The Book Bag

And like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter ….

But when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable ….

Exactly – how do you choose from a TBR of 700+? Back in the days of travel by ship and train, the narrator of Somerset Maugham’s short story, The Book Bag, didn’t need to.

… since then I have made a point of travelling with the largest sack made for carrying soiled linen and filling it to the brim with books to suit every possible occasion and every mood. It weighs a ton and strong porters reel under its weight.

Unfortunately my porter, who incidently agrees with the statement that “women who read are dangerous”, particularly when we’re travelling and he’s carrying, isn’t so accommodating. (Not even after 25 years ….)  It’s been tough but I’ve got the travelling TBR down to just 6.  He won’t even notice!

Californian Reading

On the left from bottom up: 1) Ross MacDonald – The Doomsters,  2) Elizabeth Strout – Olive Kitteridge.  Chosen because I need a novel from the 50’s and another with a colour in the title to finish this year’s reading challenges.  3) Michael Ondaatje – Divisadero,  because 5 months in and I still haven’t made a start on the 3rd Canadian Reading Challenge plus Divisadero is somewhere in California.  (Will I find it?).  4) Michael Connelly – The Closers – to read when in Los Angeles.  5)  Glen David Gold – Carter Beats The Devil – a tall of 1920’s mystery and illusion, set in San Francisco  6) Love Letters From My Death Bed – Cynthia Rogerson – chosen because I’m on a downer – or will be when this holiday is over  it’s set on a beach in California and I’ll probably never get the chance to read it in situ again. 

My Californian friend says it’s cold over there.  It’s only 65F.  Hmm – don’t think we’ve seen 65F at all in Scotland this year and come rain, hail,  or shine, I have decided I’m going for a paddle in the Pacific ….. I’ll only change my mind if I spot a frozen cobweb.  Now, that’s what I call cold.

See you when I get back.  Happy reading!

——

P.S Frances at NonSuch Book has treated Somerset Maugham’s The Book Bag less facetiously and, in so doing, has written a brilliant review.

Book Group: Perfume – Patrick Süskind

An open letter to my book group – Well-Read in Motherwell

Ladies

Sod’s law they call it.  For 5+ years I’ve been trying to get you to read something originally penned in German. Finally it happens and I’m not there.  As they’d say typisch!  However, I can register my virtual presence and put in my tuppence worth. So here I am and here it is!

Let’s start as we sometimes do:  Describe the novel in one word – I bet some of you say “stinking”.  (I can hear you now ….)   My adjective of choice would be ”creepy”  and if I’m allowed a second , I’d call it brilliant.  It’s  not quite a masterpiece. It’s spoiled by that second section, the one in which Grenouille crawls into his cave for 7 years.  I found that quite boring and simply too fantastical.  (And if my memory serves, it was totally expunged from the excellent movie version.)

I observed everything else, however, with horrified fascination.   Poor Grenouille.  You have to feel sorry for him – at least at the beginning.  Not his fault that he was born hideous, nor can he be blamed for his upbringing.  It’s a supreme irony that it’s his lack of personal odor in the stinking cesspool that was Paris, that makes him so repulsive.  Do I discern the beginnings of a nature versus nurture debate?  I’m sure there’s some mileage in it – at least until the first dastardly deed – the first stop on his journey to becoming  a fully-fledged misanthrophic scheming murdering toad - oh yes, you can have a field day with the adjectives to describe this fella.  The question for me is whether he always was, as the author suggests, a parasitic tick, waiting to drop on his next victim.

I’m somewhat adjective obsessed in this review and no wonder.  I didn’t realise there were so many words to describe odor, smell, olfactory delights.  What language and what a difficult task Süskind set himself –  to convey the pervasive influence of scent  through the written word in order to prove  that human responses to beauty and love are simply responses to smell.

I don’t have time for a detailed review.  Suffice now to say that the subsidiary characters Baldini and the Marquis were perfect counterfoils to Grenouille’s scheming malevolence.  I found Süskind’s treatment of his grotesque antihero compelling.  If you look at the structure of the novel as a bildungsroman, the ending, horrific as it is, suggests that in the end the boy made good. Looking at it from another angle, however, can’t you see a contemporary aftershave advert gone wrong?

