thorold watches the mowers in the hay in Q3 21

All through that summer at ease we lay
And daily from the turret wall
We watched the mowers in the hay
And the enemy half a mile away
They seemed no threat to us at all

Edwin Muir, from "The Castle"

Welcome to my Q3 thread! You can find the previous thread here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/331117

2021 Q2 stats:

I finished 43 books in Q2 (Q1: 36).

Author gender: F: 10, M: 33 (77% M) (Q1: 66% M)

Language: EN 14, NL 2, DE 13, FR 9, ES 2, IT 2, PT 1 (33% EN) (Q1: 52% EN)
None of the books this time was a translation

8 books (19%) were linked to the "Childhood" theme read

Publication dates from 1848 to 2021, mean 1984, median 1993; 2 books were published in the last five years.

Formats: library 0, physical books from the TBR 25, physical books from the main shelves (re-reads) 1, audiobooks 1, paid ebooks 8, other free/borrowed 8 — 58% from the TBR (Q1: 52% from the TBR)

39 unique first authors (1.1 books/author; Q1 1.2)

By gender: M 30, F 9 : 77% M (Q1 70% M)
By main country: UK 8, NL 2, FR 7, DE 8, DD 2, US 5, IT 2, and various singletons

TBR pile evolution:
22/12/2019 : 105 books (123090 book-days)
31/3/2020 : 110 books (129788 book-days) (Change: 14 read, 19 added)
30/6/2020 : 94 books (102188 book-days) (Change: 54 read, 48 added)
30/9/2020 : 94 books (89465 book-days) (Change: 39 read, 39 added)
31/12/2020: 90 books (79128 book-days) (Change: 31 read, 27 added)
2/4/2021: 101 books (84124 book-days) (change: 19 read, 30 added)
2/7/2021: 88 books (80882 book-days) (change: 25 read, 12 added)

I've obviously been taking too many books off the young end of the pile (and not adding enough new ones!): the average days per book has gone up after a long period when it was going down. It's now 919 (1172 at the end of 2019; 879 at the end of 2021; 833 at the end of Q1).

Highlights of Q2:

Q2 seems to have been characterised for me by a few long German books that were interesting but ultimately a little disappointing: Die Verteidigung der Kindheit, Pause für Wanzka and Landgericht in particular.

Erich Loest’s novel about Leipzig in the last two centuries, Völkerschlachtdenkmal, was equally interesting and time-consuming, but not quite so disappointing. And Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag was short, quirky and fun.

That makes it a bit hard to see the things that stood out. Probably my best reads of Q2 were two re-reads, Beloved and Kästner’s memoir Als ich ein kleiner Junge war.

I also enjoyed Plankton, the third part of JJ Voskuil’s 5000-page Dutch office-epic.

In crime, I was glad to get to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at last, with Los mares del sur. I’ll certainly read some more of those.

What stood out in non-fiction was The young Rebecca. Amazing writing, and an interesting contemporary insight into the suffrage question.

I also enjoyed Lord Bingham’s little book on The rule of law, which I should have read a decade ago… An honourable mention too to Nicholas Kenyon’s new book about the history of the repertoire of western classical music, The life of music.

(Shamelessly copy/pasting my post from the "Q2 Favourites" thread)

Q3 plans:

Obvious big thing in Q3 is the new Reading Globally theme read, led by Darryl, on the Lusophone world: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333403 (don't worry if you can't play the lusophone: it's never too late to learn...)

I'm hoping to fill in some big gaps in my reading of writers from Brazil and Mozambique, at least. And — ideally — also a few from the smaller countries in the list.

Otherwise, I've still got two unread Christmas gifts on the TBR shelf: And the land lay still and the massive La noche de los tiempos — it's perhaps time to get around to those.

Assuming we're not in the situation of Muir's castle-defenders in >1 thorold:, and we really are getting towards the end of Covid-19 restrictions here, two things I'm looking forward to in particular are getting back to regular library visits and a (sailing) trip to Greece planned for early September. Both of those should have some effect on what I read in Q3.

Q3 opens for me with a book I've been meaning to read for a while, but doesn't seem to fit in with any particular theme in my reading. With a crowbar, we could maybe make it fit the "Lusophone world" theme, since Bernanos lived in exile in Brazil during World War II, and hung out with people like Stefan Zweig — but that was quite some time after he wrote this book.

I took me a long time to get to Bernanos, because I had him pegged as a monarchist Catholic, associated with French right-wing political movements, who wrote a lot of books about priests. Which is true, but rather misleading, since he seems to have been one of those rare people who started out as a conservative and spent the rest of his life moving to the left. LolaWalser encouraged me to read his detective story Un crime five years ago, I've seen a lot of favourable references to him in my reading about the Spanish Civil War, and I've watched and enjoyed Robert Bresson's film of Journal d'un curé de campagne, so it's about time I read his most famous novel...

Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936; Diary of a country priest) by Georges Bernanos (France, 1888-1948)

  

If you had to guess, you'd probably assume that an English book with this title would be all about badgers, daffodils and hedgehogs, whilst a French one would be full of seething incestuous passion in the cowshed and at least three brutal, violent murders. Or a deadly boring collection of pious reflections.

There is a badger in this book, and a lot of mud, a few sudden deaths, and some Zola-style inherited alcoholism, but this is neither nature-study nor sex-and-social-realism: Bernanos takes his naive young village priest through a succession of tough philosophical and theological debates with himself and with various other characters who all somehow seem to represent different aspects of the author's complicated personality and ideological history. Whether they are priests, knightly bikers, atheist medics, haughty landowners or naughty girls, they all get to set out their arguments in a very fair and reasonable way, but none of them, not even the narrator himself, is allowed to have a convincing answer to the real-world problems of evil, poverty, disease, etc. (Interesting to see that, unlike almost every other novelist, Bernanos seems to treat sex as a very minor and unimportant corner of human morality, a long way behind poverty and inequality.)

The passion and intensity of the debates going on here make this a book that is probably easier to take for young readers than for old cynics, who went through all this when they were seventeen and don't really care to revisit it, but all the same it is fantastic writing, constantly taking you in unexpected directions. And it's ambiguous enough in its conclusions that you certainly don't need to be a convinced Christian (or even a convinced atheist) to appreciate it.

>5 thorold: ...none of them, not even the narrator himself, is allowed to have a convincing answer to the real-world problems of evil, poverty, disease, etc. I wonder how this book would have turned out if written ten years later. Interesting tie-in with the Edwin Muir quote.

Happy New Thread

>6 SassyLassy: ten years later

Bernanos didn’t have to wait so long: he was seeing and writing about the horrors of the new age within a few months of finishing the Journal, as he got caught up in the civil war in Majorca. But that’s another book I still have to read…

Looking forward to keeping up with your new thread. Checking in after a recent 10-day camping trip. I very much appreciated what Pennac had to say about reading and the hazards of school curricula. Overall, I always enjoy your threads because you consistently introduce me to books/authors I'd most likely never learn about on my own, especially those not translated into English. Cheers!

And my first proper read for Darryl's thread on the Lusophone world. This is a book I was planning to read for the Southern Africa theme last summer, but didn't quite get to.

Terra sonâmbula (1992; Sleepwalking land) by Mia Couto (Mozambique, 1955- )

  

In a war-devastated landscape, an old man and a boy set up camp provisionally in a burnt-out bus. There they find a suitcase containing a stack of notebooks, the story of a young man called Kindzu, who has set out to find his father, lost at sea in the aftermath of the war. The two stories carry on in parallel, punctuated by encounters with one-eyed giants, sorceresses, beaches and all that kind of thing.

There's a lot of Homer going on here, and a certain amount of Ovid, but it's Homer and Ovid as they might have written if they'd grown up in the Southern Hemisphere and known about Samuel Beckett and Gabriel García Márquez. And it's all going on in a very distinctively African way, which feels coherent and enjoyably puzzling, not at all like a literary exercise. Couto draws us into the terror of living in that kind of war-destroyed world, where there are no longer any certainties you can count on, and the best you can do is try to retain some shreds of human dignity. Even when all quests ultimately fail and promises can't be kept, Couto wants us to see that the attempt to live like a human being and not like a beast is already a blow against the negative forces of the war.

This was warmly recommended to me some years ago; I bought a copy last summer, and decided to read it now as it's one of the few even vaguely Portuguese-related items on the TBR.

Magellan: Der Mann und seine Tat (1938; Conqueror of the seas: the story of Magellan) by Stefan Zweig (Austria, 1881-1942)

  

Like Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Stout Cortez, and all the rest of them, Magellan is straightforward only when looked at from the perspective of the "age of discoveries" topic in school history lessons. Portuguese explorer, first person to sail around the world, discovered — by an amazing coincidence — the Magellan Strait. Tick, done that, who's next.

But of course he was actually working for the King of Spain (Emperor Charles V), having fallen out with his own king. What's more, the whole project was said to be based on a map that was a Portuguese state secret (Hugh Thomas and other later authors don't believe this map ever existed, but Zweig accepts it, with reservations), so King Manuel was not very happy with Magellan.

Magellan didn't sail round the world himself, of course. After guiding his fleet safely down the South American coast, surviving an attempted mutiny, and finding the elusive straits, he got them across the Pacific to the Philippines in a voyage where no-one knew how far they still had to go. But once there, he was killed in a typical conquistador stunt, whilst intervening unnecessarily in a local war between islands to demonstrate European military superiority. Only one of his five ships made it back to Seville, commanded by Juan Sebastian de Elcano and with a mere eighteen survivors on board out of the 256 men who set off. But that ship was carrying more than enough spices to pay off the debts of the whole expedition.

As Zweig makes clear, Magellan's legacy was more psychological than practical. His expedition made it clear to Europeans that the roundness of the world was not just a geometric abstraction, but had actual consequences and opportunities for trade. However, it soon became apparent that the passage through the straits was far too demanding and dangerous for regular use by sailing ships of the time — even fifty years later, Drake lost two of his three ships while passing through the straits, and there was no route for regular traffic round the southern tip of the Americas until Willem Schouten sailed round Cape Horn in 1616, nearly a century after Magellan.

Zweig got interested in Magellan through a book he found in the ship's library on his first trip to Buenos Aires and Rio for a PEN conference in 1936. He seems to have done some research in those cities and in Lisbon (Seville was not really an option in the late thirties...), but the book was mostly written in the British Museum library, at the same time as a novel and an essay collection (...and I get worried if I'm reading more than two books at the same time!). The German publication ban seems to have pushed Zweig's normal workaholic state into overdrive. It's a lively, very readable book, and Zweig is conscientious about separating facts from inferences, but in the end we don't really know much about Magellan the person. Very little of his own writing survives, and the only complete first-hand account of the trip is an edited and highly romantic version Magellan's Italian secretary Antonio Pigafetta produced for publication from his diaries. We're left with Magellan as a very competent man, supremely calm in a crisis, but not very good at winning hearts and minds, especially among his officers. Zweig does his best with what he could find.

This is a kind of follow-up to the two Daniel Pennac books about schools and teaching that I read in Q2 — when the winner of the 2021 Orwell Prize was announced last week, I saw a mention of Clanchy's winning the prize in 2020 for this book and realised that it would fit in very well.

I've got Clanchy's first poetry collection, Slattern (1995), on my poetry shelf (and was amused to recognise a couple of the anecdotes in this book from poems there), but I've never really followed her work up since then.

Some kids I taught and what they taught me (2019) by Kate Clanchy (UK, 1965- )

  

On the face of it, this is just a collection of anecdotes — sad, touching, inspiring, embarrassing, funny — about some of the more remarkable young people Clanchy has come across in her thirty years as a teacher in Scotland, Essex, and the Midlands (out of respect for the privacy of the kids, she changes names and obfuscates the identity of the schools and towns concerned). But of course it's rather more than that: it's a defence of what real teachers do in the real world of the late 20th and early 21st century, it's an attack on the politicians (and voters) who continue to shape the English education system as a tool for keeping the children of the poor in their proper place at the bottom of the heap, and above all it's a compassionate plea on behalf of the many kids who show brilliant promise at some point in their school career, but never realise it.

Over and over again she tells us about someone who seemed to be on track for university, the stage, or a brilliant writing career, but drops out into dead-end jobs, teenage pregnancy, self-harm, or is hit by one of the many types of accidents and illnesses that fall so much more heavily on the poor than on the middle classes. She points out how difficult it is to keep up self-confidence and believe in the delayed gratification of long-term goals (exams, university places, etc.) if you come from a background in which only hopeless dreamers think beyond the end of the month. The middle-classes are trained from birth to believe in jam tomorrow, but that's hard to do when no-one around you has ever seen any sign of jam or knows what it might be good for.

