thorold leant upon a coppice gate / when Frost was spectre-gray (in Q1)

So, here we are in 2018. And as usual, it doesn’t really feel any different from last year.

In 2017 I read 136 books (if I counted right) - still a bit more than average, but not as many as in 2016.

Major themes were the Benelux and Nordic reads from the RG group - I finally got around to reading Het verdriet van België but didn’t manage the third part of Kristin Lavransdatter or Moberg’s The emigrants yet. But I did finally get around to reading some William Heinesen, only 25 years after visiting the Faroes.

I got involved on my own initiative with a serious attempt to get to grips with Milton, reading the poems at the same time as following a lecture course and reading a few critical works and biographies. That was hard work (and partly accounts for the relatively small number of books read in the first half of the year), but it was also very satisfying.

There were a few nice little bits of serendipity, like the way a French-Canadian novel I picked up early in the year, Le figuier sur le toit, unexpectedly turned out to resonate with a couple of more or less autobiographical German novels I read later on, Pawels Briefe and Rücken an Rücken.

Towards the end of the year, I got a lot of pleasure from catching up with the work of British novelist Ali Smith - I’d enjoyed her debut short story collection 20 years ago but then somehow forgotten all about her. A very clever and original writer, I have no idea how I managed to overlook her for so long.

All in all, a good reading year.

I don’t have any big plans for the new year - one or two trips pencilled in, but nothing really major as yet. The general target is still to make room for plenty of time out of doors, plenty of music and books, and plenty of time for friends and family.

Reading plans: subject to change on the slightest whim, of course, but there are a few broad goals that I have in mind.

- Classics: I didn’t read much from before the 20th century last year (other than Milton), so that could be an area to focus some (re-)reading time on. Trollope, Hardy, Balzac and Zola are all high on the list at present.

- Reading Globally: I’m looking forward to 2018’s theme reads. Q1 is “travelling the TBR”, and there’s quite a bit on my pile that would fit that! There are some African books that have been there for years, for instance. And several leftovers from recent themes, including the Caribbean and Scandinavia.

- Big Poet Project: getting to grips with Milton last year was fun - I could carry on with that, but at the moment I’m veering towards starting someone new. Wordsworth, Keats, Schiller and Blake are the prime candidates at the moment. Rilke as well, but he didn’t grab me quite as much as I hoped when I read the biography.

- Other loose ends from 2017: I (re-)discovered several writers last year that I wanted to follow up but didn’t: amongst others Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson, Paul Auster, Goytisolo...

- Clearing the TBR: I say this every year, of course, but this is the year I’m finally going to do it. Honestly ;-)

Hello, Mark! I've starred your thread, and will follow you far more closely in 2018.

Passing by to wish you a happy new year. I look forward to following your thread this year. Btw, I loved the poem (>1 thorold:)

Love the poem too, and your attribution. Enjoyed following last year, and will try to (mostly) keep up this year. I really like your big poet project idea. Wish you a great year of reading, however close to or far from your plan you end up.

>1 thorold: Lovely.

My husband's comment on our current deep-freeze in the Midwest: "Good reading weather."

>2 thorold: I also rediscovered Ali Smith after a fairly long break, in 2015, and have been really enjoying her books since. Autumn was one of the last books I read last year and I have Winter waiting to go.

best wishes with your reading year and plans. Your headline quote makes me smile, especially when I see it in the list of CR2018 threads, I start thinking of poets at gates Kavanagh, Frost (I think), Heaney too maybe, no doubt many more. I hope to stop by and comment now and again, but will make a point only do so if I've paused a bit at the gate, to feel the view, thinking on whether there's anything to be said.

>9 tonikat: Poets and gates - I just came across this in The hand of Ethelberta:

‘ Is she a poetess ?’
‘ That I cannot say. She is very clever at verses ; but she don’t lean over gates to see the sun, and goes to church as regular as you or I, so I should hardly be inclined to say that she’s the complete thing.’

Obviously, the best time to follow up on a reading plan is Now, so I've started the year with a Palliser novel:

Phineas Redux (1874) by Anthony Trollope (UK, 1815-1882)

  

As the title rather implies, this fourth part of the Palliser saga brings back the main characters from Phineas Finn, slightly older and rearranged, but in a plot that fels disconcertingly like a re-run of that first book. Phineas is back from Ireland to have another go at establishing himself in English politics; as soon as he arrives he finds himself back in touch with the three ladies who were the drivers of the plot before - Violet (now happily married to a foxhunting peer), Laura (still estranged from her gloomy Scottish husband) and Madame Max (busy consoling the old Duke of Omnium in his declining years). And Lady Glencora, as we would expect, is discreetly pulling the strings.

Politics also seems to have gone round in circles. The Great Reform that was fought over so bitterly hasn't made elections very much fairer yet, and the hypocrisy of parliament is unchanged - in a blatant move to split the opposition, a minority Tory Prime Minister is promoting a measure that he and his party have always opposed, and which none of them believe in (plus ca change!). When a cabinet minister is brutally murdered, the police arrest an Irishman and an immigrant from Eastern Europe...

There's always something very comforting in pulling on a big, thick Victorian novel on a winter's day, and Trollope is about as warm and wooly as they come. But that's not to say that the world he writes about is idealised and comforting - he is quite happy to show us corruption, fraud, hypocrisy (religious and political), mental illness, inequality, greed and all the rest. Parliament, the Church and the Law are all fully open to be mocked and criticised for their weaknesses. Unlike most British writers of the time, he also has no hesitation about breaking the convention that marriages in fiction have to be happy, and he's not completely convinced that there's any sound basis for setting up society in such a way that men run things and women are there only to help and support them.

A detail - only one among many - that really struck me was the way Trollope lets Phineas suffer a kind of emotional collapse after what should (by normal narrative standards) have been his big moment of triumph - as soon as the intense stress he's been under is taken away, he goes into a period of depression in which he doesn't want to talk to anybody, to be seen in public, or make any kind of plans for his future. When you read it, you feel that this is the only possible way someone like Phineas could possibly have reacted, but you have to wonder whether any other novelist of the time would have allowed a male character to show that kind of weakness.

A good start to the year!

...and carried on catching up with my Ali Smith backlog:

The first person and other stories (2008) by Ali Smith‬ (UK, 1962- )

  

Another engaging, subversive collection of stories, in which Smith enjoys herself experimenting with different kinds of narrative voices, especially her trademark second-person style, in which the narrator addresses another person (normally a lover/partner) and imagines that person's responses in a fictional conversation. But this device also gets subverted here in one of the stories, where the "You" character answers back and points out how arrogant it is for the "I" character to assume she knows how "You" would act in a fictional setting, turning the tables by imagining how it would work out if the "I" character were put into that setting...

There's a lot of language-play, as we would expect, and Smith also plays around with the whole idea of narrative closure. Stories frequently have multiple narratives going on in them that fail to develop in traditional ways, and which do not always intersect or even have any obvious parallels. Or (as in "Fidelio and Bess"), two well-known stories from another medium get inextricably tangled up with each other...

>11 thorold: Enjoyed your Phineas summary. A few years back lyzard (Liz of 75ers) led a group read; you might be interested in the discussion:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/195212

Liz also did group reads of The Prime Minister and The Duke's Children (both the old and restored editions). I think she's planning another Trollope group read later in the year.

>10 thorold: made me laugh, didn't realise old TH could be funny, but then I have not really read him yet, prose anyway. Neither did I know of that book and will remember it now when I do work through him.

I will get to Trollop one day, but in the meantime I can enjoy your reviews

Enjoyed these reviews. I’m thinking how to convince whatever part of myself feels it must stick to plan to add in an Ali Smith book this year. Trollope will have to wait a while yet. The 19th century plan is, for the moment, to get there some day.

>13 kac522: Thanks - that was very interesting!

Continuing the "do it now" approach to the 19th century, I borrowed a Hardy novel that I hadn't read yet from my parents' shelves. When I wanted to add it to my LT catalogue afterwards, it - inevitably - turned out that I have a copy of it back home as well...

The hand of Ethelberta (1876) by Thomas Hardy (UK, 1840-1928)

  

Uncharacteristically for British novelists of any era, Thomas Hardy came from a rural artisan background (his father was a stonemason and builder) - he was lucky enough to get the chance to study, and practiced as an architect before devoting himself to literature. Also rather uncharacteristically for a major novelist, he is remembered at least as much for his lyric verse as for his prose fiction. He lived for most of his life in Dorset, and much of his work is set in the south-west of England, which he transformed into the fictional region of Wessex (same geography, different placenames).

The hand of Ethelberta is a fairly early novel, which appeared two years after Far from the madding crowd. He classed it as one of his "novels of ingenuity" and as a "comedy in chapters", both of which give a strong hint that we're not in the world of grim, arbitrary rural tragedy that readers of Tess or Jude might expect from a Hardy novel. But neither are we in the bucolic world of Under the greenwood tree - this is a social comedy of ambition and class-differences, very much part of the modern world of 1870s Britain (almost in HG Wells country), even if the plot sometimes seems to owe more than a little to Moll Flanders...

Ethelberta is a clever, enterprising, young woman from a working-class background who has risen in the world by a series of accidents that would easily fill a three-volume novel in themselves, but which Hardy summarizes in a couple of paragraphs on the opening page. Unfortunately, she has acquired social standing without very much money to back it up, so she has to use all her ingenuity to earn enough to support her many siblings. She finds a niche for herself as a professional story-teller, but the novelty value of this is clearly going to be short-lived, so it's a case of maximising the opportunities her various suitors present. If possible, without hurting that very nice young musician who will never have enough money to marry her.

The plot frequently requires the complex mechanisms of French farce (not Hardy's greatest skill as a novelist) and at a couple of points drifts into a parody of bad-baronet-style melodrama so good that it's hard to realise that it is meant to be funny. Which probably explains why this isn't one of Hardy's better-known books. But what does make it interesting is his careful analysis of the pain and misunderstanding that can be caused by the rigidity of a framework for social relations based on the assumption that a person's "class" is immanent and invariable, whilst in reality, late-Victorian society provided more opportunities than ever before for people to move up and down the social ladder.

The key scene in the book is a dinner-party where the Doncastles have invited Ethelberta to meet Lord Mountclere, without being aware that Ethelberta is actually the daughter of their tactful and efficient butler. Hardy resists the temptation to produce a big revelation here, but allows us to appreciate the pain that father and daughter must both be feeling as she sits there whilst he pours her wine and neither of them can afford to give any acknowledgement of their relationship. And, of course, to make his middle-class readers pause for a moment and wonder if it's possible that some of their own servants might be human beings with private joys and sorrows...

Reading this directly after Trollope made me realise what a wonderfully three-dimensional view of society Hardy has. He's a writer who can't describe the presence of a jug of milk on a table without wondering about all the people who were involved in getting it there, and in many cases telling us something about them as individuals.

The landscape is always important in Hardy as well, of course - in this case much of the action takes place around Swanage, Corfe Castle and Bournemouth, and it always feels as though you'd have little difficulty following the journeys by land and sea he describes, if you could only find an 1870s map.

The most recent novel by Monika Maron, whose family memoir Pawels Briefe I enjoyed a few months ago:

Zwischenspiel (2015) by Monika Maron (DDR, Germany, 1941- )

  

On her way to a funeral in another part of Berlin, Ruth suffers a sudden, inexplicable vision disturbance that makes it difficult for her to find her way to the cemetery. She ends up instead in a large city park that seems to be populated mostly by ghosts, including Olga, the mother of Ruth's first ex-partner Berndt (she's the one being buried), and Bruno, best friend of Ruth's ex-husband, the novelist Hendrik. And Margot and Erich Honecker (who still think it's 1990), and a dog called Nikki (who isn't necessarily a ghost at all).

Ruth is a Maron-like character who had always defined herself by stubborn resistance to the East German regime as personified by her stepfather; Olga had simply tried to lead a good life and stay under the radar, whilst Bruno drank himself to death as a form of inner exile. And the Honeckers still believe that socialism is going to come back and prove that they were right. And Nikki has smelled sausages...

So it's another opportunity for Maron to go back over her life-history and explore the way political conflict spills over into personal life, and how a broken political system breaks the people living under it and leaves them with guilts and resentments that the passage of time can never take away. But also to look more generally at ideas about death, the role of religious belief, good and evil, and all the rest. Possibly a bit much for such a slight little book to carry, but Maron just about gets away with it.

>17 thorold: lovely review. I haven't read Hardy's prose but do have several of his novels as I planned to read his prose in order. I've been to his cottage twice and to Max Gate. And yes part of the draw is his countryside which is great walking country. But I hadn't realised about this lighter side, so look forward to learning more - I'm just doing it with poetry, so maybe also more prose. I need to know now to if she develops in her gate leaning, not to mention more about her musician friend.

>19 tonikat: I think there’s a lot to be said for reading at least one of the most famous novels before you go to the early ones, otherwise you risk running out of steam before you see the point of him as a novelist. Virginia Woolf’s essay on Hardy the novelist is worth reading, if you get the chance.

Ethelberta as a poet is a bit of a disappointment - she leaves off after the first volume of love lyrics and moves on to something else. Young Mr Julian sets one of the poems to music, but then gets shunted off rather clumsily into a subplot.

Interesting review of The Hand of Ethelberta, which is a Thomas Hardy novel absolutely new to me

Another one who enjoyed your take on Hardy, and the mini-bio of him. Also interesting about the Maron novel.

>17 thorold: An awesome review - I had not read this one even though I love Hardy.

I can see I'm going to have to carry on with Hardy. He deserves the publicity! Not right now, but coming soon...

In the mean time, I'm back in Holland, and need to catch up with the books I read during my last few days in York and on the way home. First one that was left over from last quarter's Nordic theme (noticing that the touchstone defaults to WG Sebald's wonderful book of the same title reminds me that it must be about time to re-read him too!). Fun to see that the Swedish part of this book takes place in almost the same region as The long ships, which was written at about the same time.

The Emigrants (1949; English 1951) by Vilhelm Moberg (Sweden, 1898-1973), translated by Gustav Lannestock

  

Moberg was a prominent Swedish working-class writer, an autodidact who grew up on a small farm in Småland and made his name as a radical journalist, playwright and novelist who was ready to oppose all forms of authority (church, police, monarchy, Nazi Germany, ...) on behalf of ordinary people.

The tetralogy The Emigrant Novels, of which this is the first book, tells the story of an extended family of farmers from Småland who emigrate to Minnesota in the 1850s. It was a major project which kept Moberg busy from 1945 to 1959, including some seven years of research in the US (he went back to Sweden for good in 1955, disgusted with McCarthyism and American religious conservatism). From the start, one of Moberg's main aims was to inform Swedish-Americans about how and why their ancestors came to the US, and he worked closely together with his American translator Gustav Lannestock, so that the English versions appeared soon after the Swedish originals.

In this first volume, we meet the main characters, Karl-Oskar and his wife Kristina, who are trying to make a living farming on a few acres of poor land that is barely adequate to feed their family and pay the interest on their inherited debts, even in a good year. Needless to say, there are no good years in this book. Karl-Oskar's younger brother is a labourer on a more prosperous farm, where he is forced to submit to sustained physical abuse - the servant law gives labourers essentially no rights against their masters. And Karl-Oskar's uncle is a radical non-conformist preacher repeatedly punished by the priest and the law for following his "heretical" beliefs. For all of them, together with a few other local outcasts (a single mother forced to earn a living as a prostitute, a married man unable to divorce his detested wife, ...), the idea of selling up and going to America seems very attractive.

But, of course, it isn't as easy as all that - physically or psychologically - to leave everything you know and set off over the edge of the map, even if there is rumoured to be a promised land there. Moberg tells us a lot about the hardships of the journey, first by cart over the border from Småland into Blekinge to get to the port of embarkation, then over the sea to New York on a small sailing ship, where we have to endure the usual quota of storms, doubts and diseases, and some attrition of the emigrant group.

Moberg is very strong on indignation and social realism, and paints a convincing picture of what the life of his characters must have been like (obviously not so very different from the conditions in which he himself grew up 50 years later). But I didn't find it very easy to engage sympathetically with the characters - they all seemed to be more case-studies than real individuals. And the narrative march of deprivation and disaster was a bit too inevitable - it isn't easy to keep up your attention when you are always 95% certain of what is about to go wrong. So this is a worthwhile read, rather than an entertaining one. I'm not sure if I still have the courage to follow Karl-Oskar and Kristina through the many accidents and disappointments that are obviously going to face them over the course of the next three volumes.

In complete contrast, something short, English and frivolous:

The Abbess of Crewe (1974) by Muriel Spark (UK, 1918-2006)

  

Muriel Spark is one of those writers who are just about impossible to pin down, because the different bits of her life all seem to belong to other people - her Presbyterian/Jewish background in Edinburgh (so overshadowed by the film of her book that it scarcely seems her own property any more), her Doris-Lessing-style unhappy marriage in Southern Rhodesia, life in London's literary bedsit-land in the 40s and 50s, conversion to Roman Catholicism, Patricia-Highsmith-style exile in Italy with a ladyfriend (but apparently not a lover...). Her books all seem to be short, witty, and unconventional in form, but it's hard to find much more than that to link them together.

The Abbess of Crewe is a Firbankian romp set in a Benedictine religious community in England, which rather bizarrely turns out to be a satire of Nixon and the Watergate scandal. The nuns have to elect a successor to the late Abbess Hildegard, and the two main candidates are Sister Felicity, who stands for love, peace and needlework, and doesn't take the vow of chastity quite literally, and Sister Alexandra, who runs the sisters' electronics laboratory and has an unrivalled collection of incriminating tape recordings. When a couple of Jesuit novices are commissioned to break into the sewing-room in search of documents and they overreach themselves by stealing Sister Felicity's silver thimble, it becomes hard to keep the resulting scandal out of the papers.

There's also a Kissinger-like nun, Sister Gertrude, who trots the globe propagating the faith through the little tribal wars she organises in remote countries, and Sister Alexandra turns out to have a fatal weakness for English poetry - in the end it's a provocative citation from Milton that is responsible for losing her the support of the Roman Curia. So a lot of fun, some clever wordplay, but not a huge amount of substance.

Too bad about The Emmigrants, considering what Moberg put into it. The Abbess of Crewe sounds cute, although I’m wondering what “Firbankian” means. Enjoyed reading these reviews.

A second chance for the second-most-famous Turkish writer, Elif Şafak, who didn't quite manage to win me over with Three daughters of Eve last September:

The Architect's Apprentice (2014) by Elif Şafak‬ (Turkey, 1971- )

  

Apart from elephants and architecture, Şafak's take on Mimar Sinan brings in pirates, gypsies, dwarves, a beautiful Ottoman princess, evil viziers, cross-dressing, hiding behind tapestries, a vile dungeon, several fires, and more plots and poison than you can shake a stick at. It would be churlish to pretend that I didn't enjoy it - it's a rip-roaring adventure story in the best Arabian Nights tradition, and highly readable.

As with Three daughters of Eve, I felt that Şafak didn't quite manage to push this book the step further that it would need to have some kind of political message beyond the obvious. The obvious in this case being that architects depend on powerful patrons, so you can't build something big and beautiful without compromising with the nasty side of state power. She also gets herself into a bit of a structural mess, because her story needs her to preserve the viewpoint character, Jahan, as a youthful action hero (along the lines of David Balfour) through a storyline that stretches from the 1530s to the 1630s. In the end she has to play a magic realist get-out-of-jail-free card to cover this, but not until some time after we have started to smell a rat. I'm sure this could have been handled more elegantly by giving Jahan a (grand-)child to carry on his work, but it's not my job to write the book...

(Aside: A few months ago, I read Mathias Enard's 2010 novel Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants, which brings Michelangelo to Istanbul to work with Ottoman architects, but doesn't involve any actual elephants or battles except in the title. Obviously it was just an unfortunate coincidence that Elif Şafak came along four years later with a rather elephant-and-battle-heavy historical novel in which Ottoman architects go to Rome to meet Michelangelo. Even more unfortunate that no-one told her that Babar and Dumbo were just about OK because we were much younger then, but in the meantime Sarah Gruen came along and killed the market for sentimental elephant stories for good.)

>26 dchaikin: Sorry: "Firbankian" from Ronald Firbank, high priest of English high camp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Firbank

>24 thorold: When I read The Emigrants several years ago, I loved it--it was one of my few 5 star books. I thought it succeeded in showing why people would leave everything they know for the unknown. I continued with the next 2 books, and didn't like them as much, though I still found them to be good books. I have the last one on my shelf.

>27 thorold: Loved your aside about elephants! (And all your reviews).

(I'm sure there would be room here for a joke about Turkey and Christmas, but I'll leave you to put that in for yourselves.)

