2009

Tinkers by Paul Harding – #NovNov Day 13

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Another late post today, because I was out this evening – seeing the film Early Summer – but today I read 2009’s Tinkers by Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. I bought it in 2012, possibly because of the enthusiastic quote from Marilynne Robinson on the back. The novel opens:

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.

Great opening line, isn’t it? From here, we occasionally go back to the hospital bed and the disorienting world of the present – but George is much more at home in the past, by now. And not only his past. As he lies there, memory and invention swirl together as the narrative takes us into his past and into his father’s. George is a watch-mender, and the story feels like taking apart a watch – tinkering with it, and finding out how every small part works.

His own upbringing was in poverty, with an unreliable mother and a father who abandoned the family one day. Before this, the father’s most unpredictable quality was his seizures. In an era before any medication to help these, they were both frequent and alarming – though George only witnessed one once.

One of the unusual things about Tinkers is how it wanders in and out of first and third person. It all seems to stem from George’s memory, but sometimes we are in the first person of Howard’s (his father) narrative, seeing things that George couldn’t possibly have witnessed.

He had spoken no words to himself. No conscious thought precipitated his action, as if spending the whole day contemplating what he was going to do, had already done by the time he fitted words to the actions, which was to ride past the kitchen window that framed his family and leafed them in its gold light, would have diluted his resolve, would have led him to turn himself over to a fate that, had he thought about it, he would have accepted rather than acknowledge its implications. He could not have let himself be witness to the simultaneity of his wife passing him a plate of chicken or a basket of hot bread as she worked out her plans to have him taken away. Howard had assumed that their silence over his fits, over everything, stood for his gratefulness to her and her loyalty to him. He had assumed their silence was one of kindness offered and accepted.

It works because of the almost dreamlike ventures into memory that are the premise of the novella. And I particularly enjoyed when another piece of the puzzle was added, and we see Howard’s relationship with his own father – an other-worldly minister, not realising when his mind starts to depart. I can see why Marilynne Robinson liked the novel; in its structure, it has elements of Gilead and the legacy that can be passed through generations of experience.

The only bits that didn’t work quite so well for me were where it goes too stream of consciousness, and entire pages would be single paragraphs. And there was a collage-y feel at times, with quotes from other places – possibly fabricated, I’m not sure. Some on watchmaking worked well, but I had no idea what was going on with the sections on Borealis, which are sort of numbered entries of poetic experiences. Mystifying.

All in all, another Novellas in November success. I think Harding’s writing suffers a little in comparison to Robinson’s in a similar line, but it’s hardly a far comparison as Robinson is superlatively good at this. I still really liked Tinkers a lot, and would happily re-read it.

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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BoardingHouseIn March, I posted my first of four reviews of books that have won the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) – the amazing Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava, which it one of the best books I’ve read this year. The EUPL is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – the video at the bottom of this post explains a bit more. The prize is judged on the original language rather than the translation, but I don’t read Polish so I read The Boarding House in a translation by Tusia Dabrowska (or MJ Dabrowska, on over covers I’ve seen). The novel was an EUPL winner in 2012, though was originally published in 2009.

In the beginning, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The station’s pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air.

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

Luckily, the tracks remained as I’d left them. They run straight ahead, in a decisive gesture, to melt with the horizon, from here barely visible, hidden behind nature, or, to the contrary – to disappear in a hidden tunnel hollowed out in the sky and then begin running again on the other side, in a completely different and unknown world.

The opening paragraphs of The Boarding House start with the opening words of the Bible – or, more aptly for this novel, the Torah. The narrator is Jewish, and the train he is taking is out to a distant Polish boarding house, which once doubled as a sanatorium. He has been there before as a child, when he spent his summers with a grandmother. The people who live there now – like his grandmother before them – are survivors of the Shoah, or Holocaust.

There is a dream-like quality to much of the novel. The narrator listens to the stories of those who live in the boarding house, many of whom seem to live half in the past and half in the present. This is echoed in the way the prose will wind back and forth, and you often find yourselves finishing a scene in a different time and place to where you started. The edges of sections are blurred.

The narrator is himself between times too – recalling his childhood, the inherited stories of the Holocaust, the current need that he taken him back to this place. It’s a novel filled with palimpsests – though also humour, and there is the usual mix of cantankerous characters, gossipy characters, pessimists and optimists stuck in a lengthy dialogue, held together in this boarding house in the middle of nowhere.

It’s an interesting novel, and it interestingly reveals a lot about the legacy of the appalling treatment of Jewish people during the 1930s and ’40s. The dreamlike quality of The Boarding House is both an asset and a drawback, depending on what mood you’re in – it’s hard to grasp anything concrete, or feel like you’re on steady ground as a reader at any point.

