A Common Reader

Review (audio recording): Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust

Tom — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:00:03 +0000

Naxos, the renowned producer of classical music recordings is publishing a complete and unabridged recording of Marcel Proust’s epic work, Remembrance of Things Past (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu).

The reader is Neville Jason who Washington Post called “the marathon man” after his 70 hour recording of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Jason is well equipped to read this even longer work by Proust, having received the Sir John Gielgud prize for fiction while he was at RADA and having then gone on to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Old Vic Company. Indeed, while reading an earlier abridged version of Proust he did the abrigement himself and also translated the final volume (see article in Audiofile magazine).

The first volume alone, Swann’s Way (amazon link here) is over 23 hours on 17 CDs – - six more volumes are to be added to the project and will eventually run for 140 hours and will be completed in October of this year.

I have had a rather mixed relationship with Proust’s great work. I’ve read three volumes of it so far, but as I began about fifteen years ago perhaps that’s not very good going. While the book is fascinating, if it takes me a long time to get into each one and I know that by spreading it out over such a long period I lose some of the connections across each volume and have forgotten how the characters relate to each other. The books are hugely detailed (as you would expect with their huge size) and it can be a daunting task to start another one.

Neville Jason

With this background I was wondering how I would cope with Swann’s Way on an audio recording. I was pleasantly surprise to find myself totally absorbed, particularly while driving. Jason’s voice is exactly right for Proust – as a professionally trained actor, his intonation and tone is perfect for the rhythmic cadences of the Scott Moncrieff translation. My own version of Proust is the newer Penguin edition which uses different translators for each volume. The translation is flatter and more colloquial, whereas Scott Moncrieff’s sounds slightly more “classical” – which Neville Jason’s voice suits rather well.

Of course, you have to wonder how exactly you would get through 140 hours of audio recording. It almost seems like a life’s work – something that would accompany you over many years as you dipped in and out of it and kept coming back to it. If I was still at the stage of my life where I was driving up and down motorways it would be ideal, but for now it’s going to be an occasional treat over the next few years. What a lovely thing to own though, a rich resource for some point in the future when I have more time on my hands.

By the way, should you wish to read along with the audio version, the text of Proust’s work in the Scott Moncrieff translation is available for free download in various ebook formats on Project Gutenburg here.

I am selling a few books on Amazon at the moment, most of which have been reviewed on these pages. If you would like to look at them, please see my Amazon Storefront.

Review: The Foundling – Agnès Desarthe

Tom — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:11:38 +0000

Jerome lives with his teenage daughter, Marina. His wife, Paula, left him some years ago, apparently through boredom and the desire to live a more exciting life than her marriage to a rural estate agent gave her. Jerome is a quiet, introspective man who takes a long time to let his feelings come to the surface, but when Marina’s best friend is killed in a road accident, he finds himself overwhelmed with grief and assailed by emotions arising from his own past life.

Agnès Desarthe has written a complex story here which works on several levels. We read of the disruption to Jerome’s well-ordered life as he confronts deep issues from his childhood. The book reflects on the intense emotions of a teenager and their ability to bring chaos to themselves and those around them. But also, this is a story of how random events can bring powerful change into a seemingly settled life, launching it in unexpected new directions.

Jerome has a complex biography. He is a foundling – the police found him wandering in the woods in 1956 when he was a little boy. He seemed to be a forest child, adapted to life among wild things. Many years ago his adopted mother told him,

I remember the light so clearly, dappled sunlight everywhere, peeping through green leaves, line in a fairy tale. . . then when we were just comoing out of the woods, the sound of twigs grew louder, but I didn’t turn around. And then the exact moment we stepped out of the woods, I felt a little hand in mine. In my left hand I was holding your father’s hand and in my right, the hand of my little woodland darling.

His adopted parents proved to be loving and kindly people, but nobody ever got to the bottom of why Jerome was in the woods and who had left him there. The past however is about to catch up with him when he meets a retired policeman who is doing some freelance investigation of his own into the accident that killed Marina’s boyfriend Armand.

Jerome finds himself as much affected by Armand’s death as is Marina. Agnes Desarthe writes of how grief comes upon the small household of father and daughter as they move through the rituals of being comforted by friends and family. Marina’s mother Paula comes to stay for a few days, causing considerable anguish to Jerome – she left him a few years ago, leaving a level of emotional pain in his heart that he has failed to come to terms with. Although Jerome has looked after his daughter since Paula left, as is so often the case, the absent parent becomes a comforting reference point for the stricken child and soon the female companionship leads to a betrayal of Jerome which he finds impossible to deal with. The author captures Jerome’s frustration

He feels powerless and completely disorientated. Sentences come to him about how difficult it is living with women, the fight it entails, the feeling you keep showing, the pathetic little games of seduction and then afterwards: the dolls’ house, making babies. Making them, yes, fine, it’s all fireworks, pride and superpowers, but after that you feel knocked back, slowed down by all those endless, boring, repetitive tasks. The way you talk to each other as if to a colleague, to a nurse, to a dog.

