thorold lives in a society of emitters in Q2 2022

Je vis dans une société d'émetteurs (en étant un moi-même) : chaque personne que je rencontre ou qui m'écrit, m'adresse un livre, un texte, un bilan, un prospectus, une protestation, une invitation à un spectacle, à une exposition, etc. La jouissance d'écrire, de produire, presse de toutes parts...
—Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) p.96

Rough translation: "I live in a society of emitters {senders, broadcasters?} (whilst being one myself): each person I meet or who writes to me, sends me a book, a text, a report, a prospectus, a protest, an invitation to a show, an exhibition, etc. The pleasure of writing, of producing, presses from all sides..."
That was written a quarter of a century before the age of social media.

Welcome to my Q2 thread!

You can find the Q1 thread here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/338153

Q1 Reading stats:

I finished 41 books in Q1 (Q4: 47).

Author gender: F: 7, M: 33, other: 1 (70% M) (Q4: 68% M)

Language: EN 22, NL 6, DE 6, FR 6, ES 1 (47% EN) (Q4 57% EN)
Translations: 1 from Polish

8 books were related to the Q1 "Indian Ocean" theme

Publication dates from 1850 to 2022, mean 1981, median 1997; 6 books were published in the last five years.

Formats: library 0, physical books from the TBR 31, physical books from the main shelves (re-reads) 2, audiobooks 0, paid ebooks 5, other free/borrowed 3 — 66% from the TBR (Q4: 17% from the TBR)

36 unique first authors (1.3 books/author; Q4 1.3)

By gender: M 28, F 7, Other 1 : 78% M (Q4 78% M)
By main country: UK 10, NL 7, FR 4, DE 4, US 4, and various singletons

TBR pile evolution:
01/01/2022: 93 books (77389 book-days) (change: 8 read, 12 added)
01/04/2022: 84 books (77762 book-days) (change: 31 read, 22 added)

A good bit of TBR pile churn going on in the last months, but I seem to have been reading mostly from the top again, so the average days per book has gone up from 832 to 926. That's obviously related to the lockdown period when I stopped going to the library again, but I should try to read one or two more from the long-stay end. The oldest on the pile are two books from June 2011, then there's one from 2012 and one from 2014.

Highlights of Q1
— The books of Jacob — a fabulously complicated historical novel about a subject completely new to me.
— catching up with Abdulrazak Gurnah for the Indian Ocean thread
— re-reading David Copperfield at last
— Footsteps : adventures of a romantic biographer — I must read more Richard Holmes
— getting to read Patrick Gale's new novel Mother's boy (and revisiting its subject, Charles Causley)
— discovering Henry de Monfreid
— Jan Swafford's Brahms biography
— and of course reading my first home-made hardback!

Q2 Goals
— attack the old end of the TBR (no, really, this time I mean it...)
— read Ali Smith's new book, when it arrives
— the RG "Outcasts and Castaways" theme read
— Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell for the Victorian thread: I've already started The law and the lady
— all the other Q1 goals I forgot about

— I'm also hoping to travel a bit, with three short trips lined up before the end of June: fingers crossed that they can go ahead...

First book of Q2 — this is one that's been on the TBR since 2017 when I had a little diversion into reading Mythologies and Le plaisir du texte.

Roland Barthes, par Roland Barthes (1975) by Roland Barthes (France, 1915-1980)

  

Well, it wouldn't be a dull, conventional memoir, would it? Writing about himself, Barthes limits the hard biographical facts to a few briefly annotated family photos from his childhood in Bayonne and a two-page CV, and in between them he gives us a couple of hundred index-card sized fragments talking about his "real" life, which of course revolves around ideas and writings rather than boring things like dates, places and people. None of the fragments is much more than a paragraph or two long, with the only slightly longer pieces being a catalogue of books he might have written but didn't, and a discussion (you can see where this is going...) of the pleasures of the very short form.

In between times, we get cartoons, photos, sample exam questions, and a couple of examples of Barthes's painting — my favourite was an abstract doodle in the middle of a sheet of Sorbonne notepaper, titled "Gaspillage" (wasting paper). As if that wasn't enough, we also get the sheet music for a song he composed — I haven't tried to play that. He was obviously the Richard Feynman of semiotics.

You probably need at least a little bit of tolerance for French semioticians to enjoy this, and it's obviously more of a bedside book to dip into than a book you should read in one go, but if you like that sort of thing...

>4 thorold: Something to add to the aims for Q2: I see I’m creeping up on my 2000th LT review (>5 thorold: was no.1991). I managed to make The magic mountain review no.1000, so I need to do something a little bit special for 2000 as well. I was wondering about something related to what Victoria Wood used to call “the Minnellium” (see https://youtu.be/zk6kNA9zKzY).

Any suggestions, anybody? I’ve already done The discovery of heaven, The elementary particles and Stieg Larsson…

>6 thorold: No suggestions yet, but interesting question. You made me curious as to how many reviews I have written and when I might be having a noteworthy milestone. Not for a while, next year...

Meanwhile, I've been trying out a new strategy: instead of (or perhaps as well as...) talking about reading the oldest books on the TBR, I've actually read one of the two oldest. This one came back from the charity shop in June 2011, so it's been on the pile for just short of 4000 of those 78000 book-days I was talking about.

To give some sort of perspective, during the time I was letting this book ripen on the shelf, its author added four more parts to the series it comes from. The most recent of those is well over 800 pages thick, too...

De gevarendriehoek (1985) by A F Th van der Heijden (Netherlands, 1951- )

  

During the opening chapter of this second part of the "Tandeloze Tijd" sequence, we see perpetual student Albert holed up in his parents' home in Geldrop and at last preparing for his final exams. But it's a false dawn, unfortunately: A.F.Th. plays his Proustian joker and whisks Albert back to his earliest childhood memories, and it takes a good 450 pages to get him back to the point where we came in at the start of the previous volume. A small bonus is that we learn how some of the previously unexplained characters fit in, but I suspect most readers will by now be despairing of the Sisyphean task of attacking the remaining six parts of this autobiographical roman fleuve...

The "danger triangle" of the title defines the bounds of the Geldrop neighbourhood where Albert spent his early years, cut off from the rest of the world by a main road, a canal and a railway line. But it also refers to another kind of triangle that features in Albert's nightmares about his "sexual inadequacy", a problem he spends most of the second part of the book trying to rectify. It's difficult to say whether Albert's relationships with his various vulnerable girlfriends are more disturbing than the drunken violence and the hecatomb of domestic animals that between them dominate the first half of the book, though.

Strangely, despite the very unappealing characters and subject-matter, this is a book that does suck you in, and once I'd actually opened it I kept on reading with a kind of revolted fascination. Van der Heijden is a clever and vivid story-teller, and he knows what he's doing. Improbable as it all is, you feel as if you're getting a realistic picture of working-class life in the Eindhoven suburbs of the fifties and sixties.

This is a book I came across on archive.org a few years ago whilst browsing around for old yachting memoirs. A bit outside the scope of what I was looking for, but I downloaded it anyway.

I thought it might be fun to read it for the Victorian theme:

A yachting cruise in the Baltic (1863) by Samuel Robert Graves (UK, Ireland, 1818-1873)

  

Photo of Graves's statue in St George's Hall Liverpool by Mike Peel, via Wikipedia

In the 1860s the idea of low-budget cruising yachts accessible to ordinary middle-class people was still some way away (John MacGregor was just beginning to experiment with his one-person yawl Rob Roy), and "yachting" was reserved for the sort of people who run "superyachts" today. People like S R Graves, Irish-born Liverpool businessman and shipowner, Mayor of Liverpool, Commodore of Royal Mersey Yacht Club, chair of every conceivable committee concerned with the arts, sciences, economy or welfare, who would be elected MP for the city a couple of years after this book came out.

Graves was no rough-hewn shipowner in the Onedin Line tradition, but a classic Victorian polymath, interested in everything from palaeontology to public health, soaking up facts and figures the way modern travellers soak up sunshine and booze. He was clearly very proud of his Irish heritage, and often draws parallels from Irish history, whether or not they happen to be helpful. The book is absolutely groaning with data, with no fewer than four appendices containing detailed digests of the economies of the countries he visited. And in case you ever wanted to establish a Foundling Hospital, you will find enough information here to build your own and calculate the costs and mortality rates.

Graves's yacht, the patriotically named Ierne, was in the classic mode of the time, with a professional crew of about six, plus a steward and a Baltic pilot ("easily found for around 10 pounds a month"). If something interesting happened at a convenient time during the day, the Commodore and his travelling companion the Doctor might help the crew with sail-handling, but apart from that they seem to have spent their time at sea fishing, sketching, and investigating the life of the sea-bed with the help of a marine-biology trawl and a jar of spirits. But not on Sundays, of course: one of the few negative things Graves mentions about Ierne is how limited her "Sunday library" is. Once Divine Service is over, it's a dull day for them, sharing the couple of books of old sermons that are all she has on board in the way of non-secular reading-matter.

There's not much in the way of descriptions of sailing and navigation here, the book really comes alive when they get into port.

We hear about Copenhagen, Stockholm and Uppsala. In Stockholm, they bump into two honorary members of the Royal Mersey: Prince Oscar of Sweden, who arranges for them to see Drottningholm and some other royal residences, and Queen Victoria's 18-year-old son Prince Alfred, who is on an "informal" visit to the Baltic with about half the Royal Navy. Alfred urges them to come to come to St Petersburg with him, so they tag along with the fleet, giving Graves the excuse to bombard us with information about the Navy as it was in that awkward transitional stage, half still stuck in the Nelson era and half already playing with ironclad ships, steam propulsion and breech-loading guns.

We then get the full tour of St Petersburg in the days of Alexander II (Graves does not approve of Catherine the Great and her Hermitage full of atheistic Frenchmen), before Graves and the Doctor capriciously decide to hop on the recently-opened railway to Moscow, leaving the Ierne to make her own way to Göteborg and wait for them. Moscow — the first time I've read about it in a yachting book — gets a detailed inspection too, including the waterworks and numerous hospitals and churches. Then it's back to Sweden by steamer via Finland and through the Gotha Canal to meet the Ierne again for the trip home around Cape Wrath to the Mersey.

The Ierne (far right) off Waxholm with Prince Alfred's ship and its escort

>9 thorold: Fascinating, and also a reminder that I must read MacGregor's book, here somewhere.

>10 SassyLassy: Oh, yes, you must! MacGregor is a true Victorian eccentric. E E Middleton, who sailed a MacGregor-designed boat round Britain (The cruise of the Kate), is even odder. Jonathan Raban sums him up delightfully as "a man whose head was peppered with stings from the swarm of bees that he kept in his bonnet".

----
Another book I'd set aside for the Indian Ocean. As I've said before, I've never quite made my mind up about Ondaatje, and this book left me as perplexed as ever.

Anil's ghost (2000) by Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka, Canada, 1943- )

  

Anil is a forensic pathologist, who returns to Sri Lanka, the country where she grew up, to take part in a UN investigation of human rights abuses during the recent (and still ongoing) civil wars. Together with archaeologist Sarath, his surgeon brother Gamini, and the artist Ananda, she pieces together the history of a recent skeleton that has anomalously turned up in an archaeological site from a much older period.

This is a book full of fascinating and often horrifying details about the consequences of communal violence, with some really beautiful writing that sticks in the mind, but it's also a very discursive kind of a book, constantly shying away from anything that looks like a neatly-resolved plot, something Ondaatje clearly felt would be inappropriate in this kind of context. As a result, there are all kinds of side-tracks that tell us fascinating things about the lives of forensic pathologists or plumbago miners, but don't necessarily deepen our understanding of the characters and their story. In a less-distinguished writer you'd call this "research dumping".

I think the focus on the technical aspects of what extreme violence does to human bodies works against the book as well: we end up with a striking, but very generic, picture of communal violence that doesn't have much to tie it to the specific Sri Lankan setting. Also, it gives a lot of weight to scientific details that Ondaatje isn't necessarily very competent to work with on his own: There were a couple of unimportant but conspicuous errors in technical terms that made it apparent that he hadn't run the final text past his expert advisors (e.g. "microtone" for "microtome", and "millimetres" for "millilitres" — those could have been dictation mistakes).

>11 thorold: Although I haven't read it in a while, Anil's Ghost is a favorite. I found it less of a plot-driven book than a big-question book. Besides the obvious themes of identity and the effects of trauma, lies the question of truth and it's relationship to justice. At one point one of the characters says, I would tell the truth if I thought it would make any difference (paraphrased). In violent, chaotic times, does the truth matter? Does it effect anything? Is it worth it to suffer for the truth, if you know from the outset that it will not change anything? Does truth exist in a vacuum? I like thinking about these things, so this book resonated with me.

>12 labfs39: Yes, that makes sense — there’s a kind of tension between the mechanical process of establishing truth from evidence and the human question of what you can do with that truth. I suppose that’s part of why it can feel like an unsatisfying book, because we’re conditioned to want stories where people discover truth and as a result they can all live happily ever after and marry the prince.

>11 thorold: "a man whose head was peppered with stings from the swarm of bees that he kept in his bonnet" I love that!

>11 thorold: >12 labfs39: Also a favourite book of mine for reasons you've both given. I'm not fond of happily ever after books.

>13 thorold: I blame the Lais for that conditioning.

It took some time, but I worked through your fascinating March and now yachting April (Moscow is a very odd place to yacht, but it does keep with the little viking tracking that seems to be running through the book.) Admiring all your coursing through.

>15 dchaikin: Sorry March was so long! Only a little bit of sailing in this next one...

This was added to the TBR pile the same day as >8 thorold:. The two together amount to about 10% of the total book-days in the pile. The next oldest after these was added on 18 April 2012, so at least for the next nine days I can say there's nothing over ten years old on the pile...

I think it sat so long on the pile because I picked it up in the charity shop after having enjoyed other books by the same author (mostly the Latin American trilogy) rather than because I was particularly interested in reading this one. You need a bit more than that before you commit yourself to 800 pages of war and disaster. It might've been a good one to take on a long flight, but somehow I never thought of that.

Birds without wings (2004) by Louis de Bernières (UK, 1954- )

  

This historical novel takes us through the momentous bit of Turkish history between 1900 and 1923, with the narrative viewpoint alternating between a helicopter-view of the big events of the career of Mustafa Kemal and a tortoise's-eye-view of the inhabitants of a remote, small town on the Anatolian coast near Fethiye (then called Telmessos).

Rather like Ivo Andrić in The bridge on the Drina, de Bernières shows us the Ottoman Empire as a polity that for centuries made it possible for people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds to live together in reasonable harmony and without slaughtering each other, even if that life involved a lot of poverty and deprivation for most of them, and no political or legal rights worth speaking of.

The Muslims and Greek Christians who live in Eskibahçe speak the same language, have all been living in Anatolia for centuries, intermarrying from time to time, and don't think of themselves as "Turks" and "Greeks" until nationalist agitators come along and tell them that's what they are. As far as de Bernières is concerned, the "historic grievances" that led to the Greek occupation of Anatolia and the subsequent mass deportations of 1923 had their origins in the political ambitions of people like Venizelos and Mustafa Kemal, amplified into a revenge-cycle by the sort of atrocities that take place automatically as soon as you start an armed conflict.

There is some great, if rather romanticised, storytelling in this book: the Eskibahçe characters are full of interesting human quirks, and de Bernières cleverly mixes in local colour and traditions. The descriptions of Gallipoli from the viewpoint of an Ottoman soldier in the trenches are gripping too. But the political rant in the narrator's own voice in the "history" chapters doesn't seem to work as well: de Bernières is (understandably) so angry at the abuses and humanitarian disasters that leaders on all sides allowed to happen that he makes a lot of sweeping accusations that go beyond the evidence he has shown us. We're inclined to believe his assertions that Kemal, Venizelos, Lloyd George and the Kaiser are a bunch of irresponsible murderous ruffians, of course, and that all Italians except Mussolini are saints, but it would be nicer to be allowed to draw our own conclusions rather than have to take that as axiomatic. And of course, the fact that we know this is a British writer speaking on behalf of Ottoman/Turkish/Greek characters doesn't help.

Oddly, the thing I noticed most about this book before reading it, the fact that it's nearly 800 pages long, didn't really seem to matter. The use of multiple different types of narration results in quite a bit of repetition, but it felt like the sort of book where you could just dig in and let all that wash over you. De Bernière's writing isn't the sort of thing where you have to read a sentence several times. It would probably work really well as an audiobook.

>16 thorold: That's one I've had on the shelf forever too. Good to know it holds up—I'll hang on to it until I can read it.

The Muslims and Greek Christians who live in Eskibahçe speak the same language, have all been living in Anatolia for centuries, intermarrying from time to time, and don't think of themselves as "Turks" and "Greeks" until nationalist agitators come along and tell them that's what they are.

I don't buy this for a minute. It's a beloved trope of some Western historians, particularly Anglo with a jones for the Ottomans, that the Balkans were a mush of un-self-conscious sheep who didn't know what languages they spoke, whence they came, who they were. It's class-A racism in action and no more. And insofar ignorance was a factor in the lives of those peoples, it was due to those "benevolent" masters who for centuries kept them with terror and taxes rolling in the mud, without roads, without schools, without, as you note, "political or legal rights worth speaking of". And that's some enviable, desirable state of things? Funny, I don't hear them singing hosannas to the USSR.

Bernieres always sounded like trash and I guess this confirms it to me.

Sorry about grumbling.

>18 LolaWalser: It does seem plausible that Greek Christians in Asia Minor didn’t exactly identify with Athens as their cultural homeland until someone told them to do that (although most likely that someone was their priest), and Bernières does make a point of the almost total illiteracy under the Ottomans, but beyond that I’m sure you’re right, and there’s a lot of romantic wishful thinking in the whole thing.

ETA: I suppose it’s the classic conservative idea that if something bad happens it’s the result of unnecessary change, not a consequence of a previous unsatisfactory state.

>19 thorold:

Greeks knew they were Christian, Turks knew they were Muslim, the very concept of "intermarriage" and peaceful co-existence demands that there exist separate groups. People always know who they are, even if they ignore (don't know or suppress knowledge) of every ancestor exactly. The poor may be illiterate and kept so, but they had calendars and name days, familial histories which ensured that no Muhammad was born to a Greek and no George to a Muslim.

The Ottomans had zero interest in creating a melting pot, their whole taxation system and other exploitative measures depended on differential treatment of Muslims and the Christian reaya. To be sure, a small percentage of converts from Christianity was encouraged and necessary as vassals, but those tended to be carefully selected (basically from the rich).

As for the oppressed, the very poor etc. of course there are different strategies of survival, but those also don't mean some innocent primal state,, but on the contrary presuppose an ability to recognize and play with multiple identities. When Albanians gave Christian AND Muslim names to their children, they weren't doing this out of ignorance, but precisely because of specific knowledge.

One really ought to go look for the first instance when this "they didn't know who they were" claptrap arose and I bet you it wouldn't stand scrutiny today better than any of the anthropology of the "exotics".

>20 LolaWalser: "One really ought to go look for the first instance when this "they didn't know who they were" claptrap arose and - would either be a really fun study and droll story of repetitive romantic leanings toward mythical golden ages.

>16 thorold: it is on audible, a 2004 edition.

By chance, the next-oldest book on the TBR also took me to the Eastern Mediterranean, albeit a few decades later.

This one arrived on the pile on 18 April 2012, so it's a few days short of its tenth anniversary. The next-oldest after this is from May 2014, and then there's still one from 2015 and six from 2016, so I can definitely say I've dealt with the worst offenders. But I have to think of my old boss, who once complained in a department meeting that however hard we worked at improvements, there always seemed to be about half the department that was performing below average...

This was Hella Haasse's fourth novel. It doesn't seem to have been translated into English, as far as I can see, but there is a French version (Les initiés).

De ingewijden (1957) by Hella S. Haasse (Netherlands, 1918-2011)

  

Six characters — American, Dutch, German and Greek — are brought together by a variety of circumstances in a small Cretan mountain village in the summer of 1954, with the German occupation and the Civil War still fresh in everyone's memories. Haasse passes the point-of-view from one character to the next in a sort of relay-race pattern, with overlaps in which we are made to see how little one person knows of what's going on in another's life.

For each character, Haasse prompts us to think about what the transition from childhood into independent adult life really means, and how it doesn't always coincide with cultural norms or biological development. She asks how that goes together with the religious/cultural idea of "initiation" — is there a necessary modern counterpart to the mysteries of Eleusis? Probably not, it seems: the one character who explicitly thinks of himself as an initiate is the German deserter Helmuth, whose featureless working-class life was given meaning by entry into the rites of Nazism, but who has been driven out of his mind by exposure to the realities that the Nazi ideology unleashed.

As ever, Haasse doesn't give the reader an easy ride, but it's an interesting trip all the same, with a lot of incidental detail of 1950s Greece along the way, and some sharp social observation.

