thorold reserves aerial magazines in Q1

Ye too, ye winds! that now begin to blow,
With boisterous sweep, I raise my voice to you.
Where are your stores, ye powerful beings! say,
Where your aërial magazines reserv'd,
To swell the brooding terrors of the storm? ⁠
In what far-distant region of the sky,
Hush'd in dead silence, sleep you when 'tis calm?

James Thomson, “The Seasons (Winter)”

Welcome to my first thread of 2024! The previous thread was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/354544

(Stats post)

More numbers coming, but the overview is now provided for us in the glossy new “Year in Review” page https://www.librarything.com/stats/thorold/year — that tells me I read 153 books and added 163 to my library in 2023.

(Aims and goals)

Welcome to Club Read 2024, Mark! I look forward to your reviews, which are always so well-written and entertaining. I try to remember and give yours a thumb so they will percolate to the top of the review list.

Happy New Year Mark. Wish you a great 2024. And perhaps lots of air miles.

welcome to a new year! cant wait to see what book you will push me to read! speaking of, I saw beyond the wall on their shelves. Sale goes through tomorrow thinking of going to get it. Know anything about it?

Happy new year and great trade winds, Mark!

>8 cindydavid4: I saw a positive review of it recently, i think it should be interesting. It’s on my list too…

And a short book off the TBR pile for my first 2024 read. This was a little library find, I think. I've read a couple of other books by Dimitri Verhulst, who seems to be one of the best-known and most translated Flemish writers of recent years. He's particularly known for De helaasheid der dingen/The Misfortunates (2008).

De intrede van Christus in Brussel (2011; Christ's entry into Brussels) by Dimitri Verhulst (Belgium, 1972- )

  

In 1889, James Ensor painted Christ entering Brussels in the midst of a massive, chaotic procession of ordinary Belgians of his own time. In this short satirical novel, Verhulst picks up this idea and transfers it to the early 21st century: Christ has apparently announced that he will be arriving in the capital on the 21st of July, and Belgium is suddenly in a ferment of confused preparation, as six (count ‘em!) parliaments try to decide whose competence this falls under and which language should be used, whilst bishops and nuns panic and ordinary people decide to be nice to their neighbours or confess to long-forgotten crimes. An engaging satire, with lots of surreal Belgian flourishes, and the usual slightly bleak view of the world.

Ensor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ%27s_Entry_Into_Brussels_in_1889

>11 thorold: sounds fun. A good start to the year.

>11 thorold: Christ's Entry Into Brussels sounds great. I'll be on the lookout for it.

>12 dchaikin: >13 kidzdoc: Yes, well worth a look if you like a bit of Belgitude.

Another short one, this was a kind of Christmas present to myself, first Nobelist of the year...

The Pole: A Novel (2023) by J. M. Coetzee (South Africa, 1940- )

  

As usual with Coetzee, a book that seems to have more to it than appears on the surface. Beatriz, a middle-aged bourgeois lady who’s active in cultural activities in Barcelona, is asked to entertain the distinguished Polish pianist Witold after a concert. Their encounter is mildly interesting for her, but seems to have been life-changing for the elderly musician. He pursues her, she has a brief fling with him against her better judgment (on Mallorca, as is traditional with Polish pianists), and then she forgets the whole thing until she hears of his death, many years later. When things start to get complicated again.

Naturally, as well as the obvious story about the asymmetry of love in the real world, and the lost-in-translation thing about people who communicate in different languages and different media, there is a Chopin story going on here, and lots of Dante allusions, not to mention Orpheus and Cupid-and-Psyche. And all kinds of other deep stuff. Presumably the reason Coetzee writes short books is that he expects you to read them at least three times before you can pin him down…

>11 thorold: This reminds me of a poem and painting by Adrien Henri 'Christs entry into Liverpool'

https://www.liverpoollove.org/adrian-henri/

Which City would be most suitable I wonder

>15 baswood: Nice! You can do a lot with Ensor, apparently. I didn’t know that one.

I expect it would work for any city that has a bit of quirkiness about it and a history of protest. Probably not for somewhere proverbially dull like Basingstoke or Bielefeld.

>14 thorold: if you’re going to make the reader reread, brevity is nice. This sounds fun. (I read my first book by him late in 2023)

>14 thorold: Presumably the reason Coetzee writes short books is that he expects you to read them at least three times before you can pin him down…

Too funny, and certainly cuts down on the book buying!

Happy to see a new novel by him.

>10 thorold: >8 cindydavid4: Having just read Stasiland I’m interested too. Stasiland was ruined on audio but was well-reviewed in general so I’d recommend it in print. You can read my review here and I’ll put Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany on my tbr.

>14 thorold: Thanks for the review. I went off Coetzee after he settled in Australia. I didn’t take to Elizabeth Costello at all. But this sounds interesting.

>14 thorold: my library says it will be 18 weeks until I get that on ebook.

>20 kjuliff: I really liked Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy.

>22 dianeham: I didn’t try that - I didn’t think I’d understand it.

>23 kjuliff: I didn’t understand it but I liked it. :)

Here’s an article I just read about them https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/what-would-j-m-coetzees-jesus-do

>24 dianeham: I might give it a go then. 😜

>11 thorold: My first and only book by Verhulst is Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill. I found it quite charming and funny and have read it twice. I should try more of his work. Do you have a favorite?

>26 labfs39: Apart from Christ’s entry into Brussels, I’ve only read The misfortunates, which I hated, but which you might enjoy if you like Roy Orbison and depressing memoirs of rural alcoholism, and the Boekenweek novella De Zomer hou je ook niet tegen, which is odd but I sort-of liked it.

He’s a clever writer, good at making words do what he wants them to, but his choice of subject-matter didn’t really resonate with me until I got to Christ’s entry into Brussels.

>11 thorold: Feels like you definitely started the year with an interesting read. I'm looking forward to seeing your reviews again.

>27 thorold: I once lived in a flat next to some alcoholic depressed party goers from the hinterland. They had an ancient 8 track machine. One weekend they went away, or just wandered off, leaving Roy playing on that 8 track for the entire weekend at full volume. Even now, whenever I hear one of his songs, I always expect to hear the next one in sequence from that tape. I guess it's a tribute to the machine and the tape that neither broke, but I sure was hoping!

The Misfortunates might take me right back there, should I ever wish to return.

>27 thorold: Egad! No thanks. Moving along....

Belated Happy New Year. I always enjoy your reviews and thoughts, and the conversations they engender. Cheers!

Belated happy new year too! I am mostly lurcking on your thread and I think it will be the same this year.
I like the diversity and off the beaten track aspect of your reading. And your first readings of the year prove me right!

Will be following with interest as always!

First go at something medieval for the new Reading Globally theme read — I spotted this in the library, and it looked like a useful introduction to Persian literature via something I already half knew about. I read a very interesting biography of FitzGerald, With friends possessed, in 2016, and I followed up some traces of his life during a holiday in Suffolk in 2022.

Hazhir Teimourian is an Iranian-born British journalist and former student of Roger Scruton:

Omar Khayyām: Poet, rebel, astronomer (2007) by Hazhir Teimourian (Iran, UK, 1940- )

  

This could be — should be, perhaps — a classic case of bricks without straw. We know only a handful of facts about the subject of this 300-page biography: Omar Khayyām was born in Nishāpur in 1048. He seems to have worked as a mathematician in Samarkand and Bukhara, before being appointed as official astronomer in Isfahan with the task of developing a new and more accurate solar calendar. During the civil wars following the death of Malik Shah he seems to have fallen out of favour and returned to private life in Nishāpur, where he died in 1131. We don't hear anything about his work as a poet until at least a generation later, and the only substantial surviving collections of poems attributed to him were compiled over three hundred years after his death. He was virtually unknown outside Persia until the 1850s, when Edward FitzGerald published a translation of some of the poems in a manuscript from the Bodleian Library, a surprise bestseller still popular to this day.

Surprisingly, Teimourian manages to stretch this index-card narrative into a fascinating and worthwhile book, albeit one that is almost entirely written in the conditional perfect tense when talking about Khayyām. He weaves the known facts about the scientist-poet into the complex political and religious situation of the late eleventh century, and gives us a useful picture of the sort of life he might have had. Obviously, there is an element of projecting the poet onto the biographer's time here: just as FitzGerald turned him into a scientific sceptic of the age of Darwin, Teimourian clearly sees him as a fatwa-dodging secular dissident in an Islamic theocracy not unlike modern Iran. But obviously you have to do something like that if Khayyām is going to be anything more than a bit of quaint orientalism, and there is clearly a basis for it in the verse, even if not necessarily backed up by any actual evidence from the life.

Teimourian concludes the book with his own translations of fifty of Khayyām's quatrains: although sometimes clever and probably truer to the text than FitzGerald, they don't quite have the magic of those lines we've all heard quoted so many times. Teimourian rather shoots himself in the foot by reproducing the FitzGerald translations in full in an appendix.

