A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 4000 unique visitors each month. So far 212 book reviews have been published.
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 Well, that’s about 280 pages of adventuring with Don Quixote so far. Fortunately, Miguel de Cervantes has turned out to be the writer everyone says he is and my interest has been held.
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
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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” -
A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years. It was not enough for her to brush his coats, wipe his inkwell, finger his ivory comb: she had to build her house over his grave and sit with him night after night in the damp cellar
Continue reading Review – The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
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In Bomber County Daniel Swift describes how he started to research the life of his grandfather (also Daniel Swift) who was lost at sea when his the Lancaster bomber he was flying was shot down over Holland. His researches, which included visits to military graves and other memorable sites in western Europe, led him to think about the nature of the Allied bombing campaign over Germany.
Then, being conscious of the poetic legacy of the First World War (Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke etc), he began to wonder why the Second World War did not produce a similar crop of memorable poetry. The result is a book part history, part memoir, part poetic history, but all beautifully written, with a style that befits a teacher of English Literature and a writer for the New York Times Book Review.
The work of Bomber Command in the latter years of Word War II is of course mired in controversy. It seems impossible to speak of what they did with unconditional admiration, despite the fact that the Allies would probably not have won the war without the massive contribution of so many brave young men who flew in Wellingtons and Lancaster to wreak destruction on German industrial centres – and ancient cities. As Winston Churchill said, “the fighters are our salvation, but the bombers are our means of victory”.
So great has been our embarrassment at the scale of the bombing campaign that it is only now that Bomber Command are going to get a memorial in Central London. It takes a book like Bomber County to remind us of the sacrifice made by the airmen who flew dangerous missions over and over again, usually until they eventually failed to return from that fatal run when anti-aircraft fire finally brought them down.
Continue reading Review: Bomber County – Daniel Swift
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So far, my reading of Don Quixote has shown me that its humour is its strongest feature, quite apart from the compelling drama of the ridiculous “adventures” and the lyrical tales which are told along the way (by the way, the idea of reading Don Quixote over ten weeks came from Stu of Winstonsdad’s blog).
In a recent interview for Reading Matters Triple Choice Tuesday I selected A Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith as my favorite book of all time and I am now struck by the similarities between Charles Pooter and Don Quixote.
- Both are pompous, believing themselves a cut above everyone else.
- Pooter takes over-weening pride in being a member of the new middle-class of Victorian London with housemaids and tradesmen to boss around. Don Quixote is so self-deluded that he gets an inn-keeper to make him a knight and then goes round proclaiming chivalric duties and privileges wherever he goes. Pooter makes himself into a ridiculous figure without realising it, just as Don Quixote makes a fool of himself wherever he goes.
- Pooter’s voice of reason his wife Carrie, whereas Don Quixote spends as much time ignoring the wise counsel of his “steward” Sancho Panza, with equally disastrous results.
Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong Part 2 – when danger outweighs hope
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 I’ve written frequently about my dislike of the e-book idea. But now Amazon have published details of their new UK version of Kindle with its library of 400,000 books to purchase and over a million for free, is beginning to exert an appeal.
But, but, but – what about other shops? What will become of my favoured store, The Book Depository? What happens to all those lovely book design, and the people who illustrate and set so many beautiful physical volumes? Do I want Amazon to be in even more of a monopoly position? The whole thing worries me. But, the advantages can’t be ignored either. Hmm. I’m going to have to think about this and also read some of the 1000′s of articles published on the topic.
A COMMON READER IS FALTERING
My blog is having problems. I’m getting a lot of server errors when I publish and I know some people are finding it hard to leave comments. I’d be grateful if anyone who experiences problems could mail me and tell me what they are please? I know its a nuisance but it would help me a lot. Thanks in anticipation.
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An article was published in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper with the provocative title, “Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, says leading academic“. Yes,I think I can live with that! Salman Rushdie and Juian Barnes’ books usually leave me cold, but not so sure about Ian McEwan, who’s written some fantastic books.
I’ve never heard of Gabriel Josipovici but his views are certainly provocative – “Reading Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his generation – Martin Amis, McEwan – leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner”. And what about this? - “Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy remained more avant-garde than the so-called avant-garde today”. I’ve never read Tristram Shandy – obviously one to seek out.
Gabriel Josipovici has just published the book, What Ever Happened to Modernism? which looks like a fascinating read -
With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.
(from the publishers website). That sounds like a book to get hold of when its published in September.
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Along with Stu of Winston’s Dad’s Blog, I am reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes at the rate of 92 pages a week (it will take us ten weeks to complete the book). We are using the acclaimed 2003 translation by Edith Grossman whose Wikipedia entry suggests that she deserves a review of her own – I’d recommend anyone who reads Don Quixote to read the interview with her here.
I’m not going to provide background information on the book or any sense of literary criticism – there are vast amounts of material already on the net including a comprehensive and highly informative Wikipedia entry. I shall instead concentrate as usual on my reading experience, what I thought of the book, passages I particularly enjoyed, overall impressions.