The book is not all emotional pain and the experience of loss however. Jerome is an estate agent, and one of his customers provides some light relief throughout the book, leading him around the countryside and eventually settling into an old dilapidated piggery. The slightly wild personality of this woman acts as a useful counter to Jerome’s introspection and it is interesting to see how the author brings these two together to provide a touch of humour in her novel.

This is a complex novel, but not difficult to read. Although it a rather Gallic intensity surrounds the main theme of grief and loss, the investigations into Jerome’s background and the dealings with the estate agency do anchor the novel in the real world of tangible affairs. This balancing is rather skilfully done, granting the book a level of interest which it would not have had had is focused only on the events surrounding the death of a young man.

The Foundling deserves to be successful – certainly I am grateful to the excellent Portobello Books for introducing English speaking readers to this fine French writer. I am not qualified to offer technical comments on the translation (by Adriana Hunter), but I will say that the book reads elegantly and seamlessly with no clues that it might have originated in a language other than English.

Review: Such Stuff as Dreams – Keith Oatley

Tom — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:39:12 +0000

Keith Oatley is a novelist and professor of cognitive psychology at the Univeristy of Toronto. He has some remakable things to say about the act of reading. His book, Such Stuff as Dreams suggests that when we read, our brains interpret social interactions in a work of fiction as the real thing – as far as our brains are concerned we experience real human contact and are as affected by the experience as though we were actually present with the characters in the novel.

Oatley has been quoted in the magazine Scientific American Mind (article Fiction Hones Social Skills) as saying, Reading “can hone your social brain, so that when you put your book down you may be better prepared for camaraderie, collaboration, even love.”

Most readers know how deeply they can be affected by the books they read. What they didn’t know before is that when they get involved with a fictional character, they tend to follow their actions as though they were participating in them and develop a deep empathy with their motives and feelings. Oatley suggests that reading is a form of mind-training – a course in how humans behave and react to each other. Readers tend to have better social skills because they are better aquainted with the way other people think and they are more familiar with the huge variety of human behaviour than non-readers.

As I read this I thought of just one example. I remember reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali, about the experience of a Bangladeshi woman who moved to Tower Hamlets in London to marry an older man – not usually the sort of book which interests me. As I read it however, I was drawn into the story and by the end of the book I found tremendous sympathy with Nazeem and her husband Chanu. I became engrossed on the story of how the initially isolated Nazeem was changed by the people she met in London and by the end of the book my understanding of Bangladeshi immigrant culture was so greatly enhanced that I felt real understanding of the pressures faced by immigrants who don’t even speak the language of their host nation.

Oatley’s book is based on experimental research such as setting groups of people to read a novel and then testing their social abilities before and after. But in the longer term, Oatley found that people who read were better at judging the emotional state of others and also making judgements about social relationships. Reading fiction trains people in understanding other human beings just in the same way that reading a work of non-fiction can train you in science or engineering.

The author refers to research in which students were asked to read either a novel about the plight of an Algerian woman or an essay about Algerian women’s rights. Researchers found that the readers of the novel had far more concern about the Algerian women’s rights than those who read the more newsy, third-party report.

But its the internalisation of what people read which was never quite understood before. Readers personalities are subtly changed by what they read and they become better at relating to other people, particularly those who are very different to themselves.

I can relate to this in my own reading. Books have taught me so much – how “good” people can be driven to commit a murder (Crime and Punishment – Fyodr Dostoevsky), what its like to be autistic (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon), how its best to be reconciled to those who do us harm (The Railway Man – Eric Lomax) and countless other books which stay in my mind like icons on the wall of a cathedral.

Keith Oatley has more books in the pipeline and if Such Stuff as Dreams is anything to go by then we will be learning more about the transformative power of fiction and how those of us who sit in a corner with a book may be preparing ourselves far more for interaction with the real world than those who think reading is a waste of time.

Review: In the Dolphin’s Wake – Harry Bucknall

Tom — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:09:00 +0000

Travel writer Harry Bucknall is an experienced wanderer with a background in both the military and in theatre production – an interesting mix of talents which has enabled him to write a distinctive travel book in which he describes his travels through the major (and many of the lesser) Greek Islands. The book has received acclaim from masters of travel writing Jan Morris and Patrick Leigh Fermor (the latter now sadly deceased).

