thorold hopes he may sit and rightly spell in Q3

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thorold hopes he may sit and rightly spell in Q3

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1thorold
Modifié : Juil 1, 2017, 12:28 pm

Continued from my Q2 thread, which is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/254171

I felt quite a few times during Q2 that I wasn't getting anywhere with my reading, but looking back I actually seem to have done quite well: more hits than misses, and rather less fluff than usual.

In Q3 I'm going to have to find out how the transition from work to retirement affects my reading - difficult to anticipate at the moment. But I'm not someone who's ever really had problems finding time to devote to books, so I don't expect there will be any radical change in reading habits. And several people have already told me that retiring at the start of the summer holiday period makes the transition less distinct anyway. I'll have to see. The only preparation I've made for "reading after retirement" so far has been to allow the TBR shelf to fill up a bit more than usual in the last few weeks.

In any case, I haven't set myself any very specific reading objectives yet. I want to redress the M/F balance a bit after reading something like 90% books by men in Q1 and Q2, and I want to do something for the RG "non-majority languages" thread. And bring the TBR under control :-)

2thorold
Juil 1, 2017, 10:43 am

- other intro post -

3thorold
Juil 1, 2017, 11:48 am

...which brings me to the first book I finished in Q3 (I would have finished it earlier this week if it hadn't been for a little diversion into coffee pots and Ethiopia). I'm not sure why I never came across this one before, since it's been insanely popular since 1943 and appears on all those lists of "great books you should have read years ago", but for some reason I missed out on it in my teens. And since then I think the title somehow got mixed up in my mind with Howard Selby Jr...!

I finally got around to reading it now, mainly because it was a borrowed book that came to light while I was clearing out the debris of three decades from my office, and it's about time I returned it.

A tree grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith (US, 1896-1972)

 

I think I would have loved this book if I'd first read it when I was 13 or 14. It's the sort of book that makes you grasp for words like "poignant", "touching", "heart-warming" and - I tremble at the thought - "evocative".

It's an unexpected mix of a classic 19th-century aspirational self-improvement narrative with some early 20th century social realism - very much in the tradition of Dickens and Louisa M Alcott, but with a few shovelfuls of Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck (maybe even D.H. Lawrence) influence thrown in.

There are some witty and superbly inventive bits of writing, and it's not surprising that people fall in love with the book. The opening chapter would make a fantastic short story. The descriptions of what it feels like to live in poverty ring true, and stick with you even if you've read a hundred other books about that kind of life or heard about it first hand from your grandparents.

But the book is almost 500 pages long. We know more or less from the outset where the plot is headed, but it takes it forever to get there, and there are plenty of lead-footed moments: the narrator's interminable moralistic voice-overs, the almost vomit-inducing steadfastness and strength of character of Francie and her mother Katie, the protracted and constantly foreshadowed downfall of the alcoholic father, the improbable deus ex machina who plucks them out of the gutter with all the subtlety of the final chapter of a Dickens novel, etc., etc.

Fun, but not a book I would put in my suitcase for the proverbial desert island.

...and now I'm standing by to be pelted with rotten apples by the Betty Smith Fan Club :-)

4kidzdoc
Juil 1, 2017, 2:02 pm

Great review of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Mark. I somehow avoided reading it in high school or college, and given your comments about it I'll pass on trying it now.

5thorold
Juil 2, 2017, 5:40 pm

Oddly enough, I found myself following A tree grows in Brooklyn by spending the weekend with another autobiographical novel with an urban tree motif!

But this one turned out to be a good deal more eccentric and rather more to my taste. It's from an author I picked out more or less at random from those spiphany lists in the introduction to the RG "non-majority languages" thread (http://www.librarything.com/topic/260611) - the book happens to be the only one of her works currently available on Kobo where I am:

Le figuier sur le toit (2009) by Marguerite Andersen (Germany, France, Canada, etc., 1924- )

 

The reasons why an elderly German lady who has been living in Toronto for many years should be writing a book in French slowly become clear as we follow her exploration of her own past - including some disagreeable parts she has been avoiding thinking about for a long time - and her attempt to answer the inevitable question "where do you come from?" in the run-up to a big family party that has been planned for her 84th birthday.

Although it's presented as a novel, this is unambiguously intended to be read as non-fiction. The author looks back at her life in 20s and 30s Germany with her far from everyday parents, Martha - daughter of the well-known theologian Reinhold Seeberg - and Theodor Bohner - a writer, born in Ghana where his parents were serving as Lutheran missionaries. There's a lot of fascinating detail about the life of a liberal middle-class family in those times, and Marguerite's portrayal of herself as a little girl is both convincing and funny.

But of course the real story is about the political change that was going on in the background, and which she was only intermittently aware of. With hindsight, she now understands the quarrel between Theo (a mild liberal who sat in the Prussian state parliament) and Seeberg, whose strongly nationalist and anti-semitic publications after World War I helped give a veneer of intellectual respectability to the Nazis. And of course she has to try to find a way of dealing with the knowledge that the grandfather she loved and was a little in awe of was an inciter of crimes against humanity.

This isn't really a very obviously Canadian book. The French it's written in is rather metropolitan, possibly a bit old-fashioned, but elegant and a pleasure to read. There are certainly more Germanisms than Americanisms in the text. I thought at first that there was some sort of eccentric spelling convention in play, but after a few pages I worked out that it was simply an incompetent e-book conversion which had somehow messed up all the ligatures ("fammes" instead of "flammes"; "ofce" instead of "office", etc.). Irritating, but not enough to spoil what was otherwise a very interesting and enjoyable book.

6thorold
Modifié : Juil 10, 2017, 3:23 am

I thought this was likely to be another of those books I pick up and put down again over a period of weeks or months, but as it turned out, it really grabbed me, and I finished it over the weekend. Train journeys on Saturday and a lot of balcony-time on Sunday helped...

Señas de identidad (1966, Marks of identity) by Juan Goytisolo (Spain, France, Morocco, 1931 - 4 June 2017)

 

Goytisolo - his death a few weeks ago was one of the things that reminded me that several friends have been urging me to read this - is one of the people who regularly gets cited as "most important Spanish writer of the 20th century". Given how stiff the competition for that title must be, he's got to be worth at least a look...
He was one of the generation that experienced the Civil War as small children, in his case, in a wealthy bourgeois family in Catalonia: his mother was killed in an air-raid. At odds with the Franco regime - he liked to boast that his name was better-known in police stations than in bookshops - he lived most of his adult life in exile in France, and never returned to live permanently in Spain. He was closely associated with and influenced by many of the French writers of the 50s and 60s, especially Genet. After his wife's death in 1994 he moved to Marrakech.

Señas de identidad was the first of Goytisolo's books to break with realism (he later disowned the eight novels that preceded it). He deploys just about every modernist trick in the book: multi-page sentences; a narrator who switches freely between first, second and third persons; unpredictable scene-changes (the one I had to read three times before it made sense was when we switched from a piazza in Venice to a voodoo ceremony in Cuba in mid-sentence); inserted texts and documents; polyphony; language-switching (the book is written in Castilian, but he expects the reader to be able to negotiate quite lengthy passages of French and the occasional bit of Catalan dialogue; in the last chapter there are as many as five languages going on at once), etc., etc.

The multiple-voices thing is one of the most characteristic elements of the book, and Goytisolo builds it up gently from classic "now"/"then" alternation of the opening chapters to (apparently) unconnected narratives interleaved first paragraph-by-paragraph, then sentence-by-sentence, and ultimately moves on to multiple voices within the same sentence, so that the last chapter becomes as complicated to unpick as the final ensemble of a Mozart opera.

So there's a lot of virtuoso showing-off going on (and a few cheap tricks, like the way he gets the book to end on the words INSERT COIN in several different languages), but it isn't just about technique: Goytisolo wants to take the focus away from his disenchanted narrator, the exiled photographer Álvaro, and generalise his jaundiced view of the "menopausal society" of Francoist Spain into a much broader picture. Spain, as he sees it, is irredeemably damaged by centuries of (Catholic, feudal, monarchist) social control and exploitation. What money there is has been made on the backs of slaves (inter alia by Álvaro's family, who, like Goytisolo's, owned plantations in Cuba). The Civil War has left terrible scars on both sides, and Spain is being damaged further by rural poverty and emigration (we forget it now, but about two million Spanish workers migrated elsewhere in Europe in the 50s and 60s), whilst the recent opening up of the tourist trade is merely leaving scars on the landscape and putting money into a handful of greedy pockets. And the Spanish exiles in Paris are too damaged and divided to organise anything (they can't even manage to stage an orgy in an artist's studio...).