 1/2        (9/10)

TSS: A somewhat sensational catchup (Non-fiction)

The past few months have been hectic.  I went back to school and found that in the spare time that remained I preferred reading to reviewing.  (Are you shocked?).  Anyway I’ve been dipping in and out of a few good books recently.  It’s time to summarise again. 

Simon of SavidgeReads has been behaving sensationally!   I decided to follow suit starting with Kate Summerscale’s award-winning The Suspicions of Mr Which,  exploring the real life murder case that sparked the sensation genre of 19th century fiction.  It wasn’t what I expected at all.  I think the label narrative non-fiction led me to expect more narrative and less non-fiction.  Not that that’s bad.  The story is fascinating but it was told more dryly than I was expecting.  I found Summerscale’s solution to the unresolved killing quite plausible and I absolutely loved all the literary criticism – the explanations of how this case inspired 19th century literary giants Wilkie Collins and M E Braddon and Ellen Wood  and …. I determined to read The Moonstone immediately afterwards.

So instead I read Basil.  The reason becomes obvious if you compare its updated OUP Classic cover with that of Julia O’Faolain’s Adam Gould, which I read in the summer.  I’ve been meaning to write a comparative post for ages and I still intend to write one.  Only not today.

Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean contains some insightful essays into the nature of the relationship between Britain and America.  I think it could be summarised as complicated and that is reflected in the book’s structure which starts with an essay charting the ”special relationship”  since Mrs Thatcher and ending with a piece about two soldiers who died in Iraq in 2005.  It’s not all politics.  There’s an exploration of American and British Pop Culture:  pieces on the Beatles and why it’s impossible (if you’re male) not to fancy Marilyn Monroe.  Given the events of 2009, there’s an extraordinary piece about the faces of Michael Jackson written in July 2006 and of relevance to the current time of the year, an explanation of why our bookstores are so full of the celebrity memoir.

Pain is one of the new pleasures, abuse is the new nurturing.  A hummable, weepable, narcissistic self-pity, hitherto only available in the speeches of Bily Graham and the recording work of Tammy Wynette, has over the last few years, taken Britain by storm, and it is nowhere more evident that in the style of celebrity autobiography.

The essay Celebrity Memoirs written in 2003 – do you think O’Hagan’s point-of-view is still valid - or is mis-lit output diminishing?  Do you find it scary that 1 in 15 British adults have read a Dave Pelzer book? Even scarier the thought that the airing of personal non-celebrity misery on daytime televison shows no sign of abating?

And now a confession of my own.  I’ve been doing a bit of travelling recently and while browsing the airport bookshops, I’ve been snatching 10 minutes here and there with John Farndon’s Do You Think You’re Clever?  A compilation of the author’s answers to questions asked of students applying to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.  Questions of all sizes and shapes including the title question.  A fascinating little book which book-buying embargoes prevented me from purchasing.  But I’ve now got me grubby mitts on a copy and, in between novels, am devouring and loving every single minute.  Questions cover  theology, medicine, philosophy, all the sciences, literature (sample questions: what books are bad for you?; Chekhov’s great, isn’t he?;  don’t you think Hamlet is a bit long?; what would happen if the Classics department burned down?) … and from the geography section,  perhaps the question of most immediate concern to myself: if you’re not in California, how do you know it exists? (Answer: a)  because next week I’m catching a plane that will take me there and b) I’ve just read a non-fictional account about a Californian book thief.

Question:  Are you the (wo)man who loves books too much?  Would you do time to possess a much coveted tome?  John Gilkey is and would.  Nay,indeed, has.  All because he couldn’t afford to buy the rare books that he wanted so badly.  Never a man to let his bank balance get in the way of his ambitions, he got creative. And would probably have never been called to account had it not been for the personal crusade of Ken Sanders, the security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association.  Allison Hoover Bartlett pulls together the stories of both men in a series of illuminating interviews and in so doing, takes us on a tour of California’s rare book markets, auctions and shops.  (And Lizzy might now just have to follow in her footsteps.) The story’s compelling although the telling isn’t altogether successful. Gilkey ends up more sympathetic than the man who’s trying to bring him to justice.  But text aside, how’s this for a dust jacket?  One to rival Howard’s End is On The Landing, don’t you think?