Of course, in choosing Greece as his subject, the question facing any potential reader is, Will the author be able to get behind the swathes of tourist gloss to find the authentic Greece? I am pleased to say that while Harry does not try to make out that his travels were wholly in isolated villages or mountain paths, on the whole, he does manage to present a picture of a land where the old ways still run in parallel with the coastal strips and tourist destinations.

Harry’s aim was simple – “a dream of a journey through the scattered islands of the Ionian and the Aegean spanning centuries of exotic history and all the time travelling on a hotchpotch assortment of ships trailing the azure seas”. He states at the start of his book that no-one knows how may islands go to make up the Greek Archipelago – perhaps 1000 to 6000 (it all depends on the size of rock to be counted as an “island”!). In the end Harry classified the islands into seven groups – The Ionian, The Dodecanse, The Cyclades, The Argo-Saronic, The Sporades, The North Eastern Aegean Islands, and Crete.

Perhaps more than most Mediterranean nations, Greece presents an incredibly layered history, with the ancient cults of Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon etc overlain with centuries of Orthodox Christianity – a powerful force even to this day with many monasteries and devotional centres scattered throughout the islands, most notably of course on Mount Athos. Harry is informative enough about the ancient Greek religions without baffling his readers with their mind-numbing intricacies.

Holy Trinity Monastery, Meteora, Greece

He is at his best when describing the Christian history of the island, perhaps because of the living faith exhibited by worshippers as they bow before icons and kneel in dingy but atmospheric churches. He managed to get an audience with an Abbot, a peculiarly stressed individual with a desk drowning in papers and visibly struggling with his daily “audience in the round”. On Mount Athos his guest room was a bare cell, with only flea-ridden blankets available to help him through the bitter cold. But the spirituality of the Greek monks is vast and of course the privations of the life are all part of the calling.

In contrast to the aesthetic life of the monks, Harry encountered the usual demented crowds of drunken English revelers at the dreaded resort of Faliraki – in true travel-writing fashion, forcing himself to enter the Forty-Eight Hour Bar to talk with the nineteen year olds who seemed to be suitably out of their heads. The Greeks however know where their income comes from and tolerate the excesses of the young Brits, knowing that when they return to England, the euros they have spent in Greece will tide many families over the winter.

Harry can be quite intrepid at times and doesn’t shirk the more difficult terrain, having one nasty cliff fall which left him recovering for a couple of days. The most striking expedition to me was his accompanied swim around a headland on Antikythira and deep into a cave system -

We swam under a granite arch that would be the envy of any Roman architect – we became inconsequential beings in its shadow, our every word echoing off the sides of the natural nave as Paddy indicated a small darkened triangle at the rear of the gaping entrance, intermittently obscured by the rist and fall of the sea . . . feeling our way with our hands along the polished ceiling, we dived in under the water until mercifully, up we came into an inner chamber, icy cold and black like oil, the sea beating the walls with thick syrupy thwacks.

Myrtos Beach, Cephallonia

In other islands Harry is keen to discover literary roots – not least Lawrence Durrell in Rhodes, where Harry discovers the villa in which he wrote Reflections on a Marine Venus, now sadly empty with an overgrown garden. I confess to some disappointment that when visiting Cephallonia, Harry does not mention Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – surely one of the most evocative Greek-based novels of our time.

The book is beautifully produced with a beautifully designed cover, very useful maps throughout and some lovely quotations beneath the chapter headings. I can’t help but wonder how different the book would be if Harry did the same journey in 2011 with its street protests, the climate of austerity and the decline in tourist euros?

What is the purpose of travel-writing? I think its to do with carrying the reader along to obscure places or on means of transport which he or she wouldn’t normally use, in order to give a mind-picture of the places visited. Travel-writing can inspire you to visit places or even sometimes put you off. At its best, it can be a sort of substitute for making the journey yourself. I think Harry’s book fulfils all the goals of good travel writing, leaving me with images of a warm, colourful country with masses of history and culture. I recommend it for its content, its production values and mostly for the quality of the writing.

Review: Best Foot Forward, a 500-mile walk through hidden France – Susie Kelly

Tom — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:45:41 +0000

I enjoy reading about the adventures of lone travellers, particularly when they are travelling under their own steam. In the middle of winter, its particularly good to read of someone setting off on a spring morning to see where their journey is going to take them.

I’ve already reviewed Susie Kelly’s book The Valley of Heaven and Hell in which she cycled with her husband on the trail of Marie Antoinette as she fled from Paris to Rheims (only to return later to meet her death). Now, Blackbirdebooks have published Susie’s earlier book, Best Foot Forward in which she walked alone from La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast right across France and into Switzerland, carrying a flimsy tent and a few essentials – an adventure indeed.

