tailor's dummies come to life, and members of the Hapsburg family turn up uninvited.

Very strange and fascinating, definitely something I'm going to have to re-read soon.

But, once again, this makes me sad about what has happened to Penguin Classics. They still have the smart black cover designs I remember from forty years ago, but the insides have turned into a mush of smudgy ink crookedly printed on translucent paper that is creased before you even get the book home from the shop. What are they thinking?

And the guidebook to a hike I finished last week:

Dutch Mountain Trail en de seven summits (2019, updated 2021) by Toon Hezemans (Netherlands, - ) and Thijs Horbach (Netherlands, - )

 

As is well-known, there are no mountains in the (continental) Netherlands. In most of the country, the only relief comes from sand-dunes and banks of terminal moraine, and visitors from non-flat places will have to let their eyes get accustomed to the altitude for a year or two before they even start noticing these.

But there is also South Limburg, the anomalous bit of the Netherlands that squeezes itself in between the Belgian and German borders around the city of Maastricht. Here you find actual geology, with rolling hills, pretty river valleys, outcrops of chalk, flint mines, and all sorts of other things that would be completely normal anywhere else but are a source of delight and wonderment in the Netherlands. Hardly mountains, however: most of the hilltops are around 200m above sea-level, and the highest point is only 322.4m (the three-nation point outside Vaals).

The Dutch Mountain Film Festival, based in Heerlen and Aachen, has been making ironic play with the "mountainous" nature of the region for ten years. To celebrate their anniversary, they came up with the idea of devising a hiking route that would make the most of all that terrain. It started as a sort of one-off joke, but a team of enthusiastic volunteers has turned it into a serious project that has become very popular since the guidebook appeared a couple of years ago.

The route is about 100km long and involves something like 1700m of ascent: not exactly alpine, but still quite an appreciable amount of up and down. You start at Eygelshoven station, near Kerkrade, and walk clockwise around South Limburg to Maastricht, sometimes on the Dutch side of the border, and sometimes in Germany or Belgium.

There is a long-standing official regional hiking trail, the Krijtlandpad, which does a similar circuit of South Limburg and is 90km long, but the two only have a few km of overlap, mostly around Vaals and Eijsden. The DMT evidently has a different design philosophy — as well as seeking out gratuitous climbs here and there, it also ignores the basic principle that official hiking trails have to satisfy, the obligation to pass the front door of every café or restaurant in the district. As a result, the DMT route has far less asphalt than the Krijtlandpad, and avoids most village centres. When you do want to stop off in a village, it's always possible to diverge from the route slightly, of course.

The route is only partially marked at the moment, but there are clear maps and (Dutch) route descriptions in the book, and there is a downloadable GPS route. I had no real navigation problems along the way. There was one point where a path was temporarily closed because of roadworks, but I knew about that in advance from the DMT Facebook group.

The guide suggests doing the walk in four stages, but there are plenty of other points where you can find accommodation or public transport connections. I did it in six lazy stages, the first four from a base-camp in Aachen and the last two as day-trips from home.

Also included in the book are a set of short circular walks to take you up each of the "Seven Summits" of the DMT route. Most of these summits are rather anticlimactic, as they tend to be covered in trees. The best views are from the Wilhelminaberg, a mining spoil-heap in Kerkrade near the start of the walk. For most of the other summits, you get far more interesting views on the way up and down than you do at the top. But the walks would certainly be worth doing if you don't have time to do the DMT in full.

Route information in English: https://www.dmff.eu/en/dutch-mountain-trail-2/

>21 thorold: I'm glad you were able to do your walk/hike. Sounds enjoyable.

>20 thorold: I was quite intrigued by Bruno Schulz back in the day. It's unfortunate that he was murdered so young.

Just catching up here. Bruno Shultz and the are both fascinating. Robertson Davies is author I need to read. Have a trilogy here somewhere (in one volume).

>19 thorold: Oh, I like Aachen so much! I think it is such a pretty city, and the cathedral is impressive.

>20 thorold: Great review. I haven't heard of Bruno Schulz before. I don't think I will read this, but I am glad to know about him. How sad that most of his writing was lost.

>21 thorold: So interesting! I visited beautiful Maastricht for two days (the same trip as the Aachen one), but I didn't know about this mountainous region or the hiking trail. It sounds like a fantastic trip.
I live in a flat region as well (Northern Germany) and walking/hiking here is indeed so different to doing it in regions that are not so flat. I always feel like I don't know where I'm going because I cannot SEE it!

>24 MissBrangwen: But walking in flat places has its own charm too. Even if you don't spend five volumes rambling around Brandenburg...

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An Umberto Eco novel I hadn't read that turned up in the Little Library:

The Prague cemetery (2010) by Umberto Eco (Italy, 1932-2016) translated from Italian by Richard Dixon

  

Eco enjoys himself writing a spoof late-nineteenth-century adventure story, complete with ingeniously repurposed period engravings, that sends up all the great conspiracy theories of the period (freemasons, Jesuits, Dreyfus, satanism, Protocols of the elders of Zion, communists, etc.) by ingeniously linking them all to a single fictional character, the professional police-informer and forger of legal documents Simone Simonini, a Piedmontese exile living in Paris. (It's a kind of inversion of the plot of Foucault's pendulum.)

Simone is trying to get to the bottom of a strange memory loss he's been experiencing, which seems to have something to do with the occasional visits to his apartment of the Abbé Dalla Piccola. Maybe he can achieve something by applying techniques he's been told about by a young Austrian doctor he chatted to in a restaurant — what was he called, Froïde or something like that...?

All very silly, and as overcomplicated as only Eco can achieve, but of course it does also have a serious point to make about how the effects of a story in the real world can be entirely unrelated to its truth, or even plausibility, or to the circumstances of its creation. If you write something that sustains and reinforces the prejudices of (some of) the public, there's a good chance they will believe it and act on it, even if it's later exposed as a forgery or a cynical falsification.

Heinrich Böll counted as probably the most important current German writer when I was growing up — he won the Nobel in 1972 and he was from the Rhineland as well(!) — so I read most of his novels early on. I haven't re-read very many of them since, though. This is one that I came across in the charity shop about five years ago: I couldn't remember much about it, so I thought it might be fun to see how well it stood up fifty years later. Or sixty...

Ansichten eines Clowns (1963; The clown) by Heinrich Böll (Germany, 1917-1985)

  

I suppose this is the German version of the "angry young man" novel. Comedian Hans Schnier has had a kind of professional meltdown after his girlfriend Marie breaks up with him and goes off to get respectably married to someone else; with his last few Deutschmarks he retreats to his Bonn apartment and tries to take stock.

He blames Marie's Catholic friends who have been pressuring her to give up her sinful cohabitation with Hans, but widens this into a more general disgust with his wealthy parents, with Bonn, with the CDU, with the booming Wirtschaftswunder society that is obsessed with respectability and appearances but refuses to think about anything that it might have done wrong before 1945, and with the men in bars who are so happy to talk nostalgically about their good old days in the war at the drop of a hat.

Hans has made a stand against the hypocrisy of the world around him by dropping out of school and running away with Marie to build a stage career for himself, but after six years on tour this doesn't seem to have solved anything, and he has simply humiliated himself in the eyes of the world. Ironically, though, Böll seems to be suggesting that it's only by embracing this humiliation that he can start the process of reconciling himself with those around him. When we leave him in the last chapter he may be at the very bottom of his trajectory, but it seems that the only way is up.

In a way, this seems to be a bit like having your cake and eating it: Böll manages to enjoy the best part of 250 pages ranting against the hypocritical values of postwar German society in general and the Catholic Church in particular from the point of view of a radical atheist, but then plucks what looks very like a Kierkegaard-style Christian reconciliation out of it at the end. Very sixties, of course!

It's "Oldest on the TBR pile" time again — this one has been there since April 2016. It was recommended to me by somebody here, I think, but stuck because (a) it took ages to come on backorder from somewhere or other and (b) I wasn't sure I really wanted to invest 600 pages of reading in a science-fiction writer I'd never heard of (no offence to Mr Delany intended: my knowledge of science-fiction is very patchy indeed). Anyway, better late than never:

The motion of light in water : sex and science fiction writing in the East Village (1988, 2004) by Samuel R Delany (USA, 1942- )

  

This turns out to be a fascinating memoir of Delany's early years, focussing on the period from 1961-1966 when he was living in a poor district of New York City, married to his schoolfriend and writing partner the poet Marilyn Hacker, singing folk-music in coffee houses, getting started as a published science-fiction writer, and making the most of the many opportunities that the city offered for casual gay sex (the Trucks, the Baths, the Rambles, ...). In between times, we also hear quite a lot about his middle-class black childhood in Harlem. He came from a distinguished family, with a grandfather who became the first black Episcopalian bishop in the US, and aunts and uncles who were practically all civil rights pioneers.

Delany mocks the tendency of memoirists to drop names, but he still manages to slip quite a few in himself, even if most of them are ironically elusive contacts: Einstein helps the child Delany with his toy sailing boat in Central Park; Bob Dylan was meant to appear as his supporting act in a folk venue but pulls out; someone offers to introduce him to Andy Warhol but it never happens; one of his aunts slips him James Baldwin's phone number just as he's leaving for Europe. And so on.

But the real fascination of the book is mostly in Delany's description of his sexual adventures, which he describes with what feels like simple nostalgic pleasure. Even though he's writing in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he doesn't turn his recollections into the kind of elegy or outburst of political rage you find in most gay writers of that time, nor does he apply any kind of retrospective moral judgment. They were having fun, and it was good fun, and he sees no reason to apologise for that. All kinds of bad things could have happened to him, but they didn't (he compares the risk of being picked up by a serial killer to the risk of being involved in an air crash).

There is obviously also Hacker's story going on here, told mostly in excerpts from her own poetry: Delany doesn't presume to speak for her, but it does become fairly clear that she must have been getting rather less pleasure and more worry out of the sexual freedom of the sixties than Delany did, apart from the short happy time when they were living in a ménage-à-trois with the Melville-reading ex-convict Bob. And even then Delany manages to go off on a road-trip to Texas with Bob, leaving Hacker sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring.

Lively and enjoyable, a marvellous snapshot of what must have been a fascinating and exciting time to live through.

what a lovely review.

>27 thorold:

I had two editions of this book, one shorter and, I think, abridged - there were gaps in the numbering of chapters? Anyway, that's the one that won an award in 1989 and that I read that year. Must read the full edition someday - and numerous other Delany books I haven't got around to yet. I've seen him on many panels at science fiction conventions. He's a formidably bright man.

>29 dukedom_enough: I don't know what the history of it was in detail, but the one I read seemed to have been revised a couple of times since the original publication. The numbering of the chapters is odd, because he uses decimal sections and subsections like a textbook, but I think the top-level chapter numbers were continuous. It was just under 600 large-format pages.

He certainly comes across as "formidably bright" on paper. I can imagine him being quite something in person.

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More from the sixties, but this one has more to do with >26 thorold: than >27 thorold:
I've read Uwe Timm's Currywurst novel and his high-wheeler/taxidermist mini-epic Der Mann auf dem Hochrad previously; this one was his debut novel and created quite a stir at the time:

Heißer Sommer (1974) by Uwe Timm (Germany, 1940- )

  

In the hot summer of 1967, the student Ullrich is struggling to finish a dissertation on Hölderlin he needs to submit to complete his German degree at Munich University. The professor transparently doesn't like him and there are so many distractions on offer to take him out of his sweltering attic room in Schwabing, especially girls, bathing-lakes, and beer-gardens. And then the news comes through that a student called Benno Ohnesorg has been shot by a policeman during a demo against the Shah's visit to Berlin, and Ullrich finds himself caught up in a wonderful new world of leaflets, leather jackets, sheepskin waistcoats, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh," communes, sit-ins, pot-smoking and more girls. Hölderlin is set aside for good, and Ullrich moves to Hamburg in time to get involved in the anti-Springer protests that followed the shooting of Rudi Dutschke.

