thorold finds frosty fiction for the first quarter of 2017

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thorold finds frosty fiction for the first quarter of 2017

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1thorold
Editado: Ene 1, 2017, 7:11 am

So, it's 2017, my second year on Club Read, I'm a few months away from my ten-year Thingaversary, I posted my 1000th review on LT a few days ago, and I have practically no idea what I'm going to be reading in the New Year. Somehow the planning bit of my brain has been busy with other things lately (which may or may not play a part in this thread in due course...). Those who've been following my reading will know that I'm not very good at sticking to well-laid plans anyway, but have a tendency to go charging up the blind alleys of literature with a wild enthusiasm as the fancy takes me.

Things you might see here at some point, but no guarantees:
- I'll certainly be following at least some of this year's Reading Globally theme reads
- I want to carry on re-reading Proust
- there are some more things I would like to follow-up in the 1930s "burned books" theme I embarked on in autumn (Roth, Werfel, the Manns, etc...)
- I'm tempted to try Bragan's idea of knocking off a few things that have been on the TBR since joining LT

And you can be pretty sure that there will be plenty of (euro-)crime. For a start, there must be over a hundred Maigrets I haven't read yet.

2thorold
Editado: Ene 1, 2017, 7:35 am

I finished this one yesterday afternoon, but I'm going to count it for 2017:

L'ombre chinoise (1932; Maigret mystified) by Georges Simenon (Belgium, France, etc., 1903-1989)

 

This is another one from the first few batches of Maigret stories, a relatively unspectacular case in which a businessman is found murdered in his office, his body blocking the door of an empty safe. The crime is reported by a concièrge who notices that the shadow the murdered man projects on his blinds hasn't moved in a few hours - hence the French title. The English title is so generic and irrelevant that it suggests the publishers couldn't find anything really distictive in the book (although some recent English editions have a title that's a translation of the French one), but it's not without interest if you read it carefully: it's a very nice early example of the way Simenon gets Maigret to dig into the social and psychological background to a crime and work out how "respectable" people can be pushed over the edge into criminal acts. Maigret's own emotional engagement with the case comes over very well, too. And there's an entertaining minor character in the shape of the dead man's mistress, the young dancer Mine. Not a top-flight Maigret, but worth a couple of hours of your time.

3ELiz_M
Ene 1, 2017, 9:10 am

I'm so glad someone is dashing into literature's blind alleys so I don't have to. ;) I very much enjoy your reviews of erudite European literary novels and looking forward to your thoughts on books/authors that I hadn't considered before.

Happy New Year!

4dchaikin
Ene 1, 2017, 11:03 am

Mark, you thread is always rewarding and glad you are off and running. Happy New Year!

5The_Hibernator
Ene 1, 2017, 9:08 pm

6baswood
Ene 2, 2017, 7:02 pm

Hope you are going to read some more Simenon.

7arubabookwoman
Ene 2, 2017, 8:58 pm

Hi Mark--I quietly lurked on your thread most of last year. I will be following your thread again this year, and hope to comment once in a while. Best wishes for a wonderful reading year.

8RidgewayGirl
Ene 2, 2017, 9:01 pm

Is this really only your second year at Club Read? I could have sworn I've been following your reviews for longer than that.

9thorold
Ene 3, 2017, 3:45 am

>3 ELiz_M: - >8 RidgewayGirl: Thanks all!

Kay - yes, it is, but you probably saw my reviews on Reading Globally.

10kidzdoc
Ene 3, 2017, 5:42 am

Nice review of L'ombre chinoise, Mark. As Barry said I hope that you read more books by Simenon as well.

11thorold
Ene 4, 2017, 11:52 am

Cross-posted from the RG Benelux thread:

Contrapunt (2008) by Anna Enquist (Netherlands, 1945- )

  

Anna Enquist (real name Christa Broer) trained as a musician and a psychotherapist, and only took up literature relatively late in life. Since doing so, she's become very well known as a poet and novelist. The only one of her books to have been translated into English so far seems to be Het meesterstuk (The masterpiece), but most of her work is available in German or French.

Contrapunt is a novel describing, section by section, how a woman tackles the project of studying and playing through Bach's Goldberg Variations after a long absence from the piano. In parallel with her analysis of each variation and thoughts on how to approach the physical problems of technique, she reflects on her relationship with her daughter, and we gradually realise that the musical and biographical threads are being interwoven like two melodic lines in a piece of counterpoint. Just as we do when we listen to counterpoint, we can only focus on one tune at once, but each makes us hear the other in a new way.

Enquist wrote the book after the death of her grown-up daughter in a road accident, and it is clearly conceived in part as a literary way of dealing with her response to that personal tragedy, but it is far from being a sob-memoir. The episodes from the mother's shared life with her daughter are deliberately kept low-key and ordinary: things that happen in everyone's life, first days at school, holidays, graduation, parties. The purpose is not to milk the tragedy but to understand and celebrate.

The musical analysis is thorough and technical, and might be tough going for anyone who hasn't got at least some basic knowledge of music theory. Biographical speculation about Bach and Glenn Gould comes into it, but is only peripheral - it's good to see that Gould isn't mythologised in the way that he is in some other Goldberg-novels, but is soberly treated as one interpreter among the many. Enquist's pianist is more interested in working out what Bach wrote and why than in how other people have played it. I'm not a pianist, so probably not the best judge, but I found the explanation of the process of working through a complex piece very convincing, probably about the closest it's possible to get to being inside a pianist's head without actually learning to play the piano.

12thorold
Editado: Ene 4, 2017, 12:39 pm

I try not to make a habit of reading the books I give other people for Christmas, but in this case the victim passed it on to me after reading it with apparent pleasure and telling me all the jokes:

The unexpected professor : an Oxford life in books (2014) by John Carey (UK, 1934- )

  

I very much enjoyed The intellectuals and the masses and his book on Thackeray, so I had high hopes for a John Carey autobiography. And this is a very enjoyable read, with intelligent, entertaining accounts of wartime childhood in London and Nottinghamshire, National Service as an infantry subaltern in Egypt, and Oxford life as an undergraduate in the fifties and an English fellow thereafter. There are plenty of witty anecdotes and bits of lightning literary analysis, reasonable numbers of names are dropped, and a few icons are clasted in passing. Nothing very spectacular, and not much to stretch the mind: a holiday book to be enjoyed by people who remember some of the things he is talking about, not the sort of memoir that becomes a manifesto for the author's field of studies.

13dchaikin
Ene 4, 2017, 10:58 pm

What a lovely review of the Enquist. It's too bad it's not available in English, but I have to admit it sounds very difficult. And very sad, regardless of how she presents it.

14AnnieMod
Editado: Ene 4, 2017, 11:58 pm

Wonderful review of Enquist's book (even if I am not interested in the book at all, I am happy I read the review). On the other hand, Carey's book does interest me a lot - and from the sound of it, I should read it.

15thorold
Ene 5, 2017, 2:23 am

>13 dchaikin: SassyLassy pointed out on the RG thread that there is an English translation of Contrapunt, albeit a rather expensive one.