Having done quite a bit of walking in France myself, I could only marvel at Susie’s ability to find her way through such a great distance in the French countryside. Many’s the time I’ve been lost while walking in France even when walking for just an afternoon and with the car usually waiting for us just over a nearby hill. While there are way marks on all the major routes, a west-east journey like this required a lot of route-finding across dull terrain which the major walking routes never passed through. Susie was equipped only with a large scale map which frequently misled her and often had to rely on the knowledge of passers by who turned out to be far from reliable.

Many times she turned up in a village only to find it was the wrong one, or that the camp-site she was aiming at was located elsewhere. I could almost feel her fatigue on encountering situations like this,

After a long and hot safari . . . I arrived in a village which should have been just one and a half miles from Brioux. Everything about the surroundings corresponded with the map, apart from the cemetery which although very clearly marked on the map wasn’t there in the village. The name on the village notice board was not the same name as the name on the map. There were three merry ladies chatting like budgies nearby, and they waved me cheerily into their collective bosom.

“I am in Pontioux, aren’t I” I asked hoping that is I said it positively enough it would be so.

“No, but it’s not far away” said one of the ladies helpfully. “This is Arsanges. Le Pontioux is just three and a half miles in that direction”

She pointed northwards. That meant nearly five miles to Brioux. Another two hours agonising walk.

The walk was quite early in the year and even when Susie arrived at a campsite they were often far from ready for visitors. Sometimes she was the only camper, separated from the world in the middle of the night only by one wall of nylon tent, but she has a great ability to trust to fate (and a mobile phone – which presumable was often out of range). The campsite facilities varied from pristine to filthy and the distance from shops and restaurants meant that she was often faced with another walk to find her evening meal. She seemed to be un-phased by eating alone in restaurants and was sometimes rewarded by exquisite meals which enabled her to forget the difficulties of the day.

Having worked for many years in London I found a long time ago that on one of those head-achy days when tiredness and dehydration has set in that two paracetomol and a Diet Coke can be the best pick-me-up. It was interesting to find that Susie agrees with me – “Now it was a funny thing, I used to really hate that drink (Cola), but since I started out walking it had become the elixir of life, the only thing that quenched my thirst and gave me the energy I needed”. (Note, there is normally no product-placement in my book reviews!).

Of course, on a journey like this, you meet a vast range of people, some helpful, others less so. Often her fellow campers were affluent folk in mobile homes (the French seem to love these even more than we do in Britain). The appearance of a lone back-packer often went un-noticed by the leisure campers but sometimes people recognised what an arduous task Susie had set herself. I can imagine what a wonderful respite the couple Berdien and Ab gave her -

They were both fit and very tanned, and wanted to know why my feet were sore. I explained. Berdien said something in Dutch to Ab, and disappeared into the caravan, emerging a few moments later with an electric foot spa. Ab was despatched to find an extension lead, and five minutes later I was installed in an armchair, plumped up with cushions, with a large whisky in one hand and both feet immersed in warm, fragrant water. After half an hour in the spa, Berdien took my feet in her lap, patted them tenderly with a fluffy towel and then massaged them into a state of bliss.

Susie is well-up on French history and culture and provides a lot of background information to her readers. At one point she met a group of elderly people speaking the Creusois dialect derived from the langue d’Oc, the ancient language of the southern part of France, “the original language of the Troubadors”. While walking through the hilltop village of Charroux we read of the plagues and militiary battles which scarred the area in previous centuries. It is details like this that made me want to visit new areas of France to see the beautifully described sites she saw on her travels.

I have read many books of “great walks”, but few which show an ability to trudge on day after day through terrible rain and furious heat. Susie’s nights were beset by flooding and insect infestations yet she carried right across France, with feet blistered into a pulp and with terrible pain – a journey lke this cannot be made in comfort. Many people would have given up but eventually she reached Lake Geneva and walked into the lake, filling her battered green jungle hat with water and pouring it over her head. The end of an incredible journey which provided this reader at least with a sense of having travelled with the author through her struggles.

The book is available either direct from the Blackbirdebooks site or from the Kindle store and represents fantastic value at its current price.

Review: The Unit – Ninni Holmqvist

Tom — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:39:03 +0000

I have been a great fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s books ever since The Remains of the Day right up to his latest book of four stories, Nocturnes. One of his more intriguing books was Never Let Me Go, about a boarding school in which cloned children were raised to become organ donors (turned into a rather good film by Director, Mark Romanek).