This was obviously written from direct personal experience and before the dust had settled, and it's a very vivid evocation of the excitement of those times, and the width of the generation gap that was opening between the students and their parents. He has a lot of fun showing us what the parents' middle-class lifestyle looks like from the perspective of a young person home for a couple of days (oh, that German furniture of the sixties!). He also enjoys mocking the pomposity and incomprehension of the university authorities.

But it's not an uncritical account: Timm clearly feels that the students were dissipating a lot of their revolutionary energy in undirected and often pointless actions. With their comfortable middle-class families behind them to pick up the pieces, most have only a limited stake in the revolution (he couldn't know then how many 68-ers would turn into ultra-respectable establishment figures later, but he seems to have had at least an inkling). He deliberately contrasts the studdents' situation with that of people a generation earlier facing Nazi terror, or with that of industrial workers for whom a strike means a real sacrifice for their families.

As you might expect from a novel of the time, Timm's ideas about gender are not quite up to modern scrutiny, although he does make a couple of gestures in the right direction, as when he describes the needless unpleasantness involved in procuring an abortion when one of Ullrich's girlfriends becomes pregnant, or when he has Ullrich notice the way the crowd at a demo stops listening when a male speaker is followed by a woman at the microphone. But apart from that, young women come and go in the plot almost unnoticed, and they rarely get to talk about politics or whatever they are studying.

>27 thorold: Thanks for this! An older resident on my TBR pile too, and of some particular interest because I lived in the East Village from the early '80s to the late '90s. It was a fun, gritty, fascinating place then, and I love hearing about it as a place artists were settling in the mid-20th-century. Plus Delany is such an interesting fellow. I'll definitely dust the virtual dust off the virtual cover and bump it off a few notches thanks to that good review.

>31 lisapeet: Good to hear! In my case at least, there was absolutely no excuse for waiting that long before reading it.

Another German audiobook, from a writer I hadn't heard of before, but probably should have:

Vom Aufstehen : Ein Leben in Geschichten (2021) by Helga Schubert (Germany, 1940- ), audiobook read by Ruth Reinecke

  

This "memoir in stories" won the eighty-year-old Schubert the 2020 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, and it plays around with motifs from Bachmann's famous story "Das dreißigste Jahr" (apparently she was tempted to call it "Das achtzigste Jahr", but resisted). She looks back on her life, and in particular on her prickly relationship with her mother, in the context of the German history they both lived through. Schubert never knew her father, who was killed in the war, and it was her mother who had to save the five-year-old's life on the traumatic trek west ahead of the advancing Russians in 1945. An obligation that Schubert seems to feel they never quite forgave each other for.

There's also a lot of good stuff here about Schubert's difficult relationship with the authorities in East Germany — she was active in the reform campaigns centred on the Protestant Church and had a respectably thick Stasi dossier — about the changes in German society after reunification, about her work as a writer, about her religious faith and the role it plays in her life, about the trials of old age (mostly other people's, but occasionally her own too) and about the Mecklenburg village where she has lived for nearly fifty years with her husband the painter Johannes Helm. Sometimes it feels a little random as it jumps from one topic to another, but all in all it's a very rewarding and surprisingly optimistic account of living in Germany in our times.

(I hope this gets translated into English, I'm sure it has an appeal outside Germany. There is already a Dutch edition.)

And I found another one for the Slavic languages thread:

Fox (2017) by Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatia, 1949- ) translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and David Williams

  

This starts out looking like a simple collection of essays about narrative, where stories come from and what writers do with them, with particular reference to the writers of the Russian avant-garde. But then we gradually seem to slip back into the world of fiction (where we have really been all the time), when Ugrešić starts telling us about writers we are sure we wouldn't find if we tried to Google them, and about incidents we can be pretty sure she wouldn't be telling us about if they had really happened that way.

The central image of the fox as a symbol of the creative writer's status in the world is taken from Boris Pilnyak (who did exist, of course, and several of whose books Ugrešić translated): Ugrešić looks, amongst other things, at the writer as someone who steals other people's lives to turn them into stories, at the writer as someone to blame for holding the wrong opinions — she draws on the deaths of many Soviet writers under Stalin and on her own experience of being hounded by the nationalist government in Croatia — at the writer as a cheap resource to be summoned to entertain students or conference delegates, and at the difficulty of coming up with stories that satisfy her young niece. Imagine the trauma of having an aunt who knows too many fairy-tales and is happy to switch cultures and tales in mid-stream...

Good mind-bending fun.

>33 thorold: I see you also read Ugrešić's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg; which did you like better?

>34 labfs39: Difficult to say, given the lapse of time between the two, and that Baba Yaga laid an egg was almost the first thing from the Balkans I ever read. I liked both a lot, but with Fox I had a better idea of what I was getting into, since it was the fifth Ugrešić book that I’ve read. They’re quite similar in the way they mix fiction, autobiographic elements and lit-crit. Maybe Baba Yaga has more direct appeal, because it’s focussed on a clearer topic, and folk-tales are easier to get into than the Russian avant-garde. If you haven’t tried Ugrešić before, it might be a more obvious place to start than Fox.

>35 thorold: I hadn't realized you've read so many of her works. I have only read Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, in large part because it was part of the Canongate Myth series.

>35 thorold: I had to laugh when I read the title. There is a Balkan (I think bulgarian) folk dance with lyrics that sound like 'she forgot to lay the egg'. Now I have the tune in my head, not a bad thing

>36 labfs39: I think it’s because she lives in the Netherlands: people keep telling me that they went to this interesting talk by an ex-Yugoslav writer and I really should read her latest book…

Another recent German book — this one is a bestseller I keep picking up in bookshops because of the title (the place-name Monschau brings up happy memories of holidays in the Eifel and Ardennes) and putting down again because I'm not sure I want to read an opportunistic epidemic novel...

Monschau (2021) by Steffen Kopetzky (Germany, 1971- ) audiobook read by Johann von Bülow

  

A historical thriller, based on real events and with a mixture of historical and fictional characters. In early 1962, the dermatologist Prof. Günter Stüttgen — a real doctor who appeared in one of Kopetzky's earlier novels in his capacity as a humanitarian hero during the closing days of the Ardennes campaign — was sent to Lammersdorf, near the picturesque town of Monschau in the Eifel, to manage a smallpox epidemic there.

As epidemics go, this wasn't a very spectacular one: 37 people became seriously ill and one died. But over the course of four months, hundreds of people had to be placed under quarantine restrictions. Kopetzky uses the situation (and implicitly his perspective from writing during the Covid-19 pandemic) to look at the way people react to such restrictions and make sometimes very irrational decisions. The epidemic cuts right through the Carnival season, one of the most important parts of Rhineland culture, and local people aren't going to give that up without a fight.

Moreover, Lammersdorf, like so many remote German villages, has a single large high-tech employer, producing industrial furnaces in this case (the Otto Junker works in real life, the "Rieterwerke" in the novel). Any interruption to production could have catastrophic consequences for the town's economy and the careers of local government officials. And, of course, there are all sorts of unresolved questions from the Nazi period still hanging around. Industrialists who had clamoured for slave-workers to keep their production going twenty years earlier were now seeking guest-workers from Spain, Greece and Turkey, and weren't looking for anyone to start commenting on the parallels...

It all makes for quite an entertaining and readable thriller, but there's nothing very special here. Kopetzky follows the conventions of the genre in things like his inability to mention a car without specifying make and model, and he dumps a little too much irrelevant background period detail on us (yes, the Hamburg floods make an interesting story, but we know it already, and it has nothing to do with smallpox in the Eifel...). The love-plot is rather too obviously bolted on to the historical narrative, and there are rather too many events and characters in the story that don't lead to anything.

---
PS: Apart from smallpox and furnaces, Lammersdorf is famous for being on one of Europe's strangest borders, the Vennbahn, which also featured in the book on borders in last quarter's thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/340923#7863488

After all those sixties books, it's a nice change to move on to something contemporary. Albeit a book that doesn't specify what it's contemporary with...

This is one of the Q3 Victorian theme reads, and it's my first dip into the work of Mrs Oliphant, a Scottish-born writer who was very popular at the time, fell heavily out of favour after her death, and has had a bit of a revival lately.

Hester : a story of contemporary life (1883) by Margaret Oliphant (UK, 1828-1897)

  

(I'm using the Virago cover, but actually read this as a Gutenberg ebook)

After her father's death Abroad, teenage Hester and her widowed mother are offered a home in the generic English town of Redborough by their rich cousin Miss Catherine Vernon. There's a kind of Mansfield Park setup, where Hester is presented with a range of potential suitors from among the assembled cousins, with a range of different obstacles to overcome.

But this turns out not really to be what the book is about at all: Hester is determined to challenge the prevailing "Angel of the hearth" idea of what the role of middle-class Woman should be in life. Hester is not content to provide sympathy, moral guidance and domestic efficiency while some man goes out and does things for her; she wants to work and have a real part in informed decision-making. Catherine is the key example that proves it can be done: when the family banking firm was teetering on the edge of collapse (the fault of Hester's father, although Hester doesn't know this) Catherine stepped in to rescue it and ran it successfully for twenty years. Mrs Oliphant, a widow herself, had been supporting her family by her writing for 25 years when this was published, so she knew what she was talking about.

Of course Catherine and Hester dislike each other at sight — they are far too alike — and of course Catherine manages to hold conservative opinions completely inconsistent with her own history, so sparks fly between them.

That part of the plot is all quite fun, but it doesn't really get going until Volume 3, and there are a lot of balls and tea-parties to get through before then, mostly rather repetitive. For a long stretch of Volume 2 it feels as though the plot isn't advancing at all, whilst Oliphant tries to dig out subtle social distinctions through close examination of furniture, dress, hair and speech patterns. There are some jokes — the comic chorus of poor relatives, the notion that "Abroad" is a specific place (like Basingstoke but more exotic), the single-minded husband-hunting of Emma, etc. — but on the whole it's rather heavy going. Oliphant is clearly best at getting inside the heads of her older characters, so Hester and her male cousins often seem surprisingly opaque to the reader, whilst Catherine and old Captain Morgan (not-a-pirate) are very human and believable.

I wonder is shes more popular now because there is a book title with her name on it Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine or not (FWIW I liked the book) That book looks interesting

>41 cindydavid4: You never know! But I think Elaine Showalter, as well as Virago's determination to republish "forgotten" women writers, may have had something to do with it as well.

Another Slavic language, and a very major writer I've shockingly never explored on the page, although I've often enough seen adaptations of his work on the opera stage...

A nasty cheap Vintage Classics collection that turned up in a Little Library:

The captain's daughter and other stories (1828-1836; this collection 1957, 2014) by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (Russia, 1799-1837), translated by Natalie Duddington & T Keane

  

This collection includes most of Pushkin's prose fiction: the five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin from 1831, the uncollected stories "The Queen of Spades" and "Kirjali" (both 1834), the novella The Captain's daughter from 1836, and the unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great (1828). The rather plodding translations date from the 1950s, and, as you should expect in this kind of cheap reprint, there is no introduction or editorial material included.

The Captain's daughter is the star-turn, of course, taking up about half the book, a lively adventure story set during the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-4. The narrator is a young army officer serving in a fort in the Yaik region who finds himself having to manoeuvre between Imperial and rebel forces in an effort to save the girl he loves, the daughter of the fort's commandant. It's usually his sometime tutor, the serf Savelyich, who ends up saving the young man's life when he gets into a perilous situation. The story comes with a bonus chapter: a quite different alternative version of the ending from an earlier draft Pushkin decided not to use.

The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are enjoyable short stories based around simple ideas: "The shot" picks up the fateful topic of duelling; "The snowstorm" is about an elopement that goes wrong in an unexpected way; "The undertaker" makes the mistake of inviting his old clients to a party; "The postmaster" (more usually "The stationmaster") is a touching tale of a minor official with a beautiful daughter; and "Mistress into maid" is a comic-opera tale of a young lady who dresses up as a servant to meet a young man on the sly and is embarrassed when they later meet in their true roles. Several of these could very easily have been subjects for Chekhov a few decades later. Pushkin's style is rather more detached and ironic, though.