I have a beautiful copy of the above mentioned book Illustrated by Edman Dulac, picked up after I read samarkand . it sounds like the fictional account by Maalouf is more real than this one....mmm interested in reading the fitzgerald biography- worth reading?

>35 cindydavid4: Yes, I should think historical fiction might be a better way in to someone we know so little about. The Maalouf book looks interesting.

The FitzGerald bio is fun, but it is mostly about his eccentric life and fascinating circle of Victorian literary friends. Khayyām is only quite a minor part of it.

ok thanks

>34 thorold: had no idea his authorship was so mythology. The book sounds fun.

>38 dchaikin: Yes — it sounds as though his reputation was such that anything at least mildly anti-establishment and four lines long was likely to be attributed to him. Scholars have had fun trying to decide on a real canon.

Back to a book I've had on my shelves forever and started several times without getting very far. I've been reading it on and off for several weeks, finally got to the end this morning.

My scale of relative obscurity for German literature is based on how many pages into the story Bettina von Arnim pops up. In this book it's somewhere around page 360, which is pretty high!

Der Butt (1977, The flounder) by Günter Grass (Germany, 1927-2015)

  

The Grimms' tale of "The fisherman and his wife" counts as a notorious piece of misogyny: in the published version of the tale (there are others, of course), the wife Ilsebill keeps demanding more and more from the magic flounder until her greed has destroyed their happiness altogether. So, naturally, Grass uses it as an ironic central motif for this novel, his definitive analysis of the History of Women. Which is also — incidentally — a history of cooking, and of human settlement in the Danzig/Gdansk city and region, from matriarchal clans of neolithic times to the 1970 strike in the Lenin Shipyard.

Grass clearly means well, and his conclusion isn't very favourable to the way men have run the world, but even as far back as 1977, it's still quite an arrogant task for a male writer to set himself. With hindsight, there are probably roles that his proletarian strong women of history could have filled other than as cooks, nurturers and bed-warmers, and he doesn't really do himself any favours by his gently ironic treatment of the modern women in the feminist tribunal that is trying the flounder for his crimes against womanhood. Especially since the narrator, constantly reincarnated in new male characters, seems to have slept with all of the women in the book...

As always, a tour-de-force piece of writing, clever, witty and knowledgeable, but maybe not the Grass novel you should be rushing to re-read 45 years on. Unless you are fascinated by Baltic cuisine, in which case you can just read it for the recipes (not suitable for vegetarians!).

>39 thorold: Oh dear, I'm interested in the recipes, but I'm not too sure about the rest...

Interesting obscurity scale. I’m entertained by your review. I haven’t read Grass.

>41 dchaikin: Grass is definitely worth checking out: stylistically innovative, fascinated by language and history, opinionated, left-wing, very entertaining. But he does have a huge ego and gets distracted by his own cleverness sometimes— a kind of German answer to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His famous breakthrough novel The tin drum (filmed by Volker Schlöndorff) is the obvious one to try, but the memoir Peeling the onion might be another good entry point.

The Bettina thing is an old running joke from a couple of years ago when I read a few books that were by or directly about her; she’s popped up in a surprising number of historical novels since then, as well as a number of (composer-) biographies, most recently Mendelssohn. She evidently knew everyone who was anybody in romantic-era Germany (in The flounder it’s her and her brother’s collaboration with the Grimm brothers that matters), and she’s a useful clever and independent female character.

>42 thorold: entertaining and interesting about Bettina. Thanks for the Grass recommendation. Noting!

>42 thorold: I'm with Dan an this one, never read Gunter Grass either.
The Tin Drum is kind of on a fictionnal TBR list I have somwhere at the back of my head, so I'll move it up following your rec. But A have a few German lit books on my shelves I'd like to get to first. Thanks for the >39 thorold: review!

>44 raton-liseur: Keep an eye open for Bettina :-)

>45 thorold: Good advice, will do! :)

To the other end of Poland, and another bit of former German territory, but this time from a Polish perspective. This is the fourth book by the 2018 Nobelist that I've read; I bought it eighteen months ago in Aachen — yet another border region...

Taghaus, Nachthaus (1999, German 2019, House of day, house of night) by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland, 1962- ) translated from Polish to German by Esther Kinsky

  

This is a mosaic novel put together out of fragments of stories of people in a rural district in Lower Silesia where the narrator has her summer home. There are some recurring characters like the narrator's neighbour, Marta, an old lady who has been a perruquier in her former life and still makes occasional wigs, and appears to spend the winter hibernating in her cellar. But there are a lot of people who come into the book for a chapter or two and are then never heard from again.

The history of the region and its shift in identity form a recurrent theme: There are tales of the Germans who were displaced from the region in 1945 and of the displaced Poles from further East who were moved into the houses the Germans left behind. Other stories take us into the spatial liminality of the border with Czechoslovakia, but never quite manage to get out of the confinement of the wet, deep valleys that never get direct sun in the winter months.

Tokarczuk also seems to be very interested in the way the isolated hill country has accommodated eccentric forms of spirituality: in particular the cult of a gender-bending medieval saint (Kümmernis, or Wilgefortis) and the story of the equally gender-bending monk who's writing her biography. And there’s a mysterious community of heretical knife-makers (some kind of Waldensians?) that keeps popping up on the fringes of the narrative. Mushrooms and other food also feature heavily, and we are drawn into discussions about the nature of dreams and the way they do or don’t intersect with fictional narrative.

Very interesting and absorbing, but — as so often with Tokarczuk — I’m not entirely sure where it was meant to be going. The point seems to be the journey, rather than the destination.

And, hopping over the Czech border and making for the nearest theatre....

R.U.R. (1921, 2010) by Karel Čapek (Czechoslovakia, 1890-1938), translated from Czech to Dutch by Pim van der Horst

  

This 1921 play seems to be known mostly as the answer to a quiz question — “Where does the word ‘robot’ come from?”. I was mildly curious to see what it actually does with the idea of non-human workers. The answer seems to be: not all that much.

An eccentric inventor, Rossum, has discovered some sort of — unspecified — analogue to biological material, and his son has found a way to turn this into a successful commercial product, manufacturing human-like workers who incorporate all the useful features of real humans, like endurance, strength, versatility and ability to work autonomously, but omit ‘wasteful’ characteristics like personality, capacity for enjoyment, and the ability to reproduce. Of course they are a runaway success, humans are freed from the necessity to do unpleasant work, and everybody is moderately happy, until the robots — inevitably — do develop a capacity to seek greater fulfilment in their lives, and it all goes horribly wrong.

Interesting to see all this worked out from a 1920s perspective, long before the age of computers and all the rest, and it’s obviously meant as another warning about the dehumanising effects of 20th century industrial society, in the same spirit as Metropolis and Modern Times, but it’s executed as rather dull science fiction with human characters who are almost as predictable and mechanical in the author’s hands as their robot counterparts. I think it can safely rest on the shelf as the answer to that quiz question.

48 Interesting. I recently read The Wild Robot with my niece, and the robot is a Rozzum unit, who calls herself Roz. The reference went over my head.

Nice review of House of Day, House of Night, Mark. I own four books by Olga Tokarczuk, including this one, but I haven't read any of them yet.

>50 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl! You should read Drive your plow, that’s only short and quite funny, and it will give you a feel for where she’s coming from. It’s set in the same place as House of day, house of night. The other three you have (we share the same four, so I know!) are all much bigger commitments. The books of Jacob is the one that really stands out.

>49 labfs39: In the introduction of the recent Dutch translation I read there was quite some speculation about why Karel Čapek picked the very Dutch name Rossum — all the other characters have names that allude to their main characteristic, but Rossum seems quite random apart from the handy alliteration. Sadly they didn’t come to a good answer…

>51 thorold: I agree Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a great read. I’d like to read more by her but I don’t think there are any other on audio.

>48 thorold: I recently finally acquired a copy of Čapek's The Gardener's Year. In my world this is what he is famous for. Now that the year has started, it's time to start the book, so thanks for the reminder. I would never have associated him with robots, but I'll keep that in mind as I read!

>51 thorold: maybe I finally read the books of Jacob some time this year

>48 thorold: I read this some years ago in an English translation and it was paired with War With the Newts, which was a novel of sorts. I remember the novel as being funny and satirical and RUR is similar I think

>54 SassyLassy: I didn't know about that. Sounds like fun!

On to something else for the RG pre-renaissance literature thread, a book I should have read years ago...

Reynaert de Vos (13th century, 2020; Reynard the Fox) by Willem (Flanders, C13), translated to modern Dutch by Ard Posthuma (Netherlands, 1942- )

  

Reynaert de Vos is probably the best-known piece of medieval Dutch writing. In fact, it's one of the few bits of Dutch literature which has had a big influence outside the Netherlands, which puts it on a par with things like Max Havelaar and the Diary of Anne Frank. Bits of the Reynaert story have appeared everywhere from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, and a translation of the story was one of the first books Caxton printed.

