thorold is watching the leaves turn in Q4

Continuation from my Q3 thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/260777

Reading plans for Q4 - still thinking about it...

Obvious things to tackle are my still rather mountainous TBR pile and the Reading Globally theme read on Nordic countries (I hope I manage to turn up something a bit more unusual than the obvious Nordic Noir!). And I definitely want to focus a little bit on getting the gender ratio to somewhere more respectable than where it is now (a dismal 18% by female authors for Q1 to Q3).

Gratuitous seasonal picture (from a recent walking holiday in Germany):

But meanwhile, here's the first book I finished in Q4, which fits into none of the above categories, rather it's another book by an author I first came across by chance in June:

Boussole (2015; Compass) by Mathias Enard (France, 1972 - )

 

Mathias Enard is a French Arabist who lives in Barcelona. I read his 2010 historical novel Parle-leur de batailles, de rois, et d'éléphants a few months ago.

Boussole, which won the 2015 Goncourt, is a much more complex and ambitious novel. In the course of a sleepless night, the Viennese musicologist Franz Ritter allows his mind to range freely over the history of orientalism, which he interprets broadly as the persistent and often excessive fascination European intellectuals have had for "Eastern" culture. He even goes so far as to sketch out the outline of an imaginary academic text sending up the subject, Des différentes fformes de ffolie en orient (with chapters on erotic passions, disguise, disease, decapitation and on orientalists as leaders of the Faithful).

As he discusses a long string of western intellectuals with obvious and non-obvious orientalist credentials, Franz also unpacks his own career as an orientalist. He has spent time in Istanbul, Damascus and Tehran studying the interchanges between the Western and Eastern musical traditions, but we come to realise that his travels were largely a cover for his erotic pursuit of Sarah, a French literary scholar with a particular interest in 19th- and early-20th-century women travellers in the Orient. As he points out himself, he is perilously close to finding himself trapped in the plot of David Lodge's satire of the international academic conference circuit, Small World...

Amongst other things, Enard, through Franz, is chipping away at Edward Said's direct identification of orientalism with colonial exploitation. (There's a hilarious moment when Sarah drops Said's name during a desert camp-fire discussion between Damascus-based European orientalists on a trip to Palmyra - ...Sarah avait lâché le Grand Nom, le loup était apparu au milieu du troupeau, dans le désert glacial : Edward Saïd. C’était comme invoquer le Diable dans un couvent de carmélites...)

Both Sarah and Franz see orientalism as part of a collaborative cultural process, in which it isn't always possible to see who's exploiting whom. So many eastern intellectuals were (partly-)trained in the west, and vice-versa; so many texts and traditions moved backwards and forwards between eastern and western cultures over the centuries. A classic example Franz cites is the popular Bosnian song Kraj tanana šadrvana, which tells the story of a slave's impossible love for the sultan's daughter and helps Balkan muslims feel connected with their Ottoman past, but turns out not to be Ottoman in its origins at all - it is a translation of a German poem by Heinrich Heine, who was of course influenced by the work of 19th-century German orientalists in translating Persian poetry. The Bosnian translator was Safvet-beg Bašagić, an orientalist who studied Arabic and Persian at the University of Vienna under the Austro-Hungarian empire. And so it goes around...

This is an enjoyable sort of book if you are someone who doesn't mind being hit by strings of dropped names (and you have at least a vague idea of who was who in 19th century literature and music), and there are plenty of jokes, but it would probably be frustrating if you were looking for hardcore academic rigour. If you're being picky, it's perhaps also a bit too long and shapeless, and it probably does too much Sebalding - texts-within-texts-within-texts, images in the text, muddy boundaries between fiction and history, etc.

Despite the reservations, it does seem like an intriguing sort of book, although I'm not sure I'm up for "Sebalding" at the moment (great term). Anyway, a good way to start a new quarter.

Going back to your previous thread; sorting out the spreadsheet process on a Mac was the worst part of switching from a PC for me. Somehow, "intuitive" and "spreadsheet" don't go together. I much preferred Excel. Of course way back in time I preferred Lotus to Excel.

>3 SassyLassy: Yes, it’s not for everyone, but definitely worth a look. You can even read it simply for the historical anecdotes, if you want, and ignore the plot.

I agree about the disconnect between spreadsheets and “intuitive”. The spreadsheet I have on the Mac is probably no more difficult than the one I used to use on the PC, just does things in subtly different ways, and everything needs to be tried three times or looked up in the Help before it will work as you want it to.

>2 thorold: very interesting topic to explore. Seems like a good start to Q4.

A bit of travelling over the past couple of weeks gave me time to clear a few things from the queue. First off, a couple of rather random choices from two of those mid-20th-century British women writers I always used to get mixed up with each other:

1. Eva Trout; or, Changing scenes (1968) by Elizabeth Bowen (Ireland, UK, 1899-1973)

 

Elizabeth Bowen came from a fairly prosperous Anglo-Irish background. She started to publish fiction in the 1920s, and is probably most famous for The death of the heart (1938).

With hindsight, this was not the most sensible place to start with Bowen - it's her last novel, not terribly easy to place in isolation, and would probably benefit from some knowledge of her earlier work. It's a very ambiguous, modernist book, full of sixties existential doubts and misleading references to everything from Shakespeare to Ibsen and Tolstoy - some of which, like the Chekhovian gun-that-has-to-be-fired-in-the-last-act, seem to be verging on self-parody. And there are all sorts of tantalising hints of same-sex relationships. But the way the characters and settings are presented initially tempts you into trying to read it as a conventional bit of novelistic narrative, which of course doesn't work.

I don't know if I simply wasn't in the mood for it, but somehow, whilst appreciating the quality and depth of Bowen's writing, I never quite got the point of this book. Possibly something to come back to later.

2. Who calls the tune? (1953) by Nina Bawden (UK, 1925-2012)

 

I've read and rather enjoyed a few of Nina Bawden's books. She's chiefly remembered for her children's books (Carrie's War, etc.), but she also wrote novels for adults.

This turned out to have been Bawden's first published novel, which she described in a 2010 interview as "mercifully unobtainable" - mercifully for her, she wasn't around to see it reissued as an ebook. Unexpectedly, it is a sort of murder mystery, with strong overtones of both Agatha Christie and Graham Greene. The narrator, Paul (who for no obvious plot reason has some sort of MI6 background) comes to visit Venetia at the Shropshire farm where she lives with her husband Henry. Venetia - whose relationship with Paul is left ambiguous until the closing pages - goes missing overnight, and is later found dead. it looks like an accident, but the police aren't so sure...

There are some nice bits of description (especially in the WWII back-story, which readers of Bawden's later books will probably enjoy) but the plot is a bit too loose to work properly as a whodunnit, especially as many readers will see the ending coming a long way away.

...and then another early Maigret, the 15th in the series:

Le port des brumes (1932; The misty harbour) by Georges Simenon (Belgium, France, etc., 1903-1989)

 

Simenon finds (yet) another pretext to get his Parisian detective involved with ships and sailors - Captain Joris, harbourmaster in the Normandy village of Ouistreham (which would go on to play an important role in the Normandy landings of June 1944, but at that time was just a quiet little port and beach resort well known to Simenon) is found wandering about in Paris, unable to talk and apparently having lost his memory as a result of a gunshot wound to the head. Maigret escorts him back to Ouistreham to investigate.

The plot is a little bit improbable, as is Maigret's conduct during the investigation (but it's fun to discover that Maigret studied in Nantes and speaks a bit of Breton - something Simenon seems to forget in later books). But what makes this book worth reading is the detailed description of Ouistreham in the early 30s, and especially of the daily routine of the port and the people who work there. I was especially interested by the vignettes of the working of a small sailing cargo ship in the days when such ships normally didn't have auxiliary engines. Simenon is clearly observing all this from the point of view of someone who has spent plenty of time with sailors and port workers and understands what they do and why. Good stuff.

Great reviews Mark. The Bowen (not to be confused with the Bawden...) sounds tough, interesting though.

>8 dchaikin: Thanks! Yes, you can probably skip this particular Bawden, but the Bowen looks like one to keep on the list.

Speaking of lists, I had a look at the Booker shortlist a few weeks ago, and noticed two things in particular: first, that there was only one book on the list that immediately struck me as something I wanted to read; and second, that I had absolutely no idea why I haven't read anything by Ali Smith since enjoying her debut short story collection about twenty years ago. Obviously my fault, as her work seems to have got a lot of critical attention in the meantime...

Autumn (2016) by Ali Smith (Scotland, 1962 - )

  

A wonderful, modest little novel about the friendship between a young art historian and her mother's centenarian neighbour, which turns out to cover a lot more ground than you would think possible. Glorious writing and a light, allusive style that constantly refuses to tell us the things we ought to be able to work out for ourselves. There's obviously a seasonal thing going on, lots of leaf metaphors, which of course work very well if you happen to read it at this time of year. But there's also a lot about the importance of asserting our humanity through quixotic acts of resistance, especially in a (current British) society where human relations seem to be more and more based on mutual fear and suspicion. Smith explores this idea both through her fictional characters and through the life of the sixties British pop artist and proto-feminist, Pauline Boty (1938-1966). The message seems to be that an act of resistance always has value, even if we know it's doomed to fail, because it embodies our refusal to accept as inevitable the evil and mediocrity that the world imposes on us.

>9 thorold: appealing review...

>10 dchaikin: ...but predictably enough, the prize went to the big, showy American book instead!
(I haven't read Lincoln in the Bardo, beyond a quick flick through in a bookshop, so I can only judge it by its size and the nationality of its author, neither of which is an entirely infallible guide to literary merit.)

Anyway, on to another impulse non-fiction pick from the library:

Bridges : the science and art of the world's most inspiring structures (2010) by David Blockley (UK, 1941 - )

 

David Blockley is emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Bristol and a former president of the Institution of Structural Engineers. He has published a number of books on engineering topics.

This book has all the elements to work really well: an overview of a complex yet accessible subject area (even if we don't know how to calculate the strength of a bridge, we all have a basic intuitive idea of how it must work and what it's meant to do) by an author who writes fluently and knows what he's talking about. And it does work well a lot of the time. But it has a few annoying problems.

We can probably blame the publishers for the rather minimal quota of illustrations (bridges are a gloriously visual topic, it's really a shame that we get so few pictures of those mentioned in the text) and for the ridiculous decision to ban any maths beyond basic arithmetic. Surely, almost everybody likely to pick up a book like this will have done some high-school maths and physics and be familiar at least with trig functions and simple calculus, both of which would have made the book a lot easier to understand.

However, what is clearly the author's fault is that the book tries to do too many different things at the same time, and ends up not quite doing any of them in a completely satisfying way. As a counterpart to the language metaphors he consistently uses to support his explanation of the different elements used in bridges and the way they work (or fail to work) structurally, Blockley tries to get us into a postmodern discussion of the connections between physical and metaphorical bridges (on occasion, even metaphysical ones). But he doesn't really have enough space - or enough examples - to build this into anything worthwhile, and it just ends up as rather pointless froth at the beginning and end of his chapters.

More substantively, Blockley also wants to spend some time on what seems to be his own main research interest, the way "joined-up thinking" about the process as a whole is crucial to the success and safety of big engineering projects. This makes interesting reading as far as the details of the case-studies he presents go, but when it starts to get more theoretical it feels very much like a watered-down version of a lecture from a generic management course, little of which is specific to bridges or even to engineering.

I visited the Faroe Islands with a couple of friends in 1995, and found them a very strange and fascinating place indeed. On the way home (none of this new-fangled aeroplane stuff: we took the ferry between Aberdeen and Tórshavn, so there was plenty of time), I read a moderately serious overview of the islands' culture, history and topography, The Faroe Islands by Liv Kjørsvik Schei and Gunnie Moberg, and marked the pages about a number of Faroese writers I was meaning to read, in particular William Heinesen. But that's all that came of it, partly because I couldn't find any of his work in translation (The black cauldron was the only one to have been issued in English at that time). The RG theme read on Nordic countries seems to be a good opportunity to make up for that.

With hindsight, Heinesen probably wasn't the most obvious author to pick anyway - what captured my imagination was the spectacular scenery and the tiny, remote communities in the smaller islands, but Heinesen was most interested in people, especially in the small-town dynamics of society in Tórshavn. He doesn't really do landscape.

The lost musicians (1950; English 2006) by William Heinesen (Faroes, 1900-1991) translated by W. Glyn Jones (UK, Denmark, 1928-2014)

 

William Heinesen was a prominent Faroese poet, novelist and painter (during his lifetime, he supported himself mostly by selling pictures). His most famous work is probably the novel Det gode håb (1964). He chose to write in Danish, the language he was made to learn at school, rather than Faroese, which he spoke in daily life (Faroese was introduced in schools in 1938 and only became the official language, jointly with Danish, in 1948). For this reason, he publicly ruled himself out when it was rumoured that he was in the running for a Nobel - he felt that if the prize went to a Faroese writer, it should be to one who wrote in the local language.

Glyn Jones was professor of Scandinavian literature at UEA and put a lot of effort into bringing his friend Heinesen to the attention of the English-speaking world, eventually translating most of the novels himself.

The lost musicians was apparently mostly written during the Second World War, when the Faroes were effectively a self-governing British protectorate, cut off from German-occupied Denmark, and many Faroese lost their lives serving in the Royal Navy or supplying Britain with fish. But it's set during the more cheerful times of Heinesen's childhood before the First World War.

A little group of unconventional characters get together regularly in a basement in a dodgy neighbourhood of Tórshavn to play string quartets, sing, discuss poetry, and have a few drinks (or a lot of drinks) with their friends. Most of them are relatively impoverished and live from crisis to crisis by doing various odd jobs - one is a ferryman, another sets type on the newspaper, another teaches and hangs wallpaper, etc. - but they are united by their belief that the things that matter most in life are friendship, love, and aesthetic pleasure, in particular expressed through music.

Set against them is the bank-manager Ankersen, a former drunkard himself, who has accepted Jesus into his life and is driven to share the Good News and sweep away the sinfulness he sees all around him. He founds - and then disagrees with and splits off from - his own nonconformist sect, and with the best possible intentions, he becomes directly or indirectly responsible for smashing up the lives of the musicians and their friends.

This is a theme for a novel that you can easily imagine Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Gottfried Keller, or Sinclair Lewis tackling, in their different ways - Heinesen is a bit different, though, because for him the emphasis is always on the sheer fun his characters are having, and even what would for anyone else be the most tragic moments entirely fail to take themselves seriously. The movement of the plot is left to take care of itself and the focus is always on incident. There is no political agenda, only a human one - Heinesen presumably wants us to see the danger of good intentions that fail to take account of the individuals they are dealing with, but his main point seems to be that the joy of music and poetry is something that ultimately triumphs, even in the worst situations: definitely something that needed to be said in the 1940s.

Bummer about the bridges, but terrific review of the Heinesen. Wonder if he ever regretted his decision regarding the Nobel.

>13 dchaikin: You win some, you lose some...

(ETA: I meant the bridges, not the Nobel. I would guess that he wasn't all that bothered about it personally - he was already in his eighties when the question arose.)

Another non-fiction title that caught my eye - this one because it seemed to tie in with the ideas of "natural navigation" from the Tristan Gooley book I read a couple of months ago. And because it's just about the only American non-fiction book I've seen in recent years that has a title that indulges in subtle wordplay instead of hitting you over the head with the obvious.