16tonikat
Ene 5, 2017, 6:32 am

You have me hankering to listen to some Bach later today. I'll bear Enquist in mind, interesting.

17kidzdoc
Ene 5, 2017, 10:46 am

Great review of Contrapunt, Mark. Unfortunately I have no musical training whatsoever, so I'll have to pass on reading it.

18Simone2
Ene 5, 2017, 3:52 pm

>11 thorold:. Thank you for this review. I kept postponing reading it but you convinced me that I really should. If any writer is able to write about this subject and what it does to her, it is Anna Enquist.

19thorold
Editado: Ene 8, 2017, 2:07 am

I rather incongruously finished listening to Beckett's trilogy whilst going round the supermarket yesterday morning:

The unnamable (French 1953; author's English translation 1958) by Samuel Beckett (Ireland, France 1906-1989)
Audiobook read by Sean Barrett



I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any…it will be the silence, where I am…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

The final part of the trilogy is the toughest to take in. Beckett examines conventions of fiction like narrative sequence, characters, the narrator's voice and the world he exists in, and finds that he has lost faith in the lot of them. We are left with what seems to be a foetus in the womb, struggling and failing to make sense of its existence. The text teases us with all kinds of false starts that look as though they are going somewhere but actually lead us into blind alleys where they are arbitrarily abandoned or redirected. Unless you're writing a dissertation about it, this is probably a book you will read for the pleasure of its approach to language, its endless questioning and reduction of what the words it is using could mean. And it is worth it for that: I'm happy to leave the philosophical puzzles to those who still have exams to take and enjoy the sound of it.

20thorold
Editado: Ene 8, 2017, 2:50 am

...and what with that and Het verdriet van België I needed a bit of light relief, so I decided to take a small detour to check the box for the Grand Duchy:

Planet Luxemburg: und andere komische Geschichten (2012, expanded edition 2016) by Francis Kirps (Luxemburg, 1971 - )

 

Francis Kirps is a Luxemburg poet (especially on the poetry slam scene) and journalist who writes in German. He has recently published his first novel; the short comic prose pieces in this collection were mostly written for his column in the taz.

Slightly disappointingly, only three of the pieces here are actually about Luxemburg - but perhaps that's just as well, as it would be rather unwise to rely on anything he tells you about the country. Maps of Luxemburg - you will be disappointed to learn - are not necessarily printed to a scale of 1:1 as Kirps asserts in the opening mock-guidebook piece. But I did enjoy the notion that the forests of the north are noted for their nano-fauna... Later in the book we get a Luxemburg version of Animal Farm (in which I missed most of the jokes) and a wonderful Saramagoesque fantasy in which the entire Grand Duchy blasts off into space.

As well as Mr Juncker, who is mentioned (unfavourably) in several pieces, the other two currently famous Luxemburgers, the Schlenk brothers, make a guest appearance in a piece that reveals how zombies have taken over the Tour de France. Elsewhere he chronicles other sporting scandals: the use of identity theft for match-fixing purposes in boxing, the incidence of collective clinical depression in football. Music features with a history of Luxemburg's shortest-lived Viking death metal band (apparently this is a real genre - having listened to a couple of tracks on Spotify, I can see why it would make a good subject for satire, even if nobody's heard of it). We also get revelations about the colour-bar in country music, and even weirder flights of fancy in which an octopus predicts the outcome of football matches and a elderly Bavarian becomes Pope and travels to Turkey - no, wait a minute...

21baswood
Ene 8, 2017, 10:28 am

Contrapunt would have interested me, if there had been an English translation.

22thorold
Ene 8, 2017, 3:10 pm

>21 baswood: There is, apparently (cf. >15 thorold:) - sorry for being misleading. 9781921401602, University of Western Australia Press(!), 2010, Amazon UK want 25 pounds for it. French might be cheaper...

Several of Enquist's other books seem to be about music, but I haven't read any of them.

23thorold
Editado: Ene 22, 2017, 2:59 pm

I haven't got much reading done over the past week or so, but I did finish listening to another audiobook. It was about time I got to grips with a bit more Alice Munro:

The view from Castle Rock (2006) by Alice Munro (Canada, 1931- )
Audiobook read by Kimberly Farr



This book is presented as a short story collection, but - untypical for Munro - all the material for it is either from her research into the history of her family (in Part One) or autobiographical (in Part Two). The stories form a chronological sequence, but individually they are largely self-contained. We start out in the Scottish Borders around the end of the 18th century (it turns out that Munro's emigrant forebears were cousins of James Hogg "the Ettrick Shepherd", the writer who got Scott interested in ballads), and come forward to Ontario at the beginning of the 21st.

She cautions us against taking it as straight non-fiction, though: everything has been shaped and re-imagined from the perspective of a writer of fiction. Possibly a good way of ensuring that you annoy at least some of your friends and relatives, but it seems to suit her technique very well. I think there might be a buried joke in the way most of the stories subvert the usual formula of an Alice Munro story, by building up a narrative that is clearly heading for a catastrophic pivotal event (adultery, rape, murder, natural disaster, you know the sort of thing) but then having it not happen after all... Fun!

(Like other listeners, I was a bit put off by the way the otherwise excellent reader Kimberly Farr makes all the non-Canadian characters, whether they are meant to be Border Scots, Dutch, or Indian, sound vaguely like the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show.)

24dchaikin
Ene 22, 2017, 4:03 pm

>23 thorold: Nice review Mark. I enjoyed this too and would like to read more by her. Funny about the Swedish chef voices, that would drive me crazy.

25SassyLassy
Ene 22, 2017, 6:02 pm

Alice Munro territory is not all that far in Canadian terms from where I currently live. It is positively scary how good her ear is for that world. I learned very quickly to keep my mouth shut (not my normal MO) when anything more controversial than weather arose until I got to know the speaker really really well. I haven't heard any of her audio books, but you have me intrigued. Maybe I can find one at the library.

26thorold
Ene 23, 2017, 2:31 am

>25 SassyLassy: Yes, I think "ear" might be the key to her technique. There isn't all that much visual description, but she makes it very easy for you to imagine what's special about the places she's writing about, and I'm sure a lot of that is in capturing speech-patterns and turns of phrase.

You'll be amused to know that the next audiobook that came up in my list was The way we live now - started listening to it on the (frosty) beach on Saturday. Back to the 19th century...

27thorold
Feb 6, 2017, 3:34 pm

I haven't finished anything for ages: Het verdriet van België and The way we live now are both long and only advancing very slowly, so this weekend I interpolated a slightly shorter book, which several other members of my book-club have already finished (and which I nominated in the first place).

Perhaps it's also a fitting moment to be reading a book by an Iranian refugee - although that thought didn't occur to me before I picked it up...

Spijkerschrift (2000; My father's notebook) by Kader Abdolah (Iran, Netherlands, 1954 - )

 

Kader Abdolah is a Dutch-Iranian who came to the Netherlands on the run from the Ayatollahs in 1988 and writes in Dutch. He appeared on my 2016 thread with his first novel, De reis van de lege flessen.

