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So… I gave up on Lolita

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I usually wade in strongly on the ‘literary quality is the most important thing’ side of debates.  I think of myself as putting the writer’s ability first, and that age-old argument of not liking books if they have dislikeable characters has never made any sense to me.  “I’m above such things,” thought I, smugly, dusting my doctorate and twirling my imaginary moustache.

But, dear reader, it turns out I’m nothing like as objective and scholarly as I liked to believe.  Because I gave up on p.16 of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov because it was – and stop me if I’m blinding you with my critical vocabulary – too icky.

Apparently I just can’t stomach a man fantasising about nine year old girls.  I know that Nabokov isn’t advocating paedophilia (well, I assume he wasn’t), and I know that Lolita is well-recognised as a classic.  The writing was good (although I have to say I wasn’t quite as bowled over by it as some people said I’d be) but I couldn’t get past that.

I don’t know why I’m feeling quite so conflicted about my stumbling block. The argument I’ve put to myself is that I’m fine with reading murder mysteries, so why can’t I read Lolita – but then I remembered that I’m incapable of reading anything gory or violent, so… statutory rape and a character fantasising about it is also in that category, it seems.

This is not a ‘burn the books’ situation – I don’t think Lolita should be banned, or anything like that.  I actually think it probably makes me less of a reader to have this inability.  But I would be intrigued to know your opinions on the matter… and, more than that, if there are other Nabokov novels I should read instead!  I’ve only read Mary so far, so plenty to try….

Song for a Sunday

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Well, last Sunday I posted a new track from an artist who hasn’t even released an album yet (although she has found fame on the X Factor) and nobody commented, so I thought I’d try something different this week ;)

It’s rare that I like old male bands (new female singer-songwriters being my bag) but I do like the Eagles, and I love Desperado… and I suspect you do too.  Indulge.

The Teleportation Accident – Ned Beauman

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Can we be superficial for a moment?  This cover is amazing.  I love it so much.  I’ve had a hunt through the paperback to try to work out who designed it, and failed, but kudos to him or her.

I read Ned Beauman’s first novel (Boxer, Beetle) shortly before meeting him at a Sceptre party – thanks Sceptre for sending me this one too! – and was very pleasantly surprised.  I don’t think there is any way in which I could have been sold a book about boxing, beetles, and Nazis which would have made me think I might like it – but it was brilliant, energetically and stylishly written, and utterly captivating.  I was even lucky enough to interview him about it.  So, when The Teleportation Accident (2012) came out and got longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, I was naturally rather keen to read it… and lax enough that I’ve only just finished it.  Writing about a novel that’s a couple of years ago can feel more dated than writing about one from a hundred years ago, so I hope you will forgive the indulgence.

The Teleportation Accident is one of those novels which demands either a shortish review or an enormous one.  I can simply enthuse about Beauman’s extraordinary imagination and scope, or I can begin to try and explain how that is manifested… and the latter would end up taking thousands of words.  There is just so much in the novel; it’s a real tour de force.  Boxer, Beetle showed that Beauman could meld together disparate and surreal elements into a coherent and entertaining narrative – The Teleportation Accident does more of the same.

Even the title itself refers to various layers.  A 17th-century Parisian set designed, Adriano Lavicini, destroys a theatre and kills dozens after his teleportation device tears apart a theatre.  A scientist in 1930s America tries to replicate the device.  And the main character of the novel – a German called Egon Loeser, whose main preoccupation is how seldom he has sex – is fascinated with Lavicini.

Sound complicated?  I haven’t even started on the people pretending to attach monkey glands to people’s necks for health reasons, the macabre serial killer, the man suffering from an extreme form of agnosia, the film director with a secret, and the curiously named (but very beautiful) Adele Hitler…

How does Beauman make it all work?  I don’t know, but he does.  After an opening few paragraphs which make a solid attempt at Kundera-esque postmodern semiotics, he settles down into a prose style which is equal parts verve and pizazz.  I sometimes wondered (with both novels) if he folded up bits of paper with surreal things on them, pulled some out of a hat, and dared himself to write a novel joining them all up.  Well, he wins the dare.  Somehow the tone remains consistent throughout – I think it is that unchanging sense of style, as well as the very grounded, fairly carnal preoccupations of Loeser – which allow a mad box of novelistic tricks to succeed as a single entity.