"The Queen of Spades" we all know thanks to Tchaikovsky, of course, but it's good fun as a prose tale as well, whilst "Kirjali" gives Pushkin the chance to get on his hobbyhorse of Balkan independence from the Turks.

"The Moor of Peter the Great" is perhaps the most unexpected thing here: it's a fictionalised biography of Pushkin's great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal (d.1781), an African — probably from Cameroon — who was bought for Peter the Great as a slave by the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, adopted by the Czar as a godson and sent to Paris to be educated. On returning to Russia he served as a senior military engineer and married into the aristocracy. Pushkin's story, in the fragment translated here, takes him from Paris up to the point where Peter arranges a marriage for him. Pushkin has fun along the way depicting the conservative Russian courtiers struggling to keep up with Peter's strange Dutch and German habits.

The pusher of the Delany memoir could have easily been me. Glad you liked it. I still sometimes think to his visit with Auden and Kalman and smile.

>43 LolaWalser: Yes, it probably was you — thanks! That Auden dinner-party is wonderful. I'm sure we've all had that kind of experience of proudly inviting sophisticated grown-ups to our improvised first home and serving them the only thing we know how to cook (read: spaghetti), but most of us prefer to forget about it. Auden and Kalman must have been good sports, or charmed by Delany's youthful good looks...

The next Maigret on my list, prompted by thoughts about long-career authors on the Questions thread:

Les vacances de Maigret (1948) by Georges Simenon (France, 1903-1989)

  

The Maigrets are back in the Vendée, on holiday in Les Sables-d'Olonne (close to where Simenon lived during the war). But Mme Maigret, taken ill after eating mussels, is in the local hospital, and the Commissaire is at something of a loose end. Fortunately, it's not long before there's a sudden death, just after someone has slipped a note into his pocket asking him to take a look at Patient 15...

So, as so often, Maigret is investigating unofficially in a case where he has no jurisdiction, and he's free to follow his own inclinations without bothering about police procedure. And it soon turns out that this is one of those cases where there is a single suspect who is obviously guilty of something, and the mystery is all about precisely what he has done and why, and whether it can be proved.

There's some nice Atlantic coast atmosphere, some interesting digging into social structures in the town and its hotels, and a brief cameo appearance by the young Simenon himself, as a 19-year-old cub reporter on the local paper from a poor-but-honest background who is on his way to a new career in Paris after the necessary spell soliciting advertising from shopkeepers and doing the daily rounds of police station, town hall and hospital to gather news. But the character of the arrogant Dr Bellamy is so obviously antipathetic to Maigret (and Simenon) that the investigation is put rather out of balance by all the hostility.

...and an audiobook I finished on my walk this morning. I read Ruge's In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts in 2015.

Metropol (2019) by Eugen Ruge (Germany, 1954- ) audiobook read by Ulrich Noethen

  

This is effectively a book-length footnote to Ruge's historical novel about his family background, In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts. While researching that book, he became aware that his grandmother, Charlotte in the book, had lived in the Soviet Union for four years in the 1930s. Unlike her wartime exile in Mexico, which she loved to reminisce about, she never mentioned this period of her life, and for a long time Ruge knew nothing beyond his father's assumption that Charlotte and her second husband (Wilhelm in the book, a communist activist who had been heavily involved in the armed struggle in Germany in the 1920s) must have been working for the OMS, the secret service of the Comintern. The files of the OMS itself are still classified, but with the help of Russian historians, Ruge was able to gain access to the Comintern personnel files and piece together much of the story.

Charlotte and Wilhelm are suspended from their work for the Comintern in Summer 1936, because of their past friendship with one of the accused in the Zinoviev trial. Other foreign colleagues soon follow them, as the Stalinist purges strike further and further into the Comintern and the OMS is effectively dismantled, and bizarrely they are all sent to live in a famous Moscow luxury hotel, the Metropol, where they rub shoulders with Politburo members, the senior judge in the show trials, and distinguished foreign visitors (Lion Feuchtwanger has the room next to Charlotte and Wilhelm for a while). Then the night-time raids by the NKVD start, and there are fewer and fewer OMS staff members in the second-class dining area. But somehow Charlotte and Wilhelm are still there eighteen months later.

Ruge explores the things that must have been going through the minds of these committed communists as their friends and family members are arrested and killed or sent off to the Gulag. How long can you go on believing and convincing yourself that the Party still knows what it is doing? Far longer, he suggests, than we with our full-scale hindsight could ever imagine. Belief, and the accompanying feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of accusations, are very powerful forces. We all know how easy it is to ignore evidence that seems to contradict something you want to believe in, and that probably applies all the more when you have experience of fighting for those beliefs against real enemies with actual guns in their hands.

An interesting little sidelight on Soviet history, and a bit of real-life 1984.

Over a week without a new post here, that's partly because I'm travelling at present, mostly because of a ridiculously long book...

Mémoires Intimes (1980) by Georges Simenon (France, 1903-1989)
  

There are more than enough prolific memoirists in the literary world, and quite a few popular writers who have written hundreds of books, but Simenon seems to be one of the very few crossovers between the two categories. In the 1940s he wrote the childhood memoir Je me souviens and the autobiographical novel Pedigree ; in the 1970s, after he stopped writing fiction, there was a whole string of audio-diaries, the Dictées, and then this massive Casanova-esque tell-all memoir, over 1000 pages of it.

The book is addressed to Simenon's four children, especially to his daughter Marie-Jo, who had taken her own life in 1978, and it's clearly meant as a reply and defence to the hostile memoir that had been published by his estranged second wife, Denyse Ouimet. Obviously, in those circumstances you don't necessarily have to believe every word, especially as Simenon was clearly working largely from memory and didn't take much trouble to revise the text even when he realised that he had got details in the wrong order. All the same, it's an interesting read, and it gives nice insights into his view of life as someone who, thanks to a lot of hard work, had risen from humble origins in Liège to become one of the highest-paid writers of his generation.

The detailed account of his life starts with the appearance of his first child, Marc, on the eve of the second World War, but there's a summary of his early career which only looks condensed if you compare it with what follows. Then we get a full description of family life with his first wife, "Tigy", in the Vendée during the war, the move to Canada and the US, the appearance of Denyse ("D.") as his secretary and lover, the divorce and remarriage when she became pregnant, the move back to Europe and the two chateaux near Lausanne, D.'s spells of mental illness, the troubled adolescence of Marie-Jo, and eventually Simenon's old age and retirement.

Simenon's pleasure in being so wealthy and being able to treat his family to all kinds of luxuries is almost endearing -- until you stop to think about it -- and there's a certain voyeuristic pleasure in seeing into all the exclusive hotels where the family holidays, as well as the showers of dropped names along the way. If it isn't "my old friend Jean Cocteau" in the next room, it's bound to be the Chaplin family or the Beatles. When Simenon attends a party at the home of his son Marc, now a trainee director, the young film-makers attending inevitably include Deneuve, Godard and Truffaut.

It's fun to learn about Simenon's approach to writing, as well, even if it doesn't have much relevance to any mere mortal. A Maigret novel takes him about two or three hours of planning on the back of a file-cover, then ten mornings of actual writing (he got it down to seven days when he was in his sixties, less time than many people would take to read it).

One of the most enjoyable parts of the book for me was Simenon's account of his first trip back to Liège after his sojourn in America, a long series of extravagantly Belgian civic feasts and receptions for the boy who had left town as a trainee reporter some thirty years earlier. The humility and constant surprise that comes through in those passages, and the real pleasure of rediscovering old friends and mentors (and one old enemy) makes you feel that he might not have been altogether spoiled by success.

Of course, what made headlines at the time this book came out was Simenon's claim to have had sex with 10,000 women in the course of his life, mainly prostitutes. Happily, he doesn't find it necessary to list them all here, but he does try to explain his attitude to sex, not so much to justify himself but more to make the point that we should judge his actions by their consequences and not by arbitrary standards of bourgeois morality. Either way, it's pretty clear that he was happy to take advantage of his position as a rich and successful male to exploit women who didn't have the same kind of freedom of action, and it's hard to avoid the suspicion that his irresponsible attitude to sex at least contributed indirectly to the mental health issues of Denyse and Marie-Jo.

>46 thorold: And I thought Simenon spent all his waking hours behind a typewriter, or smoking his pipe!

>47 Dilara86: Yes, disheartening to know that he only needed to spend about six weeks a year actually writing in his later years.

Yep, Simenon was a hound dog. A factoid which I can't decide whether is more humorous or skanky--even recent French editions (paperbacks) of his carry blurbs boasting about his 10K "conquests". I wonder when that began and how he felt about that?

>45 thorold:

The literature on that topic is plentiful, although I doubt much of it is translated if by non-Western authors. For instance, the decimation of Yugoslav top communists in Stalin's USSR-- about 600 murdered, by some estimations, including almost all the most significant-- was THE trauma that inspired Yugoslavia's course. There's a great book which I believe did have an English translation, 7000 days in Siberia by Karlo Štajner in which he writes about these victims (he was himself arrested in 1936 and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.)

>49 LolaWalser: I can confirm that Štajner's Seven Thousand Days in Siberia is available in English translation. It’s in my local library system. 1st American edition (1988). The translator is Joel Agee, son of Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee.
The LT description is weird: Anti-Calvinists trace the rise of Arminianism from Elizabethan times . . . etc. But LT has the correct author, and the tags are what one would expect.

>50 dypaloh: I alerted LT of the wrong book description via the Bug Collectors page.

>50 dypaloh:

Oh lol

>51 labfs39:

Thanks.

>49 LolaWalser: >50 dypaloh: Thanks, interesting.
I think the 10k thing originated with Simenon himself. He seems to have felt that being open about it was creditable, even if the fact itself wasn’t. And his publishers obviously thought it was a good way to make people remember who he was.

The fourth in a crime series I started some time ago:

De dood van een marktkoopman (1977; Death of a hawker) by Janwillem van de Wetering (Netherlands, 1931-2008)

Amsterdam police officers Grijpstra and De Gier find themselves dealing with a strange murder that took place whilst most of their colleagues were busy dealing with the famous Nieuwmarkt riots. The victim has a certain resemblance to the author, a clever young man who has dropped out of academic life to meditate philosophies of life and become a wheeler-dealer trader on the Albert Cuyp market. He seems to be well-loved, but not well enough to protect him from being murdered with an exotic weapon as he looks out of the window of a locked room.

As usual, the detectives spend more time discussing philosophy and history than actually investigating, and police life intervenes in random ways as well. And the mystery is solved in a bizarre Zen way that seems to break quite a few rules of the genre. But it’s all good fun, in a very laid-back seventies way.

And a book I’ve been meaning to read for ages, but delayed until I was on the spot to borrow a copy…

Flugasche (1981; Flight of ashes) by Monika Maron, (DDR, Germany, 1941- )

Monika Maron's first novel, published in the West in 1981 after the authorities in East Germany blocked its appearance there. It deals specifically with the topic of industrial pollution, but more generally with the sclerotic political culture of the DDR as it was experienced by the generation of people born in the 1940s, who found it difficult to accept their elders’ assurance that the revolution was complete and they were already living in the socialist paradise, so that any criticism would only play into the hands of the evil capitalist West.

The young journalist Josefa is sent to write a magazine article about the industrial town of B. (Bitterfeld). She soon discovers that the real story is not about heroic workers exceeding plan targets, or the new swimming pool in the workers’ leisure centre, but about an outdated power plant that endangers the people working in it, as well as belching out 180 tons of fly ash a year over the town, making it “the most polluted place in Europe”. Industrial injuries and lung disease are at appallingly high levels in the area. Management and workers all want the plant decommissioned and replaced, but central government is deaf to their worries. Josefa writes about the situation, with a “naive” sense of justice, but of course nervous editors won’t publish her article. Maron shows us how the fear of expressing criticism built into the system creates a completely unnecessary conflict between Josefa and her colleagues, and eventually damages her personal life and her mental health.

A powerful, strongly felt book, which perhaps goes as one way towards explaining why Maron is still regularly getting into trouble for saying the wrong thing.