A fantastic, subtle, complicated and powerful book that it isn't possible to do justice to on a first reading...

7deebee1
Juil 11, 2017, 3:16 am

I also enjoyed very much Marks of Identity when I read it 3 years ago, found it a bit hard going in the first few pages, it took several attempts for me to be able to kick it off, and then it was just sheer pleasure to read after -- part of it was the challenge to make out what he was saying. It was a book which grew on me. I have the rest of this trilogy which I hope to have the time to read soon. It seems Goytisolo's life had enough drama in it which provided excellent material for writing that makes us think. His politics put him on the wrong side of the Spanish authorities until very recently, and yet, any acknowledgment of his abilities is a grudging one. It's a shame, really.

8thorold
Juil 11, 2017, 5:33 am

>7 deebee1: Yes, now I also want to read the other two parts of the trilogy, and the obituaries make me want to read his memoirs as well...

9thorold
Juil 11, 2017, 5:11 pm

Another pile brought home from the charity shop today, so I thought I'd better read at least the shortest one in the pile (and it turned out to fit quite nicely into the non-majority languages theme):

Mozart-Novelle (1947) by Louis Fürnberg (Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Palestine, East Germany, etc. 1909 - 1957)

 

The poet Louis Fürnberg belonged to the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia. As a Jew and a dedicated communist activist, he was lucky to survive the Nazi period, which he spent partly in captivity and partly in exile in Jerusalem. After the war he returned to Prague, working as a journalist and diplomat, but the growing anti-semitism of the Czech communist party led him to move to the DDR in 1954. Amongst other things he was celebrated as the author of the anthem of the East German communist party (Refrain: Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer Recht! ). Bizarrely, this best-forgotten song has recently been resurrected in German politics as the anthem of the satirical party, Die Partei...

As well as agit-prop and lyric poems, Fürnberg wrote a number of short prose works, in a style that obviously draws on Kleist's famous novellas. The most famous, Die Begegnung in Weimar (1952), deals with a meeting between Goethe and the Polish writer Adam Mickiewitz, whilst Mozart-Novelle (1948) has Mozart, in Prague on the eve of the 1787 premiere of Don Giovanni, spending an evening with the elderly Chevalier Casanova. There is some historical basis for this - Casanova was living in Bohemia at the time, and he is on record as meeting Lorenzo da Ponte, so a meeting with Mozart would not be so surprising.

There's a lot of nicely-handled period comedy revolving around jealousies in the opera company, the intervention of a reactionary Prussian Junker, Casanova's misapprehension that the opera is about him, Mozart's suspicion that Konstanze might be cheating on him, etc. There's also quite a bit of linguistic fun: Mozart's down-to-earth Austrian talk and the French-laced German of Prague high society are both teased mercilessly ("Antiquitäten embrassieren mich nicht", one lady says at the prospect that Casanova might want to kiss her). But the point of the story is the late-night dialogue between Casanova and Mozart as they wander through the streets of Prague discussing the role of the artist and the arts in a world which - as Fürnberg is only just able to resist telling us explicitly - is only a couple of years away from the French Revolution.

More fun than I expected, and the little seventies DDR hardback with illustrations by Karel Müller is a very nice object in its way too (...and it was fun to see that its previous owner had received it as a somewhat oddly-chosen confirmation present!).

10thorold
Modifié : Juil 13, 2017, 4:28 pm

Another one read for the minority language thread and to rectify the gender balance a bit. And simply because Herta Müller is an amazing writer:

Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997, The Appointment) by Herta Müller (Romania, Germany, 1953 - )

 

The 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Müller, as spiphany mentioned in one of the intro-posts of the RG thread, was a member of the German-speaking minority in Romania until she emigrated to Germany. This book was written after she left Romania, but it obviously draws on her earlier experiences.

The unnamed narrator of this novel is taking a tram journey from her home to the office where she has been summoned - yet again - to be interviewed about her alleged crimes against the Romanian state. Along the way, she reflects on the other passengers in the tram, on her current and previous husbands, her family and in-laws, her neighbours, and the circumstances that led her to the point of making a small and rather futile gesture against the authority of the régime. Her observation of the small details of everyday life is almost brutally sharp in its focus, as the stream-of-consciousness builds up a composite picture of the way living under a corrupt authoritarian government distorts and coarsens everything in life, down to the most trivial level, with madness, alcohol and suicide appearing as the only viable ways out.

It's an interesting contrast with Herztier, the other of her novels that I've read: there the character was a young intellectual who was driven to write, whilst here it's a woman who strongly distrusts the written word (or anything else that leaves a record), but has nonetheless started to note down details of the physical world around her because her faith in reality is so shaken that she no longer trusts that there will be the same number of lampposts along the street from one day to the next. Magnificent, but very painful writing.

(I wonder why it is that Müller's titles so rarely survive translation to English? The plain ones become extravagant - Herztier -> The land of green plums, Atemschaukel -> The hunger angel - and the extravagant ones plain Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet -> The Appointment, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt -> The Passport)

11tonikat
Juil 13, 2017, 4:02 pm

Happy retirement! I just caught up a bit (not entirely need to go upthread a bit). I've not read Muller at all but always intrigued by The Land of Green Plumbs. Interesting about the titles. I enjoyed reading of Furnberg's Mozart/Casanova meeting - and enjoying considering the potential it would have for that giggle given him in the film of Amadeus.

12thorold
Juil 14, 2017, 12:39 am

>11 tonikat: Thanks!
There's a passing mention of Mozart's paranoia about Salieri in Mozart-Novelle, so it's obviously prefiguring Amadeus a bit. But no giggling.

13thorold
Juil 14, 2017, 12:56 am

My dipping-into book of the last few weeks - I've probably been a bit too distracted to do justice to it:

Le plaisir du texte (1973; The pleasures of the text) by Roland Barthes (France, 1915-1980)

 

A series of very short essays (mostly 100-200 words each - the whole book is only about 90 pages long) which often read more like prose-poems than literary theory. Barthes speculates about the relationship between reading and pleasure, and tries to pin down a distinction between the culturally-mediated plaisir and the erotic jouissance and locate this in different families of texts. Of course it's also a game in which he is also trying to manipulate the reader's plaisir and jouissance by deploying the same textual strategies he's writing about (he calls literary studies the Kamasutra of the text), and playfulness often wins over clarity, but no-one is likely to mind that much. A book you can read with great enjoyment (of whatever kind!) and also a useful source of quotations to back up just about any argument you might be trying to make in your own essays...

14thorold
Modifié : Juil 27, 2017, 4:11 am

I took a short holiday in England, which is still a very pleasant place to be, if you can avoid reading the newspapers...
Once again, we were staying in a beautiful Landmark Trust building, in Staffordshire this time, the grand 16th century gatehouse to a house that no longer exists:

 

I didn't get as much reading done as I sometimes do on holiday, but there are still a few reviews to catch up on...

15thorold
Modifié : Juil 27, 2017, 6:42 am

This one was a selection for our book club - not one I proposed, as you can probably imagine, but it sounded as though it might be interesting:

Who thought this was a good idea? : and other questions you should have answers to when you work in the White House (2017) by Alyssa Mastromonaco (USA, 1976 - ) "with" Lauren Oyler



Alyssa Mastromonaco worked for Barack Obama before he became president, and was Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House for some years. I don't really read political memoirs, but I did enjoy The West Wing and thought that it might be interesting to learn something about what it's really like to work in the White House. And it was, intermittently, but this is such a bad book that the few potentially interesting anecdotes and insights didn't really stand a chance.

Mastromonaco's overall approach, which her ghostwriter was clearly unable to mitigate, is to model the text on one of those horribly intimate mobile phone conversations overheard in railway compartments, which have a strange fascination despite their repulsive content, and which you can't avoid focussing on however much you try to ignore them. There's no obvious structure to the book, and reminiscences pour out in a random, unstoppable stream (rather like the author's body fluids, which feature heavily throughout). The language is casual and conversational, which is probably meant to draw the reader in, but actually pushes you away unless you're familiar with the slang of Mastromonaco's peer-group (in which case you probably wouldn't need to read the book anyway).