It also helps that Beauman seems to be having a lot of fun (although I’m sure it was also a lot of hard work).  Here’s a paragraph I jotted down – I’m not a fan of sci-fi, but I loved the way he wrote about teleportation:

The point is, you can’t just delete the subject in one place and create a copy in another.  If you did that to a human being, all you’d be doing is murdering someone and replacing them with a clone a few minutes old.  That way, no one who believed in a soul – like my parents, for instance – would ever be willing to set foot in a teleportation device.  So instead you have to move the object itself, really move it.  But it can’t move through the intervening space.  It has to be in one place, and then, snap!  Suddenly in another.  It has to change its position all at once.  Well, what’s position, anyway?  It’s not a function of space.  There’s no more such a thing as space than there’s such a thing as the ether.  Space is just objects, and position is a function of those objects.  So if you can – the Professor always warns me against the Pathetic Fallacy, but it’s so hard to avoid sometimes – if you can make an object forget its old position, and then persuade it of its new position, then that’s teleportation.  But how do you do that?  
Ultimately, teleportation is a hook to hang the novel on.  I found I didn’t much care whether or not the machine (indeed, the various machines) actually worked.  I wasn’t even hugely invested in what happened to Loeser – I was invested in the zany rollercoaster on which the novel took me.  Even events which, in the hands of a less talented writer, would be sordid seemed to me simply surreal and part of the vivid, myriad pattern of The Teleportation Accident.

Although he is Nicola Beauman’s son, his novels could scarcely be more different from those published by Persephone – and yet I love both.  I am ultimately very attracted to a novelist who has a vast imagination, and (crucially) knows how to control it and use it very wisely.  Beauman is that novelist.

Somewhere Towards the End – Diana Athill

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I’m over at Vulpes Libris at the moment, with a review of Somewhere Towards the End (2008) by Diana Athill.  It does fit in my new century, but I actually finished it at the end of 2013.  I did like a lot of it, but struggled with some of it, and my review is mostly about what I struggled with… which I found difficult to explore and express properly, but valued trying!  Head over and read it, if you so wish, here.

Re-reading

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I’ve just finished re-reading The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson for my book group, and thus it will be filling my 1982 slot in A Century of Books, but I didn’t want to repeat myself by re-reviewing it since, like Mr. Darcy, my affections and wishes are unchanged – so, if you would like to, go and see why I thought The True Deceiver was so wonderful back in 2009.  In short – the novel is fascinating for giving an insight into Jansson’s feelings about writing for children, the relationship between two very different women is slightly sinister but also poignant, and the writing is (as ever with Jansson) beautiful and sparse.  If you’ve not read Jansson before, go grab this, it’s wonderful.

But I wanted to talk about re-reading instead – and how that changes the way we feel about the books around us.

I’m always fascinated by how a bookcase (or ten) of books is not a neutral entity to their owner.  To anybody looking into my bedroom, they are simply bookcases of books.  To me, each spine is either unknown territory – exciting, but mysterious and vague – or a place I have already wandered.  Isn’t it funny how a (say) off-white spine can go from being something about which we know almost nothing, maybe just the lead character’s name and the genre, and (after having read it) the sight of it is a trigger for all sorts of memories and emotions.

Amongst those tried-and-known books on my shelves, there are a select few which don’t just hold memories but which hold definite promise.  That’s different (of course) from the promise suggested by a recommendation, or even by an unread by a much-loved author.  They are, instead, the books that I know I can return to time and again, and know precisely what emotions they will conjure; how wonderful and stimulating the writing will be; how happy (or moved, or admiring, or amused) the words will make me.

Tove Jansson’s beautiful books are among that number.  So is The Diary of a Provincial Lady, the novels of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf… basically anything in my 50 Books list.  They are not so much books to be re-read, but experiences to be re-captured – and to be built upon.