And I don’t know if Dabrowska’s translation accurately conveys this quality in the original novel, or if there are places where it isn’t quite working as a translation. As I say, I don’t read or speak Polish – but there were many places where the writing jarred a little for me. ‘This didn’t come across very cleverly’, for instance – that use of ‘cleverly’ doesn’t quite make sense. The narrator refers to a ‘freestanding closet’, rather than a wardrobe. I didn’t quite understand this sentence, even on several attempts: ‘The door creaked, so fearing that it might cause even more of a ruckus that would wake up the entire boarding house, I sneaked through the smallest crack possible.’ That’s a handful of minor instances, but there were several on every page. Perhaps it is there in the original, and is intended to disconcert the reader. I don’t know.

It’s a difficult one. I didn’t love this novel, and I never felt on solid ground reading it. But perhaps that is the point?

Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

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#ReadIndies naturally made me think of my unread pile of Fitzcarraldo Editions. I’ve yet to buy any of the blue fiction titles, but am amassing the white non-fiction – mostly spurred on by how brilliant This Little Art by Kate Briggs is. I don’t remember why I picked Notes From No Man’s Land – originally published in 2009, and published by Fitzcarraldo in 2017 – but I’m glad I did, because it’s excellent.

Let’s address the elephant in the room first of all: this is a collection of essays about racism by a white woman. At one point she refers to her family as ‘mixed’, but this turns out to be largely about the people her mother and aunt married, not her biological relatives. Well, her mixed-race cousin is her blood relative, of course, and there is an interesting essay on their relationship that I imagine would be very different if the cousin had written it.

Anyway, when I picked up the book I had assumed, from the title, that Eula Biss was herself mixed race – the no-man’s land perhaps being between two communities. That is not the case. Biss lives in various different places throughout the essays in this collection, and sometimes she is in a racial minority and sometimes in a majority, but she is always a white woman looking at an issue that affects other people far more than it affects her. That might mean you wouldn’t want to read Notes From No Man’s Land, and I’d understand that. What I will say is that she doesn’t claim to be anything more than an observer – of current day, of her lifetime, and of history.

The opening essay is a powerful example of the latter. ‘Time and Distance Overcome’ was initially intended to be ‘an essay about telephone poles and telephones’, exploring how people reacted to have poles and wires festoon their neighbourhoods and skies. We take them for granted now, but, as Biss writes:

The idea on which the telephone depended – the idea that every home could be connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart – seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

The essay starts out looking at this dawn of a new technology. But Biss’s searches for ‘telephone pole’ in newspapers of the early-to-mid 20th century revealed something else: how often they were used for lynchings. With a judder, the essay turns to lynchings instead. Biss doesn’t over-editorialise, but lets the horror of the facts speak for itself. In this essay, she shows something she is very good at throughout Notes From No Man’s Land: resisting the narrative urge to draw everything into a structured conclusion. Whether her essays are mostly facts or mostly subjective, and this collection mixes the two, she doesn’t tie a neat bow.

The first essay is the most objective of the lot. In others, Biss’s own experience is centred – living in so-called dangerous areas of New York, and trying to establish why they have that reputation; moving to Mexico and trying to improve her Spanish; being a teacher in New York during 9/11, and being a university professor at an insignificant university in Iowa. Some of her insights in the latter were among the most interesting things in the book – how clueless most of the students were about racism, but also how university students (en masse) fulfil many of society’s fears about ‘othered’ groups, but somehow without being the target of discrimination and fear.

I loved the way that Biss interwove the personal and the historical in many of these essays – sometimes jarringly, to great effect, and sometimes much more gently. A child custody case flows in and out of Biss’s frustrations working for local media; a Nina Simone song plays during a car journey and melds with thoughts on Irish racial identity; Biss’s experience as a teacher come alongside the idea of education post-slavery. Again, even when these comparisons jolt the reader, or seem poles apart, Biss doesn’t overplay her hand as an essayist. It doesn’t seem an affront to compare ex-slaves’ education with her teaching experience, because she never directly compares them. They are just both there, in the essay, allowing each other room and creating a landscape which the reader can explore.

Chiefly, Biss is a woman driven by curiosity, compassion, and an ability to see how seemingly disparate elements exist within the same universe. Here she is on ‘diverse’:

Walking down Clark Street I pass a poster on an empty storefront inviting entrepreneurs to start businesses in Rogers Park, ‘Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.’ It takes me some time, standing in front of this poster, to understand why the word ‘diverse’ strikes me as so false in this context, so disingenuous. It is not because this neighborhood is not full of man different kinds of people, but because that word implies some easy version of this difficult reality, some version that is no full of sparks and averted eyes and police cars. But still, I’d like to believe in the promise of that word. Not the sunshineness of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it.