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher – Kate Summerscale
The Atlantic Ocean – Andrew O’Hagan
Do You Think You’re Clever – John Farndon
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much – Allison Hoover Bartlett

A Literary Puzzle: Answers revealed and a surprise prize!

Remember this?   It’s seems that almost everyone was feeling a little shy because only Jackie from Farmlanebooks dared to go where no other blogger dared.  For that, Jackie, thanks and because you obviously enjoyed the first extract more than the second, I shall send the book to you as a gift – just as soon as you send me your address details!  No doubt you want to know what you’ve won …….a novella by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte – not some postmodern impostor, but the Napoleon Bonaparte.

Written before Napoleon became the (in)famous dictator, Clisson and Eugenie is, in fact, a short story based on his own amatory experiences. So much becomes clear in the foreword and the various appendices which have been added in to explain a) the genesis of the story and b) the piecing (sp?) together of the”definitive” version from various fragments around the world. I found it all quite fascinating. The story itself  is told as a simple linear narrative. It’s of its time in the sense that it belongs to the romantic period of the late 18th – early 19th century. It’s also obvious that Napoleon was acquainted with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. But I’m saying no more – beyond the fact that I found this a most enjoyable first reading from independent publisher Gallic Press – I don’t want to give the game away to Jackie and I want her to decide for herself whether it is the work of a “literary genius”.

The second extract came from a novella which initially read like an extract from my junior school Janet and John books. (Anyone remember these?) Dearie me, I thought, there’s simple and there’s insulting. It was only after about 30 pages when I began to consider the complexity of the message behind the words. So a 7-year old child could read the words, but could they understand? Hopefully not – that would be a depressing thought although I suspect that a 7-year old child living in Romania during Ceaucescu’s “reign”, may well have. There’s your clue – the second extract came from 2009 Nobel Laureate Herta Müller’s The Passport.

For pages 1-30 I was, as you can see, totally underwhelmed. Pages 30-50 the repeated motifs and metaphors began to invade my consciousness; the owl being my favourite. I was at the half-way point by this time but still found it bland and colourless. So I put it down. A week later, because I was not in the mood to be beaten by a 96-page novella, a funny thing happened. The text was suddenly infused with colour. Red and green and white and … there was a tension developing that ensured the pages turned faster in the second half. Obviously there was a style working that I don’t (yet) have words to describe. Suffice to say the second half redeemed the novella somewhat in my eyes – though I’m not sure I’d put Müller in the same league as other German nobel laureates Mann and Grass. Still I’m curious enough now to try something else – perhaps even in the German. After all, Müller uses the language of  a 7-year old.

Clisson and Eugenie – Napoleon Bonaparte
The Passport – Herta Müller  1/2

TSS: Best Fiction of the Noughties

The papers are already full of the books of 2009.  That’s far too soon for me as I have a lot of reading left to do.  Plus I won’t be limiting the selection of my best books of 2009 to those published this year.  What I can do, however, is produce Lizzy’s Best Fiction of the Noughties.  Not such a difficult exercise as it turned out.  I just thought of the books I would relish rereading.

2001 – Bel Canto – Ann Patchett
Patchett achieves wonders turning a slow-moving story about a hostage taking incident into an emotional melody.

2002 – Clara – Janice Galloway
I will never stop singing the praises of this novel.  My book of the decade.

2002 – Niagara Falls All Over Again – Elizabeth McCracken
The first book on my list that I haven’t actually read.  I listened to an unabridged audio and immediately bought the book. Set in the days of Vaudeville, this is the tale of a comedy duo, Carter and Sharp.  A tale of the theatre, B-movies and the bittersweet nature of their relationship.

2003 - Hey Nostradamus! – Douglas Coupland
 A post-Columbine novel told from an number of viewpoints including one devastated survivor. Coupland’s masterpiece in my opinion.  If only he’d write more like this …

2003 – The Way the Crow Flies – Ann-Marie MacDonald
… and if only MacDonald would write more novels.  This, only her second (and looking like her last),  is based on a true unsolved murder case.   In complete contrast to the dark subject matter, I have very fond memories of the time I was reading it.  I was on a 3-week tour of the Canadian Rockies. Utterly glorious!