Spijkerschrift, Abdolah's second novel, is more-or-less autobiographical in theme. The narrator, a refugee living in the Netherlands, examines his relationship with his father, the deaf-and-dumb carpet repairer Aga Akbar, living in a village in the north-east of Iran, against the background of 20th century Iranian history. Aga Akbar's disability is central to the way the novel develops - it gives Abdolah a way to explore the way that language defines your perception of the world, since Aga Akbar can normally communicate only in a private sign-language developed within the family and the village. His eccentric uncle, the poet Kazem Gan, has encouraged him to write his thoughts down, but since Kazem Gan can't be bothered to teach him how to write in Persian, he ends up developing his own private and personal writing system, inspired by a cuneiform inscription from the time of Cyrus the Great on the wall of a local cave. And of course he still can't read, so he remains dependent for his knowledge of the wider world on what the people around him are able to translate into sign language. Now the narrator, sitting in his attic in the Flevopolder, is trying to reconstruct what his father must have written in the notebook, without any means to decode the cuneiform other than his memory of his father's life, and of course realising how little we can know of what goes on inside someone else's head unless they have an effective way of communicating it.

Another big theme of the book is the odd way in which having a disabled parent introduces a partial role-reversal into the parent-child relationship, giving the narrator an unusually intimate relationship with his father - and an unusually heavy load of the usual filial guilt when he becomes involved in the underground resistance to the Shah, and later to the clerics, and is forced to separate himself from his parents to avoid implicating them in his political activities.

The book ticks most of the boxes you would expect from the "refugee novel" genre - there is more local colour than you can shake a stick at, there are attractive descriptions of the idyllic-but-tough life-before-the-political-horror, there are arrests, beatings, and disappearances, there is the wear-and-tear of being constantly on the lookout for the secret police. But what makes it special and uniquely attractive is the charming, modest, but sure-footed way Abdolah navigates between the two cultures and picks up echoes in their ways of imagining the world in poetic terms (even the idea of deciphering the notebook gets tied into the framing narrative of the Dutch classic Max Havelaar).

(Review cross-posted from the RG Benelux thread)

28Simone2
Feb 7, 2017, 7:25 am

>27 thorold: Great review, I was also very much charmed by this book. I haven't read anything since by Kader Abdolah; your review makes me realize I really should.

29thorold
Editado: Feb 9, 2017, 4:18 pm

And the one I've been plugging away at in a mixture of pleasure, frustration, tedium and amusement, for what seems like forever:

Het verdriet van België (1983; The sorrow of Belgium) by Hugo Claus (Belgium, 1929-2008)

 

I'm struggling a bit to review this, as there are so many different sides to it - this isn't necessarily my last attempt...

Hugo Claus clearly saw himself as the alpha-male of Flemish writers for much of the post-war period: an alpha-male with a robust, Flemish sense of humour, evidently, but still very much the boss.

Het verdriet van België is Claus's great, sprawling, historical, autobiographical, satirical, send-up of what his neighbours and relatives did in the Second World War. It's a divisive book - as you would expect when it paints a largely one-sided picture of a country where it's rare for political questions to have as few as five or six sides - but it seems to have established itself as the definitive novel about Belgium during the occupation.

The title makes you expect a lamentation of the hardships and abuses the Belgian people were subjected to at the hands of the Germans. The opening chapters, where the 10-year-old narrator, Louis, is at a convent boarding school in the spring and summer of 1939, keep up this anticipation of gloom to come, but it soon turns out to be fraudulent in several ways.

For one thing, the Germans only appear in very minor offstage roles: the actual horrors (and there are plenty of these, don't worry) are all perpetrated by Belgians who have been drawn into collaboration with the Nazis either by personal greed and ambition or by distorted ideals of Flemish nationalism that make them see the Nazis as their natural allies against the hated French. Plus a fair bit of damage "accidentally" done to Belgium by the countries that are fighting to liberate it.

For another thing, the amoral viewpoint character Louis and the narrator, who increasingly identifies with him as the book goes on, clearly take a great, Rabelaisian pleasure in watching the theatre of moral deformation and physical destruction that is growing up around them as people get the chance to do something about the petty jealousies and envies they have been harbouring for decades. There's no shortage of corruption based on church, family and party connections; denunciations, slander, incest, murder, and simple theft.

Although Claus frequently makes fun of the Flemish nationalists' tendency to relate everything to their nation's glory days five or six centuries ago, there is a lot in this book that reminds you of one of those very busy early renaissance Flemish paintings. It is a very messy sort of book, with dozens of storylines appearing and disappearing at will, more characters than your average Dickens novel, and a narrative that has a disconcerting habit of hopping about between realistic and dream sequences without warning. The language takes some getting used to, as well, as it's relentlessly Flemish (if you're used to standard Dutch, then the experience is a bit like reading a novel that's written in Scots when you're used to standard English - you can make most of it out, but it takes a moment or two, and sometimes you have to go back a bit and read it aloud...). Claus is clearly determined not to "clean up" the way his characters talk any more than he would clean up their politics or their morals, and he wants to emphasise that all his characters have their roots in the Flemish mud. And it's very egotistical - the book stops abruptly, directly Louis achieves literary glory for the first time, without any consideration for fates of the the dozens of characters whose plots have not been resolved yet. All over Flanders, wives are still missing husbands, prisoners are still awaiting verdicts, lovers ununited, children unborn, dinners half-cooked, diseases uncured, and we'll never know how they came out.

I found that this was a book that I only really started to enjoy about 3/4 of the way through, when the penny dropped that the humour was not just incidental, it is the real point of the book. Claus seems to be arguing that most people - at least in Flanders - are not involved in great struggles of good and evil, but are trying to find a way to reconcile their material self-interest with their desire to look good in the eyes of their neighbours. From time to time the compromises they reach have truly great or truly horrifying effects, and perhaps the only way we can come to terms with the horrible banality of this is to find a way to laugh about it.

(I wonder about how the same book can have the cover above in Dutch and the one below in Polish, which is not as attractive, but 100% better match to the story. Some Catholic countries are obviously more alike than others...)

30thorold
Feb 11, 2017, 3:19 am

...and another prominent alpha-male form the low countries:

Siegfried: een zwarte idylle (2001) by Harry Mulisch (Netherlands, 1927-2010)

 

Mulisch was about the same age as Hugo Claus, published his big-novel-about-the-occupation at about the same time (De Aanslag, 1982), and also had a father who had sympathised with the Nazis and was a collaborator during the war. (Although his situation was a good deal more complex than that of Claus, since his mother was Jewish...)

The novel Siegfried is a short, dark meditation on Hitler, written towards the end of Mulisch's life. The distinguished, seventy-year-old Dutch writer Rudolf Herter is on a trip to Vienna as guest of the Dutch embassy to promote his thousand-page millennium-novel The invention of love (...is this starting to sound like anyone we know?) when he bumps into an elderly couple who turn out to have been employed as personal servants at the Berghof in Obersalzberg during and immediately before the war, and are in possession of a terrible secret they unaccountably want to share with a random passing novelist before they die... Mulisch uses this as the hook for a partly historical, partly metaphysical, and partly fantastic exploration of who Hitler was and why we have so much difficulty pinning him down psychologically and philosophically. Probably mostly nonsense, but very elegant and erudite nonsense, and eminently readable.