I was drawn to read The Unit because I was intrigued to see what Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist would make of the organ donation theme. After all, Sweden has an unpleasant history of eugenics having sterilised more mentally ill and deviant people than even Nazi Germany, in a programme that was brought to an end in 1975.

I have to say, I thought The Unit was rather good. It is unlike Never Let Me Go in many ways, not least that in the Ishiguro book it is children who donate their organs while in The Unit it is the older generation who contribute their bits and pieces for the good of others.

The Unit takes place at an unspecified time in the future. The world looks similar to ours but society has moved on. The population is shrinking and priority is given to those who can bear children. Childless, single or gay people are classified as “dispensable” and at the age of 50 for women or 60 for men (men produce viable sperm for longer than women produce viable eggs) they give up their homes and every aspect of their lives and go to live in The Unit where they spend the rest of their days – a place which has all the features of a luxury spa hotel, while going through a series of medical experiments and organ donations which will eventually kill them (via their “final donation”).

It is the matter of fact way in which this happens which shows how far this society has travelled. There is no protest on the part of the donors – they accept that this is how things are, and while they lament the loss of their previous lives, they seem content with their lot, forming a mutually supportive society to help them get through their final two to four years (nobody last longer than this).

The book opens with Dorrit, a single 50 year old woman waiting outside her house to be picked up by a dark window’d four wheel drive to be taken away to the Second Reserve Bank. She has had a hard time of it lately. Her lover won’t leave his wife for her, commissions for her free-lance writing have dried up, and she can’t afford to maintain her house. There is nothing left for her other than to respond to the letter that arrived a few weeks ago telling her to tidy up her life as best she can and prepare for her final journey to The Unit. She has nobody to say goodbye to other than neighbours and she has arranged for her much loved dog “Jock” to go and live with a family who promise to look after him. A poignant moment indeed!

I couldn’t reach the outside from now on, not by mail, e-mail, text messages or telephone calls. From now on the telephone existed for me only in the form of a fixed internal line, and as for the Internet, I was allowed to surf only under supervision, which meant an orderly or another member of staff sitting beside me, and I was not allowed to join chat forums, contribute to blogs, create or respond to advertisements, or vote in opinion polls.

She finds The Unit to be a sort of glorified Holiday Inn. There are gymnasiums and swimming pools, pleasant atrium café areas, walks in quiet gardens set under an artificial roof which mirrors the changing seasons by clever lighting. There is a better social life than most of the dispensables experienced in the outside world and every facility is provided for their amusement – from art galleries and libraries to theatres and massage clinics.

Dorrit soon makes close friends but of course, these people have a habit of disappearing for a couple of days while they donate a kidney or a cornea, returning just a little diminished in some way, but somehow taking it all in their stride for after all this is a well understood destiny to which they have been conditions for many years.

Dorrit takes part in medical experiments herself, finding these exhausting, but at least filling her days and giving her a sense of purpose. She returns to her room to write her novel, under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras located in every part of her apartment, even the bathroom.

The book raises many questions, perhaps the most significant one being what happens when a dispensable become non-dispensable by meeting and falling in love with another dispensable and forming a viable unit of their own. The result is not good although Dorrit seems to find some sort of satisfaction in the outcome.

I though this book was rather good. OK, so it seems similar in some ways to Never Let Me Go, but I don’t actually believe that Ninni Holmqvist meant it this way. The Unit has all the hallmarks of wholly original thinking and I’d rather see it as an independent take on the dystopian society genre of books which describe a world of “repressive social control systems and various forms of active and passive coercion” (Wikipedia).

Its a compelling read that kept me turning the pages (well, pressing the next button on my Kindle) and I’d overall I’d score it

7/10 – well written, good story, many good ideas, entertaining in a rather gruesome sort of way

Review: The Misfortunates – Dimitri Verhulst

Tom — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:45:28 +0000

I read quite a few European books in translation but its not often I come across a book from Belgium (only two feature on this blog so far). Late last year I made a visit to Bruges and realised that that beautiful city of canals and filigreed stonework was hardly characteristic of a country that contained the huge working port of Antwerp and the Euro-capital of Brussels. In The Misfortunates, Dimitri Verhulst has given us an image of a working-class suburb (the fictional “Arsendegem”) of an un-named town where drunkenness and low-level violence predominate.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Dimitri Verhulst was came from a broken home “and spent his childhood in foster homes and institutes”. The publicity for the book says that it is semi-autobiographical – a book where the author has taken his life as a starting point and then embellished the bare bones of his life to make it more entertaining and readable. The reader never knows where reality ends and fiction begins but as the boy in The Misfortunates is called “Dimmy” there is obviously enough reality in the book that the author can say, “This was my life”.