Yesterday was a good day for finishing things off, it seems: I also finished this, which is one of the Victorian read-along books for Q2. I'm not capable of reading a crime novel slowly enough for a proper read-along, apparently. I read the first half in one session a couple of weeks ago, put it aside for a bit and then read the second half last night.

The law and the lady (1875) by Wilkie Collins (UK, 1824-1889)

  

Wilkie Collins is known as one of the inventors of the modern detective-story, and before this I'd only ever read his two most famous books, The Moonstone (1868) and The woman in white (1859).

The law and the lady pushes the detective story into new territory, by creating a situation in which an enterprising young woman finds herself investigating a murder mystery. It is probably also one of the first crime stories in which the main physical clue is obtained as a result of forensic archaeology (the investigators even set up a tent over their work-site, in the best traditions of TV detectives...). To recommend it even further to the modern reader, one of the main witnesses is a disabled person, and there is a minor (but quite visible) character who seems to be either Trans or Intersex in modern terms. And another character who goes off to do relief work on the fringes of the Spanish Civil War (no, not that Spanish Civil War, one of the other ones).

However, interesting as though all that is, it's undermined by the complex manoeuvres Collins deems necessary to justify the use of a female investigator. There's a whole, rather ridiculous Bluebeard's Castle story to get through — "As long as you don't try to find out what my Dark Secret is, we can have a happy marriage" — before we even find out about the real mystery Valeria will have to solve. Also, like Harriet Vane, Valeria always has a man in the background to do the heavy thinking for her. Her role seems to be more to run around prodding people into activity. Although Collins was by no means a conventional man in his own life, he does seem to put a lot of very conventional Victorian (male) ideas about women into his portrait of Valeria, and she's ultimately not all that convincing.

Moreover, Collins obviously became too fond of his eccentric, wheelchair-bound misanthrope Miserrimus Dexter, and we spend far too much of the second part of the book being shown what an extraordinary creature he is, without any of it advancing the story very much. This is fun for a while, but it soon turns into a kind of freak-show.

Interesting, certainly, but ultimately not all that successful either as a novel or as a detective story.

>22 thorold: >23 thorold: Those were reviews No. 1996 and 1997, so the issue of what to do with review No.2000 is getting closer. I’ve got a vaguely appropriate solution lined up, but I’m not completely committed yet…

>6 thorold: >24 thorold: It seems an almost impossible task to suggest something worthy of 2000 to someone with your 1999 other reviews, so I'm going with an author. Would someone like Borges make the cut?!

>25 SassyLassy: Thanks, that’s a fun idea! Maybe not all of Borges in one go, I think that would be too much of a good thing, but there are one or two collections I haven’t read within living memory. Although I think Borges might call for something more mathematically interesting than a simple multiple of thousands. Maybe he should get the prime number 1999…? I already know what 1998 is going to be, but with a bit of restraint 1999 could still be El Libro de Arena.

Also, that makes me think “If Borges, why not Calvino or Bernhard…?” Austria’s leading grouch is the one who means the most to me personally, and there’s at least one major work I haven’t read yet.

I think I like that better than my original idea of books with explicit millennial references. Watch this space…

>26 thorold: I like the idea of Borges as a prime number, plus I'm one of those who believes nnn9 is the end of a series, not nnn0.

Will stay tuned though.

>27 SassyLassy: Borges is divisible only by himself and one!

OK, here's No. 1998, picked for the Outcasts and Castaways theme read of Reading Globally:

Michel Tournier became a translator and broadcaster as a fallback after failing to get an academic post in his first choice of career, philosophy. This, written at the age of 42, was his first published novel, and an immediate success, winning him the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française. His second novel, Le Roi des aulnes, won the Prix Goncourt in 1970.

(Tournier wrote a further — "better", not "abridged", he said — version of the Robinson Crusoe story for children, under the title Vendredi, ou la vie sauvage, in 1971)

Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967; Friday, or the other island) by Michel Tournier (France, 1924-2016)

  

Where J M Coetzee's Foe is a playful reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story informed by late-20th-century ideas about gender, colonialism, and how narratives are created, Tournier's version is — as you might expect — a philosophical exploration of where the solitary castaway stands in a post-Sartre world in which "hell is other people". Does the world have any existence outside our own perceptions if there are no other people to challenge those perceptions?

Tournier starts out with a fairly straightforward recap of Defoe's picture of the indefatigable British capitalist gritting his teeth to re-create all the elements of a productive economy — except sexuality — on his uninhabited island, then gradually subverts it, as Robinson becomes obsessed with the technology of production and creates vast excesses of agricultural products he has no use or market for. And of course his Robinson is not an asexual being like Defoe's, but finds himself experimenting with various kinds of sexual relationship with the island of Speranza herself. What could be more 1960s than X-certificate tree-hugging..?

Robinson's rescue of Friday from the human sacrifice he's been designated for is an accident — Robinson has already made the rational decision to side with the stronger party, but his bullet goes astray — but the entry of this new person into the island is the key moment in Robinson's philosophical release from his previous life. Friday starts out as the willing slave, but he has something Robinson lacks, being prepared to commit himself to projects without a utilitarian purpose — in particular, to create playful works of art. This ends up transforming the way both of them see the world. It liberates Friday to return to a new life as a full-fledged adult, and it brings Robinson into a meaningful spiritual communion with the island, free from his capitalist baggage.

———

Sadly, this book didn't do anything to resolve one of the greatest mysteries of French literature: where on earth did someone get the idea of turning Crusoe into Crusoé (and Poe into Poé, but not Defoe into Defoé...)?

As an alumnus of that institution myself, I was pleased but slightly puzzled to see Tournier making his 18th century Robinson a graduate of the University of York (est.1963)...

I read Vendredi ou les limbes du pacifique in high school and loved it, but of course I don’t remember anything you mention, except the x-rated tree hugging and weird venereal disease ;-)

>30 FlorenceArt: Yes, I'm sure that would have stuck in my mind as well if we'd got to read anything as sensational as that at school!

---

On to review No.1999, inspired by SassyLassy's suggestion above. This is the fifth of Borges's six collections of stories — I've (re-)read the first four fairly recently, but I've still to get to the sixth, La memoria de Shakespeare.

El libro de arena (1975; The book of sand) by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899-1986)

  

I suppose this has pretty much everything you would expect from a Borges collection: paradoxes, gauchos, world-domination conspiracies, minor academic controversies, ironic fairy tales about skalds and their kings, a magic book with no first or last page, and a supernatural creature we don't get to meet.

The two really well-known pieces are obviously the title story about the frighteningly infinite book (which obviously complements the infinite library we met thirty years earlier) and "El otro", in which the seventy-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, sitting on a bench by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hears someone whistling a familiar old Argentinian tune and discovers that he is sharing the bench with the the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who as far as he knows is sitting on a bench in Geneva. Cue a delightfully perplexed exchange about which of them is dreaming this, and how they could tell.

There are two stories that deal in different ways with the idea that it might be possible to concentrate a poem into a single word, there is an account of the beliefs of a heretical Christian sect that didn't exist but probably should have, there is an old man's story of how he witnessed the shooting of the celebrated gaucho Juan Moreira on the same night he had his first sexual experience, there is a Nordic love-story set on the banks of the Ouse, there are hints of a Nordic theme touching all the stories in the book, and altogether there is far more than could possibly fit into a relatively slim little book. Obviously Borges lent his publishers some of his book-deforming magic. Wonderful stuff, however it was done.

>29 thorold: a favorite of mine.

All this fuss about 2000 reviews, and I didn’t even notice that it was my 15-year Thingaversary yesterday! Anyway, I seem to have been acting on it unconsciously: at least seven books added to my library in the last week…

I’m about a third of the way through the book I’m planning to review as No. 2000, anyway, so I’ll have to add a bit of a retrospective when I post that review. And then read some of the others that have been stacking up in the empty space I created by chopping off the oldest bit of the TBR…

Congratulations on your Thingaversary! I celebrated my 14th in March.

...and finally, the big reveal. Or not: I don't suppose anyone has been waiting for this with bated breath. But anyway, it felt kind of appropriate to mark my 2000th review on LT by reading my 20th book by an author who has come to mean a lot to me, and whom I somehow never came across until after joining LT. My Thomas Bernhard adventure started in December 2011 (nearly four years after joining LT) with the first parts of the Autobiography. Since then I've been working my way through novels, poems, and essays (only one play so far). A few more books still to go, but I will probably ration them out to last me a few more years.

Auslöschung : ein Zerfall (1986; Extinction) by Thomas Bernhard (Austria, 1931-1989)

  

Meine Übertreibungskunst habe ich so weit geschult, daß ich mich ohne weiteres den größten Übertreibungskünstler, der mir bekannt ist, nennen kann. Ich kenne keinen andern. Kein Mensch hat seine Übertreibungskunst jemals so auf die Spitze getrieben, habe ich zu Gambetti gesagt und darauf, daß ich, wenn man mich kurzerhand einmal fragen wollte, was ich denn eigentlich und insgeheim sei, doch darauf nur antworten könne, der größte Übertreibungskünstler, der mir bekannt ist.

(Free translation: I have trained my art of exaggeration to such an extent that I can simply call myself the greatest exaggeration-artist that I know of. I don't know any other. No one has ever taken their art of exaggeration to such an extreme, I said to Gambetti, and if someone wanted to ask me some time what I actually am in my secret self, I could only answer, the greatest exaggeration-artist who is known to me.)

Clearly, Bernhard's narrator in this novel, Franz-Josef Murau, Austrian exile in Rome, shares a lot of attributes with his creator. He's given to long, and often hilarious and self-contradictory diatribes, in particular against the "Catholic-National-Socialist" culture of Austria, against his family, against many aspects of the modern world, against aristocrats, against the ill-bred, against philistines, and against people who have an exaggerated devotion to "culture". He receives an urgent telegram on the opening page of the novel and doesn't start thinking about what to do in response until about 300 pages in, at the very end of the first part. In the second half of the book he also has one fundamental problem to resolve, and he deals with it in a couple of lines on the last page, after another 300 pages or so of talking about other things. As always in a Thomas Bernhard novel, it's not about the plot.

What it is about, as the title suggests, is a Schopenhauer-inspired project to deal with — extinguish — the bad stuff in Murau's head by expressing it all. This is a novel that aims for self-destruction, or at least the annihilation of the narrator. Murau is out to free himself from the shadow of his unloving, aristocratic parents (killed, together with Murau's elder brother, in a car accident just before the opening of the novel) with their unpleasant Nazi and Catholic connections, from the philistine, money-centred atmosphere at Wolfsegg Castle, from his outdoorsy brother, from his snooty sisters, one of whom has just married a Weinflaschenstöpselfabrikant (wine bottle stopper manufacturer — Bernhard clearly loves this superb German word, and uses it with increasing degrees of irony every time the unfortunate brother-in-law is mentioned) from Baden, and from Austria in general.

Of course, Bernhard doesn't want us to take it all completely at face value: we are shown that Murau has picked up much more of his family's snobbish attitudes than he is aware of, and particularly when he starts to realise that he has inherited Wolfsegg, he starts to act in some very country-landowner-like ways towards his sisters and the estate workers. We also have to decide for ourselves whether Murau's mother was really having an affair with the super-suave Vatican diplomat Archbishop Spadolini, or whether this is another bit of paranoia on his part.

As usual with Bernhard, there's at least a suspicion that he's put some of his friends and enemies into the book. Murau's Rome friend and critic, the eccentric poet Maria, is obviously based on Ingeborg Bachmann (who died some ten years before this was written); I'm sure there are some more characters who would be recognisable to readers in the know. And of course the whole topic of the Austrian upper classes closing ranks to protect former Nazis was very current in 1985-86 because of the Kurt Waldheim scandal.

Basically, this is six hundred pages of top-quality sardonic Bernhard prose. We don't have to like anyone in the book, or even take a particular interest in the fate of Wolfsegg, but we can sit back and enjoy it all from a safe distance.

So, fifteen years of LT and 2000 reviews, that comes to an average of 133 reviews a year, which makes sense: that's about how many books I tend to read in a year. I have been reviewing everything I read "from cover to cover" during most of that time, although at the beginning, before we got Collections, I don't think I was reviewing unowned books.

According to the LT Zeitgeist, that makes me the 152nd most prolific reviewer on LT. I shall certainly put that on my CV... :-)

For well-known reasons, Thumb-counts aren't a very reliable way of judging how others perceive the quality of my reviews, but they do give me at least a very coarse indication. From a quick (and possibly inaccurate) count, it looks as though 841/2000 reviews (42%) have been thumbed by at least one LT member, with a total of 1446 thumbs, or 1.7 per thumbed review. I'm happy with that, especially given the rather wide range of what I read, which means I don't have a big overlap with any one mutual backscratching group.

Most likely to be thumbed, as far as I can see, are reviews of new publications, history books, German novels, and books I reviewed a long time ago. Obviously at least some of that must reflect the thumbing habits of a few specific individuals (thank you, whoever you are!). Joke reviews and parodies seem to get more thumbs than serious ones, which is probably fair, because it takes more effort to be funny than to be informative. And reviews with a lot of thumbs tend to attract more thumbs.

>36 thorold: Congrats! :) And Happy 15th Thingaversary. Ha - I seem to be turning into a teenager (13) in 4 days. I feel like a baby now :)

>35 thorold: Interesting review. I had never read anything by this author (or heard of him)... any recommendation for a first book by him?

>36 thorold: Happy Thingaversary!! and thanks for hanging around; I think we have all enjoy your reading exploits. Nice stats. And interesting notes on what reviews gets thumbs up. I find the star rating feature not very useful. I'm always horrified to see a splendid piece of literature given 2 stars, because the reader was not well-matched to the book or author, or wasn't up to stretching themselves.
.

>37 AnnieMod: The way I got started with Bernhard was the Autobiography, which is five separate novella-sized parts in German but seems to come as a bundle (Gathering evidence) in English. I think that's a good way in: it's much less intimidating than the full-length novels, and easier to give a context to than some of the novellas/essays. And it's very interesting in its own right, lots of good stuff about growing up illegitimate in thirties Bavaria and Salzburg, and more shopkeeping than Kipps.
Otherwise, the posthumous essay collections My prizes and Goethe dies are both short, sardonic and very funny.

If you want to try one of the novels, Woodcutters or Old masters might be the best to try first. I wouldn't go for The loser right away, even though it seems to be the most popular on LT.

>39 thorold: Thanks! The local library has My Prizes which makes than an easy choice I guess. :) That autobiography does sound interesting though...

Those are some smashing numbers, congratulations! Older reviews have more thumbs because more people participated in LT in the beginning.

I've just started looking for some Austrian authors to read before a trip to Vienna this summer. I've never read Thomas Bernhard and think Old Masters looks like a good one to try.

Thanks for sharing your reviews! I am sometimes overwhelmed by both the amount of books you read and the quality of the books you read, but I always look forward to new posts on your thread.

Very cool LT accomplishments. I always enjoy your reviews. 133 a year! That's some productive page turning!

Thanks, all! Being congratulated for staying in the same place for a long time always feels a bit unearned somehow, but I am really glad I found LT 15 years ago, and that so many interesting and sympathetic other people also found it.

>42 japaul22: I’ve read far too many Austrians for someone with no particular connection to the country. If you try Bernhard and like him, then for a musician it’s pretty much compulsory to read The loser.
If you haven’t tried them yet, when you’re making your list you might also want to have a look at Joseph Roth, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Marlen Haushofer and — for someone a bit more contemporary — Robert Seethaler…

Last week was Boekenweek, and I somehow ended up with two copies of this year's gift.
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, who was commissioned to write the 2022 gift, is a Dutch poet and novelist who famously went on a bike-ride to Italy in 2008 and never came back: he's lived in Genoa ever since. He is best-known for his 2018 novel Grand Hotel Europa.

Monterosso mon amour (2022) by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (Netherlands, 1968- )

  

After decades of knocking tennis balls into nets and drinking sherry in various third-rate capital cities, Carmen and her ex-diplomat husband have retired to a medium-sized Dutch town, where she volunteers as events organiser for the public library. But she still looks back affectionately on her teenage holiday romance with the lovely Antonio on the coast of Liguria. After a reunion with her primary school classmate Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, now a big-shot novelist, turns out to be a complete flop, she decides it's about time she did something about that teenage promise to go back and see Antonio. Unfortunately, it's March 2020, not the ideal moment to be visiting northern Italy.

An enjoyable little book, with a pleasantly romantic atmosphere but enough twists and ironies to keep you alert, and plenty of little nods to great literature. Exactly the sort of thing that makes a good Boekenweek novella. Pfeijffer has fun sending himself up in his new role as high-profile novelist, and we can't help liking Carmen, who "chronically fails conspicuously in her brave attempts to be average but doesn't realise it".

This is an older book that caught my eye on Scribd when I realised for the umpteenth time that I'd been forgetting to use my subscription. I've read a lot of articles by Timothy Garton Ash over the years, of course, but I don't think I've ever picked up one of his books before:

The file : a personal history (1997; updated 2009) by Timothy Garton Ash (UK, 1955- )

  

In 1980-1981, the young Timothy Garton Ash, who still hadn't quite made up his mind between being a journalist or a historian, went to study in East Berlin under an academic exchange scheme between Oxford and the Humboldt University. He was supposed to be doing research on communist resistance movements during the Nazi period, but ended up spending a lot of time with dissident writers, academics and clergy, gathering material for a book on the DDR of the early eighties. Not surprisingly, all this attracted the attention of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), which had built up quite a dossier on him by the end of his stay.

The whole thing has its comic side — the file is full of unimportant details, he was assigned the unlikely codename "Romeo" (because he drove an Italian sports car, he hastens to tell us), and the cumbersome bureaucracy didn't come to any conclusion about what action to take until he had returned to the West and his book was being serialised in Der Spiegel. But of course it could easily have turned out badly for him and much worse for the DDR citizens he was in contact with, as it did for thousands of other people.

Garton Ash uses this book to look in detail at that file and at the whole post-Wende system for reviewing Stasi records — the BStU, or "Gauck Agency" — with a historian's sharp eyes. He tracks down the informers ("Informal collaborators", or IMs) who reported on him, he talks to them and to the former Stasi officers who worked on his case, as well as to Gauck Agency staff and to some of his former contacts in the DDR. He talks about some of the pitfalls in the process — an ambiguously worded record makes it sound as though his academic supervisor at the Humboldt University was an IM, when in fact it was another university staff member who was reporting on a conversation with the supervisor.

He finds out how pressure was put on people to cooperate: some were being blackmailed over minor offences, some were being bribed with rewards like foreign trips, a couple were still convinced communists who remembered the thirties and felt a duty to protect the DDR state. Similarly the Stasi officers were mostly men who had grown up during or shortly after the war in an atmosphere of idealistic socialist reconstruction, and been recruited straight out of the FDJ. One of the officers he talks to unexpectedly strikes Garton Ash as a good and moral man who got trapped in a system he knew was working in bad ways, and was doing what he could to mitigate the harm around him; others seem more like simple careerists who had lost their illusions on their way through the system.

As a kind of postscript, and to forestall obvious comparisons, he also goes to talk to various people in British counterintelligence agencies. They stress to him the huge difference in scale between the counterintelligence effort in the DDR and in any normal country, in terms of staff members and number of files per head of population. And he says himself that there is no comparison between the UK, security-obsessed and secretive though it is, and a state like the DDR where there was no free press and no independent judiciary or parliament to review what the Stasi was doing. It turns out, though, that he does have a file there too, which of course he is not allowed to look at, but he's told that it is a "non-hostile" one: merely a record of occasional contacts such as the present one. They tell him.

>44 thorold: Thank you! I will check those all out and make a note of The Loser. The only author on your list that I've read in Joseph Roth.

I know that I used to be much better about thumbing reviews the first few years I was on LT. But now, I rarely click away from the individuals thread to get to the book page, so I rarely thumb reviews.

>44 thorold:, >47 japaul22: I loved Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life, which is a short but exquisitely written book. I'm sure that I read it because of the review I read right here. So keep 'em coming!

>48 kac522: Yes, I think quite a few of us here were reading that four or five years ago!

This next one is a book that has caught my eye a few times in museum shops, but never quite made it onto the TBR pile until I was looking for things with millennial connections. It didn't make the cut for that, but I found myself reading it anyway.

Like most books of this type, it was issued in both English and Dutch versions: I don't know whether the English version is a straight translation of the Dutch or an adaptation for foreign readers, but I expect the pictures are the same in any case.

1000 jaar Amsterdam : ruimtelijke geschiedenis van een wonderbaarlijke stad (2012, updated 2018; A millennium of Amsterdam) by Fred Feddes (Netherlands, 1957- )

 

The title of this book is slightly misleading: although there's evidence that people have been living in the area since around the year 1000, you can't really talk about "Amsterdam" until there is a river called the Amstel and someone builds a dam across it near the point where it flows into the IJ. Both of those things happened some time in the second half of the thirteenth century, so Amsterdam can't really claim more than 750 years. But I suppose we shouldn't quibble about the odd century here or there, and the publishers obviously thought "1000 years" sounded better...