This year, the book-club I'm in is trying out a "rotating chair" system. Our Turkish member is in the chair for the first meeting, and she proposed this well-loved novella that has only quite recently appeared in translation. Apparently it's sold the best part of a million copies in Turkey in the last three or four years, possibly (as Maureen Freely speculates in the Guardian article linked below) through people looking for a gentle antidote to Erdoğan's macho rhetoric. It doesn't seem to have been made into a film yet, but it is obviously crying out for that. No doubt someone will have a go soon.

Madonna in a fur coat (1943; English 2016) by Sabahattin Ali (Turkey, etc., 1907-1948), translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe

  

Sabahattin Ali was born in the Ottoman town of Eğridere (now Ardino in Bulgaria) and trained as a teacher. He studied in Istanbul and Potsdam. His political writings got him into trouble with the Turkish authorities on several occasions, and he lost his life in unclear circumstances (probably murdered by the security forces) whilst trying to escape abroad in 1948.

A young clerk finds himself sharing an office with the self-effacing, Bartlebyish commercial translator Raif Effendi, visits him at home a couple of times when he's ill, and slowly gets to know and love him, but the two of them never really manage to talk. Then Raif becomes more seriously ill and entrusts a notebook to the narrator, which turns out to be an account of Raif's stay in Berlin sometime in the early 1920s.

He has been sent there to learn about the soap industry but actually spends his time discovering German literature and art. At an exhibition of modern art, he is captivated by a self-portrait by the artist Maria Puder (which he starts to think of as "Madonna in a fur coat") and goes back over and over again to look at it. The artist eventually notices him, of course, but when she asks him about his interest in the picture he is too shy to look her in the face, and doesn't register who she is until another occasion when they pass by chance in the street. When the two of them eventually do start talking to each other they never stop, falling into an intensive emotional friendship. Maria is very conscious that there's a strong "masculine" side to her own personality that is complemented by something "feminine" in Raif's, and both of them are afraid of the sort of power relationships that would be implied by a conventional love affair. And of course they do eventually end up in bed together and fate doesn't grant them the time to redefine the terms of their friendship to deal with the effects of that.

Lovely and sad and romantic, but subtle and funny as well - I think you'd have a hard time finding something to dislike in this delicate little book, unless you happen to be a power-crazed male politician...

Maureen Freely on Sabahattin Ali: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/sabahattin-ali-madonna-fur-coat-re...

And back to crime. I can't help wondering if it's a coincidence that I'm reading so many books by Scottish lesbians these days, or if that's just the modern version of the effect that Dr Johnson used to complain about. I'm not complaining, anyway, as long as they go on writing good books...

Dead Beat (1992) by Val McDermid‬ (UK, 1955- )
Kick back (1993) by Val McDermid‬ (UK, 1955- )

   

These are the first two books in McDermid's series featuring the Manchester private detective Kate Brannigan:

Dead Beat introduces Kate Brannigan, a partner in a Manchester security consultancy that does investigation work mostly in commercial and computer fraud cases. She does the legwork whilst her business partner Bill Mortensen does the clever stuff with floppy disks and modems (yes, 1992 was a long time ago!). In this opener, she is persuaded against her better judgment to take time off from a counterfeit wristwatch investigation to undertake a missing-person enquiry for a rock-star client (yes, they still had those in Manchester in 1992 too...). And, without too much obvious grinding of the cogs of narrative inevitability, she finds herself face to face with her first corpse and investigating a murder. And not just any old murder, but a murder in a mansion containing a finite number of suspects.

The story is a bit silly, but it just-about works (taking into account a fair amount of self-parody), and tough-talking Brannigan and her cynical throwaway comments about the world she moves in are fun. And it's not obvious until quite late in the book who the murderer is going to be.

Kick Back sees Brannigan investigating a commercial case, a complex and initially very opaque fraud involving conservatories and remortgaging, which soon starts to get mixed up with another real-estate fraud she's investigating on behalf of her friend, Alexis. Needless to say, a body turns up in the course of the story, but it's rather incidental this time, and the real plot is about the two frauds. You may well get rather left behind by the technical details about conveyancing here, but it all seems to make sense. And it's amusing to see Brannigan getting her first mobile phone, much against her better judgment, since she's convinced that the only people in Manchester who carry mobile phones are drug dealers...

>26 dchaikin: >29 arubabookwoman: I'm sure I'd have loved The emigrants if I'd come to it a bit earlier, or if I had a personal connection to the regions he's writing about - I've probably just read one or two too many social-realist agri-epics, and didn't find anything that really makes Moberg stand out for me. I definitely wouldn't want to discourage anyone from reading it.

Thank you for your reviews. I'm adding Madonna in a Fur Coat to my wishlist.

I refer to Britain as Turkey land because with Bexit they voted for Xmas.

>30 thorold: He has been sent there to learn about the soap industry but actually spends his time discovering German literature and art. yes well wouldn't you.

Enjoyed your excellent reviews - good to know what is popular in Turkey

>31 thorold: I gave up with McDermid finding it all bit too gruesome, but these two seem not to cater for the gore hounds.

Enjoying your reviews of Turkish lit, of which I've read nothing beyond Orhan Pamuk.

There was a 1971 film of The Emigrants starring Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. Very popular among my Swedish descendant family, many of whose ancestors came from Blekinge. They settled in Western NEw York though, not Minnesota.

>35 baswood: Yes, the more recent ones can be rather gruesome, these two were fairly harmless. Unless you have a phobia about lawyers or estate agents...
I can’t speak for the rest of the Brannigan series.

>36 janeajones: It would be fun to be able to imagine yourself as the descendant of Liv Ulmann and Max von Sydow, I should think!

I came across another article on the background to Madonna in a fur coat (but it doesn't add a huge amount): http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36213246

---

I only read three books in Spanish last year (although they were all good ones!) - maybe that's also something I can improve on in 2018. Here's this year's first dip into Hispanic letters, also the first so far this year by an author from the left-hand-side of the pond. I found out about this book through SassyLassy's CR thread, but I see Kay posted about it a bit earlier last year as well.

Muerte Súbita (2013) by Álvaro Enrigue (Mexico, 1969- )

  

Rome, 1599. The painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo are playing three sets of real tennis as a result of a challenge issued for reasons neither can quite recall, which must have had something to do with the number of bottles of grappa consumed last night. Their seconds are a well-known Pisan mathematician(!) and the Duke of Osuna, respectively, and the spectators in the gallery include some Roman low-life figures who have served as models for Caravaggio's most famous canvases.

That's the sort of premise for an historical novel that is hard to resist in anyone's hands, and it only gets more intriguing when we discover that Enrigue is not only telling us about the match and the players, but also brings in a lot of background about the cultural history of ball-games (there are a lot of balls in this book: knowing the way Spanish idiom works, you can be sure that not all of them are going to be the sort used in games) and a parallel story about Hernan Cortés and the conquest of Mexico. And a few other things...

This isn't a book you can sum up easily, and Enrigue clearly doesn't want it to be something you can reduce to a single key idea. The idea he playfully suggests when he asks himself what the book is all about, some 3/4 of the way in, is that history is all about the bad guys winning, but I don't think we're meant to take this as limiting. In many ways, the book reminded me of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and his theory that the baroque way of seeing the world was only made possible by European contact with America: Enrigue also wants us to see the possible Mexican influences on Caravaggio's painting (and remind us that the Mexicans also had their own ball-game rituals...).

Fun, and definitely a book to keep your mind agile, which I really enjoyed despite my normal antipathy to ball games of all kinds. I suspect that the real-life Quevedo, combative though he was, would have been somewhat averse to ball games too, with his notorious short sight and bad leg. But that's probably something we have to allow Enrigue under the heading of poetic licence.

I'm the sort of person who has trouble remembering the rules of modern lawn tennis; 16th century real tennis is infinitely more confusing, especially since the usual terminology of the game as played at Hampton Court or in Merton Street is mostly derived from obsolete French words, not always a good basis for following blow-by-blow descriptions in Spanish, but that doesn't really seem to matter much. This isn't a book about who wins and who loses, at that level.

I tried to avoid adding to my TBR over the Christmas break, but I wasn't entirely successful. Especially when I saw an Ali Smith novel I hadn't read in a charity shop...

There but for the (2011) by Ali Smith‬ (UK, 1962- )

  

In between the main course and the sweet, one of the guests at a dinner-party goes upstairs and locks himself into the spare room. Three months later, he's still there, and his hostess is getting desperate.

Yes, it sounds a bit like The man who came to dinner, and we're probably meant to notice that, but Ali Smith's take on the undislodgeable guest is a distinctly 21st-century one. Miles is a subversive figure whom we get to know through a scattering of random, anarchic acts of kindness to strangers as well as through his silent protest against the inhumanity of the most excruciatingly funny literary dinner party since Abigail's Party. The involuntary hosts, Eric and Gen (yes, this is also a book that revels in excruciatingly bad puns), inadvertently turn him into the social media phenomenon "Milo" - before they know what's happening, there's a protest camp behind their Greenwich house, and volunteers are sending food up to Miles with a basket on a rope and pulley arrangement. And Gen is on her way to making a fortune from "Milo" tee-shirts...

As well as celebrating pointless acts of protest, Smith uses the Greenwich location and her subversively clever nine-year-old character, Brooke, to bring in a lot of ideas about how we perceive history and the passage of time, and about how puns and misunderstandings help us to make sense of a confusing and frustrating world. Like all Smith's books, it's ultimately about how crucial it is for human beings to act like human beings, to make time in our lives for love and laughter and trust between people. And it's enormous fun to read.

---

Jeanette Winterson on Ali Smith (for the Times, April 2003): http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/journalism/ali-smith/

The truth is that Ali Smith can’t be captured easily. Her ambition is to shatter the way we usually see things. She doesn’t want the obvious frame, the arranged picture. Her work is not a pose. Difficult then, to pin her down to a photo opportunity.

Enjoyed your review of muerte subita - not sure I want to read a book about the bad guys winning, but there again who can resist a description of a game of real tennis.

AS usual I enjoyed you review of an Ali Smith book, but was disappointed to find I had not got any on my bookshelves, which is a pity because I am sure I would like reading her.

>38 thorold: I envy you reading this in the original Spanish. You're probably right about Quevedo and tennis, but he does seem like an interesting character following Osuna around Europe. It just occurred to me that his swindler, El Buscón went off to the new world, another link with Enrigue. I do really believe in his discussion of seeing history from other geographical perspectives.

The French Executioner for some reason has always seemed to me like a good plot device, for some reason always livening things up.

In the spirit of Travelling the TBR Road, this is one that's been lingering forgotten on my TBR shelf since long before I joined LT. I found a receipt from a local secondhand bookshop still tucked into the front cover, dated 25 May 1995. I think I must have bought it with a vague idea that it might be useful for a postcolonial lit dissertation I had to write, but then I found something else more interesting to write about and never got around to opening it...

The delight of hearts: Or what you will not find in any book (ca. 1250; English 1988) by Ahmad al-Tifashi (Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, 1184-1253)
- translated from Arabic to French by René R Khawam (Syria, France, 1917-2004) and from French to English by Edward A Lacey (Canada, 1938-1995)



Ahmad al-Tifashi was a 13th century Berber writer. Not much is known about him except that he was the compiler of this anthology (also known as A promenade of the hearts), a frequently-cited book on minerals, and a couple of medical texts.

The delight of hearts is a collection of medieval Arabic jokes, anecdotes and poems on the topic of sex, strung together and made to look respectable by suitable editorial comments and (pseudo-)scientific discussion from al-Tifashi. The respected French Arabist René Khawam produced the first complete translation of the text in 1971 (revised 1981); the English edition published in 1988 is a partial translation of the French text by the Canadian poet Edward Lacey. Logically enough, Gay Sunshine Press only paid Lacey to translate the bits about sex between men, which is about 60% of al-Tifashi's book. Obviously, anyone with a serious academic interest (or simply curious about the other 40%, which deals with topics like massage, flagellation, and anal sex with women) would do better to read it in French or Arabic.

In his introduction, al-Tifashi explains that his chief object is to entertain and amuse his readers. The Prophet himself is known to have indulged in jokes (although the examples al-Tifashi quotes don't seem very funny at this distance in time...), and there is plenty of evidence that laughing at life is a good thing. We shouldn't assume that he endorses any of the activities he writes about, or that they are safe and legal (much has changed in the world in 800 years, but not the porn industry's instinct for protecting itself with disclaimers!).

Actually, a surprising number of the anecdotes he recounts could fit into a comparable modern anthology given a few minor tweaks relating to types of clothing, means of transport, etc. Tales about sexual partners playing tricks on each other, being more or less well-endowed than expected, and so on, are surprisingly interchangeable. Other things are a bit more exotic - for instance, there's a whole chapter about incidents of "sleepwalking", penetrating someone (usually not the person you intend to) in their sleep, which only make sense in a culture where it's usual for groups of men to share a sleeping area, and where it's very dark at night.

Edward Lacey clearly does his best to preserve this light-hearted and subversive tone by using informal language in his translation, which sometimes gives rise to slightly odd transitions as we move from delicate quatrains about fish and gazelles to prose passages that read like an American 1980s hardcore porn paperback. And there are definitely some expressions that we could have done without - notably "dinge queens" (which he uses for men who like being penetrated by black slaves). I can't imagine that many people were still using that, even in 1988...

The translated poems, many of them by the 8th century poet Abu Nuwas, preserve rather more exotic atmosphere than the prose passages, but again Lacey isn't trying to outdo FitzGerald - he keeps the rhyme and metre quite loose most of the time.

An amusing and very sexy anthology, but I don't think it really tells us anything we didn't know about medieval Arab culture. Unless you have a very narrow view of the world, it will be no surprise to learn that men liked to fantasise about sex just as much 800 years ago as they do now, and that the number of imaginable permutations was not also so different from what it is now. Since we know that writing about beautiful boys became a fixed literary convention for later poets influenced by Abu Nuwas even if what they were thinking about were beautiful girls, or they were trying to describe religious ecstasies, we can't really take al-Tifashi as representative of the Arab world in the 13th century any more than we could draw conclusions about New York City in the 1970s from a reading of Larry Kramer.

You who wipe away my kiss
from your cheek,
fearing if your master saw it,
it would speak

and he'd punish you; if I'd
only known this
fear of yours, beautiful boy,
I'd have kissed away my kiss.
      (Abu Nuwas, translated by Lacey)

>41 SassyLassy: Yes, I came out of the book wanting to know more about Quevedo (Spanish Golden Age writers altogether - that would be another Project sometime...).

I see I somehow restrained myself from using either of the "p"-words in my review, but you're right, the postcolonial slant is one of the most important things about it. I found what he had to say about Cortés from a Mexican viewpoint really interesting after having read Hugh Thomas's Mexico book a couple of years ago.

Great review of The delight of hearts - very dry(sense of humour) especially when you point out that in the 13th century most people would have shared beds and it must have been very dark at night.

Your off to fast start, Mark. Loved your review on The Delight of Hearts, what a fascinating ancient collection. But all three of the books I just read your reviews on sound terrific.

>44 baswood: Probably not actual beds, for Arabs - more like a communal space on a roof or in a tent for spreading mats out, I imagine.

“I was asleep and didn’t know anything about it until too late” is actually a defence that comes up in a lot of the famous historic gay sex cases in England - sharing beds in inns with strangers was still common until at least the 18th century. Usually without the “mistaken identity” element that al-Tifashi has so much fun with, though. In his stories the protagonist always realises at just the wrong moment that it’s not the pretty slave boy but the hairy old Emir he’s making love to, and that couldn’t really happen when there are only two of you in the bed.

>38 thorold: I read less than usual in Spanish last year as well, and I have resolved to do better this year. Muerte Súbita has gone on my mental TBR list.

Reading Muerte súbita made me want to watch Jarman’s Caravaggio again, so I spent a couple of days searching for the DVD before deciding that I either never had it or must have given it away. So I ordered it. And then realised that I do have a copy after all, but it’s on a VHS tape...

>48 thorold: I had Caravaggio on VHS too. Taped it - and all his other films - when the BBC (or Channel 4) had their Derek Jarman retrospective after his death. Sadly, we got rid of all our VHS tapes when our VCR gave up the ghost a few years back. For a long time, I was obsessed with the Last of England. It was the first arthouse film I saw at the cinema.

Another bit of Travelling the TBR Road. This one has only been on the TBR for four years, so it's quite a youngster...

African laughter : four visits to Zimbabwe (1992) by Doris Lessing (UK, 1919-2013)

  

Doris Lessing grew up on a farm in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, an experience that left her with a profound love of the country and an equal detestation for the racist values of the colonial society that ran it, both of which strongly influenced her writing. She moved to the UK in 1949 (aged 30), and apart from one visit in 1956 was not permitted to return until after independence - the Smith government classified her as a "prohibited immigrant" because of her political affiliations.

In this book, Lessing describes returning to newly-independent Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992. Although the material covers a period of ten years, she has obviously tried to avoid hindsight as far as possible and records her impressions of what she saw and heard in a very direct, immediate way - not quite a diary, but something very like it. The text is divided up into short, essay-like sections under sub-headings, in a slightly jokey newspaper style that looks as though it might be meant partly as a tribute to one of the friends she visits, a teacher in a remote bush school who is managing against all the odds to help his students produce a school magazine. But it also allows her to foreground how life in Zimbabwe is changing, by returning to a topic from a previous year under the same sub-heading.

In 1982, she is full of optimism - Zimbabwe is doing much better economically than most of its neighbours, it is able to feed itself, the scars of the long civil war seem to be healing, politics is not noticeably more corrupt than it was in 18th century Britain, and everyone (apart from her white farmer relatives, who are all muttering about selling up and going to South Africa) seems to believe in the country and its future. Where there are big problems, she sees people working hard to find ways to solve them.

On the subsequent visits, the tone changes a bit - many of the whites who left have come back, disappointed with what they found in South Africa, and are now putting their weight behind building a fair and multi-racial society in Zimbabwe, but climate change, soil erosion, AIDS, frequent shifts of agricultural policy, galloping corruption, and the increasing isolation and paranoia of Mugabe's single-party government all seem to be pushing the country into crisis. Of course, we know with hindsight that things only got (a lot) worse after 1992.

As we would expect, Lessing is a very clear and frank observer, both of what is going on and of her own reactions to it, which are obviously complicated by her status: she's simultaneously an outsider, a member of the colonial white farming class, and a left-leaning revolutionary. Most of the time she tells her story through the things people say to her and the things she directly observes herself, without resorting to newspaper reports or statistics. She works hard to see the positive and not allow herself to be distracted by the everyday inconveniences of African life.

There's a lot in the book about how the Zimbabwean landscape has been changed by the impact of increasing population - the bush that Lessing and her brother were able to roam in freely as children in the 1920s has shrunk, wildlife has disappeared in many areas, and the soil is suffering from erosion and overuse of chemicals.

Lessing also writes very perceptively about how aid projects work out on the ground. There is a very heartening description of the Book Team, a self-help project to provide villages with easily-intelligible handbooks on everyday topics. She goes out on the road with the team and is impressed with the enthusiasm and commitment of the village women who travel long distances to join in meetings and provide content for the books. And the sheer fun that they have doing it.

But we also hear about the mismatch between what people need and what aid organisations think they should have; how good ideas fail from problems in the supply of basic resources: schools that can't get books because of import restrictions; machines that can't be used for lack of spare parts; qualified teachers and nurses who don't want to work in remote areas, so their places have to be taken by enthusiastic but inexperienced foreign volunteers, etc. (all problems I've come across in many other countries when I was working with a development fund).

A constant refrain in the conversations Lessing has with black Zimbabweans is the comment "If Comrade Mugabe only knew..." - Lessing doesn't need to remind us of how many other kings and dictators that has been said by their loyal but worried subjects...

Very interesting review of the Lessing, and I enjoyed catching up with your previous reviews as well. I'm looking forward to what comes next. :)

Interesting review of the Lessing book. Entrenched rulers like Mugabe are almost always a curse.

I don't believe it! A Doris Lessing book that I have not read (or on my list to read). I have read Going Home, Lessing which is a diary/essay of her 1956 return.

Mugabe has finally gone.

Enjoyed your Lessing review, Mark.

...il songeait à ces poussées d’une famille, d’une souche qui jette des branches diverses, et dont la sève âcre charrie les mêmes germes dans les tiges les plus lointaines, différemment tordues, selon les milieux d’ombre et de soleil. Il crut entrevoir un instant, comme au milieu d’un éclair, l’avenir des Rougon-Macquart, une meute d’appétits lâchés et assouvis, dans un flamboiement d’or et de sang.

