A Common Reader

The Last Station is a fictionalised account of the last year in the life of Leo Tolstoy, and as can be seen from the cover, the books has recently been filmed with actors Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer.  The book was first published in 1990 and I assume its been re-published to tie in with the film.

Having just read The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, I was interested to read this book.  I have no doubt that the author, Jay Parini, did a huge amount of research and background reading in order to recreate these events in the form of a novel, and in many ways it is convincing but also contains some incongruities that rather spoilt the experience for me.

Each chapter in the book is written as if in the first person by six different voices, including Tolstoy himself, Sophia, Vladmir Chertkov (Tolstoy’s companion and promoter of his work) and Tolstoy’s secretary, Valentin Bulgakov (the latter show with Tolstoy in this rather good photograph).

The book has a good dramatic flow and kept my attention throughout. My quibbles are in the distortion that arises from focusing on one year only when so much has gone before which the reader needs to know in order to understand the context.  Jay Parini’s focus on the present moment will not really give the reader a rounded view of these events, although they undoubtedly make a good story.

Continue reading Review: The Last Station – Jay Parini

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I didn’t particularly enjoy Joshua Ferris’s last book, Then We Came To The End, perhaps because its theme (the tedium and chronic insecurity of modern office life) was a bit too close to home at that time.  Many of the events in it paralleled my own experiences a little too painfully.  Fortunately those days are now gone and I was in a happier mood to read The Unnamed, and I thought it was a much better book, original in both theme and execution.

This is a great book for walkers, but in a rather perverse way.  Not for lawyer Tim (the main focus of the book), a gentle stroll through quiet countryside, but rather a compulsive need to take-off, in an OCD type of way, a driven emigration from family, work and comfort into the snowy outer wastes of the city, however inadequately dressed, whatever the time of day and night.

Tim walks until he is exhausted and then gets found among the rubbish bins behind a Safeway, or knocks on someone’s door asking for help.  He phones home and begs his wife to come out and save him, but has no idea where he is.  Telephoning the emergency services for help is pointless when you can’t give your location.  This it a terrible and unique affliction which confounds doctors and specialists and could easily lead Tim to his death.

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I have been very pleased to read David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide for it is an unusual book which provides a lot of insight into the painful journeys which have to be taken to come to terms with family tragedy.  The writer comes to this from many angles, much as a historian reviews a variety of sources in an attempt to arrive at a definitive account of what really happened.

The title of this book is interesting.  Clearly it is about suicide, or more specifically a suicide, but why “legend” rather than say, “story” or perhaps “memoir”?  And the main character, Jim Fenn: why is this name so similar to David Vann’s own father, James Vann?  In fact we learn from the acknowledgements at the back of this book that David Vann is in fact writing about his father’s suicide, and that the stories are fictional but “based on a lot that’s true”.

The thing about a legend is that it may or may not be true.  Its something which has achieved an almost mythical status so I think we can say that David Vann’s stories will go beyond the mere recounting of facts and will probe into the deeper meaning of his father’s death, its long term effects and its outworking in the lives of those he left behind.

At first this book appears to be a single text, a continuum, but again in the acknowledgements at the back, David Vann thanks his graduate school tutors for helping him see “how the stories might become a book”.  And in fact we have here four linked short stories and one novella which together tell a sort of myth about the terrible events which happened to Vann when he was a young boy. Continue reading Review: Legend of a Suicide – David Vann

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The fact that I have read 11 of Anne Tyler’s 18 novels suggests that I think highly of this fine author.  She is one of the few writers whose books I pre-order before publication and then devour, putting everything else aside for a few days, and then finding that for the next two weeks or so her characters keep coming back to me.

I’m not alone in my respect for this writer.  Anne Tyler was nominated ‘the greatest living novelist writing in English’ by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby, the latter saying, “everything changed for me when I read Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Lorrie Moore, all in about ’86-’87 … voice, tone, simplicity, humour, soul …”.

Tyler is a deeply humanistic writer who depicts the complexities of the human condition while making no attempt to judge or comment on what she sees.  We see people follow the tracks laid out for them, and the way these often appear to be dead-ends.  Her characters get “stuck”, unable to move on, trapped in other people’s disappointments and their own sense of failure.  And then Tyler works her magic, healing and redeeming through relationships, which often unexpectedly come into her peoples’ lives in bizarre ways and cast a whole new light on her their characters.