Firstly, I was impressed with the sheer modernity of this book. De Cervantes’ humour and satire is bang up to date, and the whole book has a freshness about it which made me feel it could be a modern novel. It wasn’t a difficult read, but raced along from one episode to another with terrific pace. If the next eight hundred pages are going to be anything like the first hundred that I’m really not going to be bored in the company of Don Quixote. Let me just pick up a few points that struck me -
Reading can make you go mad
Well, we all know that – Timothy Ryback’s book Hitler’s Private Library shows the power of literature to shape character with disastrous results. Don Quixote developed an obsession with “books of chivalry” and read them with such devotion and enthusiasm that the he let his affairs go to pot and “with these words and phrases the poor gentleman lost his mind”. In fact he read from dusk to dawn and sunrise to sunset and was caught up in so much reading “that his brains dried up”. A warning there for book bloggers I think. This takes me back to being eighteen and reading the whold of Lord of the Rings in one weekend and expecting to see hobbits in the woods when I next took a walk in the country (a belief that soon faded I’m pleased to say).
Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong – Part 1
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 I was drawn to Rhyming Life and Death when I read on the cover that it reflects on “writing, reading and the elusive chimera of literary posterity” . I have a category of book on this blog entitled “books about books”, and as an avid reader, a new addition to it is a reward in itself.
Amos Oz is renowned in Israel for his courageous political stance as a secular social-democrat, having lived on a Kibbutz for thirty years and being a leading voice in the peace movement. He has won numerous literary awards as listed in his Wikipedia entry.
In his latest novel Rhyming Life and Death, Oz addresses the nature of writing fiction by letting his readers in on the internal reflections of the “Author”, a fictional writer, who is invited to attend a public reading of his work in Tel Aviv. During the following eight hours we read of his preparation for the reading, the event itself and then his wanderings around the city through the night-time.
The Author anticipates the questions he is likely to be asked by the audience after the reading -
- Why do you write?
- Why do you write the way you do?
- Are you trying to influence your readers and if so how?
- Do you constantly cross out and correct or do you write straight out of your head?
- What is it like to be a famous writer?
- Do you write with a pen or a computer?
. . . and so on, and on, and on. The Author sits in a café down the road from the literary centre to try to prepare his answers to these questions, but his thoughts are taken up by the waitress, with her “shapely, attractive legs”. He steals a look at her face, and finds it pleasant, sunny, with her hair tied back with a red rubber band. While he is waiting for his omelette and salad he begins to imagine her life, giving her the name “Ricky” as he writes her personal history in his head. We, the readers, are drawn into the creative process, as “Ricky” takes form before our eyes (this is perhaps a little like looking into a mirror placed in front of another mirror – the fictional “Author” creates a fictional personal for the twice-fictional “Ricky”).
Continue reading Review Rhyming Life and Death – Amos Oz
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 British readers may remember Vitali Vitaliev from his time as Moscow correspondent on David Frost’s 1990s television programme, Saturday Night Clive, and many broadcasts on BBC Radio 4. Vitali was born in the Ukraine, eventually defecting to the West, living in Britain and Australia, and eventually returning to London where he is a successful journalist and writer.
Life as A Literary Device, is partly biographical, partly reportage, and partly miscellaneous musing on life. The book consists of ”seemingly disjointed snippets of real life, they connect by association alone – the random pieces of coloured glass that from themselves into a pattern if viewed through that wonderful children’s toy, the kaleidoscope”.
Early in the book he writes of being influenced by the Russian writer Valentin Kataev, the founder of a literary style which he called “mauvism” – “a literary device consisting of the complete negation of all literary devices”. The term mauvism comes from the French word “mauvais” meaning “bad”, and as Kataev himself wrote, “I am the founder of the latest literary school, the mauvistes, the essence of which is that since everyone nowadays writes very well, you must write badly, as badly as possible, then you will attract attention”.
I am pleased to say that Vitaliev does not write badly – far from it in fact, but he has certainly held to the principle of mauvism in writing a book for the Internet age where ”one website routinely carries links to many others. You open a link in a story that you are reading and it takes you away to another story loosely connected to the first one yet years and/or miles away from it; you then close the link and return to the story you were reading in the first place”.
Continue reading Review: Life as a Literary Device – Vitali Vitaliev
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 Like so many English people, I enjoy going to France and experiencing a country very different to my own. I live near a ferry port and often see ships sailing off to cross the Channel and I always experience a touch of yearning to be sailing to the land of good wine and different (I won’t say “better”) food.
My nostalgia for France is fed when I turn to Guy Savage’s book blog, His Futile Preoccupations. Guy has a love of French literature and has read far more Balzac, de Maupassant and Zola than most readers. Being conscious of a Balzac-shaped gap in my reading I decided on Guy’s recommendation to begin with Père Goriot. Guy reviewed this himself but I have not reminded myself of what he wrote and will only go back to re-read his review when I have finished my own – such is my fear of being influenced by someone who knows far more about Balzac’s books than I do.
Père Goriot forms part of Balzac’s life-work, La Comédie humaine, and he placed it in the section Scenes of Private Life. It tells the story of Eugène de Rastignac, a young man who comes to Paris to study law. His widowed mother has gone out of her way to provide his means of support at great cost to herself and his two sisters, and it is her hope that Eugène will make his way in the world and restore their fortune.
Continue reading Review: Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
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