What Feddes is doing, anyway, is not so much giving us a history of the city as using it as a case study, in a kind of semi-coffee-table format, to illustrate how ideas of what cities should be, and how they should be organised spatially, have evolved during modern European history. And Amsterdam does make a good case-study: it's a city that's always been a wonderful mixture of organic development and strict planning, from its very earliest days. Feddes takes us through the city's development: the medieval core around Dam Square and the Amstel, the famous concentric arcs of canals built round it in the 17th century, the 19th century ring around that, the arrival of the railway and the North Sea Canal, the new suburbs of the early 20th century and the famous General Plan of 1934, the tempestuous squatter-wars of the 1970s, right through to today's megalomaniac office corridor along the Southern Axis, the North-South Metro and the string of new apartment-building islands in the IJ. All with more pictures and maps than anyone could possibly ask for.

Feddes is particularly interested in how the process of planning works, what it's for, and how ideas about both of those things have changed over the course of time. Sometimes architects seemed to be in charge, sometimes capitalists, sometimes engineers, and occasionally politicians. Very occasionally — but increasingly towards the end of the 20th century — someone would think to ask the people who lived there, or intended to live there, about what they needed. Because the Dutch are generally pretty good at that sort of thing, the experts very often got it right, and (at least as Feddes sees it) there were few really spectacular miscalculations. The overambitious 1960s high-rise development of the Bijlmer is the most famous of these, of course, but Amsterdam was by no means the only city to make that particular mistake at the time.

In between the broad-brush history and theory there are plenty of interesting little bits of detail, explorations of particular neighbourhoods or buildings that happen to have been recorded by artists or photographers at different times over the years. And I loved Feddes's discovery that the photographer J M Arsath Ro'is, who documented most of the city expansion projects of the fifties and sixties for the municipal archives, always managed to get his moped into the picture somewhere...

I've been listening to this over the past couple of weeks, on and off: without realising it, I finished it on the author's 206th birthday.

Shirley (1849) by Charlotte Brontë (UK, 1816-1855), audiobook read by Anna Bentinck

  

This was Charlotte Brontë's second novel, written during the terrible period in her life when Branwell, Emily and Anne all died within a few months of each other. It never had quite the popular success of Jane Eyre, and it tends to get tucked away in the category of "industrial novels" together with North and South and Hard Times. But it is one of the handful of books that can claim to have introduced a new given name into the language (where would we be without Ms Bassey, Ms Temple and Ms Williams?). And in places it's a fairly hard-hitting feminist text as well.

The story is set in the early 1810s, with the Yorkshire textile industry hard-hit by the export restrictions of the Napoleonic wars. Unemployed textile operatives, with no prospect of work, are getting drawn into rioting and machine-breaking. Vicar's niece Caroline is in love with her cousin Robert, an Anglo-Belgian mill-owner ruined by the war in Antwerp and trying to make a new start in Yorkshire, but of course he can't think of marriage until his business is on a sound footing, which it won't be until the war ends and the operatives stop rioting. And to make a bad situation worse, Caroline's fiery uncle quarrels with Robert over politics and forbids her to see him.

Then, a good third of the way through the novel already, Shirley finally arrives on the scene. She's a young woman of independent ideas who has, very unusually, inherited an estate in her own right, and she's determined to show that she can run it as well as any man. Charlotte Brontë must have heard tales about the famous Anne Lister, of Shibden Hall in Halifax, who was in a similar situation and about the same age as Shirley. (Obviously she didn't know about Lister's secret diaries, full of her love affairs with local young women, which were only deciphered fairly recently.) Caroline and Shirley soon become intimate friends and have long discussions about politics, the church, women's role in society, how damaging it is that middle-class women have so few types of employment open to them, and so on. Shirley scandalises a few curates, there are rumours of an involvement with her tenant Robert, but she still finds just about all the eligible men in Yorkshire chasing her.

Shirley is a wonderful character, Caroline is enjoyable if sometimes just a bit too good to be true, and there are some splendid dialogues and set-pieces, including the Sunday-school picnic and the grand scene when the rioters attack the mill, and there's a host of entertaining minor characters who give Brontë the opportunity for flashes of authentic Yorkshire dialect and some ironic voice-over commentary. I especially enjoyed Robert's very Belgian-bourgeoise sister Hortense, with her stubborn insistence on living according to the standards she's been brought up to, even though the whole of West Yorkshire is laughing at her odd dress and the strange food she prepares.

But it does all seem to ramble a bit, strands of plot seem to fall out of sight to be picked up again apologetically many chapters later, and for all its feminist bravura the plot comes to a very conventional conclusion with a double marriage, at least one half of which makes nonsense of about half the talk that preceded it. The shocking defeat of Napoleon that makes such a happy-end possible may not be altogether a surprise to the reader. Also, Caroline and Robert have both found themselves in life-threatening situations at points in the story where the reader knows there is no way the author would be able to proceed further without them, and Caroline herself is probably the only person who was surprised when her long-lost mother was finally unmasked.

Whilst Brontë is clearly very sympathetic with the plight of the starving workers, she is almost nauseously insistent that all the trouble is the fault of external agitators who are non-conformist preachers and therefore — in her Anglican view of the world — ipso facto alcoholics. And she has no qualms at all about seeing the lot of them transported to Australia. So probably not the place to look for balanced political insight. But well worth all that inconvenience for the time we spend with the title character.

The audiobook read by Anna Bentinck works well: she has a very good feel for the rhythm of Brontë's prose, and she has no trouble at all making French with a Yorkshire accent sound different from French with a Belgian accent, a trick that is required rather more often in this book than in most other Victorian novels.

Congratulations on your 2000th review! A meaningful book choice. I used to be a diligent thumb giver, but now I rarely bother click over to the book page. Mentally add another thumb to your counts, as I would undoubtedly give you one.

>46 thorold: The File sounds fascinating. I'll look for it.

>31 thorold: Good to see Borges up there!

>35 thorold: Congratulations on the 2000.
I haven't read this author. Based on your review, would Laurent Binet be a fan?

>45 thorold: ...a Dutch poet and novelist who famously went on a bike-ride to Italy in 2008 and never came back: he's lived in Genoa ever since. What a clever man! Who can argue with that?

>46 thorold: Sounds fascinating. I'm sorry to say Garton Ash had dropped completely off my radar, although I read his articles when I see them.

>50 thorold: On my reread list for this year's Victorian Tavern. Oh those non-conformists!

>52 SassyLassy: Binet — hmmm. Interesting thought, I don’t know. I don’t remember him mentioning Bernhard anywhere (if you Google “Binet Bernhard” then you get references to Bernhard-Henri…).

On the whole, trying to second-guess a French person’s taste in German literature is a fool’s errand. I know an otherwise commendably sane Frenchman who believes that Kleist and Jünger are the only German writers anyone needs to read.

Binet and Bernhard are possibly both exaggeration-artists, but if so, I suppose Binet exaggerates by making ridiculous amounts of impossible things happen, Bernhard by expressing ridiculous amounts of impossible opinions. They do both talk a lot about philosophers and very little about other writers of fiction, and they mix reality and fiction in interesting ways, but a lot of modern writers do that sort of thing. I don’t think Binet shares Bernhard’s interest in applying musical forms to prose writing.

Javier Marías might be a more obvious parallel, among contemporary writers. His approach to style and narrative structure has a lot in common with Bernhard.

A couple of train trips over the last few days were just the right length to justify another Maigret story:

Maigret à New York (1947) by Georges Simenon (France, 1903-1989)

  

Appropriately enough, this was the first Maigret novel Simenon wrote after his move to North America. Maigret is still a recent pensioner, enjoying his garden at Meung-sur-Loire, but for no very obvious reason he allows himself to be deflected into helping a young man whose rich father in New York has been sending him letters suggesting that he's facing some kind of serious threat. This puts the Commissaire on the boat to America, heading for a reunion with his old friend Captain O'Brien of the FBI.

It isn't one of the strongest Maigrets: Simenon doesn't seem to have had time to find something really characteristic and unexpected to tell us about New York or the American crime world, so he falls back on obvious clichés of whiskey, gangsters, private eyes and hardbitten journalists, supporting a predictable plot about once-penniless immigrants who have lived the American dream and are now threatened by the ghosts of those they stepped over on their way up. There are some nice running gags, like Maigret's confusion at finding himself in a city where few people speak French and where he actually has to look for a taxi rather than one turning up instantly whenever the plot requires it, as always happens in Paris. But on the whole we miss Paris at least as much as Maigret does.

“he actually has to look for a taxi rather than one turning up instantly whenever the plot requires it, as always happens in Paris”

What the…???!!!

Paris and New York sure have changed since 1947.

>55 FlorenceArt: Sorry, I should have said “…as always happens to Maigret in Paris.” :-)
I suppose we’re meant to assume that the taxi drivers all know him. And they probably get to inflate the fare when it’s on the PJ account.

It is one of the fun things about the older Maigrets that there are hardly ever any actual police cars: when he wants to go somewhere he steps into a taxi, when he wants to contact his subordinates he steps into a bar.

>56 thorold: Ah yes, i wondered if that could be your meaning but it didn't feel very realistic. But then I guess Paris was much smaller then. I remember that Maigret goes back home for lunch.

Odd semi-coincidence: The two immigrant musicians at the centre of the plot in Maigret à New York are called Joseph and Joachim (they perform as “J & J”). I’ve now started the Victorian novel Charles Auchester, in which the central character seems to be loosely based on the violinist Joseph Joachim, who of course featured heavily in the Brahms biography I read in January. I wouldn’t have thought Simenon was quite old enough for that name to the the first one to pop into his head when he was thinking about a musician (the real Joachim died when he Simenon was about four).

>58 thorold: That's a cool convergence.

As mentioned in the tavern thread, I had the silly idea of randomising the Wikipedia list of Victorian novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Victorian_novels) to pick something non-obvious as my next Victorian read, and it came up with this one, which certainly ticks the "non-obvious" box. And a bit of Victorian musical life sounded interesting...

Charles Auchester (1853) by Elizabeth Sara Sheppard (UK, 1830-1862)

 

Elizabeth Sheppard seems to have been something of a child prodigy herself, writing her first play at the age of ten, learning half a dozen languages, and teaching music and Latin in her mother's school in her teens in the intervals between writing novels. This, her first, was started when she was sixteen and completed a couple of years later, and she took the trouble to persuade Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and future prime minister, to give her a blurb — "No greater book will ever be written on music", was his verdict, which suggests that Sheppard must have been better at PR than at prose writing, or that Disraeli thought he was off the record...

The novel is narrated by Charles Auchester, a boy growing up in the 1830s in a middle-class Anglican-Jewish family in the unnamed English city of Birmingham (made obvious by a string of geographical clues and many references to the Music Festival). His exceptional musical talents are discovered by a succession of inspirational teachers, who all seem to take him on without ever having heard him play or sing, he makes friends with a string of highly-talented young women, and is sent off to the musical equivalent of Hogwarts, the Cecilia School in Germany.

At the head of the chain of musicians is the quasi-angelic figure of the Chevalier Seraphael, a musician from a prominent German Jewish family, head of a music school in Leipzig an unnamed city in Saxony, promoter of the works of J S Bach, composer of songs without words lyrics, the Hebrides Mer de Glace Overture, a Shakespeare-ish masque, a biblical oratorio, etc. Anyone who hasn't worked out that this is meant to be the late Felix Mendelssohn, the biggest musical star of Victorian England, obviously hasn't lived in the 19th century.

Other characters are clearly inspired by real life musical stars too (Berlioz, Jenny Lind, Sterndale Bennett, etc., as pointed out in Professor Upton's helpful notes in the 1890 Chicago edition which is the basis for the Gutenberg text), although most of them are rather sanitised and anglicised and actually don't have all that much to do with their "originals". The Chevalier doesn't seem to have a sister, but the role of Fanny Mendelssohn is taken over by Maria, the brightest student in the Cecilia School, whose brain unfortunately explodes when she takes on the very unfeminine task of composing and conducting a symphony. The Jenny Lind character, Clara, suffers from the respectable English puritan prejudice against the stage, something that also cripples the career of their ballet dancer friend Laura. She doesn't have the option of leaving the operatic stage for the oratorio business, and ends up teaching Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting to dance quadrilles. Upton tells us that Charles is based on Joseph Joachim, but there's not much to back that up other than Mendelssohn's early patronage and the fact that Charles plays the violin. Sadly, we don't get to see him playing the solo in the Beethoven concerto aged thirteen.

This reads very much as you would expect a book written by a gushing teenager to read. She's full of passion, especially about music, her Jewish heritage, and the lovely Chevalier, and she's good at getting inside the head of young Charles, who is still singing alto for the first three-quarters of the book. A lot of that is charming and funny. But she also has a very teenage tendency to swim out of her depth, and gets lost in passages of confused symbolism and abstract discussions of aesthetics, so that at times it's almost impossible to work out what is going on, and you just have to guess that another female character has been killed off for no very good reason. Interesting for what it tells us about attitudes to music in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Germany, and fun as an unintentional Harry Potter pastiche, but not a great novel.

And an audiobook I selected on the spur of the moment:

Lands of lost borders: a journey on the Silk Road (2019) by Kate Harris (Canada, 1982- ), audiobook read by Amy Landon

  

(Author photo Joanne Ratajczak, Star Tribune)

After cycling (illegally) across the Tibetan plateau in the university summer vacation, Kate Harris and her primary school friend Melissa come back a few years later to spend a year cycling the entire Silk Road from Istanbul to India. But it turns out that this isn't (just) another of those entertaining stories of punctures, visa problems, goat's-head soup, horrible weather and unwisely-chosen campsites, written to justify the year off from normal life. Harris is a science graduate whose aim since early childhood has been to become an astronaut and go to Mars, and she's also spent part of the time in between the two trips as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford working on the unintended political impact of scientific exploration, so she spends a lot of time digressing from the day-to-day descriptions of travel into reflections on the meaning and purpose of travel and exploration and her own motives in travelling. She also talks a lot about borders, where they come from and what they mean, in the context of the many borders they have to cross in Central Asia. It's a bit of a mixed bag: there are some very obvious observations and some quite profound ones, and she cites interesting, obscure travellers with the same gusto as she pulls out ubiquitous bits of the quotations dictionary. But overall, I found it a thoughtful, stimulating kind of a travel book, certainly a writer to watch out for in the future.

hee think Ill skip the first book (but would love to read more about the author, she sounds fascinating) But I have Land of Lost Borders on my TBR shelf and for some reason never got to it. Will do so now! (well inbetween the other two books Im reading. Its a good thing Im retired.....)

Just checked, she died when she was 31. What a loss.

Wow! 2000 reviews - stands back in admiration.
I enjoy reading your reviews because you nearly always find something positive to say about the book you have read. Either you are lucky in your choices or you just love to read. I am sure it is the latter.

>64 baswood: Thanks!

Either you are lucky in your choices or you just love to read. I am sure it is the latter.

Sometimes I’m too kind, as well — cf. the discussion about Louis de Bernières above. But, in general, I think it’s got a lot to do with loving to read, as you say: the more we read, the more we get to appreciate the good things in different kinds of writing. And the better we are at steering around the things that aren’t likely to give us pleasure.

I'm back from a short but very relaxing holiday in France, which together with the inevitable long train journeys provided a lot of reading time, and has left me with something of a backlog of reviews to write. Apologies in advance for the forthcoming deluge...

First a Patrick Gale novel I realised I'd missed:

A place called Winter (2015) by Patrick Gale (UK, 1962- )

  

An ambitious historical novel, in which Gale projects an imagined life onto the little he knows about his great-grandfather. Harry Cane, the son of a successful businessman, drifts through life in Edwardian London. He allows himself to be manipulated into marrying a woman he feels sorry for, and to be led into a pleasant routine of sexual encounters with an actor who is supposed to be giving him speech lessons. And then, when it all comes to light, he lets himself be pushed off by his family to lose himself in the colonies with much the same good grace.

At this point the story changes gears, as Harry finds a new determination to make something of himself as a farmer in the West of Canada, and finds himself drawn into real, deep friendships with his farming neighbours. And of course there's a crisis and a lot of bad things happen, not least a world war and an influenza epidemic.

As always, it's family relationships (for the widest possible definition of "family") that seem to interest Gale most, and that bring out his most interesting writing, but this time there's also a lot of very convincing historical detail, especially about pioneer farmers in Canada. The part of the book about the Edward-Carpenter-quoting psychiatrist who runs an experimental community in the wilds of Canada but doesn't quite have the courage of his convictions is interesting too, but it doesn't really get enough space in such a very wide-ranging book.

A new novel by Northern Ireland writer Jan Carson. I enjoyed her novel The fire starters a little while ago.

The Raptures (2022) by Jan Carson (UK, 1980- )

  

The story is set in the fictitious Protestant village of Ballylack one summer in the early nineties. Shortly after being told by a visiting speaker that they are "Northern Ireland's future", the eleven-year-olds in the top class of the local primary school all start falling sick with a mysterious and deadly illness. Hannah, who belongs to a particularly hardline charismatic pentecostalist family, seems to be the only child who isn't affected, and she disconcertingly finds herself nominated as contact-person to the world of the living by her dead classmates, who have somehow turned into rootless, destructive teenage ghosts.

Carson takes a hard look at the kind of small community she grew up in, wittily — and with a certain amount of affection — pinning down its absurdities and small-minded local concerns. It's very lively, clever writing, with a lot of close observation, and satisfyingly complicated levels of allegory and symbolism going on in the background of what is essentially a kind of murder-mystery plot.

But an utterly unsentimental magic-realist novel about the deaths of young children is never going to be an easy read. If The fire starters was challenging, this is the next level up. Carson makes it clear that the quaint local peculiarities of Northern Ireland life can't be separated from the very real harm that they do.

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That cover! What were they thinking? This is not a 1950s science-fiction novel.
(Admittedly, it's a miracle that they didn't go down the safe, traditional "b/w child in a bathing-suit" route...)

Borrowed from my host's pile:

Sixty million Frenchmen can't be wrong (2003) by Jean-Benoît Nadeau (Canada, 1964- ) and Julie Barlow (Canada, 1968- )

  

This looks from the cover and blurb like yet another of those handy guides to expat life written by some self-declared expert who has parachuted into Paris/the Dordogne for a few months, but it turns out to be something rather more ambitious: the bilingual Canadian couple Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow are both serious journalists who set themselves the task — with the help of a handy grant from an international foundation — of working out how the French state and its economy really work in practice, and they have tried to condense the results of that investigation into a format that would make sense to a North American reader. Their project clearly involved a lot of discussions on and off the record with influential people in France, as well as plenty of burrowing in libraries and databases, but the result is lively and informative.

Admittedly, it's twenty years old now, so probably well past its use-by date. Also, I'm not a North American reader, and there were only a few parts of the book where I really felt I was learning something new about France — I found the chapter about the inner workings of the elite civil service college ENA very interesting, for example, but I didn't really need a rehash of De Gaulle, World War II and Algeria. Or half a chapter on Minitel, for that matter! And what Nadeau and Barlow say about the French role in the EEC and EU seems too superficial to be of any use to anyone.

Obviously you can't cover the whole of French life in one small paperback: being mostly interested in economic and constitutional matters, they don't find any time for the role of art and design in France, and what they say about food is also oddly narrow — there's quite a bit about the importance of local food production and terroir, but next to nothing about the way the French buy and consume food.

I was amused by the way they were both so shocked by the French insistence that every encounter, however superficial, must start with a greeting: it never occurred to me that that might be strange to a North American. Don't they say "bonjour" in Quebec?

Better than it looks, but out of date.

And another little gem (?) my host left lying around in his guest-room to entrap visitors into reading it...

Don't : a manual of mistakes & improprieties more or less prevalent in conduct and speech (1883) by "Censor" (? Oliver Bell Bunce (USA, 1828-1890))

  

The copy of this I read is undated, it is Edwardian or late-Victorian by the look of it, and is credited to "Censor", but it's presumably just a pirated UK edition of the American book of the same title credited to the playwright Oliver Bell Bunce and originally published in the early 1880s. It's a 64-page booklet with the peculiarity that every sentence starts with the word "Don't" (in bold), listing a whole string of bad habits we should avoid in polite society. While ostensibly addressed to gentlemen (with one chapter of advice "to the gentler sex"), the publishers are presumably really aiming it at the rising lower middle classes, people like Mr Pooter of Diary of a nobody, who haven't benefited from the sort of early education in which they learn how to lead a lady into dinner or to hold a knife and fork (the advice in this section makes it pretty obvious that it was originally written for Americans, since it is cautioning the reader against exactly the sort of behaviour Mrs Trollope noticed half a century earlier).