The underlying idea seems to have been not to get the reader too involved with her specific job managing Obama's working timetable and the logistics of getting everyone to the right place at the right time, but to generalise her experience to look at what it's like to be a woman working in a very visible, high-pressure job. That's a relevant and interesting topic, of course, but in the end she doesn't do very much to address it beyond telling us about her own, rather specific, health problems. The only point at which she does seem to be addressing a more general issue turns out to be completely trivial and non-contentious: she spends half a chapter developing the theme of how awkward it was that there was nowhere in the White House where you could get hold of tampons in an emergency, but then has to admit that a vending machine was installed as soon as she pointed out the problem.

Brief sample - this is what she has to say about meeting the Pope:
The meeting was nothing elaborate—you walk up; shake his hand; say, “Your Holiness, it’s an honor”; and then you move on—and I’m not religious. But some of my family and many of my friends are Catholics, and I was struck by the sense that meeting this person would mean so much to so many people. I felt lucky.
After that, I had to go lie down in the car. Like all our drivers, the driver was a member of the military, and I always felt very embarrassed when I had to expose my digestive weaknesses to them. (My pants were also unbuttoned.) He asked me if I was OK and if he should get the doctor; I told him no. As I flung myself over the backseat, I felt something poke me in the leg. While POTUS was meeting with the Vatican’s secretary of state, I had taken, like, five packs of the blessed rosary bead souvenirs they give to people at the exit, and they were all in my pockets.

16thorold
Juil 27, 2017, 6:31 am

Another book-club choice, but this is one that I would probably have read in any case, sooner or later - I've been vaguely aware of Jonathan Coe for a long time, but I think I must have put him aside on the assumption that he was just another of those laddish-straight-male-British-writers-with-a-thing-about-pop-music (like Nick Hornby and Martin Amis):

The Rotters' Club (2001) by Jonathan Coe (UK, 1961 - )

 

A charming and very funny look at a group of young people growing up in Birmingham in the 1970s, attending a provincial grammar school that takes itself a little bit too seriously, and discovering that instead of the gloriously psychedelic world of prog rock, idealistic socialism and dadaist poetry they've been led to expect, life is going to confront them with Enoch Powell, Grunwick, IRA bombs, the Sex Pistols and Margaret Thatcher.

Coe takes us through all the usual elements of the "coming-of-age" novel with his tongue firmly in his cheek, and has fun mocking his narrator's literary and musical aspirations. We get blow-by-blow descriptions of some truly awful experimental music (but no worse than the real thing) and some mock-literary experimentation, including a sentence several times longer than the final chapter of Ulysses (the only interesting thing the writers of the Wikipedia article seem to have noticed about this book!).

Since I happen to be about the same age as Coe's characters and went to a rather similar school, this pressed a lot of nostalgia-buttons for me, and it's undoubtedly a well-written, entertaining book that captures the peculiar feeling of those times very well. Not as striking and original as The Buddha of suburbia, perhaps, and possibly not of all that much interest if you aren't already familiar with the late seventies in the UK.

17thorold
Modifié : Juil 27, 2017, 9:23 am

This is one that's been sitting on my TBR for a little while - it's by one of the authors I made a note to follow up after reading Volker Weidermann's bluffer's guide to post-war German literature, Lichtjahre, last year.

Die Mansarde (1969 - The Loft) by Marlen Haushofer (Austria, 1920 - 1970)

 

Marlen Haushofer published her first novels and stories in the early 1950s, but her books didn't attract much critical attention until the rise of the women's movement in the 1980s. She's now seen as something of a feminist icon because of the way she dissects how women's roles are defined in a male-dominated society. Sadly, she lost her life to cancer long before this rediscovery of her works. Her most famous novel is Die Wand (The Wall, 1963). As well as writing, she worked as assistant to her husband, a dentist.

Die Mansarde, Haushofer's last novel, describes a week in the life of the narrator, a middle-class Vienna housewife. Her house-cleaning, shopping expeditions, duty-visits, and routine conversations with her husband are described in painfully realistic detail, and set against the (equally painful, but startlingly non-realistic) imaginative life of her dreams and forced recollection of a period of her life she has been trying to repress.

To think for herself, she has to retreat from the male-owned space of the house into her only piece of private space, the loft where she has a studio in which she can pursue - "as a hobby", her husband insists - her former career as a book-illustrator.

This seems to be above all a book about loneliness, and the difficulty of real contact with other people. The period of breakdown she would prefer not to think about manifested itself through - apparently psychosomatic - deafness, i.e. a physical refusal to accept other people's attempts to communicate with her; her artwork is frustrated by her inability to draw a bird that doesn't look as though it is the only one of its kind in existence. Her contacts with the people around her - her children, her husband, a "friend" from the maternity ward, her former landlady, an old servant of her mother-in-law - probably look quite normal from the outside, but lack any real level of empathy or communication.

Not a book you would want to read if you need cheering up, but very beautifully written and perceptive, even occasionally funny, in a bleak way.

18thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:02 am

I have had the bad luck to lose most of August to health problems - looks as though I’m on the way to recovery now, but since I’ve not posted anything here for ages, I’ve got quite a backlog of books to review. The only slightly positive part of being ill was that I had a spell when I had too little energy to be distracted from reading by other things, and I was getting through at least a book a day. Even if they were mostly relatively light and fluffy titles, it has made quite a bit of space on the TBR shelf.
In the meantime, I’m having problems with my internet provider, so I’m writing this offline, not certain when I’ll be able to post it…

19thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:03 am

Volkswagen Blues (1988) by Jacques Poulin (Canada, 1937- )
 
A surprisingly gentle, reflective, québecois road novel in which two slightly lost souls, assisted by an ancient VW camper van and a kitten, go on a quest to rediscover their real identities on a journey from the mouth of the St Lawrence River to San Francisco. Along the way they work themselves through a great deal of North American history (via the things they see and the "borrowed" library books they read to each other), looking both at the often-overlooked French voyageur tradition and at the fate of the Native Americans as Europeans moved into their lands. Neither story turns out to be quite as straightforward as we think it's going to be. Very enjoyable.

20thorold
Modifié : Août 24, 2017, 11:20 am

Two little books about cycling:
How to survive als Radfahrer (2017) by Juliane Schumacher (Germany, 1987- )
 

I normally avoid blog-spinoff books, and even not knowing what this was, the horrible mixed-language title should have been enough to put me off. But it was a present, and I actually enjoyed it rather more than I was expecting. Juliane Schumacher is a young Berliner who blogs about her cycling experiences as radelmaedchen.de — her book turns out to be much more a celebration of the joys of getting around by bike in the city than the dour collection of safety tips that the title would lead us to expect.
There is a certain amount of practical advice on how to choose a bike that suits you, how to dress comfortably for your commute without becoming a lycra-clone, how to deal with (Berlin) traffic conditions, how to prepare for a cycling holiday, etc., but it's very non-technical apart from the bit about clothing — Schumacher's day-job is in the garment trade, and she goes into quite some detail on this part. The stress is always on the liberating effect of being on a bike in the open air and being able to go where you want in the city without having the horror of sitting in a big noisy, heavy, polluting, stuck-in-traffic, tin box. Something I can sign up to without any problem, even if cycling where I live (Holland) is nowhere near as radical an activity as it would be in Berlin...
Good fun, and very readable, but I wonder who the book is for. I don't really see non-cyclists buying it, and if you are already a convert to cycling it probably won't tell you very much that you don't know already. It's probably mostly just a way for people who enjoy Schumacher's blog (which is well worth a look if you read German) to send a little cash her way.