It was a pleasant - but also poignant - surprise to find that the one LT member who went before me in reviewing this one was rebeccanyc - we're going to go on missing her for a long time! As usual, she's said just about everything that really needs to be said about the book.

The lost art of finding our way (2013) by John Edward Huth (USA)



John Huth is a particle physicist who takes part in big high-energy physics experiments at CERN and teaches at Harvard. Rather splendidly, he's also pursued his curiosity about traditional navigation to the extent that it has grown from a hobby into a serious research interest, a lecture course, and this book.

This isn't a how-to manual on finding your way out of the bush (or across the sea) when the batteries in your GPS device run out; it's a serious attempt to produce a scientific and historical account of the tools and techniques that humans used for finding their way about the planet before the age of electronics, looking critically at how well they work, how far they are applicable in different places and under different conditions, and how far the science underlying them may have got mixed up with tradition. From time to time, as well as referring to previous research, Huth describes experiments he did himself to test the things he is writing about.

The book ends with a short story about a navigator from the Gilbert Islands that seems to be constructed as a kind of thought experiment putting together knowledge assembled in the rest of the book, but is also entertaining enough to stand in its own right.

Huth covers a lot of different topics and is pretty uncompromising when it comes to the scientific rigour of his descriptions, so there will be places where readers without a background in physics or navigation might feel they are getting left behind by the pace, but most of it should be fairly accessible to anyone.

I found that there wasn't a huge amount in the subjects covered that was really new to me (except for the material about Pacific Island navigation, where I haven't really read much since Kon-Tiki), but it was always very interesting to see the material in the light of Huth's analysis. One nice example of this is his study of the piece of American folk-wisdom "moss grows on the north side of trees". The experimental evidence shows that this is essentially useless for navigation - there are so many things that can make moss grow in different places, and there is also lichen that looks very like moss to the non-botanist, but doesn't have the same fondness for damp conditions that might make it grow preferentially on the shady side of trees. Outdoor manuals have been warning hikers against relying on it since at least the late 19th century. But there is a quite separate tradition of discourse in the humanities that associates this technique with the Underground Railroad and in particular credits Harriet Tubman with moss-based navigational skills, in defiance (as far as Huth is concerned) of all the facts.

Another example he highlights where scientific and non-scientific accounts diverge is Al Biruni's experiment to estimate the diameter of the earth by measuring the dip-angle of the horizon from the top of a mountain in Pakistan, around the year 1000 AD. He's frequently credited with getting a figure that is within a few km of the modern one, but Huth points out that such an accurate result - if indeed it is the figure he really got - could only have been obtained by accident, as the need to correct for refraction due to thermal differences in air density was not known in Al Biruni's time, and this error should have put his result out by about 20%.

Huth doesn't seem to have a political axe to grind on either Arab science or African-American history - his point is simply that when we cite scientific facts, we should do so with a scientific understanding of what we're talking about. Or at least check the scientific literature as well as the history.

Not necessarily a useful book in a practical sense, but definitely a very interesting one, and one from which people with a lot of different fields of interest will be able to pull something that challenges their preconceptions.

"Not necessarily a useful book in a practical sense, but definitely a very interesting one"

- if only they all could be described this way. Great review, and nice to rebeccanyc's influence. Noting the book.

Iceland is perhaps the obvious next step after the Faroes, but I should probably go there with something a bit more meaningful than yet another Nordic crime story...

The Legacy (2016) by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (Iceland, 1963 - ), translated by Victoria Cribb

  

I hadn't come across Yrsa Sigurðardóttir before, but it turns out that as well as being a noted crime writer, she's a civil engineer in her day-job, so maybe she would be a candidate to write the definitive book on bridges that Professor Blockley didn't quite manage...

The Legacy is billed as the first in a new series centred around an institution called "The Children's House", which is left rather vaguely-defined with an eye to leaving scope for sequels, but seems to be some sort of reception centre for children who have been involved in violent or criminal incidents. In this story, their client is a seven-year-old girl who has been the only witness to the gruesome murder of her mother. Needless to say, there's an unresolved erotic tension between Huldar, the investigating police officer, and Freyja, the psychologist who is responsible for looking after the little girl. And even more needless to say, since we don't hear anything about geothermal energy or dubious banking practices, the plot turns out to revolve about the other thing Iceland is famous for: genetics.

This struck me as a reasonably accomplished crime story technically - maybe the reader is given slightly too many clues to how it's going to turn out, but that's debatable. What let it down for me was that the author didn't really manage to add any depth to our view of the characters in the course of the story: she keeps on telling us the very same things we already know about them in her descriptions of their motivations and states of mind, so we end up thinking of them as automatons, not people. Probably a story that would work better as a TV film than a full-length book.

...and another (very) short book I finished this morning:

Journal du dehors (1993; Exteriors) by Annie Ernaux (France, 1940 - )

  

In contrast to the other books by Ernaux I've read so far, which all seem to be essentially memoirs focussing on one particular aspect of her life, this book is a loose collection of very short prose pieces describing things she's seen or overheard in her daily life, things which don't fit into any particular extended narrative but somehow struck her as important at the time.

People she notices in the train on her daily commute, the conversation in the butcher's shop, the man who collects the trolleys in the supermarket car park, the patter of beggars, conversations between hairdressers or supermarket cashiers, things mothers say to small children, graffiti on the walls of the university, etc. All superficially extremely ordinary, but promoted to significance by being included here. She usually doesn't need more than a word or two of explanation (if that) to make us realise why she noticed these things, and how they add to our understanding of what a strange and complicated thing it is to be a human being and live in a modern (sub-)urban society.

Wonderfully sharp, economical observation - exactly what we would expect from Ernaux. Not a book to take on a long holiday, but would be a great choice as a present for someone who reads slowly and appreciates really excellent writing.

Another Ali Smith novel that failed to win the Booker. This one was long-listed in 2014, the year The narrow road to the deep North (cf. my Q3 thread) won. Which made me reflect a bit on how strange it is that we pretend there's any meaningful way to compare the merit of two so very different books...

How to be both (2014) by Ali Smith (Scotland, 1962 - )



This is another wonderfully light, clever and charming novel that tricks you into thinking it a lot less profound and serious than it really is. Smith seems to be rubbing away at the boundaries we use to define dualities like life/death, masculine/feminine, now/then, here/there, gay/straight, etc., and reminding us that what looks absolute in the physical world needn't be quite so well-defined in the way we perceive the world imaginatively.

The famous gimmick of the book, of course, was that the narrative came in two parts, one from the point of view of George, a modern teenage girl grieving for her dead mother, and the other from that of the long-dead and almost forgotten 15th century Bolognese painter, Francesco del Cossa. Half the copies (including the one I read) were printed with George first, the other half with Francesco first, and it was pure chance which you got. Fun, but an odd sort of experiment, because unless you buy multiple copies or read a review, you won't even know that it's going on...

It's a very visual book, referring frequently and in detail to images - not just Francesco's paintings, but also posters and photographs, including the iconic picture of the 60s French singers Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan (by Jean-Marie Périer) that is on the front cover. For other images mentioned in the text, you're going to have to do some Googling, and I think that's also part of the experimental nature of the book (in the George narrative, Smith helpfully tells us some of the search keywords we need to use). But there's also a lot of linguistic play going on, and plenty of literary allusion too, including a number of indirect references to Giorgio Bassani's novels set in Ferrara and Bologna. Another famous son of Ferrara, the film director Michelangelo Antonioni, also gets a few mentions. Not a book that allows you to doze off!

I was particularly impressed by how convincing I found Smith's portrayal of George - it would be interesting to know whether a modern teenager would be equally convinced, of course! But the key thing obviously isn't that she's tuned into the way kids of the smartphone generation think, but rather that she's so in touch with what it felt like to be an adolescent herself that she can map that experience onto a contemporary setting without us ever noticing that there was any trickery involved. Obviously, with Francesco she doesn't have the same difficulties, since no-one has set a standard for how dead 15th-century painters should talk when they find themselves observing modern Britain (the only book I recall that uses a similar narrative trick is Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, and Korean royals are not at all the same thing as Italian painters...).

...and I still think I need to read more Ali Smith!

Ali Smith on how she got the Ferrara bug: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/24/ali-smith-the-finest-man-who-ever-...

Ali Smith sounds good here. Griselda review.

Three shortish Nordic novels, which I managed to finish over the last few days in the intervals of a very pleasant late-season sailing trip in Friesland:

Under the glacier (1968) by Halldór Laxness (Iceland, 1902–1998), translated by Magnus Magnusson

   

Halldor Laxness has a pretty good claim to being the best-known Icelandic writer since Snorri, thanks in particular to his wonderful 1930s agri-epic Independent people (which everyone should read) and his 1955 Nobel prize.

Under the glacier is a splendidly eccentric novel that doesn't fit into any particular pigeonhole, except perhaps for a generalised sixties feel of "anything goes". A naive young man is sent by his bishop to report on the state of the church community in a remote parish on the slopes of the famous Snæfellsjökull volcano in the far West of Iceland. Not coincidentally, the crater of Snæfellsjökull is where the explorers in Jules Verne's Journey to the centre of the Earth descended below ground. It is clearly a place conducive to all kinds of strangeness.

It turns out that the pastor supports himself mostly by shoeing horses and repairing primus stoves; that his wife - who may or may not be a mythical creature - has been missing for 35 years; that no services have been held in living memory and the church is nailed up, its fittings mostly used for firewood; that a mysterious wealthy outsider has had a bungalow built on part of the churchyard; and that there is at least a strong rumour that bodies have been buried in the glacier rather than in the cemetery.

Definitely all very odd, and you won't be much clearer about what is going on at the end than you were at the beginning, but great fun, and plenty to make you think about what we mean by religious belief and the nature of objective observation. In odd ways, it reminded me of Thomas Bernhard's first novel, Frost, published five years earlier - but Laxness is a lot less wordy than Bernhard!

Moonstone: the boy who never was (2016) by Sjón (Iceland, 1962 - ) translated by Victoria Cribb

   

Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson) is a colourful figure, known for as much his collaborations with Icelandic musician Björk as for his novels and poetry.

Moonstone is another rather odd novel - the central character, Máni Steinn, is a gay teenager in Reykjavik around the end of the First World War, obsessed with cinema and with a young woman called "Sóla G—" who rides an Indian motorcycle and is the double of a woman he has seen in a film. The story brings in the devastating Spanish 'flu epidemic, leprosy, independence from Denmark, and a few celebrated figures from the early history of experimental film. Nothing very profound, but engagingly quirky.

Mirror, shoulder, signal (2016) by Dorthe Nors (Denmark, 1970 - ) translated by Misha Hoekstra

   

Dorthe Nors is mostly known for her short fiction - amongst other things, she was the first Danish author to get a story published in the New Yorker.

As the title rather suggests, Mirror, shoulder, signal is about learning to drive - the central character, Sonja, is a fortyish single woman from the depths of rural Jutland who feels somewhat adrift in the urban rush of Copenhagen. She earns her living as the Danish translator of the popular but appallingly violent Swedish crime novels of Gösta Svensson, which are starting to disgust her; the driving lessons with gossipy, motherly instructor Jytte are getting her nowhere; she doesn't want to reveal that she may be unfit to drive anyway as she suffers from dizzy spells as a result of a hereditary balance problem. And she misses the contact she used to have with her sister Kate.

This should be a grim and miserable sort of novel, but it's actually very funny, and the ending is delightfully offbeat. Maybe there isn't quite enough story to support a full-scale novel (even a relatively short one like this), but that doesn't really matter, as Sonja is such an endearing character. And there are plenty of engaging jokes about the clichés of Nordic Noir...

>20 thorold: all new to me (well, I've at least heard of Laxness). Really enjoyed these reviews. Wondering about Nors, might like to try one of her books.

>21 dchaikin: Yes, I was curious too, and explored a bit further:

So much for that winter (2016) by Dorthe Nors (Denmark, 1970 - ) translated by Misha Hoekstra



This book contains two novellas that were originally published before the novel Mirror, shoulder, signal, both also translated by Misha Hoekstra: Minna needs rehearsal space (2013) and Days (2010)

Disconcertingly, all three seem to be about almost the same central character, a single woman living in Copenhagen and doing some sort of solitary creative work (a composer in Minna, a translator in Mirror, unspecified but perhaps also a translator in Days). She misses the countryside of rural Jutland where she grew up and likes to sunbathe amongst the dead prime ministers in the Western Cemetery; she gets around Copenhagen on a bike; she's in a bad way emotionally, inter alia because she's recently been let down by a man.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't read all three - in other ways they are quite different. Whilst Mirror is a fairly conventional third-person narrative in form, the two novellas are both aggressively experimental, in ways that work surprisingly well. But must have been quite a challenge to the translator...

Minna is written entirely in one-sentence paragraphs, with an absolute minimum of grammatical complexity, like a children's reading primer. The idea is obviously partly to explore a kind of literary minimalism, expressing complex ideas in simple words, but it's clearly also exploiting the poetic effects that you can get by (for example) stripping out pronouns and hammering in the repetition of the nouns:

Amager steams with rain.
The rain refracts off the manholes.
Minna never bakes cake.
Minna gets up to bake a cake.
Minna bakes a cake in the middle of the night.
Cake is the opiate of the people.

Days, on the other hand, is written entirely in lists. The first-person narrator relentlessly records what she is doing and thinking about day-by-day, with each day's record set out as a new list. The prose often runs on from one list item to another, so there are in effect two competing time-signatures going on at once: the organic rhythm of the prose and the external organising beat of the list items. It's a curious effect, but a very striking one.

5. Took the bike to Damhus Pond, and it was when I had to brake by the bird-feeding area that I thought of my taxes
6. and then my accountant,
7. and then I biked home to my receipts,
8. crunched the numbers,
9. and This is a condition, I wrote at the bottom of a heating bill,
10. this is a way of being,
11. a change in the structure of existence

...and in complete contrast, the most recent new novel from a writer who's been around and highly visible on everyone's bookshelves for as long as I can remember being able to read book-spines (her first novel came out in 1963). I've read and enjoyed almost all her previous novels, although I see I somehow missed The pure gold baby (2013):

The dark flood rises (2016) by Margaret Drabble (UK, 1939 - )

  

Perhaps not surprisingly, Drabble's latest book turns out to be about old age and death, but not - if that makes any sense - in a morbid way. Exactly as we would expect, it is full of clear, witty observation, complicated cultural references, and sharp social critique.

The title is a metaphor borrowed from D.H. Lawrence's poem "The ship of death", and, Drabble being Drabble, a metaphor has to be realised explicitly in the text, so of course we do get an actual flood, but (Drabble being Drabble) she's just teasing us. The literal flood - and the earthquake, there's one of those as well - turn out not to be the drivers of the plot that they would have been in a Lawrence novel, but merely symbolic background.

The central character, Francesca, is a woman in her seventies who still does consultancy work for a fictional version of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, reviewing housing projects for the elderly, but there's also a separate plot line involving an elderly, distinguished, gay British Hispanist, Bennett, who lives in the Canary Islands with his younger partner Ivor, which allows Drabble to bring in ideas about the history and culture of the islands, the arrival of refugees there from the Western Sahara, and (peripherally) the Spanish Civil War. A rather more sophisticated treatment of the Canary Islands than you get in your average holiday novel!

There are a few little in-jokes for readers of Drabble's previous novels tucked into the text, including the odd cameo appearance by a character we remember from thirty or more years ago. And some minor characters who sound as though they might be thinly-disguised versions of the recently-deceased whom we would probably recognise if we lived in Highgate and went to the right sort of parties...