31thorold
Editado: Feb 14, 2017, 7:18 am

...and another foray South of the Border, but going back half a century further:

Kaas (1933; Cheese) by Willem Elsschot (Belgium, 1882 - 1960)

 

The Flemish writer Willem Elsschot (real name Alfons de Ridder) worked for most of his life in the advertising business in Antwerp - he's best known for a series of novellas written in the early thirties (of which this is one), and for his early realistic novel set in a Paris lodging-house, Villa des Roses (1913).

In the novella Kaas, the long-serving office-worker Frans Laarmans suddenly gets the chance to set up in business on his own account as a cheese importer. He's essentially a Flemish Mr Pooter, a kindly, mild-mannered husband and father who achieved his maximum promotion level in the shipyard office many years ago, but who can't resist this one last chance to bite off more than he can chew. Laarmans has a lot of fun picking a name for his business, ordering headed notepaper and setting up an office, but then the first batch of twenty tons of Edammer arrives and it becomes all too clear that he is not psychologically equipped to go into grocers' shops and persuade them to order his cheese, even after a session with an expert motivator.

A gentle little social comedy, no real fireworks, but an engaging central character and a lot of charming period detail about commercial life in the thirties.

32deebee1
Feb 14, 2017, 6:34 am

>29 thorold:: Comparing it with an early renaissance Flemish painting is the perfect description. I liked it from the very start , and felt it an interesting way of looking at how people lived during an occupation. I liked its "messiness" and narrative that sometimes disconcerts, so much like real life. (I love Brueghel the Elder).

Claus seems to be arguing that most people - at least in Flanders - are not involved in great struggles of good and evil, but are trying to find a way to reconcile their material self-interest with their desire to look good in the eyes of their neighbours."

This opportunistic behaviour, I remember, he managed to convey very well. Not heroic at all, but maybe more pragmatic if the idea was to get through the war intact?

>30 thorold:: I've not read this, but have read The Discovery of Heaven and a couple of others of his.

Probably mostly nonsense, but very elegant and erudite nonsense, and eminently readable.

Good thing it's short. TDH was all of this, but at almost 750 pages, I found it a couple of hundred thousand words too long.

33thorold
Feb 14, 2017, 8:30 am

>32 deebee1: a couple of hundred thousand words too long

At least!
BTW - Mulisch seems to have taken the point that leaving your main female character in a coma for 700 pages isn't exactly in the spirit of our egalitarian times: this time all his passive female characters remain technically conscious throughout...

34ursula
Feb 14, 2017, 8:51 am

>29 thorold: That Polish cover has me more interested in reading The Sorrow of Belgium now! I mean, I've wanted to read it since I was living in Flanders, but it was (maybe unsurprisingly) hard to find an English version of the book there. :)

35wandering_star
Feb 27, 2017, 11:17 am

>31 thorold: that sounds rather fun!

36thorold
Editado: Mar 2, 2017, 5:54 am

Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy...

I've somehow let myself be sucked into (re-)reading Milton, aided and abetted by some Yale lectures I found whilst looking for something entirely different on YouTube. I'll share my thoughts on PL and the rest when I get a bit further, but in the meantime I had the idea of checking my shelves for secondary works on Milton.

The first bit of gold-dust was the essay on Milton's verse in the Penguin Selected writings of Samuel Johnson, including the famous comment - ‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions. He's probably a little bit unfair to the old boy, but his comments are pithy and mostly relevant and sensible: it's still well worth reading the essay.

Then I came across

Milton the Puritan (1977) by A. L. Rowse (Cornwall, Oxford, 1903-1997).



(Almost all books on Milton seem to use this portrait as their cover art...)

I don't remember when or why I acquired this, but I obviously bought it without opening it first. It turns out to be one of those slightly embarrassing books Rowse wrote after retiring from All Souls', the sort of tory rant that might be quite entertaining in the setting of the Telegraph letters page or a High Table dinner, but soon gets tedious on the printed page. After a couple of pages on what a wonderful, funny, caring, empathetic, red-blooded sort of writer Shakespeare was, he moves on to his actual subject: "But Milton was a Cambridge man". He doesn't really need to say any more, does he?

All the same, he goes on for another couple of hundred pages, praising Archbishop Laud and the Stuarts, condemning the puritans and Parliamentarians (whom he treats as though they were 17th-century Brexiteers) and generally rubbishing the fizzing and subversive intellectual world that Milton existed in. And, of course, being Rowse, he has a Theory: Milton was a repressed homosexual. If he'd done what Rowse would have done in his place and picked up a couple of sailors for the evening, Paradise Lost might have been a very different epic. Hmmmm.

I think I need to move on rapidly to fresh woods and pastures new Christopher Hill!

37thorold
Editado: Mar 3, 2017, 5:46 pm

...and back at the ranch, I've at last finished the audiobook that I've been listening to off and on for about six weeks now. It's somehow oddly reassuring to be reading a book about a crooked real-estate speculator who comes to a spectacularly bad end after going into politics...

The way we live now (1875) by Anthony Trollope (UK, 1815-1882)
Audiobook read by David Shaw-Parker

  

Trollope's entry in the Great Victorian Novel stakes, a vast, sprawling Vanity Fair for the 1870s, with far too many characters, far too many subplots, and far, far too many pages that pounds smoothly and steadily on over the waves of literary convention like one of the Transatlantic steamships that play such a large part in its plot. Despite all its self-indulgent predictability, it turns out to be a very satisfying and enjoyable book: Trollope is just so infuriatingly good at what he does, and this is Trollope at the top of his form.

Ostensibly, the book centres around the rise and fall of Mr Melmotte, a businessman who has appeared in London from no-one-knows-where with a tremendous reputation for wealth, power and influence, and is soon being courted by investors, politicians, diplomats and - since he has an unmarried daughter - impoverished aristocrats with sons to marry off. Trollope has a lot of fun with the notion that success in modern capitalism has far more to do with someone's reputation for being able to make money than with any actual profitable assets they control. Melmotte's fall is based on as little solid evidence as his initial success - it is not his actual crimes that undermine his credit, but the (false) rumours that he is about to be arrested for them.

But it's probably too narrow to think of this as just a satire of the financial sector - Trollope pulls in all sorts of different aspects of the ways that money, class and gender work together to undermine the moral values that we deceive ourselves into believing we use to guide our lives. Trollope - as usual - digs a bit deeper and cuts a bit sharper than his genial manner conveys, and gives us a little reminder that he was an almost exact contemporary of Karl Marx, whose Kapital had started to appear three or four years before The Way we live now. Not that Trollope was in any way a Marxist, but obviously, those were the ideas that were floating around London at that time.