Petite philosophie du vélo (2008) by Bernard Chambaz (France, 1949 - )
 
This one couldn't be more French. As well as being a novelist and teacher, Chambaz is a keen road-biker, who has completed the amateur versions of the Tour de France, Giro, Vuelta, etc., and ridden coast-to-coast across the USA. For him, "le vélo" is not about getting to where you need to be (that menial process he dismisses as "la bicyclette"), rather, it's the means to engage in an epic struggle to overcome physical and psychological weaknesses and the obstacles that nature throws in your path (mountains, weather, your competitors...) and complete the challenge you have set yourself.
Chambaz analyses the concepts and processes involved in his kind of cycling in a series of about a hundred short, semi-frivolous essays, in which he cleverly mixes together philosophical ideas originating from celebrated riders with approaches to cycling taken from great philosophers. Heidegger, Kant, Plato and the rest can all be found riding with him in the péloton. The technique is a bit like Barthes' essay on the Tour de France as a version of the Iliad, but expanded into a complete philosophical scheme.
An entertaining little book to keep by your bedside and dip into, but probably not something you would want to read from cover to cover.

21thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:06 am

The professor and the madman (1998 - a.k.a. The surgeon of Crowthorne) by Simon Winchester (US, 1944 - )

 

The first few chapters of this book are unfortunately pitched to make the reader think it is going to be another of those contrived and rather silly stories, TV documentary style, that try to build up an odd combination of circumstances into something far more sensational than it deserves. But once you actually get into the book, it becomes clear that Winchester has done quite a bit of original research to separate the real story of the unfortunate Dr Minor from the journalistic myth, and he gives us a fascinating and sympathetic account of Minor's life and the way late-19th century England dealt with his mental health problems.
I'm addicted to the OED, of course (as Winchester obviously is too), and I was a bit disappointed that the making of the dictionary rather got pushed into the background of the story. But that's well-documented elsewhere, so there's no real need for it to come in here in detail.

22thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:07 am

What am I doing here (1989) by Bruce Chatwin (UK, 1940-1989)

 

Bruce Chatwin was perhaps the biggest star of the British travel-writing boom of the eighties, but also the first to burn out, a victim of that other great viral phenomenon of the period, AIDS. Before becoming a serious traveller, he had already established himself as a formidable judge of fine art, with a glowing career ahead of him at Sotheby's. But then he went off to South America for six months, and wrote In Patagonia, the first of a short but insanely beautiful collection of books that all hover somewhere on the borders of fiction and travel-writing.
This was Chatwin's last book, a collection of his short stories, essays and journalism from the seventies and eighties which he prepared for publication during his final illness (which he refers to in several pieces, but still steadfastly refuses to call by its proper name, even though everyone who read the book must have known what it was...).

Despite the circumstances, almost everything in the book still seems to reflect Chatwin's usual concern for perfection of style, and it's a pleasure to read throughout. The subject-matter, as you might expect, ranges widely over his big interests in life - in particular the fine art business, travel, architecture, nomads, and literature. He says in an introductory note that all but one of the pieces were "my ideas", but there does seem to be quite a spectrum between very personal reflections and obvious newspaper commissions (like the Observer article describing a cruise on the Volga with a boatload of German Stalingrad veterans and widows - a kind of trip it's rather difficult to imagine Chatwin going on on his own initiative).
There are some very interesting peripheral notes related to his other books, such as his account of working with Werner Herzog on the film version of The viceroy of Ouidah, and some tantalising hints of other things that might have been developed into books if he had had more time.
A book that everyone who enjoys Chatwin's prose would want to have on their shelves to complete the set, but perhaps not the first one you would reach for if you don't know his work yet.

23thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:08 am

...and a little trip Down Under:

True history of the Kelly gang (2000) by Peter Carey (Australia, US, 1943 - )

 

I enjoyed Carey's first few books very much, but I've found his more recent ones a bit less interesting, which is probably why it took me so long to get around to this one. A mistake, because this is a really excellent historical novel.
Carey imagines how Ned Kelly might have told his own story, justifying himself and showing how the social conditions of 19th century Australia pushed him into a direction where his only realistic choice was to resist the forces of law and order that had already written him off because of the (Irish, emancipee) family he came from. The world took it for granted that he had to be a criminal, so he became one.
Obviously we are meant to read this more broadly than the specific period it is set in - Carey is showing us what life might look like if you are struggling to survive at the very bottom of society and everyone seems to be against you. But it also works extremely well as an historical novel - Kelly's semi-literate narrative voice is very convincing and consistent, and he gives us a very clear idea of what life was like at the bottom of the heap in rural Victoria. I'm not a judge of Australian idiom, but there was nothing that struck a jarring note for me. There is a lot of violence and unpleasantness in the story, inevitably, but Carey never allows Kelly to enjoy it or take it for granted. He kills policemen because it has become the only way to prevent them from killing him, but it disgusts him to have to do it.
I don't suppose that this is in any way a neutral and objective account of Kelly's life, but it's an entertaining and thought-provoking novel, and I'm glad I got around to it at last.

24thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:09 am

The grave tattoo (2006) by Val McDermid (UK, 1955 - )

 

An entertaining murder mystery with a - slightly contrived - historical back-story, in which the discovery of a 200-year-old body in a peat bog provokes various more or less devious characters to rush around the Lake District in pursuit of a possible Wordsworth manuscript, accompanied by a string of suspicious deaths. I had the feeling that there were rather too many different subplots going on at once, but McDermid is of course an old pro at this game and can keep any number of balls in the air at the same time, so it all comes together in the end.

25thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:10 am

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the present day (2017) by Peter Ackroyd (UK, 1949 - )

 

Ackroyd has a pretty solid track record of writing interesting things about London, so I took a punt on this one, despite the alarmingly broad subtitle. Unfortunately, it's the subtitle that wins - this is a book stretched ridiculously thin, and Ackroyd is trying to pack so many facts into it that he has no space for standing back and reflecting on what he's telling us.

Queer history is a difficult topic anyway, because queer desire normally doesn't leave a trace on the historical record. We know next to nothing about how the majority of people in earlier centuries saw their own sexuality and what they did about it, but we do know a great deal about how, from time to time, some people were accused of acting on their desires in ways that society or the law disapproved of, and suffered as a result.

In the last thirty or forty years, people like Rictor Norton, Alan Sinfield, Alan Bray, Colin Spencer and Hugh David have gone to great efforts to dig out this kind of data, and, since almost everything they found in the historical record for the UK happened in London, Ackroyd has to recite just about all of it, at breakneck speed, with as many gruesome details as possible, and without any discussion about whether the trends these accusations and prosecutions reflect are to do with changes in queer behaviour or with phases of greater and lesser intolerance from the rest of society. Or indeed with the ever-useful unfounded accusation to blacken someone's reputation. We never get the chance to think about whether London really was a "queer city" at any given time, or about how its queerness worked geographically, it's just facts, facts, facts.

Disappointing: this is probably a useful overview if you know nothing about the subject, because a lot of the original research Ackroyd summarises can be difficult to find these days. But I happen to have a good deal of that on my shelves already, and I found that Ackroyd added very little value to it.

26thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:14 am

The walker's guide to outdoor clues & signs (2017) by Tristan Gooley (UK, - )

 

I'm someone who spends a lot of time outdoors, and I really liked the central idea of this book, persuading us to look at the landscape in a purposive way, asking ourselves why that hill or that tree is in that place and that shape, and what information we can derive from that about where we are in relation to the earth and its weather, what the history of that particular landscape might be, and how the things we see relate to each other. It's a little bit like the way people used to do "natural history" 70 or 80 years ago (remember "Romany of the BBC"?), but with more of a practical hard edge: Gooley teaches something he calls "natural navigation", the art of finding your way about just using the information of your senses, without any useful tools like maps, compasses and GPS, and a lot of what he tells us to look out for here is related to that kind of activity.
Although the book is arranged in a slightly haphazard way, it has a good, comprehensive index, and would probably work quite well to refer to in real situations. But a lot of the more detailed information in the book is specific to what you might see in southern England (Sussex), so you would need to do quite some mutatis mutandis if you have the misfortune not to live around there.
What undermined the pleasure of reading this book for me was the constant irritation of being in contact with Gooley's "professional instructor" voice. He comes across as the sort of person the trainees would cook and eat on the third day of the survival course - a man with a suitably didactic anecdote for every occasion, and an exotic experience to trump every one of yours. Maybe he's not at all like that in real life, but on the printed page he's a bit hard to put up with.