I hope that this isn't Drabble's last novel, but if it should turn out to be that, she will have ended on a very good note. Just a shame that she didn't manage to prevent her publishers slapping on a boring generic black-and-white-photo-of-small-child cover that has no relevance to the content of the book. Perhaps they ran out of headless women?

BTW: Fun to see that sixties pop-artist Pauline Boty, who features in Ali Smith's Autumn (see >9 thorold:) also turns up in this book, which must have been written at about the same time. I wonder if they were both prompted to remember her by the same trigger?

Still catching up with Alice Munro, a writer I found out about far too recently.

Interesting to note that, despite the goriness of Nordic fiction, the homicide rate per capita in Canada is nearly twice that of Iceland. Munro is obviously onto something...
(According to Wikipedia: Iceland 0.91, Sweden 1.15, Canada 1.68, USA 4.88, UK 0.92 murders per 100 000 inhabitants per annum)

The love of a good woman (1998) by Alice Munro (Canada, 1931 - )

  

Another brilliant short-story collection (the fifth by Munro that I've read). More insights into the home-life of everyday Canadian small-town folk (optometrists, abortionists, murderers, librarians, adulterers, amateur actors, etc.). As usual, each story quietly does something new and outrageous to overturn our ideas of how a short story should work. Munro cavalierly advances time by twenty or thirty years, or shifts to a different viewpoint character, just when we're expecting a big reveal. Or we go backwards towards a piece of information that Munro then decides not to give us after all. Great fun!

The title story, especially, is a tour de force in which we are primed in the opening paragraphs to take an interest in a sudden death, but then determinedly led away from it to follow various characters who don't seem to have anything to do with the matter, but tell us a remarkable amount about the workings of small-town society in the fifties. And a beautifully obscure ending that makes you slam on the brakes and rewind the story in your mind to sort out what was really going on all along.

...and a new book that didn't even have time to get put on the TBR shelf:

Logical family: a memoir (2017) by Armistead Maupin (US, 1944- )

  

Armistead Maupin is a surprisingly divisive figure: people like or dislike his books for obvious political reasons, of course, but also for the same sort of reasons that readers disagree about Dickens: he is a writer who produced most of his work as serials under heavy time-pressure, relying on a superb natural storytelling ability, deliberately terrible jokes, topical references and sometimes rather too facile sentimentality. If you first came across Tales of the city at a time when there was no positive, funny light fiction featuring LGBT characters (as I did), you might be inclined to regard it as wonderful; if you saw it on TV and then went back to read the books you might just as easily dismiss it as too glossy, romantic and American. I think he's one of the great modern authors of light fiction, up there with Wodehouse and Alexander McCall Smith, but I know a lot of my (gay) friends just don't see the point of him at all...

It's possibly a bit more interesting if you know something about Maupin's background - he comes from a very conservative family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his ancestors included a slave-owning Confederate general, and his father sounds like the sort of lawyer who would happily have appeared for the prosecution in To kill a mockingbird. Maupin - although he was well aware of his sexuality from an early age - started out in life trying to fulfil the hopes of his family: he served as a junior naval officer in Vietnam, his first employer in his chosen civilian profession of journalism was Jesse Helms, and he volunteered for a veterans' "aid" project in Vietnam set up by Nixon's spin-doctors to try to discredit the anti-war movement (there's a gloriously creepy photo of him shaking hands with Nixon). It wasn't until he moved to San Francisco in the early 70s that he came out as a gay man and realised that the political movements he had been supporting were precisely those which were oppressing him and making it impossible for him to live his true identity.

A large part of Maupin's reasons for publishing this memoir now, in the Age of Trump, seems to be to take us through this painful process of awakening again and remind us of how easy it is to fall unreflectingly into accepting the (sometimes hateful) ideas that we see around us in the communities where we grow up.

Of course, this isn't the first time that Maupin has discussed his background: he's often used his relationship with his family and "the South" in his fiction, and he's always been open about his background in the press. In 1998, the British novelist Patrick Gale produced a very nice little biography of Maupin commissioned by Absolute Press for their excellent "Outlines" series of LGBT lives. By Gale's own account, they spent a hilarious few days together going over Maupin's past life in a series of interviews, which Gale eventually condensed into the 150-page format the series called for.

Having read that, I wasn't expecting to learn anything radically new from Maupin's own recollections of his early life: not surprisingly, what he says about himself in Logical family largely covers the same ground. Maupin reserves the right, in an "Author's Note" in the new book, to "plagiarise myself", and does so copiously: a lot of the jokes and phrasing are very close to the wording that Gale transcribed from their interviews nearly twenty years ago. But of course, there's a lot more background detail, and a few slight changes of emphasis - I felt that Maupin's father was presented as less of an ogre, more of a slightly tragic buffoon who committed himself to an indefensible value-system and was subsequently unable to go back even when he knew that what he was saying was absurd, for instance. And Maupin's time in the navy is seen less as a foolish aberration and more as a youthful adventure that taught him things about comradeship, subversion, and how male communities work.

Maupin wonders from time to time whether his professional storytelling instinct is leading him to "improve" on incidents in his past - there's a wonderful side-note about a discussion with the historian Douglas Brinkley, who, having been told the anecdote about Maupin's conversation with Nixon in the Oval Office, checks it out on Nixon's notorious tapes ("the tapes", Maupin calls them) and discovers that it was even funnier - in a creepy kind of way - than Maupin tells it.

There is also rather more here about his reactions to the killing of Harvey Milk, whom he seems to have known quite well. This is one event that Maupin obviously felt he was too close to to be able to bring it into his fiction - I was always a little puzzled about why he used the (more obscure, to most of us) Jonestown massacre in a plot without any mention of Milk. (I don't think the cover designer of this book can have noticed the comment about Milk disregarding a death-threat because it was written in crayon, though...)

An interesting, funny, and very well written memoir, as you would expect - probably something to read for the pleasure of the text rather than for the information it brings.

...and being in the mood for gay nostalgia, I watched the film version of The boys in the band (1970) last night. Fun too, in an appalling sort of way... A very clumsy adaptation of the stage play, with actors who didn’t really know what to do with a camera instead of a live audience, but it must have meant a lot to at least some of the people who got to see it back then (I was far too young, I don’t know if it even came to provincial British cinemas).

Another impulse non-fiction pick from the library:

Apollo: the race to the moon (1989) by Charles A Murray (USA 1943- ) and Catherine Bly Cox (USA 1949- )

 

Charles Murray is a political scientist from the conservative/libertarian side of the American spectrum, who aroused a lot of controversy in the 80s and 90s with his books Losing ground and The bell curve (the latter written with Richard J Herrnstein). I haven't read either, but his conclusions are usually summarised by saying that one argues that welfare benefits are ineffective at getting people out of poverty and the other that IQ is a good predictor of social class. Which, whatever else you might say about them, are clearly views that can be exploited by nasty people to support very unpleasant policy choices...

Catherine Bly Cox teaches (taught?) English literature at Rutgers University and is Murray's second wife.

If I'd made the connection with Murray's political reputation as "right-wing spawn of the Devil" I would probably never have picked this book up - I didn't realise that he was the Bell curve man until I'd finished reading it. Which perhaps just goes to show that we ought to be prepared to put our prejudices aside from time to time, since this book doesn't seem to have any very explicit political axe to grind at all.

Cox and Murray seem to have become interested in the history of the US manned space programme (which is well outside both their fields of study) largely by accident, and they approach it in the best tradition of American narrative non-fiction, the way books used to be written before everything had to be structured like a TV documentary. Their interest is focussed on the people who took up Kennedy's challenge and made it happen, in particular the engineers who built the launch vehicles and spacecraft, the flight operations people who made sure they completed their missions and got the crews back, and the NASA bosses who created the management structures that allowed such a colossal project to function at all. They obviously spent a lot of time talking to the people involved in Apollo, and they tell their story in a lively, fluent way. There's less about the actual engineering than I would have liked, but enough to allow readers to make sense of the story most of the time. And their account of the dynamics of the teams of scientists and engineers and the way they worked under pressure rings very true.

The book reminds us about the general questions that were raised (mostly afterwards - although they do argue that Kennedy was initially sceptical himself) about the utility and value-for-money of manned spaceflight, but it doesn't attempt to analyse these in detail: Apollo is presented, reasonably enough, as an outstanding human and technical achievement, and the interest is more in how it was done rather than why. Writing in the late 1980s, the authors obviously didn't have access to Soviet records, and they don't go into the question of whether there ever really was anyone else in the "race" to the Moon.(*)

As always when I think about the Apollo programme, I'm astounded how they managed to do it all in feet and inches, with essentially no women engineers in the team at all, and with computers that had a fraction of the processing power of the modern washing-machine. It must all have been down to the pens in their shirt-pockets...

---
(*) There's no mention of Syldavia, either!

Interesting reviews.

I have yet to read something by Munro, and this short story collection seems like a good place to start.

Concerning the space program: I was amazed in a similar way than you were, I think, when I ran into numerical displays used in soviet space crafts at the times of the space race between US and USSR.
The displays consisted in light bulbs containing 10 incandescent filaments, each shaped as a number. Applying power to the correct filament makes it glow and display the corresponding number. Amazing what people were able to do with the technology of the time!

>28 chlorine: Amazing what people were able to do with the technology of the time!
- and a lot of hard work and dollars!

Back to Denmark again (although this particular book turned out to be set mostly in West Africa and London):

The god of chance (2011, English 2013) by Kirsten Thorup (Denmark, 1942- ), translated by Janet Garton (UK, 1944- )

  

Kirsten Thorup is a distinguished Danish writer, originally from Funen, who won the Nordic Council Prize in 2017. She's best-known for her Jonna tetralogy (1977-1987).

Janet Garton is Emeritus Professor of European literature at UEA (I seem to be coming across a lot of people from Norwich lately) and is one of the founders of Norvik Press, an independent publisher of English translations of contemporary Nordic literature, also based at UEA. (Interview in Publishing perspectives here: http://publishingperspectives.com/2016/09/norvik-press/)

I was intrigued by the idea of this book - Ana, a hard-nosed career-woman from Copenhagen, on holiday at a beach-resort in Gambia (because that happened to be what the travel-agent was able to offer her at short notice), meets a local teenager, Mariama, and somehow comes to see her as the missing half of her own personality. She helps Mariama to come to Europe, and, naturally enough, things don't go the way she hopes. It's a complicated and sophisticated book in many ways, with a lot of different layers of imagery, pulling out social and psychological ideas about African and European cultures, families and individualism, role of women, colonialism, multiculturalism, destiny vs. chance, and a lot more.

But I didn't enjoy it as much as much as I hoped: the writing seemed to let the rest of the structure down. Garton talks about Thorup's "deceptively straightforward everyday language", but in the translation, at least, it often read more like the work of an incompetent beginner - which it obviously isn't. I felt that there was a flatness and lack of humour about the text, and we were forever being explicitly told characters' thoughts and motivations ('"X," said N, thinking Y'). That's something you can certainly do occasionally in a novel, but when you do it consistently for all the characters in every dialogue, it becomes more than a little wearing. More like reading an academic report than a novel.

Reading Armistead Maupin's memoir reminded me that it's a couple of years since I read anything by Anne Tyler (the two don't have anything obvious in common apart from the coincidence that they both went to school in Raleigh, NC, a few years apart, where they had the same English teacher).

When I review my 2017 reading, I think this is going to be the prime candidate for "most imaginative cover design":

A spool of blue thread (2015) by Anne Tyler (US, 1941 - )

  

Anne Tyler writes clever, witty, and complicated novels about the matriarchs of extended families in Baltimore. This is a clever, witty, and complicated novel about the matriarch of an extended family in Baltimore. Highly recommended, unless you've read an Anne Tyler novel in the last six months, in which case it might be worth holding off for a little while.

Seriously, this is an excellent novel, probably one of Tyler's best and most subtle, but it does read almost like a pastiche of an Anne Tyler novel at times. She dissects four generations of the Whitshanks, a family of house-builders, who live in a grand house that "Junior" Whitshank, founder of the firm, built for a client and then bought back for himself during World War II. In the foreground timeframe of the story, Red and Abby, the second generation, are starting to get old and their children are worried about them, to the extent that two sons (one single, one with a family) decide to move back in to look after their parents - nothing that Red and Abby can do will pry them loose.

More gratuitous leaves, just because it was such a beautiful clear autumn day yesterday. This is Kasteel Zypendaal, in Arnhem.

When I looked up Norvik Press to write the review of the Thorup book (>29 thorold:), a dim memory stirred in the back of my mind, and eventually I worked out that I still had a Norvik book (bought in 2010!) on my TBR pile. So I put it in my bag for the trip to Arnhem:

Naboth's Stone (1981, English 1989) by Sara Lidman (Sweden, 1923-2004), translated by Joan Tate (UK, 1922-2000)

  

Sara Lidman was a very well-known Swedish writer (winner of the Nordic Council Prize in 1980) and a prominent campaigner for left-wing and environmental causes. I read her early novel The rain bird some years ago - my secondhand copy of the translation in that case rather wonderfully turned out to be a gift from the author to a British teacher she'd stayed with in Nairobi, and there was a letter tucked into the dust-jacket in which Lidman enthuses to her friend about Under Milk Wood, Lorca, and Robert Musil. She's particularly taken with Polly Garter, commenting that what Cait "takes 300 years to tell" (presumably in Leftover life to kill), Dylan captures in one short song.

No artefacts in this book, though: I must have bought it new.

The 17-year-old Joan Tate was on what should have been a three-week holiday in Sweden when World War II broke out: she was trapped there for four years and not only learnt the language while she was there, but went to college and qualified as a gym teacher and physiotherapist. She later became a novelist in her own right and one of the best-known English translators from Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, with more than 200 books to her credit (obituary here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jul/07/guardianobituaries.books).

Naboth's Stone is the middle book in a sequence of historical novels dealing with the impact of the railway on the remote and thinly-populated inland regions of northern Sweden (Lidman grew up in Västerbotten herself). We are somewhere in the 1880s, and the ambitious Didrik is Chairman of the council in the raw settlement of Little Crane Water. He is eager to see the community develop: the imminent construction of the railway is the key to that, and he is determined to make sure that it will be routed through Little Crane Water. Didrik and his neighbours are only the second generation of farmers in the area, the economy is still largely one of subsistence farming, and the only way the settlers can get their hands on cash is by selling their trees (and/or their labour) to the big timber companies from the coast. As Didrik comes to see in the course of the book, the timber companies are exploiting their capitalist advantage remorselessly, doing irreparable damage to the forests, and giving farmers far less than the market value of their timber.

But this isn't just a political novel - most of the story is to do with Didrik's relationship with his wife Anna-Stava, with his elderly parents, with the mysterious wet-nurse who turns up when Anna-Stava isn't able to feed their son, and with Didrik's absent foster-brother Naboth. All of which feed into our understanding of how the community works, what its values are, and how it makes rough-and-ready arrangements for looking after people who can't support themselves (widows and orphans are taken into the farmers' extended families, but treated as unpaid servants).

Lidman's text, which is full of broken sentences, dialect, and bits of biblical/liturgical language, was obviously a nightmare for the translator. Tate makes a pretty good job of it on the whole, but there are some odd choices here and there. The generic dialect she uses seems to be a mixture of Scots, Northern English and rural Shropshire - there's probably no good answer when translating dialect, and I'm sure it would have been a mistake to pin it down to somewhere specific, but the mixture does sound a bit artificial sometimes, and lacks internal consistency. In the religious language, she has a tendency to re-translate the Swedish rather than use corresponding passages from the AV, which must have saved valuable time, but undermines the effect of the familiarity of the language that Lidman was presumably trying to get.