And of course it taps into a rich thread of fox stories within the even larger worldwide genre of animal fables. However, it's not really an animal fable in the nice Disney sense we tend to think of: The author of Reynaert de Vos seems to be more Quentin Tarantino than Disney. The story is full of extremely graphic violence, the sort of thing you might remember from Watership Down or Shardik. It's also pretty bawdy in the Chaucerian kind of way.

The whole thing is framed as a 3,500 line (mock-)heroic epic in rhyming tetrameters. The basis of the story is that Reynaert is being tried in the court of the lion king, Nobel, for his serious crimes — murder, theft, rape, etc. Of course, by a mixture of guile and straightforward treachery, Reynaert manages to stitch up all the animals that are sent to arrest him and bring him to justice. He eventually manages to trick the King himself into pardoning him and setting him free to go off on a bogus pilgrimage to Rome, whilst the king goes to collect Reynaert's (non-existent) treasure.

We don't know much about the author. In the opening line of the poem he calls himself "Willem, the author of Madoc". But we've never found any trace of Madoc, if that book ever existed. From the internal evidence, it seems likely that Willem lived somewhere in East Flanders in the second half of the 13th century. There are one or two candidates who might be identifiable as the author but nobody has ever found any conclusive evidence one way or the other.

Middle Dutch isn't impossible to read if you understand modern Dutch — on the whole it's probably a bit easier to read than Chaucer's English — but it is quite difficult, so it's nice having a side-by-side translation. I read the poem in a modern-Dutch translation by the poet and translator Ard Posthuma, which turned out to be quite jolly and very readable. Posthuma copies the verse form and rhyme of the original and seems to manage to stick fairly close to the original flow of the text as well.

Anyway, it turned out to be quite an entertaining read with a lot of enjoyable satire of human foibles, and it didn't take me long to read it, but it is pretty gruesome in parts. If you're somebody who cares about the bit at the end of the film where it says no animals were harmed then you might find this a little bit disconcerting. Numerous animals were clearly harmed in the making of this poem...

>57 thorold: What an interesting read ans interesting review! I love the wittiness of your intro!
In France, we have Le Roman de Renart (yes, Renart with a "t", although today a fox is called a "renard"), and it seems there are overlaps between the French version and the Dutch one (or should I put this in plural form?).

I have a version for children at home. I read it loud to my children when they were ten-ish, and I am about to reread it as we are going to play some bits of Le Roman de Renart with my 7-years pupils this year! Your review makes me looking forward to this reread (and maybe plan to read a not-designed-for-children version?).

interesting how often the trickster animal appears around the would; certainly in Navite American Cultre (esp the coyote), but also African American culture as well with brer fox a favorite of mine as a child and still love it

>58 raton-liseur: Willem seems to have taken the Roman de Renart as his starting point. But just about everyone had a fox story, as >59 cindydavid4: points out. There are lots of overlaps with things like the Panchatantra.

>59 cindydavid4:, >60 thorold: You're absolutely right. The way oral tradition circulated from one place to another is just fascinating.

Enjoyed these three reviews. Your reading always so interesting. I need to read more Olga T. I really enjoyed Drive Your Plow. I’m fascinated by Reynaert de Vos, which I hadn’t heard of before. I’ll follow your advice on R. U. R.

>57 thorold: Great review, this sounds so interesting.
>59 cindydavid4: Isn't interesting? One of my favourites is Anansi, the trickster spider in West African culture, and also the fox (kitsune) in Japanese myths.

oh I forgot Anansi, I loved the take Neil Gaiman does with that and remember kitsune as well. the concept has certainly traveled far and wide.

One of the papers I did in college was a comparison of Cinderella around the world and recently found a childrens book about just that, with some gorgeous illustrations cinderella tales around the world

Rather disappointingly, this turns out to be the tenth book by Jonathan Coe that I've read. If I'd counted first, I could have read something else before it...

Number 11 (2015) by Jonathan Coe (UK, 1961- )

  

This novel picks up the theme of old British horror films that Jonathan Coe first dealt with in What a Carve-Up, but it's primarily a state-of-England novel, like most of his recent books. At the heart of it seems to be the divide between the rich and poor in 21st century England and the whole ”chav” phenomenon, the contempt that rich people, at least in the newspapers, seem to have for the poor. And, of course, he has fun with this whole idea by introducing a character who turns out to be that straw-figure so beloved of angry right-wing columnists, the black lesbian with an artificial leg.

Coe also digs into the way we have in modern society of reducing everything to a monetary equivalent, from the quality-of-life improvement expected from a course of medical treatment to the boost in tourism that an intriguing archeological discovery might bring.

Another theme that runs through the book is the ineffectiveness of political humour. Coe notes repeatedly how making jokes about politicians, or more general satire about the evils of society, has become something which just operates as a mechanism for diffusing our anger — or guilt — and never seems to have any actual effect on the way politics works. This is set against the way right-wing columnists, who are really not so very different from the stand-up comedians, do seem to be able to stir up actual political change with their variety of rant, but Coe doesn’t dig very deeply into this distinction.

There's all sorts of other stuff, though. There's an Etonian who's having lessons in arrogance-control in order to get through his Oxford admissions process, there's a professional dog walker who makes more money than some of her rich clients, there’s a billionaire’s-wife who wants to turn her London villa into an underground skyscraper, there’s a policeman who is more interested in publicity than justice and actively seeks out reasons to arrest celebrities. And, as a bonus, we get some giant spiders and a Loch Ness monster. What more could you ask for?

It's a slightly disjointed story, but very engaging and with a lot of resonance for anybody who's got any experience of Britain in the 21st century, which is what Coe is particularly good at.

Great review. My library has got a copy of it.

>57 thorold: What a fascinating book!

>59 cindydavid4: >60 thorold: >63 rv1988: I immediately thought of the fox tales in Nathan Ausubel's A Treasury of Jewish Folklore. It's been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly, the fox tales in that feature a fox that is clever and something of a trickster, but he's the hero of his tales, rather than a villain.

>65 thorold: Definitely sounds like fun. Would the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Number 11 appear here, albeit fictionally?

>68 SassyLassy: Yes, that’s the third No.11 in the book.

A slight detour on my "round the world" trip: I was planning to visit Austria next after the Czech Republic, but I've read so many Austrian authors, so I looked for something from Slovakia. This won an EU Prize in 2018. I read it in German because that was what came to hand. Ivana Dobrakovová is a Slovak writer and translator who actually lives in Turin, but never mind...

Mütter und Fernfahrer (2018, 2022; Matky a kamionisti) by Ivana Dobrakovová (Slovakia, 1982- ), translated from Slovak to German by Ines Sebesta

  

A set of five long-short stories, three of them set in Bratislava and two in Turin, each from the point of view of a woman who doesn’t fit easily into the world and has a difficult relationship with her mother. The narrator of the first story has had a nervous breakdown after her father’s long decline into mental illness and alcoholism; Ivana is launching into an unwise relationship with a fashionable journalist as she recovers from the psychiatric consequences of a traumatic incident at a riding school (think Equus); schoolteacher Olivia struggles with loneliness after a divorce, and obsesses about the recent high-profile murder of a lonely middle-aged teacher; Lara seems to have given up hope of saving her marriage but tries, without a great deal of conviction or success, to be a good mother to her two young sons (think Days of abandonment); Veronika is comically deep into an obsession with chatting up strange men on the internet (‘to practice French’), and is now heading for a blind date with a Belgian trucker that might end up as anything but comic.

The five narratives aren’t quite linked — the characters are in their own closed worlds and don’t seem to know each other — but they do have little points of intersection, and they all end in the same slightly unexpected way.

Dobrakovová is Elena Ferrante’s translator in her day job, and there are a lot of similarities in style here, especially in Lara’s story — although obviously the Turin settings encourage the reader to think that anyway. The subject-matter is fairly dark, but she manages to relieve it with enough comedy to keep us engaged with her difficult characters and reading the book. We are held at a slight ironic distance, enough to see the absurdity of the characters from the world’s point of view at the same time as seeing how impossible it is from their own point of view to break out of the bad place they have got into. Very nicely done.

>70 thorold: does that count as Italy too? It was nice to learn about this author/translator and her stories. Enjoyed your review.

>71 dchaikin: Probably not. We need to be quite arbitrary about assigning every book in this game to one country, otherwise it would risk turning into snakes and ladders. And this next book would be a great big snake that would take me back four stages on my journey...

This was a suggestion from a (non-LT) friend who saw a post about it on Neglected Books ( https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=10162 ) and knew my penchant for European rail travel. It took a while to track down a copy: the Italian version has been reissued fairly recently but in English it never seems to have been reprinted after 1935. Körmendi is best-known for his other 1932 novel, Escape to life. He was Jewish, and went into exile in the UK and US after 1939, where he worked in radio.

