thorold is stepping westward in Q3 2023

Welcome to my Q3 thread! The Q2 thread was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/349810

Lots of travel plans in Q3, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen to my reading, but if everything goes ahead I should be away in the UK and US for quite a bit of the coming period. I expect there will be a lot of ereader time involved. I’m not planning on transporting a suitcase full of books over the Atlantic, but you never know…

In the meantime, there’s a Black Sea theme read in Reading Globally that I’m looking forward to ( https://www.librarything.com/topic/351845 ), and all the usual things still going on. And I brought a sack of books back from the annual Dordrecht book market on Sunday…

Q2 Reading stats:

I finished 36 books in Q2 (Q1: 49).

Author gender: F: 5, M: 31 (86% M) (Q1: 73% M)

Language: EN 19, NL 11, DE 2, FR 2, ES 2 (53% EN) (Q1: 53% EN)
Translations: 6 (two Spanish, one each from Danish, Norwegian, Albanian and Polish)

Publication dates from 1897 to 2023; mean 1995, median 2007; 10 books were published in the last five years.

Formats: library 8, physical books from the TBR 26, physical books from the main shelves (re-reads) 0, audiobooks 0, paid ebooks 2, other free/borrowed 0 — 72% from the TBR (Q1: 45% from the TBR)

34 unique first authors (1.06 books/author; Q1: 1.20)

By gender: M 29, F 5 :81% M (Q1: 73% M)
By main country: UK 6, NL 9, AT 2, ES 2, FR 2, DE 1, US 6, and various singletons

TBR pile evolution:
01/01/2022: 93 books (77389 book-days) (change: 8 read, 12 added)
01/04/2022: 84 books (77762 book-days) (change: 31 read, 22 added)
01/07/2022: 86 books (58460 book-days, 680 d/b) (change: 30 read, 32 added)
01/10/2022: 84 books (59801 book-days, 712 d/b) (change: 15 read, 13 added)
01/01/2023: 88 books (67009 book-days, 761 d/b) (change: 10 read, 14 added)
01/04/2023: 99 books (70256 book-days, 710 d/b) (change: 22 read, 33 added)
01/07/2023: 96 books (76010 book-days, 791 d/b) (change: 26 read, 23 added)

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Since the average shelf-time per book increased by eighty days in a period of ninety days, it's pretty clear that I've been reading almost exclusively from the new end of the pile. I need — once again! — to read some of the oldies!

This was on the library's Pride month display:

Queer: 44 LHBT-hoogtepunten uit de naoorlogse literatuur van Nederland en Vlaanderen (2017) edited by Nienke van Leverink (Netherlands, 1987- ), introduction by Xandra Schutte (Netherlands, 1963- )

   

(van Leverink photo schrijversvakschool.nl; Schutte photo Wikipedia)

In 1991, and again in 2008, the well-known (gay) poet Gerrit Komrij wrote an essay arguing that homosexuality had become too boring to be a topic for literature, now that it was no longer wonderfully secret and forbidden. He's not alone in this: for several decades there's been a kind of general feeling that Queer Lit had its moment of glory in the 70s and 80s, but that that moment has now decidedly passed.

Of course, that's not true. Certain battles in certain places have been won, mostly to the benefit of middle-class white men who want to be free to spend money and enjoy themselves, but there are still plenty of other things for queer writers to get their teeth into, even in the 21st century. Schutte and van Leverink take up Komrij's implicit challenge by putting together a collection of interesting and very diverse short stories and poems by 44 Dutch and Flemish writers who span the period from World War II to the 2010s. There are big names like Simon Vestdijk and Anna Blaman from the beginning of the period, Komrij, Adriaan van Dis, Astrid Roemer and Maarten 't Hart (all born around 1945) from the middle, and young stars like Hanna Bervoets and Marieke Lucas Rijneveld from the current generation, but there are also an awful lot of very interesting writers I'd never heard of collected here. A useful and entertaining anthology.

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A lovely simple typographical design for the front cover, but somewhat undermined when the book is on the shelf by the clumsy way they squeezed the full title and subtitle and the names and roles of both authors onto the spine whilst leaving space for the inevitable library sticker.

Amongst other things in my Dordrecht haul, there were quite a few old Boekenweek gifts. This is the 1997 novella, commissioned from Renate Dorrestein. Several of her novels have been translated to English, including A heart of stone (1998). As well as being a prolific novelist — and a pioneer of the gothic novel in Dutch — she was well-known for journalistic engagement with feminist causes.

Want dit is mijn lichaam (1997) by Renate Dorrestein (Netherlands, 1954-2018)

  

A claustrophobic family drama centred around the tumbledown home — in an anarchic, peripheral community poised on the edge of the modern world — of the widowed artist Job Olson and his crippled daughter Maria, his housekeeper and only model for many years. All sorts of generation-bending tensions come out into the open when Job brings his new and very young girlfriend Felicity into the mix, whilst Maria's son and daughter-in-law (Cas and Xandra!) are busy having a designer baby.

There's a lot of symbolism going on, some heavy biblical references and apocalyptic weather, and a lot of fierce criticism of our (modern?) drive to control our own bodies and environments as well as the male possession and control of women's bodies.

Dorrestein explains in an endnote that Job's painting in the story is based on Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" (1948, in the MOMA collection: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78455 ), but the characters are her own.

And a recent Julian Barnes novel from the library:

Elizabeth Finch (2022) by Julian Barnes (UK, 1946- )

  

Barnes has obviously been in this game long enough to know that he would never find a decently large audience for an extended essay about his namesake, the philosopher-emperor whose attempt to marginalise Christianity and put the Roman Empire back on a sane course of Hellenistic paganism was ended by his death on a Persian battlefield in 363. So he hit on the ingenious tactic of burying it in the middle of a short novel in which the narrator, Neil, dubbed "King of unfinished projects" by his daughter, tries to find out more about the life of his friend and sometime Foundation Course tutor, Elizabeth.

Of course, we soon discover that there are serious limitations to what we can ever really know about another person, whether it's the fourth-century Apostate or a reclusive private intellectual ("she never married," as Elizabeth sums herself up acerbically in one of her notebooks). And Neil's limitations as a biographer give Barnes plenty of licence to keep us dangling and withhold any satisfying resolution. This is a book about the process of living (and loving), not the result. Enjoyable, as a couple of hours spent in the company of Julian Barnes usually are.

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Yay! A cover with holes in it! I haven't had one of those for months... Sadly, the library rebound it, so I can't tell if you are meant to be able to see anything through the holes.

Also the most desperate blurbs I've seen for a while: David Bowie, who died some years before this book appeared, is quoted as saying "I really like Julian Barnes as well", and Angela Merkel is given a long paragraph in which she says little about The noise of time (not Barnes's finest hour, anyway) and a lot about her memories of living under Soviet cultural policy.

>4 thorold: This sounds interesting, although if the editors' aim was to meet "Komrij's implicit challenge", wouldn't it have been better to selection all recent works? Otherwise it feels like they are agreeing with her. Just a random thought...

>6 thorold: Which Barnes books are your favorites? I have only read Sense of an Ending, although I have Arthur & George and England, England on the shelves.

>7 labfs39: On the other hand, they left out Gerard Reve, which must earn them a few points for elephant-in-the-room avoidance… :-)

No, I think it’s a pretty good selection, with enough “old stuff” to establish that there is a tradition, but a definite centre of gravity around recent writers. And they do stay away from the obvious. There are very few straightforward “coming out” stories, much more about what happens to same-sex couples years down the road. And plenty of acknowledgment of the rest of the ever-extending alphabet soup after “L” and “G”. Maybe they could have spent more time looking for stories of non-white experiences, there’s not much of that apart from the Astrid Roemer piece. But you can pick holes in any anthology.

Barnes: Difficult to remember, I must have read quite a few of his books in pre-LT times. But I liked most of the early stuff (Metroland, Cross-channel, Flaubert’s parrot, A history of the world in 10.5 chapters, etc.). Not so keen on Arthur & George, I think. I enjoyed England, England at the time, but I don’t remember enough about it to be able to say whether you could still read that post-Brexit. Of the recent ones I’ve read, I liked everything except The noise of time, which I found didn’t have enough room for music in it. He seemed to forget that Shostakovich was a composer. I still haven’t got to The sense of an ending, but it sounds like one I would like as well, FWIW. Motto seems to be: avoid the fatter books.

>8 thorold: the ever-extending alphabet soup after “L” and “G”. Hah! You’d think adding a + at the end would put an end to the inflation, but apparently not. When I was reading Sortir de l’hétérosexualité to my mother, I had to laugh every time LGBTQI+ came up.

I have only read two books by Julian Barnes. I loved A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters but was not crazy about Staring at the Sun.

>8 thorold: Motto seems to be: avoid the fatter books. Lol, will keep that in mind.

>8 thorold: I enjoyed The Noise of Time just because it focused on Shostakovich as artist, rather than composer. Always loved his music, but the man is very elusive, so I appreciated the stab that Barnes took at him, and that he used the composer as a sort of symbol of all artists of that time and place.

I have read four (Julian Barnes that is) and enjoyed Flaubert's Parrot He writes so well and is a pleasure to read, but he never really raises the roof for me.

>11 kac522: Fair point — I might have been looking for something in the book I shouldn't reasonably have expected.

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Another Boekenweek gift from the incoming pile: this is the 1991 novella, by Cees Nooteboom, who's been churning out novels and travel books for nearly seventy years and seems to have a claim to be the most widely translated Dutch writer ever. Certainly, back in the eighties when I was planning to move to Holland, he was the only obviously Dutch writer to be seen on the shelves of UK bookshops (I remember looking at a few others with "Dutch" names and being disappointed to find that they were all South African or American...).

I don't know how true it is, but I've heard it suggested that Nooteboom has never been quite as popular in the home market as he is in the German-speaking world: someone I know calls him "the literary Rudi Carell"(*), so maybe they just disapprove of him because of his success in Germany. Anyway, for a change, this is a Boekenweek novella that is actually available in English, so you can decide for yourselves.

Het volgende verhaal (1991; The following story) by Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands, 1933- )

  

Former classics teacher Herman Mussert ("Sokrates" to his students and colleagues) wakes up in a familiar Lisbon hotel room, a room he had stayed in in the course of an extramarital affair some twenty years earlier. Which is fine, except that he's sure he went to sleep the evening before in his own apartment in Amsterdam.