I found this a very interesting book - a sort of communist Swedish Middlemarch, perhaps...

Enjoyed your last several, especially about Armistead Maupin. The first paragraph of your Anne Tyler post made me smile.

>33 dchaikin: Good to know! It's funny how, when you have been thinking about an author, you so often start coming across references to them everywhere - this morning I heard Bridget Kendall praising The accidental tourist on Radio Three...

On to another distinguished American - I think someone might have recommended this book to me, years ago, but I'd forgotten all about it. Maybe because a bit of my brain had Sontag filed away as a critic and essayist and I didn't register that she had also written fiction. It probably caught my eye in the library last week because I had Sontag in mind again as writer of the introduction to the edition of Under the glacier I read. Maybe there's even a subconscious link in the titles: Under the glacier --> Under the volcano --> The volcano lover...

The volcano lover: a romance (1992) by Susan Sontag (USA, 1933-2004)

  

Teenage servant girl goes to work for dodgy sex therapist then becomes model for fashionable painter. First Aristocratic Lover dumps her when she becomes pregnant; Second Lover is kinder, but also dumps her when the chance of a wealthy heiress comes up - he gets rid of her by shipping her off as a gift to his recently-widowed uncle, the ambassador in Naples. The uncle likes her, gives her the Eliza Doolittle treatment and marries her after a decent interval. She becomes a confidant of the Queen (Marie-Antoinette's sister!) and they are all set to live happily ever after, but then there's a Revolution in France, and a Wounded British Admiral arrives in town and has to be nursed back to health...

The real Emma, Lady Hamilton, is a character that only the most brazen writer of historical romance would have dared to invent - her whole life reads like a plot-summary in Name that Book. So maybe it's not surprising that Susan Sontag chooses to write about her from a slightly oblique point of view, taking as her central character Sir William Hamilton, whom we now remember only as a famous cuckold, but who in his own time was known as an art collector, archaeologist, and avid student of the moods of Vesuvius. And who seems to have done a pretty good job representing British interests at the notoriously raffish and corrupt Neapolitan court.

Sontag also messes about quite freely with the conventions of historical fiction - she keeps period authenticity to the necessary minimum and is quite happy to step into frame from time to time and explain something from the point of view of the modern New Yorker. Although the narrative mostly sticks very closely to recorded history, at one point we suddenly realise that we've drifted seamlessly into a story from another medium that we know to be fictional. And as well as inserting her own caustic comments on the actions of her characters and the presumed reactions of her readers, Sontag doesn't mind bringing dead people in as auxiliary narrators (the last word in the book, unexpectedly, goes to the poet and revolutionary journalist Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel).

I won't say that this was better than I expected, because I expected a lot from Sontag anyway, but it is a book that managed to surprise me and keep my interest, despite being based on a set of events I thought I was pretty familiar with to start with.

Mme Vigée Le Brun's painting of Lady H as Ariadne, which Sontag decodes as a subtle but nasty joke:

Pining for the fjords!
Perhaps this is the first bit of authentic Nordic gloom and doom of Q4:

Trilogie (2014; German 2016) by Jon Fosse (Norway, 1959 - ), German translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel (Germany, 1959- )

 

The title of this novel, for which Fosse was awarded the Nordic Council Prize in 2015, seems to be a kind of joke - it's actually a sequence of three rather compact novellas: Andvake (Sleepless), Olavs draumar (Olav’s Dreams) and Kveldsvævd (Weariness), which together come to something like the length of a standard single-volume novel. Andvake was originally published separately in 2008, and it was a couple of years later that Fosse decided to add the remaining two parts to the story.

All three parts deal with a young couple, Alida and Asle, who run away from the fishing village where they grew up when Alida becomes pregnant. In the first part, they are walking through the rainy streets of Bergen looking for a place to stay - with obvious biblical overtones, the townspeople insist that there is no room in the inn, but eventually they find a place for Alida to bring her son into the world. In the second part, Asle, now called Olav, goes through a nightmarish experience in the town on his own, and we get a new view of what happened in the first part. In the third part, we shift to the viewpoint of Alida, as seen - or imagined - by her daughter, Alise, in old age.

All three parts are written in a distinctive, poetic style, with strong echoes of the Bible (and presumably of medieval Norse texts). There also a seems to be a link to the structure of traditional Norwegian fiddle music - we're alerted to look for this because Asle and his father and son are all fiddle players. Fosse normally writes in long run-on sentences with minimal punctuation, but here and there he switches to short punchy sentences where the full stops stick out like drum beats. There's a lot of repetition, too, with phrases that come back again and again, adding to the dreamlike, meditative feel of the text established by the prevalent imagery of sleep, tiredness and dreaming.

The background to the book is one of rural poverty without a safety net. The world is tough, lives are cheap, but life goes on, fish have to be caught, and the consolations of religion seem to be irrelevant. We never get more than hints as to which century we might be in, and the hints are often contradictory - sometimes it feels like the late 19th century (as seen by Ibsen and Munch), sometimes we could be in the middle ages. Bergen is clearly still a fairly small town, without much contact with the wider world, and is always referred to by the archaic name Bjørgvin.

Not a cheerful book, by any means, but one that does interesting things with form and language: definitely something it would be interesting to read in the original. Especially if I knew more about the context!

(I read this one in German, as that was what I was able to borrow, but there is also an English translation, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2016)

Discussion of Trilogien on the Nordic Council site: http://www.norden.org/en/nordic-council/nordic-council-prizes/nordisk-raads-litt...

This one has been on my TBR shelf for about a year - I bought it after reading Maron's Stille Zeile sechs when I was following up writers from the former DDR.

This family memoir turns out to be an interesting counterpoint to the Maupin memoirs (>25 thorold:). Maupin argues that our true ("logical") families are made up of the people with whom we elect to spend our lives: we shouldn't allow shared DNA to blackmail us into loving those we have nothing else in common with. Maron's message, on the other hand, seems to be that we have to carry on loving our parents, children, siblings, even when our convictions are fundamentally different from theirs, otherwise we do irreparable harm. Both books demonstrate that it's not quite as clear-cut in real life, though...

I'll keep my review fairly short, because edwinbcn has already posted a very complete discussion of the book.

Pawels Briefe (1999) by Monika Maron (DDR, Germany, 1941- )

  

A project for a TV documentary leads the author to reflect on her relationship with her Jewish grandfather Pawel (whom she knows only through a box of letters written from the Ghetto of Bełchatów, where he was confined before being killed by the Nazis) and with her communist mother Hella. And through those relationships of course to get an insight into the ways that history interferes with our lives and personal feelings. Was Pawel so wise and tolerant in his last letters because of his experience of breaking with his own family when he left the Jewish faith? Was Hella such a staunch communist because she fell in love with and married a senior Party official? Did Monika herself become such a critic of the failings of the DDR because she was brought up to believe in the values that informed the anti-fascist struggle? Or vice-versa?

This is a very discursive, anecdotal sort of book, jumping about between "now" and "then", giving us little snatches of analysis of documents and photographs and then shifting to memories or speculations. But Maron has a lot of very interesting thoughts and questions: definitely the sort of book to make you reflect on your own family background and pose yourself a few questions about it.

And some more Danish Short Fiction (Aidt spent her early childhood in Greenland, but she writes in Danish):

Baboon (2006; English 2014) by Naja Marie Aidt (Greenland, Denmark, 1963- ) translated by Denise Newman (USA)

 

This collection of short, wild, disturbing and often deeply ambiguous stories won Aidt the 2008 Nordic Council Prize. She plays around with the boundaries of reality and fantasy, so that characters often find themselves living out their darkest fears or most perverted desires in a frighteningly realistic setting. The mostly very short forms allow her to keep us guessing until the last page (sometimes beyond it) about the characters - is the narrator supposed to be male or female? which country are we in? are they married to each other or to someone else? whose are the children? is it all just a nightmare?

Very interesting, powerful and original writing, but not a book you would want to read just before going to bed. And it might well put you off blackcurrant jam for a long time...

Enjoyed your last four, the last three feeling like an education, in a good way, to aspects of European literature that seem very foreign and unknown to me. Hmmm - a lot of your reviews fill that role, uniquely.

Still enjoying your reviews. The Aidt book seems very interesting in particular.

>38 dchaikin: >39 chlorine: Thanks! "Foreign and unknown" to me as well, mostly, before I get to them... The Maron a bit less so, but the Nordic stuff is all new to me.

On to what will probably go down as the oddest book of the year, another from Sjón's Guardian "top ten" of modern Nordic novels:

Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller (1966, translation 2017) by Guðbergur Bergsson (Iceland, Spain, 1932- ) translated by Lytton Smith (UK, USA, 1982 - )

  

Guðbergur Bergsson has been publishing novels, poems, and stories since the early sixties; he studied in Barcelona and is one of the leading translators from Spanish into Icelandic. He was awarded the Nordic Council Prize in 2004.

Lytton Smith is a poet as well as a translator, and teaches at SUNY.

Tómas Jónsson is a retired bank-clerk living in a basement flat in Reykjavik, part of which he has been obliged to let out to a young family (who have in turn sub-let a room to a young man who plays the guitar...). He has taken a strong dislike to Iceland, the rest of the world, other people (especially, but not exclusively, old people, children, Icelanders, foreigners, and women), himself, and literature, and has decided to get his revenge on all of them by writing a bestseller, which he does, in a pile of 17 school composition books. We get 400 gloriously random and inconsistent pages, where he can switch around freely between memories, descriptions of his current life as an invalid, reflections on this and that, anecdotes, parodies of Great Works of Icelandic Literature, sexual fantasies, and much else. Apart from the anecdotes and parodies, he rarely sticks to the same topic for more than a few lines, and indeed often gets side-tracked before even reaching the end of the sentence he's writing. (And from time to time his transcriber has to tell us that some crucial piece of information is illegible in the original manuscript, so we're left hanging.) Most of the time, we aren't given quite enough information to be sure whether Tómas means us to take something as a real event in his life or as a dream or fantasy.

I found reading this a very mixed experience - some parts were absolutely hilarious, some all-but unintelligible. And it is in the nature of Tómas as a narrator that he keeps coming back to certain topics and (when he's not contradicting himself) he repeats himself a bit too often.

A problem with the book is that Tómas's constant misogyny and his fantasies (at least we hope they're just fantasies) about attacking women aren't as funny as they may have been fifty years ago. We're obviously meant to see that they reflect what a failure he is as a human being and laugh at him for trying to use these stories to impress us as readers, but a little of that sort of thing goes a long way, and Tómas doesn't do anything in small doses.

Tómas (or rather Guðbergur) has obviously read his Joyce and Beckett, and knows that a bestseller has to offend the sensitive reader to get the right sort of publicity - Tómas tells us in loving detail about his chamber-pot and how he fills it and empties it, and we hear a remarkable amount about Icelandic excretion customs. We also hear a great deal about Tómas's penis (which notoriously has its own passport). Guðbergur must have known about the weird and wonderful things that were going on in Spanish literature in the fifties and sixties (Cortázar, Goytisolo, etc.) of course, and he's obviously borrowing ideas from them about how to smash apart the conventions of narrative structure. I particularly enjoyed the way he destabilises the text in the last few pages - the transcriber starts to tell us about how he found the composition books and typed them up, but what we are expecting to be a realistic narrative establishing the history of the text mysteriously drifts off into an allegorical nightmare set in the North Atlantic, so we're no surer than we were before how we come to be reading the book...

With a book like this, which doesn't follow any known rules of narrative logic and obeys or ignores the conventions of language and typography at the author's whim, you have to trust the translator implicitly: there's little we can do to check what he's doing without learning Icelandic ourselves. Most of the time Lytton Smith seems to do a remarkably good job of turning the book into lively and varied English text, so I think we probably can trust him (besides, this must have been a labour of love: I can't imagine that there's any significant money to be made translating obscure 1960s texts for small presses). But I did have a few little quibbles - silly things that should have been caught at the proofreading stage, like famous "false friends" (you don't earn "rent" on a savings account in English), or placenames outside Iceland that are left in the Icelandic form (e.g. "Kílarskurðinn canal" instead of Kiel Canal). Most confusing was the use of the word "pensioners" for the people who ate with Tómas every day in some sort of canteen (Smith calls it a "refectory", which is OK too). From the context it's obvious that the people who eat there are in their lunch break from work, and definitely not retired! I suppose the Icelandic word that gets translated as "pensioners" must have been something parallel to French "pensionnaires", i.e. paying guests, nothing to do with the English sense of people who receive a retirement pension. Language does sometimes have a way of turning round and biting you, doesn't it?

Two novels from authors who've already featured several times in my thread, one of them only released a couple of weeks ago, the other forty years old:

Ce qu'ils disent ou rien (1977) by Annie Ernaux‬ (France, 1940- )


In her most recent book, Mémoire de fille (2016: see my Q3 thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/260777#6179544 ), Ernaux tells us that she hadn't previously been able to face writing about herself as a teenager - that was a slightly disingenuous statement, it turns out: this, her second novel, published forty years before Mémoire de fille, is quite simply a fictional treatment of the same events, rearranged, compressed in time, and thinly disguised. The narrator, Anne (!), is 15, wishing that she could just wake up one morning married with two children and a not-too-bad-job, skipping all this painful in-between stage of growing up - haven't we all wished that at some point? She has just passed her BEPC exam, and faces a summer of idleness before starting at her new school in September. Of course, she's burning with curiosity about sex, and item number one on the plans for the holiday period is to lose her virginity. And of course she does, and the results are not very satisfactory: even in these enlightened 1950s, it seems that boys still get to crow over their successes and girls still have to face humiliation and embarrassment...

This is no more a romantic "first love" story than Mémoire de fille is - in fact, Ernaux in her thirties seems to convey the frustration and anger of the teenager even more powerfully than she does in her more detached and analytical seventies. And as always, it's a pleasure to listen to her narrative voice, cleverly manipulating the teenage slang of the period and the clichés of the older generation to devastating effect.

Winter (2017) by Ali Smith‬ (UK, 1962- )


The second instalment of Ali Smith's seasonal sequence - not a sequel to Autumn, but a standalone story that links to its precursor only in its images and themes, with a new set of characters and events.

Sophia is a fairly prosperous retired businesswoman, living in a big old house in Cornwall. Her son, Art, is coming to stay for Christmas with his girlfriend Charlotte (only he's just had a fight with her, and brings a Charlotte-stand-in instead...). And when Sophia gets up in the night of Christmas Eve, she discovers that Art has also smuggled in his aunt, Sophia's older sister Iris, a Greenham Common veteran and all-purpose peacenik, who definitely wasn't invited.

This is not a ghost story, Smith tells us, but all the same there are plenty of echoes of A Christmas Carol going on, and both Sophia and Art get their share of quasi-supernatural experiences in the course of the story. Shakespeare's Cymbeline is another strong intertextual presence, helped along by not-Charlotte, who turns out to be a Croatian Shakespeare scholar set adrift by the "Brexit" fiasco. I was expecting there to be a lot about Barbara Hepworth (we get a reproduction of one of her works on the inside back cover), and she does come into the story at a couple of crucial points, but she actually has rather less impact on the text than you would expect from one of Smith's "artists in residence".