There's also a lot here about the shared excitement of poetry, and how much more interesting it is for both kids and teachers to create original work in response to books than it is to dissect them for exams. And Clanchy also shares a lot of her pleasure in the multi-culti world of the school where she teaches, where the absence of any dominant majority culture means that the students quite naturally fall into the habit of treating it as a neutral space in which to respect and enjoy their different backgrounds. (It reminded me a lot of Saša Stanišic's account of the school he went to in Heidelberg.)

Very strong, engaging writing, with a lot of compassion and anger behind it. Definitely not just a book for teachers to read.

---

PS — I was amused that Clanchy serves up the classic English-teacher-anecdote about the pleasure of teaching the apostrophe, which I've heard numerous times from my father and his old colleagues — it is so wonderful to see the awed expressions on their little faces as the mystery of that much neglected punctuation symbol is revealed to them for the first time. And even more so when you discover that, without fail, the same kids will still show the same expressions of wonder and surprised discovery the next time you teach it to them, and the time after that...

UPDATE: I originally posted this review on 8 July. Since then, there’s apparently been a fuss because some readers on Goodreads were upset by language in the book that seemed to be racially stereotyping: Clanchy’s publishers are discussing changes to avoid this in future editions. Obviously that’s always going to be a risk in a book like this: Clanchy wants us to take in the exciting variety of backgrounds and characters in the school, and there’s a fine line between catchy descriptions and inadvertently giving offence.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/09/kate-clanchy-book-updated-racial-s...

Thanks for these two great reviews, Mark. Conqueror of the Seas sounds very interesting, and since I enjoy Zweig's writing I'll be on the lookout for it.

She points out how difficult it is to keep up self-confidence and believe in the delayed gratification of long-term goals (exams, university places, etc.) if you come from a background in which only hopeless dreamers think beyond the end of the month. The middle-classes are trained from birth to believe in jam tomorrow, but that's hard to do when no-one around you has ever seen any sign of jam or knows what it might be good for.

YES. Absolutely spot on. This certainly applies here in the United States, as those at the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder, whether African American kids and young adults in poor inner city neighborhoods, or White kids in depressed towns and rural areas in Appalachia or the Rust Belt. Here in Atlanta there is a distinct split between the haves and the have nots, those who come from families where higher education and long term planning toward the future is not only encouraged but expected, and others who view college as a pipe dream for the well to do, and take life one day at a time. Even though I spent my first 13 years in a mostly Black neighborhood in a large city in the 1960s and early 1970s my parents and all of my adult blood relatives, save for my grandparents, all had college degrees (my father completed a master's degree in electrical engineering at NYU shortly before I was born, and taught undergraduate students there at the same time), and in the era before de jure housing segregation was largely abolished neighborhoods like the one I grew up in were stable and peaceful, and were filled with adults such as my parents and numerous other neighbors with college degrees and white collar jobs, and stable two parent homes, who served as informal role models for us kids. My family and many other successful Black families moved out of mostly Black neighborhoods in the early to mid 1970s, once housing in nicer neighborhoods or desirable suburbs that were rapidly integrating, and these inner city neighborhoods were left mainly to poorer and less educated families and households headed by a single mother who often times was not working, and these kids did not have the same healthy role models as I, my brother and cousins did, and observed that the adults with the fanciest cars and clothes were the ones who were more likely to be involved in illicit activities, e.g. drug dealing or prostitution. Sadly, to many of those kids someone like me, even though we are of the same race, is often not someone they can relate to, and to them I am nearly as foreign as a White person from a similar background and educational and professional achievement level, even in a city such as Atlanta which has a large and visible professional upper middle class African American community.

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me seems both interesting and important, so I'll be on the lookout for it as well.

>12 kidzdoc: It hadn't occurred to me, but there must be a lot of parallels between the situations you come across in your daily work and the ones Clanchy talks about — it will be interesting to hear your take on it if you do read it.

>5 thorold:

That's pretty much all of Bernanos' novels--at the centre always a tormented Catholic, usually a priest, too good, too pure a cinnamon bun for this horrendous world. But as it seems you have a more positive (or optimistic) take on Bernanos than I do, let me draw attention to one further oddity, La France contre les robots.

>14 LolaWalser: I feel I ought to read Les grandes cimetières sous la lune next, since it gets referenced so much in Spanish books I've been reading. But a little Bernanos goes a long way. That one really made me feel as though I was back in an undergraduate Nescafé-and-fellowship group, exchanging angsts with a bunch of even more disturbed people...

Something completely different off another stack of long-postponed books:

Karaoke culture (2011) by Dubravka Ugrešić (Yugoslavia, Croatia, Netherlands, 1949- ), translated by David Williams , Ellen Elias-Bursać and Celia Hawkesworth

  

This collection of essays and columns from around 2009-2011 is built around the extended (novella-length) essay "Karaoke culture", in which Ugrešić looks at the attraction of anonymous, participatory culture, where people do things for the pleasure of doing them and without any idea of creating something lasting and original, and also without any kind of authorial responsibility or assumption of expertise. As well as karaoke she picks out things like talent shows, reality TV, Soviet "art for the people", cross-stitch embroidery patterns, water-colour painting, blogging, and — of course — new phenomena like MySpace and Second Life. I enjoyed this piece, and Ugrešić comes up with quite a few surprising and funny insights along the way, but she doesn't seem to come to any clear conclusions. I wasn't even quite sure whether she was trying to show that the internet has made "karaoke culture" more important, or to demonstrate that the urge to sing badly in front of a small group of drunken friends is nothing new in human social experience.

The other essays are a mixed bag: there are some very powerful, incisive pieces about writing and truth and history, including one where she looks back on the fight with Franjo Tuđman's nationalist government that led to her leaving Croatia (the newspapers called her a witch and published her phone number for the convenience of any reader who might wish to attack her personally), and there are some very offbeat glimpses into odd corners of culture, but there are also quite a few very standard newspaper-column pieces about young men in headphones not offering her their seats on the tram — sharp and funny and well-written, but well past their shelf life by the time they appear in a book.

An excellent book, with some very interesting things in it, but that could perhaps have done with some slightly more ruthless editing.

Darryl was very enthusiastic about this book when we did the Southern Africa theme last year — I put it on the mental TBR list, and the Lusophone theme has given me the nudge to get to it. Since the ebook was available in the original Portuguese, it was another good opportunity to practice the language, even if it took a bit longer to read as a result:

Niketche : uma história de poligamia : romance (2002; The first wife: a tale of polygamy) by Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique, 1955- )

  

Rami is a very ordinary 21st century middle-aged, middle-class housewife: convent-educated, with five kids, a nice house in Maputo, and a husband, Tony, who has made a very successful career in the police force. But she isn't happy: Tony has been neglecting her somewhat, and often only seems to be using the family home as a place to take baths and change his clothes. Women-friends advise her to win her husband back by taking courses in erotic practices or by consulting witches, but that doesn't get her anywhere. When she investigates where Tony is actually spending his time, she's alarmed to discover that as well as his legal household with her, he has been maintaining four other unofficial wives scattered around the city, each with a house and children.

Chiziane follows Rami through the process of developing a conscious understanding of the role she and her "rivals" have been manipulated into playing in Mozambican society, where there is a gender-imbalance caused by war and migration, as well as complicated intersections of traditional Bantu culture and colonialist Catholic ideas under a surface coating of FRELIMO Marxism, and the other, older, set of collisions between the largely matriarchal traditions in the north of the country and the more patriarchal culture of the south.

Rami gets together with the other women to take control of their own lives, gaining economic independence with the help of a mutual microcredit scheme and gradually manoeuvring Tony into a position where he becomes aware of the harm he has done through his irresponsible actions and his reliance on the principle of male infallibility.

There's a lot of politics and sociology to get through here, but it's presented very lightly, in the framework of a story that is effectively a romantic comedy, albeit one that doesn't try to conceal the very real oppression and suffering that is going on as a result of the way women are treated in contemporary African society. Chiziane is extremely good at what she does, there are lively characters who never descend into stereotypes, there is clever, funny dialogue, and there are some glorious angry rants and poetic excursions — altogether a very interesting and enjoyable book.

Great review of The First Wife, Mark. I'm glad that you enjoyed it as much as I did.

I'm getting behind with reviews: too much time sitting on the balcony reading, not enough sitting behind the computer...
Two translated Portuguese books from the pile, and two more or less random non-fiction books from my Scribd suggestions:

The lives of things : short stories (1978; English 2012) by José Saramago (Portugal, 1922-2010) translated by Giovanni Pontiero
  

A collection of six short pieces in the classic Saramago mode, dominated by the opening story, "The Chair", a heavily-ironic woodworm's eye view of the death of an unnamed, elderly dictator (presumably Salazar) fatally injured when a chair collapses under him. "Reflux" and "Things" are both allegorical fantasies, one about a king allergic to the sight of death and another about a dystopia in which inanimate objects rise in revolution against the men who are prepared to treat their fellow men as inanimate objects. "Embargo" is a twisted look at the oil crisis and car-dependance, and "The centaur" explores what the world looks like to the last surviving horse/man — Saramago is surely the first person to ask himself how a centaur could turn over in bed...

The book of disquiet (1982) by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal, 1888-1935), translated by Margaret Jull Costa
  

A collection of short prose pieces — a kind of diary — from the thirties, which Pessoa attributes to one of his heteronyms, "Bernardo Soares", supposedly a somewhat antisocial, depressed bookkeeper in an import/export business in Lisbon's Baixa. Soares reflects paradoxically on the benefits of not engaging with real life, social interactions, love, travel, the literary world, and all the rest: he steadfastly maintains that it's far more satisfying to live your life in dreams and imagination; better to have boredom to dream about escaping from than to achieve something that leaves you disappointed. Rather a negative position, but Soares argues it with a great deal of humour and irony, and this is a book with a quotable sentence or two on every page. Indeed, its supreme quotability is perhaps what undermines it a bit: it can feel at times as though you are reading a tear-off calendar. The solution seems to be to take it slowly, almost as if it were actually a calendar.

Like much of Pessoa's work, this was published posthumously, so there are a lot of arguments about which parts really belong to the book, which are meant to be by Soares and which by Pessoa, and so on, and various rival English translations based on different editions of the original text. You can have endless fun with that, if you want...

British Rail : the nation's railway (2013) by Tanya Jackson (UK, - )
 

Tanya Jackson is a specialist in the history of passenger carriages, and this history of British Rail seems to have developed out of a planned book on the passenger's experience of the railway. There's still something of a focus on topics like industrial design, marketing and customer service, as well as a lot of authoritative information about passenger rolling stock, and a few conspicuous gaps when it comes to freight and BR's relations with the coal and steel industries, but overall it's a very lively and well-balanced view of the nationalised railway and the part it played in British life between the 1940s and the 1990s.

Most authors of books on recent railway history are either distracted by nostalgia or have a strong political agenda, but Jackson mostly seems to manage to take a step back and look coolly at how well the political framework in which the railways were operating allowed them to do their job. There is quite a "management perspective", she refers a lot to memoirs of former BR managers and has clearly consulted extensively with Chris Green (head of Network SouthEast and InterCity in the eighties, and later Virgin Rail and other post-privatisation companies). But that doesn't stop her from being quite critical of some aspects of BR management: a lot of BR's poor public image — especially in the sixties and seventies — is directly attributable to demotivated staff, due to authoritarian attitudes and a lack of properly thought out training and career development. And there's also the whole confused mess of sudden policy reversals and internal reorganisations that undermined high-profile activities like the APT project.

The notorious Doctor Beeching, normally the villain of this kind of book, gets something of a reprieve here: Jackson comes to the conclusion that most of the reforms he urged were indeed necessary, including quite a few not carried out for some time later, if at all. She doesn't go into any detail on why it made sense to close the Waverley Line in the 1960s and to rebuild it in the 2010s, though.

Jackson takes the opportunity to tease the doyen of railway historians, George Dow, over his weakness for heraldry, but, despite that I get the feeling that this book is very much in the tradition he established, thoroughly footnoted, scholarly, and not afraid to make aesthetic judgements. But a lot shorter than his magnum opus!

Uncommon carriers (2006) by John McPhee (USA, 1931- )
  

McPhee spends time with people whose job it is to move freight around the United States: the owner-driver of an eighteen-wheeler truck, towboat captains on the Illinois River, and coal-train-drivers on the Union Pacific. He also investigates how UPS sends parcels across the whole country from a huge distribution centre in Kentucky (including live lobsters from Nova Scotia).

For a change in pace, there's a description of a canoe trip he took to retrace the 1839 journey of the Thoreau brothers on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. And a visit to the Port-Revel ship-handling training centre in the French Alps, famous (although McPhee doesn't mention this) as the place where Depardieu's character worked in the late Truffaut film La femme d'à côté.

