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 [...]]]> 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

The novel is set in 1851, and readers find [...]]]> Well, The Sisters Brothers didn’t win this year’s Booker Prize and most of the pundits said that it was an outsider.  Perhaps it was a little too quirky, a humorous add-on the short-list to provide some light reading for those who struggle through the complete set.

The novel is set in 1851, and readers find themselves in the company of Eli and Charlie Sisters, a couple of “guns for hire” who are travelling on horseback from Oregon to California where they have a job to do, “to find and kill a prospector in California named Hermann Kermit Warm”.

The story is told by Eli, the younger of the two, a man who has lived in the shadow of his big brother all his life but without his brother’s natural liking for cold-blooded murder.

The brothers journey is slow and full of incidents and strange meetings – the “weeping man” who seems to have an incurable sorrow which he is unable to properly communicate, a young boy who has lost his family but who the brothers have to leave in the wild, various whores and criminals who think they can double-cross the brothers only to have their hopes seriously disappointed.

But it is the character of Eli which is most beguiling, with his self-doubt and introspective ponderings on the life of an assassin.  Clearly he is not comfortable with his adopted profession and yearns to be a shop-keeper in a small town:  a career about as diametrically opposed to being a hit-man as it is possible to be.

As I read the book, I couldn’t help but think of the Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou, with its multiple humorous incidents and also its mythic qualities which raise it above the average “western”.  George Clooney would make a great Charlie Sisters and I kept slotting him into my mind-pictures as I read.

Patrick deWitt has a knack for capturing things with fresh eyes.  For example, at one point, Eli Sisters has a bad tooth which causes his face to swell up and create agonising pain.  They travel into a small town and manage to find Reginald Watts, a failed farmer who has turned to dentistry, but bemoans the fact that he has only had three customers in as many weeks – “It would appear that oral hygiene is low on the list of priorities in this part of the world”.  His training has consisted of memorising the nerve chart and then working out for himself how to use the dentists tools which were shipped to him on credit.  However, Watts has learned how to inject cocaine into the gum to enable him to treat his patients painlessly, and what’s more, after the procedure, he gives Eli a toothbrush and some tooth powder.  When he shows Eli how to clean his teeth, Eli is “greatly impressed with the tingling feeling this toothbrush gave me” and vows to use it every day.

The world never stops surprising the brothers with its new inventions and like the three partners in the Coen Brothers film, they move from one thought-provoking encounter to another, each one of which provokes a few philosophising remarks from the thoughtful Eli.

The brothers experience of women has been based on their experiences in bars and whorehouses, but Eli learns the pleasures of intimate conversation with a female accountant for a whorehouse.  He leaves his brother to the delights of drink and women while he follows the accountant outside and finds that nothing is quite so rewarding as a relationship.  Things cannot progress beyond the first explorations of a relationship but his desire for a settled life is intensified.  Whereas Charlie takes to killing like a fish to water,  Eli has had enough and tells his brother that the planned murder in California will be his last.

When the brothers arrive in San Francisco, things do not work out quite as they had planned.  They discover much about Hermann Warm has a remarkable invention which appears to increase productivity of gold-panning a hundred-fold. The last third of the book describes the brothers adventures in trying to fulfil their deadly mission this is not as straightforward as they expected.  In the end, Eli and Charlie’s odyssey comes to an end but not in a way the reader could possible have predicted, although it is a satisfying enough ending to this unique novel.

As suggested earlier, if ever a book was crying out to be made into a film this is it.  It is full of visual images and eccentric incidents to which no humorous extras need to be added.  Its a wholly enjoyable read, perhaps reminiscent of Peter Carey’s writings, but different enough for DeWitt to be classed as an original writer who will be worth watching in the future.

On a more practical note, there was a discussion on BBC radio this morning between a book designer and an erstwhile designer of LP covers.  The LP designer reminded listeners of how the whole LP design industry disappeared with the advent of music downloads and that album design is now an irrelvance.  The book designer from Penguin argued that good book design can increase sales.  A few years ago I would have been on the side of the book designer, but now I’ve discarded so many paper-based volumes from my library I really don’t want to re-clutter the shelves with endless more – however well-designed they are.

The Sisters Brothers is on the face of it well-designed but I soon tired of the peculiar font with its strong verticals and extra-fine horizontals.  This made it not an easy read I and I began to long for my Kindle.  The book doesn’t have chapter headings in the conventional sense, but each “chapter” begins with the first line type-set in an extra large but even narrower font which I found disrupted my reading and caused me to have to re-read the first line a couple of times before I got the gist of it.  The book design is credited to Suet Yee Chong and I think he needs to learn that while a book should look good, the main aim of book design is to aid the reading experience, not to detract from it.