Fun, but with plenty of well-observed criticism of the state of the world and the mess we're making of it, Britain in particular. And an overdue reminder of what we all owe to the Greenham Common women, and what they went through. (A small prize to anyone who can get through this book without getting Elvis's version of Muß i denn stuck in their brain...)

>41 thorold:
These seem like very interesting books. I definitely need to read some Ernaux at some point.

Also: BEPC !!! I had almost forgotten that I too have passed this exam, which I have never understood the goal of! -- Actually I did a bit of research and what I passed (in 1991! This seems so long ago) must have been Brevet des collèges.

>42 chlorine: Yes, you should! Everyone should.
I had to look up BEPC as well. I’m sure none of my French friends has ever mentioned it to me. Ernaux probably likes that sort of semi-obscure detail because she’s a teacher herself. But she does like period abbreviations - I remember discovering the first time I read one of her books that TSF was transmission sans fil.

>43 thorold:
I only know TSF from some old comics I read when I was a kid: Quick et Flupke. :)

BEPC is not important for me today but I remember that at the time the grades we got were a big deal, and my and my frieds feard our parents' reaction in case of bad grades. I also have to admit that I have a bias concerning the importance of this diploma: for people who go to regular high school it has almost no value as far as I know, but it may have some for kids that go to technical high schools, or don't go to high school at all...

>44 chlorine: feared our parents’ reaction in case of bad grades - Yes, that’s exactly what’s going on for the narrator in the book. Her parents want her to go to the lycée and become an institutrice (the most ambitious career they can imagine).

>41 thorold: Afterthought on Winter - I’ve just been watching Cymbeline from my BBC Shakespeare box(*) and realised why Smith makes such a point of it - it’s (amongst other things) a play about a British king who lets himself be persuaded by corrupt and foolish advisers to stop sending money to Brussels Rome, resulting in a costly and damaging war. He wins a battle, but ends up withdrawing Article 50 and making peace with the Romans...

(*) with Helen Mirren, no less, as Imogen

And another quasi-random bit of non-fiction:

Engineering in the ancient world (1978) by J G Landels (UK, 1926-? )



John Landels taught classics at Reading University; as well as his interest in ancient technologies, he also wrote about Greek and Roman music.

This is a very nice little book, aimed at the general reader, but written by someone who obviously knows what he's talking about both when making sense of ancient texts and when assessing the feasibility of ancient machinery, being equally ready to get his hands dirty building reconstructions of Greek catapults and to set out simple calculations that show us what is and isn't plausible when it comes to lifting stone blocks or rowing triremes. Which probably accounts for the fact that it's still around and popular, nearly forty years since it first appeared.

Landels covers a range of what you might call "heavy engineering" topics - land and water transport, water supply, cranes, and weapons - but he doesn't go into any detail on less mechanically-oriented technologies like metalworking, textiles and ceramics. In a final chapter, he gives a useful condensed account of what we know about the main classical authors on technical subjects (Hero, Pliny-the-elder, Vitruvius, etc.).

Obviously, despite all its charm, this book is getting a bit long in the tooth by now. There's been a lot more underwater archaeology done since the seventies, there's a complete working reconstruction of a Greek trireme, people have tried to rebuild the Antikythera mechanism and work out what it's for, many more catapults have been built, etc., etc., none of which Landels was able to take into account. Also, modern readers are likely to have trouble with the trivial fact that it's all in Imperial units (Landels helpfully provides c.g.s. (!) equivalents to some of these). I enjoyed the author's occasional jokey interjections in the character of a surly artisan with a Mummerset accent, and his assumption that all his readers would be familiar with the experience of hand-cranking a car engine on a cold day or with the practicalities of working with World War II infantry weapons - when I was at school in the seventies, a lot of the people who taught me were of exactly that generation, so it was all quite nostalgic for me. But I suspect that it would be rather lost on younger readers!

>46 thorold:: This is such a cool topic!
I will resist however adding the book to my wishlist however as from your comments I get it's a bit dated. Thanks for the review!

I've read most of Patricia Highsmith's books at one time or another, but I still keep coming across odd ones that I missed for some reason:

People who knock on the door (1983) by Patricia Highsmith (USA, France, Switzerland, etc., 1921-1995)

 

Hollywood has rediscovered her since she died, but during most of her lifetime Patricia Highsmith belonged to that select group of American writers who sold more books in France than they did in the USA. The reasons for her repeated rejection by American readers aren't always as obvious as they were with this book, written in response to the rise of Reagan and the religious right in the early eighties, which for quite some time couldn't even find a publisher in America, although it got good reviews in Britain and elsewhere.

The central character of the book is Arthur, a student living with his family in a small town in Indiana, doing well at high school, and looking forward to going off to college on the East Coast. His plans are messed up when his father discovers a new enthusiasm for fundamentalist Christianity.

Highsmith plays her usual trick of bringing a chaotic disturbance into a well-ordered middle-class way of life to destabilise our preconceived ideas about order and morality, and this works very well, leading us gently but firmly into a position where our response to the final crisis will not be the one we expected to have. But the book is undermined by the relative clumsiness of her satirical attack on the evangelicals. Neither she nor any of the sympathetic characters in the book has the least bit of empathy with them and their beliefs - there's no attempt to see inside their heads and we have to take it on trust that they are all either hypocrites or gullible fools. So Highsmith's attacks on them come over more as snobbish prejudice than as the incisive criticism she obviously intended.

Another thing that struck me about the book is that there's a kind of reverse American Graffiti thing going on - it's meant to be set around 1981, and we get occasional mentions of current events to remind us of that, but most of the time Chalmerston, Indiana seems to be locked in something like the Hollywood version of 40s/50s small-town America. Which is presumably largely an accident of Highsmith's biography - when she wrote this book she'd been living in Europe for more than 20 years (and probably hadn't associated with American teenagers for even longer than that); her visit to Indiana to gather local colour was a mere week's stay with some friends in Bloomington. So she must have filled in a lot of the detail from her own experience of earlier times.

Interesting for anyone who wants to chase up Highsmith's career, but really rather a forgettable period piece.

I read and liked a lot a few of the Ripley books a long time ago. For some reason I was sure that Highsmith was British, I wonder why...

>49 chlorine: Maybe because the books came as green Penguins? It is difficult to imagine her as a Texan, somehow.

>50 thorold:
That would have been a good explanation but at the time, I read only French so that's not it. I'll blame it on my being very ignorant at the time. :p

>51 chlorine: Well, anyway, it's very easy to pick up that sort of misconception - it's happened to me many times...

I was planning to read something else, but this historical novel caught my eye in the library yesterday, and I ended up finishing it before bedtime (don't ask when bedtime was...). Like The volcano lover (>34 thorold:), it's a heavyweight intellectual's take on a set of characters so romantic that you wouldn't dare to invent them if they hadn't actually existed:

The royal physician's visit (1999; English 2001) by Per Olov Enquist (Sweden, 1934- ), translated by Tiina Nunnally (USA, 1952- )

  

(I think this might be my first actual headless-woman cover this year!)

Per Olov Enquist is a well-known Swedish journalist and novelist, who has won all the usual prizes at some point in his long career. In the 80s and 90s he was married to a Danish dramatist and lived mostly in Denmark.

Tiina Nunnally is responsible for many high-profile translations of Nordic works into English, perhaps most famously the highly-praised new translation of Kristin Lavransdatter (1997-2000).

The life of the unfortunate Christian VII of Denmark (1749-1808) has long excited the curiosity of writers of all complexions, from Goethe to Dario Fo, although - despite the fact that one of the main characters was British - it doesn't seem to have been done very often in English yet (The lost queen (1969), by Norah Lofts is the only English version mentioned in the list on Wikipedia).

As Enquist tells it, the central characters are Christian himself, an intermittently lucid, mentally-disturbed young man who has become king at the age of 16 and been married shortly thereafter to an even younger English princess in whom he has no interest whatsoever; the queen, who is making up for a very sheltered upbringing by discovering the sexual power she can exert in her new role; Struensee, the idealistic young German physician (keen reader of Holberg and Rousseau) who accidentally finds himself in a position to deputise for the king, both in the queen's bed and in attempting to drag the backward and corrupt kingdom of Denmark kicking and screaming into the 18th century; and - naturally - an éminence grise, Guldberg, who is scheming against all of them. And equally naturally, it all ends in tears, as Enquist is clearly expecting it to.

Enquist is particularly interested in the opposition between the open, optimistic, and politically-naive Struensee and the secretive, vengeful and moralistic Guldberg, as expressed in the ways that both of them establish bonds with the confused and frightened Christian and react in their different ways to the potent sexuality (Enquist clearly insists on there being potent sexuality, even if that's not something you normally associate with Hannoverians...) of Caroline Matilda. This all gets tied in clever ways into the political currents of late 18th century Europe - the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment philosophes compromised by their association with people like Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia, the cynical aristocrats who run Denmark for their own benefit and are happy to have a powerless king, the peasants whom nobody really cares about in practice...

Entertaining and well-written, but maybe a bit too predictable.

>52 thorold: I should have realized there was a book behind the movie: A Royal Affair. Now I'll look for the book.

I think they have the wrong headless person on that cover!

Mark, enjoyed your latest several. Very entertained that the Landels exists...and that you read it (entertained with some admiration)

>53 SassyLassy: I can't figure that cover out, unless someone crawling on the ground, sticking their arm through someone's legs.

>53 SassyLassy: I didn’t know about A royal affair. I’ll have to look out for it. Apparently it was one of those silly situations where they couldn’t use the book because the rights had been sold to another film company which never did anything with them, so they had to base it - officially at least - on a different Struensee book and avoid the parts where Enquist made it up.

>55 dchaikin: >53 SassyLassy: It’s not easy to decode in the scan, but it seems to be a detail from a larger picture, cropped to show a woman’s right shoulder, arm and hip, in a dark-coloured dress, and there’s a table with a lamp on it in the background. Unfortunately the cover-art credit isn’t visible on my copy (probably it was on the inner part of the dust-jacket and the library cut it off when doing the protective binding), so I don’t know if it’s a modern painting or a generic bit of 18th-century art. But the woman in the picture looks rather too slender to be George III’s sister.

>56 thorold: Ah, I can make out the image now. One mystery solved. Thanks Mark.

>56 thorold: ...it wasn’t hard to find A royal affair - it’s on (Dutch) Netflix. Interesting to watch it with the book fresh in mind, but of course you find yourself saying “no, it wasn’t like that”, and then remembering that they are both fictional interpretations of real events, neither more likely to be true than the other. The most important difference, apart from merely technical things they had to change to fit into the time available, is that in the film they have Caroline arrive in Denmark with her little head already full of radical ideas, having her trunk full of Rousseau and Voltaire confiscated at the border. In the book, after getting to know Struensee she discovers sex first, and only then philosophy...

Carrying on my catch-up with Ali Smith:

Artful (2012) by Ali Smith‬ (UK, 1962- )



It's not uncommon for a distinguished writer to be invited by a university to give a series of lectures setting out their views on literature, and it's not uncommon for that writer to follow up by publishing the text of the lectures afterwards - that's how we get gems like Forster's Aspects of the novel and Q's On the art of reading. But it takes the genre-bending chutzpah of someone as clever and inventive as Ali Smith to decide to make a novel out of a course of lectures on European Comparative Literature (given at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 2012)...

The idea of the book is that the narrator is making a kind of multi-media journey of discovery which parallels the process of grieving for a dead partner (I read the book starting out with the assumption that the "I" and "You" characters must both be women, and nothing happened to upset that notion, but I did realise after a bit that there was nothing explicit to confirm it either - it's not just genre that's being bent here). Guide on the journey is the unfinished draft text of a series of lectures the "You" character was working on, but the narrator is also striking out independently, rediscovering Oliver Twist and the musical Oliver!, chasing up references from the lectures on Google and YouTube, and so on. In the process, we range widely over European literature and visual art, but also strike out into cinema and all sorts of other unexpected directions. The "I" character is a tree-expert by trade, so Smith gets ample opportunity to play around with tree-metaphors too, something she always enjoys. And keep an eye out for all the "Alice" references buried in the text - by no means all of them are pointing at Lewis Carroll.

The writers she picks up include many who mean a lot to me already - Sebald, Saramago, George Mackay Brown, Plath, Javier Marías, Stevie Smith, Auden, etc. - and a few I don't know so well, so it's an interesting journey, with lots of connections I hadn't thought about before. It being Smith, we also get a fun little excursion into a cultural backwater of the 1960s that most readers are unlikely to have ventured into before (I certainly hadn't). If you recognise the cover image then you're probably Greek and you'll know what's coming, if not, then let it surprise you in the last section of the book and don't hesitate to search YouTube with the keywords the narrator uses - it's enormous fun.

I’m officially blaming you if I finally do read Ali Smith. This sounds like great fun.

>60 dchaikin: I accept no liability! But you should. She's someone who really cares about words.

I really enjoyed Christopher Clark's Prussia book, Iron Kingdom, and I've been meaning to read this one since it came out, but never quite got around to it until now:

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012) by Christopher Clark (Australia, Germany, UK, 1960- )

  

Sir Christopher Clark is professor of modern history at Cambridge. He's originally from Sydney, and studied in Cambridge and Berlin. His books normally appear more or less simultaneously in English and German, and he's if anything even better-known in Germany than he is in the UK.

When I was sixteen, I could identify city "A" (it was usually Algeciras) and territory "B" (invariably The Sanjak of Novi Pazar) on a map of Europe without hesitation, and take you from Sarajevo to the invasion of Belgium in exactly 750 words. (I could also have done you "Bismarck's Domestic Policy" or "African Colonialism and the Congress of Berlin" for the same money.) How the European powers got themselves into such a horrifically destructive conflict in 1914 is one of the most enduring puzzles of modern history, and for the overwhelming majority of us it's a subject that had some sort of tangible consequence for our lives - relatives killed or displaced, borders redrawn, etc. What family album doesn't have at least one picture of a young uncle or grandparent looking proud but slightly uncomfortable in a new uniform, or an aunt dressed up as a nurse or a bus conductor? So there's always a kind of fatalistic fascination about works of narrative history that take it on - perhaps we even read them with a secret hope that this time "it will all come out right in the end" and the plumed hats of Europe will not go down the path to war...

Clark's line in this masterly and comprehensive account is essentially that he wants to focus on the "how" and not get involved with theorising about the "why". He points out the problems with narratives that are based on ideas of "guilt" or "blame", and instead looks mostly at the processes by which states, institutions and individuals took decisions, the information that they had, the political constraints they operated under, and their real and buried motives when taking them. And of course he takes into account that the published information about how all this happened was usually exposed to subsequent manipulation by those concerned (or their successors in office). No-one wanted to look like "the idiot who started the war" in his own memoirs.

This is interesting, because it leaves a lot of room for the two mechanisms historians usually hate above all else - "agency" (things happen because of what someone does) and "contingency" (things happen by accident). And it's clear that, in the world of pre-1914 European politics, there were a lot of crucial foreign policy decisions that had to be taken on their own by ministers, generals, ambassadors or heads of state. As Clark describes it, Cabinet discussions and collective decision-making were only part of the institutional structure in a few places (notably Britain and Russia) and even there they could be short-circuited by a dominant foreign minister used to getting his own way (Sir Edward Grey in England, Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov in Russia). Parliaments, of course, hardly enter into things at all. Newspapers are starting to be an important element, but Clark points out the confused approach many statesmen had to them, often failing to distinguish their use as a channel for publishing propaganda at home and abroad from their contradictory use as a barometer of "public opinion".