Which brings me to my question.  This is all well and good in theory – and certainly worked with The True Deceiver, about which I felt exactly the same both times around – but there are some books which disappoint when re-read.  There are others which get much better – but, since I rarely re-read a book I was lukewarm about the first time around, I seldom discover these.

Over to you for this bit – which book was the most disappointing re-read?  And which the most surprisingly rewarding?

My answers, respectively, as Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey and One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes.  The first went from being a book I loved abundantly to one I liked a lot, but felt oddly unexcited about; the latter (as you can see in my review) took the exact opposite trajectory.  Since I still rather like Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, you can see that I’ve never had a hugely disappointing re-reading experience… those promising spines have kept their promise.  You?

Hovel in the Hills – Elizabeth West

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Last year I read, and very much enjoyed, The Egg & I by Betty Macdonald (and discovered that there is a thriving Betty Macdonald community out there).  Although the very thought of going to run a farm with a recalcitrant stove and marauding animals fills me with horror (and I am very much a country boy – albeit one with a fondness for electricity), I very much enjoyed reading her witty, self-deprecating take on her adventures.  It is non-fiction disguised as fiction.  And I was hoping to find its equal in Elizabeth West’s Hovel in the Hills (1977).  Well, er… it didn’t work out quite like that.

Elizabeth West and her husband certainly have many of the same difficulties.  They decided to move from the ratrace to the bleak middle of nowhere in Wales.  At high altitudes, with wind, rain, and cold being bitterly present throughout much of the year – with very little money to boot – this could easily have been an Egg & I Mark 2.  The obstacles – from wallpaper which grew mouldy with alarming alacrity, to the difficulties of crossing vast distances without a car – are funds for much wry laughter and rolled eyes.

But, although the cover assures me that the contents will be ‘warm, funny, [and] moving’, Elizabeth West seems to have (had?) almost no sense of humour.  Obstacle after obstacle is raised, with the smug solution given.  Almost every page drips with self-satisfaction.  They clearly feel an immense sense of superiority to all the fools in the world who wouldn’t know how to run a stove, or make a salad out of weeds, or have the curious weakness of preferring a flush toilet to a hole in a shed.

Perhaps it is just a weakness in me, but I found it hard to warm to a writer who had all the answers.  Her husband was worse – the sort of irritating person who fixes everything with little more than a spanner and a stern glance.  Self-deprecation is one of the qualities I find most endearing in fact and fiction (I am British, after all) and the Wests don’t have a drop of it.

I was on happier ground when she turned her attention away from their achievements and towards nature.  Particularly when she wrote about the birdlife of the area –  that was endearing and almost witty.  True, she wrote about how good they were with animals and birds, but that couldn’t get in the way of how fun it was to read about the wildlife and the personalities they displayed.  I was strongly reminded of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water during these sections.  Here is a bit about the great tits which visited them:

We fed them on fat and peanuts as well as oatmeal and it soon became obvious which was the male and which was the female – from their behaviour as well as the slightly larger size and broad bely stripe of the male.  Pinny was always completely trusting, and quite at ease when feeding from our hands.  She flew to them without hesitation, ate daintily, and landed and took off with very gentle feet.  Podger, her mate, had an entirely different personality.  He only plucked up courage to come to our hands because he had seen Pinny do so.  But he made a great fuss about it.  Dashing in with great bluster, he would land with a clunk of clawed feet, grabbing what he could and making off with it straight away.  We went to the door with peanuts as soon as we saw the birds at our window in the morning.  If Podger arrived first he would sit on a nearby bush churring and chinking fussily until Pinny arrived to feed.  He was probably kidding her that he was being a gentleman, but we know that he needed the reassurance of seeing her feed first.
Besides the chapters on birds, I did also enjoy her descriptions of the wrangles they had experienced with the local council when they bought a caravan for holiday lets.  Everyone enjoys a tale of the small-mindedness of little people wielding power – so long as the tale is happening to someone else, of course – and West does give the whole saga amusingly.  Her sense of superiority feels justified here, at least – and there is an excellent coda to the whole rigmarole, which I shan’t spoil in case you decide to read the book.