Obviously there's a lot of advice here that — from a safe distance — just looks like common sense and basic good manners (it's always good to give your readers the feeling that they are already two-thirds of the way to respectability), as well as a lot that is simply obsolete, like the advice on dress. And there's a certain amount that was clearly excessive even when it was written. Anyone trying to follow the advice on dinner-table conversation literally would soon get stuck. Don't remain silent, don't talk about yourself, don't discuss religion, politics, or anything to do with health or digestion, don't be too witty, don't bore, ... and so on, for several more pages. And there are some odd omissions: there is nothing about how much to tip servants, for instance, and very little about visiting-card etiquette, both of which are often mentioned as points of social awkwardness by writers of the time.

I wasn't actually in Normandy, but I haven't read nearly enough Maupassant, so why not?

Une vie (1883; A woman's life) by Guy de Maupassant (France, 1850-1893)

  

A superficially gentle little novel about the life of a naive young girl with a privileged background and indulgent parents, who finds herself having to deal with an unsatisfactory husband and a wayward son, both of whom give her more than what she considers her fair share of unhappiness.

Jeanne's maid and foster-sister, Rosalie, however, is usually on hand to remind her that people who have never had to work for their living don't know what suffering means. Maupassant sneaks in some fairly harsh social criticism and some interesting Normandy local colour, but the overall tone is a kind of romantic pessimism with a lot of weather and some Thomas-Hardy-ish moments of melodrama (watch out for that shepherd's caravan!).

Fun, but probably not Maupassant's finest hour.

I thought I'd read this years ago, but I couldn't remember anything about it, and I'm pretty sure now that I haven't read it before...

Elizabeth Costello (2003) by J. M. Coetzee (South Africa, 1940- )

  

J M Coetzee doesn't really do "normal" novels, but even by his standards this was a rather odd one, with its narrative almost entirely built up out of lectures, debates, seminars, award and honorary degree ceremonies, as seen from the point of view of his fictional alter ego, the distinguished elderly Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello. There's no story as such, this is purely a platform for tossing around ideas about topics like the role of the writer, animal rights, the "African novel" (with or without quotation marks), realism, vegetarianism, the depiction of violence, and Kafka. It's deliberately frustrating: if you try to read it like a novel it will fight you all the way, and you won't fare any better if you try to pretend it's a collection of philosophical essays. But I found it the perfect book to read on a lengthy train journey: it's short enough to get through in a single sitting, it's intellectually challenging enough to keep you engaged in its detail and language, but you don't have to worry about losing track of the large-scale texture of a complicated story.

Last one for today, I hope: the next in my Maigret readthrough:

Maigret et l'inspecteur malgracieux (1947) by Georges Simenon (France, 1903-1989)

  

This collection of novella-length pieces contains the four stories: "Le Témoignage de l'enfant de chœur", "Le Client le plus obstiné du monde", "Maigret et l'Inspecteur malgracieux" and
"On ne tue pas les pauvres types". Due to an error, the first edition of the collection had the title Maigret et l'inspecteur malchanceux ("unlucky", rather than "unpleasant"), subsequently corrected at Simenon's insistence. The stories don't seem to have been published in this particular combination in English, although they have, of course, all been translated.

In these stories from the beginning of Simenon's time in Canada, Maigret's retirement seems to have been definitively cancelled, and he's back where he was a few books ago, in his old office in the Quai des Orfèvres — except for the choir-boy story, where he's been seconded to an unnamed provincial town for a while.

"Le Témoignage de l'enfant de chœur" is a classic variation on the "incomplete testimony" plot, where Maigret knows that the conflicting witnesses are telling the truth, but that there is something missing from each account. This one also gives us a nice bit of interplay with Mme Maigret as she tries to keep her husband calm in bed during an illness.

"Le Client le plus obstiné du monde" is one where the main point seems to be Simenon teasing us with an absurdly long rehearsal of the work of a café waiter and the circumstances that led up to a crime that we haven't yet been told about, but there's the hint of a piquant background story of two sisters both in love with an apparently undistinguished man. A similar plot is also at the heart of the next story, "Maigret et l'Inspecteur malgracieux", where Maigret's attention is caught by a crime that is outside his own area of responsibility, and he sets himself the task of steering his unlucky — and generally disliked — colleague Lognon into "solving" the crime without giving him any overt help.

"On ne tue pas les pauvres types" picks up an idea that Simenon uses in numerous other stories, that of the man whose family think he's going off to a dull but respectable office job every morning when in fact he gave that up years ago, and is living some kind of fascinating double life. In this case, the joke is that each layer of "double life" leads to the discovery of another layer beyond it by Maigret, and we suspect that it could go on forever.

All relatively slight pieces, but expertly handled and full of charming detail.

>71 thorold:

The first Coetzee I read and it made me instant mega-fan. The conflict in the book between Costello and another writer who scoffs at her animal-rights concerns reflects accurately Coetzee's skirmishes with Paul West.

>68 thorold:

I enjoyed that and the other book on living in France, but their The story of French was really excellent. The Canadian perspective was eye-opening.

>73 LolaWalser: The Paul West bit took me by surprise — I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t a fictional character, never having come across his books before. But at a certain point it’s obvious that the whole discussion would be meaningless unless Coetzee was talking about a real writer and a real book. The bit where she tells him she’s going to talk about his book and he says nothing at all is probably the giveaway.

I’m sure I’ve got The story of French on one of my many lists, I didn’t twig that it was by the same people!

>74 thorold:

I forgot he's named in the book... anyway, when I tried to read West later (Rat Man of Paris and Lord Byron's Doctor), I just couldn't hack him. I don't think it was all prejudice from Costello... but I guess I'll never know. Something odious about his voice (to me anyway). Would be interested in your reactions should you ever read him...

Wonderful batch of reviews (and I actually remembered to give thumbs!). Don't is seriously tempting.

>69 thorold: >76 labfs39: One odd thing that struck me was how the implication of the pen-name “Censor” has shifted since that book was published: before WWI the main sense would have been the Roman one, of someone responsible for criticising public morals. If it was used for someone responsible for removing unsuitable content from books, plays, etc., (as in Areopagitica — the first use in this sense cited by the OED), that would need to be made clear from the context or by saying “dramatic censor”, etc.

During WWI, everyone got used to letters from soldiers being “censored,” and the main sense became the one we are used to.

I wasn't very impressed with The good doctor when I read it during the Southern Africa theme, but the local branch of the Damon Galgut fan club, fresh from hearing the man himself on stage in Cape Town, called round to lend me a copy of his Booker winner, mouthing credible threats of braais with live African percussion in case I fail to read it...

Fortunately, it turned out to be a much more interesting book than the other.

The Promise (2021) by Damon Galgut (South Africa, 1963- )

  

The story of five diverse and complicated members of an Afrikaner family, bridging the end of apartheid, and cleverly condensed into snapshots set around the funerals of four of them. At the heart of the story is the promise made by Manie Swart to his dying wife Rachel to give a house to their black servant Salome, the person who had shouldered the heavy burden of Rachel's care during her last illness. At each missed opportunity for realising the promise, the value of the gift and the difference it could make to Salome's life become progressively less, in what's presumably a complicated allegory of South Africa and the end of minority rule.

Galgut's writing is fresh and witty, and the main characters and the storyline are complex and surprisingly free from the obvious clichés the context would lead you to expect — some of the minor characters descend into caricature, though, especially the various priests, the undertaker, and the Random-Army-Buddy-who-keeps-popping-up, who perhaps have a bit too much of the Evelyn Waugh minor character about them.

A very interesting and quite moving book about the moral and intellectual failure of a culture.

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The cover photo is by Dutch photographer Linelle Deunk (1967- ), from a series of portraits of children she exhibited in 2015. A lovely shot, but it doesn't tell us much about the book except that Penguin South Africa had high hopes for it and the art editor thus had a decent budget for once...

>78 thorold: Just read this about three weeks ago, and appreciated the lack of happily ever after, but of course, what else would a person expect from Galgut?

I don't tend to read translations from German to English, but this is a book that came in a pile of others from the East Berlin English-language publisher Seven Seas Books a couple of years ago — I thought it might introduce me to some interesting new writers.

Old land, new people : German short stories (1960) edited and translated by Joan Becker (DDR, - )

 

This anthology is supposed to be showing off the postwar generation of East German writers, but unfortunately the choice of texts is about as bold and imaginative as the cover design. It's almost as though they got Senator McCarthy in to advise them on what English-speaking readers would expect to find in a collection of communist short stories. Wit, subtlety and irony take a back seat to political correctness, and the most imaginative writers of the time are firmly kept out...

Four of the stories are simplistic parables about various kinds of struggles surrounding the collectivisation of farming — the selfish kulak who won't join the collective but is forced to accept its help when he's sick (Bernhard Seeger), the market-gardener who takes too much on himself in the collective because he doesn't trust his plants to the other members (Margarete Neumann), the farm labourer who tries to treat the collective with the same contempt he had for his previous aristocratic employer (Helmut Sakowski), and the selfish priest who loses his crop as a result of keeping his glebeland out of the collective (Irma Harder).

Three more focus on the crisis of the last months of the war — Erich Koehler's quite moving story about a teenager whose best friend is summarily shot as a deserter only hours before the Russians arrive, Peter Kast's silly and implausible propaganda fantasy of brave Saxon peasant communists helping the Red Army's advance using the arms they stashed away after the 1918 revolution and kept secret all through the Nazi period, and Ludwig Turek's more measured account of a group of Jewish women who manage to escape from their SS guards in the confusion of the retreat and are rescued by French and Polish forced labourers. The well-known "worker-writer" Turek is the only real "big name" author in the collection, but being born in 1898 he's hardly a member of the postwar generation.

The other two stories in the anthology are Katharina Kammer's stilted account of a communist mother's reunion with her grown-up daughter, brought up by her Nazi ex-husband in the West, and Martin Viertel's cheerful tale of the political awakening of a rough miner (daringly set, although he doesn't quite say so explicitly, in the Soviet-controlled Wismut uranium mines).

Joan Becker, who translated all of the stories, was on the staff of Seven Seas and the East German propaganda ministry. She's notorious for the much-criticised original 1965 translation of Christa Wolf's novel The divided heaven, and she doesn't exactly shine here either. Agricultural terminology and peasant speech seem to suffer rather badly in her hands, which is not good news when they take up about half the book...

Speaking of art editors with budgets to spend (>78 thorold:) — here's someone who's on her fifth successive David Hockney cover. And a foil-embossed title.

Ali Smith's new book:

Companion piece (2022) by Ali Smith‬ (UK, 1962- )

  

The trouble with using a title like "Seasonal Quartet" is that you pretty much have to stop after the fourth book, even if it's working astonishingly well (unless you're Douglas Adams). But of course there's nothing to stop you writing a kind of appendix that isn't actually named after a season of the year...

This isn't part of the Seasonal Quartet, then, and the characters and action don't overlap, but it's unmistakably using the same techniques and exploring the same kind of ideas about all those hideous things in present day life we spend most of our time pretending not to see. And about the power of stories and the arts to fight back, even if only quixotically.

Taking her cue from an e.e. cummings poem, Smith uses a kind of two-steps-backward-one-step-forward narrative sequence, which is disorienting at first but very effective, and she also sets up an unexpected crossover between Tudor and Lockdown England, bringing out parallels in the authoritarianism, intolerance and oppression of the poor going on in both periods — something like what she did in How to be both. The artist and poet Sand is isolating herself at home whilst her elderly father is in hospital not-with-the-virus, but she reckons without the prime pest of her student days, Martina Pelf née Inglis, who rings her up out of the blue with an odd question about curlews and curfews. And then she finds a female blacksmith with a curlew on her shoulder trying on her shoes, and things start getting quite confusing.

As usual, wonderful, clever, witty writing, making us question things that always seemed quite normal and reasonable, and suggesting wonderful subversive possibilities in the world around us, awful though it is at the moment.

... are you taking the piss?
    No, I said, it's one of this era's real revolutions. And one of the most exciting things about language, that grammar's as bendy as a live green branch on a tree. Because if words are alive to us then meaning's alive, and if grammar's alive then the connection in it, rather than the divisions in us, will be energising everything, one way or another. It means an individual person can be both individual and plural at the same time. And I've always believed there's real room to move in embracing the indeterminate.

(Sand's response to a millennial challenging her about "singular they".)

Another recent book that came out of the Covid-19 pandemic:

Volver a dónde (2021) by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Spain, 1956- )

  

Spain, and the Madrid region in particular, was one of the parts of Europe hit hardest in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. There were frequent horror stories in the news of overwhelmed medical and funeral services, old people abandoned to their fate in retirement homes, and all the rest of it. In this modern Journal of the plague year, Antonio Muñoz Molina records his personal view of the crisis — literally, in the form of what he sees from his Madrid balcony each day, and from his authorised excursions to walk the dog and buy food, but also less directly, in his response to the news he hears and in the reflections and memories that the crisis brings out.

At the heart of things, as usual in his books, is his background in a family of market-gardeners from Úbeda, and in particular his coming to terms with the idea that now, in his mid-sixties and with most of the older generation gone, he has become the main repository of family memory. He talks about the hard work that his parents and all their contemporaries had to do to survive, and about his conflict with his father about his decision to complete high school and go to university instead of coming to work in the family huerta.

The lockdown brings out mixed feelings — there’s relief that his privileged situation as a writer who works from home anyway keeps him out of the worst of things — all he has to give up is the tedious bit, travel to personal appearances — and a slightly guilty pleasure in the novel (and short-lived) experience of Madrid as a city largely free from cars and noise. There’s anger at the politicians who spend their time wrangling about trivialities instead of tackling the huge problems around them and at the idiots who cling to conspiracy theories or put their self-declared right to party through the night above the need to protect vulnerable people from infection. There’s frustration at being cut off from direct contact with his elderly mother (living with his sister in another city) and his two-year-old granddaughter (a few streets away), but there’s also pleasure in the nightly ritual of applauding health workers from balconies, in his little balcony garden (an attempt to redeem himself as a vegetable grower after all?), in the myriad little details he observes in the changed city, and in the process of writing, either on the computer or with a fountain-pen restored for him by a doctor friend who does that as a hobby.

I don’t know if it all adds up to anything very concrete when you put it all together, but it’s lovely writing that has given me a good deal of pleasure dipping in and out of the book over the course of a few weeks.

Due to a minor mishap I’m going to be typing with one hand for at least the next couple of weeks, so you may be getting shorter and/or less coherent reviews…

This is one that’s been on the TBR shelf for a year or so, bought after I read a Prichard “greatest hits” compilation from my Seven Seas pile. Prichard was a well-known Communist journalist from Western Australia. This is one of her most famous novels.

Coonardoo (1929) by Katherine Susannah Prichard (Australia, 1883-1969)

  

Coonardoo, set on a remote cattle station in north-western Australia, tackles the already sensitive topic of a relationship between a white Australian man and an aboriginal woman. But what really shocked contemporary readers was that Prichard presents the relationship between Hugh and Coonardoo, who have known each other all their lives and are deeply rooted in the land at Wytaliba, as the loving, meaningful and — mostly — platonic one that drives the whole plot, whilst Hugh’s marriage to the white woman he imports from the coast is every bit as functional and exploitative as the harem of black women and mixed-race children their reprobate neighbour Sam maintains on his property.

Prichard’s well-meaning attempts to show us how the world looks from Coonardoo’s perspective probably wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny in 21st-century terms, but they were quite serious and carefully researched, and clearly well ahead of their time 93 years ago. It’s also interesting how she uses a geographical point-of-view to structure the narrative: we never get more than a few miles from Wytaliba, and follow the characters, white or aboriginal, who happen to be there at the time. Other than that, it’s a fairly conventional realistic novel, full of horses and cattle and Australian weather and all the household business of running a remote farm.

Following on from >62 thorold: another travel book with bonus philosophy on audio:

On Trails: An Exploration (2016) by Robert Moor (USA, - ), audiobook read by Jason Grasl

  

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

Working outwards from his experience of walking the entire Appalachian Trail, Moor looks into the surprisingly complex question “What is a trail?” — he investigates how and why animals, from fossil sea-bed creatures and ants to elephants and bison, change the world by making trails, where human trails used by different cultures come from and how they evolve, takes a sidestep to look at human interaction with animals as hunter, pastoralist, or scientific observer, and then takes a wide sweep through the background to modern ideas about hiking and wilderness. Along the way we get plenty of chance to reflect on the many metaphorical ways we talk and think about trails too.

I found the scientific part of the discussion the most interesting: Moor seems to be an arts graduate with an unusual gift for asking scientists the right questions an continuing to do so until he actually understands what they are telling him, so his accounts of the trail-making behaviour of various animals and of how we found about it are lively and convincing, despite a few journalistic tics like his insistence on telling us about the dress and facial features of his interviewees.

The section on human behaviour was quite interesting too, although it’s very North American in its focus. There’s a lot about the tracks used by Native Americans, most of which were probably originally adapted from animal trails — bison are very good at finding the most energy-efficient route, apparently — and many of which still exist as part of the modern highway network. I was also interested by the way he picks out the odd convergence between urban liberals and crotchety gun-toting libertarians in the conservation movement, even if, as he points out, America has never been the “trackless wilderness” so many people have a nostalgic affection for.

Moor comes to the interesting conclusion that trails, with their mixture of serendipitous exploration and continuous refinement, are a repository of collective wisdom in the same sort of way that books or the internet are, and that trail-building behaviour is one of the great evolutionary steps that animals have taken, almost on a par with the invention of language.

The last audiobook I listened to irritated me because the reader didn’t distinguish clearly enough between the author’s voice and passages of quotation; this one went the other way, giving everyone quoted the stage-school accent appropriate to his or her presumed origins. If you want to hear Nietzsche and “Goatie” speaking English like camp commandants in a seventies war film, or a distinguished Belgian ethologist doing a Poirot impersonation, you’re in the right place…

>83 thorold: Yikes—sorry about any mishap bad enough to keep you from typing with both hands. Those last three all sound interesting in extremely different ways.

>85 lisapeet: Thanks! It's inconvenient in numerous ways, like anything else that messes our plans up, but pretty insignificant as injuries go...

A slightly silly pairing, to cheer myself up a bit. I haven't read any Verne since my early teens, as far as I can recall, but I wanted to reread this one after reading Under the glacier a few years ago.

Geophysics : a very short introduction (2018) by William Lowrie (UK, - ) audiobook read by Patrick Lawlor
Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; Journey to the centre of the Earth) by Jules Verne (France, 1828-1905)

  
  

Like all the books in the Very Short Introductions series I've come across so far, this one does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, taking you through all the main concepts and techniques of the subject at a brisk pace, in a way that anyone with a reasonably solid recollection of school science lessons should be able to follow. After a short introduction to establish a context for the Earth in astrophysics and the solar system, Lowrie focuses in turn on each of the main types of physical measurements geophysicists use — seismometry, gravimetry, magnetometry, etc. — and explains how those measurements have given us particular types of information about the structure and behaviour of the planet. He also talks a little about the kind of things we don't know yet — e.g. when the next earthquake will be — and about the way that geophysics has been a classic example of a field where techniques developed for "applied science" — e.g. for civil engineering, commercial prospecting, military intelligence-gathering — have led to some of the biggest "fundamental" discoveries about the nature of the planet we live on.

---

Even in the 1860s, conventional scientific opinion would have ruled out a "journey to the centre of the Earth" quite firmly: from the study of volcanoes and extrapolating measurements made in deep mines, it was clear that it would soon get too hot for humans to survive. Verne has to jump through a few conceptual hoops to have his eccentric professor support a fringe theory (on the authority of Sir Humphrey Davy!) that allows it to cool as you descend further, and he sidesteps a few other obvious problems, like where you get oxygen from, and the logistics of travelling 6300 km vertically (even on the level it would take the best part of a year to walk that far...). Moreover, like so many adventure stories, this one is triggered by the flimsiest of pieces of evidence. I'm sure any real professor, finding a crudely enciphered bit of paper left in an old book that purported to give directions for reaching the centre of the earth, would assume it was a practical joke by his students and pin it up on the college noticeboard with the spelling mistakes corrected... Verne's eager professor doesn't even stop to wonder about why anyone would take so much care to encipher such a message, or whom he thought he might be addressing.

All the same, it's a good story, Verne mixes in enough real Icelandic background (including the farrier-priest-innkeeper who later featured in Under the glacier by Halldór Laxness), geoscience and palaeontology to keep us interested, as well as a reasonable amount of peril and suspense. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't quite deliver on the promise in the title, and the ending is just silly, but we knew from the start that (a) the narrator survives to tell the tale and (b) Verne couldn't be planning to make us sit through the reverse of the entire downward journey, so there obviously has to be a quick exit from the subterranean world somewhere, as well as a physical phenomenon they fail to appreciate until the end (cf. Phineas Fogg's extra day).

In the light of Lowrie's book, I was surprised they didn't take a spring balance to measure changes in gravity as they descended...

>86 thorold: After reading your review, I followed the touchstone to Under the Glacier and am somewhat intrigued. I read Independent People and actively disliked it. Laxness is so lauded, I felt bad about my reaction. Under the Glacier sounds completely different, humorous for starters, perhaps I'll give it a go. Thanks!