If Vanity Fair was "a novel without a hero", Trollope also seems to be determined to make this a novel without a villain: neither Melmotte nor the Bad Baronet, Sir Felix Carbury, ever quite manage to dominate the story for more than a scene or two. Trollope keeps undermining their badness and showing us how engagingly weak they are underneath. None of the other men in the book really get out attention for long enough to stand out: there are lots of nice little scenes, but no-one you want to engage with. Even the bachelor squire Roger Carbury, who seems a rather likeable character in the opening chapters, is revealed to us later in the book as a well-intentioned but crashingly pompous bore.

The women do a bit better, but there's only one female character who really leaps off the page, and rather surprisingly that turns out to be the gun-toting American widow-query-divorcée Mrs Hurtle, who gets more grand set-piece scenes than anyone in the book. She breaks all the rules of Victorian fiction and doesn't care who knows it: she even manages to behave outrageously in Lowestoft, something I would not have thought feasible... Meanwhile, Hetta Carbury, who ought by rights to be the romantic heroine, is too feeble to be more than momentarily interesting (as with Thackeray's Amelia, this is probably intentional); the heiress Miss Melmotte shows a certain amount of wit and feminist determination in the later scenes, but Trollope keeps her rather quiet most of the time, perhaps simply because he doesn't want her to turn into a clone of Miss Dunstable. Ruby Ruggles is a one-trick-pony, an anachronistic refugee from a Thomas Hardy novel that hasn't been written yet, and Lady Carbury has potential but is so transparently an affectionate portrait of the author's mother that she has to be kept out of anything more sensational than a few gently comic scenes with editors and publishers.


Or: Mr Melmotte composes a tweet

"Mr. Melmotte," he said, "comes before you as a Conservative, and has told us, by the mouths of his friends,—for he has not favoured us with many words of his own,—that he is supported by the whole Conservative party. That party is not my party, but I respect it. Where, however, are these Conservative supporters? We have heard, till we are sick of it, of the banquet which Mr. Melmotte gave yesterday. I am told that very few of those whom he calls his Conservative friends could be induced to attend that banquet. It is equally notorious that the leading merchants of the City refused to grace the table of this great commercial prince. I say that the leaders of the Conservative party have at last found their candidate out, have repudiated him;—and are seeking now to free themselves from the individual shame of having supported the candidature of such a man by remaining in their own houses instead of clustering round the polling booths. Go to Mr. Melmotte's committee-room and inquire if those leading Conservatives be there. Look about, and see whether they are walking with him in the streets, or standing with him in public places, or taking the air with him in the parks. I respect the leaders of the Conservative party; but they have made a mistake in this matter, and they know it."

38RidgewayGirl
Mar 3, 2017, 5:10 pm

I'm very much enjoying your latest reviews, especially those of the Belgian alpha-males.

39thorold
Mar 9, 2017, 7:22 am

Back to the 17th century again:

I meant to continue my reading about Milton with Christopher Hill, but it turns out that I don't actually have a copy of Milton and the English Revolution, so while I wait for one to arrive, here's another view by an "Oxford man" from the toryish side of the political spectrum, albeit a "Young Fogey" (at the time he wrote this), not an old one:

A Life of John Milton (1983) by A. N. Wilson (UK, 1950- )



Milton is always going to be good value for money as the subject of a literary biography: he was convinced from an early age that he was going to be seen by posterity as a genius, and arranged his life accordingly, and he also lived through some of the most notoriously interesting times in English history, taking an active part in many of the most virulent controversies of an age when flame wars could still involve actual flames. Even if he'd never written a poem, we'd be interested in someone who grew up just down the street from Shakespeare's haunt, the Merrmaid Tavern (he would have been 8 when Shakespeare died, but since he never boasts about meeting him, he probably didn't); who whilst backpacking around Europe in the early 1640s ran into people like Hugo Grotius and Gallileo; who worked as a senior aide to Cromwell; whose young friends and colleagues included people like Andrew Marvell, etc. etc.

Wilson's problem, of course, is how to add something useful to the mountains of other biographical woks on Milton, which have been accumulating since his own day. He opts to keep things reasonably light, taking us through the essential facts we need to know in not much more than 200 pages. He manages to communicate very well the pleasure he takes in Milton's poetry and prose, although he can't resist an occasional dig at Milton's sometimes rather comical sense of his own importance. In many ways, it's exactly the book you would expect from Wilson: he is clearly bored to tears by the battles of the Civil War ("possibly the most half-hearted conflict in human history") and has no patience at all for Cromwell, but he has all the time in the world for explaining complex theological and ecclesiastical controversies to us. And, of course, he quotes Macaulay and other 19th century authorities far more often than we would have thought relevant or necessary (there's even the odd epigraph from Scott).

All in all, a useful and quite entertaining short biography.

40FlorenceArt
Mar 9, 2017, 2:08 pm

Enjoying your reviews. I still haven't read Trollope and I'm not sure whether I ever will, but I'm intrigued by your review.

41SassyLassy
Mar 9, 2017, 2:31 pm

>39 thorold: Sounds like just what is needed for someone like me who will never study Milton in depth, but would like to know something. For some reason I thought Wilson must have been born in the '20s or '30s; it must be that tory fogey thing. As you say he is a good writer though and I will have to check out the Scott epigraphs.

>37 thorold: Now you could read L'Argent. It was reading it that led me to The Way We Live Now, and I kept thinking of the Zola whenever Melmotte came up.

42baswood
Mar 11, 2017, 5:16 pm

Enjoying your reviews of your background reading to John Milton. A great review of The Way we live now:
she even manages to behave outrageously in Lowestoft, something I would not have thought feasible.. And that made me chuckle.

43thorold
Editado: Mar 13, 2017, 7:48 am

>41 SassyLassy:
I'm sure it's not an accident that Trollope keeps hinting at Melmotte's previous shady dealings in Paris. But the influence was probably more Balzac than Zola, in 1875.

>42 baswood:
I realise - too late - that my Lowestoft comment was a bit gratuitous, because only about 6 months ago I was talking about Edward FitzGerald behaving badly there.
(Lowestoft is a splendid, go-ahead seaside resort, for those who don't know it, with a fountain that performs the Sabre-Dance and all kinds of other delights for the visitor...)

44SassyLassy
Mar 13, 2017, 9:12 am

>43 thorold: You're right about the dates. It's just that I read the Zola first and that led me to Trollope which made me think of Zola and round and round.

45thorold
Mar 19, 2017, 5:37 am

Back to Milton in a moment, but first a 20th century novel that I've been failing to finish for several weeks, as a result of 17th-century distractions...

Der Gehülfe (1908; The Assistant) by Robert Walser (Switzerland, 1878-1956)

 

Walser has appeared in my threads a couple of times before: an eccentric Swiss modernist with a strong distaste for bourgeois life, famous amongst other things for retiring into a mental hospital in 1929 and remaining there until his death, whilst Europe went mad around him.

Der Gehülfe, written in Berlin in 1907, was Walser's second published novel (Geschwister Tanner was the first; in between he wrote another that was never published, apparently a fantasy set in Asia). It's his most conventional work of fiction, and was relatively popular during his own lifetime.

