I am very excited about this.
Thanks, Sort Of Books!
More when I’ve read it…
Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin
Literary T-shirts
I got an email the other day asking if I’d like to help make literature fashionable – and, being the fashionable chap I doubtless am, I said yes.
It turns out that The Affair make great book-themed T-shirts, and offered to send me a sample. How lovely, thought I, and the other day my T-shirt arrived. I have to admit that it probably isn’t ‘inspired by my favourite books’ (as their tagline goes) because I’ve never heard of Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea, but I do love the T-shirt. The fabric quality is amazing, such a nice light cotton, and the design is great. Oh, and they’re sweatshop-free, which is a brilliant bonus.
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| This is very much not what I look like. |
For a full list of the T-shirts they make (which I think are only for men, but I could be wrong) see here. There are some great books represented – Picture of Dorian Gray, Macbeth, Animal Farm etc. – and they’d make great gifts for the man in your life (and, if you’re a man, that man could be you.)
Thanks, The Affair, I love my tee!
So… I gave up on Lolita
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Song for a Sunday
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
I didn’t watch the X Factor last series, but the one before that had a great singer called Ella Henderson – she’s now got around to recording some songs, and I’m a fan of ‘Five Tattoos’. Enjoy!
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.