It soon becomes clear that this trip — if it is a trip — has nothing to do with Mussert's current job as a hack writer of guidebooks to foreign places for ignorant Dutch tourists (obviously Nooteboom making gentle fun of his own work as a travel writer) and everything to do with that long-ago affair with biology teacher Maria, which in turn was connected to an affair between Maria's partner Arendt and Mussert's star pupil Lisa. But we have to work our way through quite a lot of Ovid, Plato, Horace, planetary science and entomology — as well as a few passing references to Pessoa — before we can start to get a clear picture of what's going on. It's all quite elegant, but Nooteboom works far more slowly and methodically than I would have thought possible in the space of a 96-page novella, so there are moments towards the middle of the book when you've seen where it's going and you feel you ought to start screaming "just get on with it!". I suppose it would be good training for reading Hermann Broch...

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Through most of this book I was struggling to remember where else I'd seen the idea of a Latin teacher on the loose in Lisbon: of course it's Pascal Mercier's Night train to Lisbon from 2004, quite a while after this was written. The two stories don't have anything else important in common.

(*) Rudi Carell was a Dutch entertainer who hosted a long-running show on German TV

Catching up with threads here. I always enjoy and learn from your reviews. Thanks.

Thanks to Storm Poly, I had the perfect excuse to stay at home yesterday and finish a couple more books (not that I needed it...). Getting stuck into the Black Sea theme a bit:

Border : a journey to the edge of Europe (2017) by Kapka Kassabova (Bulgaria, Scotland, etc., 1973- )

  

During Kapka Kassabova's childhood, Bulgaria's southern border was part of the Iron Curtain, a mysterious and deadly zone, out of bounds to everyone except border guards and a few specially vetted and supervised shepherds and foresters, a place where desperate East Germans would make futile attempts to escape to the West under the pretext of beach holidays by the Black Sea. Now it's the southern frontier of the European Union, the point where desperate people from countries like Syria are trying to get in.

Kassabova returns to the region to explore this border, from both sides, visiting the Strandja mountains on the Black Sea coast, the Rhodope mountains in the west, and the Thracian plain around Edirne (Adrianople) in between the two. This isn't the kind of travel book that has a lot of actual travel in it, though: she is more interested in people and their stories than in scenery or buildings, so she takes the time to stay where she is, sit in cafés, and let the locals come and talk to her. She finds out about local practices and beliefs that seem to go back a long way before Christianity and Islam (firewalking, divination, sacred springs, etc.), about smugglers, treasure-hunters and former border guards, about the region's many minority groups, and about the uncountable individual human tragedies that go with the "bigger historical picture", from the pre-WWI Balkan Wars and the Treaty of Lausanne right through to Bulgaria's forced de-islamisation programme of the late eighties and the Syrian refugee crisis that was at its height while she was researching this book.

Fascinating, and very engaging writing. The tone and emphasis are quite different, but there was a lot of overlap of interest and sympathies that made me think of Paddy Leigh Fermor's Roumeli.

And this was a random find from Dordrecht that looked relevant for the Black Sea theme. Marc Jansen is a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, currently an (emeritus) professor in Amsterdam, who has acted as an OSCE election observer in numerous parts of the region:

Belaagd paradijs: een geschiedenis van Georgië (2021) by Marc Jansen (Netherlands, 1946- )

  

As Marc Jansen points out in his introduction to this short (150 pages plus notes) history, Georgia has some strong claims in the "earthly paradise" stakes: beautiful landscape, fertile valleys, a gentle climate, and a culture based around five-hour lunches. And the second-longest Christian tradition in the world (it adopted Christianity just a few years after Armenia).

Unfortunately, it soon turns out that Georgia has also faced some pretty tough historical challenges, in the shape of large, aggressive neighbours. Rome/Byzantium/Ottoman Turkey in the west, Persia, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in the east and, since the 18th century, Russia in the north. Georgian culture has only really been able to flourish in the periods when one or more of these neighbours was weak or distracted elsewhere, as it did during the "golden age" of the 11th century. At other times the country has often been weak, split into rival principalities that became clients of the big neighbours.

Most of us would have trouble naming any famous Georgians apart from Stalin, Beria, and maybe Eduard Shevardnadze. None of them exactly role-models, unfortunately. Jansen devotes plenty of space to Georgia's history since the Russian revolution: the brief period of independence under the Mensheviks, absorption by the new Bolshevik state and creation of the Georgian SSR, Stalin's rise to power, the terror of the thirties and forties, varying degrees of regional autonomy under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and then the chaos that followed the dissolution of the USSR.

As in quite a few other newly-independent territories, the first politicians who jumped on the box after Moscow let the reins go were nationalists (naive, or cynical and opportunistic: take your pick) who gained popular support by picking on minorities. In Georgia's case, the perceived threat to the non-Georgian Abkhazians and South Ossetians led to unrest and civil war that gave Russia an excuse to occupy both regions and set them up as supposedly independent states, not recognised by the UN. Which of course conveniently weakens Georgia and has left it with a legacy of political instability and difficult relations with neighbours. Not ideal for a country whose economy depends mostly on agricultural exports (and the fees it earns by transporting oil and gas across its territory).

A very interesting introduction to a country I didn't know much about. Looking forward to reading more...

>15 thorold: Sounds very interesting!

>15 thorold: That is interesting. I crossed that border on my motorcycle back in the 1970's on my way to Edirne. I am interested in reading about books with a Black Sea theme.

>16 thorold: My wife visited Georgia, spending about a week and a half there, just last year. I'm sure she would find this book interesting (as would I, I'm sure).

Do you know if it has been translated into English? A quick online Dutch to English translation provides the English equivalent as Beleaguered Paradise: A History of Georgia. I checked Biblio and Abebooks with no luck. The only book by Marc Jansen I could find in English was his biography of Nikolai Ezhov.

>19 rocketjk: I got the same result on the Kobo bookshop, no English (or French) translation except for the one you mentioned.

>19 rocketjk: No, I couldn’t see any sign of translations either. The most obvious general histories in English in his bibliography seem to be:
- Neal Ascherson Black Sea (2007)
- Charles King The ghost of freedom: a history of the Caucasus (2008)
- Kalistrat Salia The history of the Georgian nation (1982)
- Kakha Shengelia History of Georgia from the ancient through the modern times (2016)
- Nodar Shoshiashvili (ed.) Modern history of Georgia (2020 - no touchstone)
- Ronald Grigor Suny The making of the Georgian nation (1994)

Apart from the first two, they all sound like things to borrow from university libraries…

>21 thorold: Sincere thanks for taking the time to compile that list. I will do some looking around. I'm in NYC now, so maybe I'll have some luck at Strand Books. Always on the lookout for good gifts for my wife. Cheers!

...and another one from the library pile. Unlike most people here, I wasn't a huge fan of Wolf Hall (maybe I read it at the wrong moment?) and I never got around to the sequels. But this short story collection looked manageable and the title was intriguing.

The assassination of Margaret Thatcher and other stories (2014) by Hilary Mantel (UK, 1952-2022)

  

A set of fairly generic short stories that look to have been written over a period of about twenty years, but with a few nice, unexpected touches. "Sorry to disturb", for example, a story about an expat-wife in 1980s Saudi Arabia who gets involved in a misunderstanding-laden friendship with an Asian businessman, looks deceptively like a simple reworking of the plot of A passage to India, but comes with so much unexpected detail that you have to assume that there is a real personal experience behind it. "Harley Street" and "Offences against the person" both recast conventional workplace dramas in witty ways to show us what they might look like from the receptionist's desk (and the latter, in particular, has some clever lines of Mancunian dialogue that wouldn't have been out of place in a Victoria Wood script). "The heart fails without warning" picks up the theme of eating disorders that Mantel used in a different way in her novel An experiment in love, and "How shall I know you?" is a clever take on the writer-on-tour theme. And that title story: well, it poses the reader with an interesting moral challenge. What would you have done if someone had barged into your apartment with a sniper rifle in 1983, intent on shooting the Prime Minister from your window? In the abstract, I'm sure many of us would feel as though we might have said "go right ahead", but of course it's not so straightforward when you actually imagine yourself in that situation...

<23 “Go right ahead” and I will put the champagne on Ice

>24 baswood:. :-)

This arrived a little late for the Q1 theme read on the Baltic, so it's been sitting around on my coffee table for three months with a bookmark somewhere just before the Reformation, while I let myself be distracted by other things (not all of them books...). Time to finish it and then rearrange the History section to make a space it will go in...

The Baltic : a history (2011) by Michael North (Germany, 1954- ), translated from German to English by Kenneth Kronenberg

  

(Author photo Greifswald University)

A useful, comprehensive history of the Baltic region from Viking times to 2010, reasonably well balanced between political, social, economic and cultural history. North writes like an old-fashioned academic historian, with a lot of verifiable facts and no speculation or padding, which is efficient and allows him to cover a remarkable amount of ground in 330 pages and create a very useful reference book, but the total absence of personality in the text makes it a bit soul-destroying if you try to read it cover-to-cover.

Obviously, if you have a book focussed on a sea, you have to decide how far inland you should allow yourself to go: North's approach seems to be to try to avoid writing a complete history of every country with a Baltic coastline, but to fill in enough context that we will know where we are. And he obviously assumes that we will be reasonably familiar with at least German and Russian history. We do get more background detail on Sweden, Denmark and the Baltic States. But in a book that covers the Thirty Years War in a couple of paragraphs, you need to stay pretty alert: blink and you will miss something vital... But it did tell me a lot of stuff I didn't know, or couldn't have put properly in context, so I found it very useful.

If I'd looked a little more carefully before buying this book, I'd have realised that Professor North originally wrote it in German, and I'd at least have been able to spare myself the rather pedestrian translation.

>23 thorold: >24 baswood: go right ahead indeed. It was definitely the title that had the book jumping into my hands, and I think Mantel did a very good job with the story.

"The heart fails without warning" was probably my least favourite of the stories. It seemed like good Mantel territory, but I just couldn't get involved with the protagonist. I felt that way with the novel Beyond Black too; a book many others thought really well done.

>25 thorold: If I'd looked a little more carefully before buying this book, I'd have realised that Professor North originally wrote it in German, and I'd at least have been able to spare myself the rather pedestrian translation.
I was wondering why you read it in English, now I know!

>16 thorold:

As a Soviet republic Georgia was famous for its visual artistry, from painting to the cinema. Eldar Shengelaya and Tengiz Abuladze were two of the most prominent Georgian directors--I recommend especially the latter's 1984 film Repentance, an astonishing, unique work.

>27 LolaWalser: Thanks, I'll have a look. I'm sure I remember being taken to see something Georgian at the film club around that time, but I've no idea now what it was, so it probably wasn't that one...