Clark is obviously very conscious of the specific "blame-the-loser narrative" against Germany that was created in the light of the Versailles Treaty and reinforced by historians of the generation that fought the Nazis, and he's someone with a very close affinity to German history and the Hohenzollerns, so you do occasionally get the feeling in this book that he might be over-compensating by the stress he puts on the contribution to the slide into war made by Russia, France and Britain - Sazonov, Poincaré and Grey in particular are shown as acting in dangerous and irresponsible ways during the 1914 crisis, whilst events in Germany and Austria at the same time seem to get rather less coverage. The book has sometimes been criticised by reviewers for seeming to whitewash the Central Powers. I don't think that's an entirely fair accusation: Clark does point out failings in the ways both Austria and Germany reacted to the crisis, but (as we already saw in Iron Kingdom) he doesn't really believe in the idea that there was an over-riding "Prussian cult of militarism".

If there ever was a main cause of the First World War, it seems to have been the reliance by statesmen on all sides on a policy of "firmness" ("they will never fight us if we show that we're willing to fight them - and if they do we will beat them anyway") coupled with a failure to think through what the consequences of modern war would actually mean for their country. And worryingly, even if we've got better at international conflict-resolution in the intervening century, we still seem to have a lot of leaders around the world who put their faith in threats and missiles...

Terrific review, Mark. Back in my collage days when I lazily tried for (and did not get) a history minor I took a class on Germany and was heavily influenced by Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 by Volker Rolf Berghahn - a 1973 history book. Alas I never finished the book. He puts a lot of blame on Kaiser Wihelm for being the fool in the room (and on his navy). Perhaps it’s time I read something newer.

>62 dchaikin: I haven't read enough to be able to judge how likely Clark's view is to be right - he certainly upset some reviewers, and pleased a lot of German readers! But at least on the naval question, I think his arguments make sense - it clearly was a big deal between Britain and Germany in 1904, but by 1914 relations were friendly again and nobody except Churchill saw the German navy as a threat any more (and in the event it turned out to be an almost useless drain on German resources).

Something that really struck me is Clark's suggestion that British colonial interests (and public opinion) saw much more benefit in fighting Russia than Germany, and that the Triple Entente probably wouldn't have lasted any longer than 1914 if Sarajevo hadn't happened. And then where would we have been? (Well, my grandparents wouldn't have met, so the question is probably academic for me....)

And another quickie - it caught my eye in my Scribd recommendations (if you happen to be looking for books by female Nordic authors, patronymics ending in -dóttir are a bit of a giveaway, at least as far as Iceland goes...):

Butterflies in November (2004; English 2013) by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Iceland, 1958- ) translated by Brian FitzGibbon (Ireland, Iceland, 1960- )

  

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir is an art historian at the University of Reykjavik, with a number of successful novels to her credit. Apart from Butterflies, only one other has been translated to English so far, but the others are available in French.

Irish-born Brian FitzGibbon is a freelance commercial (and literary, apparently!) translator, based in Reykjavik.

The narrator, who's a freelance translator and proofreader, decides it's time to make a change in her life after her husband walks out on her but then, irritatingly, keeps turning up again. And she has a bit of unfinished business to deal with in the eastern village where her grandmother used to live. However, just when she's announced that she's off to the East, her best friend Auður has to go into hospital, and she finds herself - notwithstanding protestations that she doesn't know the first thing about children and doesn't know sign-language - looking after Auður's four-year-old son, Tumi, who has serious hearing problems. The two of them set off down Highway No.1 in the depths of an unseasonably warm Icelandic November, negotiating hazards including floods, landslides, Estonian choirs, roadkill and available single men, and by the time they get to the prefabricated summer cottage that the narrator has won in a charity lottery, the woman and the child have somehow found each other and started working as a team.

It's a quirky book, often very funny indeed, but always rather jumpy and unresolved, full of unnamed characters who seem to overlap a little with each other, switching between present, past and dreams, and just at the point where we might have been expecting a joined-up ending, we get a compilation of recipes for all the food consumed in the course of the book (up to and including "undrinkable coffee"). And a knitting pattern. The "recipes" of course are not just recipes, but give us various hints from which we have to try to work out a resolution to the story ourselves. Or at least we could, if those hints only joined up somehow...

Happily, my book club all enjoyed Ali Smith's Winter (>41 thorold:) - one or two were a little frightened by not being able to work out what was going on in the opening chapters, but they stuck to it and had fun following up the links to A Christmas Carol, G.I. Blues, Cymbeline, etc. So I don't need to feel too bad about bringing her name up yet again on this thread. This is the most recent one I've read from her back-catalogue, and it turns out (for the 1001ers out there) that it's got onto at least one of the 1001 lists:

The accidental (2005) by Ali Smith‬ (UK, 1962- )



The last person who reviewed this described it as "A book that expands your understanding of what it means to be human" (http://www.librarything.com/work/45474/reviews/146944196) - can't argue with that!

Someone else rather wonderfully said "i don't think i have been this ticked at a book since...Mrs. Dalloway. (stupid book!) heh." - since Mrs Dalloway is one of my favourite books, this is probably about as strong a recommendation as you could get :-)

A stranger turns up in the midst of a family spending the summer in a rented house in Norfolk, and they are all so preoccupied with their individual concerns that they just assume she's got a good reason for being there and that one of the others must have invited her in. The sense of disconnection is enhanced by Smith's use of parallel narratives from the four family members, who of course all see something quite different. And then there's a fifth narrative voice, someone called "Alhambra" after the cinema where they were conceived(*), who might or might not be the same as the mysterious stranger, Amber, but is clearly locked into a world in which the narrative conventions of cinema rule, and we soon realise that a lot of what happens in the book is a kind of awful real-life transfer of things that would make perfect sense on the screen.

Like most strangers who turn up in fiction (and like the stranger in Smith's latest book, Winter) Amber acts as a plot-catalyst, pushing the four members of the family towards a resolution of their problems and making them actually talk to each other. But of course it's not as simple as stranger turns up and problems are resolved - whilst she offers them each what might well be the thing they most need in the short term, she also takes or destroys a great deal in the process - finding resolution is not a pain-free process, and there are no fairy godmothers in this book.

Literature comes in too - one of the characters is an Eng Lit lecturer who has lost interest in anything except the transitory enjoyment of sleeping with his students, and it's great fun when his section of the narrative keeps sliding into a pastiche of the Great Poetry he's been teaching without any conviction all these years...

As you would expect, the book is set in a very precise historical moment (the summer and autumn of 2003) and there are a lot of Smith's usual funny and clear-sighted comments on current affairs - it's striking how many of the things that were grabbing our attention just over a decade ago have faded to the backs of our minds already - the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the failure of the Millennium Dome, Love Actually and the rise of the Islingtocracy, bookshops with cafés, DV camcorders. But there are other topics that haven't gone away, where Smith was probably a bit ahead of the pack in singling them out: the omnipresence of CCTV cameras, public-private spaces, social media bullying.

---
(*)Out of curiosity, I had a look to see if there really was an Alhambra in Inverness - wouldn't you know it, there's an excellent online database of defunct Scottish cinemas (http://www.scottishcinemas.org.uk/index.html) and it turns out that there were eleven Alhambras in Scotland, but none of them in the right place. The Inverness cinema that would match the circumstances of the novel best was called "La Scala", which doesn't really make for a plausible baby name...

Another terrific Ali Smith review

>65 thorold: After reading The roots of heaven and Brodeck's report I've become very interested about books about what it means to be human, and I've been interested in Smith for some time, so this is going on my wishlist.

I didn't care much for Mrs. Dalloway, though. Did the two books seem similar to you in the end?

>67 chlorine: No, I don’t think they have a huge amount in common. The person who drew the connection might perhaps have been complaining about getting multiple, incomplete views of what was going on rather than having a single authoritative voice.

>68 thorold: Ok, I've added both of your recent Smith recommendations to my wish list. I may even break down and buy them instead of waiting for the library copies to be available.

I don't know how I missed this thread...so much great reading here. I've been to Iceland, and Scandinavia is "on the list" (ooo, you got to the Faroes!) When I went to Iceland in 2010 (only 4 1/2 hours from Boston), I hadn't read much beyond Indridason's crime fiction, and surprisingly, there wasn't much to be found translated in the local bookstore I went into there. I recently read Indridason's latest standalone crime novel, and another novel, Woman at 1000 Degrees by Halgrimur Helgesson. Will have to look for the Butterflies in November...

Glad to see your review of the latest Drabble. I started it but had put it down somewhere... I also skimmed your view of The God of Chance which is somewhere in the house....

Catching up a bit, since we've now got our first snow of the winter, the critical 2 cm of it which are enough to make it useless to try to travel anywhere in the Netherlands...

>69 ipsoivan: - if you can't get hold of the two latest ones, I think How to be both would be a good place to start with Ali Smith.
>70 avaland: - I'll be interested to hear what you think about The god of chance - I wasn't very sure about it, as you probably saw.

I started reading Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire novels about five years ago, but the right-wing rant got a bit much for me when I got to the Attlee period, so I only ever got about halfway through the series. Over the weekend, I filled in a couple of gaps from WWII:

Marling Hall (1942) by Angela Thirkell (UK, 1890-1961)

Peace breaks out (1946) by Angela Thirkell (UK, 1890-1961)

   

The first thing characters in an Angela Thirkell novel want to know about someone is "who her people are" - so it's a fair question to ask of the author herself. It turns out that her father was the literary scholar, Morris-biographer and all-round Arts & Crafts figure, Professor J W Mackail, while her mother was the daughter of Morris's colleague, the painter Edward Burne-Jones. One of Burne-Jones's sisters was the mother of Rudyard Kipling, another the mother of Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Thirkell's godfather was J. M. Barrie, her brother Dennis Mackail started out as a set-designer and later became a well-known novelist as well ... I could go on, but you get the picture.

Angela Thirkell herself took up writing novels to earn a living for herself and her sons after the failure of her second marriage in 1929, and managed to turn out a book a year for the rest of her life. She's quite cynical about the commercialism of her work, often sending herself up in the character of the scatter-brained crime-writer Mrs Morland, although her genre is comic romance rather than crime. She borrowed names, plots and settings freely from the greats of Victorian literature, setting most of her books in a contemporary version of Trollope's fictional English county of Barsetshire. The stories are very snobbish, in the sense that they are written for lower-middle-class readers who will be prepared to admire (and aspire to) the life-style of the gentry families who are the main characters, whilst failing to recognise themselves in the caricatures of the lower orders. Mrs Morland is forever expressing surprise and slight embarrassment when one of her upper class friends admits to reading her books. It's difficult to say in the early novels how much this Tory elitism reflects Thirkell's real view of the world and how much is just put on for the benefit of the readers, but by the time you get to the fifties it's plain that the rant against socialism and the modern world is too consistent to be just an act. You start to feel as though you're trapped on a 250 page version of the Daily Telegraph letters page. No-one could doubt that Thirkell would have been one of the turkeys who voted for Brexit, had she lived long enough.

Of course, you don't read Thirkell for her politics (or at least, I don't...). Where she is unbeatable is in her sharp observation of the comedy inherent in the way real people talk and act. No-one does small children, enthusiastic young women, in-fighting servants, or pompous-but-loved fathers quite as convincingly or as amusingly. P.G. Wodehouse's dialogue may be just as funny, but it's highly stylised, whilst hers is something you might easily have heard in a shop or at the breakfast table (if you were around in the 30s and 40s). She's also surprisingly feminist for someone so conservative, and is very good at making us notice what women actually do in life, showing us the work of mothers, nurses, secretary-companions and others who usually get taken for granted, as complex, challenging, and highly-skilled. Whilst she rails against the modern world and affects to despise anyone whose income doesn't come from landed property, she does clearly approve of those strong-minded young women in her books who decide to take advantage of the new wartime and postwar order of things by pursuing careers in "unfeminine" areas like mathematics, engineering, agriculture and veterinary medicine. Her upbringing and her constant immersion in Victorian novels and poetry seem to have left her with a very agreeable prose style, too, which counts for something...

Marling Hall is Thirkell's 1942 book, set in the closing months of 1941. The people of Barsetshire have settled down to the hardships of wartime. The Marlings are trying to run their home with only four servants, aiding the war effort by clearing the table themselves after breakfast. Their daughter Lettice, whose husband was killed at Dunkirk, is living in the stable-block, and the retired governess Miss Bunting is helping out with looking after her small daughters. Lettice has reached the point where she is able to think about remarriage, but of the suitors on offer, one is the charming but notoriously unreliable David Leslie (who has complicated the plot of romances in several previous novels already), another is a rather middle-aged and probably gay civil servant with a thing about 16th century poetry, and the third seems to be attached to Lettice's noisy sister Lucy. We have a pretty good idea how it's going to turn out, but there's a lot of worthwhile comedy about chickens, dogs, occasional tables, and the age-old rivalry between Palace and Deanery to come before the happy resolution.

Thirkell's 1946 book, Peace breaks out, opens, as we might have guessed, in April 1945, a few days before VE Day, and its action continues through the 1945 general election, ending just after VJ Day in August. Thirkell's characters aren't exactly exultant about the end of the war - for many of them it messes up their plans for continuing with interesting war-work and getting their next promotion through; others seem to know very well that it won't mean an end to rationing and other government interference:

On the following Tuesday a day of national rejoicing burst by very slow degrees and barely recognised as such upon an exhausted, cross and uninterested world. Not much notice was taken in the country as everyone was busy, few young people were about and there was the usual dearth of beer.

Alternating with the narrator's gloom and doom about the state of England (for which she blames all foreigners, irrespective of which side they were on in the war, in pages and pages of xenophobic rant) we get an unexpectedly sunny romance plot full of set-pieces like tennis-parties, bring-and-buy sales, school sports and clerical infighting in the Close. It looks as though the charming David's days as a bachelor may be numbered, but we're left guessing until the end who will be the unlucky woman. It feels like an oddly unbalanced book, in which the plot really doesn't work together with the historical context at all, but there are still a lot of gems of detailed observation in between times to make it worth reading.

Interesting background on Angela Thirkell, which makes her writing make so much sense. I read the short stories in Christmas at High Rising about this time last year and was struck by two of the things you highlight: her downright snobbishness and her humour. I think the story that seemed the most outrageous for sheer privilege was the story of the trip to London for the pantomime. I always wondered with books of this ilk why the lower-middle-class readers who will be prepared to admire (and aspire to) the life-style of the gentry didn't just rise up and overthrow them instead, but then that wouldn't be very English, something more akin to what those "foreigners" might do.

>72 SassyLassy: why the lower-middle-class readers ... didn't just rise up and overthrow them instead

Well, Attlee won in 1945, so there was a surprising amount - by British standards - of overthrowing of privilege going on. I've heard it suggested that part of the reason for that was that a lot of working-class men serving in the armed forces were thrown into close contact with the upper-classes (their officers) for the first time, and came to realise how unpleasant they were. (Kind of Brideshead revisited in reverse.) But I don't suppose many of the people who voted Labour were Thirkell fans. We don't really expect Jackie Collins fans to overthrow capitalism, either, do we?

Thirkell probably thought of pantomime as a very egalitarian kind of entertainment. Even if you do go there by Rolls-Royce in the middle of the hungry 1930s and sit in a box. But those Tony Morland stories are a bit hard to take because they add another level of snobbery we're meant to laugh at - the part coming from Tony's horrible, selfish, prep-school code - to the underlying snobbery we probably aren't meant to see.