I first came across Zola in my teens, and I think I must have read about 10 or 12 of his books, one or two a year, in random order as I came across them, some in English and some in French, without any particular plan. And then lost interest and moved on to other things, as one does. But now so many other people in Club Read are reading Zola, I keep telling myself it's time to go back and read him again with a bit more context. Here goes with part 1...

It occurred to me that whilst we tend to see Napoleon III as a joke figure with a goatee who happened to be around during the most culturally-defining phase of modern French history (rebuilding of Paris, impressionism, Offenbach, etc.), he is really the prototype for the modern type of dictator, someone who originally comes to power democratically on a populist platform, promising to end poverty and restore law and order, but then entrenches himself by ruthlessly repressing political opponents (and giving them one-way tickets to French Guyana), gagging the press, and changing the constitution in his own favour. Mussolini, Hitler, Mugabe, Putin, Erdoğan (and many others) could have taken his correspondence course...

La Fortune des Rougon (1871; The fortune of the Rougons) by Emile Zola (France, 1840-1902)

  

Zola was born in Paris, but spent most of his childhood in Aix-en-Provence, where his father, an Italian engineer who died when Zola was a small child, was building a water-supply system. After finishing school, he moved to Paris and went to work for the bookseller and publisher Louis Hachette, whilst establishing himself as a journalist. He started writing the Rougon-Macquart cycle directly after the Franco-Prussian war, but it didn't really grab the public's attention until the publication of L'Assommoir in 1877.

The Rougon-Macquart cycle was partly inspired by Balzac's vast Comédie humaine, but it was conceived as a much more tightly-planned and focussed study, following the career of one particular family through the period of the Second Empire (1851-1871). Zola wants to show us how every aspect of French society was infected by the corruption, greed, and cynical self-interest coming down from the top, and over the course of the 20 volumes (originally he wanted to do it in 10...) and more than 20 years of work, that's pretty much what he did.

In this first volume Zola introduces us to the many members of the family, the lucky possessors of genetic material from Adélaïde Fouque (epileptic and mentally-disturbed) and her husband Rougon (vile peasant) or her lover Macquart (criminal). By the logic of 19th-century genetic science, we know that nothing could possibly go right with this mix, and it doesn't. The family is as corrupt as the government it lives under.

Because there are so many characters to introduce for future use and so much back-story to establish, this doesn't feel like a particularly well-balanced book, but from Zola's point of view we need all this information if we are to make sense of what follows, so you'd better be taking notes. Or have one of those editions that has Zola's famous crib-sheet in the endpapers.

The foreground story takes place over a few days in December 1851 as the sleepy provincial town of Plassans (Aix-en-Provence) reacts to the news of Louis Napoléon's coup-d'état. The idealistic teenager Silvère and his 13-year-old playmate/budding girlfriend Miette join the peasant army that is setting off to no-one-knows-where to defend the Republic against the evil Bonapartists, whilst Silvère's uncle Pierre schemes to ally himself to whichever side looks like giving him a worthwhile civic appointment when the dust settles. Normally in a historical novel it's a problem for the author that we already know who is going to win, but Zola cunningly exploits our hindsight to supply the tragic irony behind the story of the young revolutionaries and the black comedy of coup, counter-coup, and counter-counter-coup that plays out between the entrenched, the suppressed, and the upwardly-mobile in Plassans, in what we are obviously meant to take as a small-scale parody of the even more unseemly political events in Paris.

This book doesn't have the same kind of detailed excavation of the life of a particular aspect of society that we find in the later books in the cycle - it's obviously mostly based on Zola's own childhood memories of small-town life at the time of the coup, and so we don't get quite as much interesting detail as I would like, and we do get rather more than I would like of the sentimental adolescent friendship/love-affair of Silvère and Miette. But still definitely worth reading!

Great review! I appreciate that you took the time to provide the Napoléon context, as I'm pretty ignorant about it and am somewhat too lazy to look it up myself. This will help me with my own reading of Zola!

Are you planning on reading them all in a sequence or on reading other books inbetween?

>56 thorold: Well two things struck me from the first paragraph of your review: Aix-en-Provence that I visited for the first time last year (no longer sleepy, but still provincial) and the publisher Louis Hachette - the guide Hachette is my wine bible.

I have enjoyed every Zola novel I have read and so will be following your reviews with interest. Aways good to start at the beginning which I will do when I get to Zola.

For my French homework I am currently reading Pour une nuit d'amour. it is only about 100 pages, but I don't expect to be finishing it sometime soon.

>57 chlorine: Are you planning on reading them all in a sequence or on reading other books in between?

I'll see how it goes. At the moment I quite like the idea of reading all of them. Probably in sequence, not necessarily all this year. But it is also tempting to skip ahead to "old favourites"...
I'll definitely be reading at least a few other books in between.

>57 chlorine: Love the Arbre Généalogique. It always seems unfortunate that at the start of a series like this, the first book has to spend so much time laying groundwork, even if, as I suspect in this case, the author didn't expect to make the series quite as long as this one turned out to be. Enjoyed the review and I see you are reading in French. I have to try that sometime, but know it will slow me down and I enjoy this series too much to want that.

Had to go back and see when I read this, and see it was almost exactly two years ago (Jan 13, 2016) and I am still not through the series. I suspect you may finish before I do!

>60 SassyLassy: I had a closer look at the Arbre Généalogique (sorry, I couldn't get it legible in a size that would fit in a talk thread, but Wikipedia has a slightly clearer scan than mine: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émile_Zola#/media/File:Zola_-_Arbre_généalogiqu... ) - there are only three of the leaves that correspond to people born after 1851. If I counted right, there must have been 22 family members who had to be introduced in La fortune. Plus all the spouses and in-laws not shown separately on the tree, and a large contingent of citizens of Plassans, revolutionaries, gendarmes, officials, etc.

Zola loves words, so there's a lot to be said for reading him in French. But I did need to resort to a big dictionary a few times.

>61 thorold: There are many words in Zola that I don't understand myself, and many of those are not in the dictionary that is on my new e-reader, which is though supposed to be quite comprehensive (le nouveau Littré).

This is especially true in Le ventre de Paris with all the terms describing food and vegetables. I tend to just let it go, without striving to find a definition.

Another short novel from the "global" TBR pile - this one's been there for three years. I bought it after reading Clear light of day and then put it aside "for a bit" because it looked as though the two novels would have very similar themes (they do...). I've also read Baumgartner's Bombay, quite a long time ago.

Fasting, Feasting (1999) by Anita Desai (India, 1937- )

  

(I'm not going to claim this as my first headless-woman cover of the year, since there clearly is a head under that veil, and besides, Phineas Redux, first book of 2018, was a headless-man cover...)

Anita Desai grew up in India with a German mother and a Bengali father. She spoke German at home but had most of her schooling in English, which is the language she writes in. She's lived in the UK and US as well as India. Amongst other things, she's an (emeritus) professor at MIT. Several of her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker but - unlike her daughter Kiran Desai - she's never actually won it.

Fasting, feasting is another novel that builds on Philip Larkin's famous line about parents(*), looking at two seriously dysfunctional families. Uma's middle-class, provincial, Indian MamaPapa (she finds it hard to think of them as separate entities) don't see any particular need for her to have a life of her own. Several attempts to marry her off have failed ignominiously, as have some half-hearted attempts at rebellion, and since she's not clever enough or pretty enough to get away with fighting her parents long-term, she finds herself stuck in a life of looking after her baby brother and running pointless errands. Her pretty cousin doesn't fare much better, either - she is married off only to find herself at the mercy of a bullying mother-in-law.

Lest we think that all this is just a rant against "traditional" attitudes to women in India, Desai then changes the scene to Massachusetts, where Uma's overprivileged little brother has been sent for the obligatory "studying overseas". It becomes clear immediately that he's been just as heavily damaged by being pushed to succeed as Uma has by being pushed to fail, and moreover he finds himself staying with an American family that is every bit as dysfunctional as his own, with none of its members (least of all the father, who blithely keeps on barbecuing meat for vegetarians...) paying any serious attention to what's going wrong in the lives of the others. The only real difference between the Indians and the Americans seems to be that the American parents get a chance to mitigate some of the harm they've done before it's absolutely too late.

---
(*) Or possibly that tries to disprove Tolstoy's...

>63 thorold: Interesting review. It seems that you found more meaning in the connection between the parts about Uma and her brother than the others here who have read this book this year.

Enjoying your reviews. I may get to Zola some day, but I’ve been saying that for a few years now, so not holding my breath. You may inspire me, :)

>17 thorold: Thanks for the review of The Hand of Ethelberta. I recently began to re-read The Return of the Native and got bogged down, but I'm encouraged to pick it up again now. I've also recently picked up Phineas Redux. I'm a big Trollope fan, but have not read this one for many years, and I'm eager now to get to it.

I have read The inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai which I found disappointing. I think I would be more in tune with Anita - I have a couple on my bookshelves.

i really appreciated your putting Zola into the historical context. Someone else reviewed Fasting, Feasting here (at least one other Club Reader...or is it Club Read reader...member...??) and they had a different take on the two parts.

>64 chlorine: >68 dchaikin: The other person who recently posted about Fasting, feasting was wandering_star - that was partly what reminded me I still had it on the shelf. And made me wonder about Desai’s possible reasons for including the American part.

Another thing I had in my mind as I was reading it was to wonder whether we might have a different set of pre-programmed responses as “western” readers to an account of an exotic, Indian household in a piece of fiction from the way we expect to react to a description of suburban America. (Even though, looking from Europe, one is quite as strange and weird as the other...). I’m not really sure about that, though. There was a sort of uncomfortable Humbert Humbert feel about the way the narrator sees the Americans, I thought.

So, it looks as though the next Big poet Project is going to be all about the poet Rumpole likes to call "the old sheep of the Lake District".

The books are starting to come in. I began Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: a life yesterday, and had a quick read-through of the first couple of books of The Prelude.

Before I get too deeply into the matter, some initial thoughts on why I want to do this:

Wordsworth is a really interesting figure - he’s another non-metropolitan writer, like Hardy, and writes a lot about human interaction with landscape; he went through a very public political apostasy, starting out as a wild revolutionary and ending up conservative; he was a pioneer of Proustian self-analysis; he had one of literary history’s most high-profile invisible women running his life for him...

The Romantics generally, and Wordsworth in particular, represent the bit of English poetry with the greatest nostalgic popular appeal. Wordsworth is the only poet other than Shakespeare who has enough impact to keep a regional tourist industry going all by himself. The popular image that goes with “poet” is still of someone in a frock-coat striding over the fells looking at clouds and daffodils whilst his dutiful sister cooks the dinner. Or smoking opium and composing odes on the way to drown himself in the Mediterranean.

Naturally, if you want to write poetry yourself, you soon realise that any echoes of that sort of thing in your work are going to make you sound immature and unsophisticated, so you avoid the Romantics like the plague and stick to the 17th and 20th centuries, where all the really “difficult” poets are. In my case, I was also taught by people who had grown up with a (Leavisite) prejudice against the Romantics, and for my degree course the only modules from before the 20th century I happened to take were on Shakespeare and on mid-Victorian Britain.

So, historically I know that the end of the 18th century is a really interesting period when ideas were changing rapidly, but apart from a few hugely popular lyrics that have burned themselves into my brain and everyone else’s, I’ve never really got around to a proper look at what people were actually writing then. Possibly I’m the only living person who’s read more Browning than Wordsworth or Keats.

So watch this space...!

Watching with interest, and some awe you got through two books like that, but yes, they are for reading and re-reading, t be lived with. I'm starting book eleventh of the 1805 version today - which edition are you going to read? Dorothy is very interesting. But I look forward to hearing how this goes. Stephen Gill too. But tell me if it's better just to leave you be with it for now.

I'm interested what you say of the Romantics - I see that danger, but never wanted to avoid them due to that. And much more to the point, do you write? Or maybe that is a personal question, no pressure to respond if so.

Will be watching your dive into Wordsworth with interest as your preamble makes me realize that I too learned from those of a "Leavisite" persuasion, luckily balanced later by those of a more international interest.

Contemplating the use of "non-metropolitan" versus "rural"; would it be attitude, subject matter, class origin? Interesting term, especially for the time.

I was reading some more of The Prelude on the train this afternoon, half asleep after being out in the fresh air, and I drifted off into imagining Wordsworth challenged to call a spade a spade:

That not unworthy tool, for workman’s use,
Its blade no stranger to the grindstone’s touch
With wooden handle twice one foot in length
Or more, which in the sun-burn’d labourer’s grasp
Can cut the soil of some familiar vale
And ease the wriggling earthworm’s task,
That implement I’m asked to give a name...

I like that and am not sure it's you or him!

But he could call a spade a spade:

http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww267.html

and then I think of Heaney and then pitchforks, what next?

>74 tonikat: Touché! I wonder if I had that in the back of my mind all the time - I don’t consciously remember it, but it might be what prompted my silly reverie, if it was buried somewhere from long ago. Gill says that WW never forgot any line of poetry he’d read - I can’t claim that.

Definitely me, although a lot of the words are his. But he would have said “cleave”, rather than “cut”, I think.

I’m finding The Prelude (1850 edition of the 1805 version, found online, for the moment) difficult. Some glorious chunks of hard-hitting lines, but then you get passages where the sound seems to triumph over the sense completely. Obviously, “perusing, as it chanced, / The famous history of the errant knight / Recorded by Cervantes” sticks in the mind much better than “reading Don Quixote”, but it doesn’t actually add anything to the meaning that would justify spending two lines on it. I keep finding that I’ve been reading with my ears and not my brain, and having to go back and read it again...

>72 SassyLassy: non-metropolitan - can I come back to that when I’ve read more on Wordsworth and Coleridge?

My initial thought is “attitude” and “subject-matter”. And the way he was unable to contemplate settling in London, which would have been the natural thing for a young man with literary ambitions and no home elsewhere to do when he left Cambridge.

There is nothing to say that Wordsworth is easy, certainly some of the Prelude can seem impenetrable.

Looking forward to more Wordsworth, Wordsworth critique and Marksworth poetry.

If you were going to be a poet you would really want the name Wordsworth - I am always suspicious of people who live up to their names - I don't suppose that is any chance he was called William Blogger and changed it pretty damn quick to Wordsworth.

>75 thorold:

I aped Shakespeare once in an email to a friend, who was shocked to finally click it was me. Lost that ages ago though, would be interesting to read now. But I liked your Wordsworthian.

If by 1850 edition of the 1805 version you mean the 1850 edition then I recommend reading the 1805 version - many of his revisions are not improvements, I think. Some may be. But I am glad i went back from midway through book ninth to the start again and the 1805. The Norton critical has both versions opposite each other, and the 1799 two book version. I think there is a four book edition out there too with a 1798 version, not sure who publishes that.

I find the 1805 a bit more straightforward somehow, less careful in ways he later felt he had to be. Though I am impressed in the later books how true he was to his egalitarianism.

>77 baswood: :-)

Many of Wordsworth’s relatives on his father’s side seem to have been lawyers or local administrators of one sort or another, presumably even more conscious of the monetary value of their words than poets.

Google gives various implausible origins for the name, as usual, but the least unlikely (I owe it to WW to use double negatives wherever possible...) seems to be that it comes from Wad(s)worth, a West Riding placename.

This is possibly more of a tangent than you'd care for (I suppose it depends on how BIG you want your Big Wordsworth project to be), but given that you brought up the woman behind the man yourself, thought I'd mention something that surprised me (fairly recently, and pleasantly)--Arthur Quiller-Couch's essay on Dorothy Wordsworth, collected in Studies in literature: third series (I went a-googling for the contents and the title of the essay--"Dorothy Wordsworth"--there's no hope in hell of locating my book at the moment--and chanced on what seems to promise access to full text here: https://archive.org/details/studiesinliterat030180mbp).

I was astonished by the sympathy shown to her, not merely as to a person, but in recognition of her poetic gift. I know it's not a novel idea these days that William was frequently inspired by his sister's observations and diary notes, but I wondered whether this may not be the earliest instance, at least in critical literature. Quiller-Couch's essays were based on the lectures he started giving around the turn of the century (the Oxford "Studies in literature" books were collected quite some time later).

By the way--now this is a tangent--if you do look at the essays, I think you'd find amusing the one on Coventry "The Angel in the House" Patmore too, in the same collection.

Looking forward to your musings on Wordsworth whom I've usually found difficult. I'd echo Lola's recommendations on Dorothy, much underrated despite the sympathy. Personally, I'm far more a Blakeian, though some of Wordsworth's sonnets are sublime.

>80 LolaWalser: Thanks, I’ll have a look at that. Virginia Woolf writes (beautifully, almost ecstatically) about Dorothy as the recorder and observer of a joint poetry-making process, in The common reader second series (1932). But Q may well have been first to notice it.

It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry. But one could not act without the other. They must feel, they must think, they must be together.

Yes, it would need a bit of digging to see who was first - VW’s essays would have appeared in the TLS or somewhere before the book came out as well, but she obviously didn’t attend Q’s lectures (“Gentlemen...”). I don’t know offhand when Dorothy’s journals were published. Maybe that was the trigger for both? Q also mentions a Miss Catherine Maclean of Cardiff who wrote a book about Dorothy saying much the same thing about her influence (prior to Q’s lectures, but he only discovered it between the first and second lecture). That must be Dorothy and William Wordsworth (1927).

This comment from Q fits in nicely with my nonsense of yesterday:

Quite a number of us, presented with a page of Dorothy and commanded to turn it into half-a-dozen or a dozen stanzas of typically Wordsworthian verse, might achieve a passable parody. We should miss, of course, that final touch which ever and again redeems the great poet. But Wordsworth himself, even in his best-known poems, did not always or by any means inevitably achieve that touch. We could compose, I think, in parody something ostensibly his. But who can parody Coleridge as a poet ?

Well, as to Woolf, she couldn't go to Cambridge, but Cambridge sat for decades around her, lots of possible connections there. In any case, my impression is that Q's lectures were based on his own insight and that derived, in large part, from contemporary reminiscences about the Wordsworths, and letters and such secondary material. The reason I find the question of dating interesting is that he (and as far as I know only he) actually taught this stuff, to generations of students.

>80 LolaWalser: >82 thorold: >83 thorold: >84 LolaWalser:

I think Coleridge had a high opinion of Dorothy, though I have not read if he wrote of this - or maybe have in classes and forgot. But their walks were often as a three. This was a balance which Mrs Coleridge found hard to break into I think, she was not as taken with literature I think.

Reading her journals I wonder if this is just her, or her and William and sometimes others in conversation and idea developed -- or is it one day just her and another other things too. We'll never know.

Edit - I found this -

"Friendship with Coleridge was an exhausting affair. His enthusiasm was exhilarating, and animation transformed his 'plain', thick-lipped face; but talking was to him as much of an addiction as opium would become.

A few months survive of the journal Dorothy kept during these early days of their friendship, when, as Coleridge put it, they were 'as three persons with one soul', and their three-way marriage of minds conceived the Lyrical Ballads."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3671578/Wordsworths-...

I'd forgotten that comment of his.

Depressingly behind on everyone's threads. How could I not drop off a star with that wonderful Hardy intro?

Enjoyed your review of the Hardy novel too. He's right up there on my list of favourite authors - that particular one I wasn't so aware of, so I was very interested in your thoughts on it.

>63 thorold: I've enjoyed everything I've read by Anita Desai, but really did not like the two books I have read by Kiran Desai. (I read two only because I had to read the second for my then book club.) Can't understand how she won the Booker. I haven't read Fasting, Feasting, so I will add it to the list.

I guess I'm too lazy to try to track it down, but what is Larkin's "famous line" about parents?

I started the Rougon-Macquart journey, but stalled several years ago about half-way through with several attempts to get into The Masterpiece. I don't know why, because that period of art history interests me.

I know very little about the Lake poets (other than a brief glimpse in English Lit classes in college), so I will look forward to following your journey.

>87 arubabookwoman: Larkin - it’s the opening line of “This be the verse” - see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse

(I had it in mind because one of those nice ladies on BBC Radio 3 alluded to it one morning quite recently, saying “...but I won’t read it out because I want to keep my job.” )

Still pressing on with Stephen Gill and Wordsworth in the background, but in the meantime here's a Dutch novel I took on the train with me yesterday. I'm meant to be thinning down the TBR, but this is a book I picked up in the recycling shop last week. And one I didn't need to buy, I could easily have borrowed it from the library. And I see I have another Enquist novel on the TBR shelf that's been there rather longer. Oh well, good intentions...

I read and very much enjoyed Enquist's 2008 novel Contrapunt last January for the Benelux theme read.