The Misfortunates is a collection of vividly described episodes from the childhood and youth of a boy living in a family which is so dysfunctional that its difficult to see how a child could survive it. This is a world of drinking, violence and poverty so severe that it is not surprising that Dimmy ends up being taken into care. The book reminded me a little of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in that it doesn’t try to tell the whole life story of the boy but describes various episodes in his life.

Dimitri Verhulst was born in 1972 and apparently Belgium still had homes like this in the 1970s:

I spent my first years with my parents in Kanton Street on a tiny courtyard with a communal water pump and a communistic toilet – a hole in a plank, directly above the septic tank. Water ran down the inside of the living room walls and we stuffed balls of newspaper into the worm-eaten window-frames to keep out the wind. When we moved to Mere Street, it was only to be worse off. Our new toilet was a hole in a plank as well, but this house had the advantage of a leaking roof. Our kitchen floor was covered with buckets that caught the drops from the ceiling . . . we refilled the little bowls of rat-poison daily.

When an aunt visits from Brussels, Dimmy goes on to describe how,

we were ashamed of the pounds of raw mince we ate because it was cheap and easy, and we were ashamed of the way we stuck our fingers into the mince to grab a handful to stuff into our mouths before washing it down with cold coffee that had been left standing in a mug from yesterday. We were ashamed of the worms we got from the mince and didn’t do anything about.

With a background like that its not surprising that the episodes which Dimmy goes onto describe are going to be pretty distasteful. The family’s life revolves around the pubs of the locality including The Liars’ Haven, which hosts a drinking competition based on the Tour de France, in which each stage consisted of drinking monumental amounts of beer.

On another occasion a bailiff comes to the house to claim recompense for the family’s debts only to find that the furniture is so broken and battered that its not worth taking. Eventually taking the television with him, the family are left having to find somewhere to watch that night’s Roy Orbison concert. They con their way into the home of a local immigrant couple, bringing a case of beer with them and show the couple “the true face of Belgium” by hurling cushions at the ceiling and dancing on the table.

One riotous episode follows another. Social workers pass through, sessions in drying-out clinics are wasted away with extravagant, beer-soaked, home-coming celebrations. Eventually Dimmy grows up and away from his dreadful family – a man apart, driven by an internal search for something better.

I haven’t been one of them for a long time and the proof is that they’ve started talking to me in something that’s supposed to pass for standard Dutch, the same wat they speak to my son. Even though I know how stuck-up they find it. I no longer speak my own dialect.

I tend to think of Belgium as a fairly cultured European nation and was surprised at the level of debauchery apparently found in Dimitri Verhulst’s Aresendegem. However, the book is humorous throughout and despite the crudeness of the events described, the author frequently launches off into lyrical prose which adds a layer of unexpected beauty onto this terrible world.

The Misfortunates has been turned into a film, available with English subtitles.

Review: The Orphan Master’s Son – Adam Johnson

Tom — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:00:04 +0000

On this 1 January 2012, I wish a happy and prosperous New Year to all my readers.

I’m starting this year with a book which isn’t available in the book stores until April. However, I wanted to publish the review while the subject is so topical following the death last month of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

I started to read The Orphan Master’s Son just before Christmas not realising that our television screens would feature so many images of North Korea following the death of Kim Il Sung and his replacement as supreme leader by his young son Kim Il Un. As I watched the news reports of weeping crowds and saw the podgy face of the new “supreme leader”, I found myself reading grim passages in Adam Johnson’s book about the pitiful state of the the bulk of the North Korean population as they face forced labour and near-starvation.

It is rare to find a book set in North Korea, that vast prison-house of a nation which seems to be a giant personality-cult backed-up by the fourth largest army in the world. North Korea is such a closed-off land with such difficult access for Western people that very few books about North Korea have been published – one notable exception in recent years being Barbara Demick’s excellent Nothing to Envy which documents the accounts of six real-life citizens of the city of Chongin.

In order to write this highly detailed account of a life in North Korea, Adam Johnson immersed himself in whatever information was available about the country including defectors’ oral histories and any other material he could get his hands on. The first few pages of his book are the product of “a year’s investigation into North Korean orphanages, the floods of 1995 and the resulting famine, the city of Chongin, Soviet factories, Songun policy, military vehicles and so on”. He has also travelled in North Korea (under the watchful eye of State-employed minders of course) and this has filled in some of the gaps left by eye-witness accounts and the written literature.

The story tells the life of Jun Do, the son of an orphan master. Because he was brought up in an orphanage, he tends to be thought of as an orphan – something which apparently makes for a life-long stigma. Life in the orphanage was grim in the extreme and Jun Do’s father granted him no favours, “When the rabbit warren was dirty, it was Jun Do who spend the night locked in it. When boys wet their bunks, it was Jun Do who chipped the frozen piss off the floor”.