Patrick Ness in The Guardian almost put me off this book by telling me about the author -

It is difficult to find a profile of Nicole Krauss that doesn’t mention 1) her beauty, 2) her youth or 3) her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer (even younger, slightly less beautiful). There’s an inevitable air of [...]]]>

Patrick Ness in The Guardian almost put me off this book by telling me about the author -

It is difficult to find a profile of Nicole Krauss that doesn’t mention 1) her beauty, 2) her youth or 3) her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer (even younger, slightly less beautiful). There’s an inevitable air of complaint about these facts, however sympathetically presented, the implication being that her ability to get books published has less to do with talent than with a particularly irritating streak of good luck.

I am pleased however that I ignored the envy other authors are feeling about Nicole Krauss for within a few pages of starting Great House I was hooked.  I don’t really care what her background is – the fact is Great House is a fine book by anybody’s standards, and although it deals with obvious literary fiction themes (to name but three: the effects of the Holocaust on future generations, the iniquities of South American dictators, the semi-incestuous relationship of a brother and sister), it does with this such style, that to my mind, it qualifies as great fiction.

The book consists of several inter-leaved stories, each featuring a huge, multi-drawered desk, as it passes from one owner to another.  The desk seems to exert a totemic power over its owners and as it handed from one person another they feel a sense of loss that mirrors a greater loss in their lives to which the desk has somehow become linked.

The book opens in 1972.  Nadia, a writer has recently broken up with her live-in boyfriend, leaving her with an apartment devoid of furniture.  A friend puts her in touch with a Chilean poet, Daniel Varsky, who is returning home and wants someone to look after his furniture while he is away.  She goes round to meet him, and immediately finds herself in an engaging relationship with Daniel, only marred by the fact that he is leaving the country.  However, the furniture is hers for the asking, including the great desk, which Daniel tells her was once owned by the poet Lorca.

She has the desk delivered to her apartment and when it arrives, she writes, “my eyes actually filled with tears . . . as is so often the case, the tears sprang from older more obscure regrets I had delayed thinking about, which the gift or loan of a stranger’s furniture had somehow unsettled”.

Postcards arrive from Chile for a couple of years and then dry up (we later learn that Daniel was killed in a Chilean prison).  The desk remains with Nadia for the next 25 years until one day a young woman calls claiming to be the daughter of Daniel Varsky and asks if she can have the desk back.  Her name is Leah Weisz, and when she turns up to to claim the desk, Nadia immediately recognises Daniel in his daughter, “the same thinness, the same nose, and despite it, the underlying delicateness”.  For reasons unknown, Leah is having the desk shipped to Jerusalem.  Within days, Nadia finds her life is falling apart.  She suffers panic attacks, stomach pains, nausa and feelings of terror.  She sees her therapist and then one day out of the blue announces that she is going to Jerusalem.  The elemental power of the desk may be the key to her problems and perhaps to her whole life.

The subsequent scenes move from one location to another, and one era to another.  We find ourselves learning the history of the desk before Daniel was given it, and its progress after Nadia, its ultimate destiny to be reunited with the family of its original Jewish owner who left it behind in Budapest in 1944.  Each set of characters has their own story to tell, stories of loss and longing which are all written in the same elegant prose which is often so well-crafted that I found myself stopped in my tracks.  It took me a long time to read this book, not because it is especially lengthy but because the words were so heart-stoppingly good that I frequently had to pause to reflect on their meaning.

Often I sensed resonances of W G Sebald, in passages like this (which could almost have come from Sebald’s Vertigo)

I’d planned to walk past the house before finding a bed and breakfast nearby to spend the night, then to call the following morning.  But making my way down the platform I felt a heavy ache in my legs, as if I had arrived from London on foot, rather than sat idle for two and a half hours on the train.  I stopped to switch my bag to the other shoulder and without looking up, I sensed the gray sky pressing down on the glass roof from above, and when the letters on the flip board above he platform began to whir and click, time and destinations disintegrating, leaving us, the newly arrived, in limbo, a sickening wave of claustrophobia came over me and I had to struggle to resist the urge to walk straight to the ticket office and purchase a ticket fo the next train back to London.