Het meesterstuk (1994; The masterpiece) by Anna Enquist (Netherlands, 1945- )

  

The Dutch classical musician and psychoanalyst Christa Widlund-Broer has been publishing poems and novels under the pen-name Anna Enquist since 1991. She's also recorded several poetry and music CDs with the pianist Ivo Janssen.

Enquist's début novel Het meesterstuk obviously picks up on both sides of her professional background, although there's rather more psychology and less music than in the later Contrapunt. The painter Johan Steenkamer is preparing for the opening of an important retrospective exhibition in one of Amsterdam's top museums. Johan's ex-wife's-best-friend, Lisa, a psychiatrist, looks on with a mixture of fascination and detached amusement whilst tension mounts among the members of the Steenkamer family: something spectacular is clearly going to happen at the opening.

It soon becomes obvious that this is a Freudian whodunnit in the best Oedipal tradition, with a fine assortment of suspects including Johan's absent father, controlling mother, dead child and jealous sibling. There's more fish-imagery than you can find in a barrel of herrings, and when you start looking at the names of the characters you begin to wonder whether there might not be a Don Giovanni thing going on here as well. Especially when you see that Johan has defiantly invited his missing father (now living in New York as Charles Stone...) to the party.

Thankfully, Enquist manages to avoid most of the tramlines that all this structure is trying to force her into, and delivers a novel that is never quite predictable and a set of characters who refuse to sit themselves in neat little boxes. And some passages of wonderfully - sometimes heartbreakingly - memorable intensity. If it is a Don Giovanni, it's a Don Giovanni that makes us think more about what happens to Anna, Elvira, Zerlina and Ottavio and less about the Don and Leporello. But I felt that this did come at a certain cost: by avoiding the pitfalls that the structure has set for her, she diverts a lot of the emotional impact away from the big finale and leaves us feeling a little bit unsatisfied at the end of the novel. We weren't really expecting Johan literally to be dragged down into the flames of Hell in the foyer of the Nationaalmuseum, but a few trombones at least would have been nice...

I definitely earned my morning coffee today - there was not an inch of shelfspace left anywhere near the "H's" in Fiction, so I had to clear all the junk off the inaccessible top shelves and rearrange the books. In theory I've gained 240cm of shelf, but there were so many books piled on top waiting for a space that most of that 240cm has disappeared already. And now I need a kick-stool...

Anyway, this is a book I don't feel in the least guilty about buying. "The new Hollinghurst" is always going to have a space on my shelves!

The Sparsholt Affair (2017) by Alan Hollinghurst (UK, 1954- )

  

Alan Hollinghurst read English at Magdalen (he was yet another of the people I wish I'd taken the chance to get to know when I was an undergraduate, but if I've got the dates right he must have left just before I got there). He taught in Oxford for a while, then went to work for the TLS, where he was a deputy editor in the early 90s. His first book, the classic modern British gay novel The swimming-pool library, came out in 1988. He won the Booker in 2004 with The line of beauty.

The members of a literary group, meeting in Freddie Green's rooms in Christ Church one day in 1940, catch sight of an unbelievably attractive young man exercising in a room opposite. He turns out to be David Sparsholt, marking time in Oxford until he is old enough to be called up into the RAF, and two members of the group set out in pursuit of him immediately. One of them gets David to pose for a picture, the other - if Freddie is to be believed - actually gets to have his evil way with him, which is surprising, as David has a bona fide girlfriend in tow...

Some 25 years later, the English newspapers are full of the latest gay sex scandal, the "Sparsholt Affair". Hollinghurst amuses himself by never quite telling us what this particular scandal was about. We know that there was an MP and a property developer involved, and that David Sparsholt went to prison, so we are obviously supposed to imagine it as a kind of composite of Montague, Profumo and Poulson. Part of the point seems to be that we are unlikely to remember any of those real scandals from the 50s and 60s more clearly than Hollinghurst's characters do - whenever Sparsholt's son, Johnny, our main viewpoint character for the last three-quarters of the book, introduces himself to someone, the name gets a flicker of recognition and "Wasn't that...?", but no-one really knows.

Just as he was in The stranger's child, Hollinghurst is spectacularly good at catching the tone of the periods in which the book is set (1940, the late-sixties/early seventies, the nineties and 2012, in this case) - so good in fact that we can't really see his technique working at all, and it doesn't feel like a historical novel, more like a collection of contemporary documents. He's obviously trying to get away from the very literary plot of his last book by making Johnny a visual artist who doesn't read much (he has dyslexia, but when he went to school "it was called being thick"). So instead of a novel populated by upper-class metropolitan poetry-queens we have a novel populated by upper-class metropolitan art-queens! But there's more to it than that, of course. It's also a book that explores how perceptions of gay sexuality have evolved over the years. There's a lot of beautiful detail along the way, and a running joke about how Johnny in the 2010s still has to keep painfully coming out of the closet as a vegetarian in every new social encounter, whilst no-one cares in the least whether or not he's gay any more. I know the feeling! But it's also demonstrating - with odd echoes of Armistead Maupin - how an LGBT family-saga is not a contradiction in terms.

An excellent novel. But so good technically that it's almost difficult to see what it's doing beyond creating illusion.

The obligatory Guardian interview, from last September when this book came out: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/22/alan-hollinghurst-gay-lit-interv...

>90 thorold: excellent review. I have this on request from the library, so glad it lived up to the usual Hollinghurst standards.

The Folding Star is the other one of his I need to get to. Have you read it? It seems a bit different to his other novels in terms of period setting at least.

I don’t know anything about Wordsworth, so look forward to your project. Enjoyed learning about Enquist and Hollinghurst.

>91 AlisonY: It's ages since I read The folding star (possibly not since it was new - I should re-read it). From what I remember, it pulls in a lot of fin-de-siècle Belgian/French symbolist stuff, so it's quite slow and dreamy, and it doesn't feel as solidly English-literary-establishment as you would expect from Hollinghurst. But every bit as surreal as you would expect from Bruges.

My Penguin edition of The Prelude: The four texts came yesterday and I've been diving into that. Trying to make sense of all the changes in detail is obviously a recipe for madness, but it's interesting to see how extensive they really are. I found that the little Catherine MacDonald Maclean book on Dorothy and William (see >83 thorold:) has recently been reprinted (by CUP), so I got that as well. A very odd reprint it is too - they photographically reproduced it onto pages that are obviously much taller and thinner than the original, so it has ridiculously big top and bottom margins. But it looks useful and concise, anyway.

By a nice bit of serendipity, we've got a chamber-music festival coming up in The Hague that is also picking up on the theme of "in front of every great woman in history there stands a famous man", looking at Clara and Robert, Fanny and Felix. Should be interesting even if it doesn't directly tell me anything about the Wordsworths: https://februarifestival.nl/nl/

Alan Hollinghurst is new to me (perhaps I should get out more). Enjoyed your review.

>95 baswood: perhaps I should get out more - I'm sure that applies to all of us here :-)

- As a substitute until the weather improves, I'm still wand'ring slowly through the early-19th-century Lake District. Finished my first read-through of the 1805 Prelude, and listened to Jenny Agutter reading excerpts from Dorothy's journal (most of which I'd already seen reproduced in Gill and elsewhere).

And I've finished another one from the TBR. Unusually, this was an ebook I bought but then put aside - I'm not sure why now. But it defeats one of the great advantages of ebooks, the instant gratification thing that means there's no point in building up a TBR shelf of them...

Alexander's Path (1958) by Freya Stark (UK, etc., 1893-1993)

  

Freya Stark was one of the great British travel writers of the last century, but for some reason I've read hardly any of her work. She grew up mostly in Asolo in Italy - her British father, an artist, was a close friend of Pen Browning (son of EBB and Robert); her mother was a German-Italian. After studying at SOAS and war service as a VAD nurse in Italy, she started to travel extensively in the wilder parts of the Middle East from the 1920s onwards. Her last expedition was to Afghanistan in 1970.

Alexander's Path was the result of three lengthy trips Stark made to Southern Anatolia in the 1950s. In the course of her travels, she became interested in puzzling out the exact route that Alexander the Great followed through Asia Minor with his Macedonian army between the battles of the Granicus and Issus (334-333 BCE). The book evolved into a composite narrative of Stark's travels, geographically arranged "in reverse order" from East to West, followed by a more scholarly appendix that sets out the evidence Stark found for and against the different theories about where the Macedonians actually marched.

Although I'm moderately interested in Alexander, I don't really know the source material well enough to be seriously interested in the nitty-gritty of this mountain pass versus that one, and I didn't have any good maps of the region to hand when I was reading this anyway, so I skipped rather lightly over a lot of the military history, but I very much enjoyed Stark's often almost lyrical accounts of the landscapes and cities she found, and her hard-nosed but also oddly sympathetic comments on the people she met, the realities of their lives, and their reactions to her as an independent woman traveller. Although her chief business is to look at Hellenic-era ruins in the context of the landscape, she isn't one of those archaeological writers who regard the current inhabitants of the area they are visiting as merely a nuisance and/or a source of cheap labour - she clearly has a lot of respect for the Anatolian villagers who are often struggling to make a living in very difficult conditions. And when she stays the night in someone's house, rents horses from them, or employs them as a driver or guide, she wants to know about their families, how they live, what their aspirations are, and so on. In several cases this clearly develops into a real friendship. But she is also an old hand at Asian travel by this time, so she doesn't hesitate to hit back when someone tries to feed her misleading information, or to cheat her beyond the generally understood permissible limit. Her scorn falls equally on lazy Turkish innkeepers and on inexperienced British archaeologists who don't know the first thing about managing horses on mountain tracks. But not on Alexander, with whom she's clearly more than a little in love, and who can do no wrong...

A very entertaining, very human bit of travel writing.

Just in case anyone gets the idea that I'm being efficient and reducing my TBR, I should point out that this came yesterday. It may be on the shelf for some time...

Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet. Ausgabe in sechs Bänden. Mikrogramme 1924 - 1933 by Robert Walser

Intriguing review of Alexander's Path.

Interesting review of Alexander's Path.
I hope you don't drop the Walter collection on your foot while placing it in your TBR, that wouldn't help you get out more! ;)

So much for getting out more: instead I managed to use yesterday to slaughter another victim from the TBR shelf and still had time for a detective story as dessert...

This one seems to be another book that simply got overlooked because its moment passed, like The delight of hearts. I don't know for sure, but would guess that I bought it somewhere around 1992, when I was taking a course on which we studied one of Soyinka's plays, so it must have clocked up around 25 years of TBR time.

Once again, it was nice to see that this one is a book I shared with RebeccaNYC, who reviewed it in March 2014.

The interpreters (1965) by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1934- )

  

Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate, is probably the most famous name in African literature (closely followed by his fellow-Nigerian, Chinua Achebe). He's best known as playwright, poet, professor, and political activist, but he's also written memoirs and a couple of novels, of which this was the first. He writes in English.

The Interpreters probably came over as a very African novel when it first appeared, but the first thing that strikes you reading it now is what a very 1960s novel it is. A group of intelligent young men (and their girlfriends) are struggling against the dull, conventional and corruptly self-interested way of life of the older generation, a struggle that mostly takes the form of long, earnest discussions about politics, philosophy and religion, all punctuated by drink, sex and subversive music and undermined by a series of absurd accidents and social embarrassments that leave them more-or-less back where they started.

But it is African as well, of course: the young characters are caught between the temptations of aspiring to one of the competing value-systems of western capitalism (most of them have studied abroad) and "old Africa" - where the tribal gods are competing with Christianity and Islam. At the same time, they are confronted with the unholy compromises that the current postcolonial ruling classes have made to protect their own interests.

Soyinka knows very well that adopting the form of the novel means that he's committing himself to the metropolitan mechanisms of production and distribution that go with that - he has to get it published in London, and he knows that the audience he can deliver it to is restricted by language, the written medium, access to books, and the leisure to read. Unlike plays and poems - accessible to everyone because they can be delivered orally over the radio, or live wherever actors can find a space to perform - novels are read only by people-who-read-novels, which for Soyinka in 1965 means students, foreigners, and the wealthy middle classes. That's presumably why he's only written one other novel. And why this is such a complicated, literary novel, full of direct and implied references to other books of the time, mostly at least slightly mocking: One of the characters keeps talking flippantly about cultivating his negritude (by going out in the sun); another has mapped out a pastiche existentialist philosophical system based on the pleasures of defecation; there's an American refugee from a James Baldwin novel who also happens to be a James Baldwin fan; there is a faculty party given by a pompous professor and subverted by one of the drunken characters, who is gatecrashing - to make sure we don't miss the Lucky Jim allusions there, we keep overhearing someone in the background talking about the Madrigal Group. And so on.

The nasty portrayal of the gay Baldwin-fan, Joe Golder, was probably offensive at the time, and of course feels doubly so now, when we know about the ways that the notion of homosexuality as an "unafrican" import has been used to whip up anger against LGBT people in so many African countries. We keep expecting Soyinka as narrator to step back from his characters' disgust with the fact of Golder's homosexuality and put it in perspective, but he never does, and it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that (at least when he wrote this) he shared their views.

Soyinka is a magnificent writer with a great feel for surprising and devastating images, often in very unexpected places, e.g. Like two halves of a broad bean, the pachydermous radiogram and the Managing Director. He is also a dramatist who knows exactly how to place a major speech or a deflating incident where it can have the most impact, so this is never a dull book. But it is a complicated book, with a very heavy load of symbolism that never quite gets resolved, and many people who read it seem to feel afterwards that they aren't much further on. Given that it was published on the eve of a terrible civil war, it's perhaps not surprising that there is no neat ending with a vision for the future of Nigeria.

...I read this because a number of people over the years have told me I would like Donna Leon, but I somehow never got around to her before:

Death at La Fenice (1992) by Donna Leon (USA, 1942- )

  

Donna Leon is originally from New Jersey - she worked as a teacher of English literature for the US military and for US overseas colleges, and inter alia lived in Venice for more than thirty years. She's written 27 (at the last count on Wikipedia) novels featuring the Venetian detective Commissario Brunetti, of which this was the first. Her books are hugely successful in German and not much less so in English (but she famously refuses to let them be translated into Italian). Apparently she is a big Handel fan and a sponsor of the baroque orchestra il pomo d'oro.

In the best tradition of murder mysteries, the first Brunetti novel opens with the sudden death of the maestro between the second and third acts of La Traviata. And of course it turns out that just about everyone in his immediate surroundings could have had a personal reason to detest the conductor - an authoritarian German with touches of Karajan, Furtwängler and Richard Strauss in his back-story - even though most of them say a love of his music would have held them back from actually killing him.

The solution to the mystery turns out to be relatively simple, and mostly involves Brunetti holding back on asking the most obvious questions until we get to page 200; the reason to read this book is not the crime-story itself, but rather Leon's affectionate, mildly satirical view of Venice and the people who live there. She seems to be very good at catching what it is about the Italian professional classes that makes them peculiarly Italian, without quite turning her characters into stereotypes. (It's also nice to see how much LGBT interest there is in this book - not something that would be completely obvious for a mainstream crime novel published 25 years ago.)

By the sound of it, the mood gets a little blacker and more political in the later books, which is probably a good thing - you would fairly soon get fed up with the light, frivolous atmosphere of this one if it carried on without discovering any further depths in the characters. I don't know if the plots get any more complex, though.

Enjoying and learning. I think Soyinka’s novel might be too complex for me to appreciate. Alexander’s Path sounds fun.

100> I loved The Interpreters when I read it about 25 years ago. As I recall, I was fascinated by the interweaving of Yoruba mythology within the story.

>103 janeajones: Yes, there's a lot of good stuff going on, which I only barely touched on above. Not just the Yoruba stuff, but also Lazarus and his bush church. Not a great novel, perhaps, but it does have some very memorable writing in it. I've still got another Soyinka book on the TBR, Isara - a voyage around "essay". I might have a go at that shortly as well. And I saw I read Aké in 1990 - maybe I need to re-read that...

>97 thorold:

*hugging this post*

And there's more where that came from! Although it's doubtful they'll ever decipher all of it.

You make Donna Leon sound intriguing. I've a visceral dislike for tourist trap settings as "colour" comes so cheap and references usually a checklist of clichés--I don't know if in that respect her refusal to have them published in Italian bodes well or the opposite? I'll keep in mind that one.

>105 LolaWalser: It is all rather wonderful. There’s another book with colour facsimiles of some of the Mikrogramme as well, I’m trying to resist that...

For those who don’t know what this is about, there’s a facsimile of No.279 here: http://www.robertwalser.ch/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/verschiedene/RW_MS_MKG_...

This is the back of half a page from a tear-off calendar, about 8x17cm, and forms the second half of a 1000-word short story about a minister. The first words on the page are “dringend zu empfehlende Fähigkeit, nämlich die so einfache Kunst, für die Frauen anziehend zu sein.“

I think I can just about make out the “F” of Fähigkeit. You have to admire the editors who deciphered it.

There’s a short report from Swiss TV (in German) about an exhibition of the originals a few years ago here: http://www.art-tv.ch/10114-0-Robert-Walser-Zentrum-Mikrogramme-.html

Great review of The Interpreters, which I have not read, but of course I have read Death at La Fenice. Venice has never seemed so wonderful as a foreigner she catches it really well in all the novels. As you say the stories usually take second place to the city; although there is one novel about poor fishermen on one of the islands in the lagoon that is a bit special.

perhaps Donna Leon should get out from Venice a bit more.

>30 thorold: Going back briefly to Turkey - while we were discussing Madonna in a fur coat in our book club, one person pointed out that the translator, Maureen Freely, must be the daughter of John Freely, an American physicist, travel writer, historian of science and long-term Istanbul resident, who died last year (I looked it up - she is). I hadn’t heard of him before, but he sounds interesting - note to self to follow both of them up!

My head's still full of Purcell - a stunning performance of King Arthur by Vox Luminis in Utrecht last night - but I've also finished the second instalment of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

I'd forgotten this book almost completely apart from vaguely remembering that it was about the rebuilding of Paris, but I commented a couple of weeks ago in SassyLassy's thread about how Zola manages to keep it steamy without a greenhouse in Abbé Mouret - I think I must have had at least a vestigial memory of the role the greenhouse plays in the sex scenes in this one!

La Curée (1871; The Kill) by Emile Zola (France, 1840-1902)

  

The second book in the cycle takes us to Paris, and focusses on Pierre Rougon's son Aristide, whom we last saw in Plassans, backtracking rapidly from his stance as a radical journalist when he realised that he was backing the losing side. He's now in Paris, corruptly exploiting a job as a city official in order to make a fortune in property deals off the back of Haussmann's grand demolition and reconstruction project. He's changed his name to Saccard, and has a glamorous new wife, Renée, who is only seven years older than his son from his first marriage, Maxime.

All of which, of course, gives Zola the perfect opportunity to cast Renée as an ironic Second-Empire version of the most famous heroine in French classical drama, Phédre, making her fall desperately and self-destructively in love with her own stepson. And where else could the big sex-scene take place in a Zola novel than under a bearskin in a tropical greenhouse containing at least five pages worth of exotic plants of a sexually suggestive nature? The greenhouse in question is attached to Aristide's glamorous millionaire-villa, which is - of course - illegally built on the edge of the Parc Monceau (one of the private parks bought for the city and rebuilt by Haussmann).

Zola's point in this frantic and complex story of financial and sexual corruption, as flagged by the hunting reference in the title, seems to be to show us that most of his characters are chasing sex or money not so much in order to get it, but mostly for the excitement of the chase. If a plot fails, tant pis - something else will come along. The people who take sex seriously, like Renée, get hurt; the people who take money seriously get boringly rich and fade out of the social circuit. Aristide is an extreme example of the "hunter", who keeps a mistress only because that goes with his self-adopted role as the daring financial wizard: they meet to have a laugh together about her other suitors, and after a decent interval he sells her on to someone else. His financial deals are so elegant, crooked and complicated that he doesn't actually seem to make any money out of them for himself when they succeed. They extend his reputation as a good credit risk, and that's all that matters.

There are a lot of glorious set-piece scenes in the book, especially the grand climax of the story at Aristide's costume-ball, where Zola sets up a scene of positively operatic opulence and complexity, with different groups of characters moving in and out of the spotlight, and dancers, music, plants (again!) and tableaux-vivant all working the symbolism like there's no tomorrow.

In among the general depravity there's a surprising amount of LGBT interest - mostly unfavourable and designed to reinforce our idea of how very corrupt this world is. Maxime is at least gender-uncertain and likes to be treated as one of the girls and talk hair and fashion with them; there's a couple of aristocratic friends of Renée who are widely rumoured to be more interested in each other than in their husbands; there's a valet-de-chambre who likes to have his wicked way with the grooms and coachmen, etc., etc. All a lot more explicit than the things that Trollope sometimes hints at!