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Back to the TBR pile: when I did the stats the other day I realised that I haven't read much off the old end for quite a while. Here's a Calvin & Hobbes book that's currently second-oldest, bought in April 2017 at the height of my Milton binge. John Rogers caught my attention because he gave a very interesting Yale lecture series on Milton that is available on YouTube.

The matter of revolution : science, poetry and politics in the age of Milton (1996) by John Rogers (USA, 1961- )

  

There's a lot in the seventeenth century that seems to be about authoritarian systems with top-down control of passive (human or inanimate) bodies: Calvin's theology, the might-is-right political philosophy of Hobbes, and, perhaps above all, the mechanistic material universe of Descartes. But it wasn't all like that. It was a century when censorship walls came down and publishing became easier in many places — at least for a time — and there were all sorts of anomalous and even revolutionary ideas around.

Rogers looks at one particular moment, in England around 1650, at the time of what Christopher Hill called "the revolution that never happened" (the Diggers and Levellers), when people from a surprisingly wide range of disciplines and political opinions became interested in an alternative kind of natural philosophy known as vitalism, which derives ultimately from the alchemical tradition of Paracelsus and is based on "the unity of matter and spirit as a self-active entity." This kind of thinking was used by the Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley to argue against tyranny and private property, by Margaret Cavendish to undermine patriarchy, by conservative poet Andrew Marvell to set the organic harmony of a garden (and the virginity of his teenage pupil Mary Fairfax...) against the political turmoil outside, and by royalist physician William Harvey to explain the circulation of the blood (it's not the heart that's in charge, but the blood itself that wants to be pumped).

Above all, of course, it was used by Milton in his scientific, historical and theological explanation of the universe in Paradise lost. Being Milton, and writing at a moment when the "inconsiderate multitude" had invited the Stuarts back and he himself was in a somewhat precarious political position, of course he doesn't use it in a straightforward way: his God is sometimes represented as constrained by the physical laws he has set himself, at other times as an authoritarian free to take arbitrary decisions as he thinks fit. Rogers has fun disentangling the apparent contradictions and suggesting how we should read them to try to make some sense of it all. A lot of this rests on understanding that what Scary-Archangel Michael tells Adam in his anticipatory history lesson in the last two books is determined by the particular didactic situation, and we shouldn't read it as though it is Milton talking to us. Interesting, and it was fun how this provided Rogers with his segue into Margaret Cavendish: what might Eve have been dreaming of whilst Adam was getting those two books' worth of higher education on top of the mountain? Could she have been anticipating the non-patriarchal, distributed-control universe of The blazing world...?

>28 thorold:
… By a rather nice bit of serendipity, my music streaming thing came up with a new recording of Handel’s L’allegro and Il penseroso to play me this morning, so I read the last couple of chapters while listening to William Christie’s guys singing away about fantastic toes and Jonson’s sock. Excellent.

>28 thorold: Sounds intriguing (and fun) the way you wrote it.

Also, you're caught up to 2017 on the TBR - impressive.

>30 SassyLassy: Fortunately you didn’t see my first draft, where I tried to develop the anachronistic idea of Milton as a die-hard Remainer isolated in post-Brexit Britain…

I got to know Willem du Gardijn a little bit when I was working with his wife on the board of a small charitable foundation, many years ago, and I was quite excited to read his first novel when it came out in 2008. The contact faded not long after that. I was shocked to realise, when I saw his name staring out at me from the shelves of a bookshop recently, that I'd lost track long enough for him to publish two further novels and two short story collections. Time to read at least one of those novels:

Het einde van het lied (2021) by Willem du Gardijn (Netherlands, 1964- )

  

(Author photo Elisabeth van Sandick, https://willemdugardijn.nl/)

Marguerite Yourcenar abandons the emperor Hadrian at his villa in Tibur a few weeks before his death in the year 138. Most of us are probably prepared to take those last few weeks on trust, but the recently widowed classics teacher Adriaan — first-person narrator of the centre section of this triptych and implied narrator of the other two parts — is not. He goes to the Bay of Naples to discover where exactly Hadrian was when he died — we know he travelled to Baiae, but to which house there? — and to supply the "missing" chapter of Yourcenar's book.

Obviously a big part of the point of this book is to confront the challenging imaginative problem of how to write about the moment of death from the point of view of the person dying, something writing tutors tell you to stay away from, as it's an experience that it's logically impossible for anyone to report. But of course it's also an experience we all face, and most of us will surely have attempted to imagine what it might be like. Du Gardijn's narrator has to meet the challenge twice: once in free indirect speech for his wife Aimée, and once in first-person for Hadrian.

The centre section, where Adriaan is researching Hadrian, carefully undermines his reliability as a narrator enough to make us go back and think about what we've just read: can we take a bereaved husband's word for what was going on in the mind of his depressed spouse? How much of Hadrian is Adriaan, how much is Yourcenar, how much is authentic? And of course, how much of Adriaan is the author? The "present day" part of the story is set back to somewhere in the 1980s or 90s to separate the two of them by at least one generation (and to make the research more interesting by eliminating mobile phones and internet...).

I think the danger with a book like this must be that all three parts individually end up rather like pastiches of well-worn situations: the middle-class woman having a mental health crisis, the author in search of a story, and the philosophical classical old-timer elegantly meeting the end of his life. But we get just enough entertaining details in each part to keep us on our toes — the music of Federico Mompou in part one, the chaos of Naples in part two, and the reality of the Roman roads in part three.

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A risky cover: at first glance it looks like a generic watercolour of birds and citrus trees, but of course it's a Roman fresco

Embarrassing sixties dust-jacket time, and, as usual, it's an unduly raunchy cover on a relatively decorous book. This was an unlikely find in one of our local little libraries a few weeks ago. Judging from the succession of prices pencilled inside the front cover and crossed out, this hardback must have crossed the Atlantic at least twice in the last half century... I've read most of Eric Newby's travel books and memoirs at some point, but never this one.

Something wholesale (1962; 1970) by Eric Newby (UK, 1919-2006)

  

When he left school, Eric Newby worked his way to Australia and back as an apprentice on one of the last generation of sail-powered cargo ships. Immediately after this he found himself plunged into equally adventurous military service in World War II. All of which didn't do much to prepare him for a civilian career after 1945. Offers to join expeditions to exotic parts of the world were slow to come in, so he gritted his teeth and joined the family firm, supplying ready-made clothes to the better class of provincial department stores.

In this memoir he tells us about that period of about fifteen years when he was working in the garment business whilst trying to get a toehold as a writer. We get amusing sketches of the archaic business world of Lane & Newby, Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers, and an affectionate portrait of the author's father, an Edwardian oarsman who often sounds like something out of J K Jerome, but seems to have had an acute eye for business (albeit with a blind spot for the bureaucratic obligations of postwar Britain). And of course there's a lot about the nightmarish world of fashion, where you have to decide months ahead of time what your fickle customers are going to want (or rather, what the store buyers are going to want on their behalf). In the Britain of the 1940s, with everything in short supply, and the French liable to change hemlines at a moment's notice, this was clearly no joke, even before they came up with the New Look...

Very much a period piece, but Newby knew what he was doing, and this is still an entertaining read long after almost everything in the commercial world it tells us about has become obsolete.

Another short one from the pile, the 1960 Boekenweek novella:

De zalenman (1960) by Elisabeth Keesing (Netherlands, 1911-2003)

  

Govert Barendse wakes up in hospital, and realises to his surprise that, for the first time in his life, he has a room to himself. He is a man of the "mass generation", having started his life with dozens of other infants in a maternity ward, then moving on to a noisy family, kindergarten, school, military service, internment, work, marriage — even the accident in which he was so seriously injured took place when the bus carrying the members of his football club had to swerve to avoid a party of Boy Scouts and collided with another tour bus.

As he passes in and out of consciousness, Govert struggles to make sense of this unexpected condition of being alone. The only person who seems — fleetingly — to understand what it might mean to him is a young nurse who was in a Japanese internment camp. But she moves on to other duties and doesn't reappear; other medical staff are merely baffled at Govert's failure to expire in the first few hours after the accident. An interestingly offbeat meditation on the busily collective nature of mid-20th-century life, but a bit difficult to relate to from sixty years on.

An interesting quirk of the sixties Boekenweek gifts was that they were published anonymously, and readers were asked to guess the author from a long-list of about twenty names printed in the back of the book and send in their answer (on a postcard, naturally!) before the 1st of May, when the answer would be revealed. If you guessed right, you stood the chance of winning up to fl.150 worth of books!

I tried to enter into the spirit of this, but I found that I hadn't read any of the authors on the long-list, so there wasn't much to go on. Looking at the details that jumped out at me in the text, I was fairly sure that the author must be a woman (correct), probably born between about 1920 and 1930 (wrong: 1911), with recent experience as a parent of young children (not very recent: her daughter was born in 1938). She had almost certainly been in a Japanese camp (correct) and had thus presumably spent her early childhood in the Dutch East Indies (wrong: she grew up in Amsterdam and moved to Asia with her husband in 1938). I didn't think the medical details were concrete enough to make her a health professional (correct: she had a PhD in history), although she does pour fairly convincing scorn on the male junior doctor whose life still revolves around student fraternity parties.

But this sort of exercise is a bit like the way professional mind-readers work. If you scatter around enough biographical guesses that are broad enough to be true of large parts of the population, the audience will think you're onto something. ("I'm seeing a letter 'J'? ... and a garden? ... with flowers?")

Also fun here for bookbinding nerds: the binding of the Boekenweek gifts at that time was sponsored by the distributors of a product called Fabroleen, an impregnated paper that was embossed to give it a fairly convincing cloth texture.

>34 thorold: Oh it's a shame this novella isn't available in a language I can read!

>35 Dilara86: Sorry for tantalising! I checked WorldCat and the Dutch translation DB, it doesn’t look as though anything of hers has been translated into anything other than Indonesian. There is Inayat Khan: a biography that seems to have been written in English, but that’s about it.

>34 thorold:

Are you familiar with Jens Sigsgaard's Palle alene i verden? One of the most memorable childhood books, at least for my generation and older.

>37 LolaWalser: No, never came across that. It sounds fun, especially the bit where he gets to drive a tram. That’s something I always wanted to try when I was that age…
A different kind of being alone from what Keesing is talking about, perhaps. Hers is not so much about freedom of action (Govert is trapped in a hospital bed, after all) as about being able to free your mind from the noise of institutional collectivity.

>38 thorold:

I thought you'd know it so didn't elaborate, but yes, whenever the topic of being completely alone comes up I flash back to Palle (or Pale, as it was spelled phonetically in Croatian). The tram episode is wonderful because it happens when he's still exhilarated by the power to do, go, take whatever he likes.