27thorold
Août 24, 2017, 11:16 am

More fool me (2014) by Stephen Fry (UK, 1957 - )

 

This third volume of Fry's memoirs has been sitting on my shelf since I found it under the Christmas tree some years ago, mainly because I couldn't think of any good reason why I would want to read it. Having read it, I find it even more difficult to think of something good to say about it: Fry is a clever, articulate and often very funny writer, but it's hard to fathom why he thinks anyone would want to read his self-lacerating account of the cocaine he sniffed and celebrities he ate and drank with during the early days of his own TV fame in the 1990s. He seems to be showing off with one hand whilst he hits himself over the head with the other. Tedious and depressing.

28SassyLassy
Août 27, 2017, 7:42 pm

>26 thorold: Oh dear, it sounded like such a great premise for a book. Maybe someone else will pick up on it and go with just the central idea. It always amazes me how little most people notice of the world around them, and how little curiosity there is about it. I suppose that means I should give Bruce Chatwin another try, not much luck the first time, but that was mostly in hospital waiting rooms, not the most conducive place for reading.

Agreeing with you on The True History of the Kelly Gang.

29thorold
Août 28, 2017, 8:49 am

Back online with a new internet provider: the internet disappointingly doesn't look very different from the way it looked four days ago.
The real test is in how long I can go without restarting the modem or calling customer services, of course. :-)

>28 SassyLassy: Do have a look at some sample pages for Gooley - you won't necessarily feel the same way as I about his tone.
Based on recent experience, Daniel Pennac works for hospital waiting rooms. Not having a book with you at all doesn't work...

30thorold
Août 28, 2017, 8:51 am

Still catching up with my backlog:

La petite marchande de prose (1989, Write to kill) by Daniel Pennac (France, - )

 

The third part of the Malaussène saga. Benjamin gets a new assignment - instead of continuing as a professional scapegoat, his boss asks him to take the role of stand-in to a publicity-shy bestselling author. At the same time, his favourite sister, Clara, is about to get married to a prison governor. Somehow, (through no fault of Benjamin's, of course), this leads us into the biggest bloodbath of the series so far, and for a while the comedy gets very black indeed.
Still fun, and with some nice digs at the publishing industry, but it's a slower read than the first two books, with characters spending a bit too much time reflecting on how horrible the world is, how they can't live up to their parents, etc.

31thorold
Août 28, 2017, 8:55 am

Since re-reading Radetzkymarsch a few months ago, I've been meaning to explore Joseph Roth a bit more deeply:

Hiob (1929; Job, 1930) by Joseph Roth (Austria, etc., 1894-1939 )



Mendel Singer is a good, simple, pious Jew who's always done his best to serve God, his community and his family. He certainly hasn't had an easy time of it, but as he starts to look forward to the end of his life, he can be happy that he will be leaving all his four children better-placed in life than he could reasonably have hoped for. But then God, through the agency of the First World War, smashes everything Mendel depends on with a series of devastating hammer-blows.
Or, to put it another way, the biblical story of Job transposed to a Galician stetl and the Jewish quarters of Manhattan in the early years of the 20th century. But with a twist, because Mendel finds his redemption not in his faith but in the searing flame of his anger with God, which allows him to rediscover his buried humanity.

Up to 1929, Joseph Roth was effectively a very successful journalist who had also written a few books: with the publication of Hiob he suddenly established himself as an important - and bestselling - novelist. The book came out at about the same time as Berlin Alexanderplatz, but with its aggressively simple "fairy-tale" narrative style and its subjective, mythical theme, Roth was clearly signalling that he didn't want anything to do with modernist expressionism or "the new objectivity".

Roth is probably also being deliberately provocative in setting the book in such a very Jewish context, against the background of the sort of small town where he grew up himself. Unlike Mendel, Roth was a pretty astute observer of politics, and he had a good idea of the way things were headed in the Europe of the late 1920s (although he was still working for a German paper, after 1926 he only accepted assignments outside Germany). He knew that the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe had little chance of surviving in between the equally hostile political forces that were emerging in Russia and Germany, and he wanted to make a record of it before it was too late.

(I accidentally bought this in a Suhrkamp school edition with lots of unnecessary, distracting notes, but the small selection of critical essays in the back of the book were worth having)

32thorold
Août 28, 2017, 11:27 am

Trying to overcome my hesitation about getting involved with Rilke, a poet I've been avoiding for far too long:

Rilke : sein Leben, seine Welt, sein Werk (1981, Rilke, a life) by Wolfgang Leppmann (Germany, Canada, USA, 1922-2002)
 

Wolfgang Leppmann was born into a literary, Jewish family in Berlin - his father was Thomas Mann's first biographer, his mother an actress and close friend of Gerhardt Hauptmann. When the Nazis came to power he and his father moved to Italy and then via the UK to Canada. Leppmann served in the Canadian army during the closing years of the war, then went on to study and teach German literature in Canadian and American universities. After retirement he returned to Germany. As far as I can work out, most of his books, including this one, were written in German and later translated to English.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) probably counts - especially for English readers - as the most famous German poet of the 20th century. And I think that's part of the reason why I've been a bit hesitant about getting to know his work. Another part is that he's one of those poets who are over-popular with readers who are looking for some sort of mystical/spiritual self-improvement effect from reading poetry, and don't much care about the words as long as they are ambiguous (cf. Yeats, Khalil Gibran, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, ...). But of course prejudice about other readers is not a valid reason for not reading someone! Anyway, I thought I'd start with the standard biography and get a bit of context for him. In the background, I've also dipped into some of the works as I went along - the early Prague poems, Cornet Rilke, the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus. But of course I need to spend more time on those, especially the last two.

What especially struck me from the biography is how determined Rilke seems to have been not to fit into anything we would expect of him. He grew up as a member of the German-speaking middle-classes in Prague, but his parents were right on the bottom edge of this elite, and young Rilke obviously had quite a soft spot for the Czech culture that surrounded him, even if it comes over as somewhat patronising in his early poems ("Komm her, du Tschechenmädchen, / Sing mir ein Heimatlied..."). After the war, he surprised everyone by taking Czechoslovakian citizenship (but never actually went back to live there after his teens).

Most unpoetically, he failed to be miserable at military school, even though it was pretty obvious to his teachers that he was never going to be any use as an army officer; later on, he made only rather half-hearted attempts to compensate for the intellectually unchallenging regime there, and he apparently had big gaps in his knowledge of German and classical literature to the end of his life (don't we all?). In any case, he didn't really look for models in German texts - his biggest influences were Russian, Scandinavian, Spanish and French, and not only writers but also painters and sculptors (Rodin especially). He never seems to have earned anything like as much from his writing as he needed to support himself, but there was always a patron or lover available to help him out (even his publisher was happy to give him money he knew he would never get back). The two castles where he wrote his most important works are perhaps typical of the way he lived - at Duino (near Trieste) he was allowed to stay as often as he liked as the guest of his aristocratic patron Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis; Muzot (near Sierre, Switzerland) was bought for him by his friends after the First World War.

Rilke's private life is almost as complicated as his wanderings around Europe - it's difficult to tell which of the many women in his life were lovers and which patrons, and he seems to have had the gift of remaining friends for life with (almost) all his ex-girlfriends. With his wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, and their daughter, Ruth, it wasn't quite so simple - the marriage lasted for 25 years, but they only spent about a year of it together. (Leppmann suggests that there might have been bureaucratic complications because of their different nationalities and (nominal) religions that discouraged them from seeking a divorce.)

Leppmann's biography is not exactly a light, quick read, but it tells us the things we need to know, takes its time to reflect on what they mean, and seems to strike a good balance between "life" and "work", usually taking a couple of chapters in each section of the book to analyse representative works in detail. I'm sure I'm going to be coming back to this as I dip further into the poems.

33thorold
Modifié : Sep 1, 2017, 11:30 am

Well, I was halfway through a novel, then for no very obvious reason I happened to wander into the civil engineering section of the city library and got sidetracked once again...

Land in zee : de watergeschiedenis van Nederland (2007) by Wilfried ten Brinke (Netherlands)



This is a comprehensive history of the relationship between land and water in the development of the Netherlands, from the last Ice Age to our present concerns about global warming and rising sea levels. And there turns out to be a lot more to it than windmills and fingers-in-the-dyke.