Apparently very closely autobiographical in its details, it's an account of a radically alienated young man, Josef Marti, who spends a few months working as a live-in secretary/bookkeeper for the inventor Karl Tobler (sadly, none of his inventions is chocolate-related!) at his villa in a small town on the shores of Lake Zürich. Josef has been unemployed and in poverty for some time, and he's sucked in by the seductive middle-class comfort of the Tobler family despite seeing very clearly how hollow it all is - Tobler is squandering his inherited capital recklessly on luxuries with an unreasonable confidence in his distinctly lacklustre inventions; he is splashing out hospitality to buy his way into local society, there are serious problems in the Toblers' marriage and their relationship with their children; the beautiful house and garden are shoddily built, etc., etc. Even the countryside into which Josef escapes for his Sunday walks is seen to be an illusion compared to the hard reality of the big city...

Interesting, especially since it turns out to be much more Swiss in its language and references than you might have guessed, and it has some very beautiful - and very funny - passages, but I tend to agree with all the people who say that it feels like a wildly original book that falls short of what it could have been through being shoehorned into a traditional format - in that sense it reminded me rather of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. Of course, that's because we all read the later Jakob von Gunten first...

46thorold
Editado: Mar 19, 2017, 7:53 am

The late Master of Balliol is still lost in the post somewhere between here and the Kingdom of Fife (it's going to be a terrible anticlimax if he doesn't arrive before I get bored with the 17th century...) so here's a colleague who managed to get here from Rochester, NY rather more expeditiously. I ordered this from ABE on the same day as the Hill book, both of them with the cheapest postage option available. Obviously the US Postal Service must have discontinued its by-sailing-ship-via-Cape-Horn service, unlike Royal Mail...

The prophetic Milton (1974) by William Kerrigan (USA, 1943- )
 

William Kerrigan was an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia at the time he wrote this; the most recent information I could find on Google is that he is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts.

This is seriously heavy-duty lit-crit for grown-ups, but worth struggling with, because Kerrigan manages to retain a lively, authoritative style even in the densest thickets of patristic theology (my only criticism would be that he's clearly read too much Milton - sometimes I caught myself turning back a page to check whether this was Kerrigan or a quotation). He does have very interesting things to say about Milton and the language he uses, despite the fact that the premise of the book makes it seem like putting on the heaviest of boots to kick in an open door. The idea, as presented in the introduction, is that we are seriously missing the point if we try to read Milton in a purely secular way. Which is probably not something that any critic in their right mind would try to do, but maybe that's because they've all had a chance to read this book by now...

Kerrigan asserts Milton's own conviction that he was divinely inspired to write his poems as absolutely central to any understanding of them, and backs this up by a very detailed analysis of the history of the concept of prophesy from the ancient world right up to Calvin and Knox, and then traces back the ways this concept is reflected in Milton, not only in the obvious places like the invocations of Paradise Lost, but also in less straightforward ways, e.g. in Samson Agonistes. One of the built-in complications of prophesy, of course, is that it plays havoc with the normal concept of "time" as we are used to experiencing it in everyday life. Kerrigan has a very interesting discussion of the effects of this in literature that actually turns out to go a long way beyond Milton.

Fun, but you might need an ice-pack from time to time to cool the neurones...

(Disappointingly, the University Press of Virginia fail to credit the dust-jacket illustration and ten minutes browsing Google Images didn't help - anyone know where it comes from? It seems to be an enlargement of part of a woodcut - a detail from a 17th century pamphlet, I suppose)

47SassyLassy
Mar 19, 2017, 4:54 pm

>26 thorold: The woodcut looks like some I have illustrating a copy of Gulliver's Travels. I believe they are not attributed.

I'm betting on bas for the answer!

The Kingdom of Fife is a long way indeed from the everyday world. At least you got the correct book. amazon's used book division just delivered in record time a translation of Eduard's Homecoming, a novel about post communist Berlin, when I had ordered Romanticism and its Discontents. They were very good about it and the second book should be arriving any day.

48thorold
Mar 19, 2017, 6:03 pm

A short one for the RG Benelux thread for Sunday evening (cross-posted from there):

Zomerhitte (Boekenweek gift 2005) by Jan Wolkers (Netherlands, 1925–2007)

 

Jan Wolkers was another of the alpha-males of post-war Dutch literature (and painting and sculpture), famous amongst other things for gratuitous sex-scenes (Turks fruit), political activism and nature conservation.

This was his last work of prose fiction, a novella written as the gift-book for the Dutch book promotion week (Boekenweek) in 2005. It's a curious mixture of bird-spotting, hardcore porn, and organised crime, set among the sand-dunes of the Dutch island of Texel where Wolkers lived for many years. There are some bits of quite inspired writing in the sex-scenes, but they seem to be written with a firm conviction that it's still 1970 and women's liberation is all about the right to take your clothes off on the beach. The crime story is clumsily cobbled together, apparently as an afterthought when the author realised that the love-story couldn't be made to fill enough pages - he has the narrator describe the key scene no fewer than five times, in slightly different situations. Perhaps it would have been kinder to leave Wolkers to enjoy his retirement in peace.

49thorold
Mar 19, 2017, 6:16 pm

>47 SassyLassy: Hmm. Not an obvious mistake to make...
Did you get a look at the Schneider before sending it back? I've never tried him, but I'm usually a sucker for fall-of-the-wall novels.

The hair looks more 17thC than 18th to me, but apart from that it might well fit as an illustration for Swift. It's obviously some sort of satire.

50SassyLassy
Mar 20, 2017, 8:25 am

>49 thorold: That was the best part of it. The help desk said to keep the Schneider free of charge, so I get two for one.

51thorold
Mar 20, 2017, 2:10 pm

52thorold
Editado: Mar 22, 2017, 4:33 pm

As I watched the last of the Yale lectures on Milton last night, it's almost time to get started on my long-promised Milton post.

The Elevator Pitch

Why read Milton? He's often called the most important English poet after Shakespeare, but most people seem to get along quite nicely without reading him anywhere outside an Eng Lit course. He has a reputation for being difficult: ferociously learned, humourless, misogynistic, and full of abstract ideas and divine inspiration.

That's not far wrong, but what makes him so interesting is the combination of all that formidable renaissance scholarship with a deeply radical 17th-century puritan "question everything" attitude to politics and religion and a surprisingly subjective approach to writing, in which Milton's personality and circumstances keep bouncing back into the text. The constant presence of the author - almost as a character - gives the poems a surprisingly modern feeling.

And he's unquestionably a great and highly original poet, who uses the English language in a way no-one else can (although some would say, a way that it's not meant to be used...) with quite astonishing combinations of certainty and ambiguity.

Texts

 

I've been using my ancient OUP paperback copy of The Complete Poetry of John Milton, supplemented by the excellent John Milton Reading Room (https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/contents/text.shtml ) at Dartmouth College (which typically has more useful footnotes than the OUP edition, and the very nice ability to go straight to cross-referenced passages in other texts.)