2004 Small Island – Andrea Levy
I was so involved with this tale that I completely forgot about the rock concert  I was supposed to attend. I was crying with laughter and crying with heartbreak.  I’m talking real tears.  I didn’t want to put the book down.  So I didn’t. I remembered the rock concert 24 hours after finishing the novel … and no regrets either!  I do hope that the BBC adaptation (which starts today!) does it justice.

2006 – The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The second unabridged audio book to make my list.  Its violent reputation was initially offputting but I eventually decided, after multiple recommendations, that I might be able to handle it in small 20 minute snatches as I drove to and from work.  I don’t think I’ve ever “read” anything as powerful in my life.  I still haven’t bought the book but only because I want an affordable first edition!  I’ll make do with the film in the meantime.  Have you seen it?

2006 – The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell
Whenever a girlfriend asks me for a reading recommendation, this is the one I give.  I’ve not heard anyone make a bad comment about it and that includes all those who have made my review the most popular post on the blog.  Esme has had 5867 hits.  In second place is my Books Read Index page with 2568.  That’s some lead. Go, Esme, go!

2006 – Mothers and Sons – Colm Toibin
The last two years have seen me develop a love for short stories.  This is the collection that sealed the deal.

2007 – The Lizard Cage – Karen Connelly
Turning the harrowing story of a Burmese political prisoner’s solitary confinement into a page-turning thriller is some achievement.  It took Karen Connelly 10 years to do so.  I’m glad she didn’t lose patience.  In terms of power, The Lizard Cage is on a par with McCarthy’s The Road.  Although Connelly is a poet, so her style is more ornate. But not in a bad way.   I prefer it to McCarthy’s sparseness.

2007 – Measuring the World – Daniel Kehlmann
It wouldn’t be a Lizzy list without a German novel and so I submit this tongue-in-cheek historical novel charting the lives of two 18th century genii who both set out to measure the world.    While Daniel “superstar” Kehlmann’s Measuring the World didn’t win the 2005 German book prize, it was the people’s choice.  Arno Geiger’s “Es Geht Uns Gut” has yet to be translated into English.

2008 – The Secret Scripture – Sebastian Barry  
Don’t know if I’ll ever warm to the neatness of the ending, but everything else is superb.

2009 – Home - Marilyn Robinson
I suspect Gilead will be the novel of the noughties for most other Robinson readers, but I haven’t read it yet.  Even so, Home has a permanent place at my hearth.

So there’s my manbooker dozen for the noughties.  Let’s slice it and dice it a little:  5 male : 8 female / 4 American, 3 British, 3 Canadian, 2 Irish and 1 German / 3 Orange Prize Winners, 1 Orange Debut Prize Winner,  1 Pulitzer Winner,  2 Costa Books of the Year, 1 Saltire Book of the Year, 2 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Winners. Not a Booker winner in sight – in fact, only one Booker shortlistee!   Confirmation that I’m simply not in tune with whatever are the criteria for Booker greatness.  Although I’ve still to read this year’s winner - I suspect that it will knock my socks off!

Crime/Spy/Thrillers – A Bit of A Binge

The thing about crime/spy/thrillers is that they are so quickly read that I can’t keep pace with the reviews.   This calls for a catch-up post or, if you prefer, 3 reviews for the price of 1.

Dismissed Dead – Rod Brammer
Berlin was celebrating in November. 20 years since the fall of the Wall and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the age of the Cold War thriller was past. No so. Ex-naval intelligence officer Rod Brammer’s Dismissed Dead is set in the 60’s starting out in Berlin where his fictional spy, Finlay, is sent to retrieve a Russian bullet capable of penetrating British armour. Unfortunately there is a mole and Operation Kingstone is blown from the very start. Finlay and his fellow spy decide not to call off the operation …. A thrilling and, it must be said enlightening, story begins, in which Finlay proves to be no 007.  This is a fictional realism.  In the course of duty, Finlay is taken captive and must bear all the brutal consequences that it entails.  The action moves from Berlin to Turkmenistan, the scene of a daring rescue operation.  But the cynicism remains intact - helpers are not necessarily safe from their paylords because there are bigger agendas to protect …

Brammer’s past obviously plays a part  and the question is how much Finlay is autobiographical.   There’s a stamp of authenticity in  the flight from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan that is completely missing from the similar section of Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. 