Ten Brinke, who writes from the point of view of a professional engineer with a realistic sense of the practical problems his predecessors had to deal with, takes us in quite some detail (we're spared the maths, but for the rest there's not much obvious concession to the lay reader) through the physical processes that led to the development of the wet, sandy, peaty delta, and the way these processes were increasingly influenced by the activity of humans, from Roman times on. The interesting thing, when you've been fed the "God made the world but the Dutch made Holland" myth, is that so many of the things humans did turned out to have unintended consequences that led to problems (not infrequently: disasters) for which new, imaginative engineering solutions had to be found, and these in turn created other problems. The story, as ten Brinke tells it, is one of incrementally optimised blundering, often hindered by conflicts of interest. It is - almost - reassuring to know that even the supremely competent Dutch engineers have often had almost as much difficulty as their colleagues in other parts of the world getting landowners and politicians to invest in big flood defence projects without the stimulus of a recent disaster. Or at least it would be reassuring if I didn't happen to live in a polder myself.

Another interesting thing that came out of the book is to realise how many different, often conflicting, goals are involved. Making land available for agriculture and housing, facilitating water transport, providing clean drinking-water, keeping feet dry along the coasts and rivers and in the big cities, making space for nature conservation, and even providing for deliberate flooding to stop invading armies (the Dutch military were still devoted to this system as late as the early stages of the Cold War, even though both Hitler and Napoleon had demonstrated key flaws in it...). And it's sometimes astonishing how values change: Johan van Veen, the heroic figure who steered through the implementation of the Delta Project after the disaster of 1953, turns out also to have had a serious plan in his pocket to turn the Waddenzee and its islands (now seen as a tremendously important piece of natural heritage) into a giant polder. Unimaginable a few decades later...

Yet another thing that ten Brinke comes back to frequently is how important the development of administrative bodies to look after water and drainage was, from the medieval Waterschappen (dyke councils) to the establishment in Napoleonic times of the central authority that became Rijkswaterstaat. Even here, though, there was some trial and error involved - part of the reason the 1953 storm did so much damage was that the Waterschappen were too small and localised to maintain their dykes effectively under modern conditions (there are now about 27 such authorities in the Netherlands; in 1953 it was more like 2700).

This is a very nicely presented book, with the text backed up by dozens of maps (both historic and modern) and illustrations. But you need to be pretty familiar with Dutch geography to follow some of the explanations - I found I was spending a lot of time studying 1:25000 topo maps (which I have in an app on my iPad) to keep track of all the current and former rivers, islands, canals and dykes that come up in the discussion. And I also have the impression that I now have a much better idea of how the Dutch river system fits together and why that matters.

34tonikat
Sep 1, 2017, 4:10 pm

Caught up with you a bit, interesting reviews again (and beyond those I write in reaction to) - Chatwin I must get back to, having only read The Songlines. I have In Patagonia as the nominal next. Interesting what you say of Ackroyd. He wrote an early book on trans. I heard recently - and I really can't say where and hope I have not imagined it - that he employs a team of researchers. This may be relevant to what you say. I'm surprised as I just find him encyclopaedic in some ways - and his Blake book was wonderful I thought, and read as having been well thought through and a labour of love. I have the first edition of his Dickens bio - i think he later rewrote it as in this edition there is some creative writing, maybe in Dickens' voice, or is it others (not read it yet to remember what I read of it), which proved controversial with some.

I enjoyed what you say of Marien Haushofer - it chimes with The Wall - or at least the film version I saw and greatly enjoyed a few years ago. I have the book as a result. Maybe I should move it up the pile as I am doing woefully at reading more female authors.

Good luck with Rilke, I've not got far with him either. Good to hear of his honesty about gaps...or I'm assuming he must have been honest in order for us to know of them. I'll remember Leppmann's bio should I ever make it that way.

35thorold
Modifié : Sep 5, 2017, 6:29 am

>34 tonikat: Yes, the Ackroyd did look a bit like a book written by a team. You could be right. And definitely read Chatwin. Don't overlook On the Black Hill - I think that's my favourite, last time I looked.

Back to the TBR pile, where I'm steadily working my way through Javier Cercas. This one turned out to have some interesting overlaps in themes with True history of the Kelly gang (see >23 thorold: above), but Cercas seems to be someone who looks for unanswerable questions whilst Carey is more interested in provoking us with simple answers:

Las leyes de la frontera (2012 - Outlaws) by Javier Cercas (Spain, 1962 - )

  

Unlike most of Cercas's books, this one is presented as a (fairly) straightforward, normal piece of imaginative fiction (although inevitably, it is based at least loosely on a real person). An unnamed writer is interviewing Ignacio Cañas about his connection with El Zarco (Blue-eyes), a long-term convict whose exploits as a juvenile delinquent during the period of the transition to democracy caught the imagination of Spanish journalists and film-makers, briefly turning him into a kind of Robin Hood figure.

These days, Cañas is a respectable criminal lawyer who has been representing El Zarco in his eternal disputes with the prison system, but what isn't so widely known is that during a few mad months in the summer of 1978, the 16-year-old Cañas rebelled against his middle-class background to join El Zarco's gang of juvenile criminals, stealing cars, snatching handbags and burgling holiday houses. With the interviewer's help, Cañas tries to sort out in his mind why this happened, why it didn't have any consequences for his bourgeois career, how he got drawn back into working for El Zarco, and what it was that was driving El Zarco and the rest of the gang. In particular, Cañas is puzzled about his relationship with El Zarco's closest associate, the enigmatic Tere - was it his attraction to her, or hers to him (or both), that drew him into the gang? or was she cynically using sex to manipulate him? or were their sexual encounters irrelevant to the whole thing? As the interviews keep on digging deeper, we realise that we have just as little reliable information as before - an imaginative novelist can answer questions about individual emotions and motivations, but an objective historian just has to leave them open. And the same goes for practically all the other "why?" questions raised in the book - by going over what happened and what people said, we can expose possible reasons for those things, but there is nothing that will allow us to decide reliably which account is "the correct one".

36thorold
Sep 5, 2017, 10:49 am

...and some more slightly random non-fiction:

The essential engineer : why science alone will not solve our global problems (2010) by Henry Petroski (USA, 1942 - )

  

When I do a Google search for the phrase "scientists have", the top ten results look like this:

- scientists at IBM have captured 330 terabytes of uncompressed data ... into a cartridge that can fit into the palm of your hand
- Scientists Have Found the Oldest Known Human Fossils.
- Scientists have discovered a chemical that causes any skin type to tan
- scientists have revealed the chemical structure of one of the key markers of Alzheimer's disease
- Scientists Have A Dark Warning For You About Sex Robots.
- Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
- American scientists have accomplished a major first ... a human embryo has been genetically modified.
- Scientists Have Captured Chimpanzees Performing a Bizarre Ritual
- Scientists have found a way to potentially stop us ageing
- Scientists have cracked Rome's secret to waterproof concrete


That list obviously says more about the state of (clickbait-) journalism in the 21st century than it does about real science, but it does provide very nice evidence for the problem that is exercising Petroski in this book: the majority of the items in the list clearly relates not to scientific discoveries but to engineering achievements, i.e. the application of technology to the solution of specific problems. Apparently, journalists are still as happy as they always were to attribute every step forward to a scientist. In the wonderful world of news, engineers don't seem to exist.

(I did the search for "engineers have" as well - only two out of the first twenty results were from news sites, all the others were from professional associations. But at least I didn't find any evidence for another theory that Petroski quotes from a fifties textbook, that there are only two categories of science & technology stories: "scientific achievements" and "engineering failures"...)

To anyone who's worked in science or engineering, there probably won't be much in this book that seems new or sensational - Petroski explains what it is that engineers do (create, solve) that is different from what scientists do (discover, understand, explain), and points out the fallacy of the old idea that pure science is the necessary precursor for technological achievements. Not only do real scientists usually depend on (engineered) instruments to obtain the data that they use in their analysis, but practical engineering also often runs ahead of theoretical knowledge (e.g. the industrial use of steam engines led to the development of theoretical models of thermodynamics in the 19th century, not vice-versa).