Via Bodenbach (1932; 1935) by Ferenc Körmendi (Hungary, 1900-1972), translated from Hungarian by Ralph Murray

  

In this stream-of-consciousness novel, which takes us through a single day without any chapter breaks, the young engineer George is travelling on the Budapest to Berlin express. He reflects on what lies ahead in Berlin — an electrical device he has invented is about to go into production there — on the unsatisfactory relationship he has left behind in Budapest, on his memories of the recent war, and on what he can see out of the window as the train advances across Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

He makes desultory conversation with the other passengers in his compartment, a slightly pompous civil servant who is taking his teenage son to stay with grandparents in the Czech countryside and a young woman, Alice, who is going home to her family in the Czech border town of Bodenbach (Podmokly). George gets drawn into flirting with Alice, although she is sending out rather mixed signals. She seems to enjoy the game at first, but then draws back abruptly when George starts to suggest that he could break his journey in Bodenbach to spend a bit more time with her. It’s clear — at least to the reader, if not to George — that she hasn‘t been entirely frank about what she was doing in Budapest or about her life in Bodenbach.

A cleverly-written novel, and a wonderful, unromantic evocation of long-distance train travel at a moment when “Hitler-Stalin-Mussolini“ was still just a dark cloud on the horizon for most people. But also very much a book from the era when the rule was “if you can’t think what to do with your characters, have them smoke a cigarette.” Körmendi was clearly not a feminist, and some of the attitudes to women (and, in passing, to “homosexualists”) that he assigns to his point of view character are rather cringe-inducing ninety years later.

And more Mitteleuropa. It's anybody's guess to which modern country we should assign Ödön von Horváth — he was of Hungarian descent, born in what's now Croatia, wrote in German, and spent much of his life in Bavaria. The consensus seems to be to label him as Austrian, and that suits the logic of the "world tour", so I'll go with that.

Ödön von Horváth is incidentally one of that exclusive set of writers (cf. Aeschylus, Christopher Marlowe, Tennessee Williams, ...) who died in memorable ways: he was killed in a freak accident when a tree branch fell on him in the Champs-Élysées in June 1938.

Jugend ohne Gott (1937; Youth without God) by Ödön von Horváth (Austria, etc. 1901-1938)

  

This short novel, written in 1937 and published in Amsterdam because Horváth's work was banned in Germany, is a kind of Lord of the flies for the Third Reich: a decent, liberal schoolteacher is disgusted with the amorality and political opportunism of the teenage boys he teaches in 1930s Germany. He is initially too fearful of consequences to do anything about it, but is ultimately pushed into taking a moral stand when a student is killed on a school trip and it looks as though there will be a miscarriage of justice.

Horváth's scorn for the Nazis (the "wealthy plebeians") and the capitalists who support them is unmistakable, but what is perhaps more surprising is the way the initially agnostic, liberal narrator starts to see the moral element that is missing from his world in terms of "God," with the help of a subversive priest. A short piece, with quite a powerful punch.

>73 thorold: This author is new to me, but I can see my library stocks several of his works. I've requested Un fils de notre temps (A Child of Our Time). Jugend ohne Gott is only available in German, which I can't read :-)

>74 Dilara86: I've still never read A child of our time, but I obviously ought to, since it inspired Michael Tippett's famous oratorio...

Entertaining reviews from today and yesterday. Especially liked the Via Bodenbach, because my recent love for train journeys has fired my imagination for train journey in previous times.

>73 thorold: a freak accident when a tree branch fell on him in the Champs-Élysées Indeed memorable.

ETA: I had to run to wikipedia to see how the others died, and I must say falling turtles and inhaled bottle caps are pretty unique!

>72 thorold: what this written in 1932? Just noting that Mussolini was not on the horizon, but had been a dictator since 1922. I learned this recently when his name popped up in a 1927 novel by William Faulkner. 🙂

>73 thorold: all I can think is, poor guy. A tree!

>78 dchaikin: Yes, I probably didn’t choose my words well there. They were all three in power, or close to it, and had all done a lot of bad things already. What I meant was that in 1932 an outsider like Körmendi’s point-of-view character would probably see them as a worrying trend but not a direct personal threat. Of course a lot of contemporary outsiders saw Mussolini, at least, very positively at first.

This is a book I bought in the "wrong" language: a thing that happens to me from time to time, because I tend to put books on my list of "things to look out for" without much context, and I tend to check that list rather hastily when I'm putting together an online order and looking for other things I might buy from the same seller to use the shipping cost more efficiently.

In this case I probably have to blame Bas, who read this a few years ago in French — I somehow never realised that Schwarzenbach wrote in German. She was Swiss, and used to hang out with Klaus and Erika Mann, which probably explains the presence of a glamorous, artistic, sexually ambivalent brother and sister in this novel.

She later became better known as a travel writer, working together with people like Ella Maillart and Nicolas Bouvier in the Middle East. And had affairs with all sorts of glamorous people, including Carson McCullers and Margot von Opel (but not Erika Mann, who turned her down...). She died from the consequences of a bicycle accident in 1942.

Les amis de Bernhard (1931, 2012; Freunde um Bernhard) by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Switzerland, 1908-1942), translated from German to French by Nicole Le Bris and Dominique Laure Miermont

  

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s first novel, written when she was 22. The seventeen-year-old piano student Bernhard likes to hang out with the aspiring painter Gert and his friend Inès, both of whom seem to be in love with Bernhard. But Inès also has a serious crush on the sculptor Christina, and Gert in turn falls heavily for Christina’s artist-brother Léon…

There were a lot of echoes here of Klaus Mann’s first novel, Der fromme Tanz, but this felt like a more grown-up book, seriously digging into the questions facing young people who are dealing with questions of whom (of either gender) they really love, and trying to decide between exploring their artistic gifts and satisfying their parents’ ambitions for them to follow respectable careers. There’s a certain amount of fainting, but very little gushing or pontificating. Schwarzenbach's main point of view character, Inès, manages to maintain a certain distance from all the overheated emotion. But there's quite a lot of jolly driving around the mountains in open cars, and a cute dog. Fun for all...

Well, that’s completely new to me. (Always admire you all the languages you’re comfortable reading in)

>81 dchaikin: I take no credit for having been born into a bilingual family!

On to Italy, a more credible jumping-off point for Phileas Foggery. And even a chance to grab another Nobel laureate in passing. It's a long time since I made any inroads on the Nobel challenge: the last completely new Nobelist on my list was Anatole France in April 2023. (cf. https://www.librarything.com/topic/346875 ):

De mooiste van Salvatore Quasimodo (2004) by Salvatore Quasimodo (Italy, 1901-1968), parallel translation from Italian to Dutch by Erik Derycke & Bart van den Bossche

  

Among the Nobel literature prizewinners most of us have never heard of, the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, the 1959 laureate, must count as the one with the most memorable name. Not that that is in any way relevant to his achievement, but it does leave you wondering when you first see it whether it could be some kind of convenient made-up name for those years when the members of the awards committee can’t decide on a winner and decide to share the prize money between themselves instead.

Quasimodo was born in Sicily, the son of a railway worker, in 1901. As a small child, he experienced the aftermath of the terrible 1908 Messina earthquake: as he describes in a late poem dedicated to his father, the family lived in a freight car in the ruins of the station whilst his father helped to keep the trains moving.

As a young man, he worked as a surveyor in various parts of Italy: many of his early poems are semi-nostalgic evocations of the Sicilian landscape as recalled from exile in the north. They are often extremely beautiful lyrics, but very much in the style of that time, inward-looking and static. This all changes with the poems published after the end of World War II (but often written earlier), when Quasimodo starts to engage with the horrors of that part of Italian and European history. It seems likely that those poems were the ones that caught the mood of the times and the attention of the Nobel committee. And the very tangible anger, grief and sympathy expressed there still have a pretty powerful impact even now. There’s also some very appealing stuff in his later poems, particularly “Al padre” where he remembers his father, and “Nell’Isola”, where he imagines a craftsman building a house in Sicily.

This short Dutch anthology, with about seventy poems from across Quasimodo’s whole career, was probably a sufficient dose to get a good impression of what he was about. The parallel translations are rather plain and literal, but they stick closely to the structure of the Italian text and are thus very useful if you’re trying to make sense of the Italian. The introduction, summarising Quasimodo’s life and work in about 20 pages, is also very handy.

- - -

ALLE FRONDE DEI SALICI

E come potevamo noi cantare
con il piede straniero sopra il cuore,
fra i morti abbandonati nelle piazze
sull'erba dura di ghiaccio, al lamento
d'agnello dei fanciulli, all'urlo nero
della madre che andava incontro al figlio
crocifisso sul palo del telegrafo?
Alle fronde dei salici, per voto,
anche le nostre cetre erano appese,
oscillavano lievi al triste vento.