This passage just caught my eye. Virginia Woolf is talking about George Meredith, but it seems to apply to Thirkell too (more on Woolf coming soon):

English fiction without the nieces of Earls and the cousins of Generals would be an arid waste. It would resemble Russian fiction. It would have to fall back upon the immensity of the soul and upon the brotherhood of man. Like Russian fiction, it would lack comedy.

>71 thorold: Very interesting review.
" aiding the war effort by clearing the table themselves after breakfast.": this made me chuckle. :)

One of the things I like to do occasionally - now that I have the time - is go back and actually read books I met only as excerpts in course anthologies when I was a student (or took off the shelf for one or two relevant quotations). SassyLassy made me remember about Virginia Woolf's essays by mentioning Geraldine Jewsbury in her thread. But I would probably have got there sooner or later in any case:

The common reader: first series (1925) by Virginia Woolf (UK, 1882-1941)
The common reader: second series (1932) by Virginia Woolf (UK, 1882-1941)

   

Virginia Woolf could almost have been Angela Thirkell's big sister - they were only a few years apart and came from very similar, intersecting, arty upper-middle-class backgrounds (Woolf's mother modelled for Thirkell's grandfather, for instance). But Woolf was writing Mrs Dalloway and setting up the Hogarth Press whilst Thirkell was busy running away to Australia with a Digger.

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. “… I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

The two series of The common reader (published in 1925 and 1932) are the collections of Woolf's essays on books and writers published during her lifetime (further collections were compiled by her husband after her death). As the title implies, they concentrate on the pleasures to be found in books rather than the academic analysis of literary values. Woolf is happy to be eclectic, and whilst she visits most of the familiar lampposts of Eng Lit on her quasi-random walk, she doesn't mind going into rhapsodies about an obscure volume of 18th century memoirs that no-one has had out of the library in a century, or having fun exhuming the life of an almost forgotten country parson or an overlooked woman writer.

She is addressing English readers in English papers, of course, but still I was a bit surprised at how narrow her geographical range is here. "Literature", for the purposes of these books, seems to begin with Chaucer and the Paston Letters and end with Ulysses (still a work-in-progress when she was writing about it). Writers are, almost without exception, English - and when they are not, they are foreigners with some special claim to be recognised as English by adoption, like Swift and Joyce, Scott and RLS, or Conrad and James. There are passing references to the fact that a few Frenchmen may have written books, but this is not investigated further: it looks as though the only non-English books worth discussing are those of The Greeks and The Russians. And in both cases Woolf tells us that however much we may enjoy them, our cultural distance from them means that we will only ever appreciate them rather dimly. The famous essay "On not knowing Greek" isn't about linguistic difficulties. She assumes that we will have learnt Greek at least to the extent that we can read Homer and the Athenian dramatists, as she has. But she very sensibly warns us about the difficulty of making any assumptions about a culture where life is lived so differently from early-20th-century London, and a literature of which we read a handful of masterpieces without much knowledge of what came before or after, or indeed of contemporary works that were not preserved as masterpieces. Chaucer's England is a long way away too, but there we have so much more accessible context to help us to make sense of it. And Russia is even more of a problem, when seen from the vantage point of Bloomsbury: "Of all those who feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in Russian"(!)

Something else that came home to me about halfway through my reading is how hard it is to keep a sense of the flow of time when reading this sort of writing. Woolf talks about "The Victorians" in much the same way that we do, as representatives of a distant era, but actually she was born in Victoria's reign herself. When she talks about Tennyson, Thackeray and Trollope, they are people that her parents and grandparents knew (her father was previously married to one of Thackeray's daughters) - they're nearer to her (in time) than she would be from me. A sobering thought...

What most of us will dip into The common reader for are the wonderful essays on her real heroes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Christina Rosetti, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Brontës, where Woolf expertly points us to the things we really need to know about those writers and the conditions they worked under, without obscuring in any way her own enormous (but never uncritical) enthusiasm for them. But we shouldn't neglect the backwaters. Woolf has great fun with all her subjects, and she can make Laetitia Pilkington or Geraldine Jewsbury (or Beau Brummell or Archbishop Thomson, for that matter) as interesting and extraordinary as Wollstonecraft, and make us feel - at least for the duration of the essay - that we really ought to go off and read more about those people. And occasionally, she can be delightfully brutal with some unfortunate modern writer, like the poor Miss Hill who wrote a ladylike little book about Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings, presumably unaware that Woolf knew all about Miss Mitford because of her research for Flush. But even faced with an undeniably bad book, Woolf admits that the simple pleasure of reading and being made to think about what the author should have said wins out "Yet, as one is setting out to speak the truth, one must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment."

The common reader is decidedly not a book to read without the mind and without the heart - both of those organs will be stimulated more than adequately as you read it - but the considerable enjoyment is still there all the same!

I seem to have got into a "two for the price of one" mode lately. There wasn't any plan to this, and I don't think it will persist after these two: it just sort of happened because the Thirkells didn't take long to read, there didn't seem to be much point only reading one of the two series of Common Reader, and that gave me time for two short story collections in between the essays.

Anyway, another celebrated modernist writer I've been meaning to get around to since forever. In this case what gave me the nudge to get going with her were Ali Smith's frequent mentions of Mansfield...

Bliss and Other Stories (1920) by Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand, 1888-1923)
The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) by Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand, 1888-1923)

   

Katherine Mansfield came from a fairly wealthy New Zealand family, and spent most of her adult life in Europe. Sadly, she died very young, of TB (there's apparently a theory that she caught it from D H Lawrence), and all she's left us are five collections of short stories (two of them posthumous), a few poems, and some letters and journals.

She knew Virginia Woolf, and the two of them had long conversations about books and writing. But they didn't always see eye to eye - Lorna Sage quotes Woolf being very catty about Mansfield's perfume (i.e. her overt sexuality) in her diary after one of their early meetings, and Woolf also hated the story "Bliss" the first time she read it, but at other times she makes very positive comments about Mansfield's literary judgment and (in a review of the Journals) her writerly approach to life.

Bliss was Mansfield's second short story collection. The most conspicuous story in the book is not "Bliss", but "Prelude", a long piece about a middle-class New Zealand family, obviously modelled on Mansfield's own, moving to a new out-of-town house with a big garden. Apart from being rather longer than most, this has pretty much all the hallmarks of a Mansfield story. We are thrown in at the deep end without any explanation of who is who or what's happening, so that we have to work it out for ourselves from a series of little clues, and will make a few false assumptions before we get it all straight. Nothing obviously important happens, and the story stops as inexplicably as it started, with the lid of a jar falling off a table and not breaking. But in the meantime, we have somehow or other discovered a surprising amount about the members of the family and what is going on in their minds, information that would have made all their lives much easier if they had been able to express it and exchange it with each other. It's a story about things that mostly don't happen, connections that are not made, feelings that can't be shared. (An earlier version of this story was later published posthumously as "The Aloe".)

The title story, "Bliss", the one Virginia Woolf threw down with the expression "She's done for!" the first time she read it ("...the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too."), is perhaps the most direct in the book - Bertha is a young housewife who's feeling inexplicably much happier than is justified by being about to host a dinner-party. She discovers over the tomato soup that she's fallen desperately and completely in love - without realising it - with one of her guests. They share a perfect moment together over the pear tree, then Mansfield disillusions her horribly, and brings the story to a rapid halt before we've quite decided in which way everything is going to continue badly - for continue badly it must.

The remaining stories in the collection all seem to touch on similar themes of people being stuck in situations where they are permanently at cross-purposes, doing some kind of slow, painful harm through their inability to be open and honest about something. Sometimes it's a marriage, sometimes employer and employee, sometimes a group of people trapped in the same social convention. The mood is steered by important little details of setting, speech, weather, plants (Mansfield always brings significant plants in somewhere), but there's always something nasty for us to discover about human nature, and it's usually something that we wouldn't have discovered without Mansfield to lead us to it.

The Garden Party - like Bliss - is dominated by an extended story drawn from the author's childhood, in this case "At the bay", where the family we met in "Prelude" are staying in a summer-house by the sea, and once again we discover mostly through indirect signs - the plants, the beach, the play of the children - the invisible rifts that run between the members of the apparently harmonious family group.

The title-story is one of Mansfield's most anthologised stories, so you'll have read it twenty years ago and answered exam questions on Mansfield's death-imagery, but it's worth coming back to. It seems to have just about everything - endless quantities of plants, a significant piece of music, failures of communication within a bourgeois family, incomprehension between rich and poor, the well-intentioned action that is undermined by its initiator's realisation that she's being patronising. But it never reads like just a text for an Eng Lit paper: it's a story you can't help engaging with emotionally.

There are plenty more gems in this collection as well: "The singing lesson" is a miracle of construction, which works despite the fact that you can almost see the gears turning to keep it going; "Miss Brill" and "The Lady's Maid" are both beautiful examples of texts where the reader has to create the story despite the narrator. And I don't see how anyone can fail to enjoy "The Voyage" or "Her First Ball".

>73 thorold: I’ve heard it suggested...
It just occurred to me - does that idea perhaps come from Anthony Burgess? I’ve a vague idea it might be from his memoirs where he’s talking about his time in the Education Corps.

Spent an enjoyable evening reading through your last two threads.

>79 baswood: Great! I keep dipping into yours, but I'm afraid that I'll end up having to read your Tudors as well if I allow myself to get drawn into discussion... I really don't want to start another giant reading project at the moment.

I seem to have been reading nothing but English over the past few weeks, so I plucked something thin and German off the TBR shelf. It's not been there all that long - it was part of the haul I brought home from the charity shop at the beginning of summer.

Ich will meinen Mord (1995) by Birgit Vanderbeke (Germany, 1956- )

  

Birgit Vanderbeke was born in East Germany, but moved to the West with her family as a small child. She is known especially for her 1990 novella Das Muschelessen, which won prizes in Germany and was also quite a success in English translation. According to Wikipedia, she now lives in the South of France (which fits in with the setting of this book, at least).

Ich will meinen Mord is a quirky little novel in which the narrator, travelling by train from Montpellier to Metz on her way to what promises to be an unpleasant meeting with her publisher, decides that what she really needs is the motiveless murder of a stranger on the very first page. That man sitting diagonally opposite from her in the compartment would be the obvious candidate. But it doesn't seem to be as easy as all that. Minor characters keep managing to wriggle themselves into the book and demanding their own names and back-stories, and the opportunity for a murder gets pushed further and further back. Maybe she can do it after Lyon, where the two Swiss ladies will be changing for Berne? But the Diderot-reading prospective victim is also getting less and less anonymous - maybe the two of them should get together to murder someone for a reason instead?

It's all reasonably funny, and Vanderbeke is a good writer who manages to place quite a few nice sharp observations about human nature, the limits of what fiction can do, French trains, marriage, the Encyclopedists, and climate-change, but I don't think the central conceit was quite strong enough to carry the book even for 120 pages. Fun to read once if you find it lying around somewhere, but probably not a book to go and search out.

Those Mansfield and Woolf reviews are two my favorites by you (which is saying a lot).

>81 dchaikin: Thanks! I had my doubts about both - watching how effortlessly Virginia Woolf writes about books with that incredible mixture of enthusiasm and authority is enough to undermine anyone's confidence in ever being able to write anything that seems remotely worthwhile in comparison. Even mine.

This next one was a mistake. I persisted with it for mere box-ticking reasons (Finnish woman author) and because it was rather short, but I'd really made my mind up not to like it fairly early on, and it never really won me over.

Mr Darwin's gardener (2009; English 2013) by Kristina Carlson (Finland, 1949- ) translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah

  

Finnish journalist and novelist Kristina Carlson had her big breakthrough with her second novel, Maan ääreen (translated into German, but not English, apparently) in 1999. She also writes very popular children's books as Mari Lampinen.

Fleur and Emily Jeremiah are a British-Finnish mother and daughter team who have translated many Finnish literary works, separately and together.

This is probably a classic example of a book that shouldn't have been translated. Setting a historical novel in a foreign country is often a good idea, because it allows you to avoid getting caught up on silly points of linguistic and cultural detail ("...he couldn't have used that word in 1879") and concentrate on the story and the ideas you're trying to communicate. Instead of being a novel about a specific place at a specific time, it becomes a novel about how small communities work, how ideas about religion and science are taken up by uneducated people, and so on. But then you translate it into English, and it becomes a novel about the village of Downe in Kent, set between November 1879 and Spring 1881. English literature is full of descriptions of village communities in the south-east of England; everyone from Dickens, Kipling and H.G. Wells to George Orwell and H.E. Bates has contributed to giving English readers a very specific idea of how society functions in such a place, and how we should expect people from different classes and backgrounds to talk. It probably isn't a completely realistic idea, and we certainly mix up notions from different places and periods, but of course it doesn't bear any relationship to the very stylised, abstract version of village life we get from Carlson, where class-relationships are only hinted at and there's no differentiation between the way characters from different levels of society speak (to each other, or to the reader) except in the choice of images they use.

Of course, this - coupled with the fact that Carlson has obviously done her research quite carefully - makes an English reader over-attentive to places where people act or speak in ways that just aren't right for that place and time. In the opening pages a woman is doing her ironing on a Sunday - it's never mentioned again, but in a real English village that would have been discussed and held against her for the next forty years. A few pages on, a sermon in church urges that "we must warn our fellow men of the rocks of sin, and shine more brightly than the lamps of the wise virgins. Like the Eddystone Lighthouse" - but the Eddystone lighthouse had fallen down and was being rebuilt in 1879 (are we supposed to know that and see the irony?). A bit further on we are told that "Lewis sent Margaret into a spin" - nothing wrong with using an aeronautical image when your nearest neighbour is Biggin Hill aerodrome, but you should at least wait until after the invention of powered flight. And lots more little things like that.

That also makes you wonder a bit what Downe was really like in 1879. These days it's only just outside London, and even then it can't have been much more than half an hour away from central London by train, and it must already have been in the process of being taken over by rich men's villas and golf clubs. And people from Downe would certainly have gone off to work in London. But no "outsider" figures crop up except Darwin, who is offstage, presumably writing his little book on earthworms. For all the contact we have with the outside world, we might just as well be somewhere in the depths of Hardy's Wessex (or in rural Finland...).

Of course, this isn't what we're supposed to be thinking about. Carlson wants us to reflect on the whole Victorian dilemma about science and religion from a different viewpoint, not the usual top-down London intellectual view. Fair enough, but Edmund Gosse has already got that covered pretty well, so I don't know if she really adds anything.

Peirene tell us that we should be comparing the book with Under Milk Wood. Again, fair enough, although perhaps it's a slightly unfortunate comparison when the only Welshman in the book doesn't seem to display any evidence of his nationality at all. As Dylan Thomas does, Carlson creates the village by letting the villagers speak directly to the audience, but a novel is a very different medium from a radio play, where we had Richard Burton to mediate between us and the unadorned text.

(Grrr: the spelling-checker keeps sabotaging me. Just to avoid confusion: the village is called "Downe", but Darwin lived at "Down House". Don't ask why, this is England, that's how they operate...)

>80 thorold: >82 thorold: Sorry to hear your last two books were disappointing. Very good reviews though.

>83 chlorine: You’ll probably have a completely different view of the Carlson if you read it in French. I think it probably is a good book, just not when you take away the foreignness of the setting by putting it in English.