And perhaps that’s what I liked best about this book. It resists any ‘easy version of this difficult reality’. It recognises complexity, and celebrates the un-simple.

The City and The City by China Miéville

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You know those books that are always on the cusp of being read? Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you’ve constantly been ‘about to read it’, even if always remains fourth or fifth or fifteenth in the mental queue. Well, I got The City and The City (2009) by China Miéville for my birthday in 2010, and finally I’ve read it – I originally wanted to read it after reading a review by Sakura, who used to blog at Chasing Bawa.

The concept is what fascinated me. The narrator is Inspector Borlu, who lives in Beszel – those words should have an accent on the u and z respectively; please imagine them there. Beszel is a slightly run-down city somewhere in Eastern Europe – it also occupies the same space as the city Ul Qoma.

This isn’t fantasy, though. Rather, it’s a development of the sort of tension between cities that happened with East and West Berlin – taken to a logical extreme. Certain parts of the ‘glossotopia’ are Ul Qoma and certain parts of Beszel, but there is also a substantial ‘cross-hatched’ region, where the cities co-exist. And it is not an amicable coexistence.

Neighbouring houses might be in different cities. Pedestrians on the same street are citizens of different places. And acknowledging the other city in any way is illegal – and will get you taken away by Breach, a sort of secret police. Citizens of each city train themselves to ‘unsee’ the buildings and people of the other city – recognising, in a glimpse, an architecture or a style of dress that marks somebody as unseeable. Here is Borlu at the checkpoint between the cities:

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission – or sometimes refused it – to leave Beszel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the cross-hatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besz dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But a book can’t just be its setting, of course. The story is about a horrific murder, of a Besz woman who had been an academic. Her particular area of interest was controversial: a rumoured third city, hidden between the other two and not known by either… Her parents come to the city/cities to try to find their daughter’s murderer, and naturally do not understand the divisions they must respect.

Police procedurals are not usually my cup of tea, and I did have to skim over some of the more graphic passages, but there aren’t many of those. Borlu is a good protagonist for this set up – obeying the rules of the city and its ‘hidden’ counterpart, while mentally thinking them absurd. He is not quite Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he has no dawning revelation or rebellion against a corrupt and bizarre system. Instead, he has to work within the confines of this curious world, determined to find the killer. The quest for justice gets increasingly dangerous as fraught secrets threaten to become discovered…

The City and the City isn’t a novel I’d look twice at if it were just a modern crime novel, and the plot didn’t overwhelm me. But what kept me captivated was that brilliant concept. Somehow, Miéville kept it original and enthralling. I did wonder if it would be the same idea repeated over and over, burning out after a flare of novelty. but it’s not. Dealing with the nuances of simultaneous cities complicates the plot, but I could honestly have read Miéville’s descriptions of them and their inhabitants as much as he cared to write. A brilliant idea is fully realised.

Part of me wishes this idea was used for something other than a crime novel – but the two are really inseparable in the way the novel develops. Not my usual fare, but recommended for the extraordinary and sustained cleverness of the concept.

The Book of William by Paul Collins

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It’s only February, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read one of my books of the year – The Book of William by Paul Collins, published in 2009. The subtitle is a little misleading, but it gives you the gist: ‘How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World’.

I bought it in 2013, when I was working for the Rare Books department at the Bodleian and had been commissioned to write a very short biography of Shakespeare (and accounts of various portraits, false portraits, etc.) to accompany a DVD of adaptations of his plays. I never found out if that text was used (though I do remember that my first draft of the biography was rejected for “having too many facts” and “not being swooning enough”). But it did reignite my interest in Shakespeare – I picked up this book and James Shapiro’s excellent Contested Will around this time.

Collins’ book looks at various stages in the First Folio’s history – starting, understandably, with its creation. Shakespeare died a few years before it was printed, and there wasn’t much precedent for printing plays on such a grand scale – but he had champions of his work who saw that it happened. I’d learned quite a lot of this section before, at university and in other books, but Collins puts it together excellently. My attention was already caught.

My favourite sections of The Book of William were the next few chapters – more or less the bulk of the book, I suppose – looking at the waxing and waning of Shakespeare’s popularity. And these ups and downs sometimes, but not always, coincided with the popularity of the First Folio in the secondhand market. Collins’ accounts of rival editors in the 18th century is brilliant. One of them was Alexander Pope, no less, and his hacking away of Shakespeare’s plays led to a bitter back and forth with an editor, Theobald, who had a much more rigorous respect for the original – and wasn’t above publishing a book which highlighted hundreds of Pope’s errors.