Two books about lost things:

Verzeichnis einiger Verluste (2018; An inventory of losses) by Judith Schalansky (Germany, 1980- )

A quirky mix of essays and stories riffing on things that have been lost to history — species, books, buildings, paintings and films, amongst others. The essays/stories are often at a tangent to the ostensible topic, thus Murnau’s lost first film prompts a story about the elderly Garbo living in New York; a demolished chateau near Greifswald leads us into a memory of the author’s early life, and a lost Caspar David Friedrich painting into the description of her attempt to follow the river Ryck from source to sea.

The central idea seems to be that the Second Law of thermodynamics is reflected in all corners of human experience: our attempts to organise information in one place only result in disorder and destruction somewhere else. But an engaging and unpredictable read, anyway.


An atlas of extinct countries : the remarkable (and occasionally ridiculous) stories of 48 nations that fell off the map (2020) by Gideon Defoe (UK, 1975- )

A somewhat flippant catalogue of unsuccessful bits of nation-building, presented in the form of a series of very short essays that necessarily skip a lot of interesting background to spend time on what often feels like journalistic trivia.

Of course, there are far more than 48 ex-nations to choose from in world history. Defoe seems to have gone for a handful of proper countries that lost their separate identity due to Napoleon, colonialism, or similar big geopolitical stuff— Venice, Dahomey, Yugoslavia, etc. — a lot of short-lived microstates, usually created on islands or in frontier towns by opportunistic adventurers— Sarawak, etc. — a few temporary accidents of other states’ incompetence with maps and treaties— Moresnet! — and one or two bits of blatant abuse, like Leopold’s Congo and the Bantustans of South Africa. A mildly amusing Christmas stocking book.

More long hot days sitting in the garden with a book…

The magician (2021) by Colm Tóibín (Ireland, 1955- )

A Buddenbrooks to Felix Krull biographical novel about Thomas Mann and his clan. Engagingly written and obviously very thoroughly researched, but it isn’t very obvious what it’s meant to add to a corner of literary history we already know far more about than we really need to. It picks up obvious themes like the tension between the politically active Heinrich and his more cautious little brother, the tragedy of Klaus descending into depression and drug addiction after the war, and Thomas’s not quite secret lusting after young men. But it doesn’t seem to take them anywhere unexpected.

Perhaps a good way in if you don’t know much about the family yet, but you’re probably better off reading some of their own books.

Still pillaging my mother’s shelves:

Miss Merkel: Mord in der Uckermark (2021) by David Safier (Germany, 1966- )

On her well-deserved retirement from public life, Angela hopes to enjoy a quiet life with husband Achim and bodyguard Mike in their old house in a pleasantly obscure village in the Uckermark. But of course it doesn’t work out like that: there’s a suspicious death and suddenly a new career as central character of a series of cosy mysteries seems to be opening up. But is she going to be Sherlockine or Miss Merkel …?

Of course, this is the sort of idea that always sounds funnier in the jacket-copy than it can ever live up to, but David Safier is an experienced comic novelist and does what he can with it. There are some nice running jokes about the way both Angela and Achim still think like scientists and like people who grew up in the DDR, there’s an irritating small dog called Putin, and there’s Angela’s determination to feed poor Mike up with impossible quantities of homemade cake, but it’s a bit of a stretch to make those things fill out a whole book (let alone a series). The murder mystery — involving a Freiherr found dead in his locked wine cellar wearing a suit of armour — is fairly feeble, but should be just about enough to satisfy fans of village cosies.

Aus großer Zeit: Roman (1978; Days of greatness) by Walter Kempowski (Germany, 1929-2007)

The first part of Kempowski’s Deutsche Chronik (but the fifth in publication order), covering the period from about 1898 to 1918, the childhood of his parents Karl (in Rostock) and Grethe (in Hamburg) and their experiences in the First World War.

Kempowski uses his characteristic collage technique, mixing together his third person narrative with passages of what seems to be oral history from people who remember the Kempowski and De Bonsac families, to create a composite picture of bourgeois life in Wilhelmite North Germany, a kind of less-ponderous follow-up to the world of Buddenbrooks. Lübeck is between Hamburg and Rostock, after all.

There’s a lot about the apparently universal and unquestioned belief in German greatness, German mission, and the Kaiser. Some of that is probably hindsight— Kempowski was writing from the point of view of someone who had lived through the consequences of post-1918 German arrogance — but it’s also not so different from what you might read about British or French jingoism in the early 20th century. It’s also fascinating to read about how little people like Karl and Grethe knew about the poor people who lived around them. Karl is quite genuinely puzzled the first time he sees a hunger march, and Grethe is shocked when she leaves her suburban cocoon for the first time to work in an inner-city kindergarten.

…and another one:

Kein Roman : Texte und Reden 1992 bis 2018 (2018; Not a novel) by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany, 1967- )

A miscellaneous set of collected talks and speeches by the well-known German novelist and opera director (both roles are relevant here, but mostly the former). But scarcely the “memoir in pieces” claimed by the subtitle of the English translation. There are a few pieces where she reflects on her early life and on the slightly disturbing coincidence that the country she spent her childhood in ceased to exist just as her childhood ended. But most of the book is given over to her thoughts on books, music, pictures and the refugee crisis.

On books, there are several interesting lectures where she talks about the writing of her own novels, including a fascinating one where we are taken in detail through the process of revising a single difficult sentence from Aller Tage Abend. And, inevitably, there’s a slew of acceptance speeches for literary prizes, many of them awarded by towns we would have trouble finding on a map and named after writers of formidable obscurity. Erpenbeck conscientiously finds something interesting and positive to say about all of them, and a couple of times she even made me stop to take a note of the dedicatee to go and look for their books.

The music section was a bit of a disappointment, as it’s dominated by a long essay about Wagner’s Siegfried that is quite interesting, but utterly fails to disguise its origin as a college dissertation. It would have been nice to have a bit more about the actual work of staging operas, but that is mostly confined to the margins of pieces about other things.

As usual with this kind of book, it’s an interesting addition to the picture we have of the author, and it contains a few pieces I’ll certainly come back to, but it’s not likely to be of very much interest if you don’t know Erpenbeck’s novels.

Your mother has quite a library.

Your summer reading seems to have just the right balance.

>60 SassyLassy: Yes, there are quite a few shelves of interesting German novels I haven’t read yet. Some of them contributed by me, thinking that we might both enjoy them.

I’m in rural Suffolk at the moment, I’ll post about what I’ve been reading here when I get back to Wi-Fi in a few days.

OK, back in civilisation after a very pleasant stay in East Suffolk.

Apart from the obligatory Britten-Pears pilgrimage sites (the Red House, the John Piper window, Maggi Hambling's shiny scallop, and a very good concert at Snape Maltings) we had no shortage of literary trails to follow — W.G. Sebald at Somerleyton, Lowestoft, Dunwich, Southwold and elsewhere (re-read of The rings of Saturn coming up); Edward FitzGerald at Woodbridge and Lowestoft; P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Arthur Ransome, ...
Sadly we didn't quite have time to go and look for Mr Peggotty over the border in Yarmouth.

While I was there, I raided the house library for some even more local books:

P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Arthur Ransome, ..

three of my favs for very different reasons

Firstly a work that has very strong Britten connections:

The Borough (1810) by George Crabbe (UK, 1754-1822)

 

Following on from his earlier The village and The parish register, this is a composite portrait in verse of a small town in 24 "letters". The unnamed town is obviously based on Crabbe's native Aldeburgh (although possibly also with elements of Woodbridge, where Crabbe worked for a time). Each letter focusses on a particular aspect of the life of the town, usually describing a single representative main character each time. The best-known of these, of course, are the unhappy single mother Ellen Orford and the doomed fisherman Peter Grimes, who feature in Benjamin Britten's opera. But there are also pictures of magistrates, doctors, publicans, actors, prostitutes, shopkeepers, clergymen, teachers, poor-law governors, gamblers, and many others.

Crabbe's descriptions range from the sardonic to the sympathetic. He has no tolerance for hypocrisy or religious dissent, but he is prepared to go a long way to understand the mixture of bad luck and human failings that land people in poverty and crime, and he argues strongly against the inhumanity of the poor relief system as it operated in Georgian times. Sometimes this brings him into odd collisions of utilitarian common-sense and romantic sympathy, but his efforts to put poor people — as individuals — into the centre of the story have a lot in common with what Wordsworth was doing.

Ask the fellows who cut the hay (1956) by George Ewart Evans (UK, 1909-1988)

  

This was the first of George Ewart Evans's famous collections of oral history, a compilation of material he gathered from his neighbours in the small East Suffolk village of Blaxhall (near Snape). He recognised that the older generation of villagers around 1950 would be some of the last people who remembered the way agricultural work was done before farms started to be mechanised, and also saw that the advent of motor cars, radio and TV were breaking up the old oral lines of transmission of knowledge from generation to generation. He therefore records as much as he could of the memories of shepherds, horsemen, field-workers, craftsmen and domestic workers, and puts them together with material about traditions, pastimes, smugglers' tales, and other village activities, to give a broad overview of what life was like for villagers in that part of the country in the 18th and 19th centuries, tied together with his own editorial comments and supporting information from elsewhere. I was particularly interested by his emphasis on the dialect words he collected, many of them describing tools very specific to the working of the land in the region.

Another rural classic from the same area. Blythe — as far as I know he's still going strong a few months short of his hundredth birthday — is another of those people who links to just about everyone. He was a close friend of John Nash and his wife, he worked with Britten and Pears on the Aldeburgh Festival, his book was filmed by Peter Hall, and Wikipedia says he even had a fling with Patricia Highsmith at one time...

Akenfield (1969) by Ronald Blythe (UK, 1922- )

  

This is at first sight a similar project to Ask the fellows who cut the hay, an oral history project based around the residents of a small Suffolk village. Blythe merged the real villages of Charsfield and Debach, where he lived, into the fictitious "Akenfield" to protect the privacy of his contributors. But it's not quite the same thing. Where Evans focusses on memories of pre-mechanical times, Blythe is really more interested in how the village works now, in the late 1960s. It's oral sociology, rather than history. The villagers' memories of earlier times are relevant for the context it gives to their present attitudes to their work, the people they work for, and the kind of aspirations they have, but the past here isn't a disappearing world of splendid traditions so much as an era of social inequality, squalid living conditions, poor education and low wages. A time when men left the village only to be killed pointlessly in South Africa or Flanders.

That isn't to say that Blythe is an uncritical supporter of "progress" — his contributors note that agricultural wages are still very low compared to unskilled factory jobs, that the agricultural workers' union has little real power to change things, and that technical college courses for farm-workers (he talks to both students and lecturers) don't seem to be designed to help young people advance in their jobs.

Moreover, it's clear (even more so 60 years on!) that farms in 1967 were still going through big technical transitions in directions many farmers and farm-workers weren't happy with — factory-farming of pigs and poultry, heavy use of chemicals, etc.

A fascinating book, very influential at the time, and much less dated than you might expect.

"True crime" isn't usually my thing, but this was interesting because it happened a few houses away from where we were staying, albeit 120 years earlier. I only read one of the three books about it that were on the shelf, though. It looked like the most recent of them:

The Peasenhall murder (1990) by Martin Fido (UK, 1939-2019) and Keith Skinner (UK, 1949-)

  

In the quiet Suffolk village of Peasenhall, on the morning after a dark and stormy night in 1902, the body of twenty-year-old Rose Harsent was found in the kitchen of the house where she worked as a servant, with her throat cut and with signs of a fire having been started to attempt to conceal the evidence. She was six months pregnant, and suspicion rapidly fell on William Gardiner, one of the leading lights of her Primitive Methodist chapel. He had been accused by other villagers of having an affair with Rose a year earlier, but an internal enquiry in the chapel had cleared them.

There was some evidence supporting the theory that Gardiner was the murderer, and he was brought to trial, but there were gaps in the evidence and the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict either in the first trial or the subsequent retrial, something very unusual in English legal history, and the prosecution was abandoned without Gardiner having been found either guilty or innocent.