>67 thorold: Yes, Under the glacier wasn’t in the least what I expected after Independent people, you might well like it better. Eccentric but fun. They are still the only two of his books I’ve read, though.

One of the surprising things about getting older is the realisation that the pile of books you still want to read is not dwindling away to nothing after all. You keep coming across authors you should have known about and read years ago, but somehow didn't. There's no sensible reason that can explain my never having read anything by the obviously very well-known Irish author John Banville, for instance. If this book is representative at all, I obviously need to go off and explore his back-catalogue soon...

April in Spain (2021) by John Banville (Ireland, 1945- )

  

He had a special fondness for the moving parts of women, their wrists, their butterfly-shaped ankles, their shoulder blades like a swan's folded wings.

OK, that's obviously a sentence Banville planted to catch the reviewers' eyes and have pulled out as a signature quote (and it looks as though most of them were duly hooked), but it's also a strong hint at the ways in which this book, published under Banville's own name but using characters from the crime stories he writes as "Benjamin Black", plays around with the boundaries between "crime" and "literary fiction". Nearly half of the book is given over to a leisurely exploration of a middle-aged but recently married couple's experience of going on holiday together, with the only hint of crime in the much sparser interleaved story of a young man who has apparently taken his idea of himself as a hired assassin mostly from Brighton Rock and fifties noir films.

By setting the story somewhere around 1970, Banville gives himself the freedom to endow at least some of his characters with rather Jurassic attitudes (the "moving parts of women" thing), as well as bringing in background atmosphere from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Basque Country in Franco's time, and the dark legacy of the abuses of the Catholic "orphanage" system in Ireland. The story builds up to a moment of violence that turns out to have all the arbitrary randomness of real life, but what we carry away from the book is more likely to be the memory of some of the many lovingly-constructed scenes that have little to do with the ostensible plot and everything to do with finding out who those characters are and what kind of life they live. Quirke and his wife in the hat-shop, for instance, or Phoebe waiting for her boyfriend at Dublin Airport.

And a quick little filler:

Ex libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) by Anne Fadiman (USA, 1953- ) audiobook read by Suzanne Toren

  

A lovely little collection of essays about the odd intersections between reading and everyday life, where Fadiman talks about how we organise books in our homes (or not), how we acquire them and pass them on, how we mistreat them, how we read aloud or are read to, how the books on our parents' shelves can be raw material for building forts or a reference source in the quest for sexual enlightenment, and so on. There's a silly piece that purports to show that no-one has ever written anything original about plagiarism, and a rueful look at the joys of finding errors in restaurant menus and of writing bad but perfectly-iambic sonnets. Nothing life-changing, but probably a good book to slip into the Christmas stocking of any book-addict too young to have read it when it first came out.

Jacques Stephen Alexis was a Haitian journalist, doctor, and novelist, a direct descendant of Dessalines and an important figure in the exiled left-wing opposition to the Duvalier regime. Exiled after the "surrealist revolution" in 1946 (so called because of André Bréton's involvement), he was murdered by Duvalier's secret police during a failed attempt to launch a coup in Haiti in April 1961. I read his best-known novel Compère Général Soleil a few years ago when we had the Caribbean theme; this one has been on the TBR ever since.

L'espace d'un cillement (1959; In the flicker of an eyelid) by Jacques Stephen Alexis (Haiti, 1922-1961)

  

This was Alexis's last full-scale novel, intended as the first part of a tetralogy. It's basically grand opera: La Niña Estrellita and El Caucho catch sight of each other in the crowds celebrating Palm Sunday in Port-au-Prince, are smitten immediately, and provide us with some three hundred pages of gloriously passionate arias in free indirect speech before they end up in bed together. They are both Cuban exiles living in Haiti: she's a sex-worker in the waterfront Sensation Bar, with a column of US Marines queuing up outside her bedroom door; he's a mechanic and trade-union organiser in a shipyard. Alexis structures the story around the days of Holy Week and the senses, as their relationship progresses from sight through smell, hearing, taste and touch to that sixth sense that lovers are supposed to have.

Along the way we learn more than we might expect to about the situation of the working classes in the Caribbean and what should be done to improve it. Alexis does exploit the exotic brothel setting for all it's worth (including rather more male-gaze-type lesbian soft porn than strictly necessary), but he also makes it clear that the women are every bit as much exploited workers and victims of capitalism as the men in the shipyard (it's no accident that the US Navy is in port).

Fun, in the sort of way Porgy and Bess would be with a libretto by Friedrich Engels and Henry Miller...

>91 thorold:

Ha. Got me where I live... :)

>92 LolaWalser: Sex, socialism and surrealism? ... doesn't sound like your sort of thing at all :-)
If you're only going to read one, Compère Général Soleil is a better, more complete, novel, but this was more fun.

---

I've no clear recollection why I had this next one on my e-reader, but it turned out unexpectedly interesting. Alain Jaubert is a well-known journalist and film-maker, sometime colleague of Michel Foucault, famous inter alia for getting beaten up by the police after a Paris demo in 1971.

I've never felt a very strong urge to read Casanova, but I'm almost tempted to now. If it weren't 4000 pages long...

Casanova, l'aventure: récits (2015) by Alain Jaubert (France, 1940- )

 

This collection of essays picking up different themes from Casanova's History of my life seems to have grown out of a documentary Jaubert made for Arte in 1998, and it comes together into a kind of book-length introduction to what he obviously sees as one of the towering works of 18th century French literature, a "great and terrible novel". Because as far as Jaubert is concerned, this unfinished 4000-page epic is better seen as a highly-sophisticated work of autofiction than as the frank, confessional memoir it seems to be. After all, Casanova starts his story by claiming descent from Don Juan and Donna Anna, no less, and he goes on to shape his life as a series of incidents from picaresque novels.

There is the intriguing question of Casanova's relationship to Mozart's Don Giovanni: he certainly knew Mozart and Da Ponte (and they were all Freemasons), he was probably at the 1787 premiere in Prague, and there's a tantalising page in his papers that looks like a draft of text for the the Act II quintet, as well as numerous incidents in his Life that have parallels to the Don. It's tempting to think that he might have been a silent collaborator in the libretto, but it's just as likely that it was seeing the opera that prompted him to start writing his memoirs at last in summer 1789. Moreover, whilst the Don ends up being dragged down into Hell to the sound of trombones, Casanova's career ended rather more prosaically with him becoming a librarian. He's clearly a rococo figure with a grin on his face, where the Don is thoroughly baroque (albeit behind several layers of Mozartian irony).

Jaubert also rather unexpectedly claims Casanova as a feminist. This isn't quite as crazy as it sounds: he did once write a pamphlet arguing against an inane medical theory about the weakness of the female intellect — according to his observations women were every bit as clever as men, simply held back by excessively restricted lives and poor education. And it does seem to be true that his many sexual adventures had more to do with mutual pleasure than with adding names to Leporello's notebook, and that he had a fairly good track record for seeing his former girlfriends properly provided for when relationships came to an end. Women usually seemed to be pleased to see him if they happened to meet again a decade or two later — even if these reunions more often than not turned into piquant realisations that the charming young woman he has been trying to seduce must be yet another daughter he didn't know he had.

One thing I hadn't quite realised was that the Venetian-born Casanova, sitting in a castle library in darkest Bohemia, chose to write in French, a language he had only learnt properly as an adult. Jaubert credits him with initiating the change that allowed the passé composé, previously confined to the spoken language, to be used in literary French, something that gives his memoirs an unexpectedly modern feel compared to other texts of the time. Of course, no-one apart from a few editors and translators actually noticed that until the first unexpurgated editions started to come out in the 1960s, so he didn't quite revolutionise French literature overnight.

>93 thorold: Jaubert credits him with initiating the change that allowed the passé composé, previously confined to the spoken language, to be used in literary French, something that gives his memoirs an unexpectedly modern feel compared to other texts of the time. Of course, no-one apart from a few editors and translators actually noticed that until the first unexpurgated editions started to come out in the 1960s, so he didn't quite revolutionise French literature overnight.

Years of studying the passé antérieur for naught? Seriously though, I quite like the idea of a literary tense. It would be interesting to see that juxtaposition you mention though.

>93 thorold:

That reminds me that I have somewhere a "science-fiction" novel by Casanova, not a 4000 pages long. If you do venture to read his autobiography but can somehow give up on most of the hanky-panky, the section dealing with his escape from Venice was IIRC published separately. My Italian edition is titled Storia della mia fuga dai Piombi.

>93 thorold: I have always thought Casanova was Don Juan, but reading your comments made me look them up; well they are different (aside from one being real and the other being fictional) but I found this interesting blog that talks about them

And this summary which is probably simplistic

"The difference between Casanova and Don Juan, then, is the difference between seduction by mind games and seduction by passionate rapport, between reason and passion; what they share is that they are both excessively devoted to pleasure. What they also both share is failure: Casanova fails to find his destiny, thus ending up as a famous nobody; and Don Juan fails to find himself, thus ending up in hell."

Casanova's essays might be an interesting read

>95 LolaWalser: >96 cindydavid4: Interesting!

Jaubert analyses the escape story in some detail, so I probably need to wait a bit before trying to read the original.

Odd that the blogger concludes that the things that made Casanova interesting as a lover make him dull as a writer, whilst Jaubert seems to conclude that he must have been very charming in person because his writings are so captivating...

As a pendant to >67 thorold:, another very dark novel set in a Bible-belt family...
This has been one of the most talked-about and translated Dutch novels of recent years, whose English translation won the 2020 Booker International:

De avond is ongemak (2018; The discomfort of evening) by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (Netherlands, 1991- )

  

A detailed and very painful description of a family falling apart in the process of grieving for a child killed in a skating accident. Narrator Jas and her surviving siblings are essentially left to fend for themselves, with their parents so overcome by their reaction to the tragedy that they aren't really able to spare any emotional energy for being parents any more. But the process of growing up doesn't have a Pause button, and the kids, whilst sharing their parents' grief for their lost brother, still have all the puzzling, exciting, frightening and unstoppable experience of puberty to deal with. 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. Not an enjoyable read, but a clever and powerful piece of writing.

As usual when I'm incapacitated in some minor way, I seem to be compensating by reading anything and everything that comes to hand, relevant or not. Here's another from the austere Master of Melbourne:

A million windows (2014) by Gerald Murnane (Australia, 1939- )

 

The title of this novel picks up Henry James's image of the "house of fiction", which Murnane turns into a literal house occupied by an unspecified number of male persons seated at desks behind glowing windows and reading sentences that they have just written. Inevitably, since this is Murnane, the house looks out over level grassland. And equally inevitably, all of these male persons have some kind of involvement in the book we are reading, as characters, narrators or implied authors. And, we suspect, without any authority for such a suspicion, they are all pleasingly contradictory versions of a male person who might or might not be called Gerald Murnane and live in an unnamed Australian state...

Murnane — aided or hindered by some of these implied authors and narrators — engages us in a debate with the authors of various unnamed manuals of creative writing, books on narratology and so-called great works of literature, trying to establish what we really mean by fiction and how it works. False idols like "dialogue", "characters" and "plot" are cast down, "point-of-view" is taken apart and put back together again unrecognisably, dark-haired women from the narrator's real or purported past wander in and out, and Henry James somehow emerges as the only really trustworthy narrator we have ever known. Great fun, in an austere sort of way, but possibly not for the faint-hearted.

And a travel book...

Sea and Sardinia (1921) by D H Lawrence (UK, 1885-1930), audiobook read by Phil Benson

  

In January 1921, David and Frieda Lawrence, who'd left postwar England in disgust and were living in Taormina, suddenly felt "an absolute necessity to move" coming over them and decided to go off on a spontaneous trip to Sardinia. They take a boat from Palermo to Cagliari, travel by train and bus through the island to the northern port of Terranova, and then back to Sicily via Civitavecchia, Rome and Naples. The whole trip doesn't seem to have taken them more than about two weeks.

Lawrence describes it all with his characteristically mannered style, full of alliteration, repetition and double-shotted adjectives, and with a degree of engagement that makes it feel almost as though he's writing it all in real time, or at least so quickly that he hasn't quite realised how ridiculous it is to get worked up into a rage by a boatman trying to overcharge him or by sophisticated Palermo young women laughing at his backpack and Frieda's "kitchenino" picnic basket. Because, unlike many travel writers, Lawrence is not at his best when he's in a bad mood. When something happens to upset or offend him (which happens a lot), he comes over as tediously xenophobic and intolerant, small-minded and petulant. But when he's had a good sleep or a good meal and is prepared to enjoy life, he comes out with some fabulous, memorable passages of lyrical description. The kids going to an Epiphany fancy-dress ball in Cagliari, the vegetables on the market (a real Zola moment!), "manly" Sardinian peasants, the gratifyingly untouristy village of Nuoro in the morning sun, and the glorious Palermo marionette theatre are all more than worth the price of admission.

But woe betide anyone who reminds Lawrence that this is 1921, that Italy has just fought a devastating war and got nothing out of being on the winning side, that D'Annunzio has just failed ingloriously in Fiume (Rijeka), and that most rural Italians are living in extreme poverty and have good reason to resent foreigners, especially foreigners like the Lawrences who don't have a lot of money to spend.

"Oh yes," said I, "it's very nice to be in Italy: especially if you are not living in an hotel, and you have to attend to things for yourself. It is very nice to be overcharged every time, and then insulted if you say a word. It's very nice to have the cambio thrown in your teeth, if you say two words to any Italian, even a perfect stranger. It's very nice to have waiters and shop-people and railway porters sneering in a bad temper and being insulting in small, mean ways all the time. It's very nice to feel what they all feel against you. And if you understand enough Italian, it's very nice to hear what they say when you've gone by. Oh very nice. Very nice indeed!"

I see my first peasant in costume. He is an elderly, upright, handsome man, beautiful in the black-and-white costume. He wears the full-sleeved white shirt and the close black bodice of thick, native frieze, cut low. From this sticks out a short kilt or frill, of the same black frieze, a band of which goes between the legs, between the full loose drawers of coarse linen. The drawers are banded below the knee into tight black frieze gaiters. On his head he has the long black stocking cap, hanging down behind. How handsome he is, and so beautifully male! He walks with his hands loose behind his back, slowly, upright, and aloof. The lovely unapproachableness, indomitable. And the flash of the black and white, the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast again, and once more the black cap—what marvellous massing of the contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie.—How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.—And how perfectly ridiculous it is made in modern clothes.

Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a flower-show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From this green, white, and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet and blue crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips, in piles. Then the long, slim, grey-purple buds of artichokes, and dangling clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and basketfuls of figs. A few baskets of almonds, and many huge walnuts. Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets: magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new potatoes: scaly kohlrabi: wild asparagus in bunches, yellow-budding sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery salads with white hearts: long, brown-purple onions and then, of course pyramids of big oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny mandarini, the little tangerine orange with their green-black leaves. The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit-gleams I have never seen in such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and gorgeous. And all quite cheap, the one remaining cheapness, except potatoes. Potatoes of any sort are 1.40 or 1.50 the kilo.

There is nothing to see in Nuoro: which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore. Thank heaven there isn't a bit of Perugino or anything Pisan in the place: that I know of. Happy is the town that has nothing to show. What a lot of stunts and affectations it saves! Life is then life, not museum-stuffing. One could saunter along the rather inert, narrow, Monday-morning street, and see the women having a bit of a gossip, and see an old crone with a basket of bread on her head, and see the unwilling ones hanging back from work, and the whole current of industry disinclined to flow. Life is life and things are things. I am sick of gaping things, even Peruginos. I have had my thrills from Carpaccio and Botticelli. But now I've had enough. But I can always look at an old, grey-bearded peasant in his earthy white drawers and his black waist-frill, wearing no coat or over-garment, but just crooking along beside his little ox-wagon. I am sick of "things," even Perugino.

---

The cover image of the audiobook is taken from one of Jan Juta's illustrations, which was on the dustjacket of the first edition.

The follow-up to Sixty million Frenchmen (>68 thorold: above):

The Story of French (2006) by Jean-Benoît Nadeau (Canada, 1964- ) and Julie Barlow (Canada, 1968- )

  

Some years ago — not long before I retired — I had to go to Beijing with a colleague to discuss technical cooperation with our counterparts in a Chinese government agency. The technical part of the talks was carried out, as expected, in various functional dialects of International Business English, but the opening of the meeting took the form of a welcoming speech in elegant, very formal, French by a senior official of the host organisation, which I suspect none of her Chinese colleagues could understand. My Dutch colleague had to do some swift thinking to come up with a reply in kind: I was impressed that he remembered to start with "Madame le directeur-général, mesdames et messieurs...", the lady being of a generation to consider any other form of her title a terrible solecism.

That experience sums up a lot of preconceptions about the roles of English and French in the world of international communication. French comes loaded with style, protocol and status and the suggestion that Metternich and Talleyrand will be joining the meeting shortly; English lives in the world of Powerpoint presentations and pragmatic solutions. The directeur-général was entitled to assume that we, as representatives of an international organisation, would understand French, and she was also reminding us and her own subordinates that she had the enormous prestige of being a graduate of the Sorbonne. But she was perhaps exposing herself as a kind of dinosaur, one of the last representatives of the generations that were educated to believe that a good knowledge of French was all you needed in international discussions between educated people.

And of course, none of those preconceptions are entirely true, as Nadeau and Barlow set out to show in this follow-up to their dissection of modern France (Sixty million Frenchmen can't be wrong, 2003). Although it's presented as a history of the language, the historical part of the story is fairly perfunctory, and a good half of the book is given to a social and political examination of the status of French as a global language since 1945. They remind us how widely French is still spoken as a first or second language in many parts of the world, and how many students continue to learn it (voluntarily or not...). They look at the way the French-speaking community in Québec woke from centuries of self-isolation to become a dynamic political and cultural force in the 1960s, at the way French has survived the end of colonialism in North and West Africa, at the influence of French international schools, the Alliance française, and the Francophonie, at the French communities in Belgium and Switzerland, and at the unexpected importance of French in some countries where it doesn't have any formal standing, like Israel and Romania, or even the USA, where it is still in fourth place as a household language (after English, Spanish and Chinese).

French is still clearly very far from being at a dead end in the world at large, and a lot of that continued good health is due to clever language-promotion by governments and NGOs, but Nadeau and Barlow seem less confident about the health of French at home: the French are still inclined to get hung up on sterile discussions about language purism and ignore the fact that the world has moved on since the days of Molière-Racine-Corneille (whose works, as they remind us, French students only know through editions in which the spelling has been updated and standardised to nineteenth-century norms). The Académie française gets a particularly hard time: as far as Nadeau and Barlow are concerned, the Immortels are a bunch of amateurs who have been doing nothing in particular since 1635, and not doing it very well. They contrast this destructive conservatism with the open approach of the Office québécois de la langue française, which spends its time trying to come up with practical French terms for new concepts that would otherwise require borrowings from English.

As in their earlier book, the text is marred by imprecisions, minor errors and editorial slips (at one point they even manage to write "Indonesia" when they mean "Indochina"!), and they repeat themselves a bit, but on the whole it's a useful and very readable book, and it covers quite a few topics I haven't read much about elsewhere.

>86 thorold: There has always been a funny balance between geology and the rest of the world catching up. At the tiem of Jules Verne writing promenite Hollow Earth Throeies had once again made it back into the mainstream. Reaching as high as promient professors of Geology and Engineering in unvieristies at Havard and Cambridge. It's a strange world where both mining engineers and miners could tell the obivious and yet grand theiroes about massive holes at the poles and us living within a series of rings could coexist at the same time. If anything Verne's Journey is less outrageous than some of the hollow earth bunk that was being passed around at the time. We had a lot yet left to discover about the Earth in Verne's time we weren't all that far removed from mountians being fromed like the crinkling of a rotten apple skin tehory.

>90 thorold: Ex Libris is one of the few collections or thoughts about reading that I actually liked. Most seem a bit too cozy or try for something too profound. Ex Libris from what I remeber struck the right kind of balance for something like that.

>102 stretch: Yes, Verne seems to be quite good at exploiting the whackier ideas without committing himself too far.

Time for some randomness from the Little Library pile:

The Vatican diaries : a behind-the-scenes look at the power, personalities and politics at the heart of the Catholic Church (2013) by John Thavis (USA, - )

  

Not a diary, but a set of extended pieces of journalism drawing on the author's thirty-year stint as a Vatican correspondent. There's a behind-the-scenes piece about how the bells get rung at a conclave, a look at the odd life of a Papal Gentleman, a heartfelt moan about the terrors of travelling the world with the Papal press pack, and an affectionate portrait of an eccentric Latinist responsible for translating official documents, but also some more serious pieces about how the Vatican deals with scandals, sex, and the application of sainthood to former popes.