Collective Farm - image from MSN

Occasionally a factory would adopt a group of boys and employ them as a ready-made labour force. Indeed, anyone who could feed the boys and provide a bottle for the Orphan Master could have them for the day as an impromptu work-gang. At the age of fourteen many of the boys were recruited into the army and Jun Do became a tunnel soldier, trained to patrol the border with South Korea deep inside the vast network of tunnels that extend under the border into South Korea.

Eventually he is recruited as a low-level intelligence officer and is sent to work as a radio operator on a fishing vessel. The ramshackle trawler had another job to do – abducting innocent Japanese citizens from the beaches where they walked at night (yes, this really happened – see the Wikipedia article). During one of the ship’s voyages they are stopped and boarded by an American naval vessel, an event of such humiliation for the proud North Koreans that they dread returning home to account for themselves. Inevitably, the return to North Korea is traumatic for Jun Do for he faces one of many brutal interrogations which leaves him seriously injured.

Eventually Jun Do is sent on a trade visit to Texas – perhaps an unlikely scenario, but one which gives the author the opportunity to highlight the contrast between the two cultures. I was reminded of Chuck Palahniuk’s hilarious novel Pygmy in which a North Korean child is sent on a cultural exchange to the USA.

In the course of the book we read much of daily life in North Korea. The slightest deviation from the rules of citizenship can result in the appearance of a military vehicle at the door of the apartment block to whisk its occupants away to a labour camp (a whole family is punished for the transgression of an individual). Life in the camps is so terrible often involving labour in mines with no tools of equipment other than bare hands.

Even ordinary citizens can be conscripted to a day’s labour in the fields, which has to be undertaken with heroic enthusiasm – lorries cruise the streets of the cities and collect anyone they find even though they may be on their way to work or returning home for their evening meal.

A united nation!

The second part of the book, “The Biography of Commander Ga” shows what life is like for a senior military officer with the privileges of rank – but with the ever-present threat of being purged by the regime. Jun Do plays a major part in this story too, and we even meet up with the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, a fascinating narrative which seems all too credible. Its impossible to give more details of the story at this point without spoiling it, but its enough to say that it is almost bewildering in its ingenuity.

This is a big book (450 large-format pages) and took me quite a few days to read over Christmas. The reading experience was not among the happiest I have had recently because while there is much humour in the book the story is at times harrowing and Adam Johnson does not stint on the graphic detail.

We read of forced organ donations, life in the Gulag prison camps and numerous brutalising interrogation sessions. While these are not lengthy passages in themselves, they show what awaits any North Korean who attracts the attention of the authorities for the wrong reasons (something it is only too easy to do when every block of apartments has a warden with responsibility for ideological correctness). In some ways the book has echoes of Alexandr Solzhenytzin’s work such as The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, but at least the Orphan Master’s Son has a fast-moving story and plenty of humour to lighten the tone.

The book is a remarkable achievement and perhaps give more idea about daily life in North Korea than anything else on the market. It is a work on an epic scale and I think it is going to attract a lot of attention in 2012.

Rating: 8/10 – A unique, ” must-have” read for those with an interest in these topics

Review: Far North – Marcel Theroux

Tom — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:25:17 +0000

In Far North, we read of a world in which the inevitable results of consumerism, global warming and the environmental exploitation of poorer nations has come full cycle. The disaster has long been and gone.

Before the disaster, numbers of the concerned emigrated to Siberia, a blank canvas of a land, where environmentalists, Quakers and free-thinkers could build Ark-like communities where they would be safe from the worst awaiting mankind.

Alas, their isolation was not enough to protect them, for when the world fell apart, other, more mean-spirited groups came into their communities and sowed dissension and brought back the old ways of competitiveness and greed. An adult “Lord of the Flies” was enacted and only a few survived.

One of the survivors tells the story of what happened next. Named “Makepeace” by her Quaker father, she suffered terrible abuse from the rougher incomers and now presents herself as a man. Never a very feminine woman, she finds safety in her new persona. Her struggle for survival has in any case given her the full range of skills of any mountain survivalist. Makepeace’s family are long-gone, the victims of terrible times which leached their idealism away from them and left them prey to evil.

Makepeace drip-feeds her story to us, saving some of the more important revelations of her life to the later portions of her book (a set of old exercise books which she manages to hide in her remote cabin). She was appointed a Constable under the old order, and grimly clings to her law-keeping role for the residual status it still brings her when dealing with the hostile folk around her. But all law has gone, as has trust in one another. Makepeace’s ability to maintain a stock of weaponry and to make her own bullets is her only real security.