The case aroused a lot of publicity: the general view in the village seems to be (still, apparently) that Gardiner was guilty, but elsewhere newspapers and the public were mostly on his side. And of course amateur investigators have been amusing themselves with finding alternative suspects ever since. Fido and Skinner take a relatively sober line: whilst acknowledging the strength of the case against Gardiner, they consider that there wasn't enough evidence presented at the time to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. There are some facts, in particular the anonymous note found in Rose's possession arranging a midnight meeting, that can't easily be linked to Gardiner, and suggest to the authors that the most likely explanation is that Rose had another lover who was not identified at the time and is of course untraceable now, and that this man killed her in the course of an argument. But it's all speculation, really.

The most interesting thing about the book was really reading it whilst actually staying in Peasenhall, and getting a feel for the way village life went on there around 1900.

>65 thorold: Ask the fellows who cut the hay looks very interesting, indeed. Those sorts of books, recording specific eras and lifestyles that are in danger of (or in the midst of) passing away are invaluable.

mark you read the most interesting books! I write them down but im unsure of what to start with first, as if I don't already have hundreds on my list and tbr shelves! ah well.

>68 rocketjk: >69 cindydavid4: Yes, and it's a kind of book I very rarely think to look out for. That's the advantage of spending time with other people's libraries, of course. In this case the books selected for visitors by the Landmark Trust, which almost always include some worthwhile books I didn't know about.

(Full disclosure: Akenfield has also been on my parents' shelves since 1969, and I never looked at it in all that time...)

Something completely different: time to get back to the Slavic languages theme, and another book I should have read years ago. My excuse was always that I was saving it for "when I learn a bit more Russian". I never got very far with that aim, though...

Eugene Onegin : a novel in verse (serialised 1825-1832, revised 1837; this translation 2008) by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (Russia, 1799-1837), translated from Russian by Stanley Mitchell (UK, 1932-2011)

   

This is another of those classics that it's — almost — redundant to read, because you have heard so much about them before you start. Not only from Tchaikovsky: just about every subsequent classic Russian novel involves characters discussing or comparing themselves to Onegin, Tatiana and Lensky. The plot runs along the lines we expect with all the precision of a tramcar: Tatiana falls for Onegin but he rejects her; he has to fight a duel with his best friend Lensky after flirting with his intended, Tatiana's sister Olga, and kills him; some years later Onegin falls heavily for the now-married Tatiana and it's her turn to reject him. So it's a kind of Russian Werther, a romantic tragedy in which all the players are very contemporary poets, tied up in the politics of early-19th-century Russia.

But of course it's not really about the plot. Pushkin effectively invented the rules of modern literary Russian, and developed a bouncy, Byronic Russian verse-form (the "Pushkin sonnet") to suit his chatty, up-to-date style. In tune with his heroes Byron and Sterne he loves to wander off into digressions at key moments, and it's never absolutely clear whether the numerous "missing" stanzas or half-stanzas in his numbering scheme are errors, practical jokes at the reader's expense, or simply places he intended to come back to later.

There are also the two chapters he never finished: the half-finished Onegin's Journey, which should have been Chapter VIII, and would have smoothed out the rather abrupt transition between Onegin meeting Tatiana as a young girl and then as a married woman, and the aborted Chapter X, which never got much further than a few bits of political satire attacking the Czar's government. It's not clear where he intended to fit this into the story: Onegin and Tatiana don't appear in the surviving fragments.

Stanley Mitchell taught Russian at the University of Essex and elsewhere, and was a noted left-winger and a veteran of the 1968 student protests. He worked on Pushkin throughout his academic career. His 2008 translation tries the difficult trick of putting Pushkin's tetrameter meter and demanding rhyme scheme into English, and he pulls it off astonishingly well. The rather contrived rhymes that sometimes result have a quite appropriate feeling of Don Juan about them, and the bounce and colloquial chattiness of the original come through very strongly. Just occasionally there's a bit too much of a hint of WS Gilbert (II.10: "He sang of life's decaying scene, / While he was not yet quite eighteen."). But it's great fun to read, which is surely the most important thing.

>71 thorold: Interesting that you enjoyed Mitchell's translation. Its probably the cheapest version on the market at the moment on Kindle, if you can stomach reading poetry on kindle.

Whilst passing through London on Friday on the way home from my trip, I happened to come past the iconic LGBT+ bookshop Gay's the Word in Bloomsbury (opened in 1979). I hadn't been there for about 20 years, and had a vague idea from somewhere that it had closed down years ago, but no such luck — I came home with my rucksack heavier and my wallet lighter...

First book from the GTW stack:

Bad gays : a homosexual history (2022) by Huw Lemmey (UK, Spain - ) and Ben Miller (US, Germany, - )

   

One of the most revered traditions of LGBT culture is the recitation of the stories of our illustrious predecessors. If great men and women like Sappho, Oscar Wilde, Billie Holiday and Alexander the Great fell in love with people of their own gender, that surely gives me a strong moral argument to confront homophobes with ... doesn't it? Almost every book on queer history has some version of this catalogue of Good Gays in it, and a few — like the embarrassing Homosexuals in History by A.L. Rowse — make it their sole raison d'être.

There are some major weaknesses in this approach, attractive though it might seem, as you will realise if anyone has ever pointed out to you that Hitler was a vegetarian(*). Not only is it tricky to equate modern identities with the usually-undocumented sexual preferences of people who lived long ago, but celebrity doesn't necessarily guarantee an exemplary life...

In this spin-off from their successful podcast, Lemmey and Miller take us through the lives of a number of famous queer figures from the past who are anything but role-models. Ruthless dictators like Hadrian, J Edgar Hoover and Frederick the Great, underworld figures like Jack Saul, Pietro Aretino and Ronnie Kray, far-right sympathisers like Ernst Röhm, Yukio Mishima, Philip Johnson and Pim Fortuyn, facilitators of colonialism like T E Lawrence, or people like Roger Casement who combined exemplary (at least in hindsight) public lives with exploitative sexual adventures in private.

Obviously, it's fun to have the inversion of the usual pious histories (they deliberately pick quite a few figures who appeared in lists of "good gays" in the past), and Lemmey and Miller insert a few suitably camp and often very funny snarky comments as they go along. The section on "The bad gays of Weimar Berlin" — Miller's own field of historical research — was especially interesting. But the real point is a bit more sophisticated than that. They want to highlight the way that the "gay movement", whatever good intentions it may start with, always seems to wind up campaigning to make the world safe for wealthy white men who want the freedom to have sex with whomever they choose. "Queer sensibility" shows a disturbing tendency to veer off into a love of order, discipline, and blond boys in tight uniforms, whilst solidarity with women, people of colour, and the working classes goes out of the window.

A more interesting book than I was expecting. Marred by some small editing slip-ups and the clichéd use of Fraktur on the cover, but solidly referenced and with a good bibliography and index. Some illustrations wouldn't have hurt, although we all know how to use Google, I suppose.
---
(*) He wasn't, but this particular canard never goes away

Update to >21 thorold: — the Observer has a slightly bemused piece on the phenomenal success of the Dutch Mountain Trail:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/04/it-definitely-isnt-flat-netherland...

Back to Slavic languages, with a book I ordered some time ago that arrived while I was away. I read E.E.G. last October, and decided immediately that I needed to read more Drndić.

Trieste (2007; translation 2012; original title Sonnenschein) by Daša Drndić (Yugoslavia, Croatia, 1946-2018) translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać

  

This is Drndić's most famous novel, set, as the English title suggests, in the armpit of the Adriatic, where Italy meets Austria-Hungary and the Balkans, and it's essentially the story of a Jewish woman separated from her young child in wartime, against the background of the horrors of the Treblinka extermination camp and of Himmler's mass-kidnapping project, Operation Lebensborn. Again and again we are confronted with the question of how we deal in ordinary life with someone who might be a decent citizen, even a loving parent or spouse, now, but has committed unspeakably evil acts in wartime.

As well as the storyline, there are also very strong parallels with WG Sebald's Austerlitz in things like the documentary style, the 43-page list of names of Italian Jews deported or killed in the Holocaust, the insistence on quoting witnesses, and the muddy black-and-white photos in the text that destabilise our understanding of where the fictional story breaks off from the historical facts. Given the closeness in dates, this is probably not intentional, but rather a matter of two people with similar literary backgrounds coming independently to closely similar ways of solving the same problem. How do you write about the Holocaust in fiction without being disrespectful to the memory of those who experienced it when you are from a generation (just) too young to have experienced it at first hand? And Drndić, of course, obviously had the aftermath of the more recent wars in her own country in mind as well.

Either way, the overlaps are not big enough to spoil either book, and there's a wealth of cultural reference in Drndić that is specific to the complex history of the Trieste and Gorizia region — the many languages that meet there, the shifting place names, the presence of Joyce, Svevo, D'Annunzio and the rest, as well as intrusions into the text from Pound, Eliot, Thomas Bernhard and other offstage commentators.

>76 thorold: I will have to read this. Thanks for the review.

This next one was a signed copy, on the "specially recommended" shelf at Gay's The Word; on the acknowledgments page the author warmly thanks a couple of Gay's The Word staff members for their help in research. If that isn't evidence of a giant lesbian and gay conspiracy to take over the arts, I don't know what is :-)

Woods is emeritus professor of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Nottingham Trent. A long time ago, I read and enjoyed his two previous books on queer literature, Articulate flesh (1987) and The male tradition (1998), although the length of the gaps have meant that I never quite remember who he is before reading the next one. Outside the academy, he's also a well-respected poet.

Homintern : how gay culture liberated the modern world (2017) by Gregory Woods (UK, 1953- )

  

It shouldn't need to be said, but the "Homintern" was always a joke. Outside the imaginations of a few warped homophobes, there never has been and never will be a giant, international lesbian and gay conspiracy to take over the arts/politics/broadcasting/espionage. Even at the gayest moments in western culture — Paris around the First World War, for instance, or Weimar Berlin — there were always at least half a dozen aggressively successful Hemingways and Henry Millers to every Diaghilev or Magnus Hirschfeld.

Sadly it also turns out to have been such an obvious joke in the interwar years that it's impossible to say at this distance who originally came up with it: there are at least half a dozen plausible candidates, roughly evenly divided between ironic queers and scaremongering homophobes.

Woods takes us on a long, pleasurably discursive stroll through the history of western LGBT culture from Oscar Wilde to Manuel Puig, focusing on the connections within groups of writers, artists, musicians, film-makers and performers in the places where they particularly came together — Paris and Berlin, Capri and Taormina, Tangier, Rome, Harlem and Greenwich Village, etc. It's a fairly arbitrary selection, in which Woods is evidently allowing himself to be guided by his own curiosity: some supposedly important people are barely mentioned, others we might not have heard of are looked at in quite a lot of detail. Natalie Barney gets a lot more airtime than Gertrude Stein, for instance, and Woods is a big fan of Norman Douglas but clearly can't motivate himself to take Isherwood seriously. We hear a lot more about Virgil Thomson than about the semi-closeted but much more successful Benjamin Britten, too. Radclyffe Hall — predictably — comes out of his account as far too earnest for her own good. Woods oddly seems to have enjoyed Brigid Brophy's book on Firbank much more than Firbank's own books, which barely get a mention. And he concludes the book on the wonderful image of the elderly Louis Aragon revelling in the experience of gay pride marches in late-70s Paris "in a pink convertible, surrounded by ephebes".

There are patterns, of sorts, that emerge. Woods reasons that lesbians and gay men probably don't have more or less "artistic temperament" than anyone else, but that they have often found the arts a less hostile working environment than elsewhere, hence the proliferation of queer writers, composers, etc. He talks about the conflicting temptations to merge into the bourgeois invisibility of the closet or to use camp to depict yourself as outrageous but harmless, and about the way some queer people have found themselves drawn towards revolutionary politics on the left or the right, even though neither side has made them welcome. And about the complicated relationship between queer culture and racism, in particular antisemitism.

A very enjoyable book, full of efficient summaries of people's work and witty anecdotes about their lives, but probably also one you could easily get lost in unless you already have at least a general idea of who most of these people are.