We dart all over the place, as the account moves on. There is the gentlemen in the middle of nowhere, who stopped being a successful businessman to launch an exhaustive project to discover all the differences between the remaining First Folios, and their ownership, in an enormous five-volume series. There is the Folger Library’s collection of folios, as well as the mirror machines they use to trace distinctions between them. It’s all worlds away from a man from Stratford writing out blank verse, and fascinating to see how many chance or unlikely steps in between that moment and the present have led to his reputation – and that of this first printed collection of his plays (albeit incomplete).

I can join the ranks of those who have held a First Folio. Again, the Bodleian – I was able to look through a copy, and was amused that a previous ownership had amended the list of plays, adding or removing them according to their own beliefs about canonicity. Most of the editions Collins looks at have been similarly desecrated by earlier owners, unaware of how sacred these books would become. And some of the most tantalising moments are those that come from a similar unawareness – plays lost to history, or First Folios that disappear. As Collins points out, it’s not a particularly rare book (as these things go), with over 200 known to still exist. I own books with shorter print runs than that. A combination of things – Shakespeare’s genius, lore about the book, and of course demand – make it so valuable.

I have to admit that the end of the book sort of petered out for me. We are taken to Japan, and left there. I suppose it would be difficult to resolve something that can never truly end – for the history of the First Folio will continue and continue. And any scholars will be frustrated using this book, because there are no footnotes or sourcing – all the statements are doubtless well researched, but have to be taken at Collins’ word.

The accounts would be interesting in any writer’s hand, but Collins brings something special to this book. I love anything which foregrounds the author’s own experience of researching the book – so he is always present as we journey with him around the world. His tone perfectly captures reverence, fascination, and amusement at the absurdity of many moments in the history he relays. It’s made me all the keener to read his book about Hay-on-Wye – and also to find more and more to read about Shakespeare’s legacy. A real treat.

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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the-thing-around-your-neckThe nice people of A Great Read got in touch with me a while ago, asking if I’d like a free book in exchange for mentioning their website – which I was more than happy to do, because their website seems great. Basically, it’s an online independent bookseller – and I think many of us are on the hunt for an ethical alternative to Amazon: A Great Read could well be it.

I also liked that they weren’t just after a link – they were keen for me to find a book I wanted to read, and write a review of it; they love books and want to spread that joy. I don’t mind a book myself. And I had my eye on getting another of those beautiful Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reprints, so asked for the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, originally published in 2009. Writing about short stories is always difficult, and I seem to have ended up writing an enormous review.

Rachel and I discussed short stories on our ‘Tea or Books?’ podcast recently, and agreed that we wouldn’t naturally race towards them – and only really read them if we were in the right mood. I was intrigued to see how Adichie – whose strength lies, I believe, in her gradual creation of enormous depth to her characters – would handle only being able to have a handful of pages to create each world.

And these worlds are mostly in Nigeria or America. Adichie looks at people at different stages of life – from long-distance marriages (where the wife knows the man is having an affair), to the dark cruelties of Nigerian prison, to a writing camp where a white Englishman dictates to various African writers what is and is not considered an accurate depiction of the African experience. The last of these, ‘Jumping Monkey Hill’, is probably Adichie’s least subtle, in terms of message, but also the one which leaves the reader questioning how autobiographical it might be.

Political issues abound – either openly and vividly (bonding between two very different women who have taken shelter in a shop during a murderous riot; a woman queues for an American visa after her child has been killed and her journalist husband exiled) or more indirectly (an arranged marriage in America is laced with disappointment; two Nigerians who meet at university have very different experiences of home and of America). Many stories look at the differences between Africa and America – for instance, in ‘On Monday of Last Week’:

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one’s child were the exception rather than the rule.

Perhaps only one story (‘Tomorrow is Too Far’) has little to say about race or politics – it is a strong and surprising story of memory and guilt – and only one story, the last in the collection, struck me as rather weak. Adichie’s writing is usually assured and precise, and her structuring so even and perfect that you don’t even notice that each story has a framework. They don’t feel too ornamentally exact in their arc of action, but nor do they feel scattergun. The exception is this final story, ‘The Headstrong Historian’, which tries to cover too much ground, and does so slightly clumsily in its jumps forward in time.

The title of the book is also the title of a story, and it is probably the collection’s most innovative in style – in that it is entirely in the second person. Throughout the story, there is an iterated image of the ‘thing’ of the title – though Adichie never elaborates what exactly it represents.

At night, something would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you fell asleep.