(From Giorno dopo giorno, 1947)

Loose translation:

And how could we sing with the foreign foot over our heart, among the dead abandoned in the squares on the ice-hard grass, to the lamb-like lament of the children, to the black scream of the mother coming to find her son crucified on a telegraph pole?
Even our lyres were hanging in the fronds of the willows, through a promise, swaying slightly in the sad wind.

>80 thorold: Ah! those Swiss you never know what is going to be their native language. However in my defence I said in my review that it was translated from the original German.

I didn't know that Annemarie Schwarzenbach died after a cycling accident - tragic. I made a conscious decision to give up two wheeled transport some 5 years ago and now I will probably be knocked down by a trottinette électrique.

Mark, I am nearing the end of The Discomfort of Evening and had to pause. I decided to look at some member reviews and came across yours of a couple of years ago. You absolutely nailed this book for me. I will be reviewing after I finish, but your words I quote here encapsulate the book for me, completely .

The result is a sort of cross between the book of Job and Lord of the flies, with Rijneveld piling on the disasters whilst expertly manipulating both the comically naive and the devastatingly clear-sighted parts of a child's view of the world to leave us with maximum discomfort.

>83 baswood: Yes, probably wise. I've had my moments with bicycles too, but you can't really do without them in this country...

>84 kjuliff: Good to hear that. I think the only thing I'd add with hindsight is "if you found The discomfort of evening disturbing, that's only because you haven't read My heavenly favourite yet..."

Back to the library's supply of Jonathan Coe, which I will have just about exhausted after this:

What a Carve Up! (1994) by Jonathan Coe (UK, 1961- )

  

Coe’s breakthrough novel, from 1994. A satire of the capitalist feeding-frenzy of the Thatcher era, built around plot devices that do affectionate homage to the conventions of mid-20th-century British cinema. The hapless writer Michael Owen, author of two forgotten novels, has been commissioned — chosen at random, as far as he knows — to write a book about the appalling Winshaw family, who have been making a fortune out of unethical business practices from the good old days of the North Atlantic slave trade right through to arms-to-Iraq.

There are a lot of good jokes in the book, but it felt over-long, and the satire is stretched rather too thin by Coe’s need to cover everything from privatisation and NHS asset-stripping to cynical tabloid journalism, merchant-banking (in both senses), the Brit-art industry, unscrupulous arms-dealing and the barbarity of the agri-food industry. Also, the nature of the book requires the Winshaws to be one-dimensional pantomime villains, and that rather undermines the message about how nasty the consequences of their activities are. The deliberately hackneyed and implausible débâcle in the final chapters is handled very nicely, however, but it is foreshadowed so far ahead that it feels as though we have to wait much too long to get to it.

It’s still worth reading this thirty years on, but Coe has grown up a lot as a writer since then, so it will be at least a slight disappointment if you know his more recent work.

>85 thorold: your review is like an interesting recent history lesson.

Back to the world tour, and I'm finally heading east again...
This came up when I searched for recent Greek fiction that my library had on the shelves. A good call, as it turned out.

Good Will Come From the Sea (2014, 2019 Το καλό θα 'ρθεί από τη θάλασσα) by Christos Ikonomou (Greece, 1970-) translated from Greek to English by Karen Emmerich

  

(Author pic: Archipelago Books)

A small Greek island in the aftermath of the financial crisis, now home to a small community of former city-dwellers displaced there after losing their jobs and homes in Athens or Thessaloniki. There are tensions between these “foreigners” and the indigenous islanders (whom they call “the rats”), not helped by the mafia-like way a few big players in agriculture and tourism have got the whole island’s economy locked down. Ikonomou makes it very clear how we are supposed to be looking at this situation by explicitly referencing the classic Greek refugee-story, Kazantzakis’s Christ recrucified, on the opening page of the first story in this short collection. Three of the stories deal with “foreigners” brutally put in their place after running foul of the cartels, whilst the other one — fragmented and partly interleaved between the main three — reminds us that no story is ever complete when we only have one point of view.

The point seems to be that bad times make people do bad things, but that they also create the possibility of hope: as one of the characters explains with a Zen-like insight, the notion that “good will come from the sea” only makes sense once you have fully embraced its absurdity (it becomes particularly absurd when we realise that the island has experienced a destructive earthquake and tidal wave within living memory). A painful, beautifully-written glimpse into the dark side of a place we would normally see only when it is full of scintillating light.

>85 thorold: I quite liked this book, even with no understanding of the times or politics it was satirizing. Since it's the only book by Coe I've read, can you recommend one of his later, better works?

>87 thorold: comes across entertaining. I’m not familiar with the reference.

>89 dchaikin: You mean Kazantzakis’s Christ recrucified? It's all about a village where Christian principles are put to the test when a party of refugees arrives. It's not set in a specific crisis, but obviously prompted by the 1923 "population exchange".

Taking another break from the world tour, this was a kind of "extra Christmas present" this year:

A History of Pictures (2020) by David Hockney (UK, 1937- ) and Martin Gayford (UK, 1952- )

   

This is one of those books where you have to look quite closely at the title: It's not a history of visual art, it's a history of pictures. In other words, Hockney and Gayford are discussing the history of human depictions of the real world on flat surfaces. They look at the interaction between imaginative reproduction — artists putting lines and colours on paper — and technical reproduction where we use optical devices to project images of the real world either temporarily onto a wall or a screen or more permanently onto a photographic film or a digital sensor.

Hockney, of course, has a long-standing bee in his bonnet about the way artists have used optical devices to assist them in composing pictures. So there's a lot about how every important artist from the renaissance onwards has been using a camera obscura to trace forms or at least to establish the composition of their work. It's perhaps controversial if you're an art historian, but if you don’t have a vested interest, it does seem to make perfect sense. Why wouldn't you use a tool if it's available and makes your work easier?

Of course, they emphasise that there's still always an important creative element in choosing the composition and lighting of what you want in your picture and then choosing how you want to transfer it from the projection to the permanent record.

Hockney points out that trained artists have often also turned out to be very good at taking photographs, whilst people who have no sense of visual art are unlikely to be good at taking photographs, except in a technical sense.

The book also covers moving images and digital creation of pictures — Hockney is the great advocate of iPad art, of course — but it’s just a bit too old to cover the rapidly developing topic of AI-created images. I’m sure there will be a chapter on that if they ever update the book. It would be interesting to know what Hockney thinks about computers producing images of penguins on surfboards or inadequately-clothed Asian girls in post-apocalyptic cityscapes.

It's interesting how this book is set up very explicitly as a dialogue with alternate passages written by Hockney and Gayford. Hockney writes, of course, from the practical viewpoint of a practising artist and also from his own aesthetic insight, whilst Gayford sticks more to filling us in on the history of art, explaining the background and context of the things that were going on around the artists at the time. It's a very good collaboration and it works surprisingly smoothly. I didn't find it at all distracting really.

The book is very richly illustrated. It includes practically every picture mentioned in the text, even the very over-familiar ones. In the paperback it's not always the most beautiful, glossy reproduction, but they're all perfectly adequate. The book is quite pretty to look at, although a bit chunky to be a coffee table book.

If you're going to read just one book on the history of visual images, this is probably a bit too random and discursive: you would probably want to start with someone like Gombrich. But this is also a very nice one, and a lively, entertaining read.

>90 thorold: It's not set in a specific crisis, but obviously prompted by the 1923 "population exchange".

that sounds so agreeable like every one just exchanged places. I hadnt heard about this till I read birds without wings and was shocked appalled and saddened. sigh

the history of pictures looks like something I should get. thanks for the rec

>90 thorold: enjoyed reading your review.

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
by Martin Gayford
Another book featuring these two. This one concentrates on Hockney's art, but there are interesting points made about the art of seeing.

Back to the world tour, out of Europe at last. And another Nobelist, although this one is a revisit: I read two or three of his books around the time he won the prize, then lost sight of him again.

The New Life (1994, 1998) by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, 1952- ), translated from Turkish by Güneli Gün

  

Osman first comes across a book called The new life when he sees a pretty girl carrying it around in the university refectory. He spots a copy on a bookstall, reads it himself, and finds his life transformed in some weird way by what he reads. Osman and the lovely (but regrettably unavailable) Janan set out on a quest for Janan’s lost lover that involves criss-crossing Turkey on an apparently endless series of bus journeys, a considerable number of which end in deadly bus-collisions.

Repeatedly, Pamuk seems to side-step any straightforward interpretation of the book, allowing the plot to shift directions unpredictably whenever we seem to be getting close to some kind of resolution. It’s a sweetly-ironic account of young love, a study of how conspiracies and counter-conspiracies work and of how ready young people are to allow themselves to be influenced by ideas that promise to bring an escape from the everyday, a look at how the power of an idea can become detached from its originator’s intentions when it is put into a book, and it's often also a gently satirical look back at life in provincial Turkey a few decades ago. And a nostalgic homage to obsolete Turkish brand names, overnight buses, rail travel, bad films and the low-grade children’s literature of the author’s youth. But it also brings in Dante, Rilke, and a whole bunch of other apparently incongruent threads, so you need to keep your wits about you.