As an outsider, it's difficult to overcome the feeling that the Vatican is a deeply irrelevant institution (obviously, Roman Catholics must see this differently), but Thavis is a good journalist, able to find interesting stories in the pettiest of internal squabbles and give them some kind of context, so this is an entertaining read on the whole, helped by what looks like the sheer ineptness of the church's media strategy. Thavis can always count on some cardinal to pop up and say the wrong thing at the critical moment, turning a bland PR moment into a juicy scandal.

>101 thorold: Great story about ledirecteur-général.

Do Nadeau and Barlow discuss the different versions of French in Canada? The various regions each seemed to have a different impetus for ensuring the survival of the French language, but each was definitely aided by Québec's policies, not to mention the aid of the Official Languages Act (first enacted 1969), bolstered later by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It looks as if the authors are pretty focussed on Québec in their look at Canadian French.

It's inconceivable to me, although it's actually happening right now, that politicians in Canada feel they can run for the leadership of a national party without the ability to speak French fluently. It probably doesn't matter much in this case, as the Conservative party has very little support in Québec, but the principle still applies. Does leadership unilingualism survive in other countries with more than one official language?

>104 SassyLassy: They do talk quite a bit about Acadians, New Brunswick, and the problems French-speakers had in western provinces, but the focus is on Québec. There’s not much on the actual language in the other provinces, what they say is mostly about history and politics.

I don’t know about leadership unilingualism: I suspect that no two multilingual countries are the same. It seems to be established in Belgium that the prime minister has to be able to speak both French and Dutch, although I think there were cases where a new prime minister had to take a crash course on appointment.

In March I followed Ror Wolf through Forty-nine digressions; time for a much shorter set:

Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions (2017) by Alberto Manguel (Argentina, Canada, etc., 1943- ) audiobook read by James Cameron Stewart

  

A short set of meditations on the relationship between humans and books, starting out from Manguel's personal reaction to having to put his private library (35k books) into storage due to the sale of his house in France, and winding up with the more public dilemma of being put in charge of Argentina's National Library ("about 3-5 million books") and having to come up with a coherent formulation for the role of a national library in 21st century civic life.

Walter Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my library", which gave Manguel his title, talks about the way the books we own have meaning as physical objects, carrying memories of the circumstances in which we acquired them or the people who owned them before us, something Manguel also feels quite strongly (can another copy of Don Quijote ever be the same as my copy?), but going beyond that he is also fascinated by the way books gain meaning from the decisions we take on how to shelve them and the sometimes unexpected company they find themselves in as a result. But he's soon off far beyond that, talking about the way books relate to reality, imagination and dreams, about religious ideas of the power of words and images, about books versus political oppression, about golems, Dante, Humpty-Dumpty, Jules Verne, Borges, and much else.

>106 thorold: I went to a talk Alberto Manguel gave when he was still living in France. He came across as a very decent, empathetic person. I can't even picture 35k books in storage! So many cubic meters...

>107 Dilara86: That must have been good! He certainly comes across in his writing as someone it would be really interesting to listen to.

Yes, it’s about 10 times my physical library, so it would be somewhere in excess of 20 cubic meters if you extrapolate LT’s not very reliable physical stats. Apparently, since then he’s set up an institute of some kind in Lisbon and given them the books, so they’re presumably no longer in storage.

ok another book that I have to read couresty you! that looks wonderful noticed he has lots of other books about books! Have you read any of his others?

>109 cindydavid4: A History of Reading. :) But them I am biased - I like everything of his I had ever read.

>108 thorold: Apparently, since then he’s set up an institute of some kind in Lisbon and given them the books, so they’re presumably no longer in storage.
It's good that they're being used!

I read his Dictionary of Imaginary Places: fascinating.

>110 cindydavid4: oh that looks good! Lemme see how I like this one, I may check that one out as well (why do I always feel like a kid in a candy shop in this site!?!)

>112That looks interesting, I have a similar book that I love by Michael Page Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were: Creatures, Places, and People illustrated by the incredibly talented Robert Ingpen, who say he takes inspriation from Howard Pyle and Arthur Rachman.

I’ve only read his The Iliad and the Odyssey: a biography before this, but that made me want to read more.

I enjoyed the way in this book that when he was listing the many dictionaries he has, at the end he slipped in “I even have a Dictionary of imaginary places”.

I was way behind - enjoyed catching up. Jan Carson.... ooh, I know of her novels (obviously - NI hasn't that many novelists), but I've not read anything by her yet. I've been disappointed a little by some of the current NI novelists' work, so I've probably unfairly avoided her.

And the Patrick Gale book - I quite enjoyed it, but felt it was unremarkable and forgettable fairly quickly.

I haven't read John Banville in quite a few years, but I enjoyed The Sea. From memory I think it was a bit dark - not sure if all his writing is like that.

>113 cindydavid4: That looks interesting, I have a similar book that I love by Michael Page Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were: Creatures, Places, and People illustrated by the incredibly talented Robert Ingpen, which I've now added to my wishlist!

>115 AlisonY: I don’t think Carson is everyone’s cup of tea (I’m intrigued to know what the book club are going to say about The raptures) but she’s certainly not afraid of doing her own thing.

>106 thorold: I'm a huge Alberto Manguel fan. I feel as if he is part of my reading life.

It's a shame Manguel himself didn't do the reading, as he has a lovely voice, truly engaging.

>116 Dilara86: :)

>100 thorold: D H Lawrence was a superb travel writer, I loved re-reading those examples.

>120 baswood: When he was good, he was very, very good...

Andrés Neuman's El viajero del siglo (2009) has been one of those books I've kept recommending to people ever since I read it a few years ago, but I've been quite slow in getting to the rest of his work. I read his earlier novel Una vez Argentina in 2020, and bought this more recent one shortly after that. It turns out that a further novel (Umbilical) and the English translation of Fractura both came out while this was on the TBR pile...

I thought the reason I picked this off the pile now was that subject and author both fit in with the outcasts and castaways theme, but who knows, maybe it does also have something to do with my current situation, recovering from a (wrist-) fracture...?

Fractura (2018; Fracture) by Andrés Neuman (Argentina, Spain, 1977- )

  

This was Neuman's reaction to the 2011 Fukushima disaster, as experienced by Mr Yoshie Watanabe, a double-hibakusha who survived the Hiroshima bomb as a child but lost all his family to the Nagasaki one. Watanabe, retired and living in Tokyo after a long business career spent mostly overseas, is an oddly elusive character and Neuman doesn't claim to get inside his head: we see him mostly through the eyes of his four ex-girlfriends (in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid) and through the Argentinian journalist Jorge Pinedo who is collating information from the ladies and is hoping to interview Watanabe but never quite catches up with him.

Watanabe seems to be a kind of serial exile, someone who has been made to feel by his hibakusha status that he doesn't quite belong in the realm of the living any more, and who also feels a serious disconnect with the Japanese culture that he has grown up in, but is never quite at home anywhere else either. Neuman has a lot of quiet fun with the successive layers of cultural and linguistic confusion observed by the women and with the things they tell us about postwar Japan as well as about fifties France, sixties/seventies New York, eighties Argentina and nineties Spain, and about the notions we have of rootedness and exile. When Watanabe travels to the Fukushima region in the closing section of the book and spends time talking to the — mostly elderly — residents who have stayed in the danger area around the nuclear plant despite the advice to evacuate, he seems to find an emotional connection that gives him a kind of closure.

A very interesting and ambitious book. I'm not sure if Neuman has quite got away with it in the way he did in El viajero del siglo — it's hard for the reader to deal with an opaque character like Watanabe, especially when the four women are all modelled in such detail, and it's disorienting in a novel to have a string of serious relationships that just stop without any kind of emotional repercussions. But it's certainly worth plunging into to decide for yourself.

...and a book that "some old guy" recommended me to read a long time ago, when it might still have been vaguely relevant to things I was doing at work. I was reminded of it by seeing "another old guy" talking about it somewhere recently (TV? YouTube?).

The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering (1975; revised 1995) by Frederic P Brooks (USA, 1931- )

  

Fred Brooks was in charge of a big software development project for IBM in the late sixties. As usual with big projects, the product came in late and over budget, it didn't quite perform as well as had been hoped, and by the time it was on the market there were new technologies coming up that would soon make it obsolete. Rather unusually for a manager, Brooks decided to devote some serious thought to why that had happened, and the result was this little book, in which he lays out some basic principles of project management that have application far beyond the (now largely forgotten) world of big mainframe computing.

The two big quotable ideas in the book are things you've probably seen on a Powerpoint slide if you've ever done project management training.

Firstly, the one that gives the book its title, the idea that real life jobs don't work like those famous maths problems where one worker digs a ditch in ten days and ten workers can therefore dig the same ditch in one day. In real life, the bigger a team gets the more complex the interactions between team members become, and the more time is consumed in internal communication, meetings, paperwork, administration, etc. This seems a very obvious point, but it's one I've often seen overlooked in practice. Senior managers love the idea of big, complicated teams, and it always ends in long delays and mountains of paper...
(It being 1975, Brooks talks about "men" and "man-months" throughout, except in his example of a non-divisible job: "If it takes nine months for one woman to produce a baby...")

Secondly, as a kind of corollary to this, he proposes Brooks's Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” This is a kind of paradox, of course, but the phenomenon it describes is one that probably happens in every workplace. You're overloaded with work, so your boss recruits someone to help you, and the backlog initially gets worse as you have to divert time into training and supervising the newcomer. In a fairly generic job that soon gets compensated as the new person becomes productive, but in a complex project it can rapidly turn a small delay into a catastrophe.

Beyond these headline ideas there is a lot of sound advice about what works and doesn't work in terms of team-structures, meetings, intermediate goals, and effective documentation strategies, all of which is readily portable outside software development (and a lot of which also seems to have survived into today's formal project-management systems). Specific to computing projects, he talks about the importance of focussing design effort on specifying what the product should do, and making sure that that fits within a unified vision, preferably defined by a single architect. The nuts and bolts of how the specification is implemented will take far less time to design than the specification itself.

The 1995 edition comes with a couple of follow-up essays looking at responses to the book, with some thoughts about what he would revise in the light of the unexpected ways computing has evolved. The personal computer revolution, with the consequent shift from expensive custom software to commercial "shrink-wrapped" solutions, has taken him by surprise, as has the rise of object-oriented programming, but neither of these things seems to invalidate the basic principles he set out.

This has been on the TBR for five years — mostly because the dialect almost defeated me the first time I tried it — but I was reminded of it by reading about the Acadians in The story of French. It's also relevant for Outcasts and Castaways, of course.

Pélagie-la-Charrette : roman (1979; Pélagie: The Return to Acadie) by Antonine Maillet (Canada, 1929- )

  

Britain occupied the French colony of Acadia (roughly corresponding to the modern Maritime provinces and eastern Maine) during the North American wars of the mid-18th century. We learnt a lot about Wolfe and the Heights of Abraham in our school history, but not so much about the way most of the French settlers in Acadia were forcibly deported around 1755. An estimated 11,500 people — most of them families who had been farming and fishing there for over a century — were displaced to the southern colonies or the Caribbean, and up to half of them are thought to have died by accident, disease or starvation. Many of the survivors ultimately settled in Louisiana, where their descendants turned "Acadian" into "Cajun".

Others found their way back to Canada "by the back door", and it's this return from exile, the foundation of the present-day French-speaking communities in places like New Brunswick, that Maillet documents in her famous novel, which won her the Prix Goncourt in 1979.

The Acadian widow Pélagie has worked for fifteen years in Georgia to earn the money she needs to buy a cart and a team of oxen to take her family back to the North. They face endless difficulties during what turns into a ten-year journey, picking up numerous other exiled Acadians as they go, and Pélagie becomes a kind of Moses leading her people to the promised land.

Maillet gives the story a deliberately epic quality, rooted in an oral tradition, by reporting it to us as told around the hearth by people three generations after Pélagie and her companions, traditional storytellers who are Maillet's own direct ancestors. Pélagie's companions are straight out of the quest-story tradition: the wise old storyteller, the traditional healer/midwife, the intrepid young hero, the fey young girl, the (ghostly?) sea captain who turns up in moments of crisis, the giant (Rabelais is constantly hovering around in the background, not surprising given that many of the Acadians came from Poitou in the early 17th century), etc. But they are never just stock types: in their truculent arguments and witty dialogue, they come over as fresh and very individual, as does Pélagie with her mix of spiritual leader, Mother Courage and all-too-human middle-aged woman.

All the dialogue is in Acadian dialect, with the third-person narration in slightly more standard French, but still making extensive use of local words. It's intelligible with some lateral thinking, particularly if you've read Rabelais, but it's a bit of a shock at first. It took me a while to work out that Acadians use "je" for the first person plural pronoun as well as for the singular, for instance. And the dialect is clearly a large part of the book's character and one of the reasons for its obvious classic status in Canada.

...and something quick and silly:

What if? : serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions (2014) by Randall Munroe (USA, 1984- )

  

I can't help feeling that the real question to be posed here is "How long could civilisation last on a planet where a scientist can make a better living drawing stick-figures on the web than by doing actual science?" — Randall Munroe is of course the creator of xkcd, and this book is a compilation of entries from his "What if...?" blog, where people pose silly questions and Munroe does his best to research scientifically coherent answers to them (contrary to what they teach you in training seminars, there are silly questions, and this book contains more than enough evidence to show that...).

This is fun, if you're the sort of person who can enjoy a coffee-break conversation between scientists and engineers. Possibly not if you aren't, though: you need a certain amount of capacity to suspend disbelief. Munroe looks at how a baseball would behave if it could be thrown at relativistic velocity, what would happen if the earth started growing or if someone pulled the plug out of the oceans, how a bullet-sized piece of neutron-star material would behave on the surface of the earth, how much of the periodic table you could stack up as bricks, on which other bodies in the solar system you could fly a Cessna, whether it makes sense to extract energy from thunderstorms, etc.

Usually the answer is some variant on "NO", "very bad things", or "a small nuclear explosion", but he has fun getting there, explains a few interesting scientific principles, and includes a few of his always-funny drawings. In between the chapters there are selections of the questions he's not even going to start answering, which provide very disturbing insights into the darker side of the (presumably mostly male-adolescent) human mind...

>123 thorold: Oh I bought this book last month in a second-hand bookshop! I'm glad you liked it, it's one incentive more not to wait too long before reading it!

>123 thorold: So relieved that you liked it.
Acadian French is still somewhat obscure, and often incomprehensible for other Canadian francophones, but they work really hard at maintaining and promoting it.

>124 thorold: Quick and silly sounds fun.

>123 thorold: I'll rummage round for my copy: I have no recollection that dialogues were in Acadian dialect!

>123 thorold: I knew that history but would love to read more. Is it available in english?

>126 SassyLassy: Yes, I’m sure you must have been at least partly responsible for me putting it on the pile. But I don’t think I would have held you to blame :-)
There was never really any doubt about my enjoying it, anyway, once I got a feel for what it was trying to do.

Barlow & Nadeau talk about attending an Acadian language convention, complete with open-air mass around the Evangeline statue in Grand Pré. And about the genealogy obsession that plays a big part in Pélagie.

>128 cindydavid4: Yes, there seems to be a translation by Philip Stratford.

I had a look at Maillet’s Wikipedia page: good to see that she’s still around, although in her nineties (the ancestor in the novel lives to be a hundred). Apparently her thesis was on Rabelais: that figures!

>123 thorold: Interesting

This caught my eye in a bookshop because I'd recently read Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. Since we've recently lost Jan Morris and Dervla Murphy, it's good to see that Thubron still seems to be going strong as he enters his eighties.

The Amur River : between Russia and China (2021) by Colin Thubron (UK, 1939- )

  

In the summers of 2018 and 2019, heading towards his eightieth birthday, Thubron followed the Amur from its source in Mongolia (where it's called the Onon) all the way to Nikolaevsk where it enters the Sea of Okhotsk. When Chekhov travelled to the Russian Far East in 1890, the passage down the Amur in a steamship was the only relaxed and comfortable part of his journey, and he gets positively lyrical in his descriptions of the scenery. Thubron's experience is rather different: the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway killed the river traffic on the lower Amur (Vladivostok is a much more sensible place for a port than Nikolaevsk), and border tensions between the USSR and China have also kept its upper reaches off-limits for much of the 20th century.

Thubron starts off on horseback in the hills of Mongolia, in a protected region thought to contain the secret burial site of Genghis Khan, and we're only a couple of pages in when he has his second fall, injuring himself and obviously starting to wonder whether he really needs this kind of adventure at his age. But he sticks to it, and finds the source, which like most sources of great rivers is not exactly spectacular.

From there he goes on, cadging lifts with Buddhist monks, hiring taxis or taking local buses or ferries, into Siberia and then over the river to the Chinese side for a while downstream from Heihe, then back to the Russian side at Khabarovsk. As usual, his main interest is in talking to people along the way and finding out how they relate to the place they are living in and its history, and that's something he's very good at: he clearly manages to have interesting conversations even with people most of us would steer well clear of, like the ex-mercenary sturgeon poachers who guide him on the lower river, and gives us what seems to be a fair representation of their point of view.

Great travel writing, and a very interesting look at a part of the world I didn't know much about.

This is one that's won various prizes for non-fiction writing recently, and popped up in my Scribd recommendations:

Islands of abandonment : life in the post-human landscape (2021) by Cal Flyn (UK, - ) audiobook read by the author

  
(Author photo https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/authors/cal-flyn Nancy MacDonald)

What happens when we humans stop intervening in a place that we've previously been exploiting in some benign or (more often) harmful way? Bad things, you would expect, as our poisons and displacements of nature continue to take their effect, and a lot of the time that's clearly true, but Cal Flyn sets out to show in this book that nature is often a lot more resilient than we give it credit for. Or, to put it another way, that the simple presence of humans is usually more destructive to the ecology of a place than any nastiness we leave behind. She shows us the exceptional biodiversity to be found in places like Scottish oil-shale spoil heaps, the Cyprus ceasefire line, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, or abandoned agricultural land in the former Soviet Union. Rare species can sometimes recolonise a place astonishingly quickly on their own, and more effectively than happens in some managed nature reserves. Of course, that doesn't happen everywhere, and there are some poisons so harmful that it's very unlikely that life will ever find a way to work around them.

Flyn also looks at social effects of abandonment: the way "blight" spreads in a declining city like Detroit, damaging the physical and mental health of the community. But also at the way abandoned sites can provide a haven — albeit not a very safe one — for artistic and political expression by people who don't feel they belong in bourgeois society. She meets junkies in abandoned mills in New Jersey and survivalists on a former military base in the California desert, and tries to show us what they are about, even though she herself clearly doesn't feel very comfortable in their company.

Flyn makes it clear that she doesn't want to be read as an apologist for environmental recklessness, and that it is always better not to break things in the first place than to hope they will repair themselves, but she does seem to be arguing that an unrelieved pessimistic note in discourse about the environment can be even more damaging than false optimism. If we are convinced that life on earth is doomed anyway, there's not much incentive to change things. Flyn is clearly sure that life on earth will continue, with or without us, and that the best way to improve the odds is to stop whatever it is we are doing...

>132 thorold: oh that looks good, I love his travel writing. This would be a good companion read to the two books Ive read about the area.

>133 thorold: Thanks for that review. The book looks interesting, indeed. I've read recently that even the giant plastic island between California and Hawaii is an "immense plastic habitat."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59521211

>132 thorold: >133 thorold: Interested in the last two reviews. I like the idea of reading the Chekhov and Thubron together. There's another book about that region I learned about from a review by rebeccanyc: Dersu the Trapper, where she also mentions Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier. Dersu was a guide for a mapping expedition in the first decade of the twentieth century when Chinese, Russians and Koreans were all wandering the area.

>133 thorold: Fascinating topic.

>136 SassyLassy: Thubron mentions Arseniev quite a few times, also Dersu, but he doesn’t talk directly about the book. Sounds interesting.

One of the new Dutch novels I bought in the course of this year's Boekenweek, another young writer:

De geschiedenis van mijn seksualiteit (2021; The history of my sexuality) by Tobi Lakmaker (Netherlands, 1994- )

  
(Author photo https://www.uitgeverijcossee.nl/)

A lively 21st-century take on the good old-fashioned coming-out novel, Lakmaker showing us that even in today's Amsterdam, growing up and working out for yourself whether you want to be a she or a he, whether you are looking for a boyfriend, a girlfriend, neither or both, is still not a straightforward painless process. And that there are still plenty of stupid, selfish or bigoted people around to get in your way and try to mess your life up, including yourself.

Clever, witty observation, and since this is written as autofiction I assume some of the other characters are wicked comic portraits of people we would know if we were that age and lived in Amsterdam. Some lovely throwaway Holden Caulfieldish comments as well, like the advice on dealing with publishers: first persuade them that you have a "fresh personality", and then let them coax you to write a novel...

