Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand – Helen Simonson

When I was handed this book by my library book group, I thought they’d handed me another dud.  Despite almost universal praise in the blogosphere, it wasn’t a book I would have got to of my own accord.  But that’s the beauty of a book group – the discovery of an absolute gem.

Admittedly it took me a couple of chapters to get into but then there was no stopping me.

It was the hardback cover that put me off.   I was expecting some kind of sloppy romance.  Well, the romance is there but this is a very English comedy of manners set in a snobbish, rascist Sussex village (fictitious I presume) in which an upstanding Major falls unexpectedly in love with the Pakistani proprietress of the corner shop.  Yet this man is no liberal.  He’s very proper and very upper middle class.  Suffering from the recent loss of his brother, it is an act of kindness that makes him fall for Mrs Ali, but at 59 he is no longer sure of himself and his vulnerabilities and insecurities as he woos his lady makes him a very appealing character.  At the same time, his preoccupations and machinations to ensure the return of a family heirloom to his possession show him not to be quite the perfect specimen that some ladies in my group believe him to be.

The romance, while gentle, is galvanising and devisive and enables the author to explore preconceptions and prejudice on both side of the racial divide .  Major Pettigrew’s middle-age romance is contrasted with that of a younger pairing- their relationship also the subject of disapproval from the Muslim family.  Serious issues such as the submissive roles and sacrifices females are expected to make in traditional Muslim families are seamlessly woven into the plot.  So too are issues that cast unfavourable light on English values: the snobbishness and racism of the golf club: the materialism of the upper middle classes and those wishing to make the right connections to further their careers.

This novel certainly makes its readers think, but there’s no heavy-handedness.  In fact, it is very, very funny.   I’m not going to quote anything.  I suspect you have to be there in context to be surprised by some of the extremely witty one-liners. But I laughed out loud on more than one occasion.

It’s not perfect.  The resolution to the Abdul Wahid thread is – shall we say – rather over the top.  Too dramatic to get with the rest of the novel.  Perhaps Simonson had her eye on potential cinematics?

Minor niggle really.  I laughed, I cried at the happy ending and I completely forgot about the rubbishy wet weather outside.  Just wish I’d read it sooner.

Les Misérables vs Lady Audley’s Secret

I began 2013 in 1862 with Les Misérables. Let’s just say Hugo’s characters and plot drove me crackers and into the arms of the mad and very bad Lady Audley, who also came to the page in 1862. Was it a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire?

Scope
I never got to grips with Hugo’s scope, deciding that existence, the world, French history, politics and culture might just cover it and it’s a sensational achievement – it certainly caused a sensation. They were queuing in the streets for it on publication. Braddon’s novel, taking its cue from the same murder case as The Suspicions of Mr Whicher has been tagged the most sensationally sensational of the sensation novels (John Sutherland). Surprisingly the two novels share a significant theme – the class struggle. In both instances the downtrodden working classes are seeking upward mobility and in both cases, the heroine achieves it by marrying a rich man. What does that say for all that bloodshed and revolution? It’s not the way to attain riches in Hugo nor is it the way to retain them in Braddon.

However, the scope of Braddon’s novel is significantly smaller than Hugo’s but at no point did my eyes glaze over due to lack of interest.

Les Misérables 0 Lady Audley’s Secret 1

Genre
Can Les Misérables be pigeon-holed? Literary fiction tick. Historical and philosophical treatise tick. Romantic fiction tick. Comedy (yes, think Gavroche). Tragedy (Fantine, for sure, but it was Gavroche who made me cry). Fantasy (I don’t think I ever believed in Jean Valjean.) Work of genius tick.

Lady Audley can be easily classified. Sensation novel tick. Crime fiction tick. Feminist call to arms? Let me get back to you on that one.