This is a page-turning and sometimes vicious  thriller in which all sense of time is lost -  as would expect enduring the things that Finlay does.  In an interview on The Deighton Dossier Brammer states ” In my books I am keen that the reader knows the true cost sometimes visited on intelligence agents, in order that the population at large can sleep safe in their beds”.  Well, I for one want to know more – so I’m looking forward to the forthcoming titles.

The Silver Swan – Benjamin Black

Booker-prize-winning John Banville turned his pen to crime to (or so he admitted at one event I attended)  to generate income through increased sales.  When writing literary novels, he said, he could sweat for a whole day over one sentence.  Yet crime novels are so easy to write.  Christine Falls, his first foray into the world of crime, is an excellent atmospheric mystery set in 1950’s Dublin .  His pseudo-detective, the pathologist, Quirke, uncovering crime and corruption intrinsic to the setting at the same time as his own nefarious secrets come to light. The Silver Swan, the follow-up novel, has clipped wings. It’s flat, straightforward, completely obsessed with sex and the resolution is way too obvious.  Still readable but a little more planning and complexity wouldn’t have gone amiss.

A Cure for All Diseases – Reginald Hill

Last but not least,  a novel set in contemporary Britain.  Reginald Hill is currently my favourite British crime writer.  Actually I don’t  read his Dalziel and Pascoe books – I listen to them.  Unabridged audio books are wonderful and more wonderful still when they are filled with characters such as the sexist-pig fat man Dalziel, ambiguous villain Franny Roote, and the recently graduated psychologist, Charley Heywood.   Pascoe, modern, enlightened, clever, I could leave.  He simply isn’t colourful enough but if his role is to play a clever Watson to Dalziel’s Holmes, then in A Cure for All Diseases Hill inverts all expectations. 

Dalziel is convalescing from injuries sustained in the line of duty which leaves Pascoe to lead the investigation into the murder of Lady Denham. Only Dalziel is on the road to recovery and trying very hard not to interfere with the investigation.  Encouraged by his doctors, he confides his thoughts to Mildred, a recording device, as dumb and doting a Watson character as you’ll ever meet.  Now Dalziel’s monologues are loud, comic and definitely un-PC but they are hugely entertaining. So too are the thoughts of Charley Haywood, the outsider looking in, shocked and outraged at the invasions into her privacy, and the abuse of her trust.  An additional 3rd person narrative provides a more traditional perspective.

In addition to playing with form, Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels frequently pay homage to other literary works.  This one is heavily influenced by Jane Austen.  The epigram is taken from her unfinished novel, Sanditon, and life and relationships in the village, Sandyton, are very Austenesque, even as Hill injects a contemporary stream regarding alternative medicine.  There is so much in a Dalziel and Pascoe novel that once I’ve completed the series, I will have no hesitation rereading (relistening) to them. 

Just one flaw in this one.  It takes far too long to get going.  5 CDs worth before the first murder.  I almost gave up but then Lady Denham’s corpse was found roasting on the barbeque …..

TSS: A literary puzzle

A bit of a departure  here on Lizzy’s Literary Life (and probably more suited to a Sunday Salon post - but I can’t wait till next Sunday.  So for one week only it’s Sunday Salon on a Tuesday!) My question is precipitated by the novellas I chose for the November Novella challenge.  I’m not going to name them because I want your opinions to be freed of any prejudicial clues.  I was going to McLuhan them for you (i.e give you the text of page 69) but one of them is not long enough.  So let’s pick a number of significance to me - 25 - because my silver wedding anniversary is rapidly approaching! (How did I get so old, so quickly?) 

OK, so it’s Sunday Salon on a Tuesday and we’re “McLuhaning” about 200 words from page 25 or thereabouts.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent!

Novella One:

“I swear to you on the life of our daughter Suzanne, that I will love you forever.  But as for you, do not torture me.  Must you invent reasons to panic, when my heart is so tranquil?”