>109 thorold: Definitely in my top 3 in the series!

Interesting that you mention Trollope. I read The Kill and The Way We Live Now about three months apart to compare their treatment of the financial world, and Zola wins hands down, although the politics in Trollope was done well.

>110 SassyLassy: Yes, I’d agree that Zola wins there - but they are trying to do different things, of course. The way we live now is all about how finance works through our wanting to believe in the integrity of the Melmots, so the focus is mostly on the people he takes in; La Curée is showing us a world in which it is taken for granted that everyone is equally dishonest, and the interest is in seeing just how far they can go without doing something that could land them in jail.

A quick read yesterday to fill in our next book-club item. This is a book that quite a few CR-ers have been reading lately:

The woman next door (2016) by Yewande Omotoso (Barbados, Nigeria, South Africa, 1980- )

  

Yewande Omotoso spent her childhood in Barbados and Nigeria, but has lived in South Africa since her parents moved there in 1992. Her father is the exiled Nigerian writer and academic Kole Omotoso. In her "day job", she runs her own architectural practice in Johannesburg.

The main problem with structuring a novel around two cantankerous old neighbours who can't stand each other is that you have very little freedom in deciding where the story will go. If they aren't reconciled to each other by the end of the book the reader will feel cheated out of a proper story; if they are, then we tell ourselves that we knew that was going to happen all along, and wonder what we're paying the writer to do. Omotoso manages to steer around this problem to some extent, but in the end she gets sucked into the vortex of narrative inevitability just like everyone else who ventures into this particular plot.

Where this book stands out from most of the others that use this particular plot device is that Omotoso's objective is not so much to make us laugh (although she does do this occasionally) as to make us think about one of the nastier problems of growing old - the realisation that it's getting too late to fix the things in our life that we would prefer to have done differently - in our personal lives or in the wider world. Which doesn't necessarily make it any easier to forgive or to apologise. The two central characters, both in their eighties when we meet them, are successful career women and the children of parents belonging to oppressed minorities (Marion is the white South African daughter of Jewish refugees from Lithuania; Hortensia the black British daughter of Caribbean immigrants), and both are uncomfortable with compromises they have been forced to make between family and professional life; in addition, Marion is (at least subconsciously) aware that she has been passively complicit in the oppression that went with Apartheid, simply by being there and being white, whilst Hortensia's experience of living in South Africa makes it difficult for her to see white people as anything other than racists.

All of which sort-of works, but seems to be rather too heavy a load for the characters to carry. Especially since Omotoso's technique is to explain the development of Hortensia's and Marion's self-awareness mostly through flashbacks to their (separate) earlier lives, whilst their interactions with each other in the here-and-now are mostly rather brief and brusque. So you get the feeling that we are in two separate, occasionally overlapping novels: Hortensia and Marion are scarcely aware of each other's existence most of the time and are both looking for (or trying to postpone) some kind of resolution in their own lives, independently of each other, and it seems almost coincidental that they happen to be together when things click into place. The minor characters are also very much in the background most of the time - this is a very solipsistic book about two characters with big egos in which no-one else gets much of a look-in.

On the other hand, Omotoso adopts the perspective of an old person very convincingly - I didn't look her bio up until after finishing the book, and I was genuinely surprised to discover that she's still in her thirties.

Interesting, definitely, but more for the subject-matter than as a novel.

Great reviews of the Zola and the Omotoso!
I really liked The kill when I read it a few years ago, but missed the reference to Phèdre.
I have read only one play of Racine, Iphigénie, and was carried away. So maybe I should tackle Phèdre.

la Curée sounds like one for me. enjoyed your excellent review.

>109 thorold: I keep putting Zola's on the wishlist. I should get to this series one of these days but it seems so daunting.

>112 thorold: How's the writing generally. I ask because architects are generally not the best writers...to be charitable.

>113 chlorine: I've been pretending for years that you can get away without actually reading Racine, but that's starting to become less and sustainable. Sooner or later I need to have a serious go at him.

>114 baswood: >115 janemarieprice: Definitely. Get out your big dictionary and go for it!

>115 janemarieprice: It's not deathless prose, by any means, but perfectly acceptable - somewhere on the literary side of popular fiction. Maybe the advantages of being an African (and a writer's daughter) cancel out the disadvantages of belonging to a profession that doesn't require you to deal much in words. The book pays quite detailed attention to language, with Barbadian, British, Yiddish, Nigerian and Afrikaans words and expressions pulled in where they need to be, but it's all reasonably subtle.

And back to the TBR pile - this was one I ordered after reading The lost musicians for the Nordic theme read (see here for a little bit more background on Heinesen and Glyn Jones: http://www.librarything.com/topic/270490#6215210). It arrived last October, but looked dauntingly fat, so I didn't quite get around to it before Christmas...

The good hope (1964; English 2011) by William Heinesen‬ (Faroes, 1900-1991), translated by W Glyn Jones (1928-2014)

  

(Don't be misled by the messy, amateur-looking cover design: this is from a perfectly respectable publisher, Dedalus.)

I liked The lost musicians, but it didn't really strike me as a book by someone who could have been seriously discussed as a candidate for the Nobel. This one does. It's easily in the same league as Independent people, and deserves to be better known.

It's a historical novel in the form of a serial letter from Peder Børresen to a friend in Denmark, describing his experiences after being appointed as pastor to the parish of Tórshavn in the Faroes in the spring of 1669.

Peder is clearly a learned, conscientious and fearless clergyman who numbers some of the most influential people in Denmark among his friends from college days, but a weakness for alcohol has got him into trouble on numerous occasions in the past, and this is only the latest in a series of transfers to remote and backward regions designed to get him out of the way. And obviously another miscalculation, because he is not someone to accept the way his poor parishioners in Tórshavn are being treated by the authorities, and he's soon involved in the fight of his life.

Under the overlordship of Frederick III's notoriously rapacious minister Christoffer von Gabel, the islanders are being robbed blind through the trading monopoly of the Royal Store. They are absolutely dependent on imported grain and timber, and their only real income is from the wool they export. Gabel's officials have absolute control over all communications to and from the islands, and they use that and the criminal justice system - which is equally under their thumbs - to quash any hint of political opposition. The military commandant of the islands is free to amuse himself by raping the islanders' young daughters - anyone who objects is arrested on a trumped-up charge and thrown into the Black Hole.

The pastor finds himself involved in opposition to Gabel from the start - his predecessor's daughter, Rachel, is one of the commandant's victims, and her fiancé, the son of the parish clerk, is in jail awaiting sentence after daring to challenge the commandant. But somehow, although he scarcely believes in that sort of thing himself, he also gets caught up in the islanders' active sense of the supernatural, acquiring a reputation for driving out demons after succeeding in calming a couple of people with mental health problems.

Heinesen manages to capture the flavour of Peder's fiery 17th century combination of anger and self-doubt brilliantly. In Glyn Jones's elegant translation it comes across as belonging to the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and John Bunyan, without ever quite being conspicuously archaic, but also without ever stepping out of the frame to remind you that this is a 21st century translation of a book written in the 1960s. Obviously, the book does have a political agenda: Peder's opposition to the evils of absolutism is meant to make the reader think about Nazi abuses, and also about Denmark's current relationship with its dependencies. He possibly reacts to things that someone used to 17th century absolutism would not have considered unduly excessive (even if he was a graduate of Leiden). But that didn't trouble me whilst I was reading - Heinesen pulls you so completely into Peder's world-view that the 20th and 21st centuries seem quite irrelevant for a while.

...and this is one I've been listening to as an audiobook while I was out and about this week (I purposely chose a slightly boring - or at least uncomplicated - walk on Tuesday so that I could listen better...). As usual with audiobooks, I came across it in my Scribd recommendations and thought it looked interesting:

The door (1987; English 2005) by Magda Szabó (Hungary, 1917-2007), translated by Len Rix (Zimbabwe, UK, 1942 - )
Audiobook read by Siân Thomas (Wales, 1953 - )

  

Magda Szabó was one of the best-known Hungarian writers of the 20th century. I didn't know anything much about her before reading this book, which is her best-known in English, but she's written many other novels in popular and literary genres. She was awarded the Kossuth Prize, which seems to be a kind of Hungarian Nobel, in 1978.

There seems to be a Zimbabwean connection running through my reading this quarter - Len Rix turns out to have spent his childhood there, before moving to the UK. He also spent much of his career as an English and Latin teacher at Manchester Grammar School (I only mention that because it's the great local rival of the school I attended: if the dice had fallen slightly differently, Rix could quite easily have ended up teaching me...). He doesn't have a direct connection with Hungary but has been an enthusiastic (and distinguished) translator of Hungarian literature since accidentally picking up Teach Yourself Hungarian in 1989 and being seriously bitten by the bug. (So there's hope for us all yet.)

There's another, earlier English translation of The door by Stefan Draughon (1995).

This is a complicated book built around an apparently simple premise, the relationship between a writer (Magda) and the old woman (Emerence) she employs to help with the housework in her apartment in Pest. As she spars with Emerence to retain control of her apartment, dog and life-in-general - battles which Emerence almost always wins effortlessly - Magda finds herself confronting serious questions about love, death, God, human dignity, old age, Hungarian history, the relative values of manual and intellectual work, and - above all - about how much access we can and should grant other people to the inner parts of our lives.

Although Magda clearly has a lot in common with her creator, Szabó takes care to undermine her authority as narrator here and there to prevent us from simply identifying with one side of the story. We go backwards and forwards in our understanding of the two central characters, and every time we think we're getting there Emerence tosses in a brick and undermines it all again.

Elegant, restrained, poetical, but ultimately quite a devastating book.

Interview with Len Rix (2006): http://www.hlo.hu/news/a_passion_for_hungarian_fiction

>118 thorold: P.S. - I think the cover design of this one is going to be a prime candidate for the Spool of blue thread award for embracing the obvious.

>117 thorold: Great review!

>118 thorold: I read The door and rather liked it but felt like something eluded me, so in the end I was left with an equivocal feeling, and the impression that there was something I did not understand.
It seems you got more out of this book than I did.

I just finished Szabo's Katalin Street and loved it. Must get a copy of The Door. The Good Hope sounds like a winner.

>120 chlorine: I felt I got a lot out of it, even if I’m not sure quite what it was! It’s probably a book you need to read more than once, and I think a lot depends on how you react to the narrator. Did you look at the interview with Len Rix? He said he still wasn’t quite sure about the book even after translating it.

This was another one that was recommended in Sjón's Guardian article on Nordic fiction last October (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/11/top-10-modern-nordic-books) - it sounded interesting, but he was a little bit too quick off the mark in promoting it, as the English translation only came out this month. It landed in my letter-box a few days ago.

The endless summer (2014; English 2018) by Madame Nielsen (Denmark, 1963- ), translated by Gaye Kynoch

  

Madame Nielsen is a multi-gendered Danish actor, musician, dramatist, journalist, performance artist, novelist, etc., etc., who has also written books under her "boy's name" Claus Beck-Nielsen.

Like most of the other books, songs, and albums called (The) Endless Summer, this novella takes its title from a group of young people spending a holiday somewhere nice with lots of sex, fresh air, sunshine, and no depressing thoughts about tomorrow. But Madame Nielsen treats the concept with more irony than most. The "endless summer" - always in scare-quotes - is something that ended a long time ago, time only flows forwards, the life-choices that were up for grabs then have all been used up, the promises have mostly not been fulfilled, and most of those extraordinary people have ended up with quite predictable and dismal lives. Or deaths.

But the language of the book seems to fight that depressing message - the long, swooping lines of the text circle delicately, often beautifully, about the drabness and squalor. They loop back and forth as though to undermine the monotony of time, they pin down the irrelevant and leave the important largely undefined and ambiguous. There is power in having had moments of beauty in our lives, the book seems to be telling us, and the futures we didn't exploit are still meaningful to us.

It's difficult to say whether this is a lovely, consoling piece of Proustian(*) melancholy or a slightly banal triumph of style over substance. It probably depends on how cynical you are feeling when you read it. I quite enjoyed it, and it's apparently been a success in Denmark, but I don't think it's really something I'm going to come back to.

---
(*) My Mac's spell-checker proposes "Prussian" for "Proustian". A Freudian slip where Apple let out their real character?

>122 thorold: No, I haven't read the interview yet, I'll do that now.

>123 thorold: Interesting review. I can't decide if it's something I'd like to read or not... I'll try to keep it in mind.

>123 thorold: I’ve enjoyed your review. Im Interested from a gender perspective but am bad at reading trans or gender queer or here multi gendered authors, though there are lots, especially trans poets. Anyway also interested to read this difference between form and content, and hey then wonder if that difference had any relation to gender, had not thought of that, were you suggesting it?

>125 tonikat: Hmmm. Gender is treated a bit oddly in the book - the narrator repeatedly tells us that the main viewpoint character, who is now a “slender and sensitive boy”, will later become an old woman, but there is nothing explicit about how that affects the way s/he remembers the events of the “endless summer”. It seems to be one of the many facts that reinforces the idea that you can’t go back, but it isn’t presented as central in any way.

I suppose it’s possible that the author is deliberately making the text non-linear as a strategy for making it feel less “masculine”, but that didn’t occur to me whilst I was reading it. It would imply a rather old-fashioned way of thinking about style and gender. More sixties than 2010s.

>126 thorold: I'm going to have to read it. I suppose in some ways you may look at a gender issue being a difference between form and content (not saying which style represents which, I'm from the 60s but not in those views). I'm also familiar with the idea that it is not possible to go back. It's seeming quite intriguing to me.

btw I've made no more progress completing now the 1850 Prelude or reading round on it all, look forward to your thoughts. i did start the Excursion and read book1 (which Coleridge thought then was one of finest poems in English - The Ruined Cottage).

>127 tonikat: I'll be interested to know how you get on if you do read it! I keep saying this, but I do mean to get back to Wordsworth very soon now - for the last week I've been rather distracted by this hippopotamus of a book, but I finally got through the last couple of hundred pages today.

I ordered this some seven years ago after a German friend told me about it, but I wasn't quite prepared for its remarkable bulk - when it finally appeared (on back-order from Dar-es-Salaam, apparently) it turned out to be going on for one and a half kilos of paper, 700 pages of large-format paperback. Not something you want to lug about with you on buses, and guaranteed to break free and fall in your muesli if you try to read it at the breakfast-table. So it stayed on the TBR shelf for rather a long time...

Mr. Myombekere and his wife Bugonoka, their son Ntulanalwo and daughter Bulihwali : the story of an ancient African community (Kikerewe 1945 unpublished; Kiswahili 1981; English 2002) by Aniceti Kitereza (Tanzania, 1896-1981); translated by Gabriel Ruhumbika (Tanzania, 1938-)



This book has developed a significant, if modest, reputation, especially in Germany, as a classic of "naive literature", a Things fall apart without the literary underpinnings, and in particular as one of the very few early African novels to be written in a pre-colonial African language.

Aniceti Kitereza (that's him in the cover picture) grew up in the early days of German colonialism on Ukerewe, a large island in Lake Victoria (somewhere between Anglesey and the Isle of Wight in size), in the north of what is now Tanzania. Partly because he belonged to the family of the traditional ruler of Ukerewe, he was educated in a mission school and then studied at a Roman Catholic seminary, but he seems to have decided not to enter the priesthood, and worked in the rice business in Mwanza for some years. On the outbreak of WWII, he returned to Ukerewe where he worked for the rest of his life as a lay staff member of the Catholic mission.

Kitereza wrote Mr Myombekere in 1945, primarily for the benefit of the Wakerewe people, whom he saw losing touch with their traditional culture through the effects of colonialism. It's really a primer in the practices of daily life in Ukerewe, wrapped up in the form of a long and rambling story set in an unspecified pre-colonial period, in which nothing in particular happens except for the normal events of family life - courtship, marriage, birth, death, sickness, minor disputes, the work of cooking, butchering, hunting, farming, fishing and craftsmanship, the brewing (and consumption!) of banana beer, religious rites, healing, etc., etc., etc. (yes, definitely a three etc. book - two would be inadequate to describe it). It's directionless, repetitive, inconsistently paced, totally lacking in suspense and drama, and should be a disaster of a book, but there's just so much detail that it becomes crazily fascinating. You can't help wanting to know more about a society in which men were not supposed to be able to see their mothers-in-law, or in which the resumption of marital relations after childbirth was marked symbolically by husband and wife both urinating into a cow's horn.

The mood is very much that of oral storytelling, full of digressions and verbatim repetitions of long speeches, and it is something that is best read slowly, a chapter or two at a time, adapting yourself to an "African pace". Given his educational background, Kitereza must have been well aware of the biblical and classical Greek foundations of western culture, but quite unlike Achebe, he chose to shut them out of his story and structure it in a way that would speak first and foremost to African readers. If Europeans wanted to read it for some strange reason, well, they would have to learn Kikerewe first.

Not surprisingly, Kitereza had no luck finding a publisher for an endlessly long novel written in a language that at the time had fewer than 50 000 native speakers. The manuscript hung around for decades unpublished. Kitereza was initially reluctant to translate it, because he felt that so many of the cultural concepts he talks about were so local to Ukerewe, but he agreed to produce a Kiswahili translation in the late 60s, which was eventually published in Tanzania just after his death in 1981.

The book finally came to the attention of European readers in 1990, when a German translation (from the Kiswahili version) by Wilhelm Möhlig was published under the odd and rather Edgar-Wallace-sounding title Kinder der Regenmacher. Tanzanian novelist Gabriel Ruhumbika, who is an Mkerewe himself, eventually produced a pedantic and heavily-annotated English translation in 2002. He takes care that we can trace all the culturally-specific terms back to Kikerewe words, so this would be a useful text for anyone who is reading the book with a serious linguistic or anthropological interest, but it can be a little frustrating when - for example - the endnote gives us no more information about a bird referred to only by its Kikerewe name than that it eats snakes (which we already know from the context...). Ruhumbika also seems to have worn out the endurance of his Tanzanian typesetters - the frequency of minor errors gets higher and higher as you advance through the book, until you get to the back-cover blurb which is almost unintelligible.

It was fun, and it's definitely recommended for those with more time than sense - others might want to reflect carefully and check for vacant shelf-space before seeking out a copy.

>128 thorold: Fascinating review.
I won't read it (I'm not sure whether I have much sense but I know I have little time for books, or at least not as much as I'd like ;) but I really enjoyed learning about it through your review.

>129 chlorine: Ruhumbika mentions in passing that a Canadian colleague of Kitereza's produced a heavily-cut French version (only about 1/3 of the original) at some point, but it wasn't made quite clear if that was ever published.

For a complete contrast, I read another Muriel Spark. Her first novel, as it happens:

The Comforters (1957) by Muriel Spark (UK, 1918-2006)

  

A gloriously offbeat, subversive novel that set the pattern for Spark's literary output, where the only thing you could be sure of was that you hadn't a clue what might be coming next. Some of the usual themes are here - Catholicism, the shabbier side of literary London - but this is a novel that thinks it's an absurdist play, in which there's some kind of dangerous leak in the fabric of unreality and the characters become aware that they are characters in a work of fiction, and some of them start to fight against that idea. And not just any work of fiction, but one built on an improbable conspiracy and a set of coincidences so convoluted that it would challenge the ingenuity of Dickens to fit them all into a novel three times the length of this one. We have a main viewpoint character, Caroline, who is meant to be writing a book on The Novel, but who keeps being disturbed by the tapping of a typewriter and the voice of what is indisputably an omniscient narrator telling her what she is thinking; we have a 78-year-old granny who runs an international diamond-smuggling gang; we have an embittered old retainer who literally disappears whenever the action doesn't require her and whose bosom seems to be of endless fascination to Caroline; we have a bookseller who dabbles in satanism and despises people who buy books; we have a manufacturer of preserved figs who always manages to be away on a religious retreat when something happens in the story, and much more. It's all pretty crazy, and Spark tells us about it with her usual light, ironic detachment, managing to bring the story to the most conventional conclusion narrative inevitability could demand whilst still making us fully aware of how silly a convention it is that novels should end in that particular way. Not her best book, of course, but still very entertaining sixty years on, and well worth a look.

Great review of The Comforters -- it makes me want to read it!

Well done for reading and writing a review of Mr Myombekere, not surprised that yours is the only review listed. Glad you had some fun reading it.

Just checked - no Muriel Spark's on my bookshelves.

>132 baswood: no Muriel Spark's on my bookshelves - well, that's easy to fix!