McPhee has been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, and of course he's also trained several generations of younger writers to do it, so it's all very smooth and professional, he has asked the right questions of everyone he meets on his journeys, and he mostly seems to have understood the technical aspect of what they do very well and explains it clearly. But somehow he doesn't seem very involved. He gives us the facts about the way the Powder River Basin is being dug up and shipped east in thousands of trainloads every year to be burnt to power people's TVs and air conditioners, for example, or the way UPS bribes young people to come and work for it with college courses they will probably never finish, and he allows us to suspect that these might not be altogether good things, but he never actually says so. We've got used to a more engaged style of travel-writing, perhaps.

---

Depardieu on a miniature bulk carrier at Port-Revel

I seem to be going through a lot of relatively short books at the moment. Next batch...

Der Abituriententag : die Geschichte einer Jugendschuld (1928; Class reunion) by Franz Werfel (Austria, 1890-1945)

  

There doesn't seem to be a specific name for that category of stories in which adult characters are confronted with the consequences of hateful things they did in adolescence, but there's a lot of that sort of thing about. Maybe writers are disproportionally drawn from the ranks of former school bullies with guilty consciences; more likely they are all former victims of bullying indulging in a bit of wishful thinking...

This is certainly one of those, as Werfel's subtitle confirms: on the afternoon before the 25-year reunion of the class of 1902, examining magistrate Dr Ernst Sebastian is made to realise that it could well have been his own selfish and irresponsible actions as a schoolboy that started his friend Adler on the path that led to him being arrested on suspicion of murdering a prostitute.

Needless to say, it isn't quite as simple as that, Werfel introduces a few ironic twists into the story, but what this is really about is the unravelling of the flimsy structure on which the self-satisfied, pompous Sebastian has built his life. Sebastian has got away with all his failings because he is from a rich, powerful, establishment family; Adler has been unable to realise his early promise because his borderline status as a poor, Jewish boy in a middle-class Catholic school makes him the automatic scapegoat for everything.

I've had this on the Wishlist for a while, I'm not sure who originally suggested it to me (I think it might have been in connection with Christine Brooke-Rose?), but I was amused to see, just after I tracked a copy down and ordered it, that Joyce had mentioned it in her thread and wasn't very enthusiastic.

Instabile Texte : zu zweit (2005; Volatile texts: us two) by Zsuzsanna Gahse (Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, 1946- )



This is a tricky book to pin down, and Gahse carefully avoids saying anything that might allow us to decide whether we are reading essays, short stories, prose poems, or a novel. The individual chapters take us on a somewhat idiosyncratic tour of Switzerland, including a couple of ventures across the invisible boundaries into the French, Italian and Rhaetian language areas. Some of the sections just seem to be about the narrator's reactions to what she sees, but others have hints that she is involved in a plot that is going on just out of our sight, and those hints seem to match up to clues in the "non-narrative" passages. There are things that might fit into a love-story, which might or might not be by Tolstoy, and there is the abrupt, out of context, incursion of a murder mystery, but nothing is ever resolved. And then there are the illustrations, seemingly random short excerpts from the text crossed or interleaved in the author's handwriting. All very ... unstable, as promised.

The real underlying structure seems to be an examination of how the mechanism of language — things like tenses, genders, and the rules for assembling words — constrains what we can say and what assumptions it brings along, and how those things shift as you move between languages.

Fun, in a crossword-puzzle kind of way, and probably the sort of book that you could read multiple times in a completely different way each time.

I came across the working-class, Lancashire author Ethel Carnie Holdsworth last year, when I read her novel The taming of Nan and some of her poetry. This is another of her novels that I put aside to read later (all these books were from archive.org):

Helen of Four Gates (1917) by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (UK, 1886-1962)

 

A torrid melodrama set in a remote farm on the Lancashire moors, this sometimes feels like the love-child of Wuthering Heights and The return of the native. The old miser Amos is tortured by his need to get posthumous revenge on the woman who jilted him many years ago, and he has adopted and brought up her orphan daughter Helen purely as an instrument of this revenge. With this in mind, he manipulates the decent farmhand Martin into rejecting Helen's love, and instead marries her off to the vicious tramp Fielding Day(*), whom he encourages to subject her to all kinds of domestic abuse.

The plot may be dramatically and psychologically flawed and the male characters little more than caricatures, but the forceful, individualistic Helen and her perpetually multitasking housewife friend Lizzie are both wonderfully detailed, interesting individuals, whilst the horror of Helen's situation and the violence she is exposed to are depicted in frighteningly believable ways. And there's a lot of landscape description that is vivid and sharply observed, even if its manner owes a bit too much to Hardy.

---
(*)I can't help wondering whether Simon Raven might have read this at some point and unconsciously adopted the name for his misanthropic anti-hero Fielding Gray? It seems unlikely, but it is quite a coincidence.

UPDATE: By coincidence, the Guardian has an article about ECH, ten days after I posted this : https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/30/ethel-carnie-holdsworth-campaigner...

And a random Dutch book from the little free library.

Oude mensen (1963) by Simon Carmiggelt (Netherlands, 1913-1987)

  

Simon Carmiggelt was famous for the little sketches ("kronkels", or twists) he wrote for the newspaper Het Parool from when it was a clandestine publication of the WWII resistance right through to the 1980s. This particular selection of a year's worth of columns comes from 1963, and it's a mixture of microstories, anecdotes, fragments of overheard conversations, reminiscences, and accounts of personal experiences like trips to the country and walks with his young grandson.

The settings are often Amsterdam bars and restaurants, but there are also plenty of ventures into ordinary homes, where the new phenomenon of television was beginning to change the way people spent their free time. One of the most striking pieces is about a man who buys the TV guide to read on the bus home and plan when he is going to operate his power-tools to disrupt his neighbours' viewing most effectively.

The scale is small, the scope is modest, and 1963 was a long time ago, but there's a lot of skill involved in making a telling and often very funny point neatly and effectively in such a tight framework, without giving anyone grounds to take offence.

And a quickie from my Scribd recommendations — this one ties in with the Icelandic books I was reading in Q1 — it's basically 101 Reykjavik rewritten from the girlfriend's point of view — but it has interesting resonances with Niketche (>16 thorold:) as well.

Magma (2019; English 2021) by Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir (Iceland, 1986- ), translated by Meg Matich

  
(Author photo from Pan-MacMillan)

Iceland is one of the places we all look to as a model of good practice in gender equality, but Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir wants us to see that even in those supposedly ideal conditions, the way heterosexual relationships work is still unbalanced. When a vulnerable woman gets together with a selfish and insensitive man, it is the woman who is likely to get hurt, and then to assume that whatever has gone wrong must be her fault somehow, even when it plainly isn't.

The narrator of this stark, stripped-down novel, Lilja, records the development of her relations with her abusive boyfriend in a set of short, diary-like pieces that start out from a view of life that is every bit as romantic as Bridget Jones, but never, even for an instant, remotely funny. We know from the start that Lilja is heading for disaster, but we also know that there is no possible way we can make her believe that, or change course in time to avoid it.

Beautiful, very painful writing.

The last Daniel Pennac book on the TBR shelf — this one's been there since March 2016.

Aux fruits de la passion (1999; Passion fruit) by Daniel Pennac‬ (France, 1944- )

  

The last of the original Malaussène series, from 1999. Benjamin's sister Thérèse has announced that she's getting married, and Benjamin knows by now how it always pans out when one of his sisters ties the knot: sudden death of new brother-in-law in circumstances that lead to Benjamin being wrongly accused of murder. Pessimistic as ever, he is convinced that the luck that has sprung him from jail again so many times must be running out by now. He starts packing his suitcase and putting together a reading list suitable for a long spell behind bars.

Of course, that means that poor old Pennac has to come up with a different spin on that particular plot for once, and he does, more or less. But his heart doesn't really seem to be in it: after the usual slow-moving and wordy opening section we move abruptly into the resolution of the mystery, skipping the mid-section altogether, so that this book ends up only about a third the length of most of its predecessors. All kinds of plot-threads that were dangled at us in the opening are left unused, so this really does feel like a novel that has been finished off at the last minute against a tight deadline and with a publisher who is threatening to charge extra for pages after 250. Very odd.

There are a few entertaining dialogues and some good jokes, but it's all pretty flimsy. There really isn't much need to read beyond the third or fourth book in this series.

*checking in*

"Oude mensen" sounds like it could be one of my fave genres, the short prose-piece, feuilleton, the sort of thing bohemian "men of letters" would dash off on paper napkins in the cafés, chasing deadlines... Or, it could be nothing like that.

The Icelandic book intrigues me but I finished recently something with ultra-harrowing hetero dysfunction, not sure how long I need to recover...(The time of the doves--fantastic book, though.)

I'm reading your thread with some delay, but enjoying the diversity of your reading and your interesting reviews.
I have only audio-read Un Crime by Bernanos. I own Les Grands Cimetières sous la Lune but it does not seem to be a fun read, so I'm not in the mood for that for the moment. I also have on my ebook La France contre les Robots (recommended by LolaWalser). This one seems a bit odd in Bernanos's biography, and could be fun.

For your Lusophone theme, I can't help but recommend Tupinilandia by Samir Machado de Machado (Brazil). I read it some time at the end of last year and really enjoyed it. It's definitely part of my 2020 top reads!
And earlier this year, I read Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by Ondjaki. It was a nice encounter with Angola.

Happy reading!

>28 LolaWalser: >29 raton-liseur: Good to see you both again! Tupinilandia sounds interesting, I'm not sure if I'm ready for a gros pavé just at the moment, though...

This is a fairly substantial book that has been lurking on my TBR since 2013, but of course it was a fairly quick read once I got to it:

In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor (2008) edited by Charlotte Mosley (UK, 1952- )

    

This is an entertaining exchange of correspondence, in many ways, because Paddy Leigh Fermor loved books but obviously hated sitting down to write them, whilst Deborah, youngest Mitford sister and Duchess of Devonshire in her day job, always professed to loath books(*) but rather enjoyed writing them. He knew as little about death-watch beetles, the National Trust and diseases of sheep as she did about literature and Byzantine art, so their letters, which span five decades, never get bogged down in professional gossip, but range freely over the oddness of the world, the strange ways their respective lives have panned out, and the many interesting people they both know.

Being who they were, between the two of them they mixed with just about everybody who was anybody in the mid-20th century (not just in England and Greece, either: Deborah was sister-in-law to the Kennedys, and Paddy knew most of the ex-aristocrats of Central and Eastern Europe). Royalty, landowners, politicians, spies, travel writers and SOE types, artists and sculptors, Hollywood, the queerocracy, the Bloomsburies, and all the rest. So the names do tend to drop thick and fast, but of course they aren't trying to impress each other, it's more like an amused fascination with the way all these connections drop into place.

Often, too, they seem to use their letters as a safe space to try out material for articles or speeches they are working on: it's quite odd sometimes to read Paddy's long and detailed accounts to Deborah of trips to remote places he's been on with her husband.

Charlotte Mosley (daughter-in-law of Deborah's sister Diana) had the great advantage when she was editing this book that both participants were still around to answer questions, and she has included their comments in the footnotes where something is obscure from the letters. Other than that, her own notes are brief, unintrusive and usually enough to help you to keep up with all the idiosyncratic nicknames.

As with almost all letter collections, the main drawback is that the last part of the book leaves you on a depressing note of old age, illness, and a steady stream of funerals. Maybe the trick would be to start at the end and work backwards in time?

---
(*) This was so notorious that when Evelyn Waugh sent her a presentation copy of his latest book in 1959, he arranged for it to be bound with all the pages blank to see if she would notice.

>30 thorold: Yes, Tupinilandia is a pavé, but it reads fairly easily and it's worth it!
(I hope I'm not overselling it, though!).

Literary journalist Adam Mars-Jones wrote a couple of interesting gay-themed novels I read in the early nineties, but seems to have been focussing on the day-job since then, reviewing regularly in the TLS, LRB and elsewhere: this novella is the first I've seen of him in book form in nearly thirty years. Apparently there is at least one more novel I missed, though.

Box Hill (2020) by Adam Mars-Jones (UK, 1954- )

  

On a trip out to Box Hill in Surrey on his eighteenth birthday in summer 1975, plump, insecure Colin trips over the cool, sophisticated biker Ray. Something prompts him to answer Ray's rhetorical "What am I going to do with you?" with "Anything you like," and before Colin knows quite what is happening, he's on the back of Ray's Norton, setting out on an unexpected new career as a sex-slave in the suburban hinterland of Hampton Court palace.

Although the relationship between Ray and Colin is clearly very unequal and exploitative, and it doesn't end happily, when it ends it does, counterintuitively, leave Colin more at ease with who he is and what he wants out of life. He is in a position to build a new, happy life for himself. This in contrast to Colin's father, whose similarly dependent relationship with Colin's mother drives him into a spiral of mental breakdown.

Fun because of all the nice period detail about bikers and sex in the seventies, before everyone got hung up on motorcycle safety and AIDS, but the plot felt a bit facile.