Following on from >89 thorold:: The only Booker winner to date that is an exact square root of an earlier winner:

The Sea (2005) by John Banville (Ireland, 1945- ) audiobook read by Jim Norton

  

A recently-widowed art historian goes to stay in the seaside village that was the scene of his first great romance, during a childhood summer holiday. The plot, with its Bridesheadish theme of a boy of modest origins being taken up into the life of a rather grander family that then proceeds to fall apart around him, turns out not to be that important, except as a framework for the narrator's philosophical reflections on childhood and adulthood, love and loneliness, and life and bereavement. There's just enough witty observation of the social complexities of a dingy Irish holiday resort to keep the tone from getting too maudlin, and there's an occasional descriptive epiphany that's entirely worthy of the Bonnard paintings the narrator is meant to be writing about. A book that skates on pretty thin ice, in all sorts of ways, but manages to get away with it, somehow. Because Banville is obviously very good at this sort of thing.

Another "oldest book on the TBR" — this one's been there since May 2014. As usual, there are more books on the pile that aren't much younger than that, but at least I'm chipping away at the obstinate cases, one by one.

El laberinto de la soledad (1950; The labyrinth of solitude) by Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1914-1998)

   

(Sorry for the double cover: I was just amused to see that Catedra, who boast that this scholarly edition was prepared in close collaboration with the author, evidently couldn't decide on the correct orientation of the artwork, a collage by Paz's second wife Marie-José Tramini. My copy, dated 2013, is the one on the left, with Ariadne's thread running into the picture from the side and the artist's signature bottom right; I assume the other version with the thread running up and down is the original 1993 cover. Very embarrassing for some unfortunate art editor...)

By far the best-known work by the Mexican Nobelist, a collection of essays that sets out to discover and explain Mexican identity. Paz starts out fairly tamely by exploring the inferiority complex Mexicans develop when living among their Northern neighbours, and the pachuco counterculture that was a reaction to that, then he moves on to the macho culture with its insistence on suppressing emotions ("the mask"), the key role of the fiesta as an outlet, and the significance of the Mexican national swearword, the universal verb chingar.

But the real substance of the collection seems to be in the set of essays where he takes us succinctly through the cultural history of Mexico from Cortés and Malinche to his own generation, via the major signposts of independence in the 1820s, reform in 1857, and the revolution of 1910. He talks about the collision and fusion of Aztec and Catholic ideas, the flowering of Mexican culture in the late-baroque period (with the emergence of remarkable figures like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), the way every liberal reform movement before the revolution ended up concentrating power and land in the hands of a new elite, but left peasants no better off than before, and the mid-20th century situation of Mexico as a postcolonial developing country struggling to get away from the standard problems of debt, foreign ownership and an economy based on agriculture and minerals that leaves it constantly vulnerable to market fluctuations.

Clear, concise exposition, in which Paz ties Mexican culture into what was going on in the rest of the world, whilst insisting on its special situation as one of the very few postcolonial countries where a complex and highly-organised pre-colonial administration collapsed suddenly and left the colonisers to take over and superimpose their own culture.

And a Penelope Fitzgerald novel I'd missed somewhere along the line (funny to see she was almost an exact contemporary of Paz: I'd never have bracketed them together...):

Innocence (1986) by Penelope Fitzgerald (UK, 1916-2000)

  

As usual, Fitzgerald has an unexpected, oblique approach here: not only is this an English novel set in Florence in which all the main characters are Italian, thus making gentle fun of the great Henry James/E.M. Forster tradition, but it's also a book in which she redefines "innocence" to refer to a whole class of well-intentioned acts performed by naive people with uniformly disastrous consequences.

The story is set in Florence in 1955, with Italy still in the transition period between Bicycle thieves and Dolce vita, although we get strong hints (never followed up) that the unidentified narrator is looking at events from thirty years later. At its centre is the marriage of Chiara, daughter of the aristocratic but slightly down-at-heel Ridolfi family, who still own a farm and a renaissance villa as well as their Florence town house, with Salvatore Rossi, a young doctor with his roots in the working-class, communist South — he had a momentous childhood meeting with the dying Gramsci, which he has been trying to live down ever since. The momentum of the story comes from the way the cultivated, conservative, and slightly mad Ridolfi clan and the sensitive, prickly, scientific Rossi fail to understand each other, with various wildcards like the Monsignore and Chiara's English schoolfriend "Barney" (née Lavinia) thrown in to create extra chaos.

Lovely writing, with Fitzgerald's characteristic gentle wit and pared-down prose, and equally characteristic insistence on leaving us in doubt as to whether or not certain things really happened.

>140 thorold: I know basic mexican history, but I think this book will go farther for me. Definitely want to read it

I foolishly popped into a bookshop when I had half an hour to kill on Saturday, and came out with (amongst other things) Edmund White's most recent novel:

A Previous Life (2022) by Edmund White (USA, 1940- )

  

Edmund White's lockdown novel starts from a new take on the Decameron idea: a married couple, stuck in their ski-chalet at Sils Maria because the husband has broken his leg, decide to amuse themselves by writing down and then reading aloud to each other accounts of their previous sexual relationships. Both Constance (American and 30) and Ruggero (Sicilian and 70) have previous marriages and a selection of interesting lovers of both genders behind them, but the clou is that back in 2018, when he was only forty, Ruggero had a passionate affair with a now-forgotten American writer called Edmund White, then in his late seventies. Yes, that's right, we seem to be in the 2050s, although this clearly isn't science-fiction, and the world has changed remarkably little since the 2020s.

Because Constance and Ruggero are educated people but not novelists, and because they are meant to be writing only for their mutual amusement, White has the excuse to give us a lot of carefully calculated "bad" writing, much of it shamelessly pornographic. At times, especially in Ruggero's teenage memories, he seems to be parodying his own overwrought writing from the Boy's own story era — "At the same moment we had peeled down our mutande, releasing our hard Sicilian cocks like overeager hunting dogs." (Of course, he's only using the Italian word for underpants because it gives him an excuse to make that terrible middle-class-gay-dinner-party joke about mutatis mutandis...)

There is maybe a bit of a serious point behind all the raunchiness, as White reflects on the many ways old age makes both love and sex more difficult without noticeably reducing our need for them. He makes fun of his unappetising old man's body and its weaknesses, but he wants us to understand that he's still as happy to fantasise about hard Sicilian cocks as he was when he was fourteen. And there's also an extended joke about the way it's more often than not the discarded lovers who get to define how you will be remembered after your death...

Fun, although I was getting very bored with Ruggero's arrogant voice by the end of the book.

And a Peter Carey novel I'd missed:

Amnesia (2014) by Peter Carey‬ (Australia, 1943- ) audiobook read by Colin McPhillamy

  

After losing his umpteenth libel suit at the hands of the people who own Australia's mines, newspapers, politicians, and — it seems at that moment at least — judges, veteran journalist Felix also manages to estrange his wife and daughters and finds himself out on the street. He then gets shanghaied by his old college friend and party comrade Cecile into writing an apologia for her daughter Gaby, an environmentalist who has been arrested for computer hacking and seems to be at risk of extradition to the USA.

This somehow takes Felix back into the history of the "Battle of Brisbane" — rioting caused by the presence of large numbers of US servicemen in Queensland in November 1942 — and the Constitutional Crisis of 1975, which Felix sees as a coup instigated by the CIA and Rupert Murdoch to frustrate Whitlam's policy of closing down US bases in Australia. He contrasts the committed direct action of Gaby and her friends with the ineffectual posturings of the left back then, divided as it was between middle-class hippies (like Felix and Cecile), socially-conservative trade unionists and pragmatic politicians.

There's a lot of good stuff here about the evolution of Melbourne society in the 80s and 90s, and the running joke about the writer's ineffectiveness as an agent of political change is handled cleverly (and with a nice final twist), but Carey gets a bit too fascinated by the story of Gaby and her progress as a hacker, where he lets himself — or Felix on his behalf — be seduced by the jargon without really seeming to know what he's talking about.

A re-read from long ago, prompted by my mentioning it in the Questions thread as we're talking about reading our ancestry — one set of my great-grandparents came from a small village in Masuria. My grandmother, who grew up in the West and knew the home village only from going back there to visit relatives as a small child before the First World War, always claimed that it was exactly like Lenz's imaginary village of Suleyken.

So zärtlich war Suleyken (1955) by Siegfried Lenz (Germany, 1926-2014)

  

This was the book that launched Lenz's career, a collection of comic short stories, set in an imaginary village in the Masurian Lake District where he grew up himself. The stories are set at some vaguely defined moment in the past, probably around 1900. The villagers are depicted as unsophisticated rustics, innocent of most of the refinements of civilisation, who talk a charmingly eccentric dialect full of strange consonant shifts and random Polish words and have a strange brand of home-brewed logic (also home-brewed Schnapps, of course), but who nevertheless have a strange way of coming out on top in conflicts with external authority.

Most of the stories have a fable-like air, the kind of comic anecdotes that have been told for so long in a community that they have become detached from whatever facts they might once have been based on and re-attached to people the storyteller claims to have known. There's the grandfather who is accidentally put on the conscription list and soon has the sergeant-major tearing his hair out, the aunt who dies on a shopping trip over the border and has to be smuggled back past the frontier guards so that she can be buried at home, the tongue-tied lover who proposes by handing over the baptismal certificate he's had drawn up, the two obstinate farmers whose carts meet on a narrow track, the disreputable family that lays on an Easter feast of ingeniously stolen food, and so on. And the two men coming home from market who each con the other into eating half a frog.

It's celebrating a lost culture, of course: most of the surviving German-speaking residents of East Prussia escaped to the west in 1945, and no doubt they were among the first to buy this book. But Lenz doesn't go into that here: it's a pleasant, slightly tongue-in-cheek, snapshot of Masurian culture as people remembered it. He analyses Heimat-nostalgia and its political ramifications in detail in some of his later novels, especially Heimatmuseum — in this book it's just about having a bit of fun.

Another "oldest book on the TBR" — this one's been there since August 2015, so we're definitely winning. Probably. Well, maybe...

This was one of those silly situations where something else got in between two parts of a trilogy and took all the momentum away.

Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross (1922) by Sigrid Undset (Norway, 1882-1949), translated by Tiina Nunnally

  

The concluding part of the iconic Norwegian medieval trilogy, opening with Kristin already entering her own middle age. She's the mother of seven sons ranging from toddler to near-adult and is managing a large farm. But there are still all sorts of unresolved problems from her past to deal with, and it's not long before her relative happiness starts unravelling. Also, we're heading into the mid-14th century, and we all know what that means in plot terms...

I think this is the part of the trilogy where Kristin's character gets most interesting, as Undset reshapes some rather 20th-century ways of looking at the problems of marriage and motherhood into terms that fit together (apparently) seamlessly with very medieval approaches to law, custom and Christian belief. At times it comes uncomfortably close to being Freud in a wimple, but it just about manages to remain plausible, whilst making us see the absurdity of a lot of romantic ideas about medieval life. Nowadays we're quite used to thinking of the Middle Ages as a time of mud, smells, frightening diseases and sudden, arbitrary violence between men who went around fully armed all the time, where unhappy marriages cannot have been any less common than they are now. But in 1922, if you'd grown up on Walter Scott, that must have been quite a shocking thought.

>146 thorold: I loved Kristin Lavransdatter when I read it some years ago. Your review and your perspective on it is really interesting. I had not thought of the Walter Scott effect...

>145 thorold: That sounds delightful! I see my library has a number of Siegfried Lenz books, but they only carry So zärtlich war Suleyken as a Deutsche Grammophon audio book in German, which is no use to me, although I expect it's a good way to get the full experience, if it is read by decent actors with authentic local accents... I'll probably borrow another novel - they all look interesting.

Mark, another thank you for recommending another book Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions I assumed, silly me, that such a small book could be read quickly. Fortunately not; I am so enjoying this and have been marking favorite quotes and oh there are so many. My fav so far "I cant think in a straight line" I so relate to that. also his dedication "a man would have no trouble discovering all the beauties of the universe, even heaven itself, unless he had a partner with whom he might share his joys" Nice to find my own book concierge!

>148 Dilara86: Yes, that’s a very early book and it’s heavily based on dialect, so probably not much translated. Of the novels, Deutschstunde (The German lesson) is the one that really stands out. I’ve enjoyed all the shorter books of his I’ve read, including the late novella Fundbüro (Lost property office), which is probably translated.

>149 cindydavid4: Great!

I'm just back from a short impromptu walking holiday to celebrate getting my wrist out of plaster (I know, walking isn't really a two-handed activity, but I wanted to do something mark the occasion...). Over four days I walked a significant chunk of the route created half as a joke to promote a film festival a couple of years ago, but now very popular among hikers, the Dutch Mountain Trail: https://www.dmff.eu/dutch-mountain-trail/

I was staying in Aachen and stopped off in Maastricht on the way home, so there was a certain amount of book-temptation involved, and my rucksack was quite heavy by the time I got home.

Mayersche Buchhandlung, Aachen:

Domincanen, Maastricht (yes, the famous Instagram-worthy bookshop-in-medieval-church):

Incoming book-stack:

I didn't get much reading done during my trip, mostly just two further novels by Robert Löhr, who specialises in historical adventure stories improbably featuring distinguished German poets as action-heroes.

Das Hamlet-Komplott (2010) by Robert Löhr (Germany, 1973- )
Erika Mustermann (2013) by Robert Löhr (Germany, 1973- )

   

Das Hamlet-Komplott is almost a rehash of the earlier Das Erlkönig-Manöver, with Goethe and Kleist again involved in undercover activities during the Napoleonic wars. This book is set in 1806-1808.

For complicated reasons, Goethe and Kleist are travelling across Germany incognito, together with Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Schlegel, Madame de Staël, an Italian actress and a black poodle, all disguised as travelling players.

Löhr has fun letting his characters quote from their own (future) works, and he lets himself go a bit imagining what might happen when three major playwrights and the most famous German translator of Shakespeare have to improvise a performance of Hamlet for a rustic audience. The joke palls after a while, though, and the ending has to be very contrived to meet the historical novelist's standard constraint of not actually changing any of the bits of history we know about.

Erika Mustermann has, for a change, a contemporary setting: it opens with schoolteacher, Green activist and single mother Friederieke becoming furious at the success of the Pirate Party in the Berlin state elections in September 2011 (8.9%, 15 seats). Those are votes that should have gone to the Greens, not to a bunch of reckless nerds. She's particularly angry with one of the new Pirate delegates in the state parliament, Volker Plauschenat, who has taken the credit for a successful meme she believes he has stolen from an idea in a blogpost she wrote.

Friederieke decides to infiltrate the Pirates and get her revenge on Volker, which allows Löhr to give us a lot of fascinating — and often very funny — detail about the Pirate phenomenon in German politics, and to show us that there were actually a few serious and worthwhile ideas hiding behind the pony tails, Star Trek references, bestickered MacBooks, and endless bottles of Club-Mate. Of course, we all know how a romantic comedy has to end if it starts with a female character hating a male character, but Löhr manages to twist the narrative inevitability away from the totally obvious a few times along the way. A fun glimpse into the long-gone 2010s!

The Dutch novel I left half finished when I went away. This is one I bought at the same time as >138 thorold: I've read several of Enquist's novels before and enjoyed her writing, especially when she writes about music.

Sloop (2021) by Anna Enquist (Netherlands, 1945- )

  

Forty-year-old composer Alice Augustus is in the middle of fertility treatment when she gets the commission to write a full-scale piece for the centenary celebrations of a major orchestra. As she searches for inspiration for the piece, she looks back on her life and reflects on her situation as a woman creative artist and the curiously indirect connections between artistic creativity and biological fertility.

In other hands this could have been a fairly banal sort of "I'm pregnant with a new piece of music" story, but of course Enquist treats it with rather more subtlety than that. She fills the background with real practical knowledge of musical life and, indirectly, presumably also her experience as a writer of fiction. She also talks about the tricky situation of contemporary "classical" music (we all agree that music would die without new compositions, but most of us would rather not listen to them...); Alice in reality earns her living writing 20-second tunes for advertisements under a pen-name, but no-one in the respectable world of the Conservatorium is supposed to know that.

There's a running parallel story of Enquist's real idol, Joseph Haydn, with his very fulfilled musical life and his many unhappinesses outside that, and there's also the image that gives Alice the inspiration for her piece, the demolition of the Rotterdam building that was decorated with Co Westerik's iconic 17-metre-high relief sculpture "Girl with skipping rope" (see the cover art) — Alice clearly identifies Westerik's girl with her own longed-for child and wonders about the eventual destruction that is inherent in artistic creation. (There's a project to recreate the sculpture on the wall of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital, but it's all gone very quiet since it was announced in July 2019: the wall was still blank last time I looked.)

A complicated and rewarding novel.

And a novella from my pile of holiday plunder.

It was Pride weekend in Aachen, and they had a little display of LGBT fiction at Mayersche. Not a very bold and inspiring selection, though: out of around 25 titles, only two were by German writers, and one of those was Death in Venice! All the rest were translations, mostly very well-known books by American writers (think Giovanni's room or Call me by your name). So, naturally, I was curious about the one book by a living German writer on the display:

Eine Liebe in Pjöngjang (2022) by Andreas Stichmann (Germany, 1983- )

  

(Author photo © Daniela Imhoff via Rowohlt)

Former East German martial arts champion Claudia, now East Asian representative of a German cultural organisation, is in North Korea for the official opening of a new German library. As official minder and assistant during her stay, she's assigned Sunmi, a young postgrad who is writing a bizarre doctoral thesis on Korean influences in German Romantic poetry. Claudia knows how life in dictatorships works, and Sunmi has had plenty of previous assignments where she's been ordered to become intimate with a foreign visitor, so the two are wary of each other, but despite everything it starts to look as though a genuine romance is developing between the two women.

It's probably going a bit far to call this an LGBT novella: much of the time it reads rather as though Stichmann originally wrote Claudia as a man and only changed the gender to make it more interesting when his publisher complained that there were already too many susceptible westerner/mysterious Asian stories out there. But it's still a worthwhile little story: Even if Claudia is rather flat and passive, Sunmi is an attractively complex character, and her mix of 21st century Asian communism and 18th century German romanticism is fun to listen to. We get to go (slightly) beyond the tourist surface of North Korea, and the plot has enough ambiguities to keep it interesting.

I should really get round to reading Enquist. Unless I'm misremembering, you've reviewed several of her books, and they all sounded interesting, but somehow, I never borrowed them. My library has (sorry for the French titles - I'm hoping the touchstones will lead to the English or Dutch titles) Le secret, Le retour, Contrepoint, Les endormeurs, Quatuor, Les porteurs de glace, Car la nuit s'approche (this seems to be the sequel to Quatuor), and La blessure (a short story collection). Is there one you would recommend to someone with a middling musical culture?

>155 Dilara86: I haven’t read all of those yet, but I should think Quatuor might be a good choice. It has all the main Enquist themes in it, and it’s about musicians, but it’s not as technical as Contrepoint (which is my favourite so far, but might not be very accessible unless you are something of a Bach fanatic).

Le retour is the odd one out — a historical novel about Captain Cook’s stay-at-home wife. Also very interesting, but not at all representative.

Another one I left almost finished before I went away — on audio this time. I read Ransmayr's Ovid novel Die letzte Welt a couple of years ago, and I've also read some of his travel writing:

Der fliegende Berg (2006; The flying mountain) by Christoph Ransmayr (Austria, 1954- ), audiobook read by the author

  

A verse-novel about two Irish brothers on a quest to climb a perhaps-imaginary mountain in the Kham region of Tibet. Lots of graphic climbing detail, lots of abstract speculation about spiritual connections between oppressed peoples and the landscape they live in, a love-affair between the narrator and a nomad woman, back-story about growing up in rural Ireland with a single father who tries to compensate his humiliation at the failure of his marriage through fantasies of taking the field against the English as an IRA volunteer.

At times it veers dangerously towards becoming either Father Ted or Tintin in Tibet, but it's saved by the captivating energy of Ransmayr's free verse and the power of his descriptions of the experience of being on a mountain.

>156 thorold: I've just requested Quatuor: thank you for the recommendation.

>157 thorold: Your description of the book made me cringe so hard! I admire the way you always find something positive in all the books you read.

A short non-fiction book that caught my eye in Dominicanen. The young journalist and world-traveller Milo van Bokkum writes for NRC, De Groene Amsterdammer, etc. This is his first book, and it's already gone through three reprints in nine months:

Grensstreken: waarom grenzen liggen waar ze liggen (2021) by Milo van Bokkum (Netherlands, 1994- )

  

(Author photo www.milovanbokkum.nl)

Borders are a fascinating phenomenon of human society: why and how do we create all those imaginary lines on the map and use them to dictate which language we should speak, which set of laws we should follow, and where we can and can't go? Van Bokkum takes us through all the usual oddities of border-drawing: enclaves and exclaves, rivers that change their course, colonial straight-line frontiers defined from an office on the other side of the world, pieces of land in the sea that might or might not count as islands, the rare phenomenon of condominium (Pheasant Island; Moresnet; the river Moselle between Luxembourg and Germany) and all the rest of it.