>34 thorold: Guessing the author can be fun. Our book club used to do something a little similar by trying to guess the author and the book from selected pieces of information from the blurb on the covers or from critical soundbites.

Another leftover from a Past Poet Project, in this case the Petrarch Plunge from early 2019.

The Cambridge companion to Petrarch (2015) edited by Albert Russell Ascoli (USA, - ) and Unn Falkeid (Norway, 1966 - )

   

(Falkeid photo kagge.no, Ascoli photo Berkeley)

A wide-ranging but still reasonably compact collection of essays by eighteen recognised experts, intended to give students a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge and opinion on Petrarch's life, works and critical reception as it stood in 2015. Nothing very radical, but quite useful stuff (from the introduction it sounds as though we should also be getting things like the Queer Petrarch and the Black Petrarch, but they don't seem to have got that far...).

The essays on Petrarch's life and books are a little too condensed to be much use without a more general biography, but obviously anyone likely to be using this book will have access to one of those. The focus is on pointing out areas where new information has come to light or old theories have been demolished, but there didn't seem to be very much that was really controversial. My main take-home point here was to realise how much Petrarch kept on tweaking his works and controlling the picture of himself he wanted to leave to posterity, right to the end of his life. And how the letters are probably the next thing to read, if I want to learn more about him after dipping into the vernacular lyric poems.

The essays dealing with Petrarch's influences from earlier vernacular poets — both Occitan and Italian — and with his influence on later generations were the ones that I found most interesting. Petrarch obviously had a very complicated relationship with Dante, whose primacy as an Italian poet he was determined to avoid acknowledging, but I hadn't realised quite how much he alludes to the Occitan troubadour heritage, especially to the work of Arnaut Daniel. Olivia Holmes's essay picks this out in detail. Stefano Jossa is also very interesting on Pietro Bembo, editor of the famous 1501 edition of Petrarch's vernacular works printed by Aldo Manuzio in Venice, the book which turned Petrarch into a mass phenomenon a century after his death. And I particularly enjoyed Ann Rosalind Jones's rediscovery of the 16th century women poets who took Petrarch's example as a license to write their own love poetry.

...and, while we're doing love lyrics, a little book that crept into my shopping bag under the "Nobel" heading before I realised that I was paying 15 cents a page for the privilege. Or 30 cents if you only read one language...

Twenty love poems : and a song of despair (1924; 20 Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada) by Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973), parallel text translation by W S Merwin (USA, 1927-2019)

  

Neruda's most famous collection, published when he was nineteen. Sometimes beautiful and surprising, sometimes loud and bombastic. The poet still seems to be at the stage in his life when love is essentially the same thing as football, a competition between young men (involving a lot of shouting and posturing) that women are meant to watch from the sidelines. The women in these poems don't speak — he prefers them when they are silent: "Me gustas quando callas porque estás como ausente" — and they don't seem to exist much except as sets of body parts, not always flatteringly described ("Se parecen tus senos a los caracoles blancos"). There's no way of knowing whether the poems are about one specific woman, a series of women, or a completely abstract female figure. Possibly the last of these, given how often he talks about dolls and statues.

But the images are always breathtaking, even though Neruda draws them from a fairly narrow range (maritime stuff like waves, nets, harbours, anchors, lighthouses, seagulls and mooring lines; bees and butterflies; ears of corn; weather).

I suspect that these are poems that grow on you when you read them aloud just for the sound of the words, without thinking too much about what they are supposed to mean.

>41 thorold: Interesting to read of the essay that says Petrarch influenced 16th century female poets. I have not come across many of them yet in my reading.

I have read a few of the Cambridge Companion books and have concluded that they are aimed at a more popular audience rather than literary scholars. They are excellent for leading to further reading.......

>43 baswood: Mostly Italian and French. Gaspara Stampa, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Pernette Du Guillet, Louise Labé. She refers to a 1559 anthology called Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne. The only English poets she mentions are Mary Wroth and Isabella Whitney. I hadn’t heard of any of them. The Italians all seemed to be either widows or mistresses of big cheeses.

One of the other essays also suggests Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as a Mexican female Petrarchist, but she was late 17th century.

I think the level of this one was more aimed at undergraduates than casual readers. But certainly there are plenty of opportunities for further reading. :-)

Gaspara Stampa is an unsung genius, for my money better than Petrarca. Vittoria Colonna was a friend and inspiration to Michelangelo, who may have started writing sonnets for her (if not about her). I've read hers and Gambara's correspondence with Pietro Bembo but not much poetry... Louise Labé is a mysterious figure that some say was a hoax by students (male of course), but then, given how ruthlessly women's voices were suppressed, how much grief literally EVERY woman who ever wrote got, this rumour may have no more weight than any other.

Two more Boekenweek novellas:

De onbekende uren (1961) by Agaath van Ree (Netherlands, 1906-1999)

 

A pleasant little story of a kidnapping from the point of view of the six-year-old kidnapee, who is a close observer of adult behaviour but not very well-equipped to make sense of it. But it doesn't really seem to go anywhere or have any real point to make.

This 1961 Boekenweek gift was from one of the years when you had to guess the author, in this case it turned out to be translator, journalist and author of radio plays Agaath van Ree (real name Anna Hirsch; "Hirsch" = "Ree" = "deer"), who seems to have dropped off the literary map rather after getting this commission. The line illustrations and cover art were by the well-known book illustrator Lucie Kurpershoek.

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De ronde van '43 (1981) by Henri A A R Knap (Netherlands, 1911-1986)

  

On a rainy Sunday in the autumn of 1943, pharmacist Theo gets an unexpected visit from his Amsterdam contact, accompanied by a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl. Roosje, who is going under the name Tillie, is in danger in Amsterdam and needs somewhere to stay for a couple of nights before she can move to a more permanent clandestine address. Unfortunately, Theo has a full house and Roosje's presence might endanger the other people he's sheltering, so he sets off, with Roosje on the back of his bike, for an epic tour of the unnamed town (obviously Arnhem) to visit trusted people who might be able to take her in. And of course they all have good reasons not to...

Knap's leisurely and rather old-fashioned Good Samaritan story, apparently largely autobiographical, was quite controversial at the time, partly because it was known that the CPNB had turned down the story they originally commissioned for that year, Gerard Reve's De vierde man, on the grounds of its "unsuitable" (read "gay") subject-matter. But also because one high-profile reviewer — who might have been unaware of his later work for the resistance — accused Knap of having collaborated earlier in the war by writing plays for a German-run radio station. The resulting row completely overshadowed any discussion of the actual merits of the story.

My travel plans have been postponed slightly, so there was time to finish and write up another one from the pile as well. This is a book I bought on the strength of a review I happened to see at the end of last year. Gingeras teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and he seems to have written at least five previous books about Turkey between 1908 and 1923.

The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire (2022) by Ryan Gingeras (USA, - )

 

The Hapsburg and Russian Empires both collapsed at the end of the First World War, but the Ottoman Empire ended the war still at least nominally in charge of its own territory. Despite being on the losing side and being widely known as "the sick man of Europe", there seemed to be no immediate prospect of the Sultan being forced to step back. The main modernisers of the Ottoman state, the Committee of Union and Progress ("Young Turks"), who had come to power in 1908, were in disgrace in 1918 because of the large-scale human-rights abuses committed under their leadership against Armenian and Greek Christians, Kurds, and other non-Turkish-speaking or non-Muslim communities. Yet, four years later, and after a lot of at best misguided intervention by Britain, France and Greece (and hundreds of thousands of people on all sides killed and millions made homeless), everyone seemed to be quite happy to see the Sultan displaced by an authoritarian, nationalist Ankara government led by Mustafa Kemal, with an ideology that seemed to have a lot in common with that of the CUP.

Ryan Gingeras takes us through the complex events of 1918-1923, which involves a lot of back and forth as there were usually several different conflicts going on in parallel in different corners of what had been the empire. The Turkish state has long been determined to control what historians have to say about its origins (basically, you weren't allowed to go beyond Mustafa Kemal's own account of events) and has typically kept academics out of late Ottoman records because of sensitivities about the Armenian genocide; that has softened a little under Erdoğan, who identifies more with Ottoman history than with Kemal, but it's still problematic, and it means that most outside accounts have had to lean heavily on what was written by foreign occupiers or Armenian and Greek exiles. Gingeras tries to compensate for this built in bias and dig down into what Turks themselves thought about the situation through the memoirs of officers in the Ottoman and Nationalist armies, but there's still a lot of speculation involved.

It's difficult to come to any conclusions from this book, except that all parties — states and individual leaders — seem to come out of it equally badly. The Ottoman Empire was a mess, and every attempt to resolve that mess seems to have made things worse by overlooking the human effects of what was being done. It certainly undermines any idea we might have had of Mustafa Kemal as an enlightened reformer. He was a successful fighter and an opportunistic negotiator with foreign powers, who came home from Lausanne with a treaty that legitimised ethnic cleansing (as "population exchange"). Not exactly an enlightened role model for the twentieth century.

The Ottomans' worst legacy is in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Nearly five hundred years of abysmal exploitation and neglect in the territories once covered by early Christian empires of high culture (not to mention Byzantium, or ancient Greece and Rome), resulting in today's perception of savagery and backwardness. If the Serbs and the Bulgars, let alone Greeks, had been able to develop along the lines evident in their pre-colonized history... (I don't want to contemplate Bosnia, too painful.)

Although in fairness it must be noted that SOME responsibility for this millennial fiasco lies with the attitudes of other "fellow Christians", who more than once, and eventually habitually, joined in in attacking the Orthodox East.

…and a Jules Verne novel I’d never read that seems sort-of relevant:

Kéraban le Têtu (1883; Kéraban the inflexible) by Jules Verne (France, 1828-1905)

 

This is basically a travel book, thinly disguised as an adventure story with one of Verne’s silliest plots, one he must have come up with after an evening of Rossini at the Paris Opera.

The notoriously stubborn Istanbul tobacco merchant Kéraban is furious when the government introduces a new 10 para tax for every crossing of the Bosphorus. Rather than let his daily commute between Pera and Scutari put these few cents into the pockets of the Ottoman authorities, he announces that he will go overland. And, naturally, he takes along his dinner-guest, Mr van Mitten of Rotterdam, and their respective valets, on the unnecessary circuit of the Black Sea coast. And of course there is a dastardly villain trying to stop them, and a beautiful maiden to be rescued.

All the right ingredients, and a lot of nice Turkish and Russian local colour, but somehow it doesn’t quite have the flair of some of his better-known stories.