...and a less successful pick from Scribd:

The night visitors (2017) by Jenn Ashworth (UK, 1982- ) and Richard V. Hirst (UK - )

  

This sounded like an interesting idea, an epistolary (email) novella about someone researching a female star of the silent cinema who disappeared after a spectacular murder in Blackpool in 1917. But the authors very rapidly seem to lose track of what they are trying to do with the plot, and it descends into a confused mess of supernatural nonsense about Faustian pacts, werewolves, and the like.

On the plus side: it isn't very long, it has a nice cover, and the authors seem to be much better at proofreading than they are at plotting, which is rare.

Clever girl (2013) by Tessa Hadley (UK, 1956- )

  

Episodic infancy-to-middle-age novels have rather fallen out of fashion since Roxana and Moll Flanders, but the "just one damn thing after another" approach to fiction can still be very effective, as this book demonstrates. Hadley spent quite some years writing about her heroine Stella (several chapters were originally published as standalone short stories) before stitching it all together into a novel that takes her from a sixties childhood in a single parent family in an inner-city district of Bristol right through to 21st century middle-class life outside Taunton with an Aga, a businessman husband, and a complicated extended family of children and stepchildren that would do credit to a Margaret Drabble heroine.

There's not much obvious coherence in the plot: the things that drive the course of Stella's life are almost all complete accidents, good and bad: the point of the book seems to be in her ability as first-person narrator to take a step back from herself and look coolly at the things that are happening to her and how she has dealt with them. And of course in Hadley's clever ability to capture the feel of each of the decades she whisks us through in a few telling images.

The question of Stella's "cleverness" doesn't quite come to the fore quite as much as the title leads us to expect. This isn't a Jeanette Winterson novel in which the clever heroine is constantly surrounded by stupid people of both sexes. Hadley quietly allows Stella to switch her interest in bookish things on and off at will, depending on the stage of life she happens to be going through — it's OK to be perceived to be clever at school and later on as a mature student at university, but it's not a good look when you're a struggling teenage single mum and part-time waitress. Obviously, that's something that real people (women in particular) feel obliged to do in real situations, but it struck me as behaviour you don't often see in fictional characters. Interesting.

A couple of writers who are famous for scenery, and for not being famous:

Bergkristall : und andere Meistererzählungen (originally published 1842-1866) by Adalbert Stifter (Austria, 1805-1868)

  

Adalbert Stifter is one of those writers who often gets praised and cited as an influence by other writers — famous fans have included Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, W.H. Auden, Ilse Aichinger, Marianne Moore, and W.G. Sebald — but who was never really a popular success, in his own time or since. He didn't publish much, and only a few of his stories have been translated. He was a painter as well as a writer (although the publishers have picked a Caspar David Friedrich for the cover, not one of his), and his writing, which sits somewhere between Romanticism and Realism, tends to be very interested in the way characters interact with landscape, much less in the way they interact with each other. Characters observe each other or tell each other long stories, they don't chat. The political and social context is defined visually, by the landscape. His style is rather individual: the heavyweight sentences aren't always easy to navigate through, but it's usually worth the effort.

This Diogenes paperback contains the stories: Abdias (1842), Brigitta (1843), Zuversicht, Bergkristall (1845), Kalkstein (1848), and Der Kuß von Sentze (1866).

The novella Bergkristall (translated as Rock-crystal) is probably his most famous shorter work: it's a story of two children getting lost in the snow on Christmas Eve whilst crossing a mountain pass between their grandmother's house and the village where their parents live. With its gloriously scary descriptions of the disorienting effect of the weather and the children's battle to stay awake and warm, it's a perfect choice for reading aloud in front of the fire over the holidays. I was struck by the way Stifter carefully makes us familiar with the setting and the way the village relates to the mountain and the pass before we get to the real drama: he takes us back and forth over the pass several times in good weather, pointing out all the relevant landmarks along the way, until it becomes part of our own mental landscape. And of course the context of the story allows Stifter to slip in a lot of reflections about what Christmas really means for children and for a modern village community.

The other three novella-length tales here all focus on outsiders: Abdias tells us the story of a Sephardi refugee from North Africa who settles in an Austrian valley with his infant daughter. We get some splendid desert scenery — which Stifter had presumably never seen himself — as well as the gentle, grassy slopes and blue flax-fields of Abdias's new home. Brigitta is another outsider, an "ugly" woman who reinvents herself as a cross-dressing landowner on the Hungarian Puszta in order to renegotiate marriage on her own terms. Kalkstein takes us into the life of a country priest in the barren limestone country of the Tirol, a man laughed at for his simplicity and self-deception, but who still manages to act effectively to improve the lives of the poor people in his parish. All three stories show a huge amount of sympathy for the prickly, marginalised central character, without necessarily making them attractive.

The final piece, the very late story Der Kuß von Sentze, is hard to place: it's a tale of an aristocratic family with a tradition of resolving internal conflicts by means of a formal kiss of reconciliation between the contending parties. Where these are of opposite sexes, the tradition has been known to result in cousin-marriage. I'm not sure whether we are being shown this as a lesson in Christian tolerance or as a satire on the aristocracy's talent for putting family interest above personal preference.

And "Orstrilia, not Orstria", as Dave Jones would say...
I'm slowly working my way through Gerald Murnane's books, I think this is the fourth I've read. Murnane is often cited as "the greatest English writer you've never heard of" and, only slightly less paradoxically, as "the greatest living Victorian novelist" (...for a given definition of "Victoria"...):

Landscape with landscape (1987) by Gerald Murnane (Australia, 1939- )

 

With his usual pleasure in sowing doubt and confusion in the reader's mind, Murnane gives us a funny, touching and very-obviously-autobiographical account of his first sexual experiences and how he became a writer, telling us how he came to write his first published story. That story comes next in the book, and turns out to be a funny, touching and very-obviously-autobiographical account of his first sexual experiences and how he became a writer, completely contradicting the first one, and telling us how he came to write his first published story, which comes next in the book. He does that six times, with the last story in the book claiming to tell us all about the genesis of the first one... Fiction is fiction, we are supposed to realise, and if you choose to draw conclusions from it about the real world you do so at your own risk.

We learn that his sole literary influence was Giacomo Leopardi, or Jack Kerouac, or A E Housman, that he has or doesn't have a wife and one or more children, that he was a loner or hung around drinking with beatniks or teaching colleagues or cousins or artists, and that he is convinced that he is a descendant of Australian emigrants living among Paraguayans in the Paraguayan city of Melbourne (with its Paraguayan green-and-yellow trams and its Paraguayan social rituals revolving around canned beer and television). The only common threads he allows us to find are in the progression from being an insecure and sexually inexperienced adolescent to becoming an adult failed writer who has unsatisfactory relationships with women and drinks too much. Which we don't necessarily have to believe either...

Murnane's landscapes may be confined to the suburbs of Melbourne, sometimes even to one particular garden in one particular suburb, but they are clearly crucial to his technique. Writing is the process by which he places himself and other characters in the picture, somewhere in that landscape.

Beautiful, clever, very idiosyncratic writing.

>35 thorold: NYRB Classics has just published Stifter's Motley Stones https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/motley-stones-adalbert-stifter-review-jenny-w... which I saw in a bookstore last week, and contemplated, but I already have Rock Crystal (excellent) in a separate book, so passed. Maybe I shouldn't have.

>36 thorold: As you say, 'Famous for not being famous'. I'm afraid I had never heard of Murnane until his essay collection Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs appeared in my mail box from And Other Stories. I've been reading it bit by bit and am struck by his writing and relationship to the natural world. Those contradictions you mention do appear here too. I go back and read the initial statement, then back to the opposite - his own personal dialectic.

This was a random find in a little library, it caught my eye because I didn't know anything about the author. It could be interesting to know how it ended up in my neighbourhood...

Conte bleu (1903) by Jean de La Brète (France, 1858-1945)

  

Jean de La Brète was the pen-name of French writer Alice Cherbonnel, who had a big hit in 1889 with her first novel Mon oncle et mon curé — a book that has been translated, made into a film, and reprinted frequently over the years. She published many other novels and stories over the course of her long career, most of which seem to have been forgotten.

Conte bleu ("fairy-tale"), the main work in this volume, is a jolly little romantic comedy in epistolary form. The handsome young poet Antoine has had to sell off the family estate to pay off his late father's debts, and is now living incognito in a Paris garret, where his humble clerical job pays barely enough to keep him in postage stamps (of which he uses a great many...), let alone bread. Then one day he receives an anonymous donation of pâté — a kind lady has heard about the sad, handsome starving poet and spontaneously sent him a food parcel. Naturally, it turns out that the anonymous lady (who doesn't know his true identity) is his childhood sweetheart Chantal, who has married and been widowed since they last saw each other. Much enjoyable confusion results, happily stirred up by their various correspondents, especially the old Marquise de Lambelle, whose heart is still firmly in the 18th century, and who clearly models herself on an intriguing Marquise from a much better-known epistolary novel...

The Conte runs out with a hundred pages still to fill, so the publisher has added two shorter works. Amour lointain is in diary form, the story of an 18th-century young lady from Virginia who goes to Paris to be painted by Kneller and fall in love with the wrong English milord. It's supposed to be a tragic tale, but the charm and spontaneous bounce of Miss Evelyn's diary entries makes it difficult to take the sad ending seriously. Contes de Grand'mère is a somewhat over-sweetened tale of a young girl who talks to the flowers.

I can't think of any good reason why anyone would go out and look for this, unless you were writing a thesis about French romantic fiction ca. 1900, but it was fun to dip into. And Cherbonnel does handle the technical complexities of epistolary form very smoothly. The male nom-de-plume seems a bit pointless, though: it looks as though she has long since given up the pretence and is writing straightforwardly as a woman for a mostly female readership, but she's stuck with the name because of her early success.

I seem to come back to Angela Thirkell about once a year, which means I'm reading them at about the same rate that she wrote them.

I always seem to say exactly the same thing when I review them (she has her writer-character, Mrs Morland, say of her detective stories "...but they are all exactly the same"). So please take it as read that the dialogue is brilliant and funny, the minor characters wonderfully comic, and the plotting tight, whilst the social snobbery and backwoods Toryism are as egregiously bad as in all her postwar books.

The duke's daughter (1951) by Angela Thirkell (UK, 1890-1961)

  

This is Thirkell's 1951 book, the 20th in her Barsetshire series. She has set herself the task of disposing at last of Lady Cora Palliser, daughter of the current Duke of Omnium, who is pushing thirty and still single as a result of losing her young man in the war. While she's about it, Thirkell also remembers a few other young women left unattached by the disruptions of war, and dredges through her long list of characters for single men to hook them up with.

In the cases of Emmy, the Young Farmer, and Clarissa, who has been studying engineering at Cambridge, the reader might feel that they would have been more interesting if the author had let them get on with their careers instead of suddenly going all broody and wanting to get married. But there are conventions in romantic comedy that you can only defy up to a certain point, it seems.

Very enjoyable for all the usual Thirkell reasons, and very irritating for the other usual Thirkell reasons...

>38 thorold: Never heard about her, either pen-name or real name, and never heard about this Mon oncle et mon curé either book or film... But well, following your advice, I am unlikely to learn more about her, so thanks for the review, it's good to learn about new (to me) books without feeling the urge to read them!

>39 thorold: A book from 1951 that I have not got to yet, but it is on my list.

The oldest living resident on my TBR shelf, from June 2011. I made a note to read this after Peter Parker's Ackerley: the life of J R Ackerley in 2008, but the moment had obviously passed by the time I found a copy.

That leaves two more 2011 acquisitions and one from 2012 in the Naughty Corner...

The letters of J. R. Ackerley (1975) by J.R. Ackerley (UK, 1896-1967) edited by Neville Braybrooke (UK, 1923-2001)

  

If the name of Joe Ackerley still means anything to you, fifty years after his death, then it's probably because you're interested in LGBT literary history and you know about his long friendship with E.M. Forster and have read his saucy posthumous memoir My father and myself. Or because you're a dog-lover and have read My dog Tulip, where he is equally unrestrained in talking about the sex-life of his Alsatian bitch (called Queenie in real life).

In his own time, though, Ackerley was better known as the literary editor of the BBC weekly, The Listener, and a large portion of the letters Neville Braybrooke has assembled here come from his twenty-five years commissioning reviews of new books and art exhibitions. There are letters to just about all the prominent names of literary London from the thirties to the sixties: regular reviewers include people like Edwin Muir, Stephen Spender and Roy Fuller, but there are also plenty of little groups of letters to specialists in particular fields, like Sir Kenneth Clark (who became a personal friend, but rarely had time actually to write a review). And there's a moderately hilarious exchange with John Maynard Keynes in 1936, where it takes a lot of delicate negotiation to resolve the impasse between what the inflexible BBC bureaucracy will pay and what Keynes considers his writing is worth (Braybrooke prints it in an Appendix, including both sides of the correspondence). The most interesting letters are the ones where we see Ackerley-the-editor in action, showing a correspondent how to save what looks like an irredeemably-lost piece of writing by means of a few subtle changes.