As of yesterday, there are no more African books on my TBR shelf! Which I'm sure will also be a short-lived situation.
I think I must have bought this one about the same time as The interpreters, not long after it was published:

Ìsarà: a voyage around "Essay" (1990) by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1934- )

  

This could well be classed as one of those books with a wilfully misleading title - unless you happen to remember from reading Aké that Soyinka's father was known by the nickname "Essay". It's actually an imaginative memoir about his father's life as a young headmaster in the colonial Nigeria of the thirties and forties, reconstructed from various documents that Soyinka found in a tin box after his father's death (the title is an allusion to John Mortimer's play about his own father, of course).

I didn't plan it that way, but it turned out to be very interesting to read it soon after The Interpreters, because there are a lot of parallels between the two - both focus on a group of clever, ambitious young professionals keen to better themselves and their country, but of course they are set a generation apart, one during the colonial period, the other soon after independence. The young men are all alumni of St Simeon's Training College, Ilesa (they call themselves the "Ex-Ilés", although the - British - college principal prefers the term "Simians").

The author's father - who is bafflingly never called "Essay" here, but appears as Akinyode Soditan or Yode - loyally teaches a curriculum full of pro-imperial propaganda, but isn't taken in by it himself, and doesn't really expect his students to be. Together with the other Ex-Ilés, he believes in a future in which educated Nigerians will take advantage of the skills they've learnt from the colonial powers to take over the running of their own, progressive and thoroughly modernised country. But they find that it's not as easy as all that - there are still strong forces in play that want to get rid of the poison of European ideas and take the country back to an - illusory - ideal of the African past. This ideological conflict is brought into a tangible form when the traditional ruler of Yode's home-town, Ìsarà, dies, and there are two obvious candidates for the succession, one a conservative and the other an Ex-Ilé with a civil-service job in Lagos.

On the whole, this is a lighter, funnier book than The Interpreters - the mood is closer to Aké - but it has its moments of dark violence and sinister magical influences as well.

I was amused to see that Soyinka manages to bring in a sub-plot in which a foreign conman is practicing an advance-fee scam on innocent Nigerians. Especially since the perpetrator is a Trinidadian-Asian based in London. Surely Soyinka wouldn't be using this as a way to tease a future fellow-Nobelist...?

And another late entrant for the Nordic theme, although this is one I found on Scribd and has never actually been on my TBR shelf. Several other CR members have read this and obviously liked it. And it comes with an introduction from Ali Smith...

Fair play (Swedish 1989; English 2007/2011) by Tove Jansson (Finland, 1914-2001), translated by Thomas Teal

  

(Photo of Tuulikki Pietilä, Tove Jansson and her mother on their island in the 1950s, from Wikipedia)

Tove Jansson is of course the best-known Finnish author outside Finland, thanks to her children's books about the Moomin family. I always used to be impressed by the author bio in the front of those books that told us she lived on her own on a small island. Obviously there were some compensations to be looked forward to in adult life...

It turns out that that wasn't entirely true - the island was the site of her parents' summer-house, and she lived there only seasonally, and mostly together with her life-partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. Since we wouldn't have got this rather lovely little book without that set of circumstances, I'm not too disappointed, though.

Jonna and Mari are two women of a certain age - one a visual artist and film-maker, the other a writer and illustrator - who live and work together, but not too close together. They are Finnish, after all. There has to be an attic corridor with many closed doors between their two studios.

We see their life in a series of short glimpses, on their island, in Helsinki and on various journeys. We see them enjoying the oddness of each other's ways of seeing the world, confronting artistic and practical problems together, quarrelling and making up, and above all feeding into each other's creative work. Although what Jansson tells us about Jonna and Mari is never objectively any more than what we might have seen and heard as a visitor to their house, put together in context it becomes an incredibly intimate account of how two people can share their lives without ever giving up their own contrasting personalities. A beautiful, restrained, delicately funny and very Nordic love story.

Great last three reviews.
amazon.fr lists a French translation of the Kitereza but it's in two volumes and the first one is 300 pages long so I'm not sure it's a cut version.

I haven't read anything by Sparks either, and The comforters seem very interesting! Which other books of her would you recommend?

136. Nice review of Fair Play. Jansson is one of my favorite authors.

I’m pretty sure that i read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie many years ago, but i remember nothing about it. That would be the only Sparks I’ve read. I have Memento Mori on my wish list, so my interest is obviously piqued.

>135 chlorine: >137 NanaCC: Since I’m in the middle of (re-)discovering Muriel Spark, I don’t want to advise, but Miss Jean Brodie is the obvious one to try, and once you’ve read it and been thoroughly confused about which side you’re supposed to be on, it’s a great excuse to dig out the old videos and watch Maggie Smith doing her stuff as well.

BTW - I put a link to this piece on Spark by (the inevitable) Ali Smith in the Interesting Articles thread a few weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/29/ali-smith-on-muriel-spark-at-100?C...

>135 chlorine: The French Kitereza seems to have the same exotic titles for the two volumes as the German one, and it’s listed on Worldcat as a translation from Kiswahili and published in Frankfurt, so the one by the Canadian priest probably never made it into print.

>140 thorold: OTOH, I'm not sure what appeal à cut version would have as much appeal as the original book, even though the three etc. you mention in your review are also a problem... I guess it's a difficult book.

I'll be looking forward to your reviews of Sparks!

>134 thorold: I didn’t recognise the title, but as soon as you mentioned Jonna and Mari I realised that this wasn’t, in fact, a new-to-me Tove Jansson, but that wonderful little book I read a couple of years ago. Your review has brought it back very clearly. My recent reading, particularly of several Norwegian novels, has me thinking again how restraint can be just as effective as overstatement, if not more so. In the long run, I remember the quiet novels better.

In the meantime - it's difficult to justify keeping a 90-page novella on the TBR pile for three years, even if it is in Spanish and belongs to a genre that usually doesn't interest me all that much. But it is about an island, so there's a sort-of segue into it from Tove Jansson...

Interesting to see that Adolfo Bioy Casares was an almost exact contemporary of Tove Jansson (they were born a month apart, albeit on opposite sides of the world).

La invención de Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina, 1914-1999)

  

Adolfo Bioy Casares and his wife, the writer and artist Silvina Ocampo, were both close to Jorge Luis Borges and often collaborated with him on literary projects. Borges wrote the preface for this, Bioy's first stand-alone novella. He and Octavio Paz both famously categorised it as "an almost perfect novel" - so obviously it's more or less compulsory to read it if you want to say you know something about South American literature...

The narrator is a fugitive from Venezuela (we aren't told why he is on the run from the law, but there are hints that he's the victim of some sort of political persecution) who has taken refuge on what is meant to be an uninhabited island. Naturally, he's a bit miffed when a bunch of tourists suddenly appear and start playing the gramophone a week or two after he first arrives. At first, he keeps a low profile, thinking that this might be a plot by the police to flush him out of hiding, but then he gradually becomes fascinated with one of the tourists, a woman called Faustine, and discovers that something seems to have gone seriously wrong with either the way he perceives the world, or the way in which everyone else does.

There turns out to be a very ingenious solution to the mystery, and we are bombarded with references to H.G. Wells, Faust, Robinson Crusoe, and much profound speculation about the relationship between human individuality, memory, and perception, but none of it ever really grabbed me very profoundly - it's all just clever philosophical juggling, really, and it seems to take itself far too seriously. As one of the other LT reviewers says, it might have been much more interesting if it had been a five-page story by Borges rather than a 90-page novella in which we have time to become irritated with the lack of any real interaction between characters.

>134 thorold: - there was a very interesting documentary about Tove Jansson on the bbc in recent years. We see her island home. I hope I am not imagining this, but I think we also learn of a similar set up in her studio with her partner connected through a corridor and sharing lunch together. I do hope I am remembering correctly - ah a quick google shows I am, they were connected with an attic passageway - or maybe you knew and I just thought you meant the island? (I also remember it made me think of Frida Kahlo whose workspace was connected with Diego Rivera with a bridge.) You've made me want to read her, I did read some Moomins a while ago.

Next in what seems to be turning into a series of Spark notes...

The only problem (1984) by Muriel Spark (UK, 1918-2006)

  

There was something niggling away at me when I read The comforters and I realised afterwards what it was - I'd got it in the back of my mind that there was a Muriel Spark novel about the Book of Job, and I was expecting it to be that one. With hindsight, the title probably does imply a reference to Job, only in some convoluted symbolic way that I was too sleepy to work out at the time...

Anyway, it turns out that The only problem is the one that is about an amateur scholar writing a monograph about Job and finding himself afflicted with his own share of arbitrary suffering in the process. No boils or dung-heaps, but a lot of journalists and police interrogators who descend on him in his lonely chateau in the Vosges when it appears that his estranged wife may be involved with a Baader-Meinhof-style terrorist organisation.

Quirky and unpredictable as always, and full of witty, penetrating lines, although not quite as experimental in form as some of the others. The narrative is fairly linear, and most of the oddity is expressed through the wilful mixing-up of theological debate with a very secular story of crime, infidelity and divorce. It looks as though Spark was really looking for an excuse to have a bit of a dust-up with God about the way he treated Job - not quite the all-out rage of a Joseph Roth, but a firm rapping of the divine fingers about his failure to respect due academic process: Job’s problem was partly a lack of knowledge. He was without access to any system of study which would point to the reason for his afflictions. He said specifically, “I desire to reason with God,” and expected God to come out like a man and state his case. - a comment which is delivered not in the framework of a seminar but during a wonderful comic set-piece press-conference where the Job-figure, Harvey, is fielding questions from crime-reporters about his wife's sensational activities.

But there are still all those wonderful Sparkish lines to make sure you stay awake...

‘All she said on the card was that she was going to Munich,’ said Nathan.
‘I wish her well of Munich,’ said Harvey.
‘I thought it was a beautiful town,’ Ruth said.
‘You thought strangely. There is a carillon clock with dancers coming out of the clock-tower twice a day. That’s all there is in Munich.’
...

She was used to men answering her with one part of their mind on religion. That was one of the reasons why Edward had become so unsatisfactory after he had ceased to be a curate and become an actor.
...

No Gotham would stoop to harm a policeman. The police have always respected and looked up to us.

>144 tonikat: Thanks, I must look out for that - BBC documentaries of that type always seem to come back sooner or later. The corridor between the (Helsinki) studios plays an important role in one of the vignettes in Fair Play, in a way that makes you think it's unlikely to be invented. The island doesn't sound big enough to have a corridor on it...

La música ya está aquí, en mi cabeza, y no hay nada que hacer. En el fondo tocar no es importante, ¿sabes?, lo importante es escuchar. Si escuchas, siempre hay música.

(Opening of the last song in Schubert’s Winterreise, “The organ-grinder”, and a quote from the Organ-grinder character in Andrés Neuman’s El viajero del siglo.)

>147 thorold: My interest is piqued...know the song and the composer........and just enough Spanish....

>147 thorold: - Rilke? Sonnets to Orpheus? but not sure why the spanish, the music...hmm

>148 Tess_W: >149 tonikat: Sorry for milking the suspense a bit longer than I was planning to - the tell-tale thinning of the pages isn't always easy to judge when it's an e-book...

I found out about this book through RebeccaNYC's "What should I borrow?" list, which I shouldn't click on, because it's a sure way of increasing the height of my TBR pile. Sadly, it looks as though she never got the chance to read it herself, but when I saw that it was a historical novel inspired by Schubert's Winterreise, it was hard to resist. It turns out that Neuman grew up in a family in which German chamber music was rarely off the turntable, and knew all the songs of Winterreise long before he had worked out that there was a story behind them. It sounds very much like my own childhood, except that I missed out on the essential next step of using this experience as the jumping-off point for an extraordinary novel! Oh well, maybe next time...

It's funny how you sometimes find unexpected patterns in your reading:
- Cuban view of the French enlightenment (El siglo de las luces, read in 2016)
- Mexican view of the Italian baroque (Muerte súbita, >38 thorold: above)
- and now the Argentinian view of German romanticism:

El viajero del siglo (2009; Traveller of the century, 2012) by Andrés Neuman (Argentina, Spain, 1977- )

  

Andrés Neuman is the son of two Argentinian musicians - he grew up in Buenos Aires and currently lives in Granada. He has won many literary awards, including the prestigious 2009 Alfaguara Prize for this, his fourth novel, which also made quite a stir when it was published in English in 2012.

Early in 1827, a traveller arrives in the small German town of Wandernburg, which is in some undefined (and undefinable) spot on the borders of Saxony and Prussia. He makes friends with an elderly organ-grinder, falls in love, unintentionally steals the heart of the innkeeper's daughter, has various strange encounters with crows, ice, post-horns, graveyards, barking dogs, and a wind that shakes the leaves and blows the hat from his head. And eventually he leaves town again. You get the picture: the symbolic language of this book leans very firmly on Wilhelm Müller's cycle of poems about a winter traveller, which Schubert set to music as the song-cycle Winterreise in 1827.

There's also a significant nod to another famous German plot - the young woman the poetic traveller falls in love with turns out to be engaged to the fine, upstanding son of a local landowner, and out of loyalty to her widowed father she can't break that engagement.

And there's a lot more to this book than that. In a similar way to what Thomas Mann did in Lotte in Weimar, Neuman uses the generous framework of a nineteenth-century novel, where there is space for detailed literary, political and philosophical discussions and for plenty of sub-plots and minor characters, to give us a closely-detailed idea of what Europe was like at that particular moment in history, a moment which he clearly sees as being relevant to our own times. His main characters are young people who have grown up reading Voltaire, Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft and believe that everything is possible. But they find themselves living in a world where there are still kings and priests and policemen and censors, the European ideal has disappeared into petty nationalism, and the only rights that the state seeks to protect are those of landowners and employers. OK, maybe there are a few parallels there!

Neuman's method isn't quite as crude as that, of course - he musters his evidence carefully and takes us through all the poets and philosophers we need to make sense of all that. For the most part he sticks to his chosen chronology, although he does take some minor liberties with time, giving his characters access to books that probably would have taken a few more months to get to a place like Wandernburg, or allowing them to boast about having travelled on railways that were then still under construction.

Neuman also takes some pains to show us why so many people felt in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars that Europe needed order, authority and religion, but he rather undermines this side of the case by making all his conservative characters ultimately reveal themselves as either evil or foolish.

There are some odd little anachronistic titbits thrown in to provide a bit of postmodern Verfremdungseffekt - the two young rebels at the centre of the story are called Hans and Sophie (so we know they aren't going to beat the system, and we have our little doubts about which system it is); the two policemen who share a name seem to have been borrowed from Tintin; the Spanish character has the surname Urquijo and his late wife was called Ulrike - both names that could have been around in 1827, but are more likely to make modern readers think about 20th century news stories. And of course there is a lot more sheer physicality around than there could be in a nineteenth-century novel - sex, body-odour, urinating dogs, and all the rest of it.

The central part of the story has Hans and Sophie collaborating on a poetry translation project, with a lot of reflections on what literature is for, whether and how far translation is possible, and why we need to be aware of literature in other languages. Neuman has to use a certain amount of literary sleight-of-hand here, because he's writing in Spanish about people who are supposed to be working in German, inter alia translating Spanish poetry. And of course the oddity of that comes over all the more if Spanish isn't your first language, and you find yourself reading Keats, Nerval, Pushkin or Heine in a Spanish that you are supposed to take as German! But he seems to get away with it, somehow. It must have been a nightmare for anyone translating the novel, though...

A fascinating, mind-bending and very immersive reading experience. And another book I'm going to have to re-read some day.

(Afterthought: not really a criticism, but I was expecting a bit more about music. Apart from the implicit presence of Schubert and the anachronistic appearances of the Nightwatchman from Meistersinger, the only musicians actually mentioned are Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Paganini and Boccherini, and none are discussed in any detail. Setting the story in 1827 makes it a bit too early for Mendelssohn and Schumann to have had much impact, I suppose - but without Mendelssohn, the characters would have been unlikely to know about J.S. Bach unless they were Lutheran church musicians, so he probably shouldn't have appeared either, certainly not thrown in casually as a symbol of German identity...)

Guardian review by Juan Gabriel Vásquez : https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/21/traveller-of-century-andres-neuman...
- I didn’t spot the footballers, they obviously belong with the anachronistic titbits I mentioned. I liked Vásquez’s comment about how Neuman’s background as a poet contributes to the effect of the novel: “...his virtuosity in the short distances does wonderful things to the long novel: the attention he pays to one of his main characters is the same he pays to the sound of an adjective while describing the wind, or a dog's ears, or light.”

After a week immersed in 1827, I went to completely the wrong concert today - Vox Luminis singing motets by various Bachs from the generations up to and including J.S. It doesn’t get much more baroque than that. Obviously I should try to coordinate a bit better! But it was an excellent concert, and sometimes you need a change.

Intriguing review of Traveller of the Century. I had never heard of Andres Neuman before.

Of course I recognised the footballers in the Guardian review of Traveller of the Century, which is described as a Monster book. It all sounds very intriguing from your review. I wonder if anyone else will be tempted to read it in Club Read. If only I had the time.

>153 baswood: I checked the paper copy in the library this afternoon to see how long it really was - 525 pages of fairly small print in Spanish. Not quite “monster”, but certainly on the long side.

Returning to my criminal habits again, here are the first two books by another author everyone else has heard of except me:

Still life (2005) by Louise Penny (Canada, 1958- )

A fatal grace (2007; UK: Dead cold) by Louise Penny (Canada, 1958- )

   

Louise Penny took to crime-writing after a career as a journalist and radio presenter for CBC. She's originally from Toronto but now lives in the Eastern Townships area of rural Quebec where her novels are set. She writes in English.

In keeping with the mixed cultural heritage of Quebec, Louise Penny's murder stories bring together two apparently incompatible lines of crime-writing heritage, the Agatha Christie tradition of the cosy, complex, village murder and the Simenon roman policier. The crimes take place in the impossibly nice Quebec village of Three Pines, a place populated only by the right sort of people - painters, poets, restauranteurs, booksellers and murderers - and with more than its fair share of eccentric old ladies and charming gay couples. But the investigations are in the hands of Chief-Inspector Gamache, a man fond of poetry and good food, with an apparently endless fund of empathy for listening to witnesses, but also with plenty of authority when it comes to keeping his team of ambitious, competitive detectives in order.

In Still life, the first in the series, a well-liked Eccentric Old Lady is murdered in a fashionably unconventional way a few days before the opening of the local art show in which - for the first time - one of her paintings is to be exhibited. The book feels a bit first-novelish and rough around the edges - people have a way of telling us about themselves rather than letting us work out from their actions what they are like, and some of the action flows a little implausibly. The main red herring comes across as just that - a technically complex red herring device we are supposed to admire for its construction - rather than forming an organic part of the story, and Gamache is perhaps more tolerant about the way the author is messing him about than we could expect any real policeman to be in such circumstances. But those are details - on the whole, it's a charming, witty and intelligent story, with plenty of local colour from a part of the world we don't see all that often in fiction.

A fatal grace/Dead cold is the second Gamache story, set deep in the Canadian winter. A woman who could very well have stood as model for C.S. Lewis's White Witch (if she'd been born a few decades earlier) is murdered, to no-one's apparent regret, at the climactic moment of a curling match, and Gamache has to come back to Three Pines to investigate. Penny has obviously got into her stride by this point, and the mass of wires and pulleys required to keep the complex plot running smoothly are scarcely visible to the reader. More poetry and art, quite a bit of Canadian winter-culture, including a pretty respectable snowstorm and a suitably perilous chimney-fire. My only minor niggle was with the built-in problem of all crime series set in closed communities - any new characters we haven't met before are almost certainly going to turn out to be either murderers or victims. Or red herrings, a variety of fish Penny seems very fond of...

It's interesting to see a bit more of Gamache's wife, Reine-Marie, in this book - she's obviously inherited a lot of the sound common-sense and cooking skill of Mme Maigret, but it's hard to imagine the Maigrets enjoying a double-entendre about a baguette together!

One of my minor resolutions for this year was to go to the cinema more often. I can probably tick that off as achieved now, since with one visit so far this year I’ve already exceeded my total for 2017 and matched that for 2016...!

I’m not really planning to turn this into a film review thread, but for the record, it was Thomas Lilti’s Médecin de campagne I went to see. Lots of nice French-film atmosphere and minor characters who looked and sounded like real people, and it was nice to see how the plot (crusty middle-aged rural GP becomes ill and has to take on an assistant, who of course turns out to be an attractive young woman) avoided the obvious romantic tramlines and became a story about two very different people learning to respect each other as professionals.

(Thinking of the one film I saw in 2016 makes me a bit queasy - it was an Amsterdam screening of the Danish documentary Amateurs in space, about the inventor Peter Madsen, who was present for a Q&A after the film. And has since made the headlines in quite a different way.)