Always nice to see a review of a little known Jules Verne novel. This one fits in with your Black Sea reading - well sort of

More Black Sea:

Memories : from Moscow to the Black Sea (1928) by Teffi (Russia, 1872-1952)
  

The popular playwright and comic writer describes her last months in Russia and Ukraine during the chaotic aftermath of the Revolution, as she leaves Moscow together with other theatre people to find work first in Kyiv and then in Odesa and other cities on the Black Sea before she is finally obliged to go into exile. Writing some ten years after the event, she gives us a very clear sense of the confusing reality of living through the collapse of the world you’ve lived in all your life, and the difficulty of persuading yourself that this is really happening and won’t all magically be put right tomorrow.

Without ever being unnecessarily sentimental, the book is also an eloquent farewell to the pre-war arts scene in Moscow and Petersburg, and a memorial to all the many friends she lost during the Revolution and Civil War.

One from my parents’ shelves. This one ties in with our previous Baltic theme and the Kempowski from earlier this year.

Forgotten land : journeys among the ghosts of East Prussia (2011) by Max Egremont (UK, 1948- )

  

Egremont tries to recapture something of the pre-1939 world of German East Prussia, a region now divided between northern Poland and the Kaliningrad exclave of Russia. He visits East Prussian exiles and their—now rather neglected— museums in West Germany, does a bit of tentative travelling in the region itself, and digs into the published memoirs of a range of people who lived through some of the catastrophes of the twentieth century there.

As you might perhaps expect, he’s particularly interested in great landowning families (like his own), so we get to hear quite a lot about members of the Junker class who helped to enable Hitler’s rise to power and then decided that they didn’t entirely approve of his methods. As well as a few charming British adventurers of eccentric conservative views. There’s a rather token left-wing presence from Käthe Kollwitz, a Jewish musician and a Protestant pastor. But nothing about peasants and industrial workers who must have formed the great majority of the East Prussian population. Interesting as far as it goes, but rather haphazard.

>49 thorold:

I almost bought that one while in France — and that exact copy — but I had already bought eight and my shoulder was already hurting from carrying the haul. Next time though. I always bring back 6 or so Verne books whenever I’m in Paris.

>33 thorold: late to your recent new thread.Also have read most of Newbys travel books,might be interesting

>47 thorold: Id seen that book, wondered about how it was. Its a subject I wanted to know more about

>51 thorold: I read that last year, and really enjoyed it. Reading After the Romanovs which follows similar ground. think i like the former better

Normally I'd have a lot of catching up to do after three weeks away (some family stuff, followed by a rainy but enjoyable week in Radnorshire), but this time I spent most of my trip on one very long book: a Georgian-themed novel for the Black Sea theme, probably the best-known one of recent years. Nino Haratischwili grew up in Tbilisi, but now lives in Hamburg. She worked extensively as a playwright and stage and film director in Germany before starting to write fiction. She writes in German.

Das achte Leben (für Brilka) (2014; The eighth life) by Nino Haratischwili (Georgia, Germany, 1983- )

  

Narrator Niza has used an academic post in Berlin as an escape from her complicated family background and the traumas of her early life in Georgia, but she's pushed out of this precarious comfort zone when she finds herself looking after an adolescent niece who is seeking to connect with the past.

Haratischwili takes us through six generations and a hundred years of Georgian history: two world wars, the Russian revolution and civil war, the Stalin terror, the breakup of the Soviet Union and all the rest of the general messiness of the twentieth century. The emphasis is on the innumerable scars that are left on families and individuals by war, totalitarianism, corruption, and abuse of power, and on the difficulty of healing those scars. There are no easy answers, clearly: Haratischwili wants us to see that there are wrongs done to people that can't ever fully be put right, whether we try to do it by revenge, by hiding from them, by talking about them, by letting time pass, or even by using magical chocolate recipes.

On the shelf, this looks like a ridiculously long novel, but it never really feels like such a long book when you're actually reading it. I felt that I was being pulled into the life of the family and the times they live through in a very straightforward, natural way, and I even managed to keep most of the characters straight without resorting to drawing any family trees. Very interesting.

During my short holiday on the Welsh border, I of course visited Hay-on-Wye, and of course came back with a few books I really didn't need (but not too many, I was carrying my own luggage!). Here's one:

Simple model locomotive building, introducing LBSC's TICH (1972) by LBSC (UK, 1883-1967), edited by Martin Evans

 

LBSC was the pen-name of a model engineering writer usually known in private life as "Curly" Lawrence (he seems to have gone under numerous other names at various times), the name being taken from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, the company he had worked for as an engine cleaner and possibly a fireman for some years around the turn of the century. His articles on model steam locomotive construction, published in Model Engineer from the early 1920s until his death in 1967, are a legend in model engineering circles, and his designs still seem to be very influential half a century later.

"Tich", a simple two-axle tank engine intended as a project for beginners, is one of the most famous, and this posthumous compilation brings together his articles from the 50s and 60s describing how to build it. Sadly, the book economises rather on the illustrations, omitting a lot of the sketches he used to illustrate tools and techniques in the original articles, but it does include some entertaining period photographs of intrepid modellers driving their completed engines, including a Mrs Daltry of Rugby ("There is no reason why the ladies should not build model locomotives," as the caption rather unnecessarily points out).

There's a lot of nostalgia-inducing period atmosphere in the text as well, including anecdotes about "young Curly" improvising precision tooling out of hatpins and tram tickets and a rich selection of what would then have been routine racist remarks at the expense of hypothetical Irish, Scottish, female or Jewish characters (LBSC was at least half Jewish, and his wife was born in Edinburgh of English descent but invariably referred to as "a Scottish lassie", so he probably didn't "mean" any of this...).

Once you get beyond this surface stuff, the advice all seems to be very straightforward and practical, clearly aimed at newcomers to the hobby who don't have more than the basic minimum of tools in their workshops. Building a locomotive would still be a long and complex project, even at this level, and I have no intention of getting involved in anything like that, but it's fun to see how you might go about it, and how the individual steps all look quite manageable...

---
A fascinating bit of research into "LBSC" and his many names by a couple of amateur genealogists: https://web.archive.org/web/20110322063621/http://www.mcsme.co.uk/pubdocs/Who%20...

A fun bonus in my secondhand copy was a partial bill-of-materials written out by a former owner of the book on stationery that still sends a slight shiver down my spine: extra pages for school exams ("Write on both sides of the paper. Do not write in this margin"). Obviously a metalwork teacher making profitable use of boring invigilation sessions (and no, she or he didn't dare to write in the reserved margin!)...

Boys and their toys!

it's fun to see how you might go about it, and how the individual steps all look quite manageable...

uh-oh

Could be the famous last words... for a good while. :)

The genealogical saga is astonishing. Why would a fellow of that era adopt a name like Lillian--and just before his wedding? I'd like to think it's one of those famous British eccentricities everyone takes in stride.

>59 LolaWalser: Yes, it’s very odd. Much more interesting than I would have guessed before looking him up. Quite tantalising, it all makes Nevil Shute’s Trustee from the toolroom seem quite tame by comparison…

This is a paperback that's been on several trips with me as "back-up book" and returned unread; I decided yesterday that it was about time it got its own place in the sun, and managed to spend enough time on trains to finish it the same day...

The island of missing trees (2021) by Elif Şafak‬ (Turkey, 1971- )

  

Elif Şafak normally has a gift for finding interesting subject-matter for fiction in unlikely places, but this turned out to be a disappointingly routine Romeo-and-Juliet story set against the background of the intercommunal violence on Cyprus in 1974. The idea of having a fig tree act as one of the narrators was clever, and allowed her to bring in a lot of interesting botanical background, but it wasn't really quite enough to lift the book out of the realms of the predictable. Maybe it just made it a bit too obvious that this was an entirely research-driven project. There's a complicated bit of plot-gymnastics involved in the timeline, but that seems to be there only to allow a pair of teenage lovers from 1974 to have a daughter young enough to be a victim of cyber-bullying, and even then that part of the story doesn't really add anything, it just seems to fizzle out. Pleasant enough to read, but not one of her best.

This came up in my research for the Black Sea theme, and was also mentioned by a couple of other people in that thread. I was lucky enough to stumble on a cheap (and, as it turned out, much annotated!) paperback in Hay-on-Wye.

Neal Ascherson was one of Eric Hobsbawm's star pupils back in the day — and it shows! — but he chose to follow a career as a journalist, on the Guardian, Observer, Scotsman, LRB, etc., instead of going into academia. He's also written several books about Polish and Ukrainian history.

This is pretty much the diametrical opposite of Michael North's book on The Baltic (>25 thorold: above):

Black Sea (1995) by Neal Ascherson (UK, 1932- )

  

This is a thoughtful, complicated book, an amalgam of travel-writing, history, journalism, cultural studies, and all kinds of other stuff. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive history of the Black Sea region, Ascherson pursues a small set of topics that particularly interest him from the footprints they left in archaeology and classical literature right through to his own subjective experiences in Crimea, the northern Caucasus and and the Turkish Black Sea coast in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We read about the complicated ecology of the sea itself and how that has been and is being studied, about the region as the most intensively-documented point of interaction between the settled urban culture of the Pontic Greeks ("civilisation") and the nomadic culture of the Scythians, Sarmatians and other "barbarian" steppe peoples. But also about how the "fanciful" stuff about Amazons in Herodotus has turned out not to be so fanciful at all ... now that archaeologists have finally bothered to ask themselves whether the warrior skeletons they found in ancient burial mounds were those of men or women. And about the wonderfully multi-culti Bosporan Kingdom, based at Panticapaeum (up the hill from modern Kerch), the real identity of the Tatars and Cossacks, and the peculiar 17th century Polish aristocratic fancy of "Sarmatian" descent. And fascinating stuff about Adam Mickiewicz in Odesa, Harold Hardrade in Micklegarth, and all sorts of other things...

If there's an underlying theme, it seems to be about how different cultures/ethnicities/languages/religions have often been able to cohabit successfully in the region for long periods, but only until their equilibrium is displaced by some set of events which allows one or more parties to believe that there's something to be gained by driving out their neighbours. More often than not, the process turns out to be horribly destructive to all parties (e.g. the Abkhazian war in the early 1990s), but somehow the knowledge of the likelihood of that kind of outcome never entirely stops humans from stirring up distrust and violence.

Another of those books I've walked past dozens of times on airport bookstalls and finally picked up only when it appeared in one of our local Little Libraries. This may well be the first book I've ever read by a Nobel economics laureate, economics not really being one of my major interests. I don't think it will become a habit...