Les Misérables 1 Lady Audley’s Secret 1

Wordiness
All 19th century novels are wordy compared to the 21st century norm. But why tell a story in 300,000 words when you can take 530,982? Yes, I reckon a good 200,000 words could be lopped off Les Misérables without affecting the plot or even its briliance too much. That’s probably why most translations are abridged.

The male narrator of Lady Audley’s Secret is a garrulous pompous so-and-so at times but he never induced in me a wish to throttle him. Sometimes less is more.

Les Misérables 1 Lady Audley’s Secret 2

Lead Females
To answer the question I posed earlier. I’m not one for reading 20th or 21st century values into 19th century novels, so I remain unconvinced about the feminist reading of Lady Audley’s Secret, in which Lucy Graham’s amorality is seen as the decisive action of a self-empowered female. Nah, I much prefer her as a selfish, murdering psychopath. I’m pretty sure that if Braddon’s pen had had the license of the 21st century, Lucy Graham’s wickedness would have been much more overt.

That said I wish that Hugo could have given Cosette a personality. Biggest disappointment of the book for me. That the girl, who finally made a stand for her relationship with Marius, so quickly reverted to a simpering conventional spineless beauty and effectively deserted the man who had saved her from her dreadful childhood.

Les Misérables 1 Lady Audley’s Secret 3

Quality of writing
There were passages of Les Misérables that simply soared; passages that I will quite happily return to when I’m looking for something to marvel at; the Battle of Waterloo; Gavroche and the kidlingtons; the battle at the barricade.

Braddon’s pen never reaches the same heights.

Les Misérables 2 Lady Audley’s Secret 3

Longevity
A strange one this, given that both are acknowledged classics from 1862. By longevity I mean the one that’s going to live longest and most clearly in my mind. Hugo takes this point too. Perhaps all that wordiness and repetition played in his favour after all. I won’t forget the brilliant bits nor will I forget the irritating bits. None of it has faded. It’s four months since I finished and there’s not a week goes by without something bringing Les Misérables back to mind. People tell me that’s the sign of a good book.

Les Miserables 3 Lady Audley’s Secret 3

So it is I declare a respectable draw. This is a big surprise to me because I will happily tell you that I hated Les Misérables and loved Lady Audley’s Secret. Which just goes to show – sometimes I shouldn’t believe a word I say!

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013

Gone Girl first came to my notice in a number of Best of 2012 blogging lists.  I must read that, I thought, expecting to be completely blown away by it.

Well, it didn’t happen – at least not until the second half.  After the twist, which, of course, I can’t tell you about.

So I find myself n a bit of a dilemma.  I can tell you that the first half was spoiled for me by
the wife’s voice.  It just didn’t feel credible.  Something didn’t add up; there was a whole subtext missing.   And that was true as became clear in the second half.  After that I couldn’t stop reading.

This is the story of an utterly miserable marriage, of a power struggle, emotional blackmail and the basest manipulation. The battle of the sexes was never uglier, though it is a pretty uneven fight.  When one of the participants is a fully-fledged sociopath, there can only one winner.

On another level the author is also manipulating the reader through many, many lies of omission.  My sympathies waxed and waned towards both husband and wife, and at one point I decided they deserved each other.  But then two unconscionable events occurred and my sympath-o-meter swung decisively to one side.

I realise this “review” is on the cryptic side. Deliberately so.  Those who have read it will understand.  I don’t want to give anything away to those who haven’t as the plot is utterly sensational and the smallest detail is hugely significant.  But for the sake of my memory, I’m ending with a clue.

The Maiden caught me in the Wild,
Where I was dancing merrily;
She put me into her Cabinet,
And Lockd me up with a golden key.

(From The Crystal Cabinet, William Blake)

 and an addition to my completist reading list!

Meet the translator: Sam Garrett

Have you been following this week’s blog tour of Herman Koch’s The Dinner?  This is the final stop and I’m delighted to be discussing this book as well as other matters of Dutch literary translation with Koch’s translator, Sam Garrett.