They prolonged their conversation into the night and the darkness, going to bed very late.

But just as they had fallen asleep, Clinton was awakened by the noisy arrival of carriage and horses.  He got up and saw one of his old couriers bringing him a letter from the government.  It was an order to leave for X in twenty-four hours.  There he was to be given an important mission, which called for a man of his talents.

Poor Eunice!  You sleep on as they take away your lover!

“So that is the explanation of this terrible misery”, she cried.  “My dreadful fate is coming to pass.  Oh Clinton, you are abandoning me, and you are once again to be faced with the folly of men and the chances of fortune. Goodbye, my happiness, goodbye, happy days, so few and yet so infinitely cruel; and now so priceless.”

She was pale and weakened, and her voice faded.  Clinton himself was hardly any calmer, but he had to go.

Pertinent facts: 207 words, 16 sentences, words per sentence 12.8, number of polysyllabic words 14, passive sentences 18%, Fleisch Reading Ease 78.6, Fleisch-Kincaid Grade Level 5.2.  SMOG Index 13.5, which equates to the reading standard expected of an eleven year old.

Novella two

Robert’s great-grandmother was called “the caterpillar” in the village.  She always had a thin plait hanging down her back.  She couldn’t bear a comb.  Her husband died young without falling ill.

After the burial the caterpillar went looking for her husband.  She went to the inn.  She looked each man in the face. “It’s not you,” she said from one table to the next.  The landlord went up to her and  said, “But your husband is dead.”  She held her thin plait in her hand.   She wept and ran out into the street.

Every day the caterpillar went looking for her husband.    She went into every house and asked if he had been there.

One winter’s day, when the fog was driving white hoops across the village, the caterpillar went out into the fields.  She was wearing a summer dress and no stockings.  Only her hands were dressed for snow.  She was wearing thick woollen gloves.  She walked through the bare thickets.  It was late afternoon.  The forester saw her.  He sent her back to the village.

The next day the forester came into the village. The caterpillar had lain down on a blackthorn bush.  She had frozen to death. He brought her into the village across his shoulder.  She was as stiff as a board

Pertinent facts: 219 words, 26 sentences, words per sentence 8.3, number of polysyllabic words 10, passive sentences 3%, Fleisch Reading Ease 87.1, Fleisch-Kincaid Grade Level 3.1.  SMOG Index 11.7 which equates to the reading standard expected of a seven year-old.

—-

For comparison the reading age required for UK newspaper editorials: The Sun: under 14 / The Daily Express: under 16 / The Telegraph and The Guardian: over 17

————-

So, what are your thoughts?  Would you consider either of the two extracts as literary?  Do the reading age requirements accurately reflect the content of the pieces? What else do these extracts tell you?  Can you identify the authors?  They’re both famous – that’s all I’m telling you.  Take a guess if you like.  If you know, however, don’t tell.  It’ll spoil the game.  And don’t forget to come back next Sunday (to the real Sunday Salon), when I’ll reveal all  – including no holds barred reviews of both novellas.

 

 

TSS: Banging on the New Tin Drum – Readalong

I’ve been mulling this over for the past couple of weeks – ever since I dropped a casual question here.

Indeed, there seems to be enough interest to warrant starting up a readalong. So in 2010 let’s do it and read an European masterpiece together.

Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum , first published in 1959 was recently retranslated into English by Breon Mitchell.  All the reviews I’ve read of this new translation are superlative.  So that’s the version I’ll be reading this time around.  I have already read Die Blechtrommel in the German (it took me many, many months ….) and the first English translation by Ralph Manheim, which seemed perfectly fine to me but has been bettered by this new version.

The Tin Drum is a seminal piece of European magic realism. Amazingly probably the only piece of magic realism I’ve ever got to grips with.  Here’s the summary from fantasticfiction:   Bitter and impassioned, it delivers a scathing dissection of the years from 1925 to 1955 through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, the dwarf whose manic beating on the toy of his retarded childhood fantastically counterpoints the accumulating horrors of Germany and Poland under the Nazis.