Thinking, fast and slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman (Israel, USA, 1934- )

  

Our brains deal with the problems that confront us in daily life in two ways: the great bulk of them are handled by an associative, intuitive process that runs very fast and has a low energy cost, using a set of built-in heuristics to find the closest match to the problem we're confronted with in our memories of things that have happened before (rather like the way AI systems work, I suppose). Only when this level one system can't cope is the problem escalated to the much more costly mechanisms for rational, analytical processing of abstract ideas.

Back in 1969, the Israeli psychologist Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky spotted that while this is an efficient way to deal with straightforward things like finding food and avoiding lions, it can lead us into making illogical choices when we are confronted with some of the more subtle problems of modern life. Our brains are lazy and often don't switch on the level two system until it's too late, so we can end up going with our immediate, intuitive response without thinking things through. We jump to conclusions, constructing causality where there isn't any, we don't cope well with statistical concepts (even if we are trained in their use), we underestimate the role of chance, we allow ourselves to be influenced by irrelevant factors that are there in front of us and ignore the stuff we can't see in that moment, and we are far too confident in our own opinions, amongst other things.

Kahneman's ideas — which are not universally accepted — have stirred up most dust in economics, where of course it is heresy to suggest that the choices humans make are anything other than free, rational, and selfish. He spends a lot of time on how we assess the desirability of investments, bets, insurance, and the like, and the many ways we get that wrong. But the ideas apply to all kinds of other areas as well, of course. He talks about things like the difficulty of predicting future performance in recruitment and staff reporting, or about the problems with subjective perceptions of pain and pleasure in things like clinical tests and quality-of-life studies. Kahneman doesn't go into the way people can be deliberately manipulated by triggering intuitive responses, but that's there in the background as well, naturally.

As always for a lay person reading a psychology book, there's a tendency to dismiss a large chunk of it as "just common sense" and another large part as "weird stuff that could only happen in a psychology experiment, not in the real world". But still, there's a lot that I feel it would have been useful to know earlier in my life, and maybe even to apply in practice. (Of course, at the moments when it was most relevant I was probably working with professional psychologists who did know all this stuff anyway, but they never explained it so clearly...)

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Not sure what the cover design (credited to Yes) is all about. Chewed pencil, S-curve. No obvious relation to psychology or decision-making. Looks almost as if the designer didn't know what to do with the white space and just put a squiggle in as placeholder until a better idea should come along.

Another one grabbed from the slowly-dwindling Boekenweek pile:

Europa in een boek (1963) by Jacob Presser (Netherlands, 1899-1970)

  

Jacob (Jacques) Presser, who also wrote the 1957 Boekenweek gift De nacht der Girondijnen, was one of the leading Dutch historians of the immediate postwar period. He taught a whole bunch of future distinguished Dutch intellectuals at the university of Amsterdam, as well as writing the standard history of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands during World War II — he was Jewish himself, and survived the German occupation in hiding with a series of families in rural Gelderland. His wife died in a concentration camp after being caught with false papers. Presser came to academic life relatively late, after working as a schoolteacher for a time, and he also wrote school textbooks.

This 1963 Boekenweek gift was, for once, not a novella, but a kind of slide-show with fifty black-and-white illustrations and matching short explanatory texts developing the idea of "Europe" as a concept in geography, culture and history from the Ancient Greeks to World War II. Presser's style is light and ironic for the most part, quite schoolmasterish, but he doesn't shy away from big topics where he feels it's needed (from the perspective of sixty years later, we notice that he gives rather less space to colonialism and slavery than we would, and lets the Great Men outnumber the Great Women, but he does manage to squeeze Rosa Luxemburg and Teresa of Avila in, as well as the slightly more questionable empress Theodosia...). Nothing very unexpected, but a nice presentation, a few good jokes, and probably a useful little book for anyone not very well up in European history.

Westward stepping is becoming more imminent, so I've started in on serious homework to prepare for the trip... With Cleveland and San Francisco on the itinerary, it's hard to escape the obvious, and I'm not going to bother trying.

Apart from watching Vertigo and the first series of the TV adaptation of Tales of the city, I've been re-reading the books, for the umpteenth time. I don't think I've done a complete re-read of the series since Mary Ann in autumn came out, about seven years ago, though.

The first three:

Tales of the City (1978) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )
More Tales of the City (1980) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )
Further Tales of the City (1982) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )

    

This is the pure nostalgia part of Maupin's classic serial, where the horror of the AIDS pandemic hasn't appeared to spoil things yet. Nostalgia for the reader, that is, since he was writing the stories in real time to appear in the San Francisco Chronicle. But there is always a theme of getting older and being left behind by history here: many of his characters in these blissful days of San Francisco in the late seventies are looking back to even more blissful times a decade or so earlier, when the anti-war and civil rights movements were at their height.

Superbly fresh and clever comic writing, anyway, with many lines that are an absolute pleasure to come back to. Not many authors of light fiction can write dialogue as well as Maupin does. All three of these first books have a Hitchcockish thriller story as one of the plotlines, and this part possibly comes over less well when you've read it before and there's no meaningful suspense involved — the TV version scores here, with its slyly half-concealed bits of Hitchcock pastiche. But the characters, the glimpses of contemporary life, the dialogue and the jokes make it all worthwhile.

A joy to come back to, every time...

>65 thorold: "he was writing the stories in real time to appear in the San Francisco Chronicle."

I didn't move to San Francisco until 1986. Maupin had much of the city eagerly awaiting each next chapter to appear in the Chronicle especially for what became the chapters of the first two or three books. I doubt that sort of thing will ever happen again, at least in a daily newspaper. Even when I was still there people were already nostalgic for the days when Tales of the City appeared in the Chron.

Have a great time in San Francisco. I can't recall, have you been there before?

>66 rocketjk: Alexander McCall Smith did something similar with his 44 Scotland Street stories in the Scotsman, but that’s the only other modern case I can think of where a newspaper serial had a big impact like that.

Thanks! — No, it will be my first time. I haven’t been in the US much, apart from work trips to Washington DC. Looking forward to it. Cleveland too, of course :-)

>66 rocketjk: loved his books!

>66 rocketjk: Not quite the same thing, but Stephen King's The Green Mile was originally published in serial form, as small slim paperbacks released montly; it was published in a single volume about a year after the final chapter came out.

And a couple of John Scalzi's recent novels were originally released as digital serials, with a new chapter released (in e-book only) each week; the full novels were released (in e- and print formats) a few monts after the last chapter.

>9 FlorenceArt:

Many books are "products of their time" and they are written or re-edited to cater to a specific market at a specific time in history. Likely, in 2017 publishers thought they could make money with a "new" anthology of gay writing. I have no idea when a previous anthology had been published, but recently I bought Homoseksualiteit in de Nederlandse literatuur by Adriaan Venema, published in 1972. With such a blunt and academic-sounding title, I am sure there must have been more up-to-date anthologies, published in the 80s or 90s. Then, Queer: 44 LHBT-hoogtepunten uit de naoorlogse literatuur van Nederland en Vlaanderen obviously fits the bill for the new "Queer" community, rebranding everything as "Queer" that was previously gay or lesbian.

I think "Queer" is an interesting word in that it can be applied more easily to include vast numbers of people who could previously not easily be identified as gay or lesbian. While gay / lesbian teenagers who are still struggling with their coming out may find it reassuring to believe or claim that Shakespeare was gay, more mature people will actually admit that it is difficult to label Shakespeare gay, but "queer" is obviously more pliable. Then, too, I guess "queer" will gradually just come to mean "gay / lesbian"

Personally, I am not so happy with this new term, and would rather continue to identify as being gay.

Before long. I will get a copy of Queer: 44 LHBT-hoogtepunten uit de naoorlogse literatuur van Nederland en Vlaanderen, because I am quite interested in what new writers are around, especially also from Flanders.

>65 thorold:

I'm still in book 1, but it's a pleasant place to be. Speaking of SF movies, it might be fun to check out Sudden fear, with the homicidal Jack Palance (in a car) chasing Joan Crawford (on foot) up and down its hilly streets.

>70 edwinbcn: Well, if there's any point in all this quibbling about terms, surely it's that we should get to choose our own instead of letting other people impose the ones they think should fit us. People of "our generation" (whatever that means) have certainly had enough experience of being called things we don't like to be called...

>71 LolaWalser: Yes, there's a lot to be said for staying in Book 1! Thanks for the tip about Sudden Fear, onto the list it goes. I'm not sure how far I'll get before I go. I feel I ought to leave a bit of time for Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald, too.

Carrying on:

Babycakes (1984) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )
Significant Others (1987) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )
Sure of You (1989) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )

    

So, of course it all gets darker and less noir — if you know what I mean — when we get out of the playful seventies and into the era of HIV, Reagan and Hypocrisy. An important character is killed by AIDS offstage between the third and fourth books, but Maupin does his best to keep the tone suitably frivolous, as far as he can, even when he is busy educating us or raging against the unfairness of the world. In the fourth book there's a nicely absurd plot that coincidentally brings both Michael and Mona to England (London being such a small place, they can't help bumping into each other every few minutes); in the fifth there's a comic set-piece on the Russian River, with a radical Wimmin's music festival going on just downstream from the ultra-conservative and all-male Bohemian Grove summer camp for millionaires, a place where you're more than likely to find yourself peeing against a tree side by side with George Bush. But the sixth book gets very dark, with a clear sense of "this is where it all stops". Maupin has fallen out of love with several of his characters, and it's no real surprise to find that he set them aside for nearly twenty years after this.

>72 thorold: I don't know if you'd seen the news that Maupin is returning to the series with a new book in March, the first in a decade. Mona of the Manor finds Mona living in England, preparing for a visit from some of her San Francisco friends.

>73 KeithChaffee: No I hadn't seen that. Excellent! I always liked Mona, and often wondered why she spends so much of the series out of sight in Seattle or Gloucestershire. It will be interesting to see whether it will be inserted retrospectively into the timeline between Sure of you and Michael Tolliver Lives, or whether — as so often with characters in this series — it's going to turn out that rumours of Mona's death were greatly exaggerated...

---

The last three in the series as it stands:

Michael Tolliver Lives (2007) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )
Mary Ann in autumn (2010) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )
The days of Anna Madrigal (2014) by Armistead Maupin‬ (USA, 1944- )

    

When Maupin returned to the Tales of the City characters after an eighteen-year break, there was a clear shift in style from the dialogue-led real-time writing of the original serial to more obviously structured novels, with more description and explicit delving into what was going on in the characters' heads. Each of the new books focusses on one of the original main characters, and in the case of Michael Tolliver Lives we even go into the first person, perhaps to signal how much of Maupin's own personality and experience is being projected onto Michael.