In this case ‘you’ are a Nigerian student at an American university and ‘you’ start dating a man who is fiercely un-racist, rich, and perhaps a little too protective. He (does he have a name? I don’t think so) is a superbly complex character, and this is a nuanced relationship. Rather less nuanced (but, in this instance, very effective) are the broad brushstrokes in which the rest of America are painted:

You knew by people’s reactions that you two were abnormal – the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice. The old white men and women who muttered and glared at him, the black men who shook their heads at you, the black women whose pitying eyes bemoaned your lack of self-esteem, your self-loathing. Or the black women who smiled swift solidarity smiles; the black men who tried too hard to forgive you, saying a too-obvious hi to him; the white men and women who said ‘What a good-looking pair’ too brightly, too loudly, as though to prove their own open-mindedness to themselves.

 

The protagonists in Adichie’s stories are not necessarily all that similar. Yes, they are almost all black women from Nigeria, but that obviously no more binds them together than Katherine Mansfield’s (later) short stories mostly being about white women in England, for example. What does feel repetitive, though, is how they are almost all – all? – women to whom things happen. They are noble, passive people, victims to the prejudices and misunderstandings of others. They experience disillusionment and disappointment, except in those instances where they don’t have any illusions in the first place.

On one level, sure, this makes sense – black women face a great deal of sexism and racism in America, and the experience of those who’ve emigrated from Nigeria doubtless encompasses those lives that Adichie portrays. I don’t take any issue with her depiction of the way these characters are treated – but why are they all so good? They have so few flaws. They all seem to be the voice of reason in the face of prejudice; moral compasses surrounded by those going to the bad. The stories would have been even more interesting if she had allowed them to have more imperfections; if they had always represented the Right Opinion. As a social writer pointing out the wrongs of the 21st century, this failing doesn’t matter; as a short story writer demonstrating her craft, it does. The latter is, yes, rather less important – but since they aren’t mutually exclusive, I’d love to see both in her next collection.

Still, this drawback doesn’t prevent The Thing Around Your Neck from being a fantastic collection, elegantly written and beautifully engaging. And, in these lovely covers, it’s even more desirable for the shelves.

3 books about reading

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I am so proud of everybody for the response to my most recent post. You’ve really shown the positives that can come of people coming together on the Internet. It brings a tear to the eye! I’m excited about my Furrowed Middlebrow books arriving, and will certainly report back on what I think of the books.

But for today – let’s look at some books about reading. This has certainly my go-to comfort-genre of choice over the past year or so. I picked up quite a few in my trips to America, and I am endlessly entertained, informed, and charmed by them – thankfully there are plenty more to read on my shelves. As I often turn to them when I want episodic distraction, I don’t always get around to making proper reviews of them – so I’ve grouped three together for mini-reviews. Sound ok?

Why I Read (2014) by Wendy Lesser

why-i-readThe subtitle to this one is ‘the serious pleasure of books’, and Lesser is certainly not taking the role of the average reader. She wears her education heavily (if that is the opposite of ‘lightly’ in this instance), and it becomes rather farcical how often she mentions Henry James, BUT it’s still an enjoyable and extremely thought-provoking look at the different elements of reading. She divides her chapters in ‘Character and Plot’, ‘The Space Between’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Authority’, ‘Grandeur and Intimacy’, and ‘Elsewhere’ – make of those what you will – and her thoughts and arguments cover great swathes of territory and many writers and nationalities.

I would certainly need to re-read to familiarise myself afresh with her lines of argument, and this is closer to a scholarly book than most of the books-about-reading I enjoy, but is still certainly accessible to the non-scholar. Indeed, it would be infuriating in a scholarly context, because there are no footnotes or referencing

Why does she read? The whole book is, of course, building that answer – but I also liked (if did not agree with) the summing-up of sots of ‘I read […] for meaning, for sound, for voice – but also for something I might call attentiveness to reality, or respect for the world outside oneself’. I’d certainly recommend Why I Read – and it is also beautifully designed and printed – but somebody should have a word in her ear about how often one can get away with throwing in Henry James. I shall always wryly smile in recollection of ‘Very little in the world can compare with the experience of reading, or even rereading, The Golden Bowl, but we cannot always be reading The Golden Bowl‘. Well quite.

The Art of the Novel (2015) edited by Nicholas Royle

art-of-the-novelI asked for this collection of essays for my birthday last year – thanks Rhiannon! – because my friend (can I say that on the strength of meeting once?) Jenn Ashworth has an essay in it. You may recall I raved about Fell earlier in the year; in this collection she writes on ‘Life Writing / Writing Life’. Everybody in the collection discusses different angles on how to write, from genre (Leone Ross on magical realism; Livi Michael on historical fiction) to broader concerns like place, details, plot twists, etc. Besides Ashworth, I’d only heard of a handful of the authors (Alison Moore, Stella Duffy, and – believe it or not – two Nicholas Royles, whom I’d got confused on a previous occasion) but I am hardly the benchmark for knowing about modern literature. Only one contributor, one of the Nicholas Royles in fact, takes a weird tangent – into the concept of the death of the author – which has little to do with practical advice.