Sam Garrett (with Arnon Grunberg left)
Copyright Pascale Bonnier

1) How did you become a literary translator?
While working as a correspondent for a press agency in The Hague, I began translating some short stories I came across in magazines and anthologies. I showed a few to a publisher, who encouraged me to go on. After a while some of those stories got published in literary journals in the States and Canada. From there on out I tried to seize every opportunity to translate literature that interested me, and finally that became my profession.

2) How did you obtain the commission to translate The Dinner?
Marijke Nagtegaal, who used to be the foreign rights manager at Koch’s publishing house, called and asked if I’d be interested in doing the book. I said yes. She recommended me to Ravi Mirchandani at Atlantic, who had just – wisely enough – bought the world English-language rights to the book.

3) How long did it take you to translate the book? What were the particular challenges in translating this book?
About eight months, I believe. The real challenge was to find the American equivalent of the voice of the narrator, Paul Lohman, and to curb my own unconscious tendency to gild the lily.

4) Were there any passages where you needed to be creative because the Dutch idiom didn’t translate easily to English?
Well, there’s plenty of nasty humor in The Dinner. And if you don’t keep it nasty and funny, then you’ve already got three strikes against you. A passage that was a little tricky, but which turned out to be one of my favorites, is the Straw Dogs reference:

The actress looked me over from head to toe before speaking.

“Your wife tells me you will be leaving us tomorrow.” Her voice had something artificially sweet to it, like the substance in Diet Coke, or the filling they use in diabetic chocolates, which say on the package that they won’t make you fat. I looked at Claire, who rolled her eyes slightly, up at the star-studded sky. “And that you’re going to Spain, of all places.”

I thought about one of my favorite scenes from Straw Dogs. What would this artificial voice sound like if its owner were to be dragged into a barn by a pair of drunken French bricklayers?  So drunk they could no longer tell the difference between a woman and the ruins of a cottage with only the walls still standing. Would she still be shooting her mouth off when the bricklayers set about rectifying her foundation? Would the voice come loose of its own accord once it was being peeled off, layer by layer?

The Dutch says: “Zou ze haar tekst nog weten op het moment dat de metselaars het achterstallige onderhoud ter hand zouden nemen.” I remember thinking about the “metselaars” and about that “achterstallig onderhoud”. The word “masons” is too bland and too ambiguous in the wrong way, so I chose “bricklayers”, which sounds sort of dumpy and has the advantage of the right kind of veiled double-entendre. That “achterstallige onderhoud ter hand nemen”, with its reverberations of “achterwerk”, backside, and hands everywhere, led me to “rectifying” with its reverberation of “rectum” and so of anal sex. And what might one perhaps rectify? Foundation sounded right, and besides the connotation of “nether parts” it had the advantage of being close to “foundation garment”, which is something I think this particular aging actress might wear. “Back maintenance” wouldn’t have done any of that for me, probably not for the reader either. So it’s Herman Koch’s darkly humorous comment, and I’m kind of riffing on it.

5) You’ve won the Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation twice. (The Rider – 2007 and Ararat, In Search of the Mythical Mountain -2009). Is translating non-fiction different to translating fiction? Do you need to research the non-fiction first to become acquainted with the vocabulary and concepts or do you do the research as you go along?
Translating non-fiction definitely involves an incredible amount of research, yes. I tend to do that research as I go along: fact-checking, consulting background material, plenty of side-reading.

The actual work itself, though, is very like that involved in translating fiction. The same set of tools, the same sensibilities.

6) What’s the most interesting piece of research you had to undertake?
The most interesting research, I believe, was the work I did alongside translating The Rain Bird by Jan Brokken. I read all about the great explorers: Henry Morton Stanley, Du Chaillu, Count Brazza, Albert Schweitzer, you name it. Africa has always triggered my imagination, so that was enormously interesting.