These could be quite depressing books, rounding off the lives of characters we've known for nearly forty years, but they are leavened with a new, younger, group of characters who bring their own experiences of 21st century problems into the mix. These new characters centre around Jake, a young trans man who works with Michael and shares a flat with Anna Madrigal, acting as her de facto carer, and Shawna, whom we last saw as a five-year-old in Sure of you, now an intrepid investigator of backwaters of modern sexuality, the author of the "Grrrrl-on-the-loose" blog and a successful spin-off novel.

Michael's book sees him having to deal with his family back in Florida, giving us a rare glimpse into the ways that US society has developed in the weird fringe areas outside the rational paradise of Northern California. Mary Ann's book finds her returning to San Francisco to deal with a double crisis in her privileged life back East, and finding something like forgiveness from the author — if not from the rest of her logical family — for her bad behaviour in Sure of you. But she does get an unwelcome ghost from one of the earlier noir plots dropped on her, just to remind her who's in charge. Mrs Madrigal — now a very distinguished (if unrepentant) old lady and a hero of the trans community, has some unfinished business from childhood in Nevada to deal with before getting together with most of the other characters in a very 21st century finale at Burning Man.

From the Boekenweek pile...

This is the 1978 gift, commissioned from the veteran Flemish writer Marnix Gijsen (Jan-Albert Goris), whose literary beginnings go right back to Paul Van Ostaijen and the Antwerp expressionists of the immediate post-WWI period, but who didn't really make his breakthrough as an author of fiction until his novel Joachim van Babylon came out in 1947. In his day-job he was a senior civil servant; he served as a Belgian diplomat in the US and Canada from 1940 to 1963 (or 1941 to 1968 if you believe English Wikipedia).

Overkomst dringend gewenst (1978) by Marnix Gijsen (Belgium, 1899-1984)

  

A set of seven cheerfully ironic short stories, reflecting Gijsen's sober rational/humanist view of the world. Accidents, illness and unhappy marriages happen for no good reason, but we have to deal with them and put up with their unavoidable consequences.

The title story takes its theme from those radio messages that used to come on after the news in the pre-mobile-phone era — "Mr So and so, believed to be on holiday in the South of France, driving a blue Ford Cortina registration number such and such, is urgently requested to contact Marylebone Hospital where his mother is seriously ill" (some knowing person would always comment "that means she's died"). In other stories he writes about his sister-in-law desperately trying to make her husband notice the new furniture, or about his own doomed relationship with his (now ex-) wife, or about a charming late-life flirtation with a hospital nurse who turned out to be a fan of his early verse. All very enjoyable, and quite fittingly illustrated by Wout van Vliet, who also did the cover art.

>62 thorold: really enjoying this. I did not know about the history of the Tatars, or what happened to them post Stalin. Yup there is that theme again. Fascinated with his archaelogical explorations. and also thrilled that he has readable maps!

Clearing a couple more from the Boekenweek pile before I set off on my travels. This is the 1998 gift, commissioned from another novelist who doubled as a career diplomat, F Springer (Carel Jan Schneider). Amongst other things, he had the distinction of being Netherlands ambassador in East Berlin during the last years of the DDR. His father was a well-known professor of German literature.

Sterremeer (1998) by F Springer (Netherlands, 1932-2011)

  

This novella reads almost like an Anthony Powell pastiche: the very conventional narrator Nikko, a lawyer, tells us about his disreputable friend, the poet Felix Sterremeer (who later reinvents himself as "Starlake"), whom he bumps into from time to time over the course of many years, in the Netherlands and then in New York, observing the unfolding tragedy of Felix's unhappy marriage to a rich young American woman who had thought she was getting the new Hölderlin but ended up with the new Heinrich Stieglitz. Which of course leads her to take on the role of Charlotte S.

A nicely paced and elegantly furnished story, with plenty of fun stuff to keep us amused — there's even a walk-on for Alma Mahler-Werfel — but perhaps a trifle old-fashioned for 1998.

And the Boekenweek Essay from 2007, by Kees Fens, critic and long-time professor of Dutch literature in Nijmegen:

Op weg naar het schavot (2007) by Kees Fens (Netherlands, 1929-2008)

  

A very pleasant, chatty little excursion through the many-sided importance of humour in life and literature, from In praise of folly to Van Kooten en De Bie. Lots of examples, of course, and some thoughts on situations where humour fails us and on situations where it is the only thing we have, as in the anecdote that gives Fens his title: Bishop John Fisher on his way to the scaffold asking for a cloak "because he was afraid of catching cold".

Quick update, as I haven’t posted since I’ve been in the US, and haven’t had much opportunity to finish books, although the pile of books to take home is growing steadily. Most especially after we visited City Lights Bookshop yesterday, which has to count as one of the best curated bookstores I’ve ever visited. They seem to allocate no shelf space to anything merely because it sells. Any (American) shop that has half a shelf of Ann Quin in the fiction section has to have my respect! Quite apart from the fact that they still publish stacks of interesting poets…

Anyway, we’re enjoying San Francisco. Lots more to do here, then a couple more weeks in Cleveland to take in the opening of the concert season…

>71 LolaWalser: Thanks for the tip about Sudden Fear — we watched that with our SF host and enjoyed it a lot. Also What’s Up, Doc… And we’ve ticked off quite a few Vertigo locations along the way.

>80 thorold:

Heh, so cool! Now I must look up Ann Quin... Sounds like you're having a great time. Speaking of hauling books home, curious minds will want to know how many we're talking...

>80 thorold: glad you are enjoying your visit!

Glad you're enjoying San Francisco. City Lights is absolutely a great bookstore. A whole room of poetry!

Back in Cleveland after a little side-trip to Pittsburgh, which (amongst other things) gave me the chance to tick off another bucket list item by visiting Fallingwater: fabulous to see it at last!

I wasn’t really expecting to do tourist stuff in Ohio, but it seems to be working out that way anyway, as we’ve been to see a bunch of railway/tramway museums, plus the very strange railfan Mecca at Fostoria, a park entirely surrounded by rails, where large people in tee shirts and baseball caps get very excited waving to train drivers. We’ve also seen some interesting stuff about the eccentric religious communities who moved into the Western Reserve, including the Mormons and the Shakers.

Yesterday it finally became literary with a visit to Malabar Farm, home of Louis Bromfield, a writer I knew nothing about. None of the people in the group we went round the house with had read his books either (I’m not sure about the guide, she was evasive…), but Bromfield sounds like an interesting character, even if his novels are a bit dated. I think I might try Pleasant Valley, his nonfiction book about setting up the farm and improving the soil.

>84 thorold: The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

>85 dianeham: Not my kind of thing, really, but we did walk past it today, it’s a striking building.

When I first mentioned Cleveland someone said “you must see the public library”. They were quite right, we popped in for a look this morning and were very impressed. A lovely old building, with lots of space for books and readers, and all sorts of fine original details. We didn’t go into the modern annex, but that looks very good from the outside too. The fiction section seems vast, with a lot of the sort of books that most libraries would have tossed out fifty years ago. I could imagine getting lost in there for weeks…

Fun to see Louis Bromfield (>84 thorold:) well-represented in the “Ohio writers” section, and a little display about Andre Norton, who was a children’s librarian in Cleveland.



We also loved the temporary art installation on the ground floor: British artist Rebecca Louise Law created a giant walk-through hanging garden of dried flowers.

wow, love that! wonder how or if they can keep the kids off. hope so

>87 cindydavid4: They had a lady sitting in the room to keep visitors in order and tell them about the work. But she wasn’t exactly struggling with the crowds: we saw only one person other than library staff while we were walking around the building. Admittedly, it was soon after opening time on a Monday morning. I expect it gets busier afternoons and weekends.

>86 thorold: What an interesting art installation. I love that you visit libraries on your vacation.

>86 thorold: that looks huge. If I went in there I might never come out.

As a last fling before I return to Europe, we visited Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, lair of the rubber baron F A Seiberling. It’s a vast mock-Tudor manor house, entirely fitting for an early 20th century tycoon, and great fun to look around. But I was slightly alarmed by a sign in the library, telling us “the Seiberlings loved to read: the house contains nearly 5000 books”. You could fit my apartment into their house about thirty times, but my library only fits into theirs maybe 1.5 times…

Back home, still slightly jet-lagged, but it's time to start catching up with posting reviews from the last six weeks or so...

This one I read mostly on the plane to America, so it's already fading a little in my mind. I previously knew Christopher Bram from his historical novels about gay life in the US in the mid-20th century; here he is as a non-fiction writer:

Eminent outlaws: the gay writers who changed America (2012) by Christopher Bram (USA, 1952- )

  

A quick run-through, more biographical than literary, of the big names of Gay (Male) Lit in the USA from about 1945-2000. We start with the Triumvirate (Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote), move on to the Beats, then the AIDS generation, the Violet Quill and its handful of survivors. It's a pleasant, chatty survey, maybe a little too heavily based on Gore Vidal's memoirs in the early sections, but quite shrewd when it gets to writers Bram presumably knows personally, and it might introduce you to one or two new names. Since it excludes women and writers who didn't live in or come from the USA, it sometimes seems a bit narrow in its focus, but I suppose you can't cover everything in one book.

As a first-time visitor to City Lights, I was more or less obliged to buy a copy of this little book, the most famous thing they ever published, if only to get their stamp on the inside front cover... A good nudge to make me re-read Howl, anyway.

Howl and other poems (1956) by Allen Ginsberg (USA, 1926-1997)

  

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
...

In October 1955, there was a low-key event at the 6 Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, with the promise of a "remarkable collection of angels on one stage reading their poetry." Jack Kerouac went around with the collection bowl, whilst Allen Ginsberg whipped the audience into excitement by reading Part I of his work-in-progress, Howl. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the completed poem the following year as the fourth in his Pocket Poets series, it soon became a runaway bestseller (partly thanks to a high-profile obscenity trial) and one of the defining works of what came to be called Beat literature.

The poem itself is in three parts: Part I is a grand, Whitmanesque celebration of the lives of his poetic heroes and of his own struggle against the modern world, with copious amounts of (gay) sex, drugs, bumming around and political subversion thrown in; the incantation of Part II confronts the destructive forces of the child-eating Moloch directly, and in Part III he addresses the dedicatee of the poem, Carl Solomon, whom he met while they were both patients in the same psychiatric institution. Then there's a "Footnote to Howl", which is another incantation, a kind of Beat Sanctus.