This was one of the books I read in Edinburgh, and it was entertaining – I was reading it more out of interest than seeking advice – but I did particularly like how each essayist ended their section with a list of books they admired or recommended. It was interesting how often Muriel Spark’s excellent book The Driver’s Seat came up.

The Whole Five Feet (2009) by Christopher R. Beha

the-whole-five-feetThe most personal of the three books featured today, and the most unusual in concept (is there a word for ‘gimmicky’ that isn’t negative?) – and by far the longest subtitle. *Clears throat* ‘What the great books taught me about life, death, and pretty much everything else’.

The great plants in question are the Harvard Classics – Beha decides that he will try to read all of the Harvard Classics in a year. They supposedly take up five feet on a shelf, hence the title. For those not au fait with the series (as I was not), it was created in 1909 to be the best literature, fiction and non-fiction, made available to the everyman, in 51 chunky volumes. It is quite an unusual collection of works; the blurb describes it as ‘from Plato to Dante, Shakespeare to Thoreau’, but it also includes some more idiosyncratic choices – like Two Years Before the Mast, an account of sailing by Richard Henry Dana, Jnr.

What makes this book so engrossing is how well Beha combines the reading experience with personal accounts of his own life – losses and illness chiefly – that accompany the year, writing with a empathetic dexterity that makes the reader warm to him and care deeply. The actual responses to the books become less important as The Whole Five Feet continues, and it ultimately seems more of an endurance test than an engagement with literature. In some ways, this is more memoir than a book-about-reading, but it is none the worse for that.

Beowulf on the Beach – Jack Murnighan

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I’m not great at reading on ‘planes, and I thought (on my recent trip to the US) that it would be best to take a book I could read in short segments, rather than attempting to sustain a narrative.  While rooting through my books-about-books shelf, I stumbled across Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits (2009) by Jack Murnighan.  It was first suggested to me by an online friend, Sheila, and I put it on my Amazon wishlist – from where it was bought by my brother a few years ago.  Thank you Colin, and thank you Sheila if you’re still reading SiaB!

I think there are two things most bloggers and bibliophiles think when they see a list of books: (1) yay! a list! (2) wait, how could they have missed out/included this/that…  Well, Beowulf on the Beach is an extended exercise in both (1) and (2), tied together with Jack Murnighan’s very amusing style – so, of course, I loved it.

Let’s start with the gimmicks – and, no mistake, this is a very gimmicky book.  It would have to be, really.  Murnighan has selected the 50 ‘greatest hits’ of literature, and tells us what they’re about, what the ‘buzz’ is, the best line, fun facts, what’s sexy (!), and what to skip.

When I read, I hope the book will reach me in at least one of three places: where I zip, where I button a shirt, and where I put on a hat.
A neat sentence, and once which tells you the sort of literary scholar Murnighan is – one who isn’t afraid to talk about what is ‘sexy’.  Yup, he’s not using the word to mean ‘the best bits’, he literally means ‘is there sex in this book?’  Which is obviously a bit silly, and very awkward when we get to Lolita, but… well, it’s a gimmick, as I said.  Equally untenable is the ‘what to skip’ bit – perhaps it works when he’s talking about Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Homer’s Odyssey, but it’s pretty ridiculous to advise skipping huge chunks of a modern novel, which probably wouldn’t make sense.

But none of that really matters, because I don’t think Murnighan intends us to take those sections particularly seriously.  What I really enjoyed is how Murnighan refuses to put on a scholarly voice, and instead brings out how enjoyable reading great works of literature can be.