7) Which book was the most challenging to translate and why?
It would have to be a toss-up between In Europe by Geert Mak and Congo by David Van Reybrouck. Both brilliant works of non-fiction, but lengthy and ambitious, packed not only with facts, but also with subtle turns of phrase.

8) Do you have a favourite amongst your translations and why?
My translation of Tim Krabbé’s The Rider is still dear to me. I actually did a lot of cycling while I was translating that, and paid a lot of attention to bicycle racing and training methods, etc. The preparation for the translation itself, in other words, was an adventure and lots of fun. And the book itself was a joy, something I’d been dreaming of translating for years. It all just came together in almost every way imaginable.

9) The blogosphere will be celebrating Dutch Literature Month in June. Which three works of Dutch/Flemish literature (preferably translated into English but not necessarily so) would you recommend we bloggers read?

The Misfortunates – Dimitri Verhulst (Portobello)
Caesarion – Tommy Wieringa (Portobello)
Tirza – Arnon Grunberg (Open Letter)

10) You are stranded on the proverbial desert island and you are allowed one book to take for translation purposes. Which would it be and why?
De Avonden by Gerard Reve. A seminal novel in modern Dutch literature, revered by all but never translated – for a host of reasons. For me, as an American trying to enter Dutch culture, that novel served as a key to a new world, as an explanation for why Sundays in Amsterdam used to be so dreadfully quiet (they’re not anymore), a funny and at the same time relentlessly bleak portrait of a young man of the variety square-peg-in-a-round-hole,  living in the Dutch capital just after the close of the Second World War. And to translate it and translate it well, you’d need the kind of time you might only have on your hands after being tossed ashore on a desert island. 

———————————

A fitting finale to the blog tour, I hope you agree.  I’m also hoping it persuades you to join in Iris’s recently announced Dutch Literature Fortnight.  And as a sweetener I have a copy of The Dinner to giveaway.  Scroll down to the post below to enter. Can’t make your mind up?  See what the other blog tour participants had to say:

 

Words of Mercury
Winston’s Dad
Tripfiction
Follow The Thread
Reading in the Sunshine

The Dinner – Herman Koch (International Giveaway)

I have a giveaway copy of Herman Koch’s The Dinner, courtesy of the publisher.

This is a dark, morally ambiguous read, as enjoyable but potentially as guilt-inducing as Death by Chocolate!  Yummy but it comes with a health warning!

To enter, simply leave a comment with a description of your favourite dessert.  The winning entry will be the one which makes me break my diet.  Or if my willpower proves unbreakable, or,  as is more likely,  I decide to sample everything (!), random.org will be designated judge.

To be eligibile, entries must be made on this post.  The winner will be chosen on Friday May 10.  Competition is open internationally.

Poem of the Month: Descriptive Jottings of London – William McGonagall

I conducted a shuttle service between Glasgow and London this month. But now that I’m back north of Hadrian’s Wall, I thought it fitting to offer a poem about London by a Scottish poet. OK, so McGonagall,  it is claimed, is the worst poet in the world. And this one is no peach. It makes me smile nonetheless. Sometimes you have to read the bad stuff to appreciate the good.

The view to St Paul’s from London Bridge. April 2013

As I stood upon London Bridge and viewed the mighty throng
Of thousands of people in cabs and ‘busses rapidly whirling along,
All furiously driving to and fro,
Up one street and down another as quick as they could go:

Then I was struck with the discordant sound of human voices there,
Which seemed to me like wild geese cackling in the air:
And the river Thames is a most beautiful sight,
To see the steamers sailing upon it by day and by night.

And the Tower of London is most gloomy to behold,
And the crown of England lies there, begemmed with precious stones and gold;
King Henry the Sixth was murdered there by the Duke of Glo’ster,
And when he killed him with his sword he called him an impostor.

St. Paul’s Cathedral is the finest building that ever I did see;
There’s nothing can surpass it in the city of Dundee,
Because it’s most magnificent to behold
With its beautiful dome and spire glittering like gold.