The world has turned very ugly. The Soviet Gulag system has re-emerged and slave labourers work in blighted landscapes and ruined cities, recovering polluted artefacts from a better civilisation now long gone. Is this a solar-powered iPod? -

. . . a silver stone, about the size of an apple, but flatter and hard and cold. It lay there, dead and unresponsive. ‘Not working,’ she said. She took it out of the room and lay it somewhere . . . she went out of the room and brought the stone back. ‘I just hope there’s enough sun today,’ she said as she set it back down in front of me. It was warm to the touch now from having laid out in the sun, and on the skin of it you could see little shapes in light, like the outline of stars in the dark, but green . . . I prodded it again and the stone seemed to leap into life. A picture appeared on it, but not flat and painted, lit up on one whole side of it, and moving, and speaking. It was of girls, six or seven of them, and a bit drunk.

Makepeace has learned that her only safety is in isolation but sometimes you have to trade with others or make common cause against the many threats which surround the few remaining pockets of community. She has a terrible time of it but with her innate intelligence and survival skills she manages to extricate herself from the worst that happens to her. Her salvation is in managing her own withdrawal from the world in a way which does not corrupt her spirit.

There have been many other dystopian books in which we read a vision of a hopelessly corrupted future. This one offers the usual mix of blighted landscapes, renegade gangs living in a lawless civilisation, a few good people struggling to keep the old ways going. The genre is shared by all forms of pioneering stories whether in the Wild West, Australia or Africa quite apart from the many post-nuclear holocaust stories. Far North reminded me of Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen Baxter’s Flood. I think it reminded me most of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain which is set in the aftermath of the American Civil War and is equally well-written.

When a book has an enigmatic title its good to find the reference to it in the text – it often tells you the author’s purpose behind the book. I found the reference to “Far North” towards the end of the book:

But our world had gone so far north that the compass could make no sense of it, could only spin hopelessly in its binnacle. North had melted right off the map. North was every which way. North was nowhere.

Marcel Theroux has written a fine novel here. It is harrowing at times, but is written so beautifully that we are drawn on despite the horrors. Marcel Theroux’s father is of course the travel-writer and novelist Paul Theroux and I would say that the son writes as well as the father. The reviewer in the New York Times called Far North “an unbearably sad yet often sublime novel” and I think that sums it up well enough.

I am grateful to Gaskella for writing about this book in her blog and bringing it to my attention.

2011 Round-up including best books

Tom — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:35:39 +0000

La Flotte - Ile de Ré

2011 was an eventful year for our family, with the birth of Florence, a new grand-daughter in February and the marriage of our son in September. We now have two little girls to look after on Wednesdays while our daughter works and I have spent many afternoons doing Sudoku puzzles with half an eye on the girls in the soft-play area of our local leisure centre.

We travelled into the Eurozone in summer with a Rhine Cruise in June and a week in the Ile de Ré in September (which my wife and I will remember forever as the holiday in which I filled my diesel car with unleaded petrol on the journey home). Will I need Deutschmarks and Francs to do the same travels next year?

Well, it seems to be the thing for book bloggers to produce “best of” lists at the end of the year. I’ve been through my list of books this year and the results are below. I’ve written 53000 words in 2011 and reviewed 49 books (with one more to come on Thursday). I reviewed 70 books last year, but this year I had a break from book-blogging during July to September.

My best books in various catergories are as follows:

Best classic

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (Robert Louis Stevenson) – because it was an easy read while on holiday and is full of humourand French atmosphere.

Best contemporary fiction

The Hunger Trace (Edward Hogan) – I shouldn’t make my latest read a best-of, but I think this one will stand the test of time.

Best historical fiction

Pure (Andrew Miller) – a very fine book, beautifully written with what feels like bags of authenticity.

Best biography

A Man of Parts (David Lodge) – a bit of a fictionalised biography but I loved the imaginary conversations between the author and H G Wells.

Best travel

Forgotten Land (Max Egremont) – travels in East Prussia by a master of the genre.

Best thriller

Headhunters (Jo Nesbo) – gosh, this was clever plotting.

Best Kindle only – jointly to

The Colour of Her Eyes (Conan Kennedy) – the quiet Sussex town of Bognor Regis is not the most likely setting for a crime novel but this works really well.
The Valley of Heaven and Hell (Susie Kelly) – one of the most entertaining and informative travel accounts I have read in a long time. Susie and her husband cycle from Paris to Rheims following the Marie Antoinette trail.

Many thanks for my readers – I’m always surprised you visit but you are very welcome. Thanks also to my fellow book-bloggers who offer so much support – and so many reading recommendations.