Bibliophil

Arthur Schnitzler - Selected Short Fiction

2009-01-03T19:03:00.003Z

Arthur Schnitzler was born in 1862 and is known as one of the most prominent members of the Viennese group of writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which included Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He's most remembered now as a playwright - his play Reigen was filmed by Max Ophuls as La Ronde, and adapted for the stage by David Hare as The Blue Room. In addition his novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) was adapted and filmed as Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick.

Schnitzler was highly influenced by Freud, a Viennese contemporary, and most of his stories are dominated by themes of sex and death. The influence also manifested itself in a fascination with the inner lives of his characters, which became the stylistic feature of Zweig and Hofmannsthal too. He used interior monologues and stream-of -consciousness narratives avant la lettre, most notably in Lieutenant Gustl, included in this collection, a controversial story from the point of view of an officer who wants to avoid a duel, which caused Schnitzler to be stripped of his commission as a reservist for bringing dishonour on the army.

There are so many things to admire in Schnitzler - his great variety of form and technique, his easy facility with using female protagonists, his uncanny understanding of inner motivations, his humour (a couple of the stories are extended jokes) and his balance of tone throughout. Notable stories in this collection include Fraulein Else (also available on its own in Pushkin Press), The Wise Man's Wife and Lieutenant Gustl, as mentioned, but all of them have some worth. A delightful collection, that will bear rereading.

[2]

Round up of 2008

2008-12-31T11:07:00.002Z

In 2008 I read 78 books, of which:

27 were non fiction
51 were fiction, of which

17 were originally English
15 were from French
9 were from German
2 were from Finnish
2 were from Norwegian
2 were from Hungarian
1 was from Arabic
1 was from Chinese
1 was from Italian
1 was from Czech

The best fiction were:

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny
The Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Selected Short Fiction by Arthur Schnitzler
Illuminations by Eva Hoffman
The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon

The best non-fiction:

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart
Piano Notes by Charles Rosen
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Classic read: Middlemarch
Classic reread: I served the King of England

Discoveries of the year: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Daniel Kehlmann

I didn't do well on my previous year end's targets - no Proust, the Zola and Balzac started well but stuttered, but I did start exploring more German language literature, particularly the Viennese group of the late 19th/early 20th century (Zweig, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, etc) which was very fruitful.

Targets for this year:

Proust (as always)
Life and Fate
More German lit (Broch, Bernhard)

Paul Torday - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

2008-08-24T13:25:00.004+01:00

At a festival this summer I heard Paul Torday speak about his most recent book, about a man who drinks himself to death exclusively on fine French wines. He was an odd chap - a businessman for most of his life, he wrote his first novel, at the age of 59, to great reviews and, presumably, healthy sales. He seemed a bit nervous in front of a larger crowd than he might have been expecting (I think Maureen Lipmann was on next), and his responses to softball questions weren't particularly illuminating.

Anyway, I picked up his first novel with few expectations, to see what the fuss was about. And my conclusion is that I can see why people are reading it, but it certainly doesn't deserve the praise it's received.

The book is a satire upon modern government, although a very slight one, and not very well written. It has been praised for its innovative structure - the book is told in a variety of forms - emails, diary entries, newspaper clippings, transcripts of interviews, and no 'straight' authorial narrative - but this isn't so original, and it's hard to do well, to distinguish between the tones of the different forms. Torday largely fails to do this - the central character, Alfred Jones, supposedly speaks in interviews in exactly the same way that he writes his diary, which is, implausibly, in the manner of a novelist. There's little consideration to who the audience of each piece might be, so how the style should be adjusted - people in interviews don't reproduce conversations verbatim, nor become lyrical for no reason; they're far more guarded. Torday uses the forms as a device for telling the story in much the same manner as he would in a straight narrative, rendering them redundant, and in fact irritating by their inconsistency.

There are also inaccuracies that grate - Torday creates extracts from Hansard, but fails to understand the structure of PMQs. He also has a character, Alfred's wife, who is an Oxford-educated economist who has worked in a big international bank for twenty years, supposedly on the fast track, who earns £75,000 pa, and is very proud of this, even though it's smaller than the amount a woman in her position might expect in the real world by a large factor. Does this matter? To an extent it does. An effective satire needs to be rooted in the world it's lampooning, and while deviations from it can serve a comic purpose, inaccuracies such as these just distract, and highlight the author's lack of awareness. The latter example wouldn't matter so much if the author didn't make such a big issue out of her earnings.

The plot itself is merely passable, as farces go. A government that wants to distract the public from an unpopular Middle Eastern war latches on to a mad plan by a Yemeni sheikh to introduce salmon fishing to his country, despite the obvious unsuitability of the country for such a project. Alfred Jones is the government scientist deputed to find a solution. The climax is worthy of Ben Elton, but could have been written up a little more. There's not much more to the book - the characters are mostly two dimensional, it's witty in parts but the targets are barn-door wide. Good for the beach, when your brain is mush already, but no more demanding than that.

[58]

Clive James - Cultural Amnesia

2008-08-15T20:57:00.007+01:00

Most people know Clive James as the host of a variety of TV programmes in the 1980's and early 90s, all irreverent and mostly concerned with television around the world - he introduced British audiences to Japanese endurance shows, and may have contributed to the raising of the bar, and lowering of standards, in British reality TV. Not something to be particularly proud of, although I've no doubt he is. His laconic drawl and tortuous style was easily recognisable, and much mocked.

Plenty will also know of him as a memoirist, and also as a TV reviewer of some note. Fewer will know of him as a literary critic, but that is what he originally was, and I remember a teacher in the 80s, himself a noted poet and critic, telling me that James's poetry criticism was of high quality. This book is James's attempt to renew his reputation, and it's working - most reviews now refer to him as an Australian polymath rather than an ex-tv presenter, which must be gratifying.

And the book is largely about gratifying Clive James. He never neglects to tell us that he's read the authors mentioned in the original, or that the easiest way to learn a language is by reading an obscure writer's essays. And of course the namedropping, not just of authors read but of personalities met and charmed by the ubiquitous James.

The book is a collection of essays, inspired by quotations from notable people, not all of them authors, ordered alphabetically. The essays aren't always about the people concerned, although they are all prefaced by a brief biographical sketch, which is often the best part of the piece. Mostly they are digressions using the quotation as a starting point and mostly, for me, they don't work.

His main obsession is with the Jewish experience in Europe in the twentieth century, and he has a particular fascination for the Viennese intellectuals of the early part of the century, who are largely neglected in Britain. I hadn't heard of many of these writers, such as Lichtenberg and Altenberg, so it was stimulating to have new recommendations. And a particular favourite of his, to whom he devotes one of the largest chapters, is Stefan Zweig, who I'm also fond of.

The trouble with the essays is that few of them say anything worthwhile, and they're not particularly well written. James has a discursive, rambling style, that he obviously sees as a virtue, perhaps in the manner of Alistair Cooke's broadcasts. But Cooke's essays were remarkable because the digressions were always logical, and always led, miraculously, back to the initial premise. James digresses because of a pun or a coincidence, or just a poor analogy to set up a poorer joke, just for the sake of it. He also employs his favourite construction, a punning chiasmus, which is so familiar from his tv programmes that it's hard not to read it in his accent. This would matter less if he wasn't so obsessed with the writing style of his chosen authors, and so proud of his own - he has said, in an interview about this collection, that he has never written better.

James is plainly well-read, and broadly cultured, although there are huge gaps in his knowledge - films, for example, he appears to know little about, nor science. An introduction to James might say that he stretches from high literature to low television, but he leaps over much in between. That may appear to be a small quibble, but he does present himself as such a know-all that it's inadvertently funny when his ignorance shows through. More than once, for example, he refers to 'the fifth page of x's Google entry', which shows a lack of understanding of what Google is, and how dynamic searches change from day to day, rendering his reference inaccurate before it's even hit the page. The main essay on films is about the hairstyles in Where Eagles Dare, a fine example of James focusing on a banal inconsistency and flogging it to death.

It's hard for me to judge James's views on writers I'm unfamiliar with, although many of them aren't particularly worthwhile - to say that a writer was bad because he collaborated with the Nazis doesn't add much to the sum of human knowledge. He includes Goebbels and Hitler, and Thatcher purely to ridicule her for saying 'Solzhenitskin'. This is one of James's worst essays - he assumes Thatcher got the Russian writer's name mixed up with 'Rumplestiltskin', although there's no reason to believe it was any other than a slip due to unfamiliarity. He then wonders why no journalist apart from himself picked up on it (because it had no significance, perhaps?), and then admits that in his haste to put her down, he got Rumplestiltskin mixed up with Rip van Winkle rendering his satire harmless. The piece is a mess, but you can be sure James is rather proud of it.

There are one or two occasions when he's just plain wrong. He writes a paean to Mario Vargas Llosa, assuming, as he does throughout, that Llosa's political views are imitative of those in his novels, that a humanist writer standing for public office is necessarily to be praised, and that because his victorious opponent turned out to be corrupt, Llosa was vindicated. None of these are true. Alberto Manguel, who knows significantly more about South American politics than Clive James, has written a very impassioned essay about Llosa, who he despises precisely because his political opinions contradict the philosophy of his writing. Llosa has spoken in support of dictatorial regimes in the region, particularly in Argentina, and Manguel wonders whether the contradiction is unintentional, so Llosa has a double personality, or intentional, in which case neither his writing nor his politics can be trusted. James omits to say, or perhaps is unaware, that Llosa was leading the presidential election polls by a long way against a relatively unknown opponent, until his arrogant, patrician air put voters off him. For James, the fact that Lloisa is a good writer is justification enough.

The worst aspect of the book is that James just doesn't know how to construct an argument. His points would be more graspable if they were clearer, but he's always distracted by the irresistible witticism that adds nothing to the case. In the end he comes across as a bit of a bore.

[56]

Harold C Schonberg - The Lives of the Great Composers

2008-07-23T23:10:00.004+01:00

I am a novice fan of classical music. I didn't grow up with it or learn an instrument, and I didn't appreciate more than the most obvious cliches until quite recently, and even now most of it is impenetrable to me. But since last year I've regularly attended concerts on the South Bank, starting with familiar pieces such as Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven Symphonies, trying to understand the appeal, or just to relax and appreciate the music for its own sake.

While, as with art appreciation, I was trying to divorce the emotional reaction to a piece from the intellectual knowledge of its creator, there comes a time when the most elemental knowledge, of chronology and influences, becomes useful for a better appreciation. This hefty overview of the history of classical music provides that.

Schonberg is an American music professor, and his approach is non-technical, aimed at the untrained amateur. There's far more about the lives of the composers, following the title, than the music. It's hardr for me to question the veracity of the contents, but there's an extensive bibliography which I may use to follow up on specific composers. Schonberg obviously has his biases, and he justifies a composers worth often on how much of his works survive in the modern repertory. This leads to contradictions - Rachmaninov, despite criticisms of his lack of rigour, is proven solely because he remains extremely popular, yet Charles Ives, plainly a particular interest to an American music professor, is a genius who is not yet fully appreciated. Schonberg is also a traditionalist - while he understands what modern music is trying to do, he doesn't necessarily agree that it's worthwhile or as profound as the composers and audiences claim.

This is a good introduction to the history of classical music, unpretentious and well-organised, although pretty huge - I read it two chapters at a time over about a month.

[52]

Giles Bolton - Aid and other dirty business

2008-07-22T19:41:00.004+01:00

There are many questions that arise when considering the state of foreign aid to the developing world. How is it that Africa is still so poor when the continent has received an estimated $300bn over the last 30 years? Can aid money actually be counterproductive to an economy? Is there any point in giving a country money if their government is so corrupt it won't reach those it's intended for? Giles Bolton addresses these questions and others in this highly readable introduction to the issues affecting foreign aid.

Bolton writes as a practitioner rather than an academic, although the book is adequately researched. He worked for DFID for a few years in Rwanda and Kenya, and draws on this experience, not least in his amusing anecdotes that occasionally help to illuminate the text. He's very good at showing the effect of aid policies on the ground in Africa, but is also capable of drawing back and showing the economic arguments and the political realities, having worked for the British government and been exposed to the debate at the highest level.

It was a particularly pertinent time to read this, as the latest World Economic Summit in the Doha round of the WTO was underway. This was a critical event - there are trade barriers and subsidies, including the infamous CAP in Europe, that are ruinous to the attempts by developing countries to access markets for their products. Bolton gives examples of specific markets that are rigged against developing countries - sugar is a notorious one - and shows how they have arisen - initially out of the post-war need for Europe to become self-sufficient in food - and how hard it is to remove the subsidies now. For the uninitiated, some of the facts of the debate will be startling - European taxpayers pay $2.5 per day for every cow in Europe, while there are 300 million Africans living on under $1 per day (Japanese cows are even more pampered, getting $7 per day)

Bolton deals with the various different sources of aid - individual donations to charities, which are mainly spent on small projects, direct aid from governments, which are mostly spent on larger projects, and assistance from the World Bank. He draws distinctions between the sources and applications of these funds, and their effectiveness on the ground. His tone is refreshingly unhysterical, despite the seriousness of the problem, and he has a talent for presenting complex issues in a simple way.

This is a very good primer to foreign aid. There wasn't a huge amount in it I didn't know from other sources (he cites in the bibliography a book I helped to edit), but it was useful to have all the major issues presented together in a straightforward manner. One drawback is that the book is exclusively about aid to Africa, because that's Bolton's prior experience, but the same arguments are relevant to developing countries elsewhere.

[51]

Dinaw Mengestu - Children of the Revolution

2008-07-06T19:17:00.005+01:00

Dinaw Mengestu is a 30 year old Ethiopian who immigrated to the United States at the age of two, following his father who was forced to flee the Red Terror of Mengistu Haile Mariam. His first novel is about an Ethiopian immigrant living in Washington DC, Sepha Stephanos, who came to the US at the age of nineteen, and after 17 years runs a small, unsuccessful general store. The novel is therefore a mixture of personal experience, of growing up as an immigrant, and a translation of observed and secondhand experiences of the Ethiopian diaspora.

Sepha has managed to extricate from the huddle of Ethiopians who have taken over a whole apartment block, and who have, to the best of their ability, replicated the village and family units they knew back in Addis. After a few menial jobs, he was encouraged to open a general store using a government business grant. But he doesn't have any entrepreneurial talent, nor any business ambition, and he struggles to break even. His closest friends are also African - Joseph, a Congolese waiter, and Kenneth, a Kenyan businessman - and their meetings are full of spurious nostalgia for Africa. Kenneth and Joseph encourage Sepha through his business troubles, and vicariously enjoy his romantic liaisons, fleeting as they are, but Joseph and Stephanos both regret the studies not pursued and the frustrations of lives not meeting expectations.

The liaison in the book is with his neighbour, Judith, a white academic single mother, whose daughter is the child of a Mauritanian academic, from whom Judith is separated. It emerges that she is looking for a father for her precocious daughter, but Sepha, in his well-meaning inexperience, eludes her obvious attempts at seduction and misses the chance he knows is there.

This is the most successful part of the book, Mengestu handles the relationship with sympathy and dexterity, such that the motivations of each character are clear and credible. He has a talent for emotional narrative, and this novel is engaging throughout. The main theme is of the illusion of the land of opportunity, but there are also currents of upheaval, integration and the volatile underclass of America. Mengestu's talent with this debut novel has already been recognised - it won the 2007 Guardian First Book Award.

www.amazon.co.uk

[47]

Guy de Maupassant - Afloat

2008-06-03T19:31:00.003+01:00

Maupassant is known primarily for his numerous short stories, and also for his half dozen novels, but he also published non-fiction, including this short travel memoir, in 1888. It's a curiosity, being a mixture of anecdote, polemic, meditation and a small amount of travel writing.

After the success of Bel-Ami, and his increasing popularity as a short-story writer, Maupassant had money to indulge himself, and bought a yacht, which he named after the novel. This book was supposedly written on a Mediterranean trip on the yacht, over a period of 8 days in 1887, and is in a diary or memorandum format. Douglas Parmee, however, the venerable translator points out in his introduction that he'd used some of the anecdotes before, and it was in his nature to revise his works, so the illusion of spontaneity here is one of Maupassant's techniques.

It's an odd work, with no great coherence - there are rants against warmongers, amusing anecdotes, personal fears and reflections, it's both light and dark, shallow and deep. The title is obviously punning (even in French 'Sur l'eau') suggesting the drifting style of the narrative, putting into many ports as the captain's whim decides.

There are, as you might expect from Maupassant, passages of great lyrical beauty, and also of poignant observation, and it exposes aspects of his character in a direct way that the stories only hint at. He is, for example, nervous of crowds - he spend several pages explaining why he avoids them. This may well be a symptom of his incipient psychosis, caused by syphilis. Within three years of writing Afloat, he was considered insane, and he died a couple of years after that. As his mind deteriorated, he became obsessed in his fiction with supernatural elements, which were representation of the demons he was assailed by. The greatest poignancy of this book is that it is a late personal glimpse of Maupassant, cresting high on his fame, but with a dark storm on the horizon.

www.amazon.co.uk

[44]

Honore de Balzac - The Country Doctor

2008-05-09T10:36:00.004+01:00

This is an odd and unsatisfying book. It's barely a novel at all - very little happens, and almost all of it is in dialogue, or more accurately a sequence of extended monologues. The doctor of the title embodies an ideal character for Balzac, an enlightened social reformer who changes the fortunes of a remote French village through the application of industrial techniques and elementary economic knowledge. The first third of the book is a monologue by the doctor explaining how he achieved this.

A long middle section is another monologue recounting much of Napoleon's rule. Balzac was an overt Bonapartist, and his belief in the virtues of strong leadership, as opposed to weak democracy, are voiced by an old soldier.

The book has the feel of a transcription of Balzac's own excited conversations - it's very readable in parts, but doesn't cohere into a narrative. It has many of his virtues - his energy and engagement - but it's too transparently a political lecture to have dramatic strength. An amusing diversion.

[38]

Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

2008-05-04T10:16:00.004+01:00

When I first read this, about 15 years ago, it bewildered me a little. I hadn't read any Flaubert yet, and I had only a vague idea of who he was, and no idea why he was significant. I had read one or two books by Barnes, and knew I liked his dry wit and control, but was a pretty unsophisticated reader (despite three years at Oxford studying English) I found Flaubert's Parrot a bit of a drag, and I can't recall noting the significance of the narrator, or anything else.

Now, though, having read all of Flaubert's significant works, I came to this better prepared, not that it's entirely necessary, although an appreciation of who Flaubert was does help. And I certainly enjoyed this far more the second time round.

This book was praised at the time for not being easily classifiable. It's sort of a biography, but not in a conventional way. It's also a fiction - the narrator is a character, Dr Geoffrey Braithwaite, who is an amateur Flaubert academic, diverting energy into his hobby in order to forget his wife's suicide. It's also a work of literary criticism, a discussion about the presence or abseence of the author, and of the role and responsibilities of critics and biographers.

Parrot is undoubtedly a clever novel. Barnes has an elusive narrator - we aren't aware that the narrator isn't Barnes himself until a few chapters in, and then the context of the narrative starts to move - at one point Braithwaite is on a Newhaven-Dieppe ferry, talking to an unidentified person, whereas previously it was assumed that it was the reader who was being addressed. So Barnes subtly moves the boundaries of narrator and reader, in a book that discusses the invisibility of the author, Flaubert's ideal, and the fallacy of the death of the author, the postmodern stance.

The main theme is the limitations of biography. An early chapter presents three chronologies of Flaubert's life - one detailing the happy moments, one the disasters, and one a selection of Flaubert quotations - his life as seen by himself. The point is that any biography is necessarily selective, and will choose from all three pots, and all will be incomplete. Who is to know what are the significant moments in a life, when often the subject himself isn't aware of them?

The parrot of the title is a slight macguffin, although the ending of the book does offer a resolution to a problem that only the narrator posed - which was the stuffed parrot that Flaubert had on his desk while he was creating Un Coeur Simple, which features a parrot which becomes a symbol? Braithwaite's frivolous search for the real parrot is a parody of the search for verifiable details in an author's life, or in his text, and the resolution - that the 'real' parrot might not be identifiable - is the punchline.

This was much more fun the second time round, now that I had an idea what Barnes was doing, but I think that the fact that Braithwaite is more a device than a character weakens the book. It's not a novel or a biography, more of a smart postmodern exercise.

amazon.co.uk

[37]

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis

2008-05-03T11:22:00.004+01:00

This has been highly rated for several years, and a film of it has just been released, so I decided to buy it and read it before watching the film. Previously I'd been put off by the high price of the two hardback volumes, but Vintage have published a combined edition in paperback.

Marjane Satrapi is a 38 year old Iranian woman, well-educated, of good middle-class upbringing, and an estimable heritage - a 19th century ancestor was the Shah of Persia. Persepolis is the story of her upbringing, during the Iranian revolution and the rule of the ayatollahs since, told as a graphic novel.

As Satrapi was about 10 at the time of the revolution, her memories of it are sparse, although she does recall witnessing demonstrations against the Shah, in which her parents participated. Then, after the Shah went into exile, life in Iran changed significantly. The most obvious change was in dress policy - women had to wear a headscarf, so that no hair was visible. As she was so young, Satrapi and her schoolfriends saw it as a bit of a joke, just a new school uniform to get used to. As she grew older, she became more aware of the restrictions - on make-up, and pop music, and any Western influences - and, as a spirited girl, was subtly resistant to them.

Her resistance became risky, in a country where dissent was no game - close relatives had been arrested and executed, but with the fearlessness of youth she was outspoken at college against clothing restrictions, and risked expulsion, or worse. Her parents decided she should go away for a while, so sent her to Vienna.

Up to this point her story could have been a general one, albeit in a, to us, extraordinary situation. Her experience stood in for those of many Iranians of her generation, and by telling it she was illuminating a little exposed part of the world. There are quibbles with that - she was relatively privileged in her family and income, and while her relatives might have been at risk from the regime because of their positions or activism, she was also slightly protected by that status. She was not from the masses, and she doesn't show a great inclination to identify with them - this is her story, and becomes indivdually so when she goes to Europe.

Her experience in Vienna isn't so happy. At first she's lonely, she knows no German, and not many people she studies with know French or Persian. She becomes part of an odd group, takes drugs, occasionally to excess, certainly for too long, and, after a failed relationship, has a breakdown which culminates in hospitalisation for pneumonia. She returns to Iran, to art college, gets married, but is restricted by life there, and in the end leaves for France.

The trouble I had with the book in parts is that large sections of it are about her adolescent problems, particularly the parts in Vienna. She indulges in her isolation, the fact that she's a foreigner and no one understands her. She doesn't show any recognition that she was lucky to have the facility to go to Europe to study when her parents didn't consider Iran to be safe for her, nor that she has the choice to go to France at the end, that many other don't have. But then, stories aren't written by including all possible alternative lives, so this is unapologetically Satrapi's own story.

And it's told very well - she's witty, occasionally poignant, and literate. The animation is spare, just black and white with few intermediate shades, which creates a simple style. It's hard to know whether the success of the book is down to the fact that it's a graphic novel aimed at a memoir audience, or to the unfamiliar and exotic origin of the story, or to the quality of the composition. I suppose a bit of each. I was a bit put off her personally when I read an interview in which she said she'd never met anyone smarter than herself - a precocious statement as a teenager, but insufferable at her age. But that doesn't affect the work, which despite my few misgivings, is definitely worthwhile.

www.amazon.co.uk

[34]

Honore de Balzac - The Quest of the Absolute

2008-04-24T13:20:00.002+01:00

Balzac wrote this during a period of high activity in which he completed Eugenie Grandet and Pere Goriot. With such a volume of output, it's unsurprising that some will be of low quality, and this novel is far below the other two.

This is one of Balzac's contes philosophiques, alongside Peau de chagrin, and is about alchemy. The plot is threadbare and repetitive - a Flemish nobleman, Balthazar von Claesz, spends his family's fortune on his obsessive research into 'the Absolute', the force that underpins all chemical and electrical reactions. His wife dies of despair, his daughter attempts to ring-fence the remaining property for the children but he borrows against it, she builds the fortune up again, and he spends that. And that's it.

It's a very sloppy, irritating book, with unbelievable characters given overstated emotions. I can see that the story of Balthazar mirrors Balzac's own obsessiveness and compulsive spending, but that doesn't lend any merit to the novel.

amazon.co.uk

[34]

Andrew Crumey - Sputnik Caledonia

2008-04-23T13:30:00.002+01:00

I enjoyed Andrew Crumey's last two books, Mr Mee and Mobius Dick, which involved, respectively, French literature and philosophy, and German literature, philosophy and music. They stimulated me to read Diderot and ETA Hoffmann, and to explore those cultures more deeply. His eclectic breadth of reference - he has a PhD in Physics, yet cites Schumann and Mann - is exciting, and he makes witty connections across centuries and genres.

So I was looking forward to his new novel, and I was disappointed when I read it. It's longer than his previous books, which were tightly plotted and packed with ideas. This is flabby, and, at 550 pages, twice as long as it should be. It's in three parts. The first is about a young boy growing up in Glasgow in the early 1970s. It's written in a plain style, reminiscent of David Mitchell's recent Black Swan Green, similarly mining pre-adolescence for familiar experiences, and similarly unsatisfying.

The second part is the largest chunk of the book - 300 pages - and is set in an imagined future in Scotland. Robbie, the boy from part one, is now a conscript in a Socialist state, and a volunteer for a space programme. The narrative is slow, and written in a very basic style, with many scenes reminiscent of the daydreams of Robbie from the first part, which is a hint to its purpose. It emerges, in the third part, that the middle section is imagined by Robbie as he's in a coma. By this point I'd deduced this, but also had grown weary of a narrative supposedly imagined by a 12 year old, with the limitations that entails.

So this was too long, and a pointless exercise. It was easy enough to read, and Crumey is both funny and intelligent when on form, but as an experiment in form it's not nearly ambitious enough to be worthwhile.

[33]

Alberto Manguel - Into the Looking Glass Wood

2008-04-11T21:26:00.004+01:00

This is a collection of essays on writers and literature, most of which were originally published elsewhere. That they form a neat ensemble is due to the consistency of Manguel's themes and the irrepressible spark of his writing.

Much of this collection is concerned with the moral necessity of literature, and its relation to prejudice, oppression and liberal thought. The central essay relates to Mario Vargas Llosa, whom Manguel despises not just for his conservative politics, but more because those are at odds with the humanity of his early novels. Manguel wonders how Llosa the politician and Llosa the novelist can have such contradictory views, and suggests that it's born either of cynicism, or a lack of self-knowledge. The particular views to which Manguel objects includes Llosa's support for an amnesty for the perpetrators of crimes under the Argentine junta in the 1970s, and his view that the culture of indigenous Indians in Peru may be sacrificed for the cause of progress (to which one critic responded, "This is of course the sacrifice that many white Peruvians have been willing to perform ever since the first of them leapt ashore with Pizarro.")

Manguel's moral indignation energises this essay, and another on Llosa in the book - the fact that there are two shows just how deeply felt this is. And another piece indicates why this might be so. Manguel left Argentina for Europe in the late 60s, just before the military regime clamped down on dissent. Many of his student colleagues were arrested and executed - the details he heard many years later of their fate are grisly and shocking, and no doubt he maintains complex feelings of outrage, mixed perhaps with some guilt at his absence while his colleagues were being persecuted.

There are other pieces on being Jewish, on gay literature and erotic literature (originally written as introductions to collections) and a strained and now dated piece on electronic modes of reading. There's also a piece about the disctinction between erotica and pornography that starts with an uncharacteristic rant against American Psycho, in which I feel his outrage and indignation have blinded him to the literary merits of the work. This is unusual for Manguel, he usually has a quite sure sense, and I would have expected him to pick up on the narrative tricks of the novel, which he seems to have missed completely.

Manguel is one of those writers who make you rush to find the writers he enthuses about, from Cynthia Ozick to Julio Cortazar. Borges is an ever-present shadow, being Manguel's mentor, and many of the old master's enthusiasms have become the pupil's, including the anglophilia that delights in Robert Louis Stevenson and GK Chesterton, recurrent in Manguel's writing. He's always entertaining, as I hope he will be when I go to see him talk on the South Bank tomorrow night.

amazon.co.uk

[29]

Emile Zola - The Belly of Paris

2008-04-08T19:13:00.005+01:00

This is the third novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and is about the food market of Les Halles, in the centre of Paris. It was built in 1851, not long before the action of the novel, in 1858-9, and, like Covent Garden in London, it no longer exists on its original site, having relocated for similar reasons.

The plot of the book is quite thin - it involves Florent Quenu, recently returned to Paris after escaping his imprisonment overseas for alleged involvement in the coup of 1851. He finds and lodges with his younger brother, and becomes an inspector in the market. There are various rivalries amongst the stallholders for his affections, although he barely notices them being more wrapped up with planning an insurrection in revenge for his deportation. He is inept and indiscreet, however, and is arrested and deported once more.

The rest of the novel, probably half of it, is taken up with Zola's descriptions of the market and its operation. There are multiple page inventories of the stocks of food sold, which is all very nice but serves little purpose except as documentary. This is one of Zola's failings - he did lots of research for his books, and needed to display it, but that can inhibit a narrative, and does here.

There is a small amount of political philosophy - the theory of the Fat and the Thin, expounded by the painter Claude Lantier, who is the central characteer of the later L'Oeuvre. The Fat are the forces of conservatism and complacency, the Thin are the reformers. It's quite simple, and not greatly illuminating.

amazon.co.uk

[28]

Paul Broks - Into the Silent Land

2008-04-03T23:03:00.008+01:00

Every now and then I read a book that demands to be pressed on to others. This is one of those, a rare work of non-fiction that is written with the style and grace of a novelist.

Paul Broks is a neuropsychologist, which means he tries to explain the structure and purpose of the brain with relation to the behaviour of the individual. His field is similar to that of Oliver Sacks, who popularised neuropsychology with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings, made into a film with Robert de Niro and Robin Williams. Like Sacks, his stock is unusual and illuminating case history, but he has much more than that.

This book weaves case histories with personal anecdotes and philosophy, but that doesn't begin to explain its charm. It contains meditations on the nature of consciousness and identity, presented in an intimate fashion, relating Broks' own relationship to his science, and to himself. The chapters are short and varied - many of them could well be magazine articles, as they're witty and self-contained, but the book doesn't feel broken up, just pleasingly meandering.

It's occasionally very funny - in one chapter, after telling of people with body dysmorphia, and a need to mutilate or tattoo themselves, he goes home and says to his wife that he's thinking of tattooing his penis. 'With what? 'she says. 'Wolverhampton Wanderers,' he says. She looks at him. 'Maybe just Wolves,' she says.

He uses a variety of narrative styles - one chapter is science fiction, similar to Philip K Dick, exploring how memory is related to identity by positing a future where teleportation is possible, and considering the implications of creating a copy of oneself but not destroying the original. These sort of mental games are the staple of philosophy; Broks' advantage is that he can write so well that the reader is as engaged by the narrative as by the underlying ideas.

Although this is nominally a science book, it is occasionally startlingly moving. One case is of a subject who suffered from a bout of herpes that destroyed part of his brain, particularly the amygdala, which is often seen as the emotional core of the brain, which controls basic responses such as fear and anger. From such cases we can deduce its function - those with an impaired amygdala cannot recognise threatening situations for what they are, and conversely can interpret harmless situations, such as an argument on a TV show, with great alarm. This particular subject, unusually, had a high degree of awareness of his own behaviour, and some articulacy in describing it. One symptom is of an inability to read subtle signals, or to take any message other than literally, and also a need to explain things in detail less he be misunderstood - also recognised as symptoms of types of autism. He says that "I will tell anybody anything - what my parents don't know about my previous sex life isn't worth knowing!" and concludes: "The virus ate my shame." This is simultaneously hilarious and tragic, and very moving - his awareness of his condition brings home that the 'subjects' are also alive and can tell their own story.

This is certainly a book to value and reread. I've already bought two more copies for friends, and will doubtless buy more.

amazon.co.uk

[27]

Emile Zola - The Kill

2008-03-16T19:54:00.005Z

This book, the second in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, is so markedly different from the first that they could have been by different authors. Which is a very good thing, because the first was a bit of a struggle, and this was exceptionally good.

Zola intended to illustrate different aspects of French society with each novel - mining (Germinal), farming (La Terre), painting (The Masterpiece), courtesans (Nana), etc - and The Kill (La Curée) is about the reconstruction of Paris by Haussmann in the 1860s. While Paris is admired now for the straight boulevards and uninterrupted sightlines, which were designed by Haussmann, at the time they were controversial, and a source of corruption, speculation, great wealth created as ancient districts were destroyed to make way for the new roads. Zola saw all this as emblematic of the Second Empire, and depicted it in this novel.

It's a novel about transformation and transgression. France has recently changed from a Republic to an Empire, and now Paris is being transformed by these designs, imperiously ordered. To enable the building works, Paris sucks in workers from around France, further urbanising the country. And to finance the works, Haussmann engineers various smart enterprises, such as selling bonds to developers for the right to land alongside the new avenues. In doing so he creates a need for modern financial institutions, so France develops a more sophisticated banking system.

All this is the background to the novel, but essential to it. The main plot is sufficiently transgressive to sustain the book on its own. The main characters are Aristide Rougon, first encountered in The Fortune of the Rougons, his son Maxime by his first marriage, and Renée, his second wife, much younger than him, and whose dowry and marriage 'gift' enabled him to start his speculative enterprises.

Renée is highly sexually voracious, although not for her husband, who is mostly wrapped up in business and is unconcerned. Aristide and Renée's activities are placed in parallel - his financial transgressions, frauds and manipulations are comparable to her sexual affairs. She seeks an experience beyond the normal, and starts an affair with her stepson, who is only eight years younger and has been an intimate friend since her marriage to his father.

The affair itself is multiply transgressive. Not only the 'incest' (not technically as there's no blood relationship, but the term still applied), but Maxime is throughout described unequivocally as effeminate. Renée is boyish in appearance, with short hair, and very sexually assertive with Maxime, almost taking the man's role. Renée's closest female friends have an unhidden relationship - all this debauchery is, for Zola, one manifestation of the immorality of the Empire.

Apparently this book has long been one of the most popular of Zola's novels, for obvious reasons - a plot that involves incest, financial speculation and corruption that has regular and periodic topical relevance. On to the next volume.

amazon.co.uk

[23]

Michael Blake - A Thousand Faces

2008-03-08T10:15:00.004Z

Lon Chaney was one of the pre-eminent stars of the silent film era, and one of its finest actors. Modern audiences, if they know the name, often confuse it with his son, Creighton, known as Lon Chaney Jr, who appeared in several horror films such as The Wolfman, and so conflate the two stars and consider the father also to have been a horror actor. The fact that his best known roles were The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera adds to this misperception, although neither of those films were strictly "horror".

Chaney was known as 'The man of a thousand faces' (hence the title of this film biography) because of his remarkable ability to transform himself, using make-up and his own physical dexterity, into any sort of grotesque. Most of his roles exploited this facility - in addition to the deformed Hunchback and scarred Phantom he famously played characters with no arms or no legs, creating seemingly impossible effects that entranced audiences.

But his popularity wasn't based just on his make-up skills, he was an exceptional actor too. In the silent era, the success of an actor's performance depended entirely on his ability to express a range of emotions, and few could match Chaney in this. His talent arose out of his curious upbringing - both his parents were deaf, so he learnt how to communicate with them through facial and bodily expressions. As a child he would come home in the evening and reenact the events of the day for them. Could there possibly be better training for a silent film actor?

Sadly, most of Chaney's 160 odd films are lost- about 40 are known to exist, of which maybe half are available on DVD. The most famous, Hunchback and Phantom, get regular screenings as there's a new fashion and appreciation for silent film classics. The Unknown, a remarkable film directed by Tod Browning, who made 10 films with Chaney, is also available in a modern print and on DVD. The best I've seen, and one of the best silent films ever, is He Who Gets Slapped, directed by Victor Sjostrom, father of Swedish cinema and main influence on Ingmar Bergman, who cast him in the lead in Wild Strawberries. I saw it with a live score composed by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, and performed by him and the BBC Concert orchestra. An extraordinary experience. It's not yet available on DVD, nor is it often broadcast, but it is available to watch here.

Michael Blake is a professional make-up artist, which is his initial interest in Lon Chaney, and is the leading historian of the actor. He has previously written a biography (called, unimaginatively, The man behind the thousand faces), and this is more of a filmography, detailing his major performances and the circumstances around the production. The trouble with this is that Blake has no special talent as a film critic, nor is he a particularly good writer. His enthusiasm for his subject is evident, but he is wont to resort to cliché, and many of his plot expositions serve no purpose. Chaney was a remarkable actor, who died aged 47 after making just one sound film, and he deserves a wider appreciation than he now has. At least the increasing provision of niche market DVDs means that his current fans can see his craft.

[21]

Alberto Manguel - A History of Reading

2008-03-07T12:37:00.003Z

Alberto Manguel is becoming a small publishing phenomenon, producing a couple of books a year on a variety of subjects, most of them connected with bibliophilia. His The Library at Night, out next month, is eagerly anticipated, and I wrote about A Reading Diary recently. This book, published in 1996 and now out of print in the UK (I got mine from amazon.com) has already achieved classic status, which is fully justified.

Manguel approaches his subject on a thematic basis.There are chapters on reading aloud and reading in private - apparently it was normal for books to be read aloud, even when in private contemplation, so the low murmuring of monks at study was common, and Alexander was noted with astonishment when he read a letter in front of his troop without moving his lips. Reading was thus originally about vocalising text, and it went through a transition to become internalised comprehension.

This book is full of fascinating information like this, and Manguel is a beguiling guide. His easy style makes this book more of a leisurely chat than an academic lecture, and he hops from one subject to another without effort. His historical anecdotes are not just entertaining but pertinent, and the illustrations within the text are neatly embedded so that they appear alongside the reference, enhancing the reading experience.

Manguel's mentor was Borges - as a sixteen year old he was employed as a reader to the blind writer - and his final chapter is deliberately Borgesian. He describes all the things he might have written about reading, an infinite book, like Borges's infinite library. It's a witty conclusion inkeeping with the tone of the book.

This is a book to be savoured rather than devoured - I read it in a couple of weeks, one short chapter per night. (Manguel also has things to say about eating metaphors for reading) It's highly appropriate that a book on the pleasures of reading should be such a pleasure to read.

[20]

Emile Zola - The Fortune of the Rougons

2008-03-05T19:01:00.005Z

I was warned that this, the first of Zola's huge 20 volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, wasn't one of the best, and that was by someone who read the whole cycle in French. I found it a slog - it took me two months to read, on and off, not helped by the dubious 110 year old translation, and the horrible typesetting in this edition.

Zola's ambition was to use the history of an extended family to illustrate the history of France from 1852 to 1870, the Second Empire under Louis-Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He had particular ideas of hereditary traits, such as irascibility and drunkenness that afflict some of his most prominent characters, but that theme is mostly secondary to the broad narrative of French social life, inspired by Balzac's Comedie Humaine.

This novel deals with the coup d'etat in 1852 that begins the Second Empire - Louis Napoleon, the President of the Second Republic since the revolution of 1848, took absolute power, much as his uncle had done nearly fifty years before. This was relatively recent history for Zola's readers, twenty years after the event, although the writer himself was a mere 12 years old at the time. But for modern English readers, the events are a little confusing, and the narrative a bit hard to follow.

Zola sets the novel in a provincial town, divided between Republicans and Bonapartists, essentially conservatives. It opens with a Republican force marching by the town, joined by two young patriotic inhabitants, Silvere and Miette. Their relationship is a sentimental tragedy that forms the central episode of the book. Much of the rest is concerned with the manoeuverings of the Rougon family, predominantly Bonapartists, to attain influence despite their personal cowardice and the uncertain outcome of the coup.

Zola's intent is twofold in the book - to introduce the characters of his cycle, and to satirise the conservatives at the time of the coup. He takes an anti-Second Empire stance throughout his novels - as a political radical his opposition to despotism is fundamental. The trouble is that his ability isn't yet competent to fulfil his ambition - this novel feels rushed and uneven, there are too many authorial digressions, and the characters are shallow and unbelievable. There are elements which show Zola's budding talent, as evident in the previously published Therese Raquin, such as the action scenes involving Silvere, and the comical counter-revolution in the town. But as a whole the book doesn't work, and should be avoided, except by completists, of which I am currently one.

[19]

Charles Rosen - Piano Notes

2008-03-03T19:42:00.004Z

Charles Rosen is, apparently, a world-renowned concert pianist and music critic. The fact that I didn't know that before I read the introduction to this book establishes my minimal knowledge of classical music. I am an ingenu, but a willing learner who has been going regularly to concerts on the South Bank for the last six months, expanding my repertoire as a listener, and my appreciation. There's inevitably a limit to my participation - I can't play an instrument, in fact my musical experience is limited to grade one piano (theory only) aged nine, and a term of clarinet, so the technicalities of musical performance are beyond me. I may know that a piece is hard to perform, and admire the audacity of the performer, but I can't really appreciate the performer's experience.

This book attempts to convey a bit of that. It is a populist primer to 'the hidden world of the pianist', as it's subtitled, and uses anecdotes, history, written examples and his own experience to try to show why the concert pianist has such a special regard.

As well as being a very knowledgeable music historian, Rosen is a witty writer, and the book speeds along. Some of it was above my head, despite the unacademic approach - I couldn't appreciate the written music, and would have to play recordings of the pieces to get close to understanding his point. He moves easily from funny anecdote to the philosophy of music, of which here's a fine example:

"...performance in public seems like the natural goal of the aesthetic philosophy that has dominated Western art and music since the eighteenth century. A work of art is supposed to have a value independent of its social function, and even of its role in the artist's biography, and the public concert is at once a metaphor for this independence and its demonstration in the economy of modern life. This independence may be to some extent a fiction, but it is indispensable to our idea of artistic creation.The work of music may be the expression of an individual sensibility, and we may say the same of a performance: but once published, once played, they have become public property. That is why we can maintain that a composer does not always know how best to interpret his own work. His knowledge of the piece may be more intimate at first, but he cannot control future performances, and his opinion of how to play it may be interesting but not absolutely privileged. We may say that the performer ought to realise the composer's intentions, but we must also admit that very often the composer, the poet or the visual artist does not fully understand his own intentions - at least, this is a doctrine of artistic composition that is as old as Plato."

I learnt plenty from this book - I was amazed at first at how pianists could play several pieces, totalling perhaps two hours, without reference to the score, whereas an orchestra mostly sight-reads. The act of memorising seemed an extraordinary feat, for something as complex as a Beethoven piano concerto or sonata, for example. Rosen clarified this for me by saying that by the time he'd reached 18, he knew most of the classical piano canon, even if he hadn't played it in concert. A child's mind, especially one so musically precocious, and relentlessly inquisitive, can memorise an awful lot very quickly, and once it has done so it remains. He states that he can play far more easily pieces he first knew as a teenager than pieces he learnt within the past year. This partly explains the achievement of Daniel Barenboim's recent performance of the whole Beethoven Sonata cycle, of which I saw four out of eight concerts. This was the fourth time Barenboim had played the full cycle, over a period of 45 years, but the memorising had been done when he was a child; at this age the focus is on interpretation and delivery.

Rosen laments the culture of music conservatories and contests, which focus the student upon the one or two major performances he has to make in a year, and that they can leave music school only knowing well the three pieces they have to play in examination at the end of each year. This culture, for obvious reasons, creates a conservative and narrow canon amongst young performers, which limited repertoire will make it hard for them to distinguish themselves later.

I can't say I got the most out of this book, there was too much that required at least some musical knowledge, but it wasn't impenetrable, and it should help me a little to appreciate the pianists I watch in future.

[18]

Mark Abley - Spoken Here

2008-02-25T21:58:00.008Z

This book is subtitled Travels among threatened languages and is part travelogue and part linguistic study. Abley travels around the world - to Australia, America, Canada, Venezuela, the Isle of Man and Wales, to examine several of the hundreds of minority languages that will die out this century, and some that might not.

Abley is a Canadian journalist, and early on he apologises to academics for his lack of linguistic training, and inability to analyse languages. He only speaks English and French, although given the languages he's studying, it would have been little help if he knew ten more - few of them are related to the Indo-European family group with which English-speakers are most familiar. He has the virtues of a journalist over an academic - an empathy for the human stories behind the dry facts, and that means that he can bring out the sociological implications of the loss of these languages.

He starts in Australia, where perhaps one third of the world's endangered languages are. Partly this is because of the sparse and diverse communities of the indigenous aborigines - there are pockets of maybe a few hundred native speakers of some languages. Those that have not been urbanised are generally the old, and they find it hard to encourage their children to speak their ancestral tongue. This is a story heard around the world, it's similar amongst the native Indians of America and Canada that Abley visits.

The consequences of this loss of language are not trivial, according to Abley. A culture is identified by what separates it from other cultures, and few characteristics are more distinguishing than a language. As a language disappears, by oppression, assimilation, or domination by an external language, so does the identity of the culture. To that extent it's a political issue, and has been vociferously used as such even where the culture is thriving, such as Wales.

Abley treats all his subjects with equal dignity, although one is likely to have more sympathy for the desperate situation of Aborigines than the Welsh or Manx featured. Some of the worst abuses against the indigenous population in Australia are within living memory - the forced adoption for white education of aboriginal children, for example - and the gap in economic and social status between aboriginal and white populations is larger than almost anywhere else in the world. This makes the language debate even more complex in this situation. Economic progress for the young generation of aborigines cannot be achieved without English, and there's no incentive for them to maintain their ancestral languages. Furthermore, the elders are often timid to pass on the language to unwilling children, and they children unenthusiastic about learning it.

Abley doesn't try to impose strong themes in the book, they arise out of his travels. Language is a necessary component of political identity, economic success, cultural pride, but also of differentiation. Abley discusses throughout how different languages can express ideas and concepts that are inexpressible in other languages. There's dispute as to how much the use of language defines how the user thinks - if one language has different ways of articulating concepts of time and distance, does that mean that the speaker conceives of time and distance differently, or are this elemental concepts independent of the language used?

I went to an interesting lecture a few weeks after reading this, which was about the concept of numbers in humans. There's a scientific definition of 'numerosity', which is number sense (distinct from 'numeracy' which is an ability to count and manipulate numbers) Someone with basic numerosity can, for example, look at a group of three items and identify them as 'three' without counting them. They can also recognise four as being bigger than three, and match the same numbers of different items. This is independent of the language used, or any language at all. This is shown in cultures which are limited in the words they have for numbers. Many people are aware of tribes in Papua, or the Amazon, which have words for 'one', 'two', and then 'more than two'. Despite these limitations in vocabulary, these tribes can exhibit numerosity, which is fairly crucial as the allocation of resources depends upon it, so they know that if they have eight children they need eight meal servings, even if they don't have a word for 'eight'.

This suggests that some basic concepts are fundamental to human thought and are independent of language, but this surely doesn't apply to more sophisticated concepts, such as our relationship to the environment, or to each other. Abley is very persuasive about this value of minority languages, although it's harder to justify their preservation on that basis rather than the more essential one of tribal identity.

This is a fascinating and well-written book. Abley's early apology was unnecessary - his research is admirably presented, and pertinent throughout, and he has a good grasp of the academic background to his subject, as well as the wider political import.

[17]

VS Pritchett - Balzac

2008-02-25T21:55:00.000Z

Honore de Balzac's life was nearly as extraordinary as one of his tales, and he has been almost as popular a subject for biographers as his early idol, Byron. I have four, three of them by notable writers - Andre Maurois, Stefan Zweig and VS Pritchett - and one by a professional biographer of French writers, Graham Robb. The Pritchett is the slimmest of the four, under 200 pages, so I started with that.

He gives credit to his predecessors, Zweig and Maurois, and has plainly leaned heavily on a few sources, but this is a good primer to Balzac. The material is rich and full - in addition to his numerous novels, Balzac wrote many letters. In fact, there seems to have been little time when he wasn't writing - he would get up at 3am and write for 12 hours, then eat, and sleep for only about four hours a night. He was addicted to working, and needed to be to keep up with his excessive expenditure.

Balzac's life is a tragic tale. For all his literary success, he was never out of debt from his first efforts, when his parents funded him to spend two years writing rather than training to be a lawyer. He was feted by nobility, and aspired to a lifestyle to imitate his admirers, but was hopelessly addicted to frivolity - he had dozens of elaborate and expensive canes, for example, and collected works of art that were sold for next to nothing on his death.

His love life was no more successful than his finances. He was frequently in love with unattainable women - Madame de Castries is one of the more notable, whom he depicted in The Wild Ass's Skin - and his longest liaison was with a married Polish Countess who he rarely met during the 18 years they were involved with each other. This didn't stop him having occasional affairs, and lying about them to his amours.

Despite his almost pure coffee diet when writing, Balzac had a huge appetite, and became extremely corpulent in middle age. This was manna for the satirists, as were his occasional public stumbles, hurrying into carriages. His appetites were his ruin in the end - he died at the age of 50, in a desperate physical state.

Pritchett gives enough detail of Balzac's life for a reader of his works to determine how much of his fiction was drawn from life, but he doesn't spend much time analysing the works themselves. That's not a great concern - in such a slim volume he couldn't possibly do justice to the 90 novels and stories that Balzac wrote, about four a year in an abbreviated career. With his prodigious output and energy, he lived four lives; it seems appropriate that I should read four biographies.

[16]

Guy de Maupassant - Notre Coeur

2008-02-14T11:23:00.003Z

Notre Coeur is one of Maupassant's lesser known novels - of the six he wrote, three are perpetually in print in English, and three are hard to find. I got this one (as a present) via abebooks, in a 1946 edition.

It's a simple love story - André Mariolle becomes obsessed with a widow, Madame de Burne, a hostess of some beauty who cultivates exclusively male friends of some talent for drawing room soirées, each of whom becomes slightly obsessed with her, encouraged by her flirtation, but never succeeds. Mariolle does, with an assault of attention in person and by letter, and they start an affair.

Their input into the relationship is uneven, however - he is jealous and demanding, and despairing of her seeming casual attitude to him; she is flattered by his attention, and enjoys the physical relationship (delicately alluded to), but cannot love him in the same way, as he demands. Maupassant describes their developing emotions in typical analytical detail, with great sympathy, immersing the reader in the relationship and alternating between the protagonists. He shows an understanding of both sides of an obsession, and of how relationships with unequal passions arise and play out, probably described from experience.

The novel suffers from being just about the one affair - it's quite short, and in a narrow world, although this is typical of his stories and novels. It ends with a nice irony - on the rebound from Mme de Burne, André starts an affair with a maid who he hires, and treats her in the same way that he has been treated, receiving her adoration, having encouraged it, but not reciprocating it. The novel has a satisfactory circularity, and explains the title, 'Our Heart' - love is like this for all of us.

[14]

Rory Stewart - Occupational Hazards

2008-02-11T14:35:00.003Z

Rory Stewart's cv reads like the ultimate establishment man - Eton and Oxford, British Army and Foreign Office, a route that has supplied for centuries the administrators of the British representation overseas. But Stewart is more in the line of his compatriot Fitzroy Maclean, as an explorer and individual rather than a career diplomat. At the turn of the century he spent two years walking across Asia, from Iran to Nepal, learning the local languages and staying in villages.

In mid 2003, when this book opens, he arrived in Baghdad offering his services to the occupying forces. Although he doesn't speak Arabic, he has Persian and experience of living in Muslim countries, and the Coalition is desperate for capable hands. He's appointed provisional deputy governor of the eastern province of Maysan, bordering Iran, at the age of 30.

He enters a dangerous world, where his responsibility, until the (American) provisional governor arrives, and then a local governor is elected, is to oversee reconstruction and regeneration projects, create local political structures, and maintain security and order alongside the military forces, which are British in Maysan. There is, at least initially, plenty of funding - in fact more than they can spend, which fosters corruption.

Stewart has an awkward role in Maysan, being supposedly in authority, but not in a position to control the forces, who he nominally outranks, and undermined by his status as provisional, and merely British. When his successor arrives, the fact of her nationality as an American gives her borrowed authority. But Stewart's awareness of the limits of his influence is his strength. Most of his job is politics - negotiating power structures with the various leaders, which include the 'Prince of the Marshes' (the original title of the book), a regional tribal leader with a daunting record of resistance to Saddam, Islamists who'd spent decades in Iran, and Sadrists, the most threatening oppositional group across Iraq.

Stewart's assets are his knowledge of Islamic culture, down to how offence might be given or avoided when offering coffee at a meeting, his flexibility under pressure, and his ability to improvise solutions. He also shows acute judgement of character, and a boldness to assert his limited authority and establish the share of responsibility for the problems of the region.

He's also a very good writer. His previous book, on his travels across Asia, was very well received, as has this been, deservedly. He opens each chapter with an apt quote from Machiavelli, and you feel that Stewart is exploring the nature of leadership as he attempts to exercise it. He's well aware of the historical context - at one point, when trying to arrange for guards to protect the archaeological sites in his region, he notes that a 4,000 year old tablet recently discovered records a leader having similar problems to those he's facing. all the clichés about learning from history apply.

When Stewart is transferred to the neighbouring province of Nasiriyah, he finds conditions there very different. Few political contacts have been established, and he has to start from scratch what he'd already set up in Maysan. The military presence is provided by the Italians, who rarely leave their base and have a timidity encouraged by their Prime Minister, Berlusconi, wary of how casualties might be received in Italy. This leads to a crisis when the Coalition administration compound is besieged by Sadrists for several days, and the Italian 'Quick Reaction Force' is neither quick nor forceful. Stewart's military experience is critical - he's able to coordinate with the ex-soldier bodyguards who are the only force in the compound, and keep a clear head under mortar fire. This section is genuinely thrilling, as Stewart relates the adventure with wit and energy.

Stewart expresses no opinions on the morality of the war or occupation. This may be due to his respect and responsibilities to his erstwhile and possibly future employers, but his narrative is about the problems of being a foreign administrator in a chaotic environment, and his few complaints are aimed at the confused political messages from the Coalition.

There's a danger that a memoir, especially of recent high-profile activities, can be self-justifying, but this one appears to be honest. Stewart is candid about the mistakes he made - he recognises that his out of character brusqueness to one of many petitioners may have led to the riot that saw the governor's office ransacked, and defends the soldiers' unwillingness to intervene in this incident - should they risk their lives, or threaten those of the rioters, to protect an empty office building? But this incident led to a loss of respect for the Coalition, and increased boldness by the insurgents.

Stewart is currently working for a foundation in Kabul that is trying to restore the old commercial centre of the Afghan capital. He's plainly an administrator of uncommon ability, a good writer, and a man of independent mind, who wants to put his talents to the best humanitarian use. He'll have an interesting life, which no doubt we'll hear about.

[13]

Honore de Balzac - The Wild Ass's Skin

2008-02-06T16:56:00.002Z

This is a strange book. One of Balzac's Contes philosophiques, it supposedly contains elements of his rather opaque mystical beliefs, a mix of Swedenborg and Mesmerism and several other early 19th century theories. But those are subsumed beneath an odd tale about a magic talisman, that allows its owner unlimited fulfilment of his desires, at a price of reduced lifespan.

The book is in three parts. The first tells of how Raphael, the main character, intending to kill himself due to despair at a rejection, and at his gambling debts, is given the eponymous talisman by a strange ancient art shop owner on the banks of the Seine. He is told of the qualities of the skin, and the penalties, and immediately desires a huge banquet with his friends. Upon leaving the shop, he encounters his friends, who take him to a huge party, at which there are debates on recent politics - this was written, and is set, just after the 1830 July Revolution, and no doubt represents contemporary debates among Balzac's acquaintance.

The second part is a very long relation by Raphael of a doomed love affair, based in part upon Balzac's own failures with Madame de Castries. There are some good passages, and a notable scene in which Raphael hides in the lady's bedroom, about which many rumours arose, and denials by Balzac, of which woman in real life this incident was based on. But it is overlong and indulgent, which Balzac acknowledges in sardonic asides from the listeners in the book.

The third part is the tragic unravelling of the story - he continues to pursue Foedora, the woman from the second part, but becomes aware of her coldness, and also of the love of Pauline, his landlady's daughter, an archetypical Balzac heroine. This part has much of what Balzac became known for - fast-paced narrative, sharp dialogue and believable actors.

This was Balzac's second 'proper' novel, and his first critical success. It contains a lot of good writing, but is uneven, and doesn't compare to the careful plotting of Cousine Bette. There are typical touches of humour though - as Raphael is walking along the banks of the Seine considering suicide, he notices some booksellers, and is about to go and haggle for a book when he realises the pointlessness of it. All bibliophiles will recognise that with a chuckle. And the energy of Balzac's writing is infectious - supposedly he wrote as he spoke, irrepressibly. In this work you see the seeds of his later masterpieces, but I don't agree that this is included among them.

[12]

Amelie Nothomb - Sulphuric Acid

2008-01-28T23:35:00.000Z

Amelie Nothomb has achieved great success - 15 novels, and a reputation for being slyly mischievous - by mining her peculiar youth and writing spare, crafted novellas about beautiful girls with an excess of empathy. She was born to the Belgian ambassador in Japan, which she used in Metaphysique des Tubes (The Character of Rain), and returned there when older to work for a Japanese company, which is the basis for Fear and Trembling. She writes with wit and precision, and claims to write 3 novels a year and publish one, which is plausible given the slightness of the volumes, generally about 120 pages each.

Nine of Nothomb's novels have been translated into English, and this is the seventh published by Faber in well-designed, neat editions. It's the first of those I've read, however, to have a completely fantastic plot, as opposed to a realistic one based in some part on the author's background. The setting is in the near future, when reality TV shows have progressed, or regressed, to such an extent that the logical extreme has been reached - a reality death camp, with 'guards' from volunteers, and 'prisoners' plucked randomly from the streets.

This might have been a nice conceit around the idea of the Stanford prison experiment, in which volunteers were divided into guards and prisoners, and encouraged to act out their roles, which they did with such enthusiasm that the experiment had to be prematurely halted. Nothomb doesn't develop the story in that way - in this world the parts are played for real, prisoners are actually executed, and guards arbitrarily victimise their wards.

The plot caused predictable controversy in France (and Belgium), and it's easy to see why. While some may say it's a satire on the excesses of celebrity culture and reality TV, it's very blunt, and besides that isn't Nothomb's main concern. Her themes are of small intimate encounters and uneven power in relationships, in this case of the love by one female guard for Pannonique, a slight, beautiful prisoner who becomes the main focus for the TV producers.

The concentration camp setting becomes just a background to this relationship, and one has to question why it is used. As a metaphor it's crude, and the threat of execution doesn't carry any weight for the reader. It seems to be a lazy device, and deserving of the criticism it has drawn.

In addition, Nothomb's depiction of 'love' is actually more of a schoolgirl crush. This was appropriate in some of her earlier works, set during the pre-adolescence of a pretty girl, but one wonders whether Nothomb has anything profound to say about more adult emotions. If so, it isn't in this novella.

[8]

Alberto Manguel - A Reading Diary

2008-01-26T22:51:00.000Z

Alberto Manguel has had an interesting life. Born in Buenos Aires, he grew up for a time in Israel as his father was ambassador there. Aged 16 he was working part-time in a bookshop in the Argentine capital that Borges frequented. The great writer, by now going blind, employed Manguel as his reader, which no doubt inspired the young man to a career in literature. Having lived in England and Italy, he has since become a Canadian citizen, and writes in English.

Manguel is now something of an industry, publishing novels, art history and works of eclectic interest such as A History of Reading. This book is something of an indulgence - a year rereading favourite books, and writing generally about them, with no pressure to create a coherent theme. He calls it in the introduction a commonplace book of reading.

I'd read only three of the dozen books chosen - The Invention of Morel, The Sign of Four and Don Quixote - and given up on a couple more - Elective Affinities and Wind in the Willows (at the age of six - I still have the unread edition) The others include a couple I hadn't heard of - The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, for example, and The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati.

Manguel's intention is to allow the ideas which come from reading these books to be supplemented by the events of his life as he reads them, although the project is a little vague, and the book suffers from a lack of coherence. Familiarity with the books helps to follow his sometimes unconnected thoughts; I found some of the chapters on books I didn't know a little wearing. He is an intelligent and witty writer though, and I've since sought out some of his other works.

[7]

Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower

2008-01-24T09:10:00.000Z

9/11 is undoubtedly the most significant event of the 21st Century so far. I was in the US when it happened, and was frustrated at the unwillingness of the US (television) media to question who might have done it and why. For this sort of analysis I had to come across, by chance, programmes on C-Span such as that evening's Newsnight, or NPR radio shows. This lack of rigour, at least by the most popular news media, arguably enabled the Bush administration to conflate the threat from al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein, creating a non-existent link so that over half of Americans thought that Iraq was responsible, and so backed the invasion of that country.

Of course more know now that there was no link, and there have been many mea culpas in the media for buying the Bush line unquestioningly. But even people who consider themselves well-informed are quite hazy about the nature of al-Qaeda, its history, aims and activities. The major players are household names, thanks to the White House's need for demons - bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed - but they are known as symbols, as Saddam Hussein was, and latterly Ayatollah Khomeini and Colonel Gaddaffi.

Lawrence Wright makes these men human. He spent five years researching this book, a history of al-Qaeda from 1948, the year that Sayyid Qutb went to America to study, up to 2001. The culminating event itself is dealt with quite briefly - there's an assumption that the reader is well aware of the events of that day, and it is barely alluded to during the book, although it hangs over it in the way that the fall of Troy hangs over the Iliad.

The humanising of bin Laden is a little disconcerting, just as the knowledge that the operation to hijack 4 planes may have cost just $40,000 was. He isn't the evil genius of myth, nor did he have bottomless wealth from his father's construction millions. He actually spent much of what he had in Sudan, and arrived in Afghanistan broke; the training camps he subsequently organised there, plus fund-raising in Saudi Arabia, have provided him with his current resources.

Bin Laden's early experiences are comically incompetent. He raised a small Saudi force to assist the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, but the arabs were untrained and not battle-hardened, and had more embarrassing retreats than successful actions. He tried to claim credit for attacks in Africa that were almost certainly not organised by him, although he was part of the movement that inspired them. His anti-American speeches and interviews at the time are rambling and generalised. It wasn't until Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was introduced to bin Laden that the grand concept arose.

The story starts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, though. Sayyid Qutb, highly intelligent, partly educated in the United States, became a political martyr and the chief philosopher of the Brotherhood, executed in 1966 for his part in sedition against Nasser. Wright follows the line from there to the emergence of al Qaeda, via Saudi Arabia and the fascinating story of Mohammed bin Laden, the barely literate builder who became one of the biggest industrialists in the Middle East, responsible for the refurbishment of the holiest sites in Islam.

Wright's research for this book is admirable. He talked to people on all sides - from FBI agents who investigated the bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, to ex-AQ members and relatives of bin Laden - and travelled extensively, including a spell as a work shadow on a Saudi newspaper as a pretext in order to get access to the key information from the kingdom. But the research is the least impressive of his achievements. He presents the history of al Qaeda, astonishingly, with little moral judgement, although he does comment on the competence of some of the actors. This objective distance enables him to get close to his subjects, to the benefit of the reader. We see, because of witness interviews or memoirs, the home life of men considered the greatest threat to the United States, and the banality of it makes our vulnerability more chilling.

One criticism I have of the book is the focus on John O'Neill. He was a senior FBI officer who was responsible for counter-terrorism, and oversaw some of the investigations into the African embassy bombings. Flawed, adulterous, manipulative and short-tempered, he didn't get the appointment he deserved, to be Richard Clarke's successor as National Security Council counterterrorism coordinator. Wright believes that this was a missed opportunity, among many, as O'Neill was well aware of bin Laden's threat, but of greater relevance to the narrative is that the job O'Neill did accept, in August 2001, was as head of security for the World Trade Centre in New York. His death a month later was one of the ironies of that tragedy, but I think Wright makes too much of the personal side - his multiple mistresses, for example, have little relevance to the big picture with which he's concerned.

This is, however, an excellent work, probably the best non-fiction book I'll read this year, comparable to Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks, a similarly brilliantly researched and written book by a US journalist.

[6]

Harry Matthews - The Journalist

2008-01-19T19:57:00.000Z

Harry Matthews is the only American member of OuLiPo, the French experimental writing group that included Perec and Queneau amongst its most prominent members. Known for their playfulness and subversion, their works could sometimes be criticised for favouring form over substance, but such is the fate of modernists (and post-modernists)

The Journalist isn't a hack but a diarist. The narrator is keeping one as part of recovery from a breakdown. It isn't explained how this will help him - presumably by imposing order and rational reflection upon his daily activities - but it becomes a catalyst for a further breakdown. As an effort to organise the diary, he invents various classifications for his entries, dividing them into actions and thoughts, and then those involving other people and those just about himself, and so on until he has 25 categories. The keeping of the diary becomes an obsession, and also takes up most of his time, at work and at home, where he loses sleep in order to record his day.

This taking over of his life by journal writing reminds me of what has been observed about epistolary novels of the 18th Century, in particular Richardson's - it was estimated by one critic of Clarissa that she would have to have been writing letters for eight hours a day, and barely have had time to act the events she describes. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is far more realistic in this respect.

The journalist becomes increasingly bewildered and paranoid as lack of sleep, and avoiding his medication, leads him to lose perspective, thinking that his wife is having an affair and is conspiring with his own mistress to conceal secrets about his son from him.

The revelations in the end aren't so shocking, nor greatly different from his paranoid thoughts, but the novel isn't so much about the plot, which is slight, but the method. I thought it was successful in those terms, although the obsessive categorising doesn't distort the structure, and a diary is hardly a novel form. It's sufficiently witty and engaging though to override such gripes.

I bought this from the wonderful Calder bookshop on the Cut. Its eclectic stock includes a lot of French avant-garde, all of Beckett, as John Calder, who's in every day, was his publisher, and selections from small publishers such as Hesperus, Pushkin and Dalkey Archive, who specialise in translated fiction. They have several other works by Matthews, who I haven't seen elsewhere, as well as many other lesser-known authors, which makes browsing there an expensive delight.

[5]

Lloyd Jones - Mister Pip

2008-01-14T21:37:00.000Z

This booker-nominated work was highly recommended to me, and has a rare A+ rating from complete-review.com , so I was keen to read it as soon as it came out in paperback.

It's a slim novel, told by a young black girl, Matilda, resident of a village on an unnamed island in the Pacific between Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. At the start of the novel she's 13, and the island is in the middle of a war at the beginning of the 1990s. There are no young adult males in the village as they have all either been killed by Papuan troops, which have blockaded the island, or joined rebels on the interior of the island.

The atrocities of the war, however, are kept in the background of the narrative as Matilda tells of her education by Mr Watts, the only white person on the island. Mr Watts is neither qualified nor experienced as a teacher, and has no teaching materials, so his lessons consist entirely of readings from Great Expectations. This is the first contact for his students with literature, and very soon they are engaged by one of the most enduringly popular stories.

As the pupils become engrossed in Dickens, the threat of the war diminishes, although there's conflict with their own families. The mothers, mostly very religious, are sceptical about the morality of this foreign work, so Mr Watts co-opts them into teaching, inviting them in to give a small speech to the class about anything they knew, whether it be how to fish or cook, or old legends.

The war returns, more than once, and Matilda, her mother and Mr Watts are unwillingly drawn into a prominent role. 'Mister Pip' is mistaken by an army commander of being a real rebel, rather than a fictional narrator of a 19th century novel, and this comical error has disastrous consequences.

This is a multi-layered book of more complex moral issues than at first appears. There are themes of wandering and emigration, paralleling Great Expectations with the stories of Mr Watts, and ultimately Matilda too, of post-colonial worlds, of black versus white, traditional versus modern education, religious myth and fiction, and the uses and purpose of literature. Yet all these themes are within a deceptively light narrative, so light that when the instances of brutality do occur they are truly shocking.

I had a small problem with the narrator's voice, which appeared to be that of a 13 year old girl, but with emotional observations of an older woman. It's later revealed that the narrator is the same girl aged about 23, which explains the latter, but not the simple style, especially as she has completed an English degree. That contradiction jarred only slightly, and ignores the achievement of a middle-aged New Zealand man impersonating a young female Pacific islander. I've already recommended this to one person (who, by chance, was reading GE), and may buy it for others.

[4]

Honore de Balzac - The Black Sheep

2008-01-11T12:39:00.000Z

The translator of this novel says in his introduction that "no story in the world is more exciting than The Black Sheep, combining as it does the compelling readability of the blood-and-thunder with the deeper insights of literary art." Well, he's wrong, and this isn't even the most exciting Balzac I've read, but it does have its moments, and the pace increases remarkably up to the climax.

As ever with Balzac, the plot is mainly concerned with money, in this case an inheritance. The book starts with a tortuous introduction of the dramatis personae, being: Jean-Jacques Rouget, who has inherited the bulk of his father's wealth, due to the latter not believing that Agathe, Rouget's sister, was his daughter. Agathe, a beautiful and pious woman, has two sons, Joseph, studious, kind, and a very talented painter, and Philippe, a swashbuckling soldier, and a scoundrel.

Agathe's husband was a chief civil servant of Napoleon's state, but once he dies, and the monarchy is restored, she loses that income, and is dependent upon the income from the modest investments she has. Philippe, who she adores, deceives her and gambles away her capital, so that she's forced to try to appeal to her brother, and ensure that she has a share of his legacy. Jean-Jacques, however, is weak-willed, and controlled by his mistress, Flore, with whom he's obsessed. She in her turn is in love with a local ex-soldier and leader of a gang of pranksters, Maxence Gilet.

So far, so complicated. Add to this a political conspiracy, for which Philippe is convicted, then a confrontation and duel between Philippe and Maxence, and the full intricate skill of Balzac's plotting is evident. The book is uneven though, with digressions in which Balzac seems keen to exhibit his research. You can feel the energy with which Balzac wrote it, fuelled on caffeine, but slightly undisciplined. There's also a little too much narratorial judgement on the characters, less than in, say, Hugo or Dumas, but far more than in one of his later masterpieces such as Cousine Bette.

The themes are of money and status, but also of legitimacy. There are several characters whose fortune depends upon their legitimacy being recognised - Agathe is denied her full inheritance as her own father denies his inheritance, Maxence is presumed by many to be Jean-Jacques' brother, and Flore is a mistress rather than a wife. The doubt about the status of these characters plainly parallels the political turmoil running behind the main plot - the legitimacy of the Bourbon throne, and the resistance to it of both Philippe and Max. Much of the political significance of the novel will pass modern, and particularly English, readers by, but it would have been at the forefront of contemporary readers' minds, during the Orleanist rule.

Further themes, of the corrupting power of money, are typical of Balzac, and the ending, in which the bad guy gets ruined and the good guy gets a fortune, is rushed and unconvincing. There's a sense that, once Balzac had passed the climax of the duel, which is dealt with briefly, he had little energy left to sustain the novel.

[3]

Arto Paasilinna - The Howling Miller

2008-01-08T21:08:00.000Z

I don't have that much Finnish literature - the nearest I have, apart from this, is Mikael Niemi's Popular Music, written originally in Swedish, a funny tale of growing up on the Swedish/Finnish border. Paasilinna is apparently one of Finland's most popular authors, and his books have sold in many languages, although it appears that there aren't enough translators from Finnish, as this book was translated from French.

Gunnar Huttunen moves into a mill in a Finnish village in the 1950s. A veteran of the Winter War, he's a huge man of strange habits - he has a talent for imitating people and animals, and likes to howl when excited or depressed. These habits, while initially amusing, irritate the locals, especially the howling which tends to arouse the dogs and wolves of the neighbourhood.

Huttunen is soon unpopular with many in the village, and his responses, often impulsive, lead him into trouble with the law, arrest and committal in a mental hospital, and escape to live off the land.

This is a very funny novel about the intolerance of society for noncomformity, and is an enjoyable romp with a sensitive touch. I look forward to reading his few other works available in English, out of the twenty he's written.

[2]

Guy de Maupassant - A Parisian Affair and Other Stories

2008-01-07T18:32:00.000Z

Maupassant wrote over 300 stories in a very fertile 10 years, in addition to 6 novels and travel writing, but as there aren't any modern complete editions in English, today's monoglot reader has to buy as many selected works as possible to get the full range of his oeuvre. I have 9 collections, containing over 120 different stories.

This one, a recent Penguin Classics edition, very consciously focuses on some of the lesser-known stories, although it does also have some classics such as Boule de Suif and Le Horla. Boule de Suif was the first Maupassant story I read, which is usual as it's his most famous, and often the first in a collection as it was the first he published. Rereading it, now with some understanding of Maupassant's themes and techniques, I found it extraordinarily accomplished. It could be said that he didn't surpass this in 300 subsequent stories, although he experimented with different forms of the story.

Not all the stories in this collection are excellent. Some are quite average, and many very slight. Moonlight, for example, is an ironic tale about a devout parish priest, who is scandalised to hear that his niece has a lover. Walking under a moonlit sky and considering the matter, he undergoes a 'conversion' stimulated by the conclusion that God must have designed such charm for the purpose of desire. It's a witty inversion of a moral instruction, and very short, but a little too neat.

Femme Fatale (or La Femme de Paul) on the other hand is rather more overt - a man loses the girl he's obsessed with to a lesbian. Maupassant doesn't bother with euphemisms, it's quite plain what he's discussing, and it's for stories such as this that he became notorious in Victorian England. He gained a reputation for being very risqué, although few of his stories are as challenging in their treatment of sex, as this one is. But it's all relative - Maupassant's open discussion of desires and affairs was far from what publishers in England would allow.

The best of this collection are the well-known ones - in addition to those mentioned above there are The Jewels and The Necklace, which are sort of counterpoints, both hinging on the veracity of some jewelry, and concerned with how fundamental deception is to society. Regret is one of his archetypical stories, Maupassant's imitation of an impressionist painting, perfectly capturing one emotion in a single scene.

[1]

Round up of 2007

2007-12-31T12:52:00.000Z

2007 was a good year for my reading, better than ever before.

I read 87 books, of which:

20 were non fiction
67 were fiction, of which

29 were originally English
20 were from French
8 were from German (6 of them by Zweig)
5 were from Russian
3 were from Spanish
1 was from Hungarian
1 was from Serbo-Croat

Classics newly read - Ulysses, Germinal
Classics reread - Crime and Punishment, Darkness at Noon

Best fiction read

Liquidation by Imre Kertesz
Germinal by Emile Zola
Fantastic Night and other stories by Stefan Zweig
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac
Homo Faber by Max Frisch
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Headlong by Michael Frayn

Best non-fiction

Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks
Lawless World by Philippe Sands
Nine Suitcases by Bela Zsolt

Discoveries of the year: Stefan Zweig, Sinclair Lewis

Next year's plans:

Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle
Balzac's major works
Proust
Life and Fate
The Man Without Qualities
Classic to reread - Anna Karenina

Anne Fadiman - At Large and At Small

2007-12-31T12:26:00.000Z

A few years ago, Anne Fadiman produced a small book called Ex Libris, a collection of essays on books and bibliophilia. It was an unexpected success, finding a permanent home on the Waterstone's checkout desk, largely through word of mouth - I probably bought 6 or 7 copies myself. Ex Libris mixed the personal with the objective, with chapters on book collections, treatment of books, special obsessions, and specific topics such as the sonnet.

It's this mix of personal and general that Fadiman calls the 'familiar essay', perfected in the 19th century by William Hazlitt and, her personal obsession, Charles Lamb. Nowadays there are lots of critical essays, and plenty (too many) personal columns, but few that combine the two, where you can feel both educated and connected by the same piece.

In a plain bid, by her publishers no doubt, to repeat the success of Ex Libris Fadiman has collected several of her occasional essays from the last decade, on varied subjects, but all of them of close personal interest to her. Because of this, they're written with a passion and knowledge unlikely in subjects more distant from the writer, merely researched rather than lived. This is engaging, but the extent to which it is depends a lot on whether the reader shares the obsession.

So my indifference to ice cream and coffee meant that those chapters left me unmoved, but I was far more involved with the essays on Lamb and Coleridge. I know little about the former, apart from the psychosis of his sister, and found Fadiman's love for him appealing, but I didn't think Coleridge was my sort. I wasn't aware of his repeated flight, even as an adult, which is some indication of the insecurities that lay under his daunting intellect.

This collection isn't as good as Ex Libris, although it has its moments. The expression of a deep personal moment in the last chapter is a little nakedly manipulative, and doesn't fit with the other essays, and too many are a little overkeen to persuade the author of the validity of the obsession. But Fadiman is a good writer, and humorous, and the book works as a light gift.

[87]

WG Sebald - Austerlitz

2007-12-23T17:57:00.000Z

I read this a couple of years ago, and wrote elsewhere about it immediately afterwards, when I had the book still fresh in my mind. I thought I should save my thoughts on here.

I think this is probably the best book I've read in the last 10 years. It had an extraordinary effect on me, and was a total joy to read. The fact I read it in 2 sessions, after failing to finish a book in 3 months, is some indication of that.

Not surprisingly, I disagree with many of the comments above. There's so much in this book that many seem to have missed.

It's a book about time and memory. As such its obvious forebear is Proust, who is very consciously referenced more than once in the first ten pages - Austerlitz and the narrator meet in the Salle des pas perdus, an echo of 'temps perdu', and Austerlitz refers to the buffet barmaid as the 'goddess of time past.' But I feel that what Sebald does in this book is the opposite of Proust (the little I've read of the latter) Rather than, as Proust does, almost stopping time by focusing in on an individual moment and analysing it for pages, Sebald moves with pace through time, jumping backwards and forwards, making links that become more apparent as they accumulate.

The particular reason I like the structure of this, an apparent rambling narrative, is that it reflects the way I have conversations, jumping from one theme to another as inspired by a key word or thought. More relevantly, it's how memory works, leading you from one thought to another without apparent direction, the only theme being the path in retrospect through those thoughts, like an Alasdair Cooke letter or an episode of James Burke's "Connections". But, as with bopth those examples, the unifying theme is made apparent at the end.

I disagree that the narrative voice, of Austerlitz, consists of one emotion, or rather that that is a weakness. I was in tears several times while reading this, so powerful was it. It's a book not just about repressed memory, but repressed emotion. Austerlitz has been brought up by austere Calvinists, forgetting his infancy, and then become a dry academic. The narrative voice is appropriate to that, and his search for his history is also a search for feelings long lost - memories of his mother, even his native language that resurfaces in talking to Vera.

Why the double narrator device? I can think of several reasons. Principally because of the usual problem of how the story as told by the narrator came to be written down in the format the reader encounters it. The nature of the narrative is fluid, moving from one theme to another in a way that reflects intense conversation. If Austerlitz had decided to write his memoirs - which adds another problem of character intent - he would have structured them and created order. With the form of a 'narrator' simply retelling Austerlitz's conversation, there's an impression of a lack of structure - although of course it's intricately designed - exacerbated by the lack of any normal literary structural devices - paragraphs, chapters, headings.

Continuing the themes of memory brought up by the book, and linking in to the 'psychogeography' as mentioned by LFF, referencing Ackroyd although I think Sinclair is probably more relevant with the term, which I don't believe applies here. I don't think Sebald is interested in spurious mystical properties attributed to buildings because of the memories of past inhabitants. His concerns are more concrete. The buildings mentioned by Austerlitz all have direct relevance to his story, although when he first mentions them he's not aware of this. There are 4 railway stations discussed at length - Antwerp, Liverpool Street, Prague and Austerlitz. Liverpool Street and Prague are the end and starting points of his journey as a 5 year old. Antwerp is the centre of Austerlitz's obsession with stations and railways, although he isn't conscious of why; and of course Austerlitz represents him, not just in name but more symbolically. In addition, the forts discussed in the first pages are exactly the same design as Theresienstadt. I have a problem with the last, as, while Austerlitz's obsession with station architecture can be explained from repressed memories, he was unaware of his mother's incarceration until he got to Prague. Unless the suppression allowed him to link stories of the evacuation from Prague that he came across in his general reading to his interest in fort architecture, without understanding the significance of the link.

These stations are not just repositories of memories of passengers who have passed through them, as they might appear, which would be a tenuous and lazy metaphor. They contain Austerlitz's own memories. And the Gare d'Austerlitz, naturally, is the central repository, or should be. The metaphor of a library for memory is of course equally lazy, but more directly appropriate, and Sebald extends it in a way that's directly relevant, and provocative. The Bibliotheque Nationale, that's been built upon a site near the Gare d'Austerlitz, is railed against by Austerlitz, not just from an architectural perspective, but for its folly. But the underlying message is clear: The National Library is the representation of modern memory, it's where Austerlitz goes to find his own history. And it's been built upon the location of the warehouse that stored the loot of Parisian Jews, now lost. The symbolisation of that, that modern memory, efficient, shiny, erected to the glorification of a vain President, supersedes the memory of one of the great tragedies of the city, literally buried under its foundations. Similarly his efforts to find documentary evidence of his mother's imprisonment are restricted to an abbreviated Nazi propaganda film - memory is sanitised, edited, repackaged to serve the interests of those in control. Austerlitz's repression is symbolic of the suppression of the collective memory, his blackouts of the selective amnesia of society.

I think this book is hugely significant, and it will grow in stature with time. It's a tragedy that Sebald died only months after it was published, but I suppose that's preferable to him dying before. There's a vast amount in it that I haven't picked up on - the long Marienbad sequence for example, which plainly has significance beyond the river Auschowitz. Given the mention of Alain Resnais a few pages later, I presume it's a reference to his film L'Année dernière à Marienbad, which I'm just about to watch, and I understand is about the unreliability of memory. More significant of course is Resnais's film Nuit et Brouillard, a short documentary of Auschwitz, the unmentioned place that haunts the book, the final destination for the train that took his mother.

Tom McCarthy - Remainder

2007-12-16T18:03:00.000Z

I had few expectations of this novel, although it had been recommended. It's a curious novel of some originality, but is in the end unsatisfying.

The narrator has suffered a traumatic accident which, for legal reasons, he can't describe, but which the reader can infer involved something falling from a plane (I assumed human waste) The accident left him in a coma for some time, and when he awakes he's still psychologically affected. He's given £8.5m as a settlement and considers what do do with this new wealth.

After briefly considering and dismissing philanthropy, he decides to use the money to recreate remembered scenes, using actors, exactly replicating a resonant memory, and replaying it incessantly. His almost unlimited resources enables him to demand perfection in his recreations, to buy buildings and refit them to match his memories. He tries to create 'authentic' moments through artifice, and of course the contradiction in that doesn't occur to him.

As his mania increases, his awareness of reality decreases, and he begins to achieve blissful fadeouts akin to epileptic fits. That state appears to be the manifestation of the perfect moment, although of course it's a symptom of the neurological damage he's suffered.

The exercise is an ultimate expression of solipsism - making the world match one's own perceptions, elevating the personal experience above any one else's considerations. It's also a diversion upon the creative process, of the elusive nature of memory, and how hard it is to grasp again that perfect moment in our past. It's also about wanting to control our environment, to eliminate those aspects with which we cannot relate.

There's a precision to McCarthy's writing appropriate to the narrator - his obsessive repetitions are presented as entirely logical and consistent, while they are patently maniacal. Comparisons have been made to Auster, and he does have a similar cold attention to structure and self-aware intelligence.

The ending is a logical consequence of the narrative, but I found it forced, and the illusion that allows the reader to accept all the actors in the recreation doing so without demur for months doesn't accept the transfer of that to the real situation of the denouement. But McCarthy is witty and engaging, as well as undoubtedly smart. His second novel has just been published.

[85]

Stefan Zweig - The Royal Game

2007-12-07T12:28:00.000Z

This novella, also known as Chess in a new Penguin edition, is typical Zweig - concerned with self-destructive obsession, acutely observed with unmatched attention to emotional nuance - but it isn't, as many of his stories are, about love, but about intellectual obsession.

As usual, Zweig uses a framing narrative device. The tale is told to the narrator by a man on a cruise, a situation he previously employed in Amok. The encounter occurs because the narrator has lured the world chess champion, also on board, into a challenge chess game against a group of passengers, and Dr B, previously unannounced, interjects with an analysis of the position, forcing a draw, to the surprise of all.

there's a call for him to play a challenge against the champion, which he refuses on the basis that he hasn't played a game of chess in over 20 years. This a shock to the observers, and the narrator tries to get an explanation. Dr B tells his story.

He used to be a lawyer in the old Austrian regime, entrusted with the financial affairs of many senior figures, and when the Nazis invaded, he was arrested and expected to be taken to a concentration camp. Instead, because he was a valuable source of information, he was imprisoned in a cell and subjected to interrogation. One day he manages to steal a book from the pocket of a guard's jacket, left hanging near him. The book turns out to be 150 championship chess games. As he's been starved of intellectual activity for months, he devours the book, game by game, teaching himself how to project the games in his head, learning the games by repetition and playing them to himself.

After a while, this stales - he is just remembering past games, barely exercising his mind, so he tries to play against himself. At first he finds this impossible - after all, the skill in chess is to be able to predict the other person's moves, and if you're playing both sides, how can you both anticipate yet not know what your 'opponent' will play? So he learns how to divide his mind between the two parties. He does this so skilfully that he's able to play games at high speed, flipping from one player to the other in his mind, pacing his cell while he plays incessantly.

The internal game-playing becomes a mania, and in the end he collapses from the mental exhaustion, and is taken to a hospital. He recovers, but is warned against playing chess again, as it might bring on another attack. Nevertheless, he agrees to play against the champion, as a matter of curiosity - he has never tested his self-honed skills in a proper game, never mind against a world master. Almost effortlessly, he wins - the mental calculations come quickly to him, as opposed to the rigorously plodding champion.

He is challenged to a second game, and during this he starts to lose his focus. It turns out that, frustrated by the champion's slow play, he's playing other games simultaneously in his mind. This pushes him towards a crisis, just averted by the narrator.

This is a very late Zweig - published the year before his death - and is one of the best of his novellas. The intensity of intellectual obsession leading to madness reminded me of the Aronofsky film Pi, and the scenes in the cell of Darkness at Noon, which I've recently reread. As usual with Zweig, the emotional descriptions are precise, and most of the action internal, and the effect powerful.

[83]

Stefan Zweig - Amok and other stories

2007-12-05T20:31:00.000Z

Stefan Zweig was obsessed by suicide throughout his life, as these stories prove. Each of them, written from when he was 23 until 30 or so years later, deal with an obsession ended by the death of the protagonist.

All of the stories, as with most of his works, have a secondary narrator. The first is told by a man, discovered by the narrator hiding on a ship from Calcutta to England, who became obsessed with a woman in the Dutch East Indies (presumably Indonesia) who asks him, in his capacity as a doctor, to perform an abortion. He refuses, not out of any scruple, but because his price is to sleep with her. She has a back street operation, which kills her, eventually, while he attends her. After desperately telling his tale, he kills himself.

Amok is the most considered and successful of the stories, in which the near insanity of the protagonist is quite believable. The second story, The Star above the Forest, is the poorest of his that I've read. A waiter falls in love with a Baroness he serves, and kills himself by lying on the track in front of her train. It's a very naive story of a coup de foudre, and the progression of the waiter's passion is unexplained. In his more mature works, Zweig dealt closely with the intellectual rationale for emotional states, but this was written before he'd developed that skill.

The third story, Leporella, is Gothic in subject - an ugly, simple cook is retained by a Baron who has an unpleasant wife, who is perpetually frustrated as he refuses to consummate the marriage. The cook develops an attraction for the Baron, and encourages his affairs when his wife is away. She kills the wife, believing it to be his wish, then kills herself when he dismisses her in horror.

Leporella isn't quite as disturbing as it's intended to be, and the ending is rather pat and predictable. It wasn't published in his lifetime, perhaps Zweig wasn't happy with it.

The last story, Incident on Lake Geneva, is much tighter than the rest, almost Maupassant-like in its concision. A simple Russian soldier finds himself in Switzerland in 1918, stranded after troop movements in World War I, and is bewildered that he can't get home, can't understand the language, and is told that the Tsar has been deposed, which he doesn't understand. He can't comprehend the distance home - he's been forcibly transported by train and ship around the world to Europe - and is in despair that he can't see his family again. He, naturally, kills himself. This story has deeper resonances, though, about the dislocation and upheaval of ordinary people after the events of 1914-18, the inability of people to come to terms with the devastation and huge social changes.

Inevitably, given his obsession, Zweig killed himself, along with his wife, in 1942, presumably in despair at the future of the world at the height of the Axis powers' fortunes.

[82]

Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

2007-12-04T17:40:00.000Z

Most of Zweig's stories deal with obsession, and are told by a secondary narrator, that is one relating the tale to the primary narrator, assumed to be the author. This story, one of his finest novellas, is about two forms of obsession, one by a young man who is a compulsive gambler, and one by a middle-aged widow who becomes briefly infatuated with him.

Told with Zweig's usual attention to emotional nuance, it's a study in gambling mania to put alongside Dostoevsky, and includes some outstanding passages, including about 4 pages on the observation of hands to derive character. The precision of his writing is always a delight, but in this story it combines with the description of a brief but destructive passion. There's a contrast between the clarity of the prose and the turmoil of the scenes described, explained by the tale being a confession by an intelligent woman 25 years after the event of an exceptional passion.

Many of Zweig's stories are structured in this way, desperate confessions of past indiscretions by people wanting to unburden themselves to the unnamed narrator, presumed to be Zweig. While this is a simple narrative device, and not very convincing, it lends Zweig himself a personality of someone to be confided in, which adds some credibility to his narrator characters.

This is definitely one of Zweig's best stories, tightly conceived and told, and entirely convincing.

[81]

Charlie Brooker - Dawn of the Dumb

2007-11-24T18:55:00.000Z

Charlie Brooker is a TV previewer and columnist for the Guardian. He may also be one of the funniest writers in England. His attitude is of misanthropy and bile, and his style is frequently profane, but I found myself laughing out loud on almost every other page of this collection.

The collection alternates his Screen Burn columns for the Guardian Guide, which I read regularly, and his weekly G2 columns, which I don't, and so were new to me. Much of the TV stuff is about trash - Big Brother, I'm a Celebrity, X Factor - which he skewers with a fascinated awe at the idiocy and grossness of the participants. As I don't watch any of these (any more), I ended up skimming many of these articles, although they were still funny even when I didn;t get the references.

He has a great talent for using exactly the right metaphor, often an obscene one. He describes Piers Morgan as 'looking twice as smug as a man who's just learnt to fellate himself', which is pretty apt on many levels. In fact, I could pull quotes at random from the book, it's full of great ones. Even the index is funny. Scanning through, I came across 'motherfuckers' (as you would, to which the reference is 'see psychics'. Under 'cunts' it goes 'see complete and utter cunts.' 'Complete and utter cunts - see psychics.'

[79]

Nick Foulkes - Dancing into Battle

2007-11-22T11:36:00.000Z

This is subtitled 'A social history of the battle of Waterloo', and as such deals very little with the battle itself, and almost entirely with the social environment of Brussels in 1815. Using first hand sources such as diaries and letters, Foulkes recreates the relationships and explains why so many of England's aristocratic families were living just 25 miles from one of the biggest and most important battles in history.

I had heard about the Duchess of Richmond's ball tangentially - it was a legendary event, held on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, from which many soldiers went into action still in evening dress. It features in Vanity Fair, which I've read, long ago, and Childe Harold, which I haven't. David Miller produced a book on the ball in 2005, well researched down to analysing which crops had been most favoured by invitations.

Foulkes doesn't get so close in his descriptions, he provides more of an overview of the dramatis personae, and of their personalities. Wellington's consideration of his public reputation is shown - while he may have been apprehensive at the coming clash with Napoleon, he displayed an unflappable confidence. Foulkes suggests that Wellington had become aware of his significance to the British - even greater than his tactical or leadership qualities, his very presence gave the British extra belief. After the battle, he credited the win in part to his appearance on the battlefield at critical moments, and he may have been right.

Wellington's political beliefs, as reactionary as they come, underpin this history. He believed that only the aristocracy could be effective soldiers, and disdained professional (ie trained) soldiers, such as the artillery. Riding to hounds was adequate training for battle, and many of the battle descriptions written by the participants are in terms of hunts. Much of the pre-battle assembling in Brussels was in the form of London social occasions - balls and banquets, a whole class transplanted across the Channel.

But why were they there? Largely to take advantage of cheaper rents, and to escape creditors - many of the aristocracy had become involved in gambling around that time - but also to take advantage of peace in Europe for the first time in a decade to have a look abroad. Napoleon's escape from Elba took everyone by surprise - not least Wellington, busy in Vienna negotiating the treaty to divide Europe - and the speed of his advance on Paris more so.

Foulkes is very good on the attitudes of the English to their hosts, and to the displaced French court, using his sources wittily. Particularly memorable is the Duc de Berri not even causing the English soldiers to stop cleaning their kit, never mind be on parade for his review, once they realised he wasn't THE Duke. It is occasionally hard to remember which aristo is which - there are several Carolines - but the observation of their little parochialisms is entertaining.

As the imminence of conflict becomes apparent, Brussels becomes frantic with new forces arriving from Britain, some of the residents leaving, and Prussian and British forces requisitioning properties, in different styles. Foulkes doesn't question the reports of Prussian behaviour being more akin to an occupying army, and attributes the different attitudes of the national armies to the characters and examples of their commanders - Wellington and Blucher.

Foulkes doesn't deal much with the battle itself, instead referring the reader to more focused histories such as a recent one by Andrew Roberts, but does follow the fates of the notable persons the book highlights. The Earl of Uxbridge, possibly the most dashing British soldier of his age, leader of the cavalry, famously lost his leg while in conversation with Wellington, and Foulkes puts his reputation in context - he'd scandalously seduced Wellington's sister-in-law a decade before, and was a very famous figure even before the battle. The place where his leg was amputated became part of the Waterloo tourist trail, his leg even buried in the garden and marked.

The slaughter of the battle itself was horrendous - supposedly it was one of the most intense battles ever, in terms of the numbers of men in such a small area - and many casualties were still lying, alive, on the battlefield a week after being hurt. Most poignant was Wellington's quartermaster, chosen despite his protests because the man to be appointed was in Canada, who arrived from his honeymoon, with his new wife, and was killed in the battle. Of course there were many thousands more deaths, each with a similar story, and Foulkes's focus on the aristocracy feels a bit limited, but that's the significance of the battle - the last in which the upper class of Britain played such an overwhelming part.

[78]

Stefan Fatsis - Word Freak

2007-11-17T21:30:00.000Z

Fatsis is a Wall Street Journal correspondent, specialising in sport and business. He started writing a quirky article about the world of professional Scrabble, and realised it was a fertile enough topic to expand into a book - but only if he participated himself. So he spent a year endeavouring to get to the standard of the best in the world, and compete in the top division at the national championships in the US.

His start isn't auspicious. He plays some trial games, with top quality players giving him tips, and when one says he could have played 'CONGER' or CRONE' instead of the word he played, he admits he didn't know either word. At this point I considered that his basic vocabulary was so low (especially considering his profession) that no learning of word lists could possibly make up for it.

But he isn't deterred, and learns the 2 and 3 letter words, the essential building blocks of Scrabble. The main tactics of professional Scrabble though are to keep the board tight and build a rack so that a bingo (a word containing all 7 letters on a player's rack) can be played, gaining 50 bonus points. A lot of the book the techniques several top players have for learning the 7 and 8 letter words. It's meant to make them sound endearingly loopy and obsessed, which it does, but it's also rather dull.

The mechanical nature of the rote learning and application does seem to take the genius out of the game, but there is a lot of tactical nous required too. But mostly, it's a game for obsessives, dominated by oddball men rather than women, misfits, some of whom struggle to hold down a job. Fatsis is good at presenting these characters, as you'd expect from a journalist, and he makes friends with many of them, who encourage him in his ambition. It's funny on occasion, a little tragic, and not quite as fascinating as Fatsis believes it to be. But then, he's drawn into the obsession, which requires that he loses some perspective.

[77]

Guy de Maupassant - A Woman's Life

2007-11-13T18:05:00.000Z

Maupassant is known as a short story writer, but he wrote 6 novels, of which this is possibly his best, by reputation. It's a simple story, of a woman who marries when young, has a difficult marriage to a man who betrays her, and a son who wastes all the family money.

It's a rather depressing story, expertly told. Many of Maupassant's stories have the same cynicism about life, the cruelty of events and of people. This novel is full of his greatest virtues - the attention to emotional nuance, the precision and conciseness of the prose, and the indulgence in lyrical beauty - which mean reading it is a delight, even though the emotions evoked are of pity.

The book depicts a fatalistic attitude. Things happen to Jeanne, the innocent are victims of the ruthless, the avaricious and the careless. There's much of that in Balzac too, but he has active protagonists, whereas Jeanne, the woman of the title, is passive, helplessly accepting life's buffeting. She's a pathetic heroine, but we have sympathy for her because of her simplicity - her naive love for her husband and her son leads to her ruin.

Her life is contrasted with that of her previous maid, Rosalie, who she grew up with, and who was seduced by and made pregnant by Jeanne's husband. Rosalie's toughness and rough honesty is part of Maupassant's characterisation of Norman peasantry, who feature in many of his stories, often as comic butts, but here with respect and affection.

Maupassant's attention to minor characters is notable - Aunt Lison, the old maid, is frequently present, but never noticed, and the small cruelty of Jeanne laughing at the idea that anyone might consider marrying her is very touching. This is typical of his short stories, which occasionally are based around just one example of an exquisite moment.

[76]

Byron Farwell - Burton

2007-11-09T13:17:00.000Z

Sir Richard Burton was one of the most extraordinary men of his, or any age. As an explorer he discovered Lake Tanganyika, as an adventurer he performed the Haj to Medina and Mecca, in disguise and under great peril of discovery, as a linguist he mastered over 25 languages, and as a translator he produced the definitive edition of the Arabian Nights. Yet he never found the acclaim he felt was his due, and suffered professionally due to his arrogance and stubbornness, spending the last part of his career in the backwater of a consulship in Trieste.

There's lots of research material available for a biographer as Burton was immensely prolific, publishing about 25 volumes of travel journals, most of which weren't well written, and didn't sell particularly well. Farwell uses all this material, and much more, and is quite condescending in the appendix about previous biographers who didn't read everything Burton published (although he admits much of it isn't very readable) He plainly has a lot of affection for his subject, while admitting he was not always a very likeable man, and was rather self-destructive in his arrogance.

Burton is most famous now for his translations of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra - the former was a huge success, partly no doubt because of the sexual content. Farwell deals with that, but, rather like Burton's wife, who burnt much of his diaries and unpublished works after his death, he is a little prudish about the sexual texts, such as the Kama Sutra and the Perfumed Garden, and doesn't much discuss this aspect of Burton's career. Farwell first published this biography in 1962, and he's plainly an old-fashioned colonialist, recognising the bravery and restlessness of Burton, but not his more esoteric tastes.

Burton was very remarkable in many ways, driven by a need to know, and by an unsappable energy, that meant he was always active, learning languages, writing up his trips, planning more trips. For several years he managed to persuade the Army to fund his travels, being nominally an officer in the Indian service; later he joined the Diplomatic Service, in Brazil and Trieste, but spent more time away from his posts than doing his duties, to the frustration of his employers.

Burton's methods were extraordinary - he developed a system that enabled him to learn languages within 2 months each. He would devote himself to vocabulary learning, carrying word lists with him during the day and devoting several hours each day to studying. He would also immerse himself in the culture in a curious way, setting up a market stall in the town bazaar, dressing up as a local, and talking to those around him. He would be able to improve his accent, and find out as much as possible of local customs. Periodically, he would go to Bombay to take the Army language exams, in Punjabi and Gujerati and Hindi and several others, and inevitably come top.

One would imagine that these methods, the languages and his travels would lead him to a particular affinity with the people he studied, as it has with many travel writers, but this appears not to be the case. Burton was a man of his age, an extreme one certainly, but he contained all the prejudices of the Empire to the extreme. While he could no doubt affect sympathy while in disguise, never more so than on his perilous Haj to Mecca and Medina, dressed as an Afghan, he was in reality very dismissive of most non-English. His interests were wide, but the objective was the accumulation and display of knowledge.

He did both in a haphazard way. Supposedly his travel writing was more or less a transcription from his notebooks, in the order that he considered them, and also full of his prejudices, rants and digressions. He made important journeys, particularly in Africa, but didn't have either the nous or inclination for active self-publicity, and the ruthlessness to see the main chance.

Because of this he lost the opportunity to discover Lake Victoria and the long-sought source of the Nile, which Speke, on a diversion from their joint trip to Lake Tanganyika, found and took the credit for. Burton never recovered from this, and bore a lasting grudge against Speke, refusing for many years to believe that Lake Victoria was as big as claimed, or was the source of the Nile. This enmity was typical of Burton, whose 'career' as an explorer ran out of steam relatively early, and who wasn't suited for routine or chains of management. He deserves to be remembered though, as he is, for his translations, of the Arabian Nights and Camoens.

I picked up my edition, a Penguin reprint from the 1990s, secondhand for £2, and it was intermittently inspiring and fascinating. It led me to visit his grave in Mortlake, a tomb in the shape of a tent, erected by his wife, and also including her coffin. Here it is:

[75]

Irene Nemirovsky - Le Bal

2007-10-16T20:29:00.000+01:00

Nemirovsky was a highly popular French novelist in the 1930s, and several films were made from her works - two from Le Bal, one in French and one in German. Her current revival is due to the recent discovery and publication of an unfinished novel, Suite Francaise, which detailed life under the German occupation she was suffering, prior to her arrest and deportation, and death in a camp.

Nemirovsky drew on her personal experiences for her works, and her early life was highly eventful. Her father was an important banker in the Tsar's court, which informed David Golder, and the family had to escape from Russia after the revolution, which is the basis for the second story in this volume, Snow in Autumn.

The first story, Le Bal, was stimulated by Nemirovsky's fractious relationship with her mother, which is hinted at in David Golder too. A young girl, feeling ignored by her social-climbing mother, sabotages a ball to be held at her home by not posting the invitations. As the evening develops, and it becomes evident that no guests are going to arrive, the mother's distress is the daughter's victory.

It's evident that this is a young girl's fantasy, no doubt Nemirovsky's dream as she grew up distant from her mother. It's similar to Maupassant, a clear influence, in its tone and structure, but he would have told the story in 10 pages, whereas she uses 50. I found that a bit too long, but I suppose the wait for the inevitable denouement matched the tension of the girl's anticipation.

The second story, of an aged servant following her masters from revolutionary Russia, is better, a contemplation of devotion and ageing.

[71]

Mike Atherton - Gambling

2007-10-03T21:17:00.000+01:00

Mike Atherton's book purports to be an overview of gambling as a social phenomenon, covering the history of it and the current state of gambling in the UK. It's a huge subject, and it's beyond the former England cricket captain, but he seems to have had fun researching it.

Atherton has a degree from Cambridge, but didn't do much with his intellect for a couple of decades while playing cricket professionally. He now commentates and writes columns, at which he's competent, but he's not a writer. His style is sloppy and casual, and his opinions often not well-considered. On one page early on he refers both to 'proles' and 'liberal elite', which made me check that he wasn't a Mail writer (Telegraph actually)

There wasn't a lot in this book I didn't already know - he covers the South Sea Bubble, and John Law's escapades in Paris, which is widening his brief a bit, but surprisingly doesn't mention Casanova, who ran lotteries and became rich from them. His favourite betting scene is plainly the track, and he gets most involved when writing about horseracing and the decline of the online bookie, whereas poker leaves him bewildered and a bit sheepish.

Some of the colour pieces are amusing - Atherton can be as affable on the page as on screen, although also as irritating. As a populist guide to gambling this is fine, but Atherton was aiming for more than that.

[67]

Andrew Meier - Black Earth

2007-09-30T23:58:00.000+01:00

Andrew Meier was Moscow correspondent for Time for 5 years until 2001, and this book is collected from his experiences in the former Soviet Union. Each chapter is set in a different location, and with a different theme - organised crime in St Petersburg, oligarch power in Moscow, the gulags of Siberia, the war in Chechnya, and the new oil wealth in Sakhalin.

The book is a mixture of reportage and social history. One early chapter deals with a massacre in Chechnya that Meier himself exposed, going into Grozny at great risk to himself to investigate an army atrocity.

Meier, thanks to the status of his employer, has access to senior figures in Russia, from oligarchs to ex-Politburo members. This gives his account the credibility of highly-placed primary sources, so his comments on the power of the Kremlin, for example, are particularly well-informed.

Many of the chapters have an elegaic feel to them, examining the troubled past (Communism, gulags) and present (Chechnya, oligarchs), and there's little optimism felt. Maybe this is an accurate reflection of the state of Russia today. It's certainly fascinating material, and Meier is a very good writer, able to immerse himself in the culture, and present it in an engaging way.

[66]

Benjamin Markovits - Imposture

2007-09-30T13:29:00.000+01:00

Markovits's slim volume is the story of Polidori, Byron's doctor, most famous for writing The Vampyre at the same gathering that Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein. It's very tightly written, sensitive to the nuances of Polidori's emotions, and those of Eliza, a woman who mistakes him for Byron, and falls in love with him.

The imposture of the title is manifold. Polidori's story is passed off by his publisher as by Byron, which creates huge sales, but because of that Polidori cannot make a proper claim on the income from it. Polidori doesn't disabuse Eliza of her mistaken identification, although he intends to. The novelty of having a woman pursue him, having been intimidated by witnessing Byron's conquests, makes him hesitate, and allow the self-seduction. Polidori also passes himself off as a doctor - although trained as one, he's plainly not competent. The whole book is imbued with failure - Polidori has been too close to one so great, and measured himself by comparison, he's a poor doctor, lover, gambler, and even his literary success is stolen from him.

A friend who has a specific interest in Byron and his set got fed up with the inaccuracies of the book, but it is a fiction, just as Byron created fictions about himself. Perhaps such books are better for not knowing the facts behind them.

[65]

Richard Overy - Russia's War

2007-09-22T21:37:00.000+01:00

I bought this when in St Petersburg as I wanted to know more about the siege of Leningrad, and the most recent edition about that was too expensive. This has only a short chapter on the siege, but it is a fascinating book by a very good historian.

Overy provides a quick background to Russia before the war, notably the rise of Stalin, and the oppression of the 1930s. This establishes the political environment, and the relationship between Stalin and the Soviet people. Overy is good on the psychology of the dictator, notably his belief that he could read Hitler's intentions, which he posits is the reason for Stalin's infamous breakdown upon the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

There's plenty in here I didn't know - I was very sketchy on the Eastern Front, which is why I was so interested in the book - and the biggest revelation was how badly the British, and French, fucked up a potential alliance with Russia in 1939. Invited by Molotov to send delegations to discuss an arrangement similar to WWI to intimidate Hitler from his expansionist ambitions, both countries sent envoys without sufficient authority to negotiate. This lack of commitment, and disrespect, frustrated Molotov, who responded promptly when Ribbentrop offered a non-aggression pact. Ribbentrop himself went to Moscow, the agreement was worked on in a couple of days, and almost immediately both Germany and Russia swept into Poland. Stalin was happy to have bought some time to rearm - he knew that Russia's military was no match for Germany's at that point, and indeed it still wasn't in 1941, when Germany unexpectedly broke the pact and invaded.

Overy is very good on the psychology of Stalin, although his attempts to understand his subject border on sympathy. He certainly represents Stalin's relationship with Churchill from the perspective of the Russian, who trusted Roosevelt far more. The battle descriptions are overviews, by necessity - there's plenty of other literature on Stalingrad, Moscow, Berlin, Kursk and Leningrad, and this is a summary narrative. The link throughout is Stalin, just as in Germany it was Hitler, but Overy doesn't overdo comparisons between the two.

The huge numbers involved on the Eastern Front are hard to appreciate. Overy talks of 500,000 men lost in a battle, or 3 million Germans captured - bear in mind that Britain had only 250,000 deaths in the whole war. The imbalance of the war is explicit - the Allies had relatively little action between 1940 and 1944, while Russia took the main burden. That they were able to do so, despite being technically outclassed for most of that time, was down to the huge manpower at their disposal, the brutal attitude towards the deployment of these men, but also to the tactics of some very able generals, notably Zhukov. The relationship between Zhukov and Stalin is a key one - the general was one of the few people who could contradict the dictator, and he has the same weight in this story as Kutuzov does in War and Peace. Both men saved Moscow, and therefore the country. Zhukov also saved Leningrad, and devised the plan to save Stalingrad. But when Stalin heard that Zhukov was claiming, after the fall of Berlin, to have won the war, he had him demoted - Stalin needed to be seen as the sole saviour of the country, although he was a poor military tactician.

Reading this has also been preparation for reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, which I have since started.

[64]

Malcolm Bradbury - To the Hermitage

2007-09-20T22:14:00.000+01:00

This was Bradbury's last novel - he died the year it was published, in 2000. It has a double narrative - the narrator, travelling to St Petersburg on a cruise from Stockholm as part of an undefined 'Diderot Project', and the story of Diderot's trip to the same city in 1773 at the request of Catherine the Great, who had bought his library, but let him use it in his lifetime.

I'm quite fond of Diderot, the little I've read of him (mostly Jacques le Fataliste), and Bradbury's enthusiasm for the wittiest of the Enlightenment philosophers was the genesis of the novel. The Diderot Project is a real group that Bradbury was involved with, inspiring the story, and he has a little fun with stock types, the academic satire he's best known for. That element of the story is the weakest, and the pay-off - that each member of the seemingly unconnected group represents one facet of Diderot's versatile career - is predictable.

More interesting is Bradbury's imagining of Diderot's character and interaction with Catherine. Diderot has notions of an ideal society, but as that involves the absence of monarchs, and the devolution of power, they're not well received. The conclusion, that instead of creating a new Russia he's responsible for the new America, emphasises the great influence of an underrated philosopher - less read than Voltaire or Rousseau, but probably more significant, due to the Encyclopedie, which disseminated the Enlightenment ideas and methods of enquiry.

I started To the Hermitage while in St Petersburg, although I didn't get to the parts set there before I left the city. The city was built as an ideal, in the way that few European cities have been, but many in America have. Peter the Great wanted a new Amsterdam, hence the canals cutting through marshy land, and both he and Catherine sponsored learning and culture - Peter founded the Academy of Sciences, and Catherine the Hermitage, which she filled with art partly bought for her by Diderot. Catherine's tribute to Peter, the famous Bronze Horseman, was built by a sculptor recommended by Diderot - his influence pervades the city, but is now forgotten.

The book is pretty funny - not, according to Auberon Waugh, the funniest book ever written, but Bradbury is an experienced comic writer, and his ironies and wordplay are very entertaining. But it's the depth of the book, the suggestion that Diderot is the founder of the modern world, that stays with the reader.

[63]

Nikolai Gogol - Diary of a Madman and other stories/The Squabble

2007-09-05T20:18:00.000+01:00

I'm sure I don't fully appreciate Gogol. He comes with such a weighty reputation - Dostoevsky's famous quote about all Russian writers emerging from under Gogol's Overcoat, Nabokov claiming that he was the greatest ever Russian artist - but his stories are deceptively simple.

There are seven stories in these two collections, including The Overcoat, The Nose and The Diary of a Madman, his most famous. They are variously highly amusing, absurd, tragic and poignant. He anticipates, and influenced, other writers who created a distorted world, semi-real, certainly disturbing - Kafka is the easy example.

Gogol distances himself from his narratives in subtle ways - claiming to have heard the story third-hand, or dismissing its veracity at the end, creating illusions of reality and fiction. Yet the stories are told in a very spare, simple style. The Nose, the most absurd story in the collections, could be a dream - a man wakes up to find his nose is missing, discovers it leading its own life as a civil servant, then on another day wakes up to find his nose restored. Yet the person who cut the nose off, a barber, is outside the potential framing of the dream, so we enter into 'reality' with the loss of the nose prior to the victim's waking up and discovery of his loss.

There have been symbolic interpretations of the story, as with The Overcoat - 'nose' for 'penis' is the most obvious, the story as fear of impotence or castration - but such readings are not necessary, nor implicit.

I saw parallels in The Overcoat with Murnau's The Last Laugh, in which a head porter in a top city hotel loses his job, and his military-style uniform, and therefore his status and dignity. Akaky Akakeyevich, the 'hero' of The Overcoat has become a Russian type - a humble clerk who works hard and makes sacrifices in order to be able to afford an essential new overcoat - hardly a luxury in a Russian winter - and, gaining it, is enhanced in status, as the porter loses his when deprived of his coat. Akaky is then mugged for his coat, fails to find it despite appeals to the police and higher authorities. He dies of an illness caused by the cold, and comes back to haunt the city.

Supposedly many readers see Gogol's sympathy for lower social orders as the most significant aspect of the story, and that is a persistent Russian theme - although isn't it in most national literatures? But is Gogol's moral that one shouldn't strive for more than ones own station, to have an external appearance that belies ones status? Is it a salutary reminder that those things we strive so hard to obtain can be lost in a minute, that all life is fragile? It's the simplicity of the story, resonant and haunting, but the openness of the questions that make it so memorable.

[61/62]

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment

2007-09-03T23:51:00.000+01:00

I started writing this before I went to St Petersburg, just after rereading the novel for the first time in 15 years. Since then I've seen several places where Dostoevsky lived, including his last house, now a museum, and the study where he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, which was particularly moving. I've also seen the supposed locations of the action of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov's flat, the Haymarket and the pawnbroker's flat, and Dostoevsky's grave.

None of that has particularly illuminated my appreciation of C&P, but given that many of the buildings in which Dostoevsky lived and set his stories still stand, it does provide a mental backdrop for the action. And imagining Dostoevsky himself, in relative poverty, feverishly scribbling his story against a deadline, describing Raskolnikov in his own fever, adds to that.

I first read this when I was about 22, a typical age for it, when the intensity of the prose and the complexity of the themes appeal to the post-adolescent mind. I had considered that maybe when I reread it I'd find that I'd outgrown it, or that perhaps it wasn't as good as I'd found then - as with the Idiot.

But I was wrong, it is a magnificent novel, of course. One of the most remarkable aspects is how Dostoevsky stretches time. The novel takes place over a few days, maybe a week, yet this is represented in 550 pages, seemingly entirely of action with very little digression or flashback.

The police procedural element is much less than I remembered it, and the confrontations between the investigator and Raskolnikov less plausible. But such is the heightened atmosphere of most of the novel, the tension at the interviews pervades the rest of the novel, as it does Raskolnokov's mind.

It's Raskolnikov's mind that's at the centre of the book, of course. Why does he commit the crimes? Is he insane? He compares himself to Napoleon, saying more than once that if the emperor, at the beginning of his career, had to murder one worthless old woman in order to achieve the greater good of ruling France and changing the world, he wouldn't hesitate to do it. That one life is insignificant in comparison to the many other lives that will be sacrificed in later wars.

It's not a naive philosophical point, but for most people it's a mind game, a moral dilemma that wouldn't need to be faced, and indeed Raskolnikov needn't put it to the test. He does so not for money - the little that he takes from the pawnbroker's flat he hides, and has no thought as to where she might keep her fortune - but to prove to himself that he is the 'great man' of his own dreams. He transgresses moral taboos, kills for no good reason, and sets himself outside society. From that point his dislocation is reflected in the urgent narrative.

However, Raskolnikov is not amoral, despite his compulsion to be so. He believes that, in order to be 'great', he has to stand 'above' the petty moral concerns of ordinary men, but he has neither the courage nor the strength to do so - he cowers in panic and paranoia after the event, and although his conscience isn't troubled by the killing, he's afraid of the consequences.

His continuing moral sense is manifested by his attitude to his sister, and to Sonya. His idealisation of Sonya, a simple girl forced into prostitution by the destitution of her family, is part of the same romantic attitude as his idolisation of Napoleon, and comes out of his need for emotional, then spiritual comfort. He protects his sister from a bad marriage to a cynical man.

[60]

Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt

2007-08-21T19:47:00.000+01:00

I was recommended this a little while ago, and tracked it down secondhand. I'm very glad I did, it's remarkably good, and much funnier than I expected.

It's a satire of American urban life, written in 1922, and feels in many ways very contemporary. George Babbitt is a real estate salesman in a fictional town in middle America in 1920. He's averagely prosperous, has a wife and 3 kids, and a car, and is involved in the community. Everything's going quite nicely for him, and he doesn't question it.

But then Babbitt starts to feel that maybe his life isn't so satisfying, and maybe he's lacking something. As he considers what he might be lacking, he breaks with his routine, and resists the conforming pressures of his social group. He even starts to sympathise with socialist agitators, to the horror of his colleagues at the club. When he refuses to join a nationalistic society made up of businessmen of the town, he finds his career threatened.

Lewis's satire is very adept, drawing with wit a man of limited scope but enough depth to be sympathetic. The ending is surprising, and a little pessimistic - the conclusion is that the forces of conformity will always win, and that conservatism is the prevailing force in the US.

The influence of Lewis is plain. As an early satire on suburban life, it prefigures Updike (was Rabbit deliberately echoing Babbitt?), and the focus on the ordinary man anticipates Arthur Miller. But the value remains not just in his relevance, but in the quality of the writing and the humour.

[59]

Constance L Hays - Pop

2007-08-20T21:26:00.000+01:00

This is a short history of Coke, subtitled Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company, from its origins in the 1880s as a restorative served in pharmacies, to the glory expansion years of the 80s under Roberto Goizueta, and to the troubled 1990s.

It's a fascinating story of how a simple soft drink came to represent America throughout the world - cunning marketing in World War 2, where Coke bottling plants were set up alongside troop bases, identified Coke alongside the valiant liberators of Europe and Asia.

The legendary Goizueta was an exiled Cuban, who was a school contemporary of Castro, and whose family lost everything in the revolution. He was already working for Coke at the time, and found a substitute job in Florida, progressing through the 70s to become President, then Chairman and Chief Executive. Modern corporate governance rules advise against the combination of both roles, but in the 80s big autocratic personalities were in, and there were few bigger than Goizueta. His stated aim was for Coke to become the liquid of choice by the majority of people in the world - his market place was not just the cola market, or the soft drink market, but all beverages, including water, tea and milk. He used this argument to counter anti-monopoly suits in Europe, some of which were proposed by Pepsi, and many of which curtailed Coke's attempts to control the entire sales chain.

Hays describes well the central relationship between Coke and its bottlers, a legacy of the initial franchising decisions in the 19th century. The bottlers were the local distributors of Coke - they bought Coca Cola syrup at a fixed price, bottled it and sold it to outlets within a geographical franchise. The local Coke bottler became a significant social figure in America, wealthy, well connected, symbolic of enterprise, community, healthy living, and America. But for Coke, they restricted the potential for growth. Many of the contracts were perpetual, so that the relationship between the Coke company and the bottler couldn't be broken, and the price was tied to the price of sugar. This last was broken by Coke switching from sugar as its principal ingredient to high-fructose corn syrup, a change which has had significant health impacts in the Us not touched upon by Hays.

The former problem was solved by buying up bottlers, and allowing some to consolidate, so that there were fewer, bigger, bottlers. This helped Coke's ability to control marketing and pricing, and Coca Cola Enterprises (CCE) was created as the largest bottler. This was the basis for the growth in the 80s, but also of many of the problems faced by Coke in the 90s.

Hays spends half of the book on the period from 1981 to the present, allowing only one half for the history of almost a century before. This is partly because the recent period has been the most dynamic in Coke's history, but also because her undoubted in-depth research focused on interviews with key personnel from this period. She is good on the personalities of Goizueta and his hardworking but inadequate successor, Doug Ivester, but has a shaky grasp of finances. She says that Coke was doing better than Pepsi at one point because the share price was higher, and throughout attaches great significance to share splits, which are just rebases and have little intrinsic worth. These undermine her credibility a little - how can she be asking the most penetrating questions of ex-Coke executives if she doesn't understand these fundamentals?

[58]

Honore de Balzac - The Unknown Masterpiece

2007-08-20T21:06:00.000+01:00

This short story by Balzac is very famous and influential, and was adapted into a film by Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse) It concerns an old painter, a fictional mentor to two historical painters, Pourbus and Poussin. He has spent 10 years trying to complete a painting, originally of a mistress, but he hasn't had a suitable model to complete it. Poussin's mistress, of uncommon beauty, is offered as a model on the condition that the other artists can see this painting, perpetually locked away in the painter's study.

The argument over the display of the mistress and the painting is a commentary on the transience of corporeal beauty against the permanence of art, and the possessiveness of each man to their 'mistress' upon the value of art. The final revelation of the painting provides a further twist, and anticipates arguments about art which would be held a century later.

The companion story in this collection, Gambara, is similarly about the nature of creativity, although in this case about a composer and instrument maker. I found this less successful, and the long explanations of an opera composed by the title character tedious and hard to follow.

In both stories Balzac describes the obsessiveness of the creative act, and the delusions that artists express in support of their works. There are also parallels between the first story and Sarrasine, with direct allusions to Pygmalion in both stories - both are about an artist trying to replicate his ideal of beauty, but in Sarrasine he is deceived by the object, and in The Unknown Masterpiece by the replication.

[57]

Emile Zola - Germinal

2007-08-13T19:22:00.000+01:00

I approached this book, which has legendary status in France, and in world literature, with no preconceptions and little knowledge of its subject. It's quite refreshing to approach the classics in this way, and it rarely happens with English novels.

The first thing that strikes you is Zola's narrative skill. The first 10 chapters or so are set on one day, when Etienne Lantier arrives in a mining village looking for work, and finds food, accommodation and a job. In those chapters Zola sets up the novel, presenting the physical aspect of the mine, and the history and politics behind it, but always through the narrative, using the characters naturally to develop and expand the scene.

It's a large and complex novel that Zola keeps control of for most of its length. There is a descent into sentimentality towards the end, and implausibility, but for the first half the rigorous realism, and vigorous action, are compelling. It's a very physical book, all about the striving of the men and women underground, and their hunger, and lots of sex. The sex is just a part of the narrative, it's treated in an unsensational way, remarkable for the period, and startling when compared to contemporary English literature, such as Hardy.

The politics in Germinal is directly Marxist - Marx is quoted, and the International is in the background supporting the strike. This may be the reason for its continuing popularity in France, more Socialist than Britain, and perhaps why Zola is less popular in England than he once was. Maybe there's an assumption that, stripped of its dated politics, there's little left of Zola, but that's certainly not true.

Zola's recurring theme of the inheritance of personality traits, which features throughout the Rougon-Macquart cycle, is not very significant in Germinal, although it is mentioned. Etienne is supposedly hotheaded and prone to rages, which isn't an implausible character trait of itself, and the inheritance of it appears unnecessary.

Zola's thorough research is evident throughout, from the details of working down a mine, to that of the life of miners during a strike. There is some implausibility and inconsistency though - a family who were near starvation living upon the earnings of several mining family members manage to survive for several months without any income beyond charity, which runs out soon. Zola doesn't address that issue with the closeness he applied to the first few chapters.

The scenes of the uprising and the strike are hugely energetic and vivid, and show Zola at his best - vigorous action supported by strong characters.As the narrative develops, the tragedies become a little relentless, and the ending is excruciatingly sentimental, and indeed implausible - Zola is unaware that lack of oxygen would have killed the trapped miners before lack of food.

But that's a quibble when set against the huge ambition, and success, of this novel. Zola is often accused of being too political, and lacking humour, but in Germinal his intense attitude has its greatest expression.

[56]

Cyrano de Bergerac - Journey to the Moon

2007-07-31T22:45:00.000+01:00

In common with most people, I only know of Cyrano de Bergerac through Rostand's play, dimly aware that he was a real 17th century writer and playwright. Rostand in fact took some elements of Cyrano - his appearance, legendary swordsmanship and fondness of duels, and great wit - and elaborated a romance around it to create a new hero.

It's a little disappointing to find that Cyrano didn't live to old age, but died at the age of 36, leaving a couple of plays, and some heretical works published after his death. Journey to the Moon is the most famous of them, a satire in which the narrator travels to the moon by ingenious means, and discovers a population there that lives in ways contrary to those on earth.

De Bergerac prefigures Swift in imagining travel to a distant land, and discovery of a race of people similar to man, but superior in reasoning, to comment on and satirise his own society. Much of the narrative is taken up with discussion of scientific speculations, which may seem a bit bewildering now, but it must be remembered that the mid 17th century was a time when strict Aristotelian natural philosophy was being countered by empiricism and observation, and attempts to synthesise theories of 'humours' and 'elements' and alchemical beliefs with new discoveries.

De Bergerac shows some familiarity with scientific learning of the time, and his speculations, about the existence of vacuums, or the nature of atoms, are entertaining if wide of the mark.

He's more daring when discussing religion, being openly transgressive by disrespecting prophets in his imagined Garden of Eden, having his narrator profess atheism, and discussing the existence of the soul. As the introduction suggests, he was a true libertine, in terms of free thought as well as free living, and one wonders what else he might have produced had he lived.

[55]

Honore de Balzac - Sarrasine

2007-07-31T22:16:00.000+01:00

This notable short story is famous as the subject of an essay by Barthes, S/Z, who broke it down into separate units for close analysis. It's a very early Balzac story, and as such is remarkable for its complexity.

A man, attempting to seduce a woman at a ball, tells her the story of Sarrasine, a man who becomes obsessed by a singer, Zambinella, whose beauty and voice enchant him. His obsession grows until he is compelled to declare his love, and is gently rejected. He plots to abduct Zambinella, who is a favourite at the court, and when he does he discovers, as he had been warned, that 'she' is a man, a castrato. The shock of this revelation leads to a catastrophic ending.

Balzac plays with the ambiguity of his story, and with the language, in a way that isn't translatable - 'son' et 'sa' are used where English can only have either 'his' or 'her', for example, while the gender of the possessor isn't revealed in French, but assumed. He refers to legends of androgyny - the beauty of Adonis, the strength of Sappho - and the transgression of the story is evident throughout. It has a feeling of a fantasy, connected through these legends to past stories,but it's rooted through the fact of castrati in present reality. It also plays on the fear of men - that the object of their desire isn't what they want, and of course submerged homosexuality.

The second story in this Hesperus edition is a slightly strange one about a love affair between a man and a panther, which ends tragically.

[54]

Honore de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet

2007-07-31T21:49:00.000+01:00

This is one of Balzac's earliest novels, and one of his best. It is, as with most of his works, concerned primarily with money and inheritance, and the darker impulses of men which interested him.

Monsieur Grandet is a cooper and winegrower who, by assiduous harbouring of his wealth, and good business dealing, has come to accumulate a fortune. Very few people are aware of this, not even his wife or daughter, the eponymous Eugenie, due to his compulsive secrecy and obsessive scrimping. Only his lawyer and his banker, who compete to provide a match for Eugenie from their families, know about his riches.

Grandet is a fabulously drawn character, a miser, but not a caricature. Balzac observes him close-up, and creates a consistent, although terrifying man, all emotions sacrificed to the obsessive, and pointless, accumulation of wealth, to the exclusion of even his own family. A criticism of Balzac is his cynicism - he finds avaricious, malicious people more interesting, so his novels are dominated by them, and Grandet is an extreme example.

Eugenie is less interesting to begin with, not just because she is good, but because she is a child, simple and without many character traits, so she genuinely has less interest. As she grows more bold, and then hard, her character develops, but still the heart of the book is with her father. Balzac's rhapsodising over Eugenie never convinces, it feels forced and not true to life as he observed it.

Grandet is a sort of counterpoint to Pere Goriot. Both are obsessed and ambitious, but whereas Goriot sacrifices himself for the sake of his daughters, Grandet sacrifices his family for his own sake, to the extent of forcing his daughter to forgo her inheritance from her mother so that he doesn't have to disclose his wealth. He is a monster, but such is Balzac's skill that he isn't implausible.

[53]

Philip Roth - Everyman

2007-07-29T09:55:00.000+01:00

Continuing a run of books written by Phils, I tried this latest Roth. I've only read a couple of his before - Portnoy's Complaint, of course, and American Pastoral, and I don't yet have a handle on what makes him so great.

This is a serious work, concerned with mortality - it opens with the funeral of the main character, and most of it details the ailments he's suffered in his life. He's had a major cardiovascular operation every year for 6 years, and on the eve of the last one, from which he won't wake, he recalls his life, and the mistakes he has made.

By the end of his life he has had three marriages, and two estranged sons. His brother, a spectacular overachiever, Goldman partner, with a successful marriage and four children, has always supported him, but in the end his envy, and shame at his own frailty and relative failure leads him to, unjustly reject him.

The main character is not named - he is 'Everyman', not just symbolic of any man, but also of the medieval allegorical play, whose subject is the summoning of the living to death. It's a calling to account of a man for his life, and as such it has a universal resonance. It's also about the frailty of the human body - for a long part of the book, every character is defined by the ailments they've suffered.

There's an unresolved element to the book, of whether Roth intends for the character's ailments to stand for his moral failings, how he has treated his wives and family, or whether it's his own lack of direction and self-respect which have led to both. He considers the contrast between his brother's life and his own to be down to luck, but plainly he made moral and career choices, and these are also general in their symbolism - we all make these choices, we all envy those who make different ones.

In the end I found this unsatisfying. Maybe if I reread it in 20 or 30 years time it will resonate more, but it's very tightly written and with some irony.

[52]

Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

2007-07-25T19:36:00.000+01:00

I don't usually read historical fiction, it doesn't appeal so much. I think it might be to do with the perceptible strain of an author trying to lever in as much of his research as possible, which distracts from the narrative, and perhaps the inconsistencies and anachronisms arising when applying 20th/21st century dialogue to historical settings. I'd much rather read a writer from that period, than one from now reimagining the period.

But this book had been recommended by several people, as had Hensher in general, so I gave it a go. It's really pretty good. Early on I felt that Hensher loved his own prose a little too much, and that the narrative dragged, but as it developed his presentation of the central characters was convincing.

It is a story of great relevance to today, set during the British war in Afghanistan of the 1830s, but its immediate pertinence is inadvertent and fortuitous - the book was finished in early 2001, before 9/11 which precipitated the invasion.

The research, largely from memoirs by the real protagonists, is worn lightly, and Hensher is most interested in the motivations of each of the characters. He tells a story of great folly - the English hubris in attempting to usurp the Afghan throne in order to control the region - close-up, and without commentary.

The scenes back in England are lesser, although well-observed, and tend to an unsatisfying lack of resolution, but overall the book has a good sense of atmosphere and purpose. I'll definitely read the other Henshers I have on the back of this.

[51]

Philippe Sands - Lawless World

2007-07-19T21:15:00.000+01:00

Philippe Sands is an international lawyer, a QC, and a barrister at Matrix Chambers, where Cherie Booth practises. He is highly respected and renowned for his experience and expertise, having helped to negotiate many international treaties, including Kyoto, and being currently a Professor at UCL. He is thus a very competent and trustworthy guide to the basics of international law, from the Atlantic Charter to Kyoto.

This book, subtitled 'The whistle-blowing account of how Bush and Blair are taking the law into their own hands', analyses the ways in which the Bush administration have subverted international law, in multiple areas, which has led them into a war without legitimacy, and to lose the respect, trust and cooperation of much of the international community, notably excluding Britain.

Sands's style is very clear, he's pitched this to a lay audience, and is very aware that it needs to be led through the issues under discussion, and he does that as you'd expect a law professor might. Despite his obvious underlying frustration with the US administration, this book isn't a polemic, and his own views rarely surface. This is a dissection of where the US have acted in breach of international laws and treaties, and the problems consequent upon those actions, refreshingly free of speculation or hyperbole.

He opens the book with the story of the attempted extradition from England of General Pinochet by a Spanish prosecutor, for offences against Spaniards committed while he was leader of Chile. This is relevant because it was found that Pinochet's state immunity didn't apply for offences with international import, such as torture or genocide. The decision, by the British law lords, had great resonance, particularly in America where ideas of sovereignty of the state outweigh those of international cooperation. There certain political leaders, past and present, were offended by the idea that they could be held to account by a foreign court for crimes committed in the service of the USA. Attention focused on Henry Kissinger, particularly for his known complicity in the Chilean coup of 1973, but events since the Pinochet case have exposed other civilian leaders to this risk.

This leads into America's opposition to the International Criminal Court. While I was aware of that stance, there's a lot in this book I didn't know, such as the USA's withholding of military aid to any country who assists with the ICC. This blackmail has been effective for smaller states, although it hasn't been applied to countries such as Britain, who have backed the ICC vigorously. Sands shows how the USA's opposition is paranoid and inaccurate - there are safeguards to prevent rogue prosecutors from launching speculative actions - and how the ICC has been demonised by deliberate misinformation as it runs counter to a neocon philosophy of American supremacy.

Subsequent chapters, on Kyoto and trade deals, are informed by Sands's involvement in negotiating treaties and acting on behalf of countries in court cases, but he never puts himself at the centre of the discussion, and uses his examples to illuminate the issues. He shows how the US will use international law where it suits them - in trade, most notably, where they recognise the future advantages of being seen to abide by multilateral rules.

But the meat of this book is in the chapters dealing with Iraq. There is a forensic analysis of how the Security Council was bypassed, which was known at the time - I remember railing against it with much the same information that Sands presents here - but which has been much forgotten since. The argument is as follows:

1. The US had decided to invade Iraq to get rid of Saddam. The motivations for this are various, and not immediately relevant.
2. An unprovoked war is an international crime, of aggression, so the pretext they used was that Saddam was an immediate or imminent threat to the US or its allies, due to its ongoing WMD weapons programme.
3. In order to get international sanction for this, the US proceeded through the Security Council, expecting, it seemed, that Hans Blix would discover WMDs and justify their action.
4. SC resolution 1441 bound Iraq to comply with the investigation, and that serious (but, crucially undetermined) consequences would follow non-compliance.
5. Specifically, and I remember this clearly from news reports at the time, SC member countries were assured that 1441 had 'no trigger points' and 'no automaticity' - the words of John Negroponte, the US Ambassador to the UN. Countries voted for the resolution explicitly on this basis, that they would have another discussion as to sanctions or action required if Iraq didn't comply. This is critical.
6. There was an attempt to get a second resolution, for war, which failed, despite frantic efforts.
7. The US and British governments decided that the second resolution wasn't needed after all - so why did they go to such efforts to secure it? - and that 1441 was sufficient - even though the countries who voted for it had been explicit that they weren't agreeing to war. This is so transparent, it's incredible that none of the MPs that voted for war raised the point.
8. Hans Blix's final report before the war was that Iraq was complying with their investigations, and that no WMDs had been found. All the same, Tony Blair decided that Iraq was in material breach of its obligations, despite the fact it wasn't his call - it was up to the Security Council to make that judgement.

In order to back up his decision, Blair relied upon the Attorney General's opinion, which Sands savages, with lawyerly rapier cuts, as being inconsistent with previous opinions, and plainly influenced at the last minute by US pressure. He spends a whole chapter on this, such is its importance - many MPs wouldn't have voted for war had there not been such an opinion, and the Chief of the Defence Staff insisted on it.

There are other chapters on Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the torture policy of the US, which, coincidentally, Bush announced yesterday. He shows how the argument that the President can authorise any means necessary to pursue America's wars, as Commander in Chief, is not only contrary to international treaties that the US is party to, but could also be used to justify genocide. It is contrary to the Geneva Conventions, which Alberto Gonzalez, then the White House Counsel, now, frighteningly, Attorney General, despite his manifest incompetence and lack of independence, dismissed as irrelevant, and the 1984 UN Convention against Torture.

The US, belatedly, is seeing how its lack of concern for these fundamental treaties has affected its reputation, and more importantly legitimacy around the world. Moral credibility is critical when trying to establish relationships and influence in hostile areas, and the US has lost a lot due to bull-headed and near-sighted officials and advisers. It seems that they are recognising the damage this has done, although Bush's announcement yesterday is still the US interpreting the Geneva Conventions for their own convenience, when they are non-negotiable. The test is - would they accept other countries, such as Syria, freely interpreting or ignoring the Geneva Conventions?

This is an excellent book, of great clarity and rigour, which shows just how important it is that the leaders of the world abide by the rules their forbears established.

[50]

Richard Layard - Happiness

2007-07-06T21:53:00.000+01:00

Richard Layard is, supposedly, a new economics guru, holding a position that Charles Leadbetter did a decade ago. As Leadbetter was adopted by Tony Blair for his writing on social entrepreneurship, Layard has been taken up by David Cameron (see this speech) for his theory of social happiness. Sound a bit woolly? It sure is.

Layard's ideas, such as they are, develop from Utilitarianism, as defined by Bentham and then John Stuart Mill. This is a philosophy that the greatest good arises from what brings the greatest happiness to most people. An old, well-established theory that Layard claims to update, calling it a 'science of happiness'.

So what makes this a science? Well, essential characteristics of a science are that it is definable, measurable and testable. And Layard tries to satisfy these conditions. He says that we know when people are happy because we can ask them. And we know that their responses are consistent across nations because we ask similar questions and use large samples and get similar responses.

A lot of the beginning of the book is taken up with showing that we can measure happiness, through MRI scans, and there's a lot of references to research, although in a frustratingly vague way. He will refer to four surveys within one paragraph, then assume that the argument has been concluded and move on.

Much of the book is like this, and more of it is just conjecture. There's no economic theory here, just airy optimistic waffle about how societies function better through cooperation rather than rampant self-interest, how taxation is good, and we should give to the third world because it makes us feel better. It's flimsy stuff.

If you're seeking happiness, don't read this book, it won't fulfil.

[49]

Stefan Zweig - Twilight

2007-07-01T20:49:00.000+01:00

This small volume has a couple of short stories by Zweig - Twilight and Moonbeam Alley. The second is very short, by Zweig's standards, and a story of obsessive love, sex and money. The first is an imagined recreation of the last days of Madame de Prie, the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon in the 1720s who fell out of favour and was exiled from Versailles. This was the King's response to the collapse of John Law's financial enterprise, which led to widespread unrest as people caught by the burst bubble ended up bankrupt.

Zweig imagines de Prie's despair at her exile, deprived not just of her influence - she had been the most powerful woman in France, and had chosen the King's wife for him - but of any social life. As she still has money, she hosts some balls at her country estate, to bring society to her, as she is not allowed to go to it, but the prospect of another couple of years exile is too much for her, so almost out of pique she kills herself, hoping, in vain, that she would at least attain some immortality through that.

The fact that de Prie is now forgotten is part of Zweig's point - the futility of vanity, striving for fame and influence for its own sake.

[48]

Stefan Zweig - Confusion

2007-07-01T19:33:00.000+01:00

This is a very deceptive novella. It's a memoir by a retiring privy councillor of his student days, and the influence upon him of one particular tutor. The student, having briefly indulged himself in Berlin instead of studying, is admonished by his father, and drops out to enrol in a provincial university, studying English. There he encounters a tutor of mesmerising charisma, who stimulates him intellectually, and for the first time exposes him to the excitement of study.

The student becomes obsessed with the tutor, and when he finds out that he has never published a planned work on Shakespeare, encourages him to do so by offering to take dictation. Their close collaboration increases the student's admiration, but also complicates it, as he's also attracted to the tutor's young wife.

The student's attraction is clearly platonic - it's made clear that he's attracted to women - but it turns out that that of the tutor for the student is not. The revelation and explanation are handled with a delicacy typical of Zweig, and expressed through the inexperienced eyes of the student.

This story of frustrated homosexual love and repression was published in 1927. Even considering the adventurous environment of 1920s Berlin, homosexuality was a crime in Germany, and remained so until 1968. Zweig's description of the tutor's ordeals - seeking out sex in back streets, marrying a boyish young girl, with whom he can't sustain a physical relationship, suffering taunts and risking blackmail and disbarment - is candid and sympathetic, and perhaps linked to the natural sympathy of a Jewish-German intellectual for other persecuted outsiders.

[47]

Tim Harford - The Undercover Economist

2007-06-29T14:50:00.000+01:00

I wonder if there's scope for a pop-economics book on the effect of pop-economics books on the behaviour of the population. There are so many out there at the moment - Freakonomics was the last bestseller - and this one is added to the pile.

Harford is an FT columnist and economics writer of some experience, and this book attempts to explain real-world phenomena in terms of basic economic theories - Ricardo and Adam Smith, for example. It's hard to do this right - identifying the audience is tricky. Should he expect them to have a basic understanding of economics, or assume no knowledge at all? Harford tends towards the latter, which means that much of the book is quite simple, but he manages to illuminate a few things even for people who are used to seeing the world in economic terms.

He starts off with the example of coffee shops, something that people can readily identify with. Why is coffee so expensive, and why are there different prices for different coffees? His explanations are lucid, and appear obvious - coffee is sold at a price that people are willing to pay for it (if they weren't, the price would drop) and the high rents coffee shops pay for prime sites are determined less by the landlord and more by the coffee price - competing retailers bid up the price of rent according to what they can afford to pay.

Harford introduces subtle concepts such as marginal rents, comparative advantage and scarcity value, which he repeats like a mantra. This is more of an economics primer than Freakonomics, which was a little specious in its attempt to illuminate economic oddities by showing examples from the fringes. He tries to show why Cameroon is poor and China is rich, with more success in the latter case than the former, but the last couple of chapters lack structure.

Although I learnt a bit from this book, it was neither as entertaining nor as informative as it might have been - I felt it fell between the two.

[46]

Nicholas Mosley - Time at War

2007-06-28T14:52:00.000+01:00

Nicholas Mosley is most famous for being the son of Oswald Mosley. This was true in 1939, and, despite his best efforts, and a distinguished career as a novelist, it remains true now he's 84. He gave up the struggle to get out of his father's shadow when he wrote his biography, having been handed the task by Oswald himself, despite their political opposition and occasional estrangement.

Mosley junior had a brief but distinguished war experience, earning an MC in a skirmish in Italy, and always planned to write an epic novel or memoir about it. Now, 60 years later, he's got round to it with this slim volume.

Too young at 16 to join up at the start of the war, Mosley volunteered upon leaving Eton before he was conscripted, and was trained in a rifle regiment. He was worried that his stammer might preclude him getting a commission - the prospect of an officer being unable to get his words out under fire being a serious consideration - but a string pull saw him through (not his last)

His memoir has been reconstructed from letters he wrote and received at the time, many to his father - debating Nietszche, mostly - and convey not just his physical experience of war, but his spiritual debates at the time, and mostly his desire for knowledge, in that hungry gap between school and university. Occasionally he comes across as a prig, but the old Mosley is well aware of it and punctures his youthful pretentions as a philosopher or literary critic.

Mosley is certainly a good writer, and witty, and in this brief memoir you see the genesis of some of his ideas - his opposition to war, and to fascism, and attitude to religion and sexuality. I've only read one of his novels, his most notable one, which has themes of war and sexuality, and am encouraged to read some of the others I have.

[45]

Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

2007-06-28T14:33:00.000+01:00

The Desais, mother and daughter, have much in common - both were educated and have worked in both India and America, both have written novels about the contrast between the two countries, and both have been recognised by the Booker committee, mother nominated three times, daughter winning with this, her second novel. And on the basis of the last two books I've read, the daughter is a superior writer.

This book has much more depth than Fasting, Feasting, more detail and humour, and is more politically engaged. The structure is balanced, alternating between the story of a family unit - grandfather, a retired judge, granddaughter, cook - in North Eastern India in the mid 80s during political unrest, and the cook's son, scrabbling to survive in New York's restaurant kitchens as an illegal worker. The judge recalls his experience in going to England to study, and the effect it had on him, turning him into a not-quite-Indian, not-quite-English member of the Indian Civil Service, with arrogance and affectations, and a fear of women.

Desai is strongest in the emotional detail, of the granddaughter's budding romance, the cook's son's frustration, the judge's distance. Where Anita Desai uses a broad brush, Kiran has a fine one, and pinpoints attitudes and feelings expertly. This is likely to be a bestselling Booker, deservedly, rather than a forgotten one.

[44]

Anita Desai - Fasting, Feasting

2007-06-25T10:20:00.000+01:00

This novel had some reasonable acclaim when it was published in 1999, and a Booker shortlist nomination, but I didn't find it very satisfying. Neither as funny nor as moving as claimed, it has mostly plastic characters, and a relentless, downbeat tone of rejection and isolation.

The life of Uma, a plain woman dominated by her parents, tricked out of marriage 3 times and prevented from gaining either education or self-respect, is contrasted with that of Arun, her brother who is given every opportunity, goes to university in America, but finds himself alienated and unhappy. There is some wit, and a little substance to the social comment, but it's pretty light stuff.

[43]

Martin Gardner - Did Adam and Eve have navels?

2007-06-22T21:16:00.000+01:00

Martin Gardner is a veteran American science writer - very veteran, as he's 93 this year, and this book was published only 7 years ago. He's notable for popularising mathematics, and also for 'debunking pseudoscience', which is the subtitle of this book. In addition he's published The Annotated Alice, so has a wide range of interests and competence.

This book also has a wide range, being articles written for Skeptical Enquirer, the magazine of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), co-founded by Gardner and the magician and fraud-buster James Randi, among others. Targets include Creationism, Intelligent Design, UFOs, Urine Therapy, Homeopathy and other pseudo-medicines, Freud and numerology. I say 'targets', but Gardner is actually remarkably soft, and makes few strikes.

His style is to list the attributes of each 'pseudoscience', the practitioners, and some history, to use a few quotes and then leave it, as if just presenting the facts on the page condemns them. Occasionally he'll say that a theory is preposterous, but he almost never says why. This is very frustrating, given so many of his subjects are open goals for a knowledgeable scientist who knows about empirical methods. I'd hoped that the book would be more like the excellent Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, but too often it disappointed. Perhaps Gardner was always like this, or perhaps, like Alistair Cooke, he's lost his bite in his dotage. Never mind, there are tips in here towards further reading, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who I've neglected until now (but then, I haven't even read any Dawkins yet)

Bad Science

[42]

Michael Chabon - The Final Solution

2007-06-20T18:47:00.000+01:00

Arthur Conan-Doyle is held in genuine respect and affection by 'serious' modern writers, less so for his style, which is limited and functional, than for being the creator (or major developer) of a genre, and for inspiring them to read as young boys. Recently a couple of the stars of modern fiction, Julian Barnes and Michael Chabon, have paid homage to ACD, Barnes by novelising a true incident in his life, and Chabon by writing a new Holmes story.

Neither, wisely, attempts to imitate ACD's style. Barnes's spare, emotionally precise prose is well-suited to portraying Doyle's inner-life and its repressions. Chabon's novella , while initially structured like a Holmes story, is written with an inward gaze that Doyle would not have considered. It's very much a Chabon story.

Sherlock Holmes (never named in the book) is now 89 and living out his long retirement keeping bees down in Sussex. He is called upon to help in a murder in the neighbouring vicarage (so far so cliched), and the disappearance of a parrot - animals are a classic Holmes story essential. With typical insight he dismisses the police's first suspect, and eventually tracks down the murderer, via a misdirection or two.

As a Holmes story, it isn't particularly satisfying. The slight twist at the end is neat and resonant, but doesn't really impact on the story in retrospect as it might. Chabon's strengths, of characterisation, emotional description and insight, work to make this a fun modern novella, but not a Doyle story.The no-nonsense Doyle approach - description and analysis, with a touch of wry humour, then into the action - loved by young boys precisely because of its emotional shallowness, is the style most suited to the genre. Chabon's ventriloquism overreaches when he has one chapter in the mind of the parrot. But I've no doubt though that Chabon's newest novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, will succeed as his previous ones have.

[41]

Peter Carey - Theft: A Love Story

2007-06-19T22:54:00.000+01:00

Carey has been acclaimed by a well-read acquaintance as possibly the best author currently writing in English, so I thought it was time I read one of his books. I read half of Illywhacker about 20 years ago, but felt it might be better to try a more recent work.

Theft: A Love Story is in a fashionable modern genre - the lit fic art history mystery. Frayn's Headlong is another example. The genre is useful for modern writers as it enables them to use art as a proxy for literature - the creative act being a major obsession - and also to have characters having intelligent discussions, displaying the author's research. Frayn wore this last too obviously; Carey is more subtle than that, and his descriptions of painting techniques feel less like lectures than Frayn's digressions on Bruegel.

Theft has two narrators - Michael Boone, a forgotten Australian artist, and his brother Hugh, a huge lunk, damaged and socially incapable, but occasionally insightful. These two narrators revolve around each other, Hugh dependent upon Michael, as the action moves from Sydney to Tokyo and then New York. The plot evolves with increasing tension and involvement, as Michael is dragged into an art fraud, and his loyalties are stretched between a woman and his brother.

Carey's strength is characterisation, and more his ability to create character through narrative voice. While I haven't read his previous works, The True History of the Kelly Gang was noted for its supposed authenticity of voice, and that's evident here. Hugh, in particular, has a stumbling grace to his narration, and there's an energy and anger to both men that drives the story forward.

[40]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Fooled by Randomness

2007-06-18T21:23:00.000+01:00

Taleb is the man who came up with the Black Swan theory, the subject of his latest book, and no doubt lots of misinterpretation by broadsheet columnists (cf the Tipping Point, long tail, chaos theory, etc) The Black Swan, which he introduces in this book, is a highly unlikely event that cannot be dismissed as too improbable - even if you were to count thousands of white swans and no black ones, you cannot conclude that black swans don't exist. It's tied up with the Popperian precept about the falsifiability of a theory, and also with common notions of probability.

Most of this book is about probability - how important it is, how people, even very smart people in jobs that are all about probability, misjudge it, and about how biases in the perception of evidence lead people to wrong conclusions.

Taleb has been a Wall Street trader, and has worked in derivatives, but now is an academic, and came to fame on the crash of LTCM, when he was able to explain the downfall of the company by his Black Swan theory - the Nobel prizewinning founders of LTCM had dismissed as near impossible the eventuality that actually brought them down, which showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the cost of the risk involved. In these sorts of probabilistic events, says Taleb, you can't afford to ignore the upper and lower ends of the distribution curve, because it's not the frequency of the event that's critical, but the magnitude of it. This means that if the extremely rare event is potentially catastrophic, it must be taken account of.

Taleb quite deliberately puts as few numbers in the book as possible - he didn't want it to be a text book, and wanted just a general discussion of his principles. However, this means much of the book is frustratingly vague, not helped by his unstructured, chatty style. There are a lot of decent points made, helped by his voluminous reading (which he never fails to remind the reader of), but he claimed he didn't want to put a quote in that wasn't on the top of his head, so that it didn't become a dry, library-created tome.

Some of the most interesting points are about the biases that people have, unwittingly, when analysing data, and these can apply across almost all general activities. One of the most common is survivor bias. This is an assumption that those items of data that are visible are the whole sample, and drawing conclusions from that, while ignoring items that have failed from the total sample. So, for example, there are books written on millionaires and successful businessmen that attempt to find common traits, and therefore work out what qualities might be required to achieve. So it turns out that successful entrepreneurs are hard-working and risk-taking. Taleb points out that so are most unsuccessful entrepreneurs (some of them may also be lazy and cautious) These are necessary, but not sufficient qualities, but because the sample only inlcuded the millionaires, there was a survivor bias.

Another example is of quotes from reviews that are on the backs of books, or on theatre billboards. They are intended to convince a potential buyer that the review represents a consensus opinion of critics, whereas of course they have been specially selected precisely because of their favourable attitude.

A further example of survivor bias, and a very literal one, that I have long considered, is of holocaust literature. It's natural, when reading the works of Primo Levi, or similar writers, to be in awe of the fortune that he survived, through all the selections and illnesses and transports and marches. What was the chance of his survival? 100%, as it happens - we are only reading about him because he survived to tell us. If we'd chosen to follow his life back in 1938, the chance of our picking a man who would go to Auschwitz and survive would of course be very very small, and it would be highly unlikely that we'd have any story to tell at all - only the survivors tell their tales.

Most of Taleb's discussion relates to traders - that is his background, and that is what he is trying to explain. Much of it attributes the success of traders to pure luck, although he isn't very convincing as to why. In a book that is about randomness, he doesn't explain why the market is random, he assumes that it is, and draws from that the conclusions that the outcomes we see could be generated by chance. In this he is bolstered by his prejudice against unthinking corporate types, MBAs (although he has one), CEOs, and everyone who spends their time in a suit and not reading books. The book is frequently condescending, and seeks, broadly, to show that the rich successes of Wall Street have no inherent skill.

His thesis is that, within the game as it is, there are bound to be winners. If you set up random games of Russian roulette, there would be survivors at the end, who would be the winners. Because of hindsight bias, the survivors would then attribute their success to some skill or technique. This is what happens on trading floors all the time. People take positions, the market moves in their favour, they win, and confidently assert that they were the best at predicting the market move. They're helped in this by the outrageous rewards given for success, which confirm this belief. Of course, those who take such positions that pay off at the extreme ends are most vulnerable to movements in other directions, and they rarely have protection against those movements - the people who do have lowered their exposure, and so aren't the big winners in the first place.

It's all quite evident, and Taleb uses this overview to deride the short-term winners in the market place, and to gloat at those who get caught out, as most of the big players will eventually because, as he claims, they don't understand the real probabilities in the market, believing as they do in their own predictive skills, and so therefore don't adequately protect themselves.

The book is spoiled by these personal prejudices, and by the presence of Taleb throughout, telling the reader just what his habits are, who his friends are, and why his philosophy is the best. It's all far too smug, and not justified by some of the analysis. But it's written in a handily comprehensible way for laymen, and more particularly journalists (who, of course, he derides) to understand, so he becomes the newest guru.

In a fine example of survivor bias, the quote on the front of the book is from Fortune - 'One of the smartest books of all time.' I think not.

[39]

Stefan Zweig - Fantastic Night and other stories

2007-06-13T20:42:00.000+01:00

This is why I love having such a large library. It's the discoveries - although Zweig can hardly be called a discovery, having been recommended to me by more than one person, but there's still a delight in reading something new that startles you with its excellence, and leaves you refreshed.

Zweig is a marvellous stylist, but he's more than that. There's a precision to his emotional description that's rare, and sets him among the top writers, in a line from Flaubert and Maupassant through Proust. He has a soft irony, but he's mostly concerned with deep passions, and what it is to be alive.

Each of the stories in this collection is superb. The most notable, to me, is the second, Letter from an unknown woman, which was made into a film by Max Ophuls, which I own and watched recently. Ophuls adapted both Zweig and Maupassant (in Le Plaisir), and his polished style and concern for emotional subtlety made him the most appropriate director for these authors.

Zweig likes to experiment with narrative techniques, trying to find credible ways of having a first person narrator, through which he can achieve a greater intensity in his emotional depth than through a third person view. All five of the stories have first person narration, and four of them primarily concern that narrator. He uses this to explore intense emotions - of sudden passion (Fantastic Night), unrequited love (Letter...) - and also more subtle ones, of nostalgia and yearning (The fowler snared)

The last two stories concern obsessives, a blind print collector and a bibliophile, both brought down by the post-war situation in Austria (which Zweig documented), and both are very poignant and wonderfully told.

I have a few more Zweigs here, and I've just ordered 4 more from amazon, all in impeccable Pushkin Press editions. My pleasure in reading him is similar to when I discovered Hoffmann a couple of years ago.

[38]

Matthew Kneale - When we were Romans

2007-06-12T12:52:00.000+01:00

There's a vogue at the moment for memoirs of childhood - Andrew Collins, for example - and also of stories written with child narrators. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime was a spectacular success in this genre; David Mitchell's Black Swan Green was also popular, although I felt much less convincing and entertaining.

Matthew Kneale, who wrote the well received and best-selling English Passengers, has now tried something more similar to Haddon's book than Mitchell's. The narrator is a young boy, Lawrence, (I didn't get the age, but maybe 8 or 9) who is taken with his younger sister by his mother to Rome in order to escape from her lurking ex-husband. The narrative is written with an approximation to the writing style of a young boy, with an accuracy and consistency I felt Black Swan Green lacked.

The book's strength, as with Haddon's, lies in the imagining of a young boy's thoughts as he describes his circumstances and feelings, and observations of his mother as she breaks down with paranoia. He captures a 9 year old's capriciousness, how he will go from hating to liking an adult on a whim, and how he defines the world by what material gifts he can receive from it - mostly toys. Lawrence's undeveloped emotional life is the most moving aspect of the book, as he struggles to understand his mother and the situation, while asserting his own needs.

I've felt a connection to all 3 books mentioned above - Curious Incident is about a mathematically precocious 15 year old, which I was once; Black Swan Green concerns a boy who is 13 in 1982 (I was 12) and is full of period detail that I recognised. When we were Romans is relevant to me for much deeper reasons, and because of that I read it with an emotional intensity rather than a critical distance. I found the set-up, the sense of threat and paranoia, the fear and rootlessness very believable, and it awoke unwelcome memories of refuges and temporary homes. The mixture of excitement and disorientation, missing your home, and having your affections desperately bought off with presents (in one case a kitten); all were painfully recalled. I can speak strongly for the veracity of the scenario Kneale writes, and for the Lawrence's imagined experience.

I don't normally buy books new in hardback, and if I do I rarely read them before they come out in paperback anyway. In this case I found a proof copy large format pback in Notting Hill Book Exchange for £6 (as opposed to £17 new), and am very glad I did.

Guardian review

[37]

2007 books

2007-06-10T15:20:00.000+01:00

What I've read so far this year:

Poor People - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Weight of Numbers - Simon Ings
Jacques le Fataliste - Denis Diderot
The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo
Captain Pamphile - Alexandre Dumas
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure - John Cleland
Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller
The Accidental - Ali Smith
Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky
Collected Short Stories - Guy de Maupassant
David Golder - Irene Nemirovsky
Notre Dame de Paris - Victor Hugo
Incidences - Daniil Kharms
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket - Honore de Balzac
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
Written Lives - Javier Marias
The Swimming-Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst
Liquidation - Imre Kertesz
A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch - Danilo Kis
The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney
Bouvard and Pecuchet - Gustave Flaubert
The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares
November - Gustave Flaubert
The Rights of the Reader - Daniel Pennac
Restless - William Boyd
Ulysses - James Joyce
Nine Suitcases - Bela Zsolt
Arthur and George - Julian Barnes
Headlong - Michael Frayn
Hopeful Monsters - Nicholas Mosley
Bel-Ami - Guy de Maupassant
Budapest - Chico Buarque
Fiasco - Thomas E Ricks
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
One Thousand and One Ghosts - Alexandre Dumas
Unless - Carol Shields

That's 36 so far this year. The best of them have been Liquidation, Nine Suitcases, Suite Francaise (a common theme), Fiasco, Bel-Ami and Hopeful Monsters. Most disappointing - Restless.

An intro

2007-06-10T14:31:00.000+01:00

I set myself targets - books to read, films to watch. This is mainly to stop myself getting lazy, to impose an informal structure on my cultural life, so that at the end of the year I can consider I've made some progress, if only in reducing the book mountain.

Of course, that's a futile effort - I have about 1800 unread books here, and buy about 200 more per year. My target is 2 books per week, which isn't sufficient to stop the mountain growing. I also have about 100 unwatched films, which is more manageable, and my film target is about 150 per year - one per week in the cinema and two per week on DVD, roughly.

I also set myself projects. Currently I'm reading a lot of 19th Century French literature, and watching German films - Fritz Lang, FW Murnau and others. I alternate the French stuff with modern, and with non-fiction.

I usually write my reviews of what I've watched and seen on the Guardian Unlimited talkboards, where a couple of people read them, I may get an odd comment, then they sit on the thread until deleted. So I thought maybe it would be better to set up a blog to collect my reviews and thoughts. And this is it.

[edit] I've decided, for ease, to separate the books from the films.