It is an intense read and best taken slowly.  So I’m proposing to read one part per month (around 200 pages) for three months.   I’ll post my thoughts here on the final Sunday of each month starting January 2010.  And I hope that  whether you’re a fully fledged Germanophile, an award winner / Nobel laureate reading challenge participant or simply curious, you’ll read / discuss along with me.

And when we’re done reading, discussing and comparing translations, we can watch the film (and keep the book to movie challenge participants happy too!)

How many more reasons do you need to join in?  OK, two more. 1) It’s brilliant and 2) a darn sight easier than Ulysses!

Convinced now? Grab yourself a copy – any copy, any language will do –  and I’ll see you in January.

The White Castle / My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk

Up there with the best of Calvino, Eco, Borges and Marquez – Observer

Would that blurb attract you? Calvino I’ve always meant to read.  If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, reportedly a major influence on David Mitchell’s brilliant Cloud Atlas. Eco’s The Name of the Rose a masterpiece but I found Baudelino unfinishable.  The very idea of Borges fills me with dread and Marquez is magnificent when not magically realising.   All of which leaves me pretty ambivalent about that blurb … it wouldn’t have drawn me to reading Pamuk’s 1990 Independent Award for Foreign Fiction winner, The White Castle.

However, a few years ago, I read My Name is Red.  What a difficult read that was!  But  a cracker nonetheless – despite the effusive bad language!  It’s a rare novel that keeps me reading past that but My Name is Red is extraordinary.  An exploration of the differences between East and West with art as the  differentiator.  However, it is a murder mystery, one with many narrators - including the corpse, a painted dog, a coin and all the suspects.  As I said, a difficult read, one to be taken slowly, but one which is very rewarding.  It won the Dublin Impac Award in 2003, the French Prix du meilleur livre étranger and the Italian version the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 2002.   A milestone in contemporary literature, then, a position that will be recognised with the publication of an Everyman’s Library edition in 2010.  And I’ve just discovered that there’s a BBC World Book Club episode here.

Of course,  I’m dissembling. I don’t want to talk about The White Castle because I don’t understand it.  Thank goodness it’s only 145 pages long (actually it felt much longer).  It started well enough.  A young Italian scholar is captured by pirates and sold as a slave in Istanbul.  Eventually he is owned by a Turk who is eager to learn about the scientific and intellectual advances in the West.  So far, so good.  Pamuk has set up  the relationship to explore the theme that fascinates him.  The differences between East and West.

And there ends any sense – either in the novel or my review.  The relationship deteriorates. Both slave and owner resent each other.  They spend hours, days, months, years (?) concocting false histories of their lives.  Outwardly they ressemble each other and at various points in the narrative they swap roles,until eventually the Turk becomes the Italian and escapes back to the West.  Oh dear, was that a spoiler?  Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t because  first the Turk or even the Italian has to exist.  And, if one doppelganger is a figment of the other’s imagination, then who knows what happening?  Certainly not me.

Just after finishing this book, when I still cared, the purple beauty on the left dropped through the letter box and with it an interview with Orhan Pamuk …. and a few clues.

Q: What inspired you to write The White Castle?  It’s the first book where you employ a theme that recurs thoroughout the rest of your novels – impersonation. Why do you think this idea of becoming somebody else crops up so often in your fiction?

A:  It’s a very personal thing.  I have a very competitive brother who is only eighteen months older than me.  In a way, he was my father, my Freudian father, so to speak.  It was he who became my alter ego, the representation of authority.  On the other hand we had a competitive and brotherly comradeship.  A very complicated relationship. ..In The White Castle the almost sadomasochistic relationship between the two main characters is based on my relationship with my brother. …

On the other hand, this theme of impersonation is reflected in the fragility Turkey feels when faced with Western culture.  After writing The White Castle I realised that this jealousy – the anxiety about being influence by someone else – resembles Turkey’s position when it looks west.  You know, aspiring to become Westernised and then being accused of not being authentic enough.  Trying to grab the spirit of Europe and then feeling guilty about the imitative drive.  The ups and downs of ths mood are reminiscent of the relationship between competitive brothers.