There is also a great deal of correspondence with publishers and others about Ackerley's own books, which helps to make it clear why he published so little. At every stage there would be nervous voices telling him to make cuts to avoid potential problems with libel or obscenity: whenever the cuts got to the point where the book itself had disappeared, he would change publishers and start again.

If you're looking for gay gossip, there's not much in the first part of the book — Ackerley doesn't seem to have had any qualms about mixing private matters with business correspondence, but he was writing on BBC notepaper, so he (or Braybrooke) knew where to draw the line. After his retirement, he's a little less inhibited, and there are some quite racy accounts of his adventures in Athens and on a trip to Japan to visit his friends James Kirkup and Francis King.

Although it took Braybrooke a remarkably long time to edit this book (more than eight years), Ackerley's sister Nancy West was still alive when it came out, so Braybrooke cuts out anything in the letters that relates to her mental health problems, which were one of Ackerley's biggest worries during his last years. However, Forster had died (in 1970, three years after Ackerley), and we do get some very interesting letters about his last years.

There are some remarkably silly cuts in the book: one trivial example is in a letter of February 1963, where we read that "My half-sister, Sally ____, became Duchess of ____ last week..." It's perfectly understandable that a (dowager) duchess, even in 1975, might prefer not to advertise the fact that she was the illegitimate daughter of the rakish Roger Ackerley, but that sentence doesn't do anything to conceal her identity. The newspapers in 1963 didn't fail to mention Gerald Grosvenor's unexpected inheritance of the title that made him the richest man in England for a few years, and not many readers would have forgotten that by 1975. Even if they had, the blanks would have been a great stimulus to look it up, even in those pre-Wikipedia days!

Otherwise, there's not much to complain about in the editing, although Braybrooke does have an irritating tendency to footnote things we already know from the notes to the previous letter. At least the notes are on the page, so you don't need a finger stuck in the back of the book.

On the whole, Peter Parker's biography from ten years later is a much more useful resource on Ackerley's life, but this book is a nice bonus, with some interesting behind-the-scenes stuff about how literary journalism worked in the mid-20th century.

>42 thorold: Really interesting review. I'd not heard of Ackerley before. Were he and Forster lovers are just friends over the years?

>43 AlisonY: Just good friends, as far as we know. They both preferred working-class lovers, as middle-class men of those days tended to do. My father and myself is a fantastic memoir, thoughtful and funny. Do read it if you get the chance.

And another one from the pile of Seven Seas paperbacks I acquired last summer. Morris has been on the syllabus of various courses I've taken over the years, but I was surprised to find only one piece in this book that I recognised, the famous lecture "Useful work versus useless toil":

Political writings of William Morris (1973) by William Morris (UK, 1834-1896) edited by A.L. Morton (UK, 1903-1987)

   

(Picture of Morton from marxists.org)

Nowadays there's so much respect for William Morris as a designer that it's somehow difficult to see him as anything else, but when Professor Morton founded the William Morris Society in 1955, he was probably thinking more of Morris's role as a pioneer of English socialism than of up-market wallpaper patterns.

Morris was an energetic propagandist for socialism from the mid-1870s until the end of his life, constantly on the road addressing indoor and outdoor political meetings. Included here are two letters from Morris to his daughter Jane in April 1887, where he describes the schedule of a particularly gruelling trip to Scotland, with one or two speeches every day in a string of different towns and cities, and then he was persuaded to tack on an extra few days addressing miners on Tyneside just when he thought he had finished...

Most of the pieces in this fairly short book were written as lectures, with just a couple of short pieces of straight journalism at the end of the book. Public speaking in late-Victorian times was rather different from what it is now — no microphones, of course, and rowdy audiences who could easily shut a speaker down if they chose to — so Morris's style, with its carefully crafted rhetorical periods and breathing pauses, is sometimes a bit hard to take in cold print (it's easier if you put on a long false beard and declaim through it to yourself). All the same, it's obvious that he was very good at presenting Marxist ideas in terms that his British audiences could make sense of: he paints a very clear picture of what's wrong with capitalism (exploitation, waste, and ugliness, in particular) and why only a revolution can put things right.

Although he has a lot to say about how important it is for work to be useful and meaningful, and to result in the production of useful and beautiful things, he doesn't go in for any kind of romantic return to medievalism. He accepts that there are jobs that are best done by machines, but he urges that the effect of introducing a machine should not be to replace a skilled worker with an unskilled one, but rather to eliminate the need for someone to do a mindless and unpleasant job. He isn't a naive idealist: he realises that under socialism there will still be a need for managers and for people who clean toilets, and accepts that this could be a problem, but he doesn't see it as insoluble.

If Morris had any clear ideas about what socialism would mean for existing gender roles, he doesn't talk about it here. He uses the word "men" frequently, and by it he seems to mean male workers. There are some passing hints that he sees a socialist world as one in which people would be free to follow their "animal urges" as long as these didn't harm anyone else, but he doesn't expand on this. He does talk about slavery and the exploitation of workers in the colonies, but he treats these things as simple consequences of the capitalist system, not as a separate problem.

What is astonishing if you're used to reading nineteenth-century English intellectuals is the complete lack of any reference to religion. He neither attacks the churches nor defends them, he simply seems to find them irrelevant to the situation of late-Victorian workers. He also clearly doesn't have any interest in democratic reform or electoral politics: government for him means the official defence of capitalism, and meaningful change can only come from its replacement by a mass movement of workers. Piecemeal reform is a danger, as he argues in one of the last pieces in the collection, as it will tend to mitigate the pain of living under capitalism without taking away the ultimate cause of the pain. If we could bring him back and show him the 21st century, he would probably be entirely justified in saying "I told you so" (but he might be pleased to see that beards are back in fashion).

Well, now I will try to draw these discursive remarks to a head, and will give you a more concise and complete idea of the society into which I would like to be reborn. It is a society which does not know the meaning of the words rich and poor, or the rights of property, or law or legality, or nationality: a society which has no consciousness of being governed; in which equality of condition is a matter of course, and in which no man is rewarded for having served the community by having the power given him to injure it.
It is a society conscious of a wish to keep life simple, to forgo some of the power over nature won by past ages in order to be more human and less mechanical, and willing to sacrifice something to this end. It would be divided into small communities varying much within the limits allowed by due social ethics, but without rivalry between each other, looking with abhorrence at the idea of a holy race.
from the 1887 lecture "The society of the future"

>46 thorold: I read his novel News From Nowhere some years back. I often wondered how utopian he thought it was, or if he really believed that socialism would create this perfect society not far off what he'd described in that book.

He certainly had an old fashioned stereotypical role of the jobs women should carry out in that novel - interesting that none of them turned up in his political writing.

I feel a bit guilty about Mimi Khalvati — I enjoyed her first collection, In white ink in 1991, and I found her very interesting when a friend brought her along to read at our poetry group shortly after that, but somehow that interest didn't translate into actual purchase of any actual books during the last thirty years. On the plus side, I have some interesting catching up to do!

Khalvati is one of the founders of The Poetry School, which runs poetry training programmes in the UK. She was born in Iran but has spent a lot of her life in London.

Afterwardness (2019) by Mimi Khalvati (Iran, UK, 1944- )

  

(Author picture Nigel Bewley, via Wikipedia)

This is, rather unusually these days, a collection of fifty-six sonnets. Not quite a sonnet sequence, but not quite a random selection either: the collection opens with a small child on an aeroplane, flying trustfully into the unknown, and it ends with someone looking up into the sky and reflecting on the memories that are triggered by seeing vapour-trails. In between, the sonnets seem to be arranged roughly in chronological order of the moment in the poet's life they are talking about — Iran, Britain, school, family visits, old age. Not a memoir, but a kind of life-collage, perhaps?

Khalvati's treatment of the sonnet form is very individual, but it's hard to put a finger on quite what it is that she's doing differently. There is never the feeling that you are reading something constrained into a strict form, it's a surprise to see that each poem occupies the same number of lines on the page, and even more of a surprise to see that there are rhymes, exactly where they are supposed to be, but so understated that they become almost inaudible. Carpets, courtyards with fountains, and tree-blossom are brought in here and there, but perhaps more as a gentle tease than anything else. We're not really in West-Eastern divan country. The tightly-packed, crossword puzzle side of occidental sonnet form is certainly there: most of the poems trick you into starting to read one thing and then going back to read something quite different when you've got to the end. But it's a pleasant, civilised and often funny experience, not a tug of war with a poet's giant ego. Very enjoyable, a book I'll certainly come back to.

--

(The cover picture is by Vuillard, who is mentioned in a couple of the poems)

>47 AlisonY: I'll have to re-read that as well, now...

It looks as though Morris initially really believed that capitalism was on its last legs and the revolution would come very soon, but he seems to have become less optimistic about that by the late eighties. Isn't the happy socialist future in News from Nowhere set in the year 2000?

>49 thorold: Hmm. The character wakes up in the 21st century, but I can't remember if Morris got into detail about the year.

>48 thorold: Thanks for the review: I hadn't heard of Khalvati before, but scribd has a couple of her books and I've just downloaded her Selected Poems.

>46 thorold: It would be good to have those writings together. It's always a positive check (for me at least) to go back to his idealism.

Looked up Morton - it seems his works may be getting difficult to find, so good acquisition on two levels.

>52 SassyLassy: I think A people’s history of England is still in print. But the Morris collection doesn’t seem to have been reprinted for a long time (it was published by Lawrence Wishart in the UK, International Publishers in the US).

ETA: Just noticed that I also still have Freedom in arms on the TBR, also from the same Seven Seas batch, a collection of Leveller texts edited by Morton.

Two short books — I read the first one in the train this morning, and swapped it for the second in a little library at my destination...

Feeks (1999) by Riana Scheepers (South Africa, 1957- ), translated from Afrikaans to Dutch by Riet de Jong-Goossens

  

Riana Scheepers is a South African writer who grew up bilingual in Afrikaans and Zulu, and writes in the former. At the time she published this story collection she was still a high-school teacher, and she has written extensively for children as well as for adults. She doesn't seem to approve of her work being translated into English, but does seem to be quite well known in the Netherlands and Flanders.

The stories in this collection play on some obvious South African themes: Zulu and Dutch-Calvinist cultural traditions, violence, and so on, but the main recurring theme seems to be the way female strength can be elided into witchcraft. In some of the stories women are falsely accused of using supernatural powers; in others they actually do seem to have the power to change the world in unauthorised ways. Sometimes — as in the story where an elderly woman unjustly consigned to an asylum by her relatives gets her own back on the world by fine embroidery — Scheepers expresses her anger at the state the world is in subtly and very indirectly; at other times she is frighteningly direct.

----

Duel (2010) by Joost Zwagerman (Netherlands, 1963-2015)

  

This novella was the 2010 Boekenweek gift. Zwagerman was an art-critic as well as a novelist. In this quirky tale of how the director of an important Amsterdam museum ended up putting his fist through a thirty-million-dollar Mark Rothko, he has a lot of fun playing around with questions about the respect and monetary value we attach to works of art, and the conflicts between the idea that art is there to be enjoyed and the idea that it is there to be preserved for the future.

Another disappointment from Scribd. One of those books where you keep on reading because you feel there must be something good coming, but there isn't.

The Handsome Sailor (1998) by Larry Duberstein (USA, 1944- )



Unlike Larry Duberstein — who seems to have been steadily publishing a novel every couple of years since time began, according to his (self-published?) Wikipedia page, all of them praised immoderately by people we've never heard of — Herman Melville had a fabulous spurt of creativity in his forties, then went very quiet for the last thirty years of his life, settling down into the uneventful life of a New York customs officer, leaving us only the unfinished text of Billy Budd at his death.

The aim of this historical novel seems to be to examine that break in Melville's creative life, but it somehow gets rather lost on the way, leaving us with two disconnected portraits, one of them of Melville in New York in the 1880s flirting with a young widow, the other with Melville at Arrowhead around the time he was writing Moby-Dick, partying with his literary friends and rolling in the hay with a married neighbour. In a short epilogue we see him coming home from Bermuda on a steamship where he meets a young officer cadet who might — or might not — have been the inspiration for Billy.

The things that really do seem to have led to Melville's loss of confidence as a writer don't seem to get mentioned at all — the poor reviews of Pierre, health and financial problems and the disruption of the Civil War, to name but a few.

Duberman seems to be quite good at establishing characters and settings — this is his fifth novel, after all, he's had time to practice — but he never seems to develop them or use them to tell a story. And he's clearly not very much in tune with the nineteenth century, either in terms of language or of social detail. Melville notices Cora because she's in the habit of visiting (alone!!!) the same coffee house where he goes on his lunch break(!!). I kept expecting her to drain her decaf latte and get out her Powerbook... As for the pastiche Melvillese the narrator of the 1880s chapters is apt to lapse into, the less said the better.