The Yale lectures by John Rogers are here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf91LApkCpU&list=PL2103FD9F9D0615B7

Lyric poems and masques
Mot many big surprises here - I've read the most famous of these a few times in the past, and I even once saw a student production of Comus in a college garden. It was fun to rediscover how many quotable phrases and book titles come from Milton - everything from "the light fantastick toe" and "the cricket on the hearth" to "sport with Amaryllis in the shade", "look homeward, angel" and "fresh woods and pastures new". As I said, Milton doesn't really do jokes, but generations of schoolboys have been amused by "Jonson's learned sock" and the poet's modest aim to "sit and rightly spell". But there's more than trivial silliness that makes you notice that sort of thing: even in what from any other poet would most probably be very formulaic, apprentice pieces, Milton is twisting the language to its limits to make it do what he wants.

Reading with Rogers' lectures in mind (and the Wilson biography) it's interesting to see how many references Milton drops in to his own future career as the great epic poet for which all this is only a preparation.

Prose
There's a lot of good stuff here, which I've barely dipped into as yet. The divorce pamphlets, the defence of free-minded Presbyterians against oppressive prelates, the defence of regicides against royalists, the defence of Independents against oppressive Presbyterians, etc. Lots of opportunities to see some good old-fashioned ad hominem attacks finding their marks...

Areopagitica, the great defence of freedom of the press, is a fabulous and very powerful bit of argument, but it's a surprise to realise that Milton wasn't really arguing for unlimited free speech: he had no problem with courts being allowed to punish authors and suppress harmful books once published, but objected strongly to licensing which would have stifled dissident ideas before anyone got a chance to debate them.

Paradise Lost
This is the Big One, the Great National Epic that Milton knew it was his destiny to write. Most young poets have a similar conviction, but Milton actually did it. And Destiny, at least, obviously has a sense of humour, because Milton found himself writing it at what should have been the low point of his life, a discredited supporter of a failed revolution, blind, unemployed, and saved from the scaffold only by the magnanimity - or worse, indifference - of his former enemies.

Anyone else would probably have given up in disgust and retired to the country, but Milton, dictating to a string of willing young men who were expected to turn up early in the morning to "milk" him of the material he had received from his Muse overnight, produced a magnificent, daring 10,000 line epic poem dealing with no less a theme than Creation and the Fall of Man.

Looked at from a safe distance, the logic of Milton's celestial office politics seems a little circular: God creates humans, knowing that they will be tempted to exercise their free will and Fall from grace; he sets up an Atonement mechanism to ensure that they can be redeemed at a certain moment, but this requires him to beget the Son and exalt him above all the angels; this in turn leads to professional jealousy, Satan's failed rebellion and expulsion from Heaven; this gives Satan a motivation to tempt humans to disobey God. And we're back where we started. It all makes God sound more like an incompetent manager constantly fixing problems he's caused himself than an omniscient creator, somehow...

But all that has little to do with the real experience of reading the poem, which rarely fails to be as subtle and complex in its details as it is overwhelming in its audacity at high level. And since this is a poem about Everything, Milton brings in references to just about every field of knowledge he had access to. It's the Book of Genesis Moses might have written if he'd been a Cambridge Man. As you would expect, there are copious allusions to the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament, and Milton's predecessors in the classical and renaissance traditions of epic poetry, but the poem also shows a detailed knowledge of geography (Moses might have been surprised to see all the mentions of America), botany, zoology, medicine, the law, physics, chemistry, astronomy (there are at least three allusions to Milton's meeting with Galileo, but the archangel Raphael, despite just having completed a flight across half the Solar System, rather quaintly refuses to commit himself on "heliocentric vs. geocentric").

I've got a lot more reading to do before I really get a grip on PL - I've just spent a profitable hour on another YouTube lecture, this one from Paul Stevens (Toronto) on Milton's Satan (https://youtu.be/N1Dr9JnBGJk) - and that makes me want to read Stanley Fish...

Paradise Regain'd
As I mentioned somewhere else, this poem intrigued me simply because you hear so little about it. It's much shorter than PL, somewhere around 2000 lines, and most of it is written in a very plain style, shorn of all the flashy similes and classical references we're used to. But it's still theologically subversive: where PL expands from one chapter of Genesis out to the whole of human time and a bit more, PR condenses the Gospel story down to the forty days in the wilderness. The implication is plain: all that crucifixion and resurrection stuff was just show-business, as far as Milton is concerned the story of the Atonement is over at the moment when the Son overcomes Satan's attempt to tempt him. Needless to say, the form of the temptations isn't quite the same as we're used to from the Bible, and at the point where Satan is dangling the intellectual treasures of Athens in front of the Son's face, we get a distinct feeling that Milton - who, if anything was putting himself in Satan's shoes in PL, is now imagining the scene from the Son's point of view and asking himself 'what would tempt me to put aside my mission in life?'

Samson Agonistes

This is a tricky one. In his only tragedy, which was probably also his last work to be written, Milton imagines Samson at the end of his career, blinded, betrayed and a prisoner of the Philistines. It's hard not to read his anguish as a self-portrait - so hard that very few readers have bothered to try, and those that do usually end up tying themselves in knots making Samson into Christ.

If you start getting biographical, then you are more-or-less forced to take the hideously misogynistic things Samson says about Dalila as evidence of the way Milton felt about women in general, or perhaps about one woman in particular. The favourite nominee here is his first wife Mary Powell, but the evidence that their marriage was as disastrous as this implies isn't all that convincing. It certainly got off to a rocky start, but that might well have had more to do with the Civil War than anything else. If Milton hated women so much, why did he get married three times...? Maybe Dalila is so untrustworthy because that's what the story demands, and maybe Samson hates her because he knows he let his affection for her distract him from his mission.

The real problem for the 21st century reader ought to be that this is a play whose hero is to all intents and purposes a fanatical middle-eastern suicide bomber. Milton had his moments earlier in life when he was promoting the idea of slaughtering not only the enemies of whatever the True Cause was at that particular moment, but also their wives and children. Maybe his conscience was starting to trouble him about that, and he wanted to show the reader how easily pain and rage and betrayal can push you over the edge into condoning unspeakable acts of violence. Or maybe he really thought Philistines were as expendable as the Irish. The 17th century sometimes feels like a very distant place, sometimes not...

53baswood
Mar 22, 2017, 12:25 pm

>47 SassyLassy: No answer from me on that one, but >48 thorold: there was a film of Zomerhitte http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995757/ However I don't think the image on the front cover of the novel comes from that film - ha! trivia indeed.

54baswood
Mar 22, 2017, 12:28 pm

I have not yet tackled Paradise Lost in its entirety or much else by Milton apart from some sonnets and a few extracts and so reading your posts >52 thorold: is an education and thank you for the links.

55thorold
Mar 22, 2017, 4:59 pm

>53 baswood: Ha! Distraction techniques. You're just trying to change the subject from old woodcuts, aren't you?

If you want trivia, the film of Zomerhitte was directed by the star of Turks fruit, Monique van de Ven. Who obviously has more time for Jan Wolkers than I do.

56janeajones
Mar 23, 2017, 7:40 pm

Look at the use of color imagery in PL -- it's pretty interesting.