But he also looks at social consequences: how those borders and their occasional absurdities affect the people who live near them. The people in the complicated Cooch Behar exclaves who until 2015 couldn't legally leave their homes without a piece of paper they could only get by crossing four frontiers, the AIDS epidemic in Kaliningrad, and so on.

There's a chapter that looks in detail at the frontiers of the Netherlands and how they came into being, including such quirks as the single road that has the Dutch town of Kerkrade on one side and the German town of Herzogenrath on the other, where the frontier was opened by "people power" long before Schengen; the village of Elten that was transferred from Germany to the Netherlands in 1945 and returned in 1963 (according to legend, every street was parked solid with trucks full of butter the night it changed over, saving millions in import duty...); the complicated Dutch/Belgian village of Baarle Nassau/Baarle Hertog that claimed the world record for exclaves and enclaves after Cooch Behar was cleaned up (van Bokkum dismisses it as 90% tourist trap); and the odd leftover bits of the Netherlands and Belgium on the "wrong" side after the river Maas was straightened.

Nothing very profound, and you won't learn much if you're already addicted to geographical quirks, but a nice overview, and generously illustrated with maps.

And a very short book that is currently the oldest on the TBR, one of two or three non-Montalbano books by Camilleri I brought back from the charity shop in 2016. For some reason I mixed this up with another book and thought it was a historical novel:

La bolla di componenda (1993; Indulgences à la carte) by Andrea Camilleri (Italy, 1925-2019)

  

In this extended essay, Camilleri looks at the typical southern-Italian phenomenon of componenda, or informal agreement, a vital ingredient of the way brigandage and organised crime have always functioned, especially in Sicily. There's a recognised tariff for selling stolen property back to its owner (in the best traditions of Jonathan Wild, as he notes); when the young Camilleri, on his way to take an exam at the university, got a night-time ride to Palermo in one of his father's fish-trucks, he saw for himself how the truck was stopped by armed men on the road and an agreed quantity of fish handed over as a fee for safe passage.

But what really prompted this book was his discovery in the papers of an 1875 commission of inquiry into crime in Sicily of references to what's bizarrely called a Bolla di componenda, a "deed of unwritten agreement", a document sold annually by parish priests that granted indulgence for a specified amount of crime (for the fee of 1.30 lire, you could have stolen property up to 32.80 lire; if you'd stolen more, you had to buy extra certificates). Naturally, the copy of the Bolla that was meant to be attached to the proceedings of the commission is missing, and Camilleri can't find one anywhere else ("you never will", his friend Leonardo Sciascia tells him), but there are references with corresponding details in other contemporary accounts of Sicily.

Camilleri is fascinated by the way the clergy still managed to get involved in organised crime despite all the restrictions they put on things like the sale of indulgences after the Reformation. Somehow, the Bolla is worded in a way that gets around the rules. He quotes the wonderfully named military commander, Lt.-General Avogadro di Casanova, in his (apparently ignored) evidence to the commission as saying that all that is needed to wipe out crime in Sicily is to get rid of the priests and aristocratic landowners and pay the peasants a fair wage...

Lots of great reviews here, Mark. I'm envious of your walking holiday/book buying trip. Sounds lovely.

A brief side-track into a novella by an Irish writer I didn't know about, pressed on me by a fellow book-club member yesterday:

Small things like these (2021) by Claire Keegan (Ireland, 1968- )

  

The scandal of the Irish "Magdalen-laundries" and "orphanages" is well-known to anyone who has read the papers over the past few years, and I've read several novels recently that talk about the terrible things done there to unmarried mothers and their children by the church, acting in the name of the Irish state.

Keegan chooses a different approach in this novella, starting out from the thought that these institutions existed within wider communities whose members must have had a pretty good idea of what was going on inside the convent walls. But for years and years no-one dared to ask any difficult questions or risk getting into conflict with the church authorities.

She shows us the kind of barriers to free discussion that would have existed in an Irish small town in the 1980s, but lets a very ordinary man, the coal merchant Bill Furlong, accidentally come face to face with an egregious abuse of power by the nuns and step in to correct matters. We don't get to see how it works out, but we can imagine that as long as it's just Furlong against the united might of the Catholic Church, it's probably not going to end up well either for him or for the woman he is trying to rescue.

Precise, economical and very powerful writing about things that are always much less ordinary than Keegan is trying to make out. Very nice: I'm going to have to look out for her earlier books.

>162 thorold: That one's definitely toward the top of the virtual pile. I have a former colleague/friend whose mother was a Magdalen Laundry girl (she and her twin sister were adopted)—I had never heard of the institution until I met her. Just appalling, the things that have happened under our noses.

>162 thorold: I've not heard of the author previously either, but I think this is the third or fourth mention of this book in Club Read in the past few months -- BLBera and maybe AlisonY or wandering_star also read/posted this title. With this review, I might have to finally add it to the tbr.

More from the recent pile, and more from the category "things that happened under our noses":

Der Reisende (written 1938; first German publication 2017; The passenger) by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Germany, 1915-1942), edited by Peter Graf (Germany, 1967- )

  

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz came from a middle-class Berlin Jewish family. He and his mother emigrated in 1935, and he lived first in Sweden, where his first novel Menschen neben dem Leben was published successfully (in Swedish, and under a pseudonym) then in France before moving to the UK in 1939, where this, his second book, was published in English translation, originally as The man who took trains (The fugitive in the US). Like many Jewish refugees he was interned by the ever-hospitable British as an "enemy alien", being sent to a camp in Australia for a couple of years. He died, together with 361 other passengers, when the ship bringing him back from Australia was torpedoed in October 1942. The unfinished manuscript of his third novel was lost with him.

Despite attempts by Heinrich Böll and others to get it published after the war, the original German typescript of Der Reisende languished in an archive for decades and was in danger of being forgotten altogether until Peter Graf, who has republished other exile-literature, heard about it through the author's surviving relatives, and brought out the first German edition of the book nearly eighty years after it was written. This rediscovery also led to the publication of a new English translation as The passenger. Menschen neben dem Leben has also now been published in German.

Der Reisende, written at great speed in a few weeks at the end of 1938, is Boschwitz's reaction to the events of early November, the orchestrated anti-Jewish riots of the "Kristallnacht" which gave Jewish Germans an unambiguous indication that they could not safely remain living in their own country, but unfortunately didn't motivate neighbouring countries to open their borders to refugees.

Berlin businessman and First World War veteran Otto Silbermann has so far been able to accommodate himself reasonably well to living under the Nazis, but from one day to the next he finds his world falling apart. His friends are unreachable, or take the opportunity to buy up his remaining assets at rock-bottom prices, his non-Jewish wife runs away to her family, and he's only just able to escape in time when thugs break into his apartment to smash it up.

All Silbermann can think of to do is to get on a train and head for the nearest vaguely friendly country, but of course he doesn't have any means of getting over the frontier legally. He's given a tip about a people-trafficker, but arrives only to find that the man has already been arrested. He tries for the Belgian border, and manages to cross secretly, but the Belgians send him straight back, and it's back to the railway, criss-crossing Germany haphazardly in express trains. At one point he tells himself "I have already emigrated: I'm not in Germany any more, I'm in the German Reichsbahn." And eventually, of course, he finds himself back in Berlin, having achieved nothing except to escape arrest but lose his remaining money. All rational planning being exhausted, he decides on one last, glorious piece of symbolic resistance.

It's a book written in a rage by a young and highly engaged writer, so even with Graf's tactful cleaning up of the typescript it's a bit rough around the edges here and there, but it's an astonishingly vivid picture of what it feels like suddenly to be unwanted, an outlaw in your own country. A worthwhile rediscovery. What a shame Boschwitz didn't get the chance to leave us more than those two novels.

>165 thorold: For context: in the five days I was staying in Aachen last week, I must have crossed frontiers between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands at least twenty times, without encountering any more formality than minor differences in bus tariffs and rules about where masks are required.

>165 thorold:

Good stuff.

>166 thorold:

So you went back to the 18th century, how nice. :)

Some random Dutchness from the Little Library. Journalist, poet and novelist Koos van Zomeren was a mainstay of the Dutch hard left in the old days, but that was mostly behind him by the time this came out.

Saluut aan Holland (1992) by Koos van Zomeren (Netherlands, 1946- ), photographs by Freddy Rikken (Netherlands 1951- )

  

In this selection of columns written for NRC in the early nineties, van Zomeren goes in search of the kind of things that make the Netherlands "nothing special, but in a very special way", and in particular the way the country has changed during his own lifetime. He has a very enjoyable approach to his work: very often he doesn't find what he's hoping to, but he reports what he has found, and makes something interesting out of it.

We get to read — amongst all sorts of other things — about ferrymen, radical students, people with dementia, people who live at the top of a tower-block, a farmer who still works with horses, another who breeds Blaarkop cattle, the gibbons in a zoo, a court hearing, a firm that makes water-slides and another that makes liquorice "drop", the Begijnhof in Amsterdam, the new village of Zeewolde, and all the houses the author lived in during his childhood in and around Arnhem. Each piece is illustrated with a photograph, usually subtly ironic, by Freddy Rikken.

I've started on a project I've had in mind for a long time, reading Don Quijote in Spanish. This is clearly going to take some time: the initial wave of enthusiasm has carried me as far as the end of Part I, Ch.XI, 102 pages into the 1111 pages of text in the Real Academia Española's fourth century edition. And that's after skipping nearly half the 120 pages of introductory essays by the great and the good. But it's fun so far, anyway, and the 17th century language is fairly manageable with the help of the notes and glossary. More on this as the project advances (if and when...). But you may see the recent flood of reviews here slowing down a bit.

---

In between times, a short French novel from the pile. I came across Lydia Salvayre through her wonderful 2014 Goncourt winner Pas pleurer. She's a psychiatrist and the child of Spanish Republican refugees living in SW France.

La compagnie des spectres (1997; The company of ghosts) by Lydie Salvayre (France, 1948- )

  

Louisiane is doing her best to deal with a bailiff who's taking inventory of her possessions prior to seizing them for unpaid rent, but her deranged elderly mother keeps butting in, convinced that it's 1943 again and the bailiff has been sent by Pétain (always "Putain" to her) and Darnand (the head of the fascist Milice). The story keeps gliding backwards and forwards between the bailiff's systematic progress through the two women's claustrophobic flat and the wartime village in Haute-Garonne where Louisiane's mother grew up, and where Louisiane's uncle Jean was brutally murdered by fascist thugs when he was eighteen.

It's constructed more like a stage-play than a novella, but it's an original — and surprisingly witty — look at modern France's relationship with the Vichy era, and the way individual human lives (and thus, by extension, society as a whole) get broken when we attempt to sweep past injustices under the carpet instead of looking for a true resolution.

...and I finished another audiobook on my walk this morning.

Mijn lieve gunsteling: roman (2020; My heavenly favourite) by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (Netherlands, 1991- ), audiobook read by Hans Kesting

  

In case you felt that Rijneveld's first novel was a tough read, the second one ups the game considerably. We're four years on from The discomfort of evening, in a very similar disaster-struck farming family (but not exactly the same one). The young girl who corresponds to the narrator from last time is now 14, but the viewpoint has shifted to that of the slightly creepy vet who was her only real adult friend in the last book. Almost needless to say, he's now got a bad case of the Humbert Humberts.

So this is basically Lolita-in-the-cowshed. We are stuck in the vet's first-person view, we watch him sinking deeper and deeper into his obsession with the girl and — always against his better judgement — concocting pathetic stratagems to exploit her weakness and get closer to her. As in Lolita, we come to realise that he's telling us, or his investigators, the story after it has all gone horribly wrong. There are shifts back and forth between reality, dreams, and fantasy, and there is complicated play with words and images — but they are taken from the vet's James Herriott vocabulary, not Nabokov's academic and literary one.

But of course there's another level to it as well: implicitly, this is not Humbert Humbert as imagined by a middle-aged Russian intellectual making fun of the American dream, this is Humbert Humbert as imagined by Lolita. Which of course adds several levels of discomfort for the reader right away: we are shown very clearly how the girl is desperately lonely, desperately unsure of herself, made insecure by the loss of her brother and her mother, worried about adolescence and gender identity, and all she's got to cling onto apart from her dreams is the fraudulent and exploitative affection she gets from the vet.

Rich, powerful and very complicated writing. But also very disturbing.

>169 thorold: I read The Company of Ghosts twelve years ago and liked it less than you. I read it in English, and in my review I wrote that there was a dearth of punctuation, making all the dialogue difficult to follow. Was it that way in the French, or was that a translation issue?

>170 thorold: Lolita-in-the-cowshed

LOL

>171 labfs39: The punctuation was non-standard, rather than missing — Salvayre does things like having sentences stop in mid-air or run on from the end of one paragraph or chapter to the start of a later one (not always the next). The idea seems to be to convey how the three characters are all talking at cross-purposes and existing in worlds of their own: I thought it worked well, and it wasn’t really difficult to follow. That was partly what was in my mind when I said it was constructed like a stage-play. But I can imagine that it caused problems for a translator.

>165 thorold: I read The Passenger at the end of 2021 and it made a lasting impression on me. It was really unsettling and the exhaustion of rationality is really well described. I'm glad you liked it as well.

>172 thorold: ...I notice Don Quijote also has sentences of dialogue that stretch across chapter-breaks. There's a precedent for everything...

>173 raton-liseur: "exhaustion of rationality" is a nice way of summing it up, yes.

I'm in the process of transferring my audiobook affections from SCRIBD to Bookbeat, which seems to offer more non-American content. This is another German one that popped up there. I read Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche in 2014, but I've rather lost sight of Bronsky since then.

Der Zopf meiner Großmutter (2019; My grandmother's braid) by Alina Bronsky (Russia, Germany, 1978- ), audiobook read by Sophie Rois

  

Are Bronsky's babushkas getting less monstrous as she gets older? Well, maybe the former dancer Margarita Ivanovna in this book is not quite as destructive in her passage through the world as Rosalita in The sharpest dishes, but by most sane standards she still scores somewhere around eleven out of ten on the overprotective grandmother scale. The unfortunate grandson Maxim has spent his early years being protected from all sorts of largely imaginary dangers and treated for entirely imaginary illnesses and disabilities, as he gradually starts to realise when the family moves from Russia to Germany.

It's a darkly comic story — of course, there's a hidden tragedy that explains at least some of his grandmother's strange behaviour — and there's a lot that will bring up cringe-making memories for anyone who as a small child had to act as interpreter for embarrassing foreign relatives who just didn't "get" the culture they were living in. My own grandmother was from the overall-generation where Margarita Ivanovna is a track-suit-wearer, but otherwise they had a lot in common, especially when it came to fighting draughts, mulching food, and disinfecting any surface a child was likely to touch...

A short one I picked up at random for a weekend away:

Kopfgeburten : oder, Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980; Headbirths: or the Germans are dying out) by Günter Grass (Germany, 1927-2015)

  

Grass builds up a nice Swiftian satire around the perennial German panic about low birth-rates and an ageing population — if the Germans were to die out, he suggests, that would neatly solve the "German problem" in European politics, get rid of the Berlin Wall, and give his own books the extra kudos of having been written in a "dead language" — and describes the process he would go through to concoct a film script on this topic with his friend Volker Schlöndorff, using their impressions from a joint lecture tour of Asia as background for a story about a generic North-German schoolteacher couple, Dörte and Harm from Itzehoe, who are using an Asian holiday to try to make their minds up whether it would be right to bring a child into a world like this one.

But it all gets mixed up with the 1980 elections, where Franz-Josef Strauß and Helmut Schmidt were about to contest the chancellorship (Grass imagines an alternative reality in which Strauß had become a left-wing novelist instead of a conservative politician), with the campaign against nuclear energy, with the discussion of "inner emigration" reopened by the publication of an essay by Franz Raddatz in Zeit, with the deaths of the poet Nicolas Born and the former revolutionary Rudi Dutschke, and with a whole bunch of other things that were current in late 1979.

It's always fun to read Grass, of course, and it's interesting to be reminded how different (and how similar!) the world was in 1979. But this is also a fascinating glimpse into the creative process, even if it is, as it appears to be here, a purely hypothetical exercise in creativity, with Grass playing off his head-births — imaginary versions of real and fictional people — against the hypothetical Germans being born (or not) in the imaginations of prophets of demographic doom.

The preparations for a walking-tour are simple. I only had to buy a large rucksack, a strong pair of boots, a one-gallon plastic water-bottle, a Husky outfit of jacket, pants and socks that was light to carry but warm to wear, a few basic medical supplies, half-a-dozen notebooks and a dozen ballpoint pens. To maintain contact with my own civilisation I also packed a Shakespeare anthology, Tom Jones, W. E. Carr’s Poetry of the Middle Ages, Cooper’s Talleyrand and Boros’ Pain and Providence. Unfortunately other books inexplicably accumulated in my rucksack between London and Massawah and when climbing to the 8,000-foot Eritrean plateau I found myself carrying a weight of fifty pounds.

The late, great Dervla Murphy — from the Prologue of In Ethiopia with a mule (1967). An inspiration to all of us who like to travel light...

She seems to have had the only known copy of W. E. Carr’s Poetry of the Middle Ages — as well as LT sources, I tried ABEBooks, Google Books and Worldcat, but none have ever heard of it. Sadly, it gets stolen in the course of her journey, so our only chance of tracking it down would be to visit the remote village in Ethiopia where it was taken from her.

It was sad to hear of the death of the apparently indomitable Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy a few weeks ago. I picked out one of her books I hadn't read before (overlooked mostly because it doesn't involve a bicycle):

In Ethiopia with a Mule (1968) by Dervla Murphy (Ireland, 1931-2022)

  

Even Dervla Murphy had to admit when she went to Ethiopia at the end of 1966 that this wasn't a place where a bicycle was going to be much use for getting around, so she travelled through the highlands on foot, accompanied for most of the way by a loyal pack-mule called Jock. As you would expect, there's a lot of astonishing scenery, breathtaking climbs and descents, plenty of hardship and quite a few near-catastrophes on the trail — she's robbed several times, she and Jock both suffer repeatedly from accident, disease, noxious insects and hunger, and near the end of the journey Jock is so worn out that she is obliged, to her infinite regret, to trade him in for a donkey.

But, this being Dervla Murphy in her prime, she seems to have an unlimited capacity for laughing at her own discomfort and bouncing back from any difficulty. And she also has an astonishing gift for making contact with the local people wherever she is. Even in the poorest village she always seems to manage to find a family prepared to offer her their hospitality for the night, and whether or not they have a language in common, she's soon drinking beer with them, learning about their lives, and sharing their meal before bedding down on the floor of a hut, squashed in between children and goats. As in her other books, it's obvious that this kind of contact — despite the bed-bugs — is the thing that gives her most pleasure during her travels, and she starts fretting as soon as there's an interlude of "civilisation" in a town with a hotel or westernised teachers or officials.

Murphy only devotes a few pages to Addis Ababa and doesn't have much to say about the political situation at the time of writing, so this isn't a book to turn to for an analysis of the last years of Haile Selassie's reign, but it is a fascinating account of a region not many outsiders had visited in those days.

This is one that caught my eye during my recent trip to Germany, but didn't quite make it into the haul illustrated in >151 thorold:. I then saw that it was available as an audiobook as well...

Winkler is a well-known historian with a Social-Democrat background, he's written numerous books about German history. Before his retirement he was professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Wie wir wurden, was wir sind: Eine kurze Geschichte der Deutschen (2020) by Heinrich August Winkler (Germany, 1938- ) audiobook read by Stefan Kaminsky

  

This is a potted history — on a similar scale to the "Very short introduction" series in English — of the way Germans have seen their Germanness in the context of history, taking us in about 250 pages right through from the Holy Roman Empire and Reformation to Covid-19, with a level of detail that steadily increases as we get closer to the present day. Although it's really a book about how history has been used (or misused, or ignored...), it's probably also a very useful crib-sheet for anyone who has lost track of where Luther, Bismarck and Willy Brandt fit into the story.

Winkler's main interest seems to be to show us how ideas of submission to authority and fear of chaos (which he traces to the Lutheran Reformation and the Thirty Years War) have acted to slow down the development of true democratic responsibility in Germany — something that at least partially accounts for the failure of the Weimar Republic and the success of parties like the AfD in the new Bundesländer — as well as the way that the events of 1931-1945 have influenced German attitudes to European union, which he sees as quite out of step with those of the rest of the continent. He's also scathing about the idea of post-Holocaust Germany as a state that has a uniquely high moral mission in international affairs as a result of what it's learnt from its terrible past mistakes: this is just a disguised form of German superiority complex.

A very interesting and useful little book. I'm not sure if it's convinced me to take on Winkler's full-length histories...

>123 thorold: I am way behind on keeping up with your reading.... I find Pélagie: The Return to Acadie interesting, and thank you for the thorough review. I have had a loose fixation on the Maritime provinces and have been reading a bit here and there on the history of the area (as a Mainer by birth and longtime heritage, it intrigues me, especially the early settlements).