Having just read a couple of books by Argentinian writers, on my last visit to the library I noticed another one I'd been meaning to follow up for some time:

Bestiario (1951; Bestiary) by Julio Cortázar (Argentina, France, 1914-1984)

  

Julio Cortázar was born into an Argentinian diplomatic family in Brussels in August 1914, just as the German invasion arrived there. After some years in Switzerland and Spain, the family returned to Argentina. Cortázar spent the rest of his childhood in Buenos Aires, and later worked in various parts of Argentina as a teacher and translator, after WWII also as a literary journalist. Not long after the publication of his first short-story collection, Bestiario, he moved to France to get away from the Peron regime. He was based in Paris for the rest of his life, working mostly for UNESCO, but also travelled extensively (especially with his third wife, Carol Dunlop) and took a high-profile interest in South American politics. As a writer, he's probably best-known for his experimental novel Rayuela (Hopscotch - which I read in 2014), written in such a way that the reader is left free to choose in which order to read the individual chapters.

This little collection of eight strange and subtle short stories marked the start of Cortázar's "official" literary career. At least two of the stories had previously been published by Borges in his review Los Anales de Buenos Aires, and there's obviously some overlap with the Borgesian way of seeing the world, but the emphasis is different - Cortázar is clearly particularly interested in the point at which the strange collides with the everyday, and in what the close examination of that could tell us about the way the human mind works. The fantastic elements in his stories are often quite subtle, and never quite take over from the realistic ones. We are never quite permitted to decide whether the logic of the story requires us to take the fantastic element literally, or if it is pushing us to step back and see it as a delusion of the narrator. In "Casa tomada" a brother and sister gradually abandon parts of their house to a something that they experience only as vague sounds coming from the rooms they have given up, whilst in "Bestiario" parts of the house where two children play are out of bounds because of the movements of a tiger we never get to see; in "Ómnibus" two passengers are inexplicably frightened because everyone else on the bus has a bunch of flowers and they don't. Some are nearer to ghost-stories: in "Lejana" a woman has a dream-like encounter on a bridge in Budapest with the woman she's been dreaming about, whilst in "Las puertas del cielo" the narrator takes a recently-widowed friend to a dance hall and they both see his dead wife dancing a tango (thus undermining Borges's famous idea that what distinguishes Argentinian literature is that it is not recognisably Argentinian...). Interestingly, the story that worked least well for me was the most recognisably Borgesian one, "Cefalea", about some ranchers who are attempting to breed an imaginary and very sensitive creature, the mancuspia.

And the long-awaited next instalment of Spark-notes...

Odd to realise that this book covers almost exactly the same timeframe (VE Day, the 1945 election, VJ Day) as Angela Thirkell's Peace breaks out, which I read in December. Two books that could scarcely be more different...

The girls of slender means (1963) by Muriel Spark (UK, 1918-2006)

  

This is probably Spark's best-known book after The prime of Miss Jean Brodie. And - of course - it turns out not to be quite what we would expect. Just about any other writer, inspired to write a book about a period she'd spent 20 years ago living in a hostel for young women, would have come up with - and many of them did! - a light, nostalgic, romantic comedy, essentially a boarding-school story spiced up with a bit of grown-up sexual jealousy, in which the heroine falls for the wrong man but realises just in time and marries the quiet one instead. But not Muriel Spark. She somehow manages to turn this unpromising material into a formally and linguistically experimental novel-of-ideas which is at the same time a satire of experimental novels-of-ideas...

As usual in a Muriel Spark novel, you find that your sympathy is being bound to characters who later turn out not to be sympathetic at all (tip: nobody comes out of this story well), the narrator is constantly butting in with opinions that contradict or undermine your preconceptions, and everyone criticises everyone else. Two parallel lines of narrative from different time periods switch places without warning, and apparently random overheard fragments of Great Poetry (recited by the offstage Joanna, training to be an elocution teacher) act as an ironic commentary on everything else (or possibly vice-versa...).

But it is also a wonderful comic novel about growing up, about rationing and shortages and youthful poverty, about being hungry but afraid of getting fat, about sex and religion and literary and political posing, about beauty and whether it matters, and many other things that you couldn't imagine would fit into such a slender book. Endless fun!

Just a few random bits of Sparkery about poetry:

Joanna Childe had been drawn to this profession by her good voice and love of poetry which she loved rather as it might be assumed a cat loves birds; poetry, especially the declamatory sort, excited and possessed her; she would pounce on the stuff, play with it quivering in her mind, and when she had got it by heart, she spoke it forth with devouring relish.

...she wrote poetry of a strictly non-rational order, in which occurred, in about the proportion of cherries in a cherry-cake, certain words that she described as ‘of a smouldering nature’, such as loins and lovers, the root, the rose, the seawrack and the shroud.

...he took Jane to a party to meet the people she longed to meet, young male poets in corduroy trousers and young female poets with waist-length hair, or at least females who typed the poetry and slept with the poets, it was nearly the same thing.

...and it's that time of the year again, the annual Dutch book promotion, Boekenweek. Which means that there's a specially commissioned novella handed out to everyone who buys Dutch books this week. Last year that was a bit of a mixed blessing, as they chose Herman Koch; this year the gift book was commissioned from the young Flemish writer, Griet Op de Beeck, from Ghent, who's already published four successful novels (none of which I've ever heard of, not that that means anything):

Gezien de feiten (2018) by Griet Op de Beeck (Belgium, 1973- )

  

Left a widow after 49 years of marriage, Olivia surprises herself and shocks her rather conservative daughter by volunteering to go and teach in a refugee camp in Africa. The reader will probably be a little bit less surprised than she is to find out that she is still young enough to fall in love...

Basically a romance, but quite an intelligent, funny and touching one, cleverly and economically constructed. And it gently challenges a few of our received ideas about age, race and migration, although it's hardly a protest novel. Looks like a good, safe choice for Boekenweek.

Love the Spark quotes.

Another short one. This is one of those books where for some reason the title stuck in my mind a long time ago, before I knew anything about the author or the type of book it might be. Until I finally got around to it today. Possibly the reason I noticed it is just that - like Bonjour Tristesse - it retained the original French title when it appeared in English translation. But cynics might say that it's because it includes a punctuation mark I have a known weakness for, the ellipsis...

(Alternative theory: I once read a lovely piece from one of Tchaikovsky's letters in which he raves about Brahms's manly chest and fine, sexy beard, but confesses that he can't stand the man's music...)

Aimez-vous Brahms... (1959) by Françoise Sagan (France, 1935-2004)

  

(The French paperback I got from the library has a cover design that must have been taken by mistake from the "generic latin-American romance" drawer.)

Françoise Sagan (real name Françoise Quoirez) came from an impeccable mix of grand French landowning and industrial families, and had a classic "bad little rich girl" career of expulsions from good schools. She had the good (or possibly bad) luck to write one of the most spectacularly successful international bestsellers of the fifties, Bonjour tristesse , when she was only 18, thus being propelled into a long and turbulent celebrity career in which she was rarely out of trouble over money, drugs, boyfriends, fast cars, husbands, even faster cars, business scandals, and politics (she was once famously criticised for turning up at a student protest meeting in a Ferrari - "not true," she said, "it was a Maserati"). Somehow or other, she still managed to find time to write twenty novels...

Aimez-vous Brahms... was Sagan's fourth novel. Paule, a divorced, thirty-nine-year-old Parisian interior decorator who sounds suspiciously like a refugee from a Colette novel, is struggling to cope with the onset of old age (we should remember that Sagan was only 23 when she wrote this!). Her boyfriend, Roger, is showing signs of losing interest in her the moment he's out of her sight and has rather more "business trips" away from Paris than is quite plausible. Paule is becoming frightened of being left alone. Then she meets a beautiful young lawyer, Simon, the son of one of her wealthy clients. He's 25 and bone-idle, but he's gorgeous and very needy for love, and Paule is faced with a terrible choice - should she trade Roger in for a new, faster model, or would it be safer to try to get him refurbished?

Brahms comes in only rather peripherally - Simon has invited Paule to a concert which would be their first outing together and asks if she loves Brahms; Paule realises that she has absolutely no idea. In fact, she's not even really sure whether she loves anything except herself and her own existence.

It's slick and elegant and a bit more sophisticated than just a rehash of the tragic young man/older woman romance that has been the staple of every Great French Novel since Stendhal, but it's also gratuitously patronising to anyone over the age of 25 and it's set irredeemably in an haute-bourgeoise world in which work is something that other people do and there's something very wrong with your life if you regularly get home before midnight. So amusing enough for 120 pages, but I wouldn't like to make a habit of it.

Elle ouvrit son pick-up, fouilla parmi ses disques et retrouva au dos d'une ouverture de Wagner qu'elle connaissait par cœur un concerto de Brahms qu'elle n'avait jamais écouté. Roger aimait Wagner. Il disait : « C'est beau, ça fait du bruit, c'est de la musique. » Elle posa le concerto, en trouva le début romantique et oublia de l'écouter jusqu'au bout. Elle s'en aperçut lorsque la musique cessa, et s'en voulut.

Second film of this year: Tom of Finland, directed by Dome Karukoski - an unlikely biopic about the man who must surely have had a good claim to be Finland's second-most-famous graphic artist. I've a feeling we're not in Moominvalley any more...

Quite nicely done, and of course plenty of attractive flesh and leather on display, but rather disappointingly linear and literal - I would have expected a film on such a subject to be a bit more playful and less concerned with biographical dotting of i's and crossing of t's.

Bonjour Tristesse book title? film? well known phrase or saying? Many people have heard of it, but today probably few have read the book.

>163 baswood: You missed out "...poem by Paul Éluard" :-)

(Original and English translation here: https://ilyadesmots.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/a-peine-defiguree-paul-eluard-bonjo...

I hope I'm not provoking anyone to echo Stevie Smith's immortal line "Do take Muriel out", but here's another one...

Loitering with intent (1981) by Muriel Spark (UK, 1918-2006)

  

Although written thirty years later, this novel harks back to the period of Spark's life in the late 40s and early 50s when she was living the impoverished literary life in London's bedsit land, which also formed the background to A far cry from Kensington and The girls of slender means.

The narrator, Fleur Talbot, is a young writer who takes on a secretarial job to support herself while finishing her first novel, Warrender Chase. Her employer, Sir Quentin, runs a club for memoir-writers which Fleur cheerfully assumes must be a cover for a blackmail racket. Her job is to type up the members' work-in-progress whilst silently correcting the most egregious errors of spelling and grammar, but she amuses herself by "improving" them in other ways as well, adding comic detail which the members are always happy to take on board as their own work. But then she starts to notice that bits of the as-yet-unpublished Warrender Chase are turning up in the present-day lives of the memoirists - life seems to be plagiarising art in the most disconcerting way...

Loitering with intent is quite a popular title for humorous memoirs, and it's obviously no accident that Spark picked it as the title for a novel that explores the complicated relationship between experience, fiction and memory. This is one of the most believable accounts of the process of writing a novel that I've seen in fiction, but it's also a very funny comic story in itself, with a glorious eccentric old lady, a complex missing-manuscript plot, and a lot of clever jokes at the expense of literary pretensions, incompetent amateur writers, shady publishers, sex, and plenty of little digs at the author's younger self.

Lydie Salvayre is another writer I've been meaning to follow up for ages - I read her brilliant 2014 Goncourt winner Pas pleurer two years ago. Once again, the library came to the rescue...

Passage à l'ennemie (2003) by Lydie Salvayre (France, 1948- )

  

Lydie Salvayre grew up in the Toulouse area as the child of Spanish civil war exiles (her mother's memories of the Republic in Catalonia formed the basis for Pas Pleurer). She practised as a psychiatrist in Marseille before becoming a full-time novelist.

Passage à l'ennemie is a clever satire about an undercover policeman who is assigned to infiltrate a delinquent youth gang in a high-rise estate on the fringes of Paris. Over the course of eight months living with the young men of the estate, smoking pot with them, sharing in their resistance to all forms of authority, and not least falling in love with the only female member of the "gang", the beautiful but silent Dulcinée Savedra, he gradually realises that his sympathies lie more with the people he's being paid to betray than with his colleagues on the side of law and order.

Salvayre is obviously a writer who is very interested in the way conflicts in our lives play out in the collision between different languages (Pas pleurer tells its story largely through the confusion of Spanish and French in the mother's mind) - in this book, she tells the story entirely through Arjona's official reports to his superiors, and we watch him gradually going off the rails as the painfully bureaucratic, impersonal language starts to give way to little touches of coarse but fully-human street French. She handles this beautifully - Arjona's attempts to pour his heart out in numbered bullet points are hilariously touching, and it's only in the very last report that he manages to kick the habit of referring to himself in the third person as "le soussigné" (the undersigned).

Names matter in this book. The narrator is using the alias "Adrien Arjona", a name he has borrowed from the absent father he never met. Arjona happens to be Salvayre's maiden-name (being an Andalusian name, she points out that it could easily be of Arab or Jewish origin), but it was also the family name of two famous Andalusian brothers from the Enlightenment, one a poet and the other a reforming police-chief and later mayor of Seville. The gang's resident intellectual is a student drop-out called Wallenstein. And of course, Dulcinée's name tips us off that there's something else going on here as well - this is a story fully compliant with the First Law of Spanish Literature. Arjona's mind has been distorted by his reading of spy fiction - in particular Gérard de Villiers's "SAS" series - his image of himself as a James Bond/Prince Malko action-hero figure is every bit as unreal as Don Quixote's role as a knight-errant. It is only through his love of Dulcinée and his need to enter sympathetically into her mind and find out why she is unable to speak that he recovers his own sanity and the clear view of life that shows him what disgusting animals his police colleagues are.

Fun, subversive and very clever, but don't look to it for a balanced view of France's social problems!

And I managed my third cinema visit of the year yesterday - Lucky, directed by John Carroll Lynch, with a beautiful performance by Harry Dean Stanton (who died last September). Significant tissue consumption from the dozen or so people who saw it with me. But it sometimes felt rather overwritten - as though we were being manipulated into laughing at uneducated people saying unintentionally profound things.

And quite a shock to emerge from a couple of hours looking at cactus-country into an icy Dutch north-easterly gale...

Laurent Binet is in contention for the Booker International with La septième fonction du langage, which I read a few months ago - that reminded me that I hadn't read his previous novel.

HHhH (2009) by Laurent Binet (France, 1972- )

  

This is a "non-fiction novel" in a similar sort of style to those of Javier Cercas, i.e. it combines a relatively objective investigation of a particular set of historical events - in this case the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942 - with a very subjective account of the process of researching and writing about those events. Binet tells us about how he came to be interested in Czech and Slovak history and to love Prague above all other cities (he did his French military service as a teacher in Slovakia and later had a Czech girlfriend), how he learnt about the assassination and its consequences, how he reacted to the sources came across as he was researching it, and so on. And of course that leads into discussion of wider issues - about the Nazis and their impact on European history and on our perceptions of how history works, about Heydrich's role in developing and implementing the "Final solution", about the value of resistance to overwhelming force, and about the complicated relationship between history, narrative, and historical fiction.

Sometimes Binet's niggling about the verifiability of the past takes on a comic dimension: early in the book he notes that he's told us that Heydrich grew up in "Halle", without realising that there are several towns of that name in Germany and he has no idea which one it was (it turns out to have been Halle-an-der-Saale). There's also a long-running niggle about the colour of Heydrich's car - Binet remembers the Mercedes he saw in a Prague museum as being black, and his girlfriend-of-the-time confirms that, but other writers talk about a green car, and photographs from the time are of course black-and-white. Perhaps it would be possible to settle this doubt somehow (maybe there's still a copy of the order for the car in an archive somewhere), but of course it's not that important - it doesn't materially affect the course of the attack on Heydrich, but it troubles his conscience as a writer that he may be giving us false information, and of course this serves as a symbol of all the thousands of other points of detail that a historian cannot know but a historical novelist would have to supply.

Binet generally follows the convention of pretending that his writing of the book is happening in parallel with our reading, so that if he finds out something new he should have told us about earlier, he doesn't go back and change the earlier chapter, but rather discusses his doubts with us.

It's an interesting exercise, but I think Binet takes on a bit too much. Compared to all the other people who've already written about Wannsee and Theresienstadt and Babi Yar, he can't help coming over as a bit of a lightweight. Cercas has been doing this rather longer, and seems to have a bit more control of where his mind rambles off to in the course of telling the story. But Binet does give us a very compelling account of the assassination itself and of the German operation to track down the attackers, both of which seem to have been beset with accidental difficulties and silly mistakes. It's tempting to say "HMmM..."

Didn't realise that HHhH was originally written in French, but then that is not so surprising since my only connection to contemporary literature is through LibraryThing. Great reviews as always, hope the weather improves soon in those northern climes.

>169 baswood: Didn't realise that HHhH was originally written in French - not surprising at all, really - he identifies so closely with the Czechs that if you didn't know anything about him, you'd probably have to read it quite carefully to work out that he wasn't one himself. In complete contrast to La septième fonction du langage, which couldn't be more French if it tried....

Here's another little book by an author who's featured a lot in my reading lately - I've read six of her books in the last two years (but they're almost all very short).

La Honte (1997; Shame 1998) by Annie Ernaux‬ (France, 1940- )

  

Annie Ernaux also writes "non-fiction novels", but they are of a completely different kind from those of Cercas and Binet - the historical events at the centre of her books are the very private, personal events of her own early life, and she writes about the experience of coming back to those events from her current perspective as a mature writer, opening up areas of her memory that many of us would be reluctant to go into.

This book was prompted by the memory of a pivotal day in June 1952 when a row between her parents looked frighteningly likely to get out of hand. It's trivial in hindsight, because nothing serious actually happened, her parents made up their differences immediately afterwards and carried on as normal, but it was of course extremely scary for her at the time, and it was also significant because this was a moment when she realised that there were things in her life that were somehow so shameful that she wouldn't ever be able to talk about them. In the book, she digs into the surroundings of her life in 1952 to get to grips with that feeling of social shame that was closing in on her as a 12-year-old - her parents' café-épicerie, their neighbourhood in a small town in Normandy, the convent school she went to, being an awkward, flat-chested, bespectacled adolescent, what was in the papers and on the radio then, how people talked in patois or "good French", how out-of-place her parents suddenly looked when they had to move out of their usual setting on a holiday trip, and so on.

It's a theme she touches on in other books, of course, and it's by no means unique to her - there are plenty of other writers who experienced at some point the feeling that their working-class background and lack of savoir-vivre somehow made them "not good enough" for the intellectual world they aspired to belong to. But Ernaux is peculiarly good at teasing out the details that make a period and a social setting come to life - you can't really read this without identifying with the narrator and her shame, even if you weren't twelve years old in 1952 and have never visited Normandy...

Excellent review of La Honte, Annie Ernaux. That is one I will definitely buy when I find myself in a decent French bookshop/libraire d'occasion. My French book for this week is Les Vrilles de la Vigne by Colette.

>171 baswood: You'll probably find that there's a lot of overlap between the themes of La Honte and La Place. But you can't really go wrong with Ernaux. Don't overlook Les Années!
I need to go back to Colette sometime - the Sagan book reminded me how long it is since I've read any.

Whoa! I can't believe I missed this thread! So much great reading, I'm overwhelmed! The Hardy write-up early in your thread is divine. He was such a favorite of mine during a certain era; it's been a long time since I read him.

Thanks for the review of La honte. I loved La place and looked up some of her other books, but they all seemed to be about her unsatisfying love affairs and the subject doesn't really appeal to me. I'll add La honte to my wishlist but should probably wait a bit to read it, it might feel a bit repetitive so soon after La place.

I read Bonjour tristesse a few years ago and was not very impressed by he writing, although the story was OK. Of course she was only 18 so maybe her writing got better later, but based on your review I'll skip Aimez-vous Brahms.

>174 FlorenceArt: Of the ones I've read so far, you might be interested in Journal du dehors or Les Années , which are both excellent but not at all in the "intimate memoir" style.

But Mémoire de fille and Ce qu'ils disent ou rien would both fit your "unsatisfactory love affairs" category, so avoid those...

Someone told me that Sagan's later stuff was better - perhaps 1959 is not late enough. Not sure if I have the courage to try any more.

Bookmarked for future reference - I just came across something that reminded me about Matthew Arnold's "Memorial Verses April 1850" on the death of Wordsworth. Not his best poem, but interesting.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43594/memorial-verses-april-1850

...Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear—
But who, ah! who, will make us feel?...

I was planning to read something else next, but I saw in my recommendations that a new Adamsberg had appeared in the last few months without me noticing it. So the queue was interrupted...

Quite unusual for me - I don't often find myself reading a series that is still being written.