It is Nicole Krauss’s assured voice which kept me reading this book with an unusual level of intensity.  She writes of interior states of mind, often illusory, but manages the different conditions of each of her varied characters with great confidence.  Sometimes I almost didn’t feel that she invented it all – the book seems to have a mythical quality, a true story perhaps, not in fact, but in what it speaks of.

I was reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, “every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it”.  Nicole Krauss has an ability to draw her readers into the close and intricate worlds of her characters, with a sense of intimacy which almost makes you feel part of their circle.  This is a fine, fine book which deserves to last as long as Daniel Varsky’s great desk, and like the desk it should be passed from one person to another in the hope that it will be as meaningful to them as it was to us.

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It seems a little pointless writing about this massively hyped novel Freedom, the follow up to Franzen’s 2001 block-buster, The Corrections.  After all, every English language newspaper on the planet seems to have published a review of it, and [...]]]> Note – for the Michelham Priory Christmas Quiz 2010 click here.  For the answers click here.

It seems a little pointless writing about this massively hyped novel Freedom, the follow up to Franzen’s 2001 block-buster, The Corrections.  After all, every English language newspaper on the planet seems to have published a review of it, and the number of blog posts about it surely exceed those for any other book.

However, for my own purposes at least I’m going to provide a few thoughts on Freedom, not least because it took a couple of weeks out of my reading life this winter and it seems a shame to omit it from this blog solely because I’m unlikely to find anything original to say about it.

Firstly, let me say that Freedom is a pretty good read, if rather overlong.  Its a compelling family drama which manages to bring out all the issues that are concerning America at this point in time.  Its characters are personifications of “types” of modern Americans and they confront the issues which concern America today.  And let’s not forget that this is Franzen’s concern – to produce what you might call “state of the nation” fiction – which exemplifies the power of the novel to bring out the underlying meaning of events.  As I read it, I was even reminded of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities which took a similar approach to the rapacious greed of the financial world of the 1980s – however, Franzen is much more serious that Tom Wolfe, who manages to keep his readers racing from page to page: with Franzen its sometimes a bit of an effort, due partly I think to lack of editing.

Freedom is a kind of War and Peace (Franzen tells us so much in the story)  – a novel about love, loss, friendship, and commitment to ideals that spans decades.  It focuses on the story of Patty and Walter Berglund, their children and most importantly, Walter’s lifelong friend, tobacco-chewing Richard Katz.   Katz is an interesting character – a partly successful rock singer with a great deal of charisma and talent, yet odious in many respects due to his excessive self-regard.  Walter is more ponderous and dull, perhaps “worthy” is the right description, for he always wants to do the right thing, ending up with a career in environmental protection but having a fanatical and unfashionable belief in population control.   Patty is the “hockey Mom” type who has given up her career to stay at home – needless to say, this turns out to be one big error on her part.

The book is a sort of high-class soap opera in the way that one family drama leads to another and you want to find out what happens next.  Like soap operas you also know that certain romantic pairings are going to be inevitable (and rather disappointingly, the old cliché of wife and husband’s best friend features heavily).

The book is complex and goes of at tangents throughout its course.  However, its rather beautifully written and despite these sideways lurches, its impossible not to be drawn into the narrative.  My one criticism is that Franzen’s voice changes little.  There is a lengthy section where Patty launches off into her autobiography but the tone and style of writing is rather too much like the rest of the book which is written in the third person.  With the switch to Patty’s “autobiography suggested by a therapist”, my interest waned rapidly. Patty’s stilted use of the third person, often calling herself “the autobiographer”, jarred on me, together with her unlikely ability to reproduce the exact words of conversations at which she was not present.

This is a book for liberal-minded baby-boomers and its possible that younger people would fail to understand some of the personal conflicts the characters go through.  Many reviwers have questioned whether Freedom is the Great American Novel of the 2010s.  I would call it good, but not great.   It is for example not as good in my view as Richard Ford’s novel, The Lay of the Land which seems to have more grown-up characters with far richer inner lives than Franzen’s rather stereotypical characters.

No-one could doubt Franzen’s political correctness and British readers may appreciate his outlook on modern life in general and American foreign policy in particular.  In a video interview with Sarfraz Manzoor, Franzen discusses freedom in all its forms and seems to suggest that our freedom is, or should be constrained by responsibility others.  Loyalty to friends means work. And while this applies in personal life, it is also a principle which nations should follow also.  Franzen seems to be ashamed of the actions of the USA over the last ten years and does not shrink from voicing his disappointment -

The degree to which we are almost a rogue state, and causing enormous problems around the world in our attempts to preserve our freedom to drive SUVs or whatever – it does make one wonder what is in out national character to make us such a problem state.