As in Whitman, the first thing that hits you about the poem is its tremendous momentum and kinetic energy, but there's a lot more to it than just the pounding impact of the long lines: every line is dense with paradoxical, unexpected but never quite nonsensical language (negro streets, starry dynamos, unshaven rooms, pubic beards, ...), and there's a clear thread of insight into the hostile world under all that counter-culture posturing. It's tempting to think of it as nothing more than drug-induced ramblings from long ago, but that's not at all what's going on here: this is a serious attempt to push beyond the usual limits of poetry and make it relevant to people who are confronting the dehumanising effects of fifties society, and it still clearly has things to say to us today.

The Pocket Poets collection includes five more, shorter, incantatory poems in the same kind of Whitman long-line format, plus four rather more conventionally lyrical "earlier poems". Probably the most striking is "Sunflower Sutra", where he and Kerouac sit in the shade of a locomotive on a dockside and contemplate a dead sunflower.

One of the other members of my book-club happened to be reading this and — possibly because of its brevity, or because the author was a physicist — she proposed it as our next group read. I came across a copy in Dog-Eared Books in San Francisco, the only bookshop I visited on this US trip that had more than about half a shelf of Spanish-language books, and I read it on the flight back to Cleveland.

El Túnel (The Tunnel; 1948) by Ernesto Sábato (Argentina, 1911-2011)

  

For once, this is a well-known Latin-American book that doesn't get cited as a precursor of the "Boom". We're not in magic-realist territory here at all, or even in the realm of political history: this is a full-on existentialist novella in the Camus tradition, where we never leave the disturbing world of the inside of the protagonist's head.

Like Camus' most famous protagonist, the painter Castel is a convicted murderer reflecting on the circumstances of his crime. Falling in love with María, the one person with whom he has established real communication through one of his paintings, has broken through his radical alienation from society for a while, but then he starts to become obsessed with the idea that her love for him is not exclusive. Castel is not a sympathetic person, and it's not a very pleasant psychological journey we share with him, but Sábato doesn't give us much choice: we're compelled to stay with him to the end, even though we know where this is going. Powerful stuff, which has a lot of relevant things to say about the way we interact with the world even if we find the premise of the inevitability of jealousy-killing unpleasant and artificial.

I wanted to read something related to Cleveland: a local bookseller told me that crime-writer Les Roberts is the biggest local literary star, so I picked up this one, intrigued by a title that turned out to have nothing to do with my adopted home country...

Roberts is originally from Chicago. He seems to have come to Cleveland in the 1980s from Los Angeles to work as a TV producer, and at some point switched to writing crime fiction with a gritty local background. My Other Half recalls Roberts back in the day being feted as a (minor) local celebrity whenever he dropped into the office.

The Dutch : a Milan Jacovich mystery (2001) by Les Roberts (USA, 1937- )

  

When a crime novel opens with someone falling off a high bridge, you know it's going to end up at least casting doubt on the official suicide verdict. But, predictable plot apart, this turned out to be a decent run of the mill detective story, with a noir slant and a lot of entertaining local detail about Cleveland. Unnecessarily dated by rather too much naive astonishment about the dark world of the internet, though.

One that the O.H. found while tidying up and put aside for me to read.

Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-1998 (1999) by David Ehrenstein (USA, 1947- )

 

Gossipy and rather unfocused account of the way gay and lesbian people (and gay and lesbian fictional characters) were treated by the US film and TV industry in the 20th century. It wanders around through a series of interviews rather randomly, and it falls far too easily into the fallacy that Hollywood is the centre of the universe, but some of the oral testimony Ehrenstein quotes is quite entertaining.

His main point, insofar as he has one, seems to be that for a long time there was a big difference in Hollywood between what "everybody knows" and what it was acceptable to say in the press. Hollywood people (and the journalists who wrote about them) only got into trouble if that line was crossed somehow, hence bizarre situations like Liberace successfully conducting a libel action against a British newspaper columnist who used language implying that there might be something not quite heterosexual about his stage persona.

Having spent time in several US cities, I got curious about how they work, and this was the first thing that came to hand:

How to kill a city : gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood (2018) by Peter Moskowitz (USA, 1988- )

  

I've always tended to think of "gentrification" as one of those trivial things that right-on people get unduly upset about — pavements thronged with oversized baby-buggies and dusty secondhand bookshops being crowded out by gleaming wine bars. But Moskowitz reminds us that, at least in US city centres, it's a lot more serious than that. Where local authorities have little power to regulate housing and rent controls don't exist or are easy to circumvent, gentrification quite simply means poor (i.e. mostly non-white) people being priced out of the housing market and — in a bizarre reversal of the "white flight" of the mid-20th century — being forced to move out to suburban areas where there are few jobs and no public services to support them.

The political culture in the US means that public authorities are judged primarily by their ability to keep taxes low, so the "successful" mayors are those who get into bed with property developers and replace their housing projects with up-market condos, hotels and conference centres (preferably including monorails or vintage trolleys). If poor people leave the city as a result, who cares? Once they are gone, they don't appear in the statistics any more, and we can save on schools, buses and health care. Moskowitz quotes New Orleans as the most glaring example of this: after hurricane Catrina, thousands of the former (Black) residents who had been displaced from their homes never returned to the city, and no-one made any serious attempt to find out where they had gone and whether they had found anywhere to live and work.

Moskowitz probably isn't the most neutral observer of this kind of process, but he makes a convincing and scary case that something very nasty is going on just out of most of our sight. Even when local people have the skills and experience to resist it, there isn't much hope of stopping it long term, until Americans start running their cities the way Europeans do. Which is unlikely, given the way European cities are going these days. We're more likely to find European mayors talking longingly about the good example of San Francisco...

Background to >93 thorold:

The Beats : a very short introduction (2013) by David Sterritt (USA, 1944- )

  

(Author photo Smugloren, via Wikipedia)

As usual from this consistently useful series, a very solid, fluff-free treatment of the subject in an astonishingly small space: Sterritt takes us efficiently through where the Beats came from, what they stood for (or rather: against), who they were, what they wrote, and how they influenced their own and later generations. We get reasonably detailed biographies of the main players, especially Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, a look at their most important works, and a good overview of the circumstances in which they worked. The culture of unfettered sex, drugs and free jazz they existed in might look selfish and destructive when we see it from our perspective, sixty or seventy years later, but Sterritt reminds us that for the most part they were very serious creative artists, with their ground-breaking "spontaneous" prose and poetry actually being subjected to a great deal of careful selection and editing before it was ever published.

>93 thorold: Sunflower Sutra one of my favourite poems and perhaps one of Ginsberg's most approachable ones

>81 LolaWalser: Speaking of hauling books home, curious minds will want to know how many we're talking...

Final tally (I think):

13 books bought in either San Francisco or Cleveland, of which:
- 10 hauled home (4 read, 6 unread)
- 3 left in Cleveland for future hauling (2 read, 1 unread)

Additionally, I noted four titles of (heavyish) new books that I saw in US stores but realised I would be able to get just as easily in Europe. Three of those are now on order. I’m working on the fourth, which turns out not to be as new as I thought.

I was travelling with hand baggage only, but sooner or later there will be suitcases in play.

Congrats on snagging an Other Half, and securing a very manageable book haul. I typically end up having to sacrifice clothes and other expendables, or buy additional luggage.

David Ehrenstein used to be active (maybe still is) on Salon's Table Talk and I had the somewhat shell-shocked pleasure of fighting a good (flame)war side by side against a tide of Nazisoid homophobes. His public persona rubs many the wrong way but I admired the unstinting effort he put in our ¡No pasarán! on that occasion.

>97 thorold:

Younger North Americans (in particular) seem to be developing more of an urban conscience, which comes with the realisation of how capitalism and racism created the hellholes typical for the continent.

Europe is still succumbing to neoliberal imperatives but all that will end in a catastrophe anyway.

I remember David, he was also onReaderville and rubbed many peoplethe same there. didn't think Salon Table Talk was still around

ETA yup they closed down in 2011, Cut my online teeth on table talk in 2000 met people on line who would become my friends, even met some of them. I eventually found on Readervill and now on FB and LT, still talking books.

https://www.salon.com/2011/05/13/tabletalk_closing_open2011/

>101 LolaWalser: >102 cindydavid4: Interesting about Ehrenstein — I got the feeling that book-length wasn't really the ideal form for him.

More tidying up of holiday books, and someone else who made a career out of rubbing people up the wrong way:

Palimpsest : a memoir (1995) by Gore Vidal (USA, 1925-2012)

  

(Interesting: only one of the eight author photos on LT shows Vidal's right ear. Was he ashamed of it, or did he just develop an effective pose early in life and stick to it?)

A thoroughly nasty, but very enjoyable, memoir, in which Gore Vidal shamelessly and wittily takes the opportunity to settle scores with numerous well-known people who aren't around any more to answer back, whilst at the same time doing his best to impress us with how many of the great and famous he has rubbed shoulders with at one time or another. I frequently felt uncomfortable about laughing out loud at this book, but it was hard not to.

Lots of vitriol is directed at his mother; at the Kennedys (he shared a stepfather with Jackie); at the US literary establishment, which he accuses of blacklisting him after the publication of The city and the pillar with its explicit same-sex love story; at Truman Capote (accused of being short); at President Truman's "national security state" (fair enough); at European cinema for its deluded notion that directors are more important than writers; at Charlton Heston; at Hillary Clinton (insufficiently impressed at meeting him); at the English royal family (dim); and at just about everyone else who appears in the book, with the minor exceptions of Tennessee Williams, who is only mildly teased, and Vidal's grandfather Senator T P Gore, who can do no wrong.

>103 thorold: "at Hillary Clinton (insufficiently impressed at meeting him);"

I once saw Vidal being interviewed on TV. Dick Cavett, maybe? Anyway, the interviewer asked Vidal if he was ever going to write the sort of collection that famous people sometimes do, along the lines of "Famous People I Have Met." Vidal became instantly irate. Why do people always ask me that? I should write a book called "Famous People Who Have Met Me!"

>104 rocketjk: He quotes Hillary’s put-down, which he obviously enjoyed: when she and her official party are leaving his Italian house, she tells him: “Thank you, this has been a dream come true … for my mother.”
(Quoted from memory — the book is still in Cleveland and I’m not)

Great books and reviews, as always! Glad you enjoyed the trip to the US and were able to find some things to haul home (that's how I judge the success of trips like that).

>106 labfs39: Thanks!

I realise we're some way into Q4 already, but I've finally got around to posting a new thread. The first new reviews should be up soon, too:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/354544