Quand sort la recluse (2017) by Fred Vargas (France, 1957- )

  

Fred Vargas (real name Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) is a scientific archaeologist who has been writing crime fiction "in her spare time" for the last thirty years. This is her ninth novel in the very successful series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg, the unlikely, eccentric head of a specialist murder team in the Paris police. (Most of her books have been translated into English by now, but of course this one is still too recent for that.)

The recluse spider injects a particularly nasty venom into its prey, but European species don't have nearly enough of this poison to be dangerous to healthy humans. And in any case, living up to their name, they are not aggressive and tend to avoid human contact - very few people are ever bitten by them. So when three men in the South of France die of the effects of recluse spider bites within a short period of time, the web(*) is full of rumours and speculation - climate change, genetic mutation due to insecticides, ...? No crime has been reported, but all the same, Adamsberg's policeman's mind looks for criminal explanations to clusters of unexplained deaths, and his suspicions are reinforced when it turns out that at least two of the victims knew each other.

But not everyone in Adamsberg's team agrees with him, and the normally very loyal second-in-command Danglard is the loudest of the voices saying that this isn't a case, and should be left to the zoologists. But when has that sort of consideration ever stopped a fictional detective? Adamsberg presses on surreptitiously with a few volunteer colleagues, and soon finds himself navigating through very dense fogs of forensic and psychological uncertainty, and unearthing some very unpleasant crimes. The spiders are not the only kind of recluses involved here. And - not for the first time - it looks as though he will have to find the solution to the mystery somewhere in his own subconscious.

Definitely well up to the usual standard. Very black in places, but nicely paced so that there is always a bit of comic action in the murder team to relieve the tension when it threatens to get too heavy for the reader. The cat, La Boule, is back on top of the photocopier, there's a guest appearance by one of the Three Evangelists, there's a running joke about snowglobes, and an endless quantity of Béarnaise cabbage soup. What more could you want from a crime story?

---

(*) This ambiguity works in French as well, and Vargas has her fun with it.

I enjoyed your last reviews.
I'm lucky to have your thread to keep me informed about some French litterature. My main source of book information is here and that can be very English-language oriented. I have a feeling your read far more many French books than I do. :)

Your reviews definitely make me want to get to Erneaux sometimes this year. But before that there's a Queneau I've been meaning to read for a long time.

>178 chlorine: I have a feeling you read far more French books than I

Maybe I have over the last couple of weeks, but cumulatively you’re probably ahead of me by a couple of orders of magnitude.

I think I’m probably behaving in exploring French literature rather like those dreadful visitors from out of town who on their first day staying with you have already been to three museums you’ve never heard of, found a marvellous restaurant, and have got tickets for a show you took it for granted was already sold out. Or to put it another way, the less you already know about something, the more open you are to trying out new stuff.

>179 thorold: Don't tell me about these dreadful visitors! :D
They also go on top of the Eiffel tower while I never do. :/

Anyway it's not a race, so I hope most of all you enjoy what you read. :)

I've been delaying this forever, but I want to document at least something before moving on to the Q2 thread...

William Wordsworth: a life (1989) by Stephen Gill (UK, 1941- )
Selected poems (2004) by William Wordsworth (UK, 1770-1850), edited by Stephen Gill
The Prelude: The four texts (1995) by William Wordsworth (UK, 1770-1850), edited by Jonathan Wordsworth (UK, 1932-2006)

  

Stephen Gill and Jonathan Wordsworth both taught English literature in Oxford (SG at Lincoln College; JW at Exeter and later St Catherine's). JW was the poet's great-great-great-nephew.

The record of Wordsworth's life is interesting for all kinds of reasons, not least simply because of the accident of when he was born and how long he lived. This is someone who during his student vacations witnessed the heady atmosphere of revolutionary France, but who was still around in the year before the Great Exhibition to fulminate against railway expansion and mass tourism. He outlived the critical young writers of the generation after his own (Byron, Keats, Shelley) to become a national institution courted by all sides of the political and religious spectrum - Charles Kingsley, the Arnolds and Mrs Gaskell looked to him for inspiration just as much as Ruskin, Keble and Newman did. And of course he's one of the few writers who can be said to have exerted a direct geographical influence - without him, the fells of Cumberland and Westmoreland would never have turned into "the Lake District". There would never have been that wonderful moment on 14 August 1805 when Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott and Sir Humphrey Davy climbed Helvellyn together - the battle of Trafalgar was still a couple of months away, but the 19th century had already defined itself...

Gill's Life is a sober, academic account, staying away from gossip and speculation and focussing on Wordsworth's writing and the things that were directly relevant to it. It's lively and readable, but it's clearly designed in the first place for readers who are engaging with the poetry and are looking for context and background. And that's important, because Wordsworth really is a writer who is involved in the politics of his own times. However, if you just want anecdotes about home-life in Dove Cottage or detailed maps that will allow you to retrace Wordsworth's treks across the fells, this is not the place for it.

Something Gill is very interested in is the way Wordsworth often seems to be defined more by what he did not write than what he did, in particular the long philosophical poem "The Recluse" which he had planned out with Coleridge's encouragement, and to which "The Prelude" was supposed to act as a kind of introduction. "The Excursion" would have been one part of "The Recluse", but Wordsworth really wasn't a man for abstracting and systematising his ideas: he was passionately interested in what could be learnt from digging into the individual human experience, but he was sceptical about any ideas that started to float free of that foundation.

---

So, what's special about Wordsworth as a poet? He's often thought of as a radical innovator, even if most of the things he does are not in themselves new. There were other 18th-century poets who wrote about non-exalted subject-matter (ploughmen and peasants, not nymphs and goddesses) and chose their language from the registers of everyday prose; other poets were not afraid to use ballad form when they had a story to tell; other poets wrote in the first person and didn't claim to be objective observers of universal truths; other poets found a pathway to the sublime and transcendent through their experience of the natural world. Just think about Gray, Burns and Goldsmith, for example.

But Wordsworth did all these things more richly, assertively, naturally, consistently and sympathetically than his predecessors. And got richly and assertively mocked for it by critics, like Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review, who felt that it was ridiculous for a serious poet to waste his time on leech-gatherers, idiot boys, Alice Fell, and aged beggars. Which is ironic, because it is precisely that slightly sentimental sympathetic involvement with the real human stories behind individual suffering that made him so popular with many Victorian readers. (It's also interesting that many of these poems about lower-class "characters" come directly from Dorothy's notes - easy enough to imagine that it was she who inspired him to talk to the people they met when they were out and about and discover their stories.)

The poems about the poet's encounters with nature (Daffodils, skylarks, cuckoos, rainbows, etc.) are more difficult to take seriously, because they have been so cheapened by over-exposure. When we see the line "I wander'd lonely as a cloud", we don't think about clouds, we think of the jokes and parodies and perversions of this line that we all know - I think the first thing that comes to my mind is the 1980s Heineken commercial ("Refreshes the poets other beers cannot reach..."). And I don't see how anyone can still take "My heart leaps up" seriously... But they do often have an unexpected power if you can somehow persuade yourself to read them as though for the first time - that worked for me with "To a skylark", when I suddenly found myself thinking about it as though it had been written by Gerald Manley Hopkins. Which it could easily have been, had Wordsworth not got there first, with something that comes very close to GMH's "sprung rhythm". And "Westminster Bridge" is still as nearly perfect as an English sonnet can be, even if you've heard it badly recited a thousand times. So, there's still plenty in this book that isn't as predictable as you thought it was going to be...

---

The Prelude is Wordsworth's surprisingly fresh and modest account of growing up and developing his ideas about poetry, as seen through a series of key encounters with people or (mostly) with the natural world. We learn about his childhood in the family home and later at Hawkshead school, his Cambridge days, walking over the Alps, his experiences of the French revolution (omitting the bit about his unplanned French daughter...), and his love for Dorothy and for Coleridge.

The blank verse is firm, plain and natural - he has a few annoying habits like winning a syllable to pad a line by using a double negative, or throwing in a "poetic" elision or archaism, but he does this sort of thing far less often than most poets of the time, and a reader in 1805 (had anyone been allowed to read it then) might well have found the language astonishingly direct and plain. Nowadays the archaisms are more noticeable to us than the "plain" language, of course, and it's hard not to get irritated with his habit of describing people and things instead of naming them. Your heart leaps down when you behold a "that ... who/which ... " construction. But those minor things aside, this is a poem that you can - and should - read "like a book". It's a wonderfully open intellectual autobiography by someone who would most definitely not like to think of himself as an intellectual.

Never published in Wordsworth's lifetime, it started off as a 150 line poem in 1798, grew into two books of blank verse in 1799, achieved what most people regard as its definitive form in 13 books in 1805, but was then revised several more times before it was published posthumously in 14 books in 1850. Wordsworth was an incurable tinkerer, and constantly worked on his earlier poems, tweaking punctuation and orthography, changing a word here or there, sometimes even deleting and inserting long passages. The Penguin edition prints the 1805 and 1850 versions as parallel text, so that it's easy to see what was changed, but sometimes very difficult to fathom out why. More often than not, you feel that Wordsworth got it right the first time - wording that was tight and clear to start with becomes weak and woolly in the revised text. Some of the changes obviously reflect the way he became more and more conservative in old age - sympathy for radical ideas is played down, religious experiences that were undoctrinal and almost pantheistic in their expression are forced into language that will fit in with the ideas of mainstream Victorian Christianity.

---

I've still got a couple of books on the shelf about Wordsworth & Coleridge and about William & Dorothy, so more to come...

The Stephen Gill book is the one for me as far as a biography is concerned.

Interesting to see that your views on subsequent versions of the Prelude seem to chime with other critics. I will stick with the 1805 version.

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on what is special about Wordsworth.

Another one I've been meaning to read for some time. A lot of people in CR seem to be reading this at the moment!

Books about the recently-retired finding a purpose in life are not high on my priority list just now (I can just hear my sister saying "You see - you should find a hobby like that!"), but I stuck to it because it's Erpenbeck, and she's sure to have something worth saying...

Interesting too how this book resonates with Wordsworth's message that you have to listen to people's individual stories and not try to fit them into some arbitrary model of human behaviour you have set up.

Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015; Go, went, gone) by Jenny Erpenbeck (DDR, Germany, 1967- )

  

Jenny Erpenbeck comes from a prominent East-Berlin cultural dynasty - her grandparents were writers and communist activists, her father is a physicist and philosopher, her mother an arabist, and she herself is quite well-known as an opera director as well as being a novelist. I've read and enjoyed her previous novels Heimsuchung (2008) and Aller Tage Abend (2012), which both deal in different ways with Germany's recent history.

A retired classics professor becomes interested in the fate of a group of African men who have been staging a protest in Berlin against the absurdity and casual cruelty of the immigration laws in whose web they have become entangled. He goes to meet the men, starts talking to them, and in the process of learning their stories becomes quite close to several of them and begins to shape his life around supporting them in their struggle to regain visibility and human dignity.

The men are mostly from West Africa and have been migrant workers in Libya, from where they were violently displaced when the civil war broke out. Because they first set foot on European soil in Italy, the law insists that - even if they do ultimately get refugee status - they can only get permission to live in that country, where there are no jobs, no housing and no provision for supporting them. Germany has plenty of space and a labour shortage, but these men aren't allowed to live or work there, and nervous (local and national) politicians trying to appease right-wing voters are not very willing to be seen to be making concessions of any kind to migrants. So the Africans are stuck, unable to advance or to do anything to support themselves, first in an unofficial tented camp on the Oranienplatz, then dispersed into various improvised hostels until the formal procedure to send them back to Italy has been gone through.

By bringing the liberal-humanist professor (as acutely conscious of the history of his own country as someone born in the closing stages of the war and having spent most of his working life in the DDR has to be) into conversation with the migrants, Erpenbeck allows us to come to our own conclusions about the underlying morality of immigration controls. It's not so long ago that Germany was stripping citizenship rights from millions of its own people, and even more recently Richard's own city was internationally reviled for building a wall to prevent its people from leaving. What's more, millions of Germans were themselves displaced from other countries and (more or less) welcomed back into Germany at the ends of both the first and the second World War. So how did it get to the point where so many Germans - the people Tacitus praised for their iron tradition of hospitality - now think it's acceptable to refuse to take in the people who come knocking at their doors?

This isn't a book with any easy answers to the "refugee crisis" beyond the key message that every migrant is a person with his or her own story and reasons for being here, which we should listen to - and it isn't just a book that is applicable to Germany, either. It does make it pretty clear, though, how the legalism and bureaucracy of the state immigration process serves as a cover for racism, selfishness and (still!) an imperialist desire to dominate and control "others". And Erpenbeck isn't just addressing the AfD voters and the riot-policemen here - she obviously wants to remind all of us in the "developed world" that when we are enjoying the luxuries our lives here offer, we enjoy them at the expense of someone somewhere else...

A chastening, but at the same time somehow heart-warming book.

This one is this month's book for the book-club I'm in. I was interested because Haddon is a very popular writer I've somehow never got around to. I don't think this book really encourages me to read more...

The Pier Falls and other stories (2016) by Mark Haddon (UK, 1962- )

  

Mark Haddon has written many children's books, as well as a couple of very successful novels for adults, none of which I've read. He lives in Oxford.

Judging by this collection of short stories, Haddon is clearly a very gifted writer, but he seems to have an almost unremittingly bleak view of the world and of human nature. Most of the stories are in one way or another about how people react to the extreme physicality of violence and suffering when it breaks unexpectedly into their lives. The context and the approach vary from story to story - in "The pier falls" the style is so journalistic that it's a surprise to find that this isn't a description of an actual event; "Wodwo" brings figures of medieval myth into a contemporary magic-realist setting; "The Island" takes a legend in its own terms and strips the magic away from it; "The woodpecker and the wolf" seems to be magic-realist sci-fi; "The boys who left home to learn fear" is Rider Haggard/Conan Doyle adventure; whilst "Bunny", "Breathe" and "The gun" are good old-fashioned council-estate drab. But every time we know that at some point in the story we are going to get dismemberment, violent death and soiled underpants. But with enough real feeling that it's never merely grotesque grand guignol.

If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will probably like.

---

Haddon on his (non-beige) influences as a short story writer: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/23/mark-haddon-writing-short-stories-...

The council-estate theme that comes up in a few of these stories made me curious about where Haddon grew up himself and led me to this rather charming radio piece he did a couple of years ago about his parents' house. He speculates whether being an architect's son and having grown up in a well-designed house has made him particularly sensitive in his writing to the surroundings people live in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07yb92w

A little annexe to the Wordsworthery in >181 thorold: - this is the book that was mentioned in passing by Q in his lectures on Dorothy (cf. >83 thorold:):

Dorothy and William Wordsworth (1927; reprint 2011) by Catherine MacDonald Maclean (UK, ?-1960)



Catherine MacDonald Maclean taught at Edinburgh University and later at (what was then) University College, Cardiff at a time when there were not many women in British academia. She published a number of books about Scottish poets and others about the Wordsworths and Hazlitt. I couldn't find a date of birth for her by simple googling, but her first book was published in 1915, so I'd guess she was born before about 1890. She was obviously a respected figure in her field - later on she appears on title pages as "DLitt, FRSL", but in 1927 she was still "just" an MA.

This little book is a collection of nine essays - the first two are about Dorothy herself, the next three about how Dorothy and William cooperated, and the last four about William. Maclean is obviously a passionate Wordsworth enthusiast, but she's especially enthusiastic about Dorothy "...a woman of genius" "...a mind unusually sensitive and poetical" "...the most poetical woman of her generation" (a generation, Miss Maclean doesn't remind us, that included women like Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, ...).

However, allowing for a bit of overselling, what Maclean says about Dorothy's writing is sensible and helpful, and fits in well with at least those excerpts from her letters and diaries that I've looked at so far. Dorothy is a very precise, modest and conscientious writer who always manages to show us the magic in what she has seen with a minimum of fuss. And she notices the most extraordinary little things: "As I lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world" (this is a passage Virginia Woolf also quotes in her essay on Dorothy). Her brother often takes these details and works them up into something grander, but not invariably better.

In the middle part of the book, Maclean explores the collaboration of William and Dorothy a bit more deeply, and sets out her theory that the "Lucy poems", if not a literal depiction of Dorothy, were the result of William's feelings for her. But what Maclean particularly values these poems for is "their utter withdrawal from the poetry of mating". Oops! Well, you wouldn't want love poems to be about sex, would you?

It's interesting to see that she feels she has to include two essays defending Wordsworth against modern detractors - "Vulgar errors" and "On the depreciation of Wordsworth's poetry". Virginia Woolf (who would probably have had endless fun with "the poetry of mating") being one of the chief suspects in the second essay. And it's curious to see that the modern writers she brings in to demonstrate that what Wordsworth stood for is still important are Thomas Hardy and Romain Rolland, both in their capacity as novelists. For Maclean, Wordsworth's use of language-registers and the way they fit the "substance" of his poems is much more important than the form this substance happens to be delivered in.

Interesting, but a bit of a period piece, really. Worth reading for the two Dorothy essays, but "the poetry of mating" is one of those unfortunate phrases it's going to be hard to shake off now I've seen it!

Another short book by a writer from the former DDR:

Verfrühte Tierliebe (1995) by Katja Lange-Müller (DDR, Germany, 1951- )

  

Katja Lange-Müller seems to be one of those "writers' writers" - in other words, you never see big piles of her books on the tables of high-street bookshops (in fact, you rarely see them on display at all), but you keep hearing them praised by other authors. Volker Weidermann, in particular, speaks very well of her books, and also mentions her behind-the-scenes work teaching and mentoring young writers. Quite a few of her works have been translated into Dutch and other languages, but none into English yet, AFAIK.

Like many of the DDR writers whose reputations have survived the Wende, she was the unruly child of an important political family - her mother Inge Lange was a Central Committee member and one of the most powerful women in the East German government, her father a senior manager in the state-controlled media. When young Katja got into trouble over an anti-government protest, the authorities had to be very creative in getting her discreetly out of the way: she was assigned to an internship in a carpet factory ... in Ulan Bator! She left the DDR in 1984. I read her most recent novel Drehtür eighteen months ago.

Verfrühte Tierliebe is a short, wry, witty book consisting of two separate but parallel novella-length episodes from the life of the unnamed narrator, who is a schoolgirl in "Käfer" and a young woman in "Servus". In both, she lands herself with a disproportionate amount of trouble and humiliation through a small, impulsive act of subversion that seemed like a good idea at the time. In the back-cover blurb, Monika Maron perceptively describes the narrator's gestures as "two failed attempts to begin life": she is trying to assert her individuality as a human being in a world where individuality and the possession of free will are punishable offences. There's nothing overtly political in either story, and in fact you have to read them quite closely even to work out that the setting is East Germany, but it's fairly obvious that one of the things Lange-Müller is trying to make us see is how human values get squashed out when authority can't afford to let itself see the funny side any more. Sadly, we can't claim that that particular problem disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall...

Clever, funny, touching, unexpected and very human - this definitely deserves to be better-known!

I'm catching up a bit, only three weeks or so behind but an acre of text (and others' posts) behind (not to mention my own). But,

150 - very intriguing. I think I need to read more Goethe and Holderlin first though. I wonder about Bach being in it, a mistake, deliberate? The kind of thing a writer fears if the first. But lovely review.

I was going to leave it at that today and catch up post by post gradually -- but then saw your Wordsworth posts (>181 thorold:, >185 thorold:) -- very interesting. I feel we could have a conversation - or begin to - I am not so well versed in eighteenth century poets.

Sometimes I wonder if the poem Wordsworth wrote on the recluse was the one he lived in later life, some truth somehow, which as with any, ebbs and flows in clarity. But really that is speculation, as I only know a few accounts of people meeting him later (when he seemed very in touch with the poetic), I don't know his later poetry really, nor have I finished the bio I started on him, lost track after the huge years. I wonder if his later life was a response I suppose to what he had written, how he had lived - I suppose also to his context, maybe to having to hide some things. In an indirect and different way it makes me think of Rimbaud, wonder at that. But really I am speculating. Must read Gill, one day.

I think my lack of eighteenth century poets has helped me read WW as though fresh. I've not been bothered by his mannerisms and style either, in fact just charmed, just part of him, how he did it, for me.

I haven't read Catherine MacDonald MacLean - that is quite a turn of phrase. It makes me wonder if she is addressing something, but I don't want to speculate on that.

Wow - an incredibly interesting set of reviews. I feel educated after I read your thread :)

Keep them coming in Q2!

I know you've moved on to a new thread, but just wanted to say that you have done what many classes failed to do -- interest me in reading Wordsworth. I suspect there was just too much of that "you should really read this" around him.

>187 tonikat: >188 AlisonY: >189 SassyLassy: - Thanks, All!
If anyone still has comments on the posts above, feel free to post them here. Otherwise, please come on over to the Q2 thread...