Puzzling, but often quite captivating. If you are looking for a book about how many angels can dance on a candy-wrapper, this is the one.

>93 thorold: I've had mixed luck with Pamuk. I loved My Name is Red, but thought Snow only okay. I have The White Castle on the shelves. Have you read that one?

>90 thorold: yes, that. The 1923 population exchange? Off to google. Enjoyed your reviews. Excellent as always.

>94 labfs39: Same here. I liked My Name Is Red despite a bad French translation, but did not finish Snow. The translation was better but I think I was just bored. I’m not keen to try another book by him, even if it has numerous bus crashes 😉

Another longish gap, as I let myself get distracted from finishing books again... But the world tour continues, with another slight cheat. Kader Abdolah comes from Iran, but he's been living in the Netherlands for a long time and writes in Dutch. Nevertheless, I thought this book was sufficiently Iranian in its perspective to count, and it appealed to me because, like several other books I've read in this virtual journey, it travels back over ground I've already covered. A few of Abdolah's books have appeared in English translation, but this one only shows up in Dutch and Italian on LT so far.

Salam Europa! (2016) by Kader Abdolah (Iran, Netherlands, 1954- )

  

As you might expect with Kader Abdolah, this is a very simple book at first glance, and then gets more and more complicated the further you get into it: an Iranian exile in the Netherlands in 2016 comes across the travel diary of a nineteenth-century Shah on a tour of Europe and starts to rewrite the Shah’s adventures in the style of traditional hikayat storytelling. But it soon becomes obvious that there’s more going on: the narrator — who is clearly a fictional character, not the author himself — finds himself writing adventures that don’t have a clear source in the original accounts of the Shah’s journey and indeed don’t make sense because the people and dates involved won’t line up. There are strange touches of magic realism, like the flying carpet the Shah presents to the future Queen Wilhelmina. And non-historical characters creep in: the Shah’s proto-feminist Armenian wife Banu, who has sneaked along hidden in a linen chest in the baggage train; the narrator’s self-appointed research assistant Iris, and so on.

What is really going on is a look at Europe’s relationship with “the East”. On the one hand we have the distinctly peculiar — but still oddly sympathetic — viewpoint of an oriental despot who has 300 wives and can’t go anywhere without a comically vast entourage of officials, servants, guards, and servants-of-servants, encountering the modern Europe of the last quarter of the 19th century (sometimes we seem to be in the 1870s, sometimes the 1890s). His outsider status allows him to have oddly intimate conversations with monarchs, political leaders and great intellectuals in the countries he visits, picking up the threads of rapid technological progress and the advance of liberal humanism that are going on at the same time as vast military expansion and the consolidation of imperialism. As Shah, he’s a nostalgic reminder of the despotic power that European monarchs have mostly lost, but he’s also in control of a region with useful natural resources and a big potential market for consumer goods.

On the other hand, the narrator is reacting to the Europe around him as it tries to deal with the Syrian refugee crisis and Islamic extremism, and he is clearly trying to resolve that picture of Europe with the one that the Shah sees. The result is a book that throws a great many balls in the air and juggles them around with a light, ironic touch, but then leaves us to catch them for ourselves. Abdolah isn’t pretending to have the last word on orientalism, but he does want us to see that there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. The Omar Khayyām remix of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, perhaps…

ok that works for me on so many levels. On the list it goes. oh wait, its not in English yet? Let me know when it is please

>98 cindydavid4: Same for me! I might borrow Spijkerschrift / Cunéiforme / My Father's Notebook from the library instead.

Oh I hope you enjoy My Fathers Notebook as much as I did. Marc, anything else by that author translated into English?

>99 Dilara86: Yes I enjoyed that one too! The other one I know of that’s available in English is The house of the mosque. I’m not optimistic that Salam, Europa! will be translated, since it’s eight years since it was published. And it is quite rude about Queen Victoria :-)

>85 thorold: You wrote if you found The discomfort of evening disturbing, that's only because you haven't read My heavenly favourite ye You were so right!

I am a third of the way through My Heavenly Favourite and I see what you mean! I see you didn’t review it. I don’t think I will be reviewing it either. It’s the most disturbing book I’ve ever read.

On a lighter note…There’s a new addition to Tales of the City - Mona of the Manor.

>102 kjuliff: I did review it: https://www.librarything.com/work/25666883/reviews/219056243
...but I can quite understand why you wouldn’t want to.

>103 dianeham: Yes, I’m saving it for the proverbial rainy day!
There was a nice interview with Maupin in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago where he talks about the new book and about how he moved to London a few years ago (coming from San Francisco, he can actually talk about saving money by living in London…)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/24/look-at-your-country-its-amazing-a...

>105 thorold: Good article. Thanks.

>104 thorold: Oh I see it now. I was looking at reviews under the English title and your has appeared only under the Dutch title. I would have thought. reviews for the same book, original and translation would have been cross-indexed.

I really liked your review. The Lolita pov is so apt.

>104 thorold: I notified LT and they have now combined the two versions so that people searching under the English translation of My Heavenly Favorite will see your review.

Salam Europa sounds like a fun read. Terrific review

Life After Life (2013-03-14) by Kate Atkinson (UK, 1951- )

  

I’ve read most of Kate Atkinson’s books, but I didn’t rush out to buy this one, as the reviews all focussed on the “branching narrative” thing and made it sound as if it would be rather gimmicky. It is gimmicky, of course, but now I finally get around to reading it (the book club picked it for this month) I have to admit that Atkinson is a good enough writer to get away with being gimmicky. It’s a very professionally assembled historical novel that gives us — multiple — convincing pictures of what it might have been like to grow up as the daughter of a middle-class Home Counties family in the first half of the 20th century.

We move pretty seamlessly from a Forster-ish view of the Todd family in its idyllic outer-suburban retreat ca. 1910 to a Stephen Spender view of the London Blitz (plus additional graphic horror that no-one writing at the time would have put in, but which we need because most of us nowadays haven’t actually lived through that kind of experience ourselves). Along the way, Atkinson gets us to think about things like the position of domestic servants, violence against women, and the limitation of educational and career opportunities for girls, all without ever seeming to be pressing any obviously anachronistic buttons. (Atkinson is from a similar background and generation to me, and her knowledge about England in the first half of the century must come from much the same kind of sources as mine, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it all rings so true…)

I’m not sure if the “multiple lives” thing actually adds much, but perhaps it does allow Atkinson to play with a wider range of ideas and settings than might comfortably have fitted into a simple linear narrative. And it does raise some interesting ideas about the arbitrariness of the kind of small events that dictate how our lives will turn out, even if we ignore all the slightly silly reincarnation and déjà-vu and “what if I went back to assassinate Hitler?” stuff.

>110 thorold: Great review. It’s a while since I read Life After Life and I think it was my first Atkinson novel. I remember only that I liked it a lot, enough to follow with reading her later books of the series that one belonged to. Since that series I feel that her later trilogy (?) is a bit more-of-the-same but set in 1920s nightclubs. An environment that I’m just not interested in, and one which Atkinson doesn’t have first-hand experience of.

Stile I remember fondly my early days plowing through time and time with Atkinson under her very English middle-class families.

>110 thorold: Not very often you review a book I’ve already read. I loved Life After Life and enjoyed your review. i’m not into gimmicks either, but here i liked it. My take was that the gimmick was really important to make her writing work. The repetition quietly gives us many different perspectives of different characters in different circumstances and that enlivens her writing, giving it an extra very tangible meaning.

I'm off on my travels in the real world shortly, but until then it's back to the virtual world tour with the last of my current stack of library books. Nadeem Aslam moved from Pakistan to the UK with his family when he was in his teens. This is his most recent novel and the first I've read from him:

The Golden Legend (2017) by Nadeem Aslam (Pakistan, UK, 1966- )

  

A very angry novel, about a group of characters who find themselves caught up in multiple ways in the cycle of violence that dominates life in modern Pakistan. For Aslam, it seems to be a country where the military are in an unhealthily close relationship with the US, the police and judiciary are corrupt, violent and inefficient, and there is a general culture of Islamic paranoia that means that even the slightest perceived threat to orthodoxy — local or remote — is liable to provoke disproportionate official punishment, mob violence, and/or acts of terrorism.

The book seems to be conceived in a tragic, romantic mode, but Aslam’s characters are the victims of this endemic violence at so many different levels and from so many different directions in the course of the book that it almost becomes farcical, which surely isn’t what he intended. There are also some odd bookbinding choices going on: a book damaged by a brutal intelligence officer in the course of the story is being lovingly repaired by stitching the torn pages together with gold thread, in a sort of literary kintsugi. I can see the point, aesthetically, but I’m not sure that it would work mechanically, and there are far better ways to repair paper…

In the end I liked the general approach of the book, with its Rushdie-like conceit of “beauty vs. violence,” but I felt that Aslam undermined his case by piling too much miscellaneous bad stuff onto too small a group of characters.