And another from the long-stay wing of the TBR penitentiary. I bought this in April 2013:

Iris : a memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998) by John Bayley (UK, 1925-2015)

  

A lovely, sad, funny book, in which Bayley shares with us both his happy memories of married life with Iris Murdoch and some of the day to day realities of living with her now that she has Alzheimer's. Peter Capaldi was working on Murdoch's official biography already when Bayley was writing this memoir, so he doesn't say much about her career and novels, but focusses on the things they shared: swimming in rivers, holiday trips, friends, houses (he stakes a strong claim for the title of "least house-proud couple in Oxford..."), and occasional literary cooperation. And on the story of how they came to get together in the first place, of course. Bayley is modest, deprecatingly witty, and obviously intensely grateful for all these experiences, and for the odd moments of joy he's still able to share with his wife in her current condition, even if it's only watching Teletubbies together.

One odd aspect of Bayley's obvious generosity is the way he refrains from naming anyone mentioned in the book whom he dislikes. This sometimes leads him to tell us everything about that person apart from the name — one person who gets this treatment is Dorothy Bednarowska, a well-known Fellow of St Anne's College, whose only offence seems to have been getting in the way of Bayley's attempts to chat up Iris at the party where they first met; another is Elias Canetti, one of Iris's occasional lovers, who is described down to his Nobel Prize and the title of his best-known book, but named only as "the Dichter". But that's a minor quirk, and you couldn't have such a very Oxfordish book without some sort of puzzle in it...

>39 thorold: You’ve reminded me that I really want to get back to Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire series. I love the humor. And, despite the flaws, I enjoy the stories. I’d been reading the newly released virago editions, as availability was an issue. They are lovely covers.

Since we are talking about crime novels and locations in the Questions thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/333530#7566445) I had a look on the TBR shelf to see what I had pending in that line, and came up with a recent random little library find out of Klaus-Peter Wolf's famous series of Krimis set on the German North Sea coast in East Frisia. It turned out to be the middle volume of a trilogy, but that's never stopped me before:

Totentanz am Strand: Sommerfeldt kehrt zurück (2018) by Klaus-Peter Wolf (Germany, 1954- )

  

This is the second of three novels narrated by Dr Bernhard Sommerfeldt, so that Wolf's famous East Frisian police officer, Ann Kathrin Klaasen, is reduced to a mostly offstage presence. Sommerfeldt has established himself in the first novel as an ordinary, decent man — albeit one who is living under an assumed name and practicing as a GP without any actual medical qualifications — forced to turn to serial-killing to protect the honour of his primary-school-teacher girlfriend.

The six murders he has to his credit so far have unfortunately rather damaged his reputation with Ann Kathrin, and he has been obliged to leave East Frisia and, when we meet him again, is living under a new name in the safe obscurity of Gelsenkirchen. It turns out that it isn't quite so easy to retire from serial-killing, though, and professional obligations soon recall him to the north. And there is also some unfinished business to attend to in Bamberg, and there is even more trouble when Sommerfeldt runs into his former receptionist Cordula, who is determined that they should join forces to become the Bonnie and Clyde of Langeoog.

In general, I don't like killer's POV very much, but I found this one with its very black humour and sardonic inverted morality quite appealing. It's realistic enough to be a moderately gripping crime story, but not enough to make you really feel sorry for the victims, who are in any case all society offenders who might well be underground.

I'm trying t sort out a trip to visit a friend in France, but it seems to be descending into the usual chaos of conflicting dates, so it will probably never happen. But I worked out that the best way to get there would be to take the train to a place called Niort.

Now I pick up the next Maigret story in my pile, and find that it opens with the Commissaire changing trains at the very same station. It's a small world...

L'Inspecteur Cadavre (1941; Maigret's rival/Inspector Cadaver) by Georges Simenon (France, 1903-1989)

  

Maigret undertakes an unofficial mission at the request of a judge-friend, whose brother-in-law — a landowner in the marshes of the Vendée — has been the victim of a campaign of anonymous letters accusing him of murder. When Maigret gets to Saint-Aubin-les-Marais he is surprised to find his ex-colleague "Cadavre," now a private eye, getting off the same train and pretending not to see him. Moreover, his hosts don't seem to be exactly happy with the judge's helpful intervention, and are acting very much like a family with something to hide.

As usual, Simenon enjoys the moral ambiguities opened up by taking Maigret out of the official world of regular police work, and he has fun exploring the feuds and power-struggles lurking below the surface of a tranquil agricultural community. Whilst ports are obviously what he does best, his villages are always interesting too, so this is an enjoyable read, even if the actual case is fairly straightforward.

As usual, this wartime publication is set in a kind of generic thirties peacetime, with no mention of current events at all.

>59 thorold: As usual, this wartime publication is set in a kind of generic thirties peacetime, with no mention of current events at all.

Was there an official reason for doing that, or was it the best way to get published in a difficult time (not that Simenon would have had any difficulty in that regard)?

>60 SassyLassy: I don't know — I mean to get to reading a Simenon bio, or his memoirs, some time...

I imagine it could equally well be either official censorship or commercial prudence — authors of popular fiction often tried to avoid being too topical because they were afraid the books would stop selling as soon as the moment passed. Like the Dickensian prejudice against mentioning exact dates.

Back to Lusophony (in French, since that was what came to hand):

La œdécouverte de l'Amérique par les Turcs ou Comment l'Arabe Jamil Bichara, défricheur de terres vierges, venu en la bonne ville d'Itabuna pour satisfaire aux nécessités du corps, s'y vit offrir fortune et mariage ou encore Les fiançailles d'Adma: mini-roman (1994; The discovery of America by the Turks) by Jorge Amado (Brazil, 1912-2001), translated from Portuguese to French by Jean Orecchioni

  

A late novella, written as a tie-in with the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of China Hispaniola. Amado reasons that if Columbus could be said to have "discovered America", the same thing could just as well be said of two Ottoman opportunists who happened to arrive in Bahia on the same immigrant ship in 1903. Raduan becomes a professional poker-player, Jamil a shopkeeper, and there's a comic plot of Raduan trying to marry Jamil off to Adma, fearsome daughter of Ibrahim, proprietor of the Bon Marché drapery.

Amado uses a deceptively simple kind of Arabian Nights narrative style to tell the story, but it's all heavily loaded with irony. If it's a rehash of The taming of the shrew then it's one in which the men are shown to be just as shallow and selfish as the women. Ibrahim's chief motivation for marrying off his daughter is to obtain the freedom to go fishing in the mornings again: he apparently sees nothing odd about canvassing a possible suitor for her hand during a party at the local brothel. Amado's narrator seems to be on the side of the men in the battle, but it's not at all clear that the reader is expected to agree with that.

Now I pick up the next Maigret story in my pile, and find that it opens with the Commissaire changing trains at the very same station. It's a small world... --- just 80 years too late and don't forget your pass sanitaire

>62 baswood: Yes! Eighty years ago the train would have taken me a good deal nearer to my destination than Niort, too.

Some more TBR pile housekeeping. This one has been sitting there since June 2013, neglected for much the same reason as the Ackerley letters (>42 thorold:) — I had a Browning-phase in 2011, during which I read — amongst other things — the Brownings' courtship letters and the other two main published collections of EBB's letters, but this last one was elusive, and the moment had passed before I found a copy.

Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849-1861 (1973) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (UK, 1806-1861), edited by Peter N Heydon & Philip Kelley

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an industrious letter-writer: Robert published the two thick volumes of the courtship correspondence in 1898, Frederick Kenyon edited a similarly chunky two-volume edition of all the other letters he could get hold of in 1897, and a more modest 350 pages of letters to her sister Henrietta came out in the 1920s. But other little piles of letters continued to turn up throughout the 20th century: those printed here only came up for auction in 1971, when they were acquired by the Browning Institute, who published this book.

The Ogilvys met the Brownings in Florence in 1848. The two families, with babies a few months apart in age, soon became friends, and continued to see each other on and off until Elizabeth's death in 1861. This collection includes 37 of Elizabeth's letters, plus a final letter from Robert written shortly after her death. The editors also reproduce two versions of a short memoir of Elizabeth written by Mrs Ogilvy, and a small selection of her poems that are relevant to the correspondence.

Eliza Ann Harris Dick Ogilvy (she usually signed her poems as "EAHO") was rather different from EBB — fourteen years younger, for a start, and born into one very conventional Scottish army-and-empire family and married into another. She evidently didn't see eye-to-eye with EBB on spiritualism, Napoleon III, Italian politics, or the appropriate way to dress small children, and they are night and day as poets, but all that doesn't seem to have prevented them from liking each other and enjoying the exchange of ideas in their letters.

It's a shame that EAHO's side of the correspondence was lost: she was clearly a witty writer when she wanted to be. Her description of EBB in the memoir is a case in point — "She was just like a King Charles Spaniel, the same large soft brown eyes, the full silky curls falling around her face like a spaniel's ears, the same pathetic wistfulness of expression..." — she goes on to suggest that there must have been a resemblance to Flush when he was younger, but that by the time she met him he was mangy, old and smelly. Her poems, as included here, range from clever light verse to heavy Victorian sentimentality, well over a century past its read-by date.

The letters themselves are engaging and as full of opinions and curiosity as EBB always seems to be: there is a bit of gossip about Florentine friends, a lot of news about the young Pen Browning and his remarkable achievements and occasional ailments, the inevitable tirades in defence of spiritualism and Napoleon III, and the usual problems of travel, accommodation, servants, and the fraught business of getting parcels of books across Europe in pre-Amazon days.

A nice complement to the other collections of letters, probably filling in some gaps (it's so long since I studied them that I've forgotten where the gaps are), and with the editors' helpful notes you could almost read it as a self-contained look into the Brownings' life in the fifties.

>59 thorold: a place called Niort

My neck of the woods! (give or take 100 km)
The locals can be quite touchy about Niort's lack of visibility. Because this is the only town in a very rural département, outsiders tend to think Niortais are yokels, which riles them up quite a bit. You'll then get a lecture on how for the longest time, they had the highest rates of female employment, cars per capita, and women drivers in France. That they have more clubs and associations than anywhere in France, and that they've been on a 35-hour week for ever! And that their shopping district is better than ours. Speaking of which, if you have time to kill in Niort, la librairie des Halles is a decent bookshop. I was warned about a second-hand bookshop owned by a fascist (no idea if it's literal or hyperbole), but I can't remember its name or location... The local specialty is angelica - candied or as a liqueur.

>64 Dilara86: Interesting, thanks! I should have a couple of hours in Niort on the way home, two weeks from now, I'll try to have a look at Librairie des Halles. The friend I'm visiting lives near La Châtaigneraie. Niort isn't exactly on the doorstep but it's the nearest useful station.

Back to the DDR:

Irreführung der Behörden : Roman (1973) by Jurek Becker (DDR, Germany, 1937-1997)

 

A lively novel with a very sixties feel to it. Gregor is a student in East Berlin when we first meet him in 1959, bored with his law studies and vainly trying to hawk ideas for stories to editors and TV producers. We follow him through his marriage to his student girlfriend Lola and his breakthrough as a successful screenwriter and novelist, with many misadventures and comic incidents along the way, but the real point of the story seems to be Gregor's increasing discontent with life as the spark of originality he started out with is snuffed out by his growing technical fluency and his chameleon-like ability to adapt his work to what the market wants and what the authorities are prepared to accept. He doesn't exactly wake up in bed and discover that he has turned into a giant cockroach, but the effect is much the same.

(This doesn't seem to have been translated to English: the title translates as "misleading the authorities")

And I was almost certain you were going to the marais poitevin!
That reminds me: David, the main character of Le Banquet annuel de la Confrérie des fossoyeurs is an ethnology student writing a thesis on a small marais poitevin village. He takes the train from Paris to Niort, and then has to take a taxi to the village. That was a fun read - if you don't mind 100-odd page Rabelais pastiches, that is.

>66 Dilara86: I expect we'll get to the Marais at some point, it's something that was proposed but never done last time I went there. We're going to see William Christie's gardens at Thiré one day, which is in the right direction.

I enjoyed the other Énard books I've read — that one sounds fun too, I'll look out for it. Thanks!

---

This is a follow-up from Joe Ackerley (>42 thorold:): his friends and regular correspondents included James Kirkup (this post) and Francis King (coming soon), both writers I've been meaning to follow up for a while.

I've read a few of Kirkup's poetry collections and his comic novel Gaijin on the Ginza, a long time ago. He was a prolific writer of poetry, travel books, novels and memoirs and did a lot of literary translation (he was Simone de Beauvoir's English translator for a while, but they didn't get on, so Patrick O'Brian took over). He also seems to have written erotic fiction for Olympia Press under numerous pseudonyms. After his 1977 brush with the English legal system at one of its least distinguished moments (Whitehouse v Lemon), his work became rather hard to find in the UK for a while, but Peter Owen brought out his last few volumes of memoirs in the 90s. Most of his later poetry was published in Salzburg.