But, as you’ll have gathered, I found that the irritating outweighed the enjoyable in Hovel in the Hills.  I’m probably just too cynical to enjoy the story of someone being better than everyone else.  Give me Betty Macdonald accidentally setting fire to things any day.

A change to my century; a change to my life

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This photo is a year or two old,
but shows how I stand in relation to Sherpa…

Firstly, blog news – after seeing some alternative centuries around the blogosphere, and chatting to my friend at work, I have decided to shift my century a bit.  I’ll now be doing the past 100 years – that is, 1914-2013.  I found the first years so difficult to fill last time, and I also missed the 21st century – this way I can keep myself more content, and still have a great overview of a century.  And, of course, 1914 is not an insignificant year.

Secondly, life news – I had my DPhil viva yesterday, and have passed with minor corrections!  I think I’m not technically a doctor until I’ve done those corrections, had them approved, and got a piece of paper from the English faculty in my hands – but to all intents and purposes I am now Dr. Thomas.  Gosh, how strange that sounds!  I think it might take me a lot longer to get used to it than everyone else.

It’s not too late for some 2013 stats, is it?

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Using my annual meme, with some extensions and wanderings, here are (a bit belatedly) my stats from 2013… just because I find it interesting, and really enjoy reading everyone else’s.

Encouraged by earlier comments…
here is one of my favourite Sherpa photos.

Number of Books Read
103, which is rather fewer than 2012’s 135, but not far off 2011’s 106.

Number of Books Bought
We don’t count those any more.

Fiction/Non-Fiction Ratio
64 fiction and 39 non-fiction – every year the percentage of non-fiction gets higher.  Will it overtake fiction one year?  (Well, yes, maybe… here endeth the investigative journalism).

Male/Female Authors
63 by women, 39 by men, 3 by both.  That’s a higher percentage of male authors than last year, and exactly the same number male as non-fiction.  Coincidence? (Yes.)

Re-reads
Only 10 – mostly because of my Reading Presently project, I think.  Of those 10, 7 were for teaching, thesis, or work.

Theses submitted
One. I couldn’t resist putting this in here, and it did impact my reading a great deal.

Oldest book read
After A Century of Books in 2012, I decided 2013 would be the year I read loads of 19th-century literature.  So, the oldest book I read?  Er, Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes by Harry Graham, from 1902. Oops.

Newest book read
Probably Black Sheep by Susan Hill, right at the end of the year, since it was a 2013 novel.

Shortest Title
Was also one of the very best books I read this year – Stet by Diana Athill.

Books in Translation
Oh dear, only 3 I think, which is pretty appalling – and suggests that people tend not to give me books in translation, maybe? They were from French (Phantoms on the Bookshelves), German (All Quiet on the Western Front), and Hungarian (Skylark). And two of them ended up my 50 Books list.

Most Books by One Author
This is definitely a battle of the Dames…. Agatha Christie helped me get through reader’s block in the summer, and I taught Muriel Spark to an undergraduate in the autumn.  Who wins?  It’s actually a tie – 7 a-piece.

Most Disappointing Book
I’ve hoped that Nina Bawden would be an author that I’d love, but I found A Woman of My Age utterly tedious.

Most Serendipitous Book
Either Floater by Calvin Trillin, about journalists in Washington DC (which I read while staying with journalists in Washington DC), or The Young Ardizzone by Edward Ardizzone, which turned out to be partly set in the village where my grandparents lived for over thirty years.

Animals in book titles
Snake Beach by Lisa Glass, Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi, Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs by Jeremy Mercer, Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym, Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie, Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie, and Black Sheep by Susan Hill.

Strange things that happened in the books I read this year
Snakes infested a modelling contest, letters were systematically banned, a fake war was reported, a old woman was swindled into believing herself immortal, a draper flew, two children discovered an underground world, a dead romantic novelist haunted her husband, fence builders became serial killers, a snow child came alive, and a woman discovered that she was in a novel when she heard a narrator speaking through the walls.