...and a small side-track, a book I found while I was looking for something to read for India, the next obvious stop on the world tour. It is 100% diaspora, so not relevant for that purpose, but it ticked a couple of other boxes and looked like necessary light relief after >113 thorold:.

No One Can Pronounce My Name (2017) by Rakesh Satyal (US, 1980- )

  

An enjoyably fluffy LGBT-themed novel set in the Indian-diaspora community in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. Harit is a socially-awkward middle-aged bachelor shop assistant, living in what seems to be an atmosphere of mutual misunderstanding with his elderly mother after the Barbie-related death of his sister; Ranjana is an unfulfilled empty-nest mother-and-housewife whose son has gone off to be a high achiever at Princeton. Both of them clearly need to break out of their current lives in one direction or another. And Satyal, of course, ensures that they get the chance to do so.

There’s a lot of nice observation of the social structure of immigrant communities, with some delightfully cringe-making Indian parties, and Satyal also has a lot of fun at the expense of the Creative Writing industry, with a splendidly comic grand finale at a writers’ conference where the keynote speaker is a bigshot writer of novels about Indians in America (she’s recently moved to Lisbon and is about to publish her first book in Portuguese: Satyal can’t possibly be making fun of any real celebrity here, can he…?).

I was a little bit disappointed to find that there was nothing specific about the Cleveland setting: it’s all very generic suburbia, apart from the names of a real university and a few fictional shops and bars. Even when a character lands at Hopkins, he doesn’t feel compelled to notice its quaint period charm. The book is presumably set in Cleveland merely because Satyal grew up at the other end of Ohio and doesn’t want to embarrass his own family and friends.

In the end it’s a rather conventional American novel (Satyal is a publisher in his day-job), where the characters achieve fulfilment largely through becoming more integrated into America and (eventually) going to bed with the correct person, but there are quite a few enjoyably bizarre touches along the way.

Enjoy your travels! Keep in touch.

>113 thorold: maybe sometimes you need to put your practical knowledge aside and allow an author a golden thread bound book 🙂

>114 thorold: whoa, you’re a Cleveland expert.

Enjoyed your posts, as always.

>115 dianeham: >116 dchaikin: Thanks!

This risks turning into one of those operatic death-scenes that go on for far too long, but I managed to finish yet another one from my pile of started books. I don't actually leave until Sunday morning, so theoretically there might still be another one before my departure, and then it will be reading-on-the-plane...

This one was a Christmas gift, part of my nephew's subtle campaign to drag me into the 21st century. It turns out that David Byrne is a rather famous musician — slightly embarrassing that I didn't make the connection until I opened the book! I assumed it was going to be some generic young person blogging about a long-distance cycling tour...

Bicycle Diaries (2009) by David Byrne (Scotland, USA, 1952- )

  

This wasn't quite what I was expecting — the title made me imagine a travel book or a piece of cycle advocacy, but actually it's more of a semi-random collection of short essays about cities, the people who live there, and the arts, inspired by Byrne's travels to different parts of the world in the course of his work as a musician. When he travels, he likes to take a folding bike with him and use that to explore, but the cycling per se is only a rather minor part of the story. The format of the book is said to be loosely modelled on W G Sebald, with a mix of first-hand impressions, rambling philosophical sidetracks, and black-and-white photos, but there's a lot more shooting from the hip and a lot less evidence of weeks spent researching stuff in libraries than you would get in an actual Sebald book. Which is fair enough: I don't think anyone would be buying this book expecting to get heavyweight academic delvings.

Byrne is clearly an intelligent, thoughtful person, and his situation in life allows him to meet interesting people in the course of his travels (assuming that you accept artists, gallery-owners and musicians as "interesting people"...), so this makes for a pleasant, lively read, but I don't think you will find anything very earth-shattering here, unless you are someone who loves motor cars and thinks of the USA as the model of perfect urban planning (in which case it might annoy you a little...). A good short-attention-span book to read on a journey or in a hospital waiting-room, probably.

>114 thorold: Great review

...splendidly comic grand finale at a writers’ conference where the keynote speaker is a bigshot writer of novels about Indians in America (she’s recently moved to Lisbon and is about to publish her first book in Portuguese: Satyal can’t possibly be making fun of any real celebrity here, can he…?).

Haha, oh now I have to read this.

>117 thorold: oh he was in Talking Heads! That would be an intersting book to read in that case

I managed to go a step further east on the virtual world tour whilst crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction yesterday…

Mr Sampath — The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (2009-07-22) by R. K. Narayan (India, 1906-2001)

  

With a writing career that spanned two thirds of the 20th century, R K Narayan used to be one of the best-known Indian writers internationally (there were several shelves of his books in our public library when I was growing up), but he’s rather faded off the map recently. As someone who grew up heavily influenced by writers like Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett and P G Wodehouse, was promoted by Graham Greene, and who produced dozens of well-made middle-class novels, most of them set in the imaginary South Indian small town of Malgudi, he doesn’t really fit the profile we look for in postcolonial writers, but he was extraordinarily good at what he did, and there seems to be a lot of value in his Balzacian project of chronicling the way Indian small town society fits together.

ThIs recent reprint, with an introduction from that great modern comic storyteller Alexander McCall Smith, brings together three short novels from Narayan’s middle period, all written shortly after Independence.
In Mr Sampath: the printer of Malgudi a young man comes to Malgudi to set up a new, socially-critical weekly magazine. The only printer he can find willing to take on the legal risks is the eccentric Sampath, whose ancient printing plant clearly isn’t quite up to the job, but who somehow gets the magazine going anyway. All goes well until Sampath is distracted by an opportunity to get into the movie business, and chaos ensues as the young editor finds himself scripting a Hindu epic instead of writing columns attacking slum landlords and town officials.
The financial expert, Margayya, is a middleman who when we first meet him is making a good living sitting under a banyan tree outside the Co-operative Land Bank helping farmers to fill in their loan applications. A humiliation makes him determined to rise in the world and make a career for his son, and a few years later he has made it to a city office and is running a wildly successful pyramid scheme, but of course the son isn’t interested in following in his father’s footsteps, and the pyramid collapses…
Waiting for the Mahatma is more directly historical — a young man with no real political convictions is drawn into the Independence campaign after being asked for donations by a pretty girl who turns out to be in Mahatma Gandhi’s entourage. The only way to get close to the girl is to join the movement himself. Narayan cleverly manages to convey both the enormous excitement of the Mahatma’s personal charisma and the difficulty normal humans face in trying to put his radical ideas into practice in their lives.

>120 thorold: I love Naryan’s stories and I think I read every available one when I was younger. They are simple but somehow effective stories. Years ago I read - and I don’t know if it’s true, that Naryan sent a large brown-paper parcel of his handwritten manuscripts to a well-known English publisher. It was nearly thrown away - the wrapping was of poor quality. But an editor decided to take a look and was enchanted.

>121 kjuliff: According to Alexander McCall Smith, Narayan sent his first novel to a lot of London publishers in 1936 and they all rejected it, and then he told a friend who was in Oxford to take the M/s and ceremonially dump it in the Thames. Instead, the friend persuaded Graham Greene to read it, and he got it published. But I’m sure I’ve heard the story about the poor wrapping somewhere as well — maybe that was a version Narayan used for the benefit of Indian readers when he didn’t want to look like someone who had been saved from the slush pile by a successful British writer.

I also read many of them when I was younger. And I (re-)read both The painter of signs and The Bachelor of Arts as set texts for (different) courses.

>122 thorold: Ah, thanks for that. It’s years since I heard that brown paper wrapping story. I’m not surprised it wasn’t true. But yes it does sound like a Narayan tale.

By chance, we found out that Percival Everett would be at one of the local libraries promoting his new book on my second day in Cleveland — not an author I knew much about, but clearly a highly-regarded novelist with a strong track record, and the book sounded intriguing, so we went along to see what he had to say. And of course we slipped in to Mac’s Back Books the day before to pick up a copy and get ahead of the game…

I enjoyed the event: it was fun to see Cleveland book-people out in force (lots of slightly eccentrically dressed middle-aged ladies and a sprinkling of students and gay men: pretty much what you would see anywhere). It turned out that this was also the occasion when they announce the winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Awards ( https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/winners/ ), so there was lots of local interest.

Everett had some interesting and amusing things to say about the book and how he developed it — apparently he gets all his best ideas for books while messing up his tennis game. Clearly, that’s where I’ve been going wrong…



James (2024-03-19) by Percival Everett (USA, 1956- )

  

We’ve all read Huckleberry Finn, or at least we all have a good idea of what it’s about — it is another of those books that gets referenced so much that it’s almost unnecessary actually to read it. But we probably haven’t thought much about how different the story would look if it were told from Jim’s point-of-view. It’s the classic bacon-vs.-egg situation: what seems like a thrilling adventure to the white boy is a hideously frightening life or death struggle to the enslaved black adult.