Another important element of Petroski's argument, the basis for the "global problems" bit of the subtitle here, is the idea that engineers who understand about practical manufacturing, costing, regulatory and environmental matters, reliability, risk analysis, etc., are always needed when something has to be taken from a scientific principle that could potentially solve our problem to a practical implementation of that solution that can be marketed and used safely and economically. And that goes for electric cars and CO2 mitigation as much as it does for deflecting the asteroid that is hurtling towards us.

Petroski writes well and articulately, as always, even if one or two of his illustrative anecdotes are a little too well-known. And he makes a good case for his profession, as you would expect him to. But I have a feeling that this is another book that is unlikely ever to reach anyone who doesn't already agree with its arguments before picking it up, but maybe it could come in handy if you have a young niece or nephew wondering about taking engineering courses...

37thorold
Sep 7, 2017, 6:40 am

I've been meaning to have a look at the Turkish writer Elif Şafak since her name came up in Geert Mak's book about Istanbul, which I read a couple of months ago. Her most recent book appeared in my Scribd audiobook recommendations just at the right moment...

Three daughters of Eve (2016) by Elif Şafak (Turkey, etc., 1971 - )
Audiobook, narrated by Alix Dunmore

  

A random incident of street-crime prompts bourgeois Istanbul housewife Peri to look back 15 years to her time in Oxford and her encounter there with a controversial philosophy don, Professor Azur. This in turn allows Şafak to have a bit of fun mocking the Turkish upper classes whilst exploring the tensions inevitably set up in people who grow up exposed to a constant debate between Islam, Kemalist secularism, western liberalism and modern capitalist ultra-nationalism. At home in Istanbul the young Peri feels under pressure to accept each rival ideology out of loyalty to the person close to her who represents it; in Oxford she is faced with the bigger challenge of making her own mind up, provoked by Azur and Peri's student friends Mona (Muslim feminist) and Shirin (secular fashion-victim). What's more, all this turns out to be happening in 2001, and people of Muslim background are under more pressure than ever to justify themselves in the eyes of westerners. Sometimes it all feels much more like a constructed example in a philosophy textbook than a novel.

There's a lot of interesting discussion in this book, but ultimately - inevitably, I suppose - it doesn't come to any clear conclusion. Şafak doesn't have an easy answer to the problems of the world in her pocket, unfortunately, so we are left with little more than an invitation to be open to debate, to stand up for our own principles, and to listen to the views of people we disagree with. Which is all very well, of course, but from Şafak's reputation as a fearless challenger of censorship and bigotry, I would have expected something a bit less tentative.

All the same, Peri is an engaging character, and there's a lot of nicely observed detail in the book. I enjoyed both the Istanbul and Oxford sections (although I did find it a bit disconcerting to hear someone being nostalgic about student days that took place a full generation after mine...!).

The audiobook narration by Alix Dunmore worked pretty well, for the most part, but I was thrown off a little by the convention she adopts that Turkish characters in the book should always speak with a conspicuous "Turkish accent", whether they are speaking Turkish or English. Obviously, it doesn't make any sense that people should have a foreign accent in their own language, and it is also rather questionable in English - people from the sort of social circles represented in this book, most of them educated abroad, would be mortified at the notion that they speak English with an accent like a carpet-seller...

38thorold
Sep 7, 2017, 8:31 am

...and a book that needs no particular reason to get to the top of the pile:

Runaway (2004) by Alice Munro (Canada, 1931 - )

  

The trouble with Alice Munro is that she is so consistently good at what she does that I want to say almost exactly the same things about this collection as about all the others I've read so far. Every story in the book takes you unmistakably into Alice Munro country, that world in which people are unaccountably drawn to ruin their lives by misreading a situation or failing to grasp an opportunity (more often than not an opportunity three or four decades ago). But each story also does something radical and unique to bend the formula of the short story in a way that you would have sworn before reading it couldn't be done. There ought to be a law against it, but fortunately there isn't...

39Dilara86
Modifié : Sep 7, 2017, 12:30 pm

>37 thorold: Despite the didacticism you describe, I'm really tempted to buy this book - mostly because its themes are close to my heart. But when you say that Turkish characters always speak with a Turkish accent, is that just the audiobook reader's *oral* accent, or did the translator write Turkish-flavoured dialogue as well?

40thorold
Modifié : Sep 7, 2017, 4:12 pm

>39 Dilara86: No, I think it's just the way the audiobook reader chose to perform it. I glanced through a paper copy in a bookshop and didn't see any sign of that kind of quaintness. (I don't think it's a translation, BTW - Şafak writes in both Turkish and English, and there's no translator credited, so I assume this one was written in English.)

41Dilara86
Sep 8, 2017, 4:51 am

>40 thorold: Oh good. I'm reading Pillars of Salt by Fadia Faqir at the moment (she's originally from Jordan and she writes in English), and making very slow progress so far because I'm finding the "Arabian storytelling" style hard to get into. (One example: "The English had killed Harb, the twin of my soul. His gentle hand had stroked my braidless hair, 'Don't cry, twin of my soul. Don't cry. By your grandmother Sabha's life you will be happy with me.'") Also, the fact that Elif Şafak lives in Turkey but writes in English makes Three Daughters of Eve a good fit for Reading Globally's non-majority language writers theme.

42edwinbcn
Sep 8, 2017, 8:21 am

Nice to catch up on your reading.

43thorold
Sep 14, 2017, 9:41 am

Distractions from reading are starting to creep in again, which is probably a good thing, but I have finished another audiobook and a novel from the library in the last couple of days...

Firstly, back to crime, and a series people keep telling me to try:

Holy disorders (1946) by Edmund Crispin (UK, 1921-1978 )
Audiobook, narrated by Paul Panting

  

The composer Bruce Montgomery, mainly known for his film-scores, e.g. for the Carry On and Doctor films of the 50s and 60s, wrote crime stories under the pen-name Edmund Crispin, which turns out to have been taken from the name of a character in a Michael Innes story. Innes was of course the pen-name of a critic who later became an English professor at Oxford, so there's a certain circularity in all this...

There have been some rather untoward goings-on in the organ loft of a West Country cathedral, and church-music composer Geoffrey Vintner finds himself playing Watson to the tetchy Professor Gervase Fen's Holmes as they try to disentangle an increasingly complex plot. There's a great deal of silliness, most of it fun but quite irrelevant to the crime, as well as bucketloads of allusions to both serious and light literature. However, it's a bit disconcerting to find that Crispin can't quite make up his mind whether he's writing a lurid thriller or the kind of English detective story that relies on the reader keeping track of the movements of a whole chapter of clergy to the nearest minute and understanding the significance of a 32' organ stop: there's nothing really wrong with mixing the two subgenres, you just don't quite expect it...

I expect I'll read a few more of these, because they are clearly fun and seem to be reasonably well done, all the obvious faults of style being deliberate provocations, but I'm not quite an instant convert yet...

44thorold
Sep 14, 2017, 11:43 am

I seem to be having good luck with Australian writers lately - this is another one I've been a bit reluctant to pick up (although of course I heard a lot of good things about it when it won the Booker three years ago) but which turned out to be a must-read when I finally got to it:

The narrow road to the deep North (2014) by Richard Flanagan (Australia, 1961- )

  

Writing about great atrocities, especially when the atrocity is well-known and the experience is described at second-hand, can be a tricky business - it's all too easy for a writer to employ cheap tricks to milk our emotions without actually saying anything that changes the way we think about the events described. And of course we all know (in outline) about the Burma death railway, and given the number of people caught up in World War II, it's not unlikely that we've met someone who was a prisoner of the Japanese "and has not been the same since" (or heard of husbands and sons who never came back). Whilst the survivors I've met hardly ever spoke directly about what had happened to them, you only needed to see the way they reacted to a casual comment about the excellence of Japanese cars or hifi systems to get an idea of the impact the experience had on them.

Which is all a way of saying that Flanagan has to do something special and unexpected to make it worth our while reading this book. And he does, in several different, complementary ways. We get the inevitable vivid and painful descriptions of atrocities, but they are carefully unemotional and objective, obviously rooted in Flanagan's research, focussing on very specific physical things - hunger, injuries, the symptoms of disease - and on the social and cultural mismatch between the Australian prisoners and the Japanese guards. Unlike most writers of PoW stories, Flanagan takes viewpoint characters from both sides, and tries to show us why the Japanese act in the ways they do, and drill down into how a love of poetry can be reconciled with arbitrary beatings and decapitations, and with forcing people to work under conditions where around 20% of the POW workforce (and perhaps 50% of the Asian slave-workers) died in the course of 1942-3. We don't quite get to engage sympathetically with Major Nakamura and Colonel Kota, but we do get at least a thought-provoking glimmer of what the railway project might have looked like to them.