...and one of the many books Woods talks about (also fits in nicely with the Mann family and >56 thorold:, of course):

Der fromme Tanz : das Abenteuerbuch einer Jugend (1925; The pious dance) by Klaus Mann (Germany, 1906-1949)

  

Klaus Mann's first novel, published when he was nineteen. His hero, Andreas, is a clever young man who leaves his provincial middle-class-intellectual father and his fiancée, a childhood friend and the daughter of a well-known artist herself, to pursue a career as a cabaret performer and look for beautiful young men in the night-clubs of Berlin. But, obviously, we needn't assume that there's anything remotely autobiographical going on here...

The story is fascinating for its very vivid first-hand descriptions of gay life in twenties Berlin, Hamburg and Paris, full of cabaret scenes, rent-boys, drag-queens, and even a sort of precursor of Anna Madrigal's boarding house with a cast of colourful eccentrics of all orientations. Plus a couple of bonus Zola set-pieces in the final chapters, an artists' ball and a dawn scene at Les Halles. Whilst there's no explicit description of sex-acts — presumably that would have been going too far even for Weimar censors — the encoding is so transparent that we can't really claim he's keeping anything from us. Not like Isherwood with his constant glances over the shoulder to respectability.

On the other hand, it's a bit harder to cope with the story of Andreas's psychological development, involving Walt Whitman singing the body electric whilst Andreas has peculiar dreams about rosary beads, angels and the Virgin Mary. This is all very first-novelish. There are clearly good ideas behind it: Mann seems to be talking about the collision between the abstract ideals of romantic love Andreas has grown up with and the breathtaking physicality of his desire for the lovely Niels. But the presentation of this somehow gets side-tracked into long-winded sentimentality. You can always skim lightly over the first few chapters and the last. There aren't so many 1920s gay novels that you can afford to toss one aside.

Enjoying your reviews - both your GTW books sound interesting in different ways.

The Pious Dance also sounds interesting, although I don't feel in the mood for the long-winded sentimentality you mentioned.

Back to the Frowning Coast ... as promised, a re-read of W.G. Sebald's Suffolk Coast novel.

W.G. ("Max" to his friends) Sebald grew up in Wertach in the Allgäu (Bavaria). He came to England in 1966 to do a PhD in Manchester, and never went back to living in Germany. He spent most of his career teaching in the European Literature department at UEA, sadly dying in a car accident at the age of 57, just as he was starting to get going as a novelist. He wrote in German, but all his major books appeared more or less simultaneously in English translations prepared under his own supervision: if anything, he seems to have been more influential in English than in German.

Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (1995; The rings of Saturn) by W G Sebald (Germany, 1944-2001)

  

It wasn't planned like that, but our holiday in East Suffolk was around the thirtieth anniversary of the walking tour Sebald describes, and we visited many of the same places.

Lord Somerleyton no longer seems to drive miniature trains around his estate, and the decline of the coach-tour business means it no longer pays them to open the house — an astonishing Victorian pile, something between a sanatorium and a small London terminus, built by and for the railway contractor Samuel Morton Peto — to visitors, but the gardens seemed to be in surprisingly good order, considering that we were in the middle of a drought. The gardener we chatted with was too young to be the man Sebald describes, but was clearly full of clever ideas for keeping the place looking attractive without spending any actual money. We enjoyed the maze, but got to the centre and out again with rather less difficulty than Sebald reports.

In Lowestoft we saw that they have taken his message to heart and done something about their station, which Sebald characterises as "not renovated even once in the last century". As it happened, we ran into someone from the Community Rail Partnership who spent an hour and a half showing us the progress they have made or intend to make in restoring the place to its former glory (and telling us all about the history of the town and its woes — the Peter Duck storytelling tradition is clearly alive and well). Sadly, the "dancing fountains" on the sea-front, a Millennium project Sebald would have loved, which were leaping around to the tune of the "Sabre Dance" last time I was there, are now defunct: we were told a contractor had accidentally destroyed the control system with an excavator.

In Southwold, it was great to see that they now have a little display case in the Sailors' Reading Room commemorating Sebald's visit and including the photographic history of the Great War that excited his curiosity, open at the page showing Franz Ferdinand's bloodstained tunic.

Edward FitzGerald, whom Sebald gives a substantial digression all to himself, is now commemorated in the little local museum in Woodbridge, including some documents about the building of his yacht, the Scandal. And photographs of some of the Lowestoft fishermen who used to sail with him.

Orford Castle is currently encased in scaffolding, something that would probably have charmed Sebald as well.



We didn't come across any Chinese emperors, silkworms, or traces of Chateaubriand or Roger Casement, but we did notice that Joseph Conrad's time in Lowestoft has now earned him the dubious distinction of having the local Wetherspoon's named after him.

...and of course I'm still meaning to get around to reading Urne burial. Soon. Probably.

Sebald never explains why he chose the title, but I suppose it may be referring to the way people and events leave arbitrary traces behind in the world that are curious in themselves, but often bear no obvious relation to their causes. One of the epigraphs describes how Saturn's rings are probably the fragments of a former moon.

This is what I said about the book when I first read it in November 2011:

Sebald is wonderful: my biggest regret on finishing this book is that I've now read all his major works. But the consolation is that I have the excuse to start re-reading...
I was expecting to enjoy this book — I read it with a walking holiday in East Anglia fresh in my own mind, and I got a lot of pleasure out of following the connections that Sebald makes, whether it's the port of Lowestoft and a slept-through BBC documentary on the hotel TV that put him onto Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, or the remains of the Southwold Railway that launch him into 19th century China and the empress Tzu H'si. According to the books I've looked at, the local legend about the Southwold coaches having been intended for China has no basis at all, but that's beside the point. Sebald uses the presumed connection to link his themes of colonialism and East Coast decay, just as he does with Conrad, Casement and the Belgian Congo.

And a relatively new book I've been listening to on audio over the past few days.

Edward Wilson-Lee teaches medieval and renaissance literature at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge:

A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History (2022) by Edward Wilson-Lee (US, UK, - ), audiobook read by Richard Trinder

  

Contrary to what you might expect from the title, this is in effect a parallel biography of two Portuguese 16th century figures, the poet Luís Vaz de Camões and the humanist scholar Damião de Góis.

Damião had a high-profile career as a trade envoy in the Low Countries and the Baltic before returning to Lisbon to work as archivist and official historian in the Torre do Tombo. During his travels around Europe he spent time in the universities of Louvain and Padua, and seems to have formed close ties with many of the leading figures of the age, including Erasmus and Luther, as well as with the founders of the Jesuit order. He also developed a fascination with other cultures, especially the non-Christian traditions of Lapland and the non-Western Christianity of Ethiopia, which he extended during his work as historian into a tendency to look at what colonised people said about the Portuguese as well as what the colonisers said to justify themselves. And, of course, it wasn't long before he had the Inquisition knocking on his door.

Wilson-Lee sees Damião's Chronicle as a kind of last-ditch attempt by humanism to present a view of the world in which Western European Christianity is merely one of many cultural traditions, with much to learn from the advanced cultures of places like India and China, and he contrasts it to the assertive, Eurocentric and imperialist neoclassical view projected by Camões in The Lusiads.

It's a cleverly-written book, that manages to turn a fairly abstract literary and historical debate into something very like a murder mystery, full of entertaining glimpses at Camões's experiences in the Lisbon underworld and at the sharp end of colonialism, mirrored by Damião's semi-clandestine encounters with forbidden knowledge (among the things that got him into trouble were his passions for the polyphony of Josquin and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch...). Necessarily there's a little bit of oversimplification along the way, but it's an interesting glimpse into a period when it wasn't entirely obvious that Europe would be forcibly split between Catholics and Protestants or that Europeans would see it as their mission to finance our culture by robbing the rest of the world for the next few centuries.

>82 thorold: A strange title for the book, but one I will keep an eye out for.

>83 baswood: Yes — an unfortunate choice given how many books there are with that or similar titles that actually are about water. I think it's an allusion to a line from The Lusiads.

Ok, that one is definitly on the list. Have never heard of the two men, and know little about the country except for the inquisition and colonization. Thankyou for once again sharing one of your books.

>85 cindydavid4: It's an interesting follow-up to the Indian Ocean theme from earlier this year, as well: it ties into several of the books I read for that, especially Empires of the monsoon.

>82 thorold: This book sounds fascinating, although I'm not too sure about the murder mystery thing! It looks like it could have been written by Umberto Eco...

I admire the steady rhythm of your reading!

>88 LolaWalser: I think that "steady rhythm" conceals a lot of underlying bumps in the road...

My "long weekend" to attend a get-together at a friend's house outside Florence somehow turned into a full week of semi-unplanned rail travel across Europe, with pauses of varying lengths in Brussels, Köln, Zürich, Milan, Innsbruck, Regensburg, Leipzig and Hannover. Some of those places are plausibly on the way from The Hague to Florence, others not... Obviously I should have read a book for each city, but things went a bit too quickly for that, and some are already covered in my recent reading, e.g.

Brussels:
— (see below)
Köln:
— Gilgi : eine von uns by Irmgard Keun (read May 2019)
Zürich:
— Justiz by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (read September 2017)
Milan:
— should be lots, but I can't think of any now, apart from Foucault's Pendulum.
Florence:
— Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald (read June 2022) (...and all of E M Forster, the Brownings, Henry James, etc.)
Innsbruck:
— (seems to be difficult, I can't find much in my library apart from railway and tramway books)
Regensburg:
— (similar, all I can find for now are books about medieval history or travel on the Danube)
Leipzig:
— Völkerschlachtdenkmal by Erich Löst (read May 2021)
— Charles Auchester by Elizabeth Sara Sheppard (read April 2022)
— ...and lots of stuff I've read about Bach, Mendelssohn, the Schumanns, etc. I brought back Gesang vom Leben, a book about the city's musical heritage, for the TBR pile
Hannover:
— Pilgrimage 1 by Dorothy Richardson (read January 2020)
— probably lots more somewhere. I know I've got a Handel biography to re-read sometime. Maybe something about Leibniz, who lived in both Leipzig and Hannover?

This was something light for railway-reading that fitted in with Brussels, at least:

Les deux messieurs de Bruxelles (2014; Invisible love) by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (France, Belgium, 1960- )

  

A set of five stories of various lengths, in Schmitt's characteristic romantic / realist mode — last time I read one of his books I compared it to a Willy Russell film. The title story is the most striking situation: a rather conservative gay couple (a jeweller and a set-designer) sneak into the back of Brussels Cathedral and exchange their own vows behind a pillar whilst the priest is marrying a couple of strangers at the altar. Subsequently, they feel a strange compulsion to follow the progress of Genevieve and Eddy and their children through their rather ordinary working-class life, with unexpected results. There's also a story about an Auschwitz survivor who can only reconcile himself towards humanity with the help of his dog, a trick-story about a man who marries a widow to get closer to her deceased first husband, a dark story about a woman's relationship with her son and her nephew set against the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, and a middle-aged couple whose relationship is shattered by the difficult decision whether to bring a child into the world with an inherited disease. And the customary Schmitt afterword explaining where these stories came from — mostly from train journeys, it seems, in this case.

Very agreeable to read: written with a light, ironic touch, and with some lovely original turns of phrase, but not shying away from difficult subject-matter.

(PS: It looks as though the English version of this book has a different combination of stories...)

>89 thorold: My "long weekend" to attend a get-together at a friend's house outside Florence somehow turned into a full week of semi-unplanned rail travel across Europe, with pauses of varying lengths in Brussels, Köln, Zürich, Milan, Innsbruck, Regensburg, Leipzig and Hannover. Some of those places are plausibly on the way from The Hague to Florence, others not... Obviously I should have read a book for each city, but things went a bit too quickly for that, and some are already covered in my recent reading
That reminds me of Yoko Tawada's Train de nuit avec suspects (originally written in Japanese, but there has to be a German translation): each chapter is named after a town or city (generally European) and tells the story of the train journey to that town - with various degrees of annoyances.