Tyler understands family more than most.  In real life, we know that families are rarely wholly supportive, being beset by sibling rivalry and parental criticism.  “Little brother” and “big sister” remain in those roles long into their middle and even old age. Tyler specialises in exploring this type-casting – when her families get together we know that the result is rarely happy. Continue reading Review: Noah’s Compass – Anne Tyler

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It is always a pleasure to read a new edition from One World Classics, particularly when the title is one I’ve not read before.  Black Spring was written between Miller’s more well-known Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and while it has not gained the stature of the other books, it is well worth a read in its own right.

First published in 1936, the book consists of ten almost independent (though linked) episodes covering Miller’s early life in Brooklyn and the period when he was writing in Paris.

The Wikipedia description of Miller’s writing applies perfectly to this book: “mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism”.  I have little doubt that while the work may be rooted in personal experience, this is more like an excursion from the bare bones of Miller’s existence than a verifiable memoir rooted in the real-world.

The book was banned in the English-speaking world when it was first published in Paris, but the modern reader will again be surprised at what shocked earlier generations for there is nothing particularly salacious in it to the modern mind.  Perhaps American and British readers would have been shocked to the core at Miller’s description of the Parisian urinals? – -

I go to the urinal to take a leak.  As I stand there looking up at the house fronts, a demure young woman leans out of a window to watch me.  How many times have I stood there in this smiling, gracious world, the sun splashing over me and the birds twittering crazily, and found a woman looking down at me from an open window, her smile crumbling into soft little bits which the birds gather in their beaks and desposit sometimes at the base of of a urinal where the water gurgles melodiously, and a man comes along with his fly open and pours the steaminng contents of his bladder over the dissolving crumbs

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Although I’ve heard of Chuck Palahniuk, particularly in the context of his highly successful novel Fight Club, I’d never read anything by him before until being sent  Pygmy through the post.  At first I was not sure that this was going be my sort of thing, but within a few pages I was hooked.

Imagine a country containing an amalgamation of all the worst attributes of North Korea, Communist China and Nazi Germany.  Children are tested for their future educational and career needs at the age of four, and those who show high potential are whisked away from their parents into state institutions.  There they are brainwashed into complete subservience to the state, using a curriculum involving extreme martial arts, political indoctrination, chemical warfare and urban terrorism.

Now move forward to a mid-Western church in America where a female missionary feels such concern for these children that she arranges an exchange visit for a number of them to stay with American host-families.  The children arrive in America to have six months of respite from their harsh existence, and as the host-father puts it, to “to sing our songs and share the fellowship of our homes and church”.  However, unbeknown to these generous-hearted families, these children have been given a plan:  their educators have shown them how to wreak “Operation Havoc”, a terrible act of destruction on the evil American town in which they have come to stay.

Continue reading Review: Pygmy – Chuck Palahniuk

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I came to The Other with mixed feelings as I tend to think of David Guterson as someone who’s suffered from “second novel syndrome” – a brilliant start with Snow Falling on Cedars, followed by a rather mediocre second novel, East of the Montains.  His third novel, Our Lady of the Forest, was much better however and sticks in my memory to this day.

The Other is the story of two boys who grow up as life-long friends while following very different paths.  The narrator, Neil Countryman, meets John William Barry while competing in a running race.  A friendship develops between them and they both develop a love of the wilderness, taking long trips into the vast landscapes of what is now the North Cascades National Park in the Pacific North West. They also love literature, from Jack Kerouac, through to T S Eliot, taking in along the way a huge range of classic and contemporary books.

Neil Countryman eventually decides to train as an English teacher, and marries and raises children.  Barry on the other hand ploughs a different furrow and becomes a mystically-inclined hermit who builds himself a cave dwelling in a remote part of the mountains, and his life revolves around survival skills and Gnostic literature.  Countryman visits Barry periodically and brings him supplies from civilisation and news of the outside world.  However, ultimately, Barry becomes achieves a sort of fame as The Hermit of The Hoh (mountain) and Countryman, his amanuensis.

Continue reading Review: The Other – David Guterson

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