But it got good reviews from some other English readers, so maybe it’s just me, anyway...

>84 thorold: You're right that I would appreciate the Carlson differently than you, even if I read it in English, probably, BTW. But then I'm sure there are other books that address the same point as this one (as you mentioned), while not relying on artificial portrayal of any time or place, so I'm not in a hurry to read this one.

>82 thorold: Some books just don’t work, and some books bring out the critic in us fairly or unfairly, but it does sound like maybe you are knowledgeable to enjoy this book.

I didn't feel like anything too serious after the last few, so I thought I'd have a look into an unlikely German trend that had escaped me until someone told me about it quite recently, the Ostfriesenkrimi...

Ostfriesenkiller (2007) by Klaus-Peter Wolf (Germany, 1954- )

  

As well as writing Krimis, Klaus-Peter Wolf is a children's writer, screenwriter, playwright, and an activist who's been involved in many high-profile political and social causes in Germany and elsewhere. He's originally from Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhrgebiet, but has lived in Norden since 2003.

Ostfriesland (East Frisia) is the bit of the German North Sea coast between the Ems and the Weser, including half-a-dozen assorted islands in the Waddenzee. English readers might know the area from the classic spy story The riddle of the sands; until recently Germans only knew of it for its notoriously high rainfall and tea-consumption, and its inhabitants as the butt of the same sort of tasteless jokes elsewhere told about Belgians, the Irish, Poles, blondes, viola-players, etc. But apparently it's on the way up again - North Germans who can't afford Florida or Bavaria are rediscovering the region as a place for holidays and retirement homes, and with the growth of the Ostfriesenkrimi phenomenon it also looks as though it's getting to the point where it can claim a fictional-murder rate comparable to international hotspots like Ystad, Oxford and Reykjavik. Obviously something that deserves a look, and where better to start than with Wolf's first book about Inspector Ann Kathrin Klaasen?

Actually, it's difficult to see what makes this book special. It's a good, routine sort of serial-killer story with a few clever twists, but there doesn't really seem to be all that much fascinating local colour here. Wolf's gimmick - such as it is - is that all the places he mentions (streets, bars, restaurants, etc.) really exist, and I'm told that a lot of them now have big signs up saying "Ann Kathrin ate here". And we get a walk across the Watt in the opening pages, a bit of wind and rain on the dike and a few seconds of sailing later in the book, but that's about it. Not really a book that would make me want to move to Aurich or Norden.

In line with Wolf's radical background, the plot is all about a charity that works with disabled people, and Wolf takes the opportunity to illustrate some of the less obvious problems faced by disabled people and those who are trying to support them. We don't get the feeling that we are being preached at, but Wolf gets his message across very efficiently here - he obviously knows what he's talking about. I also enjoyed the way he sneaked a Pippi Longstocking theme into the plot, not quite but almost under the radar. And he's clearly a fan of Jean-Claude Izzo's crime novels, which gets him a lot of bonus points from me!

On the other hand, Ann Kathrin Klaasen on this first outing comes across as something of a crime-fiction cliché - not only does the first murder take place just as she's leaving the office for a long-overdue spell of leave, but it also cuts into the evening that she'd reserved for telling her husband that she knows all about his extramarital affair. Oh, and it turns out that she joined the police force because her father was a police officer who was killed on duty, and she's still out to get his killers, and naturally she doesn't understand the words "you're off the case", or indeed accept any order she doesn't like from her chief or from the public prosecutor. Amazingly, she doesn't seem to have a drinking problem yet. But there are at least a dozen more books coming, so she's got time.

There are a few other silly clichés about - we keep getting told that characters did not know they only had four hours to live, and Wolf is sometimes such a man - when he's showing us how much women are exploited and mistreated in life, it always seem to require them to take their clothes off, and no vehicle, weapon, or wristwatch ever comes past without us being told the make and model.

Entertaining enough, and its heart is in the right place. The annoyances are mostly only noticeable because they are annoying things so many other crime writers do. I can't see myself ever putting him on my list of favourite crime writers, but I might read some more...

Since I probably won't be posting all that much over the next couple of weeks, I'll post some provisional stats already. To be updated in due course updated to the end of the year on 12.01.18

52 books read in Q4 (136 in 2017); in 2016 I read 172 books, an unusually large number. I've posted 1140 reviews since joining LT in April 2007.

The apparent drop in numbers in 2017 is from the first half of the year, while I was still working (only 51 books in Q1 and Q2). Maybe it was pre-retirement stress.

Gender balance is not looking too good, but it's at least improved on what it was in Q1 and Q2: 18 by female authors in Q4, i.e. 35% (49, i.e. 36%, in 2017)
- slightly better representation of female authors than I feared, but still not wonderful!

113 distinct authors (not counting co-authors, translators, etc.), of whom 35, i.e. 31%, female, so I'm very slightly more likely to read multiple books by a female author than by a male. Overall average 1.14 books per author.
Most books by one author this year: 6 from Ali Smith, 4 from Annie Ernaux and Simenon, 3 from Alice Munro.

Date of first publication ranges from 1875 to 2017 - mean publication year 1988, median 1999, 35 (26%) were published in the last five years. So my reading seems to be getting suspiciously up-to-date!

79 books (61%) were in English; the biggest of my loosely-defined categories was "fiction", up to 86 books (63%)

I'm still having spreadsheet trouble, so the charts aren't up to my usual standard.

>87 thorold: I was also unaware of Ostfriesenkrimi... Nice review !

>88 thorold: I love your charts!

Love your stat breakdowns, with analysis.

Several people recently said good things about this book - it was a nice long, undemanding read that got me through a rather tedious travel day (fog in Manchester, all flights delayed...) on Monday:

The long ships (Röde Orm, 1941 & 1945; English 1954) by Frans G Bengtsson (Sweden, 1894-1954), translated by Michael Meyer

  

Frans Bengtsson was a Swedish essayist and biographer - Röde Orm was his only work of fiction.

This wonderfully entertaining Viking epic is written in a very distinctive, dry style, with lots of action and dialogue and no analysis or moral, obviously in conscious imitation of the style of the Sagas, but also rather reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott at his best. We are encouraged to take the characters at face value, and enter into the surprisingly foreign moral world of the Norse warriors, where violence is always a more powerful argument than law or custom, property belongs to anyone strong enough to keep it, and human life is cheap. Bengtsson follows these ideas through to their logical conclusions and shows us how a society like that could - just about - function. Sometimes we have to admire the strength and determination of the warriors who manage to make their presence felt over most of the known world; sometimes it becomes so bizarre that we just have to laugh (rather like the opening of Asterix and the Vikings, where we are shown the practical problems that arise when no-one knows the meaning of fear - kids who won't eat their porridge, ships that keep colliding because no-one gives way, etc.).

Guess who...

Public Library and other stories (2015) by Ali Smith‬ (UK, 1962- )



Appropriately enough, I borrowed this (well, actually, my mother borrowed it for me) from the small branch library that still manages to open a couple of days a week in the village where my parents live.

The UK has lost an incredible number of public libraries in recent years, partly as a result of a perception that books are not relevant to the digital age, but mostly because local authorities are so starved of cash under the Tories that they simply can't afford to provide any services that are not essential to keeping their citizens alive and well. In this book, Ali Smith mounts a spirited defence of books and libraries, directly in the passages between the stories where she asks her friends and fellow writers what access to library books menat to them, and indirectly in the stories themselves.

We get everything we would expect from an Ali Smith book, of course - illuminating glimpses at what's wrong with our world, initially puzzling but ultimately very satisfying narrative tricks, and entertaining sidelights on writers and artists we might or might not know about (Katherine Mansfield, who's never far away in Smith's fiction, gets a starring role this time). Good stuff, definitely.

Thanks for the interesting reviews! I feel like everybody here is reading The long ships. I loved your comparison with Astérix! :)

I’m not having a lot of luck with Finnish writers - I happened to come across this new book by an author I’d heard good things about, but it didn’t work for me ( or the others who’ve reviewed it on LT so far).

Norma (2015; English 2017) by Sofi Oksanen (Finland, 1977- )

Sofi Oksanen is a Finnish-Estonian writer, best known for her World War II novel When the doves disappeared

 

Yes, you guessed it, this is another of those magic-realist feminist crime novels set in the milieu of the Finnish human-hair-and-surrogate-baby mafia...

It sounds like an interesting premise, and it gives Oksanen the opportunity to play around with ideas about the commercial exploitation of women's bodies, but somehow it didn’t really manage to grab me. Perhaps there were too many different storylines going on, and perhaps the author put too much effort into trying to confuse us into jumping to the wrong conclusions about her characters.

nice to see The Long Ships here, and more Ali Smith. Sorry about the Finns.

Nice reviews of The Long Ships and Public Library and Other Stories, Mark. I own the Bengtsson but not the Smith, so I'll look for it soon.

Another post-Wende DDR novel:

Rücken an Rücken (2011; Back to back) by Julia Franck (DDR, Germany, 1970- )

  

Julia Franck is a well-known journalist, novelist and occasional actor, who comes from a prominent family of DDR arts-establishment figures - she moved to the West with her parents as a young girl.

This novel - which seems to be based at least loosely on the lives of the sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger (Franck's grandmother) and her children - rather unexpectedly marries a Werther-like tragic-poet plot with the same sort of conflict between generations that informs a lot of other German fiction from after the Wende. Thomas and Ella, born in the closing stages of World War II, experience the DDR as a closed, prison-like society, full of abusive uses of power, whilst their mother, a communist, Jewish sculptor who spent the Nazi years in exile or in hiding, sees the Workers' and Peasants' State as a golden opportunity and the only bastion against a repeat of the horrors of the thirties. It's a book that is constantly on the edge of romantic and political cliche, especially in the later chapters after the Wall goes up, but it is saved (just about) by the immediacy and oddness of the children's life in their very unmotherly mother's Berlin-Rahnsdorf studio. (Apart from anything else, there is the bizarre way so many of the scenes have to be played in the nude - it's like finding yourself in the middle of a German park on a summer Sunday...)

...and a book I was given as a Christmas present:

The good immigrant (2016) edited by Nikesh Shukla (UK, - )

  

This collection of essays about what it's like to be black, Asian or minority ethnic and perceived as an immigrant in Britain started life as a crowdfunding project on Unbound. It includes contributions from writers, actors, comedians and others from a wide range of different backgrounds. Very lively and thought-provoking, although the contributors are mostly so young that many of the cultural references left me behind (I can't tell my Kardashians from my Kanye Wests, and I feel a bit silly having to Google names as famous as those...).

The message is clear, though: just because a society pats itself on the back for being inclusive and multi-culti, that doesn't exclude the existence of racism, which is something that goes a lot deeper than skinheads chanting offensive slogans in the street. When there has to be a plot reason for the presence of a non-white actor in a TV show, all is not yet well.

Of course, Mr Cameron's little referendum disaster almost made this book redundant: no-one can doubt any more that there are large numbers of British people who don't like "foreigners". When you read the final essay in the book, in which the journalist Musa Okwonga (one of the very few black people in Britain who can claim an Eton-and-Oxford background) describes his reasons for giving up on the UK and moving to Berlin, you are tempted just to think that he was clever enough to get in ahead of the rest...

Still, I think this is a book that goes beyond the limits of Britain in 2016: the experiences the contributors describe are something that anyone ought to be able to relate to, whether you've grown up as someone percevied to be "different" in the community where you live, or you have been confronted with "different" people living next door to you or in your class at school.

Great review of The Good Immigrant, Mark. I bought a copy of it last year, and I'll probably read it in February or March.

>94 thorold: I think Sofi Oksanen's When the Doves Disappeared was a much better book than Norma, and I've bought Purge, her first book to be translated, and winner of the Nordic Prize (in the TBR pile). Apparently Doves and Purge are part of a quartet of books related to WWII; however, I don't know if the other two books have been written, not yet translated; or, not yet written.

>97 thorold: I read Julia Franck's The Blindness of the Heart in translation some years ago. I liked it a lot but remember it as complex and rather bleak (I'm a bit vague on the whole story at this point -- so many books ago!).

>100 avaland: I saw your review of Norma too late, otherwise I'd probably not have bothered with it! Will try to give Oksanen another chance...

There are only a few hours of 2017 left, so time for a little bit more catch-up on what I've been reading over the holiday period. First a book that I've taken on trips several times now without opening it (I didn't bring my much-travelled paperback with me this time, but I found a copy here).

The Black Prince (1973) by Iris Murdoch (Ireland, UK, 1919-1999)

  

Iris Murdoch probably counts as the most influential of the generation of writers who came to prominence in Britain in the years after World War II. She was an academic philosopher as well as a novelist.

The Black Prince plays around with ideas about the complex relationship between Art, ethical choices, and erotic love. Which is arguably what all novels do, but Murdoch does it in more complex, sophisticated and (unexpectedly) explicit ways than most. We are drawn into engaging emotionally with a very unlikeable narrator - not only a boring man but also an unsuccessful writer - who briefly becomes interesting, human, and a creator of worthwhile art through falling into a totally reprehensible passion for a woman 40 years his junior, the daughter of his best friends. Murdoch constructs a wickedly comic narrative around the love affair, which of course ends up hurting all concerned in spectacularly awful ways, and we can't help laughing at things which in real life we would see as a terrible tragedy. Add in a few levels of unreliable and contradictory narrators, and the result is great fun, but also gives us a lot to think about.

Now, where can I get some postcards of the Post Office Tower...?

...and finally, since I started the year with Simenon:

Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret (1944) by Georges Simenon (Belgium, France, 1903-1989)

  

This collection brings together most of (I daren't say "all" - Simenon bibliography is a complex field and different sources all seem to have different lists) the Maigret short stories originally published in magazines in the thirties. In terms of subject-matter, they cover more or less the whole gamut of the Maigret world - there's a canal story, a seamen's cafe story, a couple of Paris-Brussels train-journey stories, some Paris milieu stories, a peasant-village story, and some provincial bourgeois settings. Mme Maigret is in the background of two or three and the central character of one (the classic "L'Amoureux de Mme Maigret"); three or four of the stories are set during Maigret's first - subsequently-rescinded - retirement from the police force to a cottage on the Loire.

On the whole, I think the "short novel" format works better for Maigret than short stories, because the whole point of a Maigret is the slow accumulation of psychological and social data about the people concerned that leads Maigret to a solution of the mystery - in a short story, this background depth is necessarily sacrificed to leave space for dull stuff like plot exposition. And there are a few stories here in which there is just way too much plot ingenuity. But all the same, there are some real gems here: "Etoile du Nord" is a wonderfully bizarre interrogation story, in which the tables are turned between detective and suspect several times before Maigret works out what is going on (unfortunately, it's also one of the few places where Simenon lets Maigret act in an unnecessarily unpleasant way towards a woman character); "Tempete sur la Manche" makes memorable use of the contrast between action and provincial-boarding-house tedium; "L'auberge aux noyes" is simply dripping with bad weather and thirties atmosphere. Good stuff to end a reading year on!

The 2018 thread is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/278102

I’m looking forward to seeing you all there in the New Year, but don’t hold your breath for the first review - I’ve just started a Trollope, so it will be a day or two!

I’ve just started a Trollope, so it will be a day or two!

That's one of the things I like so much about your threads! Looking forward to your 2018 reading.

>104 SassyLassy: Well, I was joking, of course, but it turns out that I did somehow manage to read half of Phineas Redux in the last 24 hours. I think I need to stop hanging around with octogenarians and get out of the house a bit!