A poet could not but be gay : some legends of my lost youth (1991) by James Kirkup (UK, 1918-2009)
Me all over : memoirs of a misfit (1993) by James Kirkup (UK, 1918-2009)

  

James Kirkup divided his memoirs into numerous short parts, which sometimes jump backwards and forwards in time in confusing ways. A poet could not but be gay is the fourth in publication order, and it deals mostly with his time teaching in Sweden and Spain in the mid-1950s, but there are numerous flashbacks to England in the early fifties and a few looks forward to the next phase of his life, in Japan.

There's a lot of very entertaining gossip about sexual adventures in the public lavatories of Britain and the continent, as well as two more serious love affairs in Spain. But of course there's also a lot about Kirkup's progress as a writer and his literary friendships, most importantly that with Joe Ackerley, who acted as a kind of literary godfather to him and placed a number of his poems in the Listener, usually over the shocked objections of his clerical staff and/or the nervous BBC bureaucracy.

Kirkup reproduces quite a number of letters from Ackerley, most of which either didn't get included in Neville Braybrooke's edition of the Letters, or were heavily cut there. This often shows us a different side of Ackerley from the "official" one: still warm and funny and very supportive of Kirkup, but also liable to become rather cutting about other people who had annoyed him in one way or another.

A particularly enjoyable feature of the memoir is the very natural way Kirkup includes his own poems in the text, in the context of the situations where they were written.

Great fun, but you need to have a certain amount of background knowledge about the English (gay-) literary world in the 1950s, otherwise you're going to get a bit lost in the stream of names.

Me all over takes up the story around the end of 1958, at the point where Kirkup has come back from Spain and is looking for another opportunity to get out of the oppressive climate of the British Isles. Before he actually gets to the point of leaving for Japan he reverts for a while to his conviction of being persecuted and blacklisted by the British Council. As an openly gay, vegetarian, conscientious objector and founder-member of CND from a working-class background, it's just possible that there might have been things about him that rubbed the 1950s Establishment up the wrong way, so this wasn't necessarily paranoia, even if it sounds very like it. Then we get an entertaining passage in which he annihilates the characters of de Beauvoir, Sartre, Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly within the space of about a page and a half. You can almost see the smoke rising from the paper...

But most of the book is shared between Kirkup's first experiences of Japan, where he was to stay for thirty years, and the last years of his friendship with Joe Ackerley and his sister Nancy West. Again, many of Ackerley's letters are quoted — some of which also appear in Braybrooke's book, but usually with passages excised or names deleted — and Kirkup shares with us the pain of seeing a close friend in decline but on the other side of the world. But there's also a lot of fun in his encounters with Japanese culture, especially the sort of Japanese culture you find in back-alleys and seedy bars, and in his caricatures of the official British expats and the way they panic at the prospect of a loose cannon like Kirkup popping up on their doorstep...

—-

ETA: I forgot to mention that there’s a link to the Brownings (>63 thorold:) as well — Kirkup claims (he doesn’t say on what grounds) to be related to the “Barone” Seymour Stocker Kirkup, who was a contemporary of Keats and Shelley and still a prominent member of the British community in Italy in the Brownings’ time. EBB talks about his famous discovery of a portrait of Dante in Florence in a couple of the letters to Mrs Ogilvy.

>67 thorold: William Christie's gardens at Thiré
I'm jealous! Especially if you're going to the baroque music festival.

>68 Dilara86: I think it's just the gardens, unfortunately.

This is a book several other people here (Jerry was one, I think) recommended when I was talking about David Crystal and other writers of popular histories of English a year or so ago. It's taken a while to get around to it.

Our magnificent bastard tongue : the untold history of English (2008) by John McWhorter (USA, 1965- )

  

Like a lot of popular non-fiction these days, this is somewhat oversold by its subtitle: it's not a history of English, still less an "untold" one, but a set of five essays on more or less controversial topics in historical linguistics. The main focus of the book is in the first and third chapters, where McWhorter argues that contact between speakers of Old English and Celtic languages (ch.1), and between speakers of Old English and Old Norse (ch.3), may have been responsible for some of the grammatical features that make modern English so different from the other Germanic languages. The other three chapters are provided to allow for some routine bashing of language pedants and followers of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ("grammar constrains thought"), and to give some air-time to the Vennemann "Phoenicians in Germania" theory, which sounds in McWhorter's account rather like a modern version of the Victorian obsession with the missing tribes of Israel.

I'm not sure if McWhorter's arguments about the Welsh and the Vikings are convincing, but he does seem to have a valid point when he says that studies of the history of English have been too tied up with statistics on words and etymologies and have not paid enough attention to the really weird things about modern English compared to other languages, like the two present tenses, the "meaningless-do" in questions and negative statements, and the absence of grammatical gender and extreme simplification of verb-forms. In the light of recent research on language-contact elsewhere in the world, he argues that these are developments typical of what happens when a lot of non-native speakers use a language. And he points out some interesting parallel features in Welsh grammar.

The weakness in his position is that there is no written evidence for any of these things until the boom in written Middle-English in the thirteenth century, many centuries after the contacts he's talking about. Can that really be explained away by scribal conservatism? Maybe, maybe not. But it's certainly not something that any non-professional reader of this book is going to be in a position to judge. Generally, when I see a popular book setting out an "academics have been getting this wrong for decades" argument, I'm looking for a very high standard of proof, and that doesn't seem to be on offer here.

The book is written in a strange Brysonic dialect of English, but without most of Bill Bryson's precision and conciseness. McWhorter is obviously a broadcaster first and a writer second: on paper his mixed metaphors and rambling sentences are cruelly exposed to view, and his American colloquialisms look forced rather than spontaneous. And they are often very provincial. As a non-US reader I had to keep stopping to decode obscure references to sports, TV and brand-names.

>69 thorold: "This is a book several other people here (Jerry was one, I think) recommended "

If you're referring to me, not so. I was involved in a conversation about word usage during which his ideas were invoked, but I haven't read him. Your review is interesting, as always, though.

>70 rocketjk: Sorry, it's so often you, but this time it seems to have been jjmcgaffey who suggested it. And I'm not blaming either of you — even if he has his irritating side, McWhorter still tosses around some interesting ideas.

>69 thorold: I don't think I've read any of McWhorter's books on linguistics, though I did a fair amount of reading as an undergraduate on the history of English. The idea that modern English -- and its grammatical structures in particular -- can be a result of creolization/language contact is something I'm sure I've read before (I'd have to go digging to figure out where). The general theory makes a lot of sense to me intuitively but I'm not familiar enough with current linguistic research to be able to say to what degree his claims are widely accepted by the scholarly community. His specialty does seem to be in language contact, for whatever that is worth (either making him especially qualified to identify and evaluate the creole-ness of English -- or leading him to see interlinguistic influences everywhere regardless of whether they explain the phenomena in question).

Sapir-Whorf indeed seems to be a popular subject for linguists to take a swipe at. I think some of the criticism is justified and it's something that non-linguists often tend to accept at face value, so I can see why they may feel it is important to dispel myths about the significance of certain cultures supposedly having hundreds of words for snow or no concept of time and similar claims. But attacking the "strong" version of Sapir-Whorf (i.e. language determines thought) is really a bit of a straw man -- as far as I know no serious linguist today would try to claim that it is valid. But the "weak" version (and adaptations thereof, i.e. that language and linguistic categories can influence what we pay attention to in the world) is still a matter of much debate. I like Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass for a very readable overview of the arguments for and against and how linguists have tried to test it. It's somewhat on the technical end of the spectrum for a popular science book, but it is intended for the general reader rather than the specialist.

My initial reaction to the Venneman claims is much the same as yours...

It's funny that you mention Bill Bryson in this context, as he tends to attract criticism for being superficial at best and inaccurate at worst in his writings on language matters -- problems one would hope a professional linguist would avoid -- though of course I realize your comparison was about style rather than concerns about factual accuracy.

>71 thorold: "Sorry, it's so often you, . . . "

Ha! Off topic, but you've reminded me of a funny line from the comedian Rita Rudner about the dangers of starting a game of peek-a-boo with the child in the airplane seat in front of you, because you are going to tire of the game long before the child. As Rudner put it . . .

"Yes, it's me. It's still me. It's always going to be me."

OK, sorry. Carry on!

>72 spiphany: Yes, to be fair to McWhorter, it’s only simplistic journalistic interpretations of “strong” Sapir-Whorf he’s mocking, he points out that there could be a case for weaker versions. And he manages to get through the whole book without a single mention of Eskimos and snow. (Although he did lose a few points by bringing in pork/swine and beef/cow.)

I haven’t looked for serious reviews of the book, I imagine it would be interesting to know what serious linguists working in that field thought of it. I don’t suppose the Professor of Linguistics at Bangor was too impressed about being accused of being blind to possible Welsh influences on English…

I think Bryson just crept in via a bad pun. But I do see him as a master of that kind of jokey colloquial register.

>74 thorold: I went digging in languagehat's blog (as my go-to source for keeping up with recent publications in popular linguistics and Russian literature, among other things) to see if he or his readers had commented on the book, and sure enough:
http://languagehat.com/the-bookshelf-our-magnificent-bastard-tongue/
The blog commentators seem to agree with your assessment that the book is rather lacking in substance to back up his claims.

>75 spiphany: Thanks! Interesting discussion there. I don’t look at that blog often enough.

Reading just one Maigret story is a bit like eating just one peanut...

Maigret se fâche (1947; Maigret gets angry) by Georges Simenon (France, 1903-1989)

  

This novella was originally published together with La pipe de Maigret (which I read separately a few years ago) in 1947, as the first in the series to be issued by Simenon's new publisher, Presses de la Cité. It was also the last Maigret story before Simenon moved to the US.

As in some of the 1939 short stories, this is set a couple of years after Maigret's long-postponed retirement to his country cottage in Meung-sur-Loire. He's starting to get a little bored with angling and gardening, and it doesn't take him long to agree when a distinguished elderly lady turns up on his doorstep to ask for help in clearing up the mystery of her granddaughter's death. He soon finds himself in a classic Maigret setting — a decayed fishermen's inn on the upper Seine — extracting information about the dark secrets of the upper bourgeoisie from servants, lock-keepers and poachers, and is surprised to be identified as a high-school classmate by the old lady's son-in-law, now a business tycoon.

It's a classic Maigret investigation, where he doesn't so much "solve" the mystery as rattle the cupboards until a skeleton falls out. Nothing very sophisticated, but some interesting twists due to Maigret's nebulous not-quite-official status.

>73 rocketjk: oh my goodness she was one of my fav comedians, david and I got to see her when she came to phoenix, absolutely hilarious. Havent heard anything about her for a while. She does remind me of some of Paula Poundstone, but classier.

ETA apparently she's spent lots of time in vegas in fact has become the longest-running solo comedy show in the history of Las Vegas. seems like a comedown to me. but its just coz Im not a fan of that city. Shes got some youtube videos I might watch

>77 thorold: I’ve been collecting the new Penguin translations - but apparently had misplaced the first few. I wonder if reading the series in order actually matters. Any idea?

>79 AnnieMod: From the narrative point of view it doesn't seem to matter much what order you read the Maigrets in: stories don't build on previous stories, and Maigret always has much the same job, colleagues and family (except for a few random books in the middle, like >77 thorold:, where he's retired).

Since soon after I started learning French (mid-70s, I suppose?) I've been reading whatever Maigret stories happened to cross my path, in random order, without any obvious ill-effects. Simenon made up about half the French-language section in our local library in those days (and Balzac the other half, probably).

I went back to Pietr-le-Letton about ten years ago and have been going through them more or less systematically since then. It is interesting seeing how the details of the technique evolve, and how Simenon is interested in different kinds of settings as the years go by. And technology, like the police having their own cars instead of always taking taxis, or not having to go into bars to telephone.
But unless reading Maigret is the only thing to do, you'll have a hard time reading them fast enough to notice such things changing. I've got through about a third of the novels and stories in a decade. The chances are that I'll already have forgotten Pietr by the time I get to Monsieur Charles. Assuming I live that long...

>80 thorold: Thanks. Suspected so but was not sure. :) So pretty much like Poirot or Perry Mason and most of the other Golden Age and a bit later detectives. The evolving detective is indeed a modern invention (maybe because it had become easier to actually find the older books), with a few examples from the earlier days to prove the point (and even they are not that connected). I’ll see if I can find the early volumes (just in principle) but I may decide to start with the ones I can see. :)

>81 AnnieMod: Yes, I think it's pretty general for all those detectives who appeared in huge numbers of stories: TV and radio as well as books. It's only the ones at the "posh" literary end of the scale (like Lord Peter Wimsey) where the authors had enough time to map out multi-book plot lines.