>91 Dilara86: Sounds interesting. But there isn't an obvious German version: From the way she lists her work, I get the impression (possibly mistaken) that she keeps a firm dividing wall between her German books and her Japanese books and doesn't approve of them being translated back and forth. I might go and look for the French one.

Barley patch (2009) by Gerald Murnane (Australia, 1939- )

 

This was Murnane's first work labelled as "fiction" after a long break, and it seems to be largely an attempt to investigate what the idea of "fiction" means to him, and why he stopped writing it, something he comes back to in later books like A million windows and A history of books. Naturally, he doesn't come up with a one-line answer, but spends time refining the question and blocking up some blind alleys, with — of course — copious reference to mutually contradictory versions of his own background and early life, books that have influenced him in good or bad ways, horse-racing, the Roman Catholic Church, girlfriends, and houses of more than one storey standing in level grassland.

As you would expect, it's the journey rather than the conclusion that is interesting (if there is a conclusion), and this has to be read as one of many facets of Murnane's exploration of what writing is supposed to be and do. But it's always a pleasure to immerse yourself in the twists and turns of his determinedly underdetermined language.

(And I think we have a winner for "most literal-minded cover art of the month"!)

And this quarter's other Victorian read:

Lady Anna (1874) by Anthony Trollope (UK, 1815-1882)

  

This is mid-period Trollope, written in 1871 during a sea-voyage to Australia and published in book form three years later. It's a fairly lightweight novel, built around a small number of characters and a single main plot idea, and appeared shortly before the much more substantial and complex The way we live now.

The essence of the story is that the twenty-year-old heiress Lady Anna Lovel wants to marry her childhood friend Daniel Thwaite, to whom she's been secretly engaged for a long time, whilst her mother and everyone else around her wants her to marry her cousin Frederick, who has inherited the title of Earl Lovel, but not the money that goes with it. This is all complicated by the way Anna's evil father, the previous Earl Lovel, has tried to disinherit her and her mother by claiming that his marriage to Anna's mother was legally invalid. As a result, they spent Anna's childhood in litigation, poverty and social obscurity, their only real friends Daniel and his father, a Keswick tailor.

Cue two of Trollope's favourite ways to develop a story: legal quirks and stubbornness.

Trollope's most famous legal-quirk novel, The Eustace diamonds, was written very shortly before this one. In this case, the lawyers (on all sides) are benevolent, competent and professional, but the law itself is built so as to make things as difficult as possible for a woman whose husband (living or dead) doesn't want to support her. The only bright side is that it makes things even more difficult for the Earl's other discarded mistresses, who are all Italian and therefore not regarded as reliable witnesses.

Stubbornness is a difficult way to develop a story, since it requires having a character that doesn't change in any important way for long stretches of the plot, but it's a bit of a Trollope trademark. It's most usually middle-aged men who deploy it — see The last chronicle of Barset or He knew he was right, for instance — but this time we have a long, drawn out stalemate between Anna and her mother, who are both equally stubborn. The Countess can't admit the idea of her daughter marrying a tradesman, especially after all the humiliation and suffering she has endured to secure her own title; Anna can't admit the idea of breaking her promise to Daniel. Something has to give somewhere, but it takes a surprisingly long time before Trollope allows the story to reach its inevitable crisis.

Not Trollope at his best, but pretty good by anyone else's standards.

Back to Helga Schubert (see >32 thorold: above). This is a book I picked up in Leipzig and read most of on the train home:

Judasfrauen : Zehn Fallgeschichten weiblicher Denunziation im Dritten Reich (1990; 2nd edition 2021) by Helga Schubert (Germany, 1940- )

  

Ten stories of women who informed on political offenders during the Third Reich, most of them during the war, at a time when courts were routinely handing down death sentences for offences like listening to foreign radio stations or expressing doubts about the final victory. Schubert takes their case files and treats them in various imaginative ways to try to work out what it is that makes someone into an informer or betrayer under a dictatorship, sometimes writing from a neutral third-person viewpoint, sometimes from the point-of-view of the informer herself, or from that of the person betrayed.

It's an odd mix of the extreme and the everyday. One of the women seems to have acted merely because she wanted to prove to her colleagues that she really had recognised Carl Goerdeler, the most prominent civilian implicated in the Stauffenberg plot; others out of jealousy or to get rid of an abusive or inconvenient husband; others out of fear that someone else would report them for not reporting something; one woman who infiltrated a Christian discussion group acted because she needed an exit visa; a few even acted simply out of hardline political conviction. Obviously we don't know how representative Schubert's sample of ten cases is, but it doesn't sound very different from what you hear about informers in other dictatorships.

It's also something of a shock to be reminded how even in those extreme circumstances, the courts still insisted on a show of proper procedure, assessing the reliability of evidence and sometimes admitting appeals and clemency requests (but only if the prisoner hadn't already been secretly executed...). Unsupported denunciation evidence was sometimes questioned, and even not admitted unless corroborated by other evidence, such as a confession (but no-one asked how the confession was obtained). That show of proper procedure was what allowed many Nazi judges to regain office after 1945: it wasn't their fault that the law they were administering was evil, was it?

Schubert had to struggle even to get permission to look into the archives of the Nazi political court in East Berlin in what turned out to be the final years of the DDR, and she couldn't get permission to publish the book, which eventually came out in the West in 1990. The DDR authorities were rather sensitive about books discussing dictatorships and the role of informers in them, for some reason. Particularly when the writer also talks about the unpleasant consequences those informers faced after the fall of the dictatorship. Surely they didn't think readers would make a connection to the present-day realities of the Workers' and Peasants' State?

A disturbing look into the realities of living under dictatorships of whatever kind, anyway.

>94 thorold: That's one I hope gets translated into English.

>95 labfs39: It looks as though winning the Ingeborg Bachmann prize for Vom Aufstehen has got her a lot of attention in Germany — that’s obviously why this one was reissued, and there were a few others in the bookshop that had recently been reprinted too — so maybe there’s a chance that English-language publishers will notice her now.

More from the GTW stack (>73 thorold: etc.). A new Andrew Holleran novel is quite an event: this is only the fourth he has written since the iconic Dancer from the Dance in 1978, a book that has come to mark the transition in gay fiction from the apologetic "if you prick us do we not bleed?" books of the forties and fifties to the affirmation of gay culture in the novels of the Violet Quill circle.

The Kingdom of Sand (2022) by Andrew Holleran (USA, 1944- )

  

That's how you know you've been in Florida too long — you no longer go to the beach.

The narrator of this book is a typical Holleran figure, a single gay man rather cut off from the humdrum provincial world around him. He has moved to a small town in northern Florida to look after his elderly parents and has somehow stuck there long after their deaths, well on his way into old age himself.

He can't find any good reason to be there: his parents' old neighbours are all gone, whatever natural attractions the region might have had once have all been destroyed by human activity, the cruising zones at the video store and the boat ramp are rarely frequented by anyone under sixty, and his only local gay friend, Earl, with whom he watches old movies once or twice a week, is well over eighty. The town isn't even convenient for shopping or airports. Yet he's somehow unable to bring himself to throw out his parents' stuff and sell up the house. Moving seems to carry an even greater threat of lonely old age than staying put. Maybe the only solution is Earl's strategy of putting himself in the hands of a fortune-hunting paid carer?

It's perhaps somehow ironic that Holleran, who started his career by celebrating the gay community's cult of youth and beauty, is the writer who now feels it his duty to warn us what happens to you in the end if you allow that aesthetic to become the sole basis on which you let love and companionship into your life. He's almost at the point of agreeing with our parents when they regretted how sad it was that we wouldn't have any children to look after us in old age.

Not a cheerful book, but near enough to the real lives of plenty of people I know that it can't be dismissed as unduly pessimistic. This is what old age is about for a lot of people: not just gay men.

>94 thorold:

The Americans allowed so many Nazis to stay in their posts, especially high-ranking ones, that it's hard to see why they'd bother to replace the judges.

The variability of cases seems what one would expect. I doubt there is some overweening "informer" psychology--opportunism is probably the key.

>97 thorold:

His previous book was an elegy about the loss of beauty so I guess it's the expected progression.

Ageing LGBTQ+ without families are growing in number. But I'm not sure progeny would have been the solution. It often isn't even for people who brought up their children.

Your mad train travel--admit it, once you started rail-hopping, you just couldn't resist adding trips... :)

>94 thorold: Several years ago I read and reviewed a book called The True German: The Diary of a World War II Military Judge by Werner Otto Mueller-Hill. Although I had a hard time not believing that the author started the diary as a safety measure in case he was accused of war crimes, it was interesting to read how he justified his actions.

>89 thorold: >98 LolaWalser: Footnote to my mad train travel (from Ch.1 of Vainglory — more Firbank coming shortly):

“They begin, I believe, by Brussels ——”
“I can hardly imagine anyone,” Lady Georgia observed, “setting out deliberately for Brussels.”
“I suppose it does seem odd,” Mrs Henedge murmured, looking mysteriously about her.

>97 thorold: I know very little about LGBTQ+ literature, so really enjoyed your last reviews, especially The kingdom of sand. Unfortunately, Holleran is not widely translated into French.

As we get to the end of Q3, it's about time for a (mini-)project. I've been re-reading most of Ronald Firbank's work in tandem with Brigid Brophy's study of him, which I was reminded about by Homintern (>78 thorold: above). It's a bit messy, because Firbank's novels are all pretty short, so they tend to come in collected editions of one sort or another.

Prancing novelist : in praise of Ronald Firbank (1973; reissued by Dalkey Archive in 2016) by Brigid Brophy (UK, 1929-1995)
The Early Firbank (1991) by Ronald Firbank (UK, 1886-1926), edited by Steven Moore
The flower beneath the foot (1923) by Ronald Firbank (UK, 1886-1926)
Three More Novels: "Vainglory", "Inclinations", "Caprice" (1951) by Ronald Firbank (UK, 1886-1926)
Valmouth and Other Novels (1961) by Ronald Firbank (UK, 1886-1926)

       

Brophy
Ronald Firbank's grandfather was the classic Victorian self-made man, who started out as a Durham mineworker at the age of seven, educated himself and became one of the leading railway contractors of his time. Just to prove that there's nothing in heredity, Ronald (called Artie before he became a writer) turned out to be allergic to all forms of organised schooling, never passed an exam in his life, and was so unsuccessful as a writer in his own short lifetime that he had to use his (quite modest) inherited wealth to subsidise the publication of all of his books.

He's scarcely better known nowadays: if you come from a certain kind of background (mostly centred around middle-aged Oxbridge/Ivy League queens of high-anglican leanings, I suspect) you'll have heard of him as a cult early-20th-century author of camp novels with a hint of LGBT naughtiness, but the chance of your actually having read him is pretty minimal. And that's despite the way a whole succession of influential writers have gone out of their way to promote him, including in his own time Evelyn Waugh(*), the Sitwells, Lord Berners, and Carl Von Vechten; later on others including Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Brigid Brophy and Alan Hollinghurst stood up to be counted.

Brophy's critical study of Firbank is almost as long as his collected works, coming in at some 600 pages in paperback, but it turns out to be a very lively read, because she has strong opinions about the merits of his writing and the way it's been treated by people who don't have the perception to appreciate it properly (including his previous biographers). She makes a very strong case for Firbank as someone who made an important contribution to modernist ideas about fiction and how it should work: at times she seems to see him as the Stravinsky of Eng Lit, but she doesn't seem to be able to tie him into direct influences on later writers. Or indeed contemporaries. We don't get much more than hints that Virginia Woolf read Firbank, for instance.

Naturally, Brophy has some sillinesses of her own too: she's writing in 1973, so there is far more Freud than we really need (to give her credit, she has clearly read Freud attentively and criticises him from time to time: she isn't just quoting off the peg theories). And she has a bee in her bonnet about Firbank's Irishness, through his Anglo-Irish mother, something there's scarcely any trace of in his writings.

Where she is undoubtedly on the mark is in her close attention to the huge influence Oscar Wilde had on Firbank, and the way he used his early writings to work this out of his system, culminating in the Salome-pastiche in The accidental princess.