I Pose – Stella Benson

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I know some people are very keen to end a reading year on a high, but for me it is more important that the first book of a new year is good.  Of course, I would love every book I read to be good, but somehow it feels as though a bad first book sets off a bad tone for the whole year.  So I deliberately finished off a book which I was already halfway through, and knew was brilliant… I Pose (1915) by Stella Benson, reprinted by Michael Walmer and sent to me as a review copy (more on this exciting new reprint publisher here).

I had read one book by Stella Benson before – Living Alone, about witches living in a boarding house – and I liked it, but would have preferred Benson to keep her feet more firmly on the ground.  The opening pages, satirising a council meeting, were entirely delicious.  Well – I Pose more than answered my request, and I found it very amusing.  The style is so fresh, lively, and not for a moment taking itself remotely seriously.

I Pose is set up as an allegory – the main characters are referred to solely as ‘the gardener’ and ‘the suffragette’.  The idea of an allegory rather terrifies me, as it does suggest earnestness (which I’m allergic to in fiction), but Benson has the same feelings as me.  She definitely has some important things to say – I’ll come on to those later – but she uses these characters chiefly to lampoon the notion of allegory.

Both gardener and suffragette – but particularly gardener – live life through epithets.  They are continually posing; the title refers to the mixture of sincerity and insincerity with which they adopt their stances.  For, yes, the suffragette cares deeply about suffrage – but when she claims not to care about life or limb, or to be unlovable and unloving, then it is decidedly a pose.  The gardener, too, is forever choosing poses which permit him to speak in riddles and epigrams.  Some might find it wearying, but I loved every moment.  When the gardener meets the suffragette, he instantly knows that she is one – she has, after all, the stereotypical appearance of the militant suffragette…

The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in the eyes of a self-respecting young man.  She had the sort of hair that plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it prettily.  Her complexion was not worthy of the name.  Her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction.  Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to dress as if she were pretty.  And even this is not a very attractive virtue.
He doesn’t agree with her methods (she intends to blow up a church) and Benson is at her satirical best on the topic:

The gardener, of course, shared the views of all decent men on this subject.  One may virtuously destroy life in a good cause, but to destroy property is a heinous crime, whatever its motive.(Yes, I know that made you tremble, but there are not many more paragraphs of it.)
There are plenty of moments where Benson addresses the reader, always tongue-in-cheek and often defending her choices as a novelist, against imagined criticisms.  She freely admits that the suffragette is not a typical heroine…

I quite admit that the suffragette was an infuriating person.  I yield to none in my admiration for any one who could manage to keep their temper with her.
The suffragette and gardener end up on a boat sailing abroad, posing as a married couple (albeit briefly), and they dash madly around various foreign climes, meeting some extraordinary people along the way.  My favourite was probably the always-antagonistic Mrs. Rust…

“I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mrs. Rust, who now made this remark mechanically in any pause in the conversation.
Earthquakes and suffrage clubs come and go, as do the adventures of an obnoxious young boy and an adorable Scottie dog, but the plot is certainly not the most important aspect of I Pose.  I loved it almost entirely for Benson’s style.  It reminded me a little of P.G. Wodehouse – certainly she has his affinity for the pleasures of understatement (‘She was not in the least miserly of a certain cheap smell of violets’) alongside just enough of Oscar Wilde to make the prose frothy and delightful, and not enough to make it tiring (to me).  Her way with words is astonishing, and shows a confidence which no début author deserves to possess – but it is a confidence which is, at the same time, entirely well-deserved.  This sort of novel is so difficult to do well – it could have very easily felt self-indulgent and overdone – but I think it is a wonder.

And, while I spent most of the novel thrilling to the writing and not caring too much about plot and character, I surprised myself by growing to care considerably about the possible romance between the gardener and the suffragette… now, making the reader care about characters with no names, when the narrator is openly and proudly dismissing their suitability to lead a novel, where nothing is said with a serious tone… well, Miss Benson, that is an achievement indeed.