And as for Nelson’s Monument that stands in Trafalgar Square,
It is a most stately monument I most solemnly declare,
And towering defiantly very high,
Which arrests strangers’ attention while passing by.

Then there’s two beautiful water-fountains spouting up very high,
Where the weary travellers can drink when he feels dry;
And at the foot of the monument there’s three bronze lions in grand array,
Enough to make the stranger’s heart throb with dismay.

Then there’s Mr Spurgeon, a great preacher, which no one dare gainsay
I went to hear him preach on the Sabbath-day.
And he made my heart feel light and gay
When I heard him preach and pray.

And the Tabernacle was crowded from ceiling to floor,
And many were standing outside the door;
He is an eloquent preacher, I solemnly declare,
And I was struck with admiration as I on him did stare.

Then there’s Petticoat Lane I venture to say,
It’s a wonderful place on the Sabbath day;
There wearing apparel can be bought to suit the young or old
For the ready cash– silver, coppers, or gold.

Oh! mighty city of London! you are wonderful to see,
And thy beauties no doubt fill the tourist’s heart with glee;
But during my short stay, and while wandering there,
Mr Spurgeon was the only man I heard speaking proper English I do declare.

On Writing – A L Kennedy

A L Kennedy spends a lot of time on trains, travelling up and down the country from one literary festival to the next, across the American continent from literary festival to literary retreat. She crosses oceans on ships, thanks to her underlying fear of flying. This means she does a lot of her writing on the move or in hotel rooms. She also teaches creative writing at Warwick University, appears on television panels and performs as a stand-up comic. As a writer who paid less attention to her physical welfare than to the demands of her writing, she has also suffered for her art. Thankfully these days her health is better, although there are still doubts about her workload. She was recently on the panel of judges for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

That is the backdrop for a series of blog posts, originally published in the Guardian, now collected into this volume alongside some essays and the script of her one-woman eulogy to Words. A show I had the pleasure of seeing and I am delighted now to possess the script!

I can’t think of any book that would have been better company as I recently gallivanted up and down the country between Glasgow and London on both West and East Coast Lines. Because A L Kennedy is one of those authors I make a beeline for at any literary festival. She is sassy, funny, and not afraid to voice an opinion. She has an immaculate sense of timing. This is A L Kennedy writing as A L Kennedy (not one of her tormented fictional characters). Her voice is undiluted and as I read it was just like I was listening to her.

The blog posts follow the creation of an unnamed novel, though the timeline indicates it was The Blue Book. From the days of research through the first draft, the painful rewrites, the crafting of the words to publication. The genesis of a novel: a child is conceived, born, reaches adolescence (and drives its author demented) but is still nurtured into adulthood before making its own way in the world. Insights given as to how an idea forms into a narrative; the analysis of each sentence. For example:

A man walks into a room

We’re off then. He’s a man definitely a man, not a lady, or a unicorn, or an urchin – not even with urchin-like characteristics – unicorn-like, then? Does he seek out virgins? Not that I’m aware of. Was he at any time a lady? Nope.

Slowly a paragraph builds and along comes the following suggestion.

The light of the universe hightlights his broad cheekbones.

Right, I’m filling a sock with room-service supplies, taking you imto a bathroom and hitting you with it, until you either get a grip or die like the useless weasel you clearly are. Light and highlights? Because we love useless and meaningless repetition? …. AND DON’T EVER LET ME CATCH YOU SLIPPING POINT OF VIEW LIKE THAT – WE’RE IN CLOSE THIRD. HE CAN’T SEE HIS OWN SODDING CHEEKBONES, CAN HE?

Laugh out loud funny in parts, there are also serious and eloquent defences of the life enhancing and sustaining power of the arts in general and words in particular, alongside evidence of the role of community workshops in helping participants build a sense of self-worth. Kennedy pours her passion, honesty and humanity into every piece and thus delivers a masterclass on writing, on blogging and the realities of her life as an author.

Superb.