The other major thing that Flanagan does is to put the experience of 1942-3 in the context of his characters' whole lives. What happens when a relatively ordinary person, who has found an ability in himself to respond extraordinarily to an extraordinary situation, returns to "normal life", where such demands don't exist? And what if the experience that you think is defining for your whole life is something completely different from that episode of heroism/war-crimes? This is again risky for Flanagan, because his main Australian character, Dorrigo Evans, tends to act in unattractive ways at home (he's a serial philanderer, and only moderately competent as a surgeon), and we have to spend a good deal of time with him. But he's entirely human: the recurrent references to Tennyson's Ulysses give him a sense of direction we can identify with despite all the motel room adultery, the harping on a lost pre-war love, and the awkward duty-visits to ex-comrades and their widows.

A difficult and challenging book, which perhaps doesn't always hit exactly the note it is aiming for, but it does consistently get close enough to compel you to stay with it despite the occasional dull passage. Very powerful writing in the set-piece scenes, necessary context elsewhere.

45thorold
Modifié : Sep 16, 2017, 12:05 pm

This one's been on the TBR pile since shortly after I read La Place earlier this year:

Mémoire de fille (2016 - no translation yet, AFAIK) by Annie Ernaux (France, 1940 - )



In her most recent book, Ernaux goes back to a phase of her life she's deliberately skipped over in her earlier books, because she hasn't been able to find any real connection with the person she was then, the eighteen-year-old Annie Duchesne of the summer of 1958, at last free of parental supervision to spend a couple of months working as a monitrice at a summer camp, and eager for that, enormously meaningful, first sexual experience which she knows that narrative inevitability is going to provide for. Needless to say, it doesn't work out the way she imagined it, she makes a fool of herself and gets into one of those self-hating phases of growing-up that most of us have the misfortune to go through at some point. All very banal in substance, but the way Ernaux engages with her teen self from the perspective of a novelist in her seventies brings all that adolescent misery to life in a way that is anything but banal. There's a lot that is quite specific to what it was like to be a young woman in the late fifties - someone who had grown up with expectations shaped by romantic films and women's magazines but was just about to get the chance to read La deuxième sexe - but there's also a good deal that is much more general than that, about being young and dealing with the obligation to create a future for yourself to meet the expectations of your parents, teachers and peers. And living things as though they are going to be written one day. Very interesting, sometimes painful, sometimes touching, sometimes very funny.

46dchaikin
Sep 16, 2017, 11:50 am

Mark - not sure I'll ever catch up here, but just wanted to say I'm glad you're well. And, I'm enjoying reading through your now old reviews.

47dchaikin
Sep 16, 2017, 6:59 pm

>33 thorold: "incrementally optimised blundering" - this is a phrase that needs more traction. Fascinating review, by they way.

48thorold
Sep 18, 2017, 5:00 am

"Swiss crime" is a subgenre that sounds as though it ought to be one of those famous mock-examples of oxymoron, like "English cooking" and "military intelligence"...

Justiz (1985 - The execution of justice) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Switzerland, 1921-1990)

 

The playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt was of course one of Switzerland's best-known 20th century writers: as well as his work for the theatre, he's famous for two very black, philosophical crime novels written right at the beginning of his career in the early 50s, (Der Richter und sein Henker and Der Verdacht).

A prominent Zürich businessman walks into the city's most exclusive restaurant and politely greets the professor of German, who's dining there. He then produces a revolver and shoots him dead in front of a select group of witnesses including the local police chief and the public prosecutor. Before anyone has time to react, he walks out again and carries on with his programme for the evening - the confusion is so complete that the police only catch up with him at the Tonhalle, where he's listening to a performance of Bruckner's seventh symphony (and the police have to wait for the end of the piece before moving in to arrest him...).

It's probably only Dürrenmatt who could turn so transparent an act into a murky crime story full of moral ambiguities, and even Dürrenmatt had trouble with it - he started to write the book in 1957, and came back to it several times over the next 25 years, but never really worked out how to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion until the 1980s, when his publishers asked him to prepare the fragment for publication as part of his complete works. In its final form, it became essentially a satire on the idea that there can be any certainty in the concept of "criminal justice" (a theme that comes up quite a bit in Dürrenmatt), as well as poking a bit of malicious fun at Swiss bourgeois life, where "culture" and "society" always get subordinated to "business".

The book sometimes feels a bit disjointed because of the long gestation period and the very confusing timeline (the narrator of the main part of the text is an alcoholic disgraced lawyer, Spät, who has clearly lost his grasp of the order in which things happened), but there are a lot of very telling observations and some good jokes, so it's still well worth a look, even if it isn't Dürrenmatt on top of his form.

49thorold
Modifié : Sep 23, 2017, 12:28 pm

This is one that I bought online in a fit of enthusiasm for recent French literature a little while ago - it's been sitting on my shelf ever since I realised that it was over 700 pages long. I needn't have worried - it was a surprisingly quick and very enjoyable read when I finally got to it. And it gave me an opportunity to use the word “eponymous” in a review, which is always fun...

Le club des incorrigibles optimistes (2009 - The incorrigible optimists' club) by Jean-Michel Guenassia (Algeria, France, 1950- )

 

An entertaining and very absorbing novel, in which the growing-up of a teenage boy in late-fifties/early-sixties Paris is set against the back-stories of a group of refugees from Iron Curtain countries - the members of the eponymous club - who befriend him and try to teach him to take chess seriously. Add in a dysfunctional family of plumbers, two young women who could have walked out of any 50s French film, at least two literary lions, and the Algerian crisis, and you’ve got more than enough to fill 700 pages without it ever seeming too much.

50thorold
Modifié : Sep 24, 2017, 3:38 am

I picked this up because I remembered liking The hours...

The snow queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham (US, 1952 - )

 

An over-written little book that unfortunately fails to answer the question why we should be interested in any of these people or their depressing stories. There are some paragraphs that I'm sure would sound absolutely beautiful read aloud, and there are a few interesting and original bits of observation, but I found myself coming to the conclusion that the kind of wistful novels about gay men from New York City I so used to enjoy 25 years ago must have come to the end of their useful life. Sad.

ETA: ...but I was quite touched to see a character in the book twice referring to George W Bush as the worst president in US history. Some assumptions go out of date faster than you could possibly imagine :-(

51thorold
Oct 2, 2017, 4:52 am

So, Q3 is over, it's October already, before I'm ready for it, as usual...

Naturally, the wonderful Excel sheet I made in my lunch breaks on the office PC doesn't work any more on my Mac at home - continuing to develop my spreadsheet skills wasn't really on my priority list for the first months of retirement, so at least for Q3 we'll have to make do with stats presented less glamorously than usual:

Books read in Q3: 33 (Q1 to Q3: 84)

By language:
Dutch: 1 (12)
English: 16 (37)
French: 7 (18)
German: 7 (14)
Spanish: 2 (3)

By author gender:
F: 10 (15)
M: 23 (69)

By genre:
General fiction: 17 (46)
Crime: 4 (8)
Assorted non-fiction: 12 (30)

So, not surprisingly (given that I was ill and otherwise out of action for about six weeks), I read more books than usual this quarter. I also managed to read a few more female authors than in Q1 and Q2, but not as many as I hoped to.

52thorold
Oct 2, 2017, 5:04 am

...and my Q4 thread is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/270490

53AlisonY
Déc 1, 2017, 1:43 pm

I was very behind in catching up with your reviews. You have added a few books to my teetering wish list there. Very interesting reads.

54wandering_star
Déc 13, 2017, 4:47 am

>26 thorold: Catching up after a loooong time. Howled with laughter at your description of Tristan Gooley's authorial voice. I am reading one of his books at the moment (about water) and while some of it is very interesting I do not think I would like to go on one of his training walks.

55thorold
Déc 13, 2017, 11:03 am

>54 wandering_star: It would be interesting to meet someone who’s actually been on one and hear what he’s like in real life!