In the final chapters of the book, we are led one by one through all of Firbank's books in quite some detail: this turns out to be very helpful, both in revealing patterns that we might otherwise have missed and in giving hints at decoding some of the more deeply encoded references in the text. She also discusses Firbank's many oddities of spelling, grammar, punctuation, translation, etc., some of which are clearly simple mistakes, but many turn out to be stretching language in unexpected ways. He seems to have had a kind of horror of being quite precise in any language other than French, including English. His Italian and Spanish are both horrible (intentionally or not), and his English often picks up odd French tinges of word-order and vocabulary. For instance, he uses "berce" as a verb several times, a word that doesn't appear in the OED, but whose meaning "to cradle" would be obvious to anyone who understands French (and could be guessed from the context anyway).

What Brophy doesn't bother to explain are Firbank's occasional buried dirty jokes: those are left to surprise the reader (including some I only picked up on a second or third reading...).
---
(*)The young Waugh gave Firbank rave reviews — later on he cooled off rather. Brophy suggests this is because he didn't want readers to see how much he'd stolen from Firbank's techniques in his early books. More prosaically it's probably got a lot to do with the older Waugh's lack of sense of humour where Catholicism was concerned.
---

A quick run-through the books:
Juvenilia (in The early Firbank)
These pieces from 1903-1908 — a dozen or so short stories, two one-act plays and Firbank's one known published essay, on the Flemish painter Jan Gossaert — show Firbank still very heavily under the influence of Wilde, Beardsley and Baudelaire. Heavy, incense-laden descriptions of costume and interior decoration (count the number of times you see the word "mauve"...), bright, paradox-laden dialogue, conventional narrative flows with straightforward tragic or comic outcomes.
Most interesting are probably Odette d'Antrevernes — a faux-naive account of a young girl who tries to set up a Bernadette-style date with the Virgin Mary, told without a hint of irony — and Lady Appledore's mésalliance — the story of a young man who loses his fortune and has to go and work as under-gardener on a big estate, an odd kind of return-to-Eden myth.

The artificial Princess (read in The complete Firbank)
This story or novella was mostly written around 1910, but left unfinished. Firbank completed it towards the end of his life, but hesitated about publishing it, and it eventually appeared posthumously. The Princess, preparing for her 17th birthday party, realises that her situation has surprising parallels with that of Salome in the Bible, and sends her lady-in-waiting off on an epic tram-journey to secure the presence at the party of the nearest local equivalent to John the Baptist. Despite dancing a tarantella in front of the bathroom mirror wearing only a pearl necklace and a diamond bracelet, her plans don't quite work out, and she's cheated of her charger-moment.
This is Firbank's first characteristically "Firbankian" work, and it's also, as Brophy perceptively points out, a kind of Oedipal settling of accounts with Firbank's (literary) father-figure, Oscar Wilde. If he can deflate the high emotion of Salome, he's ready to move on and do his own thing.

Vainglory (1915) (in Three More Novels — and don't ask why Firbank's first three published novels are "three more")
One of Firbank's "big" (200 pages), complicated novels, with a theme of art and immortality picked up in two main places: the new fragment of Sappho that Professor Inglepin has discovered, and the stained glass window that Mrs Shamefoot wishes to erect as a memorial to herself in the Trollopean cathedral of Ashringford. But there's also a Firbank-like writer, Claud Harvester, a composer, Winsome Brookes (a rather mistimed caricature of Rupert Brooke, who was killed a few weeks after the book came out), and a Famous Actress, Mrs Compostella. And a lot of fun and games along the way.

Inclinations (1916)
Like Caprice, this is much slighter than Vainglory. It's the fairly simple, linear tale of the teenager Mabel Collins, who allows herself to be seduced by the Biographer, Miss Gerald(ine) O'Brookomore and carried off on a romantic tour of Greece. But the delightful female-dominated British community in Athens is infiltrated by a rogue heterosexual, Count Pastorelli ("Take my word for it, ... he's not so pastoral as he sounds."), and Miss Collins allows herself to be carried off, resulting in Gerald's famous cri de coeur in Chapter XX, which reads (in full) "Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel!"...

Caprice (1917)
Both Vainglory and Inclinations had actresses as secondary characters, but this time the theatrical theme moves to the centre, as Miss Sinquier, a Dean's daughter from another Trollopean cathedral city, runs away from home to throw herself into the world of the London stage. But alas her Romeo and Juliet turns into The mousetrap...

Valmouth (1919) (read in Valmouth and Other Novels)
Another "big" novel, set in a West Country coastal resort where the air is unusually propitious to long life, a setting part Thomas Hardy and part Sanditon, plus a subsidiary cast of Gothick priests and nuns, but where everything is turned on its head by the presence of Madame Yajñavalkya, the first of Firbank's black main characters. She's obviously not meant to represent any real culture — she has a Hindu-sounding name, often makes passing references to Islamic and African cultures, (and even Judaism) looks vaguely African, and speaks a patois all of her own. She's there to make fun of the repressions of British culture, of course, bringing waves of subversive, matriarchal sexuality into this most conservative of settings.

(Missed out for now: The Princess Zoubaroff (play, 1920); Santal (story; 1921))

The flower beneath the foot (1923)
This time we're in the not-quite-North-African, not-quite-European, country of Pisuergo, for a story of court intrigue and unrequited love. With extra (flagellating) nuns. And (implied) lesbian sex in a rocking sailing-boat. Prince Yousef makes a conventional political marriage with a dreadful fox-hunting English princess, whilst his discarded mistress is forced into martyrdom and sainthood.

Sorrow in sunlight / Prancing Nigger (1924)
This was Firbank's only book to be commercially published in his lifetime: Carl Van Vechten arranged for it to be published by Brentano's in New York. He was also responsible for changing the title from Firbank's original choice of Sorrow in sunlight to the much catchier and infinitely more embarrassing one (in hindsight) by which it's been known ever since. Van Vechten can't be blamed entirely, though, as it's the affectionate epithet by which Mrs Ahmadou Mouth likes to address her husband in the novel.
The book is set in an imaginary tropical country, loosely inspired by Haiti, where Firbank doesn't seem ever to have been, with shades of Jamaica and Cuba, which he did visit. So, obviously, it's got to be a straightforward Jane Austen story, of a family that goes to the big city so that the two daughters can be married off. Or not quite straightforward, as Firbank just chooses to take us up to the point where everything has gone wrong with Mrs Mouth's plan, and doesn't bother to write what would be the second half of the book in real Jane Austen. As in Valmouth, the exoticism isn't a real attempt to depict any existing tropical culture, but a device to satirise European culture.

Concerning the eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926)
Firbank's last completed book, and his most perfect excursion into high camp, set in a Trollopean cathedral city loosely based on Seville. All you really need to know is that it ends with the Cardinal-Archbishop, naked except for his mitre, chasing the naughty choirboy Chiclet around the cathedral in the middle of the night. The fun is in how it gets there, of course.

---
When I bought Prancing novelist, I found that all the online booksellers in Holland are using a database in which it's listed as Prancing Ovelist. That sounds almost like oversensitivity to the "N-word" by association, until you see the spine of the Dalkey reprint, on which they manage to omit a letter from the author's name: "Brigid Bropy"! Perhaps it's Firbank's own dyslexia coming back to haunt later generations, unless there's someone at the publisher's with a very subtle sense of humour...

>102 thorold: I broke my own rule of always sleeping on a book before posting a review, and consequently wrote far more about Firbank than I intended to. Perhaps I didn’t even say the most important things very clearly. I’ll try to summarise:

Why you shouldn’t read Ronald Firbank any more in 2022:
— He’s a privileged, middle-class, gay white man
— At a time when contemporaries were experiencing the horrors of World War I and its aftermath, he’s escaping to unruffled settings that seem immune to historical reality.
— He likes to write from the point of view of middle-aged women and black people.
— There are scarcely any working-class people in his books.
— Even if he’s far from being a racist by the standards of his time, he practices extreme forms of cultural appropriation, inventing fanciful cultures all of his own and attributing them to his black characters. And he occasionally, but prominently, uses language about black people that we no longer consider appropriate.
— He takes nothing seriously, especially the religious practices of Islam and Roman Catholicism. And he takes clerical sexual abuse as a subject for comedy.
— He’s often wilfully inaccurate in his use of English.

Why you should still read Ronald Firbank in 2022:
— He’s gloriously funny, and every two or three sentences there’s something so perfectly and ridiculously framed that you feel you ought to cut it out and hang it on a wall.
— His books are pared down to the absolutely essential minimum, so that he forces you to read them with great attention, more than once. If you skim, even for a moment, the plot will have gone off in a surprising direction without you.
— He does completely unexpected things with existing conventions of literary form.
— Under the frivolous surface and baroque decorations, he’s telling us important things about the experience of being human and living in the world.

wow, so where does one start?

>104 cindydavid4: Not everyone’s going to like Firbank, his style can be disorienting until you get an ear for it, so I’d definitely say try a sample before you start ordering piles of novels…
Gutenberg has The flower beneath the foot, which might be a good way to test the waters.

>105 thorold: Ooh, I was curious about Firbanks, but had decided not to follow up at this point, but if there is a Gutenberg file, I'll definitely have a look!

I love Firbank. That is all.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/64115#1250678

>107 LolaWalser: Can’t have too many Mabels!

>105 thorold: thanks!

Did I over-Mabelize the quotation? Bizarre... comme c'est bizarre...

>110 LolaWalser: "Let us all cling together!"

---

A recent publication spotted in the library (in a section I don't usually visit, Dewey 090: the whole place is mixed up while they rebuild...):

News and how to use it (2020) by Alan Rusbridger (UK, 1953- )

  

The veteran(*) Guardian news editor's thoughts on news media and how they work in a post-print world, in the form of a set of sixty or so short essays arranged, for no obvious reason, alphabetically from "ACCURACY" to "ZOOMERS". Most of it is aimed at helping either the reading public or would-be editors and journalists to make sense of what we see, but it's spiced up by the occasional bit of back-stabbing Fleet Street reminiscence.

There's a lot of quite sensible advice about making ourselves aware of the way what we read may have been shaped by the private interests of proprietors, the commercial interests of advertisers, and the career ambitions of the people who write it, as well as thoughts on how those considerations might be taken out of the loop. Needless to say, he approves of the Guardian's "moral-pressure-paywall" model, although he has his doubts about whether it will be a model that can last through the next big shifts in the industry, whatever they turn out to be. He's also surprisingly positive about the quite different ways other news organisations have found to finance their internet journalism — cross-subsidy, sponsored content, and even the MailOnline's highly profitable showbiz (non-)news factory ("Sidebar of Shame" as it's known in the industry). But on the whole this is stuff anyone interested enough in journalism to be reading this book will know about already.

One thing that did catch my attention was Rusbridger's focus on what turns out to be a surprisingly thin line between outstanding investigative reporting and relentless pushing of unsubstantiated claims. He cites quite a number of case studies of award-winning reporters who ended their careers in ignominy after doubt was cast on their uncanny ability to find stories where other journalists couldn't. The monster-ego always seems to be more vulnerable than the team of equals to self-delusion, fraud, or being seduced by evil dictators.

Interesting, but a bit patchy.

---
(*) Anyone who has such a shamelessly young author photo deserves all we can throw at him...

>111 thorold: "One thing that did catch my attention was Rusbridger's focus on what turns out to be a surprisingly thin line between outstanding investigative reporting and relentless pushing of unsubstantiated claims. He cites quite a number of case studies of award-winning reporters who ended their careers in ignominy after doubt was cast on their uncanny ability to find stories where other journalists couldn't. The monster-ego always seems to be more vulnerable than the team of equals to self-delusion, fraud, or being seduced by evil dictators."

The great American journalist and media critic Renata Adler fixed the downturn of American journalism to the time when reporter bylines suddenly became ubiquitous instead of rare, something a reporter previously had had to earn through years of excellent reporting, and the proliferation of the use of uncredited quotes.

>112 rocketjk: Yes, Rusbridger also has hard things to say about the tyranny of bylines and datelines.

Moving on: time for my Q4 thread, which is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/344928