I’m ever so pleased the author knew what he was writing about.   I only wish he could have done so in a way that this reader understood.  My advice to you – ignore The White Castle.  Pick up My Name is Red instead.  But give yourself lots of time to read it.  It took me a good 3 weeks.

The White Castle  

My Name Is Red 

The Paris Review Interview of Orhan Pamuk

Talking about Detective Fiction – P D James

I have just spent the most intriguing weekend in the company of P D James. (I was going to say delightful – but is that appropriate considering the subject is murder?)  The thing is when I’m under pressure, I  binge on cream cakes crime reading.   So when I saw this in the newly published lists, I simply grabbed it and gorged myself. (Book-buying embargo notwithstanding!)  Just one word of warning, this is the literary equivalent of that cream cake you gain 5lbs just looking at!  Let’s come back to the weight that my TBRs (both real and virtual) gained reading 150 pages of crime-related literary criticism ….

Need I introduce P D James, author of 18 novels, creator of the delectable Adam Dalgleish, and winner of numerous crime fiction awards?  I didn’t think so.  One of the undisputed queens of British crime fiction, her insights in the world of detective fiction are distilled into this slim volume of  8 chapters and a selection of hilarious crime-reading related cartoons.  She covers a lot of ground from the beginnings of detective fiction in the work of Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins through  the Golden Age of crime fiction right up to the contemporary scene (although coverage of this latter subject is somewhat cursory).  The history of the genre then coupled with a personal appreciation of  the most influential authors and her personal favourites.  Now we don’t always agree – I can’t stand Sherlock Holmes for example. But James does at least make me understand his significance - so my literary blindspot won’t be so quite so total from here on in … well, perhaps not.

At 89 years of age, James isn’t simply theorising about the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, she has lived through it.  So the chapters relating the 4 grandes dames of the golden age, Agatha Christie, D L Sayers (another of my blindspots), Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh are particularly illuminating.  I’m glad to report that she is much kinder to Dame Agatha in this book than she was when I saw her speak, rather mockingly, I thought, about closed group murder mysteries a few years ago.  (Yes, it was ironic given that I had just read James’s own, very good closed group mysteries The Murder Room  and The Lighthouse.)  In this volume, however, James discusses Christie’s strengths and weaknesses in an honest and balanced measure.  I’m glad that we both hold the innovation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in high regard. (…. and the writing of my own favourites Michael Dibdin and Reginald Hill).

While the emphasis is very much on the British crime scene, there is an excellent chapter on American crime noir, examining the reasons why British crime-writing was soft-centred and American hard-boiled.   There is also much about the craft and choices that crime writers make in relation to setting, viewpoint and characters with James divulging some of the secrets and inspirations behind her own novels … and the progression of the sychophantic Watson character, a man who irritates me only slightly less than his “lord and master” Holmes.

Particularly enjoyable is the chapter “Critics and Aficionados – why some don’t enjoy them and why others do”.  Are you an Edmund Wilson who in 1945 published an essay entitled “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”  Or are you a W.H.Auden who wrote that his reading of detective stories was an addiction, the symptoms being the intensity of his craving, the specificity of the story and its immediacy?

Well, like Auden, I’m craving crime at the moment and so watch this space.  I haven’t had a crime binge for a couple of years but right now, I’m studying for a professional qualification,  so in my spare time,  I need easy reading, story, narrative pace and entertainment.  However, I’m of the opinion that crime fiction can also be literary.

So it’s now time to confess the books that have been added to my in-the-very-near-future-to-be-read-TBR as a result of spending a couple of days in the company of  P D James.

1. Emma – Jane Austen (This has never appealed but P D James assures me that it is a detective story!)

2. Phineas Redux – Anthony Trollope (Likely to be my first Trollope!)

3. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins (Been meaning to read this forever.)

4. Something by Margery Allingham (About time I read her.)

5. Something by Ngaio Marsh (About time I read her too!)

6. The Continental Op – Dashiel Hammett (Perfect reading for my forthcoming trip to San Francisco.)

7. The 100 Best Ever Crime and Mystery Novels as chosen by H R F Keating …..

8. Crime fiction related cartoons at www.cartoonstock.com

I am not going to divulge how badly my book buying embargo has been busted during the last few days.  Let’s just say it’s criminal!