Anna Karenina is like a sundae with a dollop of Madame Bovary as its base and a squeeze of melted Middlemarch poured over the top.
Since I’ve not read any of those three novels (well, the first hundred pages of the third), I can’t comment on the accuracy of Murnighan’s simile, but I love the idea of it nonetheless, and it is a good example of his lack of holy cows.  Charles Dickens becomes Chuck, Murnighan refers to ‘zingers’, etc. etc.  It’s all very informal, and great fun – but also very informative.  Murnighan is nothing if not passionate about literature.  Here’s part of what he has to say about One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Forget magic realism.  Right now.  If I hear you say the words, I’ll sneak up behind you with a piano-wire; I’m not kidding.  Yes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is associated with that dimwit’s category (lumping him with the epigone Isabel Allende and other charlatans), but his imaginative leaps are the least important about this book.  To reduce Garcia Marquez’s narrative genius to such an infantilizing pseudoconcept as magic realism is high treason in itself, but to allow that academic manure to be what people talk about regarding this novel, as if humanity doesn’t need to be sat down, as a whole, at grandpa Gabo’s knee and told what’s really important, that is utterly inexcusable.  Literature classes have a sacred book on their hands and they make it sound like the trip journals of a peyote fiend.  For shame.
Eeks.  Truth be told, Murnighan’s tastes could scarcely be more different from mine.  He says Paradise Lost is the best work ever written (I don’t even think it’s the best work Milton wrote beginning with the word ‘Paradise’), Moby Dick the best novel (snore), and Faulkner the best novelist (haven’t read any, but…).  While he covers more of the globe than I do with my reading, there is a rather shameful paucity of female writers responsible for these 50 books – Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison.  Of course, he is not to blame for the sidelining of women throughout literature’s history, but the inclusion of authors like Robert Musil, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy rather than (say) Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, and Muriel Spark – all of whom have at least equal claim to canonicity – does speak some prejudice.  Make no mistake, Murnighan is a big fan of overtly masculine, guns-and-big-themes literature, and proudly states it; we were never going to coincide in our literary tastes.  (His chapter on Pride and Prejudice is, by the way, pretty poor… I don’t think he got the point, since he thinks it’s all about ‘romantic fantasies’, instead – as I would suggest – of being chiefly about self-knowledge.)

I was also left wondering whether Murnighan ever read anything that wasn’t canonical, since he seems to have read all fifty of these books dozens of times.  Does he ever pick up something he’s never heard of, and discover an unexpected gem?  That (as I’m sure you’ll be aware) is one of the greatest joys of the reader’s life.

But these are small criticisms for a book which, as I suggested at the beginning of this post, could only be found perfect by a bibliophile were that bibliophile to compile the list themselves.  Whether or not you’ll use Beowulf on the Beach as a manual for the reading life, skipping the bits Murnighan advises against and bookmarking the sexy bits… well, I doubt you will – but any lover of literature will delight in a very witty, very intelligent, entirely biased and totally enthusiastic reader sharing those enthusiasms.  A perfect Christmas present for the bibliophile in your life – and a perfect birthday present to me from Colin back in 2010.

The Help (in which I step off my high horse)

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I recently read The Help by Kathryn Stockett – I shan’t bother giving a full review, since I’m so late to the party that nearly everyone seems to have read it already, but it does provide a useful opportunity to talk about a general trend in my reading.

Very briefly, for those not in the know, The Help is about 1960s America – Jackson, Mississippi, specifically (which to me is chiefly notable for producing Eudora Welty and this wonderful song) – and the racial tensions of the time.  Particularly those between maid and employee – the cast of characters is almost exclusively women, including the three narrators Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter Phelan.  All three narrators are marvellously engaging, the whole novel is a terrific page-turner without sacrificing any narrative polish, and all in all it’s a very good novel.  If it weren’t tremendously popular already, I would be waxing evangelical about it to all and sundry.

It’s not a flawless novel.  You think the characters are complex (and some are) but then you realise that some of the racist characters are unrealistically bad in all ways – and there is an incident involving a naked man and a poker which needn’t have been in the novel at all (and isn’t nearly as unpleasant as I’ve realised that sentence sounds.)  But it’s an extremely impressive debut novel, and it’s bewildering that 50 agents turned it down.

Simply to create three characters so empathetic and engaging (that word again; but it is appropriate) is an exceptional achievement.  Novels were multiple narrators usually end up having one who isn’t as vibrant as the others, or one who is head and shoulders above the rest – not so, in Stockett’s case.  I was always delighted to see any of them turn up in the next chapter – with perhaps a slight preference for irrepressible Minny. No, wise Aibileen might come top. Oh, but what about Skeeter’s enthusiastic confusion and determination?  Oh, hang it, I love them all.

So why am I writing about The Help without reviewing it properly?  To expose one of my failings, I’m afraid.

I had assumed, since it was so popular, that it would be very poor.  If it hadn’t been for my book group, I wouldn’t have read it – and I’m grateful to the dovegreybooks ladies for giving me a copy (although I don’t know which of the group it was!)

You can excuse me – or at least understand where I’m coming from.  If you’ve found your way to Stuck-in-a-Book, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve experienced a similar thing.  Seeing Dan Brown and his ilk at the top of the bestseller charts, it’s difficult to believe that anything of quality could sell millions of copies, in the way that The Help has.

I did love The Time Traveller’s Wife, but other bestselling representatives of literary fiction have proven singularly disappointing to me.  Ian McEwan’s recent output has been rather ‘meh’; Lionel Shriver’s fantastically popular We Have To Talk About Kevin was so dreadfully written that I gave up on p.50.  Things like The Lovely Bones and The Kite Runner weren’t exactly bad, but I found it difficult to call them good, either.  Bestselling literary fiction is usually vastly better than bestselling unliterary fiction (yes, Dan Brown, I’m looking at you) but it doesn’t excite me.