Frazen feels that the USA almost fetishises freedom and pursues it to a degree that is harmful to other nations.  He identifies the Democratic Party as the “adult party” who are tasked with making an unworkable system work by battling the childish and unrelenting anger of the Right.

As has been well-reported elsewhere, the UK edition of the book has a few minor typing errors.  However, I read the offending version and hardly noticed them – and wasn’t the pulping of thousands of copies a contribution to the waste of resources which Franzen lambasts so consistently in the story?

Freedom is a good read and I’d recommend, with the proviso that it IS rather long and you’re going to have to have a good capacity for endurance to get the best from it.

Title: Freedom
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publication: Harper Collins (23 September 2010), Hardback, 570 pages
ISBN: 9780007269754

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Like many readers, I have a vague and sporadic interest in poetry and like to browse favourite anthologies from time to time.  I occasionally set pen to paper myself, usually when something has moved me more than usual, but only in a private way and definitely not for sharing.  But on the whole I [...]]]>

Like many readers, I have a vague and sporadic interest in poetry and like to browse favourite anthologies from time to time.  I occasionally set pen to paper myself, usually when something has moved me more than usual, but only in a private way and definitely not for sharing.  But on the whole I tend to forget about poetry and it doesn’t feature greatly in my reading experience.

Last week, Nicholson Baker’s new book The Anthologist came my way (I’d ordered it from the library before they’d actually got a copy and so I was the first person to borrow it – what a treat!) and has managed to get me interested in poetry again – and one or two poetry books are back on my bedside table.  I’m not alone in finding that The Anthologist has this effect – The Guardian books blog had a similar experience and described this book as “an elegant and surprisingly emotional book; one of the finest of the year”

Nicholson Baker is a interesting author.  He writes slightly quirky novels like The Anthologist, or A Box of Matches, but was also responsible for the substantial pacifist tract against World War II, Human Smoke which I reviewed here.  He is a keen evangelist for Wikipedia and has recently published just about the most useful article I have read about the Kindle e-reader, in The New Yorker magazine.

Nicholson Baker's earlier book - A Box of Matches

The Anthologist is a strange book.  On the one hand its a first person account by the fictional poet Paul Chowder of a period of his life in which he was charged with writing the introduction to a new poetry anthology.  Paul describes his approach to poetry and spends quite a bit of time discussing poetic forms, great poets of the past and their lives and why some poems “work” and others don’t.  But mixed in with this is a personal story of how Paul has lost his girlfriend Roz.  She seems to have given up on him, finally finding his chaotic and disorganised approach to life just too difficult to deal with.  Paul misses her greatly and throughout the book launches various half-baked schemes to win her back.

The remarkable thing from the reader’s perspective is how Paul’s personal difficulties impact on what he says about poetry, and in a way, almost form a new poem about the inner life of a middle aged man going through a difficult time.  The book is very funny, for we get highly involved with the minutiae of Paul’s life – we hear about the de-fleaing of a dog, the making of a bead necklace as a gift to Roz, the practical difficulties of laying a wooden floor and the best way to pick blueberries while on a walk.

We get little insighful reflections along the way:

Isn’t crying a good thing?  Why would we want to give pills to people so they don’t weep?  When you read a great line in a poem, what’s the first thing you do?  You can’t help it.  Crying is a good thing.  And rhyming and weeping – there are obvious linkages between the two.  When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter.  When you’re an adult you don’t sob quite the same way.  Bue when you’re a little kid, you go “Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih”.  You actually cry in duple meter.  Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.

I found this a beguiling read.  I wanted it to go on and on.  There was something about it which showed that in the midst of immense difficulties, the small details of life can carry you through.  The buying of a loaf of good bread with some olives and taking time to savour them can do you good.  Going to bed surrounded by books – “I never make the bed – its like a stew of books.  The bed is the liquid medium.  Its a Campbells Chunky Soup of books”.  Or going out to the garden at midnight to sit in a chair and listen to the night.  Baker’s writing has the Zen-like quality which brings you to a halt in your hurried life and says “take your time” – a quality which must be essential if you’re going to make any sense out of a new poem.