Everett brings us face to face with this reality in a delicate, ironic way, letting us draw our own conclusions rather than ramming the obvious down our throats. He says his aim is not to attack Twain’s book, but to complement it in an affectionate way, giving us access to a way of seeing things that would have been closed to the original author.

He does this on multiple levels, with the most important and unexpected being language: he makes the point that slaves would have communicated between themselves in a private language inaccessible to their white masters, and that has nothing to do with the “slave dialect” they used for talking to white people. Since we don’t know much about this private language, he adopts the arbitrary convention of having the slaves in the story speak standard modern English amongst themselves (the whites all speak southern dialect, of course), and translate this into “Yes, massa” dialect as required to display suitable humility and unthreatening stupidity to the whites. To rub the point in, we see the narrator, James/Jim, giving the black children a formal dialect lesson in an early chapter.

We also learn that Jim has taught himself to read, and is studying on the quiet in Judge Thatcher’s neglected library of Enlightenment philosophy. Again, this isn’t meant to be taken literally as something that would have been going on behind the scenes in Huck Finn, but it is supposed to make us stop and realise that these are normal, intelligent human beings, perfectly capable of talking about Locke and Voltaire if they got the chance, who are being made to live like animals.

Everett has the sense of humour and storytelling ability to engage with someone like Mark Twain without making himself look silly, and he has the perception to make us look at something we are very familiar with in a new way: this book probably won’t teach us anything we didn’t already know about slavery, but it will force us to re-examine the way we think about what we have read about it previously. Entertaining and worthwhile.

recent issue of NYer had an excellent article about him. Interested in reading more; where should I start?

I love the story behind the story. Oddly enough I just ordered a book through Mac's Back Books.

>125 cindydavid4: I don’t know — maybe others could comment. The books people were mentioning last night were Erasure (which was adapted to make the film American fiction), The trees and Dr No. (Everett seems to be determined to make life hard for anyone using LT touchstones…!)

>126 labfs39: Great! It seems to be an interesting little bookshop, all sorts of good stuff on offer, and very engaged staff. Worth supporting. They were at the event last night as well.

>125 cindydavid4: The 75ers American Authors Challenge featured Everett in August last year:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/352677

You might find some recs there.

>124 thorold: Oh! I've seen this title pop up in Litsy, but no one has mentioned the Huck Finn connection -- thanks for the thoughtful review. Onto the wishlist it goes.

>128 kac522: thanks

A slightly quirky find in the basement of Mac’s Back Books:

Cleveland: the best kept secret (1967) by George E. Condon (USA, 1916-2011)

  

(Author photo https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/ )

The long-serving Plain dealer journalist George Condon gives us a chatty account of Cleveland’s origins and tells us about some of the remarkable people who have made it what it is. He’s understandably proud of his own city, the fifth sixth eighth … 54th largest in the US, but he’s also well aware that not everyone is equally convinced of the joys of the Great Lakes climate or the elegance of the Downtown area, which was essentially one large demolition site at the time of writing, in 1967, and now looks a bit too much like a city that was rebuilt in the sixties.

We learn about Cleveland’s industries, its bewildering array of ethnic communities, its sports teams (I skipped lightly over all the football and baseball), its newspapers (how can you not like a city whose main paper has stuck doggedly to the name Plain Dealer since 1842) and its magnificent cultural institutions.

But the real joy of the book is in his pleasantly anecdotal biographies of Cleveland characters, from tycoons like Rockefeller, the Van Sweringen brothers and Cyrus Eaton to politicians like Mark Hanna and Tom Johnson, as well as oddities like the con artist Cassie Chadwick (who in the early years of the 20th century cheated banks out of over $2M by pretending to be Andrew Carnegie’s natural daughter) and the 20s lawman Eliot Ness.

A good fifty years out of date, and probably not a book you would want to read unless you are curious about the background to this particular city, but fun if it does happen to fit your needs.

I’m always a sucker for quirky books on language — I’m not sure how this one escaped me for so long. When I bought it, the assistant in Half-Price Books speculated about what “a non-brief history of swearing” would look like. I should have said “Four times as f____g long!” — but of course I didn’t quite have the presence of mind for that…

Holy Sh*t: a brief history of swearing (2013) by Melissa Mohr (US, - )

  

(Author photo https://www.melissamohr.com )

A nice summary of the history and sociology of swearing in English from the point of view of a lexicographer, with a lovely mix of scholarly precision and dry wit. Mohr is clearly someone who is capable of taking endless pleasure from the bizarre ways in which real humans manage to use words to relieve our feelings, and she manages to convey that pleasure very well here.

As background she starts out with the Romans, who were clearly great enthusiasts for bad language based on sexual activity or body functions, and moves on to what the Bible can tell us about the Judeo-Christian tradition of religious oaths. As we all know, an exchange of promises between the God of the Old Testament and his followers was at the core of Jewish and Christian theology, so that any vain or ill-intentioned use of religious oaths was seriously frowned upon. A false oath had the potential to hurt God’s body.

This transferred into medieval Christian societies: the big taboo words people used to express their feelings in medieval England were all religious. Mohr suggests that the famous “Anglo-Saxon words” — most of which are actually of Middle-English origin — would have been considered relatively harmless by most people, partly because of the strength of emotion involved in breaking religious taboos and partly because of the very different attitudes to personal privacy in medieval times. When sex and excretion mostly happened in the presence of others, they might give rise to ribald jokes, as in Chaucer, but they couldn’t really be seen as big taboos to break.

Mohr charts the rise of “obscene” language after the reformation, from Elizabethan drama to Lady Chatterley and Lenny Bruce, and looks at the way sexual and excretory words are gradually being displaced from top taboo position by racial and other epithets. She speculates briefly about how we might be swearing in the 22nd century, but of course admits that such a thing is impossible to predict.

An endlessly fascinating topic, partly because we all enjoy reading about the quasi-forbidden, and partly because this is an area where language gets pushed to the limits of creativity and words rarely mean the same as what they did even a generation ago.

>132 thorold: Since you read a book about cursing and you are in Cleveland. This is the end part of Richard Pryor’s joke about the movie The Exorcist. (Excuse my French!)

You know, God, there's a person here that's possessed
And we was wonderin'—I know you're busy, I've checked your schedule
And if you don't mind, the devil is just actin' a muthafuckin' fool
Could you exorcise this muthafucka to Cleveland some place?"

>132 thorold: A most interesting review. I’ve noticed regional differences in swearing, between countries - Australian and the US. There is at least one swear word used in Australia that would never be considered ok in the US. Also I’ve noticed regional differences between states I. The US. New York City appears to be the most lenient, especially in the workplace.

I realize I’ve strayed from your review, but I’m intrigued.

>133 dianeham: Fun!

>134 kjuliff: Yes, Mohr talks about that a bit as well, though not in much detail. She claims Australians say “bloody” all the time, which is maybe a bit dated.
It’s certainly something I’ve been aware of all my life — there are quite different thresholds for using bad language in different cultures, and the type of swear words used varies a lot as well. It’s very hard to get the tone right if you want to swear in another language…

>135 thorold: Yes “bloody” is used in Australia but not so much anymore. It’s been replaced with the F word, although not to the extent that word is used in NY.Yes now I’m thinking about it, there’s a variation in searing between ethnic groups in the same area.

Did the book talk about gender and swearing? Both in terms of who is doing the swearing and swear words that are gendered?

>137 labfs39: Yes, a bit. She’s most interested in the way the words have evolved over time, and she goes into how quite a few words that are gendered in their literal meaning have come to be used in non-gendered ways. She does also quote one or two modern studies of swearing by gender, but she doesn’t discuss that at any length. There are probably people who’ve written about this from a gender-studies perspective rather than lexicographers, who might have more to say.

>124 thorold: Just catching up on your thread. I'm on a Percival Everett discovery too: how nice that you got to hear him speak as well. I picked up The Trees by him from the library to read this month.

>132 thorold: This sounds fun. Recalling the trope about swears being the first thing people learn, when studying a new language (or atleast, school kids).

>139 rv1988: Yes, I’m looking forward to reading some more Everett. The playground trope is typical of the complications of learning a new language — you eagerly learn the dictionary equivalent of the “bad word” of your choice, but of course it doesn’t work in remotely the same way in the new language as it does in your own. Even where you have a word with a very similar register — e.g. “shit” and “merde” — there are all kinds of subtle distinctions in when you can and can’t use it, and there’s even a big physical difference between the feeling you get from saying the different words. The amount of expression a really emotional native French speaker can put into that rolled “r”…!

And that’s it for Q1 — the new thread for Q2 is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/359728

(Sorry about the book that briefly appeared here and has now mysteriously moved to the new thread!)