>80 thorold: The only Maigret book I've read is Maigret and the Pickpocket. (Translated by Nigel Ryan, if that matters) My short review, from 2012, begins thusly:

"This was the first book I actually bought in Finland during our vacation. These Maigret books must be very popular in the country, as I saw a lot of them in the stores I visited, both in English and in Finnish."

I enjoyed the book a lot, and thought to get back and read more Maigret novels, but haven't yet. I do recall not being quite sure, at the end, what exactly had happened. Things seemed a bit cryptic to me, but I thought that effect was intentional, in fact, and didn't mind it. On the other hand, I'm pretty easily confused, so who knows?

>83 rocketjk: Yes, I think Simenon is often much more interested in what's going on in his characters' heads when they come into contact with a serious crime than he is in the logical process of solving the crime. And sometimes he skips a few steps in the reasoning in order to let Maigret have his big surprise confrontation scene at the end.

On to another crime series I dipped into for the first time a few months ago:

Tatuaje (1974; Tattoo) by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Spain, 1939-2003)

  

Vázquez Montalbán's character Pepe Carvalho first appeared in Yo maté a Kennedy in 1972, but at that point he was still a CIA agent: it was only in this second appearance that he took on his long-term role as a Barcelona private eye. He seems to have been doing private work for some time when we first meet him — in the bed of his sex-worker girlfriend Charo — but he hasn't yet acquired an office or an assistant. He does, however, already seem to have picked up very high standards where food and drink are concerned, and it is in this book that he first hits on the scheme of selecting books from his extensive library to use as firelighters.

The messenger who drags him out of Charo's bed proves to have been sent by Ramón, owner of a local hairdressing business, who commissions Pepe to discover what he can about a dead man recently found in the sea off a bathing beach, whose only identifying feature is a distinctive tattoo. But it has to be strictly private: Ramón doesn't want Pepe to have anything to do with the police investigation.

The tattoo soon leads Pepe to the Netherlands, where he experiences the joys of hippie-era Amsterdam (rijstafel, herring sandwiches, Paradiso, an unwanted bathe in the canal...) and gives us his impressions of The Hague and Rotterdam as well. And it's not long before he knows who the tattooed man was and what he was mixed up in, but that still leaves open the more interesting question of why a backstreet hairdresser should be interested...

Fun, in a predictably dark and cynical way, with some interesting period detail of Barcelona and Holland, and a great deal of outstanding food.

>74 thorold:, >75 spiphany:

I just read a nebulous article of his in The New York Times where he makes out, I kid you not, that it's the fault of the left that the right wing made "woke" into a "slur"--one must wonder if he thinks everyone but him is a fool...

And do check out the ideas he smuggles through in this para--my underlining:

The unbiased anthropologist would term the reason that a few episodes of “30 Rock” with mock blackface sequences are no longer streamed “censorship.” However, as the historian and podcaster Amna Khalid taught me, the perspective behind decisions like this is more commonly wielded via terming something “problematic,” which in modern usage so often implies not just that something is abstractly a problem but also that it ought to be classified as inconsonant with civilized sensibility and cordoned off from it in some way. Especially on the left, “problematic” is being drawn onto the treadmill to step away from the stodgy, menacing, backward associations that the word “censorship” has taken on, while engaging in what many would treat as the same project.

In the first sentence he asserts without evidence that an "unbiased" anthropologist (weird choice for a culture critic, but whatever) would "term" something "censorship". Like, don't even argue with this thing I am saying--I have it on the word of Unbiased Anthropologists. But people do argue with the opinion that this sort of thing--leaving out of reruns of old series the episodes with glaring racism--is "censorship". For one thing, it's done by private media channels interested in keeping their customers; for another, it doesn't even affect any other carriers or hard copies widely available in retail. And what is "mock blackface"? Blackblackface? (This is not the only stupid phrase occuring i the article--see: "The result will be resistance, much of it no less pretty..."---but I guess we must accept the NYT doesn't proof-read anything anymore...)

In the next sentence a "perspective" is "wielded" and "term" is again used as a verb. The subject went from "censorship" to "perspective". Something gets "cordoned off" from a "sensibility". "Censorship" has been alchemised into the adjective "problematic". It's one of the ugliest paragraphs I ever read from the hand of a (presumably) word-lover. Same can be said for the entire article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/opinion/woke-politically-correct.html

>85 LolaWalser: Yes, that's pretty much the way he writes in the book as well. Never use a simple, clear term when there's an obscure, muddy equivalent available.

---

I'm back from my little trip to the Vendée, during which I followed up the hint from >66 Dilara86: (thanks!) and read this book, set just over the border in Deux-Sèvres.

I also used the opportunity to trace some Simenon connections — Château de Terre-Neuve at Fontenay-le-Comte, where Simenon was living during the war years and must have written >77 thorold: — and pursue Rabelais from Fontenay to the Abbey of Maillezais.

The William Christie afternoon was excellent — wandering through the gardens between al fresco mini-concerts of obscure baroque music. But it would have been nicer to see an opera as well!

Le banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs (2021; no English yet) by Mathias Enard‬ (France, 1972- )

  

Enard obviously wrote this novel as a celebration of the countryside where he grew up, the Poitevin Marshes and the Département of Deux-Sèvres around Niort. The centrepiece is a gloriously over-the-top account of the Gravediggers' Annual Banquet, held in Rabelais's alma mater, the ruined Abbey of Maillezais, and this is framed by a semi-comic account of a young Parisian ethnologist spending a year in a farming hamlet near Niort to learn about rural life in 21st century France. In between, we get all sorts of glimpses of the history of the region: the Wars of Religion, the Napoleonic period, the two World Wars, and so on. The novel is full of convincing, sympathetic and often very funny sketches of rural characters and realistic accounts of rural life, and in many ways it reads like a very good travel book, but there's also a kind of Buddhism-for-dummies framework of reincarnation and wheel-of-life going on, which was a little bit less convincing.

I'm halfway through the fourth and longest part of Het bureau, so I needed something a bit lighter to keep me going...

This was from the pile I brought home from the charity shop in summer 2017:

L'herbe rouge - Les lurettes fourrées (The red grass, 1950; Ages fulfilled, 1962) by Boris Vian (France, 1920-1959)

  

L'herbe rouge, originally published in 1950, is a short novel in a kind of science-fiction idiom, full of Vian's usual paradoxes and black humour (and a talking dog). But it turns out to be much less about the strange machine that engineer Wolf and his assistant Saphir Lazuli are building, or indeed the red grass that is growing around it, than about what is going on in the two men's subconscious — a kind of Freudian version of Don Giovanni.

The machine sends Wolf off on a punishing psychoanalytical tour, during which he is questioned in depth about his parents, his education, his religious beliefs and his sexuality. At the same time, Lazuli is trying to deal with a disturbing sexual problem: whenever he's on the point of making love to his beautiful girlfriend Folavril, he senses the presence of a sad-faced man in a dark suit watching them. We soon get the feeling that this isn't going to end well.

The novel comes together with the short-story collection Les lurettes fourrées, written in 1948-1949 and published posthumously in 1962. There are three stories: "Le Rappel" has the engaging eccentricity that its action takes place during the time the main character is falling from the Empire State Building (including a stop for coffee partway); "Les Pompiers" is about what to do when the fire brigade can't fit you in until the day after tomorrow; and "Le Retraité" is a dark satire about the way violence and intolerance can escalate for no reason.

>86 thorold: It looks like we were pretty much on the same page about Le banquet annuel de la Confrérie des fossoyeurs!

The William Christie afternoon was excellent — wandering through the gardens between al fresco mini-concerts of obscure baroque music. But it would have been nicer to see an opera as well!
Maybe next time? And if you can't get in, there's always the Soirées lyriques de Sanxay (https://operasanxay.fr/about/), an open-air opera festival.

I read the third part of J J Voskuil's epic of office life, Het bureau, in June, so I thought I might as well keep the momentum going and carry on with Part Four, which I started on the train back from France. Given the size and weight of these as physical books, it's a real bonus to be able to read them as ebooks: I'd never take an 800-page novel on a train journey otherwise.

Het A.P. Beerta-Instituut (1998) by J J Voskuil (Netherlands, 1926-2008)

  

With this fourth — and longest — part, we reach the mid-point of the series. We're in the years 1975-79, so Maarten Koning has now been at the Office for twenty years, and he's reached his fifties. The focus changes from the international scientific disputes which dominated Part Three, and we're now much more involved with Maarten's struggles to come to terms with his role as a manager and find ways to impose his authority on co-workers who have different ideas about how the job should be done — and indeed about what the job actually is, as there are still plenty of grey areas in the definition of ethnology as a subject.

The foreground is filled, as always, with the minute detail of coffee-breaks, filing-systems, staff-meetings and committees, but slightly offstage there's also the less distinct story of how Maarten's work is affecting his marriage. Maarten's mother-in-law is declining gradually into dementia, whilst Beerta is still mentally alert but has never quite recovered physically from the stroke he suffered at the end of Part Three, and is now living in a care-home. As the title has already given it away, it's no surprise to see this part ending with the Office being renamed in Beerta's honour. Other memorable set-pieces include a rather harrowing week of interviews of candidates for a vacant post, and a couple of departmental outings, on one of which Maarten has to be saved from sinking into a morass.

The scale and level of trivial detail of this novel is such that you sometimes get the depressing illusion that you're reading it in real time, and that Maarten will never catch up with you in age, but that's also its strength: it's easy to believe that no-one else has ever got close to the realism with which Voskuil captures the wave of despair that runs through you when you hear the words "I just have a small point concerning the minutes of the last meeting..."

Yoicks, does that sound a chore... so what is it its secret, does it distract you?

I find nothing distracts me. I was watching a movie, Zeit der Störche, a harmless love story set in 1970 in green and watery Havelland and the entire time everything was referring to Afghanistan.

>90 LolaWalser: does it distract you? — not sure, but that may well be what's going on. There's something about that kind of highly detailed examinations of the mundane that can get very compelling. And it's also extremely funny at times, although Voskuil pretends to take it all very seriously.
But there's probably a bit of "because it's there" mountaineering bravura involved as well.

---

Erik Orsenna was one of the guests at the William Christie thing — he was reading what must have been excerpts from his La Fontaine biography in between pieces of related music in one of the concerts, but unfortunately it was a kind of reverse-Beethoven experience: we could all see his moustache fluttering, but no-one beyond the front row could hear what he was saying through it. Opera singers are better trained in projecting their voices than elderly novelists.

Anyway, that resulted in his latest book catching my eye in Paris on my way home:

La passion de la fraternité: Beethoven (2021) by Érik Orsenna (France, 1947- )

  

(Author photo from pre-moustache days)

A popular biography of Beethoven published to mark the 251st anniversary of his birth ...???

... Well, for the reason we all know, the Beethoven-year 2020 was not all that it might have been. In January of that year, Orsenna got together with two musicians to develop an evening of music and readings about the life and works of the great composer. The virus turned up and prevented them from ever taking their performance on tour, and eventually Orsenna repurposed his part of it as the next in his series of chatty biographies, following on from Le Nôtre, La Fontaine, and Beaumarchais. But by then the moment for new Beethoven biographies had almost passed.

The result is an engaging, lively account of Beethoven's life, with a lot of emphasis on the political and social context of his times and a few entertaining parallels from Orsenna's own experience as a courtier during the reign of François Mitterand, and some rather vague thoughts on the political role music, and Beethoven's in particular, has played and continues to play. And what relation "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" has to "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité".

This would probably be an enjoyable introduction to the subject for a non-musician, but it's meant as a handy digest of basic facts and it's unlikely to add anything to what you've already read in other books about Beethoven, particularly since it doesn't say anything about the music itself. Obviously that part would have been handled by the musicians if the project had gone ahead as planned. But he also skimps on some quite important details, for instance when he talks about Beethoven setting Schiller's Ode to joy but doesn't say anything about the poem's complicated textual history, shortened several times by Schiller himself and practically rewritten completely by Beethoven. There are also various minor bits of sloppiness in the text (like his assertion on the second page that all the many small German states in the 18th century were ruled by Prince-Electors) that would have gone unnoticed or been corrected on the fly in a live performance, but stick out rather in print.

Fun, but of rather limited appeal.

While I'm in a French mood (and looking for books to read on the train), time for another Nestor Burma story:

Corrida aux Champs-Elysées (1956) by Léo Malet (France, 1909-1996)

  

This one takes us into the 8th Arrondissement, with Nestor Burma just having finished an assignment as bodyguard to an American film-star, and with his room in a posh hotel on the Champs Elysées paid for by his former client until the end of the month. It's not long before other clients from the film industry seek him out, and from there it's a small step back into the usual dreary routine of life as a noir detective: getting bumps on the head, being kidnapped by gangsters, finding naked blondes in his bed, and so forth. And the corpses piling up around him, needless to say.

Enjoyable, and with plenty of Malet's usual extravