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A Common Reader has been beset by network problems and has been up to his ears with router stats, sync speeds and interleaving over the last week. Now hopefully resolved. Lindsay Clarke came to fame by winning the Whitbread Prize in 1989 with his novel, The Chymical Wedding. It has been a long wait [...] I have enjoyed Alberto Manguel’s book about reading for many years now (A History of Reading, A Reader on Reading, The Library at Night and others). It was with some trepidation that I came to my first work of fiction by Manguel - would he be able to create fiction as well as he critiques it? [...]
Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, the third in the series, is published this week. It is simple in concept, being an account of a young woman’s walk to church from her home in a guest room of an old-people’s home in Rome (which is run by Protestant nuns). The year is 1943, and the young woman is German, her husband a young ordinand who despite an earlier injury to his leg, has been sent to support the German army in their campaign in Tunisia. The woman is heavily pregnant with only a month to go before the baby is due, and as she walks through the city we read of her thoughts on love, war and the German cause, while she also notices the beautiful surroundings as she passes the landmarks of Rome – which Delius describes in such detail that it is tempting to get on a plane and fly out to see them for yourself. The novel consists of a single sentence extended over its 117 pages. But this does not make the book difficult to read because the text is broken up into paragraphs, and the technique preserves the flow of the woman’s thoughts over the hour of her walk. Continue reading Review: Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman – Friedrich Christian Delius
Howard Jacobson writes with sophistication and verve. I often found myself pausing over a sentence to take in the meaning, double, or triple sometimes, for Jacobson’s use of language is always inventive and occasionally startling. The story centres on Julian Treslove, a former radio producer whose career has failed to rise as it should have, mainly because of his lack of focus on the task in hand and a degree of self-doubt which robs him of the certainty he needs to succeed. Treslove has two close friends, Sam Finkler, a television producer and Jewish philosopher and the former teacher of Sam and Julian, Libor Sevcik, an elderly widower, also Jewish, who in some ways acts as a mentor to the two men. One day, while walking near Broadcasting House Treslove is mugged and all his valuables are stolen. Treslove is mortified to realise that his assailant is a woman. And to complicate matters, although the words she uttered at the time of the robbery are indistinct, on further reflection, Treslove comes to believe that they were the words, “You Jew!”. Continue reading Review: The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson
I’ve been reading David Crystal’s A Little Book of Language (review to come) in which he describes the origins of language, how we learn to speak, the variations of accents and dialects and just about everything else which concerns a linguist. This made me think of other books – all favorites of mine – which mess about with language, playing tricks with their readers and compelling them to think about the way words work in the brain.
But perhaps the best in my category of “books which mess about with language”, is Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. First published in 2001 and reprinted many times, this remarkable book consists of a series of letters written by Ella Minnow Pea, addressed to her cousin and other relatives and friends from her home on the small island of Nollop, which is located in the Atlantic, 21 miles southeast of Charleston, South Carolina. The island is fictional of course, and is independent of the United States and governed by an autocratic Island Council. At the centre of the town, stands a cenotaph built in honour of Nevin Nollop, and bearing the inscription “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog“. Apparently Nevin Nollop invented this pangram (a sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet) and it seems to be the town’s only claim to fame. Continue reading Review: Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn
I’ve never liked reading more than one book at a time, and so its not been particularly easy to interrupt my current book to return to Don Quixote which I am reading over the course of ten weeks. However, I soon get back into the tales of the valiant knight and his exploits with his servant Sancho Panza. This week’s reading in Don Quixote covers pages 276 to 368. I am reading the book in ten chunks of about 90 pages each, and this is chunk number four. Untangling a mistaken coupling This week we read of two pairs of lovers, previously mis-matched, now reorganising themselves so they are in the correct pairs! Don Quixote has little part in this, it being left to the noble Don Fernando to be persuaded of the rightness of the new arrangements – after all, he was to get the lovely Dorotea who his associates assured him was unequalled among women, humble, beautiful, virtuous and loved him greatly. Who could resist? The war against the wineskins Meanwhile our brave Don Quixote persisted with the belief that he had resolved the amorous confusion by doing battle with two huge wineskins containing about 18 gallons (about 70) litres) of wine believing it to be a giant. Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong Part 4 – war and peace
The style of writing reminds me very much of British crime writer Martina Cole, who’s work contains an equal number of unpleasant characters who also spend their time abusing each other. At least Martina sets out to shock: her readers know what they are getting, but with its Booker long-listing, surely The Slap is supposed to be something rather better? Its a long book (483 pages). Round about page 250 I found myself getting cross with myself for choosing to read a book solely because of its Booker status, but I persevered to the end through further episodes in the lives of this miserable crew. The Slap is not particularly well written – while it held my interest, it didn’t make me feel good about myself for carrying on with it – this is not an uplifting reading experience! There are no surprises in it, no character development, nothing to make you feel that the author has any fresh insight into the human condition. For me, a “good book” will make me feel sorry when it ends and sad to let its characters go – with The Slap I heaved a sigh of relief that I would never have to think of any of these people again. Continue reading Review: The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas
As the book opens we meet Nick and his partner Astrid who are driving to Hastings to pick up Nick’s father Ken, a miserly, cantankerous old man, living in Hastings on the South Coast with his unfortunate wife June. They are all going to have lunch with Dave, Nick’s brother and his wife, Marina. The lunch will be dominated by Ken’s announcement that he wants to leave all his money to son number two, Dave, and expects Nick, a lawyer, to draw up the will which will so determinedly favour his brother. Astrid can’t help herself from exclaiming, “What about Nick?”, only to hear the irascible old man reply, Thank you young lady, but you’re new to this family. You’re not even in the this family, matter of fact, so I’ll ask you to keep your nose out. Ken’s appalling behaviour suffuses this book. He really is a wicked old man, blind to his own failings and judgemental about everyone else’s. When people treat him as he deserves he is puffily hurt and fails to see how his own provocations are at the root of his troubles. Continue reading Review: The Old Romantic – Louise Dean
I’ve pulled out three themes from this week’s reading: Wilderness Spain is a country of mountain ranges and high sierras and in the 16th century it wasn’t difficult to get off the track and find yourself in a place only inhabited by lonely goat-herds and the creatures of wild places (wolves are mentioned but I think these were the Iberian wolf which is less dangerous to humans than some other varieties). In the Gospels, the mad man who had enough devils cast out of him to drive a herd of pigs over a cliff wandered in the wild places. The wilderness is a place of lunatics and mad adventurers, which must make it hard to those who have to scrape a living in those places by hunting animals or tending goats. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza travel through the wilderness while fleeing retribution for freeing a group of convicts destined to become galley slaves. They meet a young man with lacerations all over his body and wearing ragged clothes. His tale seems lucid enough – the Duke’s son he served had stolen his beloved Luscinda from him by trickery. But while he started his tale with sanity, a fit of madness came over him half way through, causing him to throw a rock at Don Quixote then beat Sancho to the ground and jump up and down on his ribs. Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong Part 3 – the complexities of love
My only knowledge of Lydia Davis, before coming to The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, is that she was the translator of Marcel Proust’s Swanns Way, in the Penguin edition which adorns my shelves – and its one of the six volumes of Remembrance of Things Past which I’ve actually read (only three to go). However, I have now learned more about her from her Wikipedia entry and also from an interview with her in The Guardian on 4 August. This is a lovely book, nice and thick (733 pages of text), and with countless short pieces which you can dip and out of. For while many of the stories are a few pages long, quite a few of them are just a paragraph or two, or even just a few lines, expressing depth with concision as with a Japanese Haiku. The stories cover a vast range of subjects and it would be impossible to even begin to categorise them. A few samples might cover short portraits of a relationship, jury service, motorcycling, journeys, music and just about anything else you’d like to think of – its probably somewhere in there. This is one of the few reviews when I can actually quote a whole story as an example of the authors work. This one is called simply “Love” -
Continue reading Review – The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
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