57thorold
Mar 25, 2017, 10:03 am

>56 janeajones: I'll have to look for that - it didn't strike me up to now. But it's a fairly safe assumption that any kind of imagery in PL must have something interesting behind it. Thanks for the tip!

Meanwhile, I've been going Dutch again, this time with the poet Gerrit Komrij (cross-posted from the RG Benelux thread):

Verwoest Arcadië (1980) by Gerrit Komrij (Netherlands, 1944-2012)
Er is geen vrijheid in de zandwoestijn (2009) by Gerrit Komrij, selected and introduced by Victor Schiferli

   

Verwoest Arcadië ("Destroyed Arcadia") is an autobiographical novel in which Komrij takes a charming, funny, and perceptive look back at his childhood in the small town of Winterswijk and his student days in Amsterdam. Much as he does in his poems, he uses jokes and paradoxes to lead himself and the reader up to some quite difficult and painful truths about growing up, self-awareness and the consciousness of mortality. But he mostly talks about his lust for books and beautiful boys (like most of us, he seems to have found it easier to feed the first than the second of these, they take up space in the ratio of about ten to one in the text). He talks a bit about the problems of hindsight in autobiography, and he warns us not to take his fictional alter ego, Jacob, as historically reliable, which then gives him the excuse to make critical judgements about the books Jacob was reading which are clearly not Jacob's views but those of the mature narrator, but which are very funny and perceptive anyway. The sort of book that makes you wish you could have had a chance to meet the author in real life.

Er is geen vrijheid in de zandwoestijn was compiled as a Festschrift for Komrij's 65th birthday, bringing together a selection of 65 poems from different moments in his career with an essay celebrating his work by Victor Schiferli. I haven't read much Dutch poetry, but if you had asked me to list the attributes of a typical modern Dutch poem, I think I would have come up with something like what Komrij does: metrical, rhymed, and set in a strict form, very ironic, relying a lot on jokes, paradoxes and puns especially when dealing with serious subject-matter. So it's a bit of a surprise to be told how radical Komrij's metrical clowning was considered to be when he first started doing it in the free-verse, stream-of-consciousness early sixties. It's obviously had a lot of influence since then!

It is striking, though, to see how far he takes this formalism: all the poems in this selection are either sonnets or 12-liners with one of two or three possible variants of rhyme-schemes. Maybe that's just Schiferli trying to keep the collection harmonious, but it does make you wonder if Komrij did ever write anything that wasn't either 12 or 14 lines long?

It does look in one or two of the poems in this collection as though Komrij sometimes got a bit worried about it: in "Noli me tangere", for instance, he talks about putting "a landmine in the last line" that destroys the poem (or perhaps just the tensions it's built up) when the reader gets that far - "a poem must be complete in order not to exist".

58thorold
Editado: Mar 27, 2017, 5:04 pm

And the obligatory review of the 2017 Boekenweek gift, handed out free by booksellers to anyone who buys Dutch books this week. Admittedly, not a book I'd have been likely to pay for, but they are always nice-looking little editions to keep on your shelves:

Makkelijk leven (2017) by Herman Koch (Netherlands, 1953- )

 

(The bookmark showing Herman Koch unconvincingly masquerading as a train conductor came with the book to promote the NS free travel offer)

Herman Koch is the author of a string of very successful unreliable-narrator novels, including Het diner and Zomerhuis met zwembad. Just for a change, this is a novella with an unlikeable and obviously unreliable middle-aged male narrator. In this case, the narrator is a successful self-help author, who has sold more than 40 million copies of a book that advises its readers never to do today what they can postpone until tomorrow and not to try to change anyone, least of all yourself. Naturally, he completely fails to follow his own advice, and equally naturally, the result is a family disaster. The book isn't quite as obvious as this summary might suggest, and it's fairly witty, in a blokey sort of way, in its detailed observation of some of the absurdities of modern life, but I didn't really feel myself engaging with the narrator or any of the other characters.

59thorold
Mar 29, 2017, 8:50 am

Well, the late Master of Balliol finally arrived from Dunfermline yesterday, so I can start getting my fix of 17th century Marxism. But before starting on that, I had to deal with a significant gap in my reading of an important Dutch hater of Marxists (cross-posted from the Benelux thread again):

Op weg naar het einde (1963) by Gerard Reve (Netherlands, 1923-2006)

  

Reve's most-read work is probably still his 1947 "generation gap" novel De Avonden (recently translated into English), which fits into the Catcher in the Rye/Bonjour Tristesse/Nada/Loneliness of the long-distance runner (etc.) slot in the Dutch canon, and is thus more often on than off the syllabus. But he's best known in literary terms for his later work, where he takes a kind of Thomas Bernhard role in provoking the norms of Dutch society from the position of the one sane and reasonable voice rising above the dull-wittedness around him. As the Dutch are a lot harder to provoke than the Austrians, you have to be quite extreme to shock them, but Reve managed to get himself condemned by church, state and his fellow writers on numerous occasions.

Op weg naar het einde often gets cited as Reve's breakthrough work, where he first found the combination of style and subject matter that suited him best. Like most of his later works, it's at an indeterminate point on the borderline between memoir and fiction - the narrator is the Dutch writer Gerard R from the city of A, but there's so much irony about that we can't be absolutely sure at any point that he's speaking for the author.

The book consists of six "travel diaries" (or letters) written in different places, but forming a kind of continuous narrative anchored on specific dates in 1962-63. The narrator attends a PEN conference in Edinburgh (Angus Wilson, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark and many other prominent writers of the time have walk-on parts); he returns to Amsterdam and has to cope with his partner Wim having run off with a plumber from Essex; he goes to London to attempt a reconciliation with Wim; he spends time with his friend P in the Essex countryside; he travels to Spain to try to reduce his living expenses. In between describing his adventures, there are many reflections on sex, religion, literature, death, and alcohol, often combined in unexpected ways (there's a magnificent passage where during Mass in an Amsterdam Catholic church, he has a sexual fantasy about a young man sitting opposite him). He fulminates entertainingly against the stupidity of his fellow-writers and the meanness of the reading public, who are not prepared to shell out a measly few guilders for a book.

The language itself is ironic: he writes about the most secular subject-matter in a style that recalls the religious writing of a few centuries earlier; he insists on quaint alternative spellings to add to the strangeness of what he's writing and force the reader to pay attention to the actual words (there seems to be some sort of etymological system to this, but obviously the main point is Verfremdung).

It's a funny, shocking and beautifully written book, and it comes with a good deal of period detail which sets my nostalgia engine working as well. There are some glorious moments in the text - when he stands up against Hugh MacDiarmid's homophobic comments at the PEN conference, for instance, or his diatribe in support of the Dutch writers' strike of 1962 when he goes on for page after page discussing the subsidy writers should get per page...

60dchaikin
Mar 31, 2017, 12:21 am

>52 thorold: I'm catching up and just read this and all the posts that lead up to it, and follow. Fun stuff. And many terrific posts in Milton, especially this one.

61dchaikin
Mar 31, 2017, 12:30 am

Enjoyed your benelux reviews too. Reve sounds like quite a writing personality. Great review.

62thorold
Abr 1, 2017, 9:39 am