I understand that its worth getting hold of the audio book of The Anthologist because the author reads it himself.  I might even do that – or perhaps ask for it for Christmas.  I have a feeling that its something I would return to over many years.  In the meantime, this is one book I keep dipping back into after I’ve read it and when its out in paperback I’ll definitely buy a copy.

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, [...]]]>

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

Don’t worry, many of the stories are far more substantial than that, but they all share a rather quirky outlook on life which challenges the customary way of looking at things, as in the story, Our Kindness, begins -

We have ideals of being kind to everyone in the world.  But then we are very unkind to our own husband, the person who is closest at hand to us.  But then we think he is preventing us from being unkind to everyone else in the world.

As I read this collection, I realised that you have to read several at a time in order to appreciate Lydia’s unique view on life.  She has the ability to look at things from a new angle so that her readers suddenly see the strangeness of things they usually take for granted.  Once more, I can only quote examples.  Take the story, “Interesting”:  it is simply a few short paragraphs each of which uses the word “interesting”.  ”My friend is interesting but he is not in his apartment.  Their conversation appears interesting but they are speaking a language I do not understand”.  In each paragraph, we move through different ways in which the word can be used and then at the end we read of a handsome traffic engineer who is interesting because of his appearance, his fine English accent and his animation.  We expect him to say something interesting when he is about to speak, but no, he is never interesting, because “yet again, he talks about traffic patterns”.  There is so much that could be said about this story.  Was it a failure in the observer that prevented her from finding what he said interesting?  Was the man there specifically to talk about traffic patterns?  (in which case he may well have been interesting to those who had come to listen).  Or was he just a bore who couldn’t leave his pet subject for more than a few moments?

All Lydia’s stories can stimulate reflection in this way.  They can’t be taken at face value, but have to be reflected on.  The blanks have to be filled in.  And yet, despite the brevity of many of the stories, they are not poetry.  Lydia herself in the interview above says that she is happy to call them stories and I think she’s right.  Terms like “prose poem” or “philosophical reflection” are just too laden with meaning for these precise, elegant pieces each of which has at least a tiny narrative flow to them which qualifies them as stories.

In her Guardian interview, Lydia Davis was asked about her short pieces and said, “it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn’t make me recoil exactly – I loved working on it – but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke”.

I am pleased to have this book on my bedside table and will dip in and out of it for some time to come.  It would make a great gift for any reader as I’m sure anyone would find something of interest in it.

Newspaper reviews:
Lydia Davis with William Skidelsky in The Guardian

A podcast on this book, including a reading of two of the stories is available on the New York Review of Books website

But sooner or later, [...]]]> These days I find myself struggling with the Christmas thing.  Like most adults, I’ve lived through many of them.  I’ve had times when the whole Nativity has been tremendously meaningful to me, and other times when it barely passes through my consciousness – this year, the latter condition seems to apply.

But sooner or later, all those carols on the radio start to get to me – John Rutter’s Candlelight Carol for example, or Harold Darke’s arrangement of In the Bleak Midwinter, or perhaps that most moving German Christmas song, Still, Still, Still, Weils Kindlein Schalfen Will, sung so beautifully by Bryn Terfel on his album Simple Gifts.

I suppose its something about a message based on an infant  “bringing down the mighty from their thrones”, which runs so counter to the strong-flowing current of modern life.  And so I turn once again to The Other Wise Man.  I don’t know how many times I’ve read it but it seems to resonate with my mood most years, when all the paraphernalia of Christmas overwhelms the story of a baby being born who somehow gives a glimmer of hope to those who wish to receive it.  You can find The Other Wise Man for free on the net on Project Gutenburg.  Its not very long and won’t take more than half an hour or so to read.

The Other Wise Man is a simple story of a fourth wise man, Artaban, a Zoroastrian scholar, who wants to travel with the other three Magi to follow the star, but keeps getting held up because he responds to people on the way who need his help.  The poor man arrives too late to see the baby, but then there’s a catch at the end which seems to encapsulate the message of the Nativity and usually gets to me in one way or another.

I think what I like about the story, is that its for those who don’t believe, those people who never quite grasp what religion is all about and perhaps don’t even want to.  Its for people like me who don’t really believe that anything happens to us when we die but still want to live as good a life as we can manage without really wanting to articulate why that might matter.

The author Henry Van Dyke was one of those men whose memory is lost in the mists of time, an American Presbyterian clergyman who wrote much about his faith, most of it long-forgotten.  Nowadays The Other Wise Man is the only book for which he is remembered, and the edition I have is only 60 pages long including illustrations such as the one on the right.