Remember a little while ago I posted that quotation from Diana Athill, about the two types of reader, and how the second type created the bestseller?  Well, my experience had led me to believe that I’d never find a chart-topping novel that I really loved and admired.  Perhaps a few would be page-turners, but I couldn’t imagine any would actually bear closer analysis too.

Well, reader, I was wrong.  While Kathryn Stockett isn’t (yet, at least) on the scale of great prose writers like Virginia Woolf, she is certainly a cut above the usual.  I’m delighted that I stepped down from my high horse long enough to enjoy it – or, let’s face it, that I was pushed off against my will.

Return of Winnie-the-Pooh

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When it was announced that there would be an authorised sequel to Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, I was rather sceptical.  It seemed doomed to failure from the outset, and previous attempts to cash in on Milne’s talent (notably the horrendous Disney adaptation, and resultant filling of the world with the hideous illustrations that were mangled into being) weren’t encouraging.  But I read the first story online and was pretty impressed; Verity gave me a copy of Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (thanks Verity!), and… 15 months later, quick as a snap, I read it.

I don’t know why it took me so long, other than because it almost always takes me an age to read the books on my shelves, however much I’ve been looking forward to them.  But it seemed the perfect choice for my sickbed last week, undemanding and jolly, and so I took it down.

My thoughts could be summed up by saying: “It’s pretty much as good as it could be.”  We all knew it would never be as good as the original – how could it be? – but it could have been a lot, lot worse.

The right people wrote and illustrated it, for a start.  David Benedictus, the writer, had already dramatised the Winnie-the-Pooh books for the radio, and Mark Burgess (stepping into E.H. Shepard’s shoes as illustrator) was the colourist for Shepard’s illustrations in When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.  These are clearly men who have a great awareness of, and fondness for, the genius of Milne and Shepard.  Whatever results they come up with, they have written and illustrated with respect and caution.  Not for them, the slap-dash “Wouldn’t it be funny if Rabbit looked like he was off his head on drugs, and Eeyore were an alcoholic?” stylings of Disney.

The stories in the book take place during one of Christopher Robin’s school holidays.  I’ll write a little bit about the ending of The House at Pooh Corner in another post, soon, but it’s clear that Christopher Robin hasn’t forgotten his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood.  He’s changed a bit, but he’s still delighted to see them – and they organise (or should that be organdise?) a speshul welcum home party for him, complete with speshul invitations.  Roo has his eye on a green jelly, and is trying to convince everyone else that the red and yellow ones look better.  Kanga successfully diverts Owl’s story about Uncle Robert.  Pooh gets drowsy and dreams about honey.  “Jollifications and hey-diddle-diddle,” comments Eeyore, and who are we to disagree with him?  Of course, Christopher Robin eventually turns up, and all is well.  It is a gentle, auspicious start to the collection.

Things continue pretty well.  As we go through the book, the events are chosen well.  Owl wants to write a book.  They start a school – Eeyore is headmaster.  Cricket is played.  Rabbit tries to take a Census…

“I thought I was a sensible animal,” Rabbit said, shuddering. 

“Of course you are,” said Pooh, “everybody knows that.” 

“And it was such a sensible idea, the Census.” 

“It’s almost the same word,” agreed Pooh.
It’s all very much in keeping with the gang’s original adventures, which is great.  Benedictus does, though, add another character.  A drought dries up the river, and there emerges (possibly indignant from years of having pooh-sticks dropped on her head), Lottie the Otter.  She wears pearls, says ‘darling’, and has gumption.  She certainly isn’t a replication of any other characters – it’s impressive the Benedictus has found a gap in the seemingly-comprehensive gallery of personality types invented by Milne – but, perhaps unsurprisingly, Lottie never quite works as a character.  Benedictus cannot rely on the charm that Milne has already built up in Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore et al – and there is a lot of looking-over-the-shoulder at events and expressions from previous books, which is better than if they’d been ignored altogether.

And there lies the problem, the inevitable problem, with Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.  The charm is missing.  Or, rather, it is less.  The same goes for Mark Burgess’s illustrations – the spark of genius which characterised both Milne’s writing and Shepard’s drawing is absent from their imitators.  That indescribable something which brought Shepard’s illustrations so charmingly alive, and gave Milne’s prose a subtle undertone of wry wit and affectionate knowingness – it has not been bestowed upon Burgess and Benedictus, at least not in these guises.

The main emotion I have, when closing the very enjoyable but ultimately, of course, inferior tales of the Hundred Acre Wood?  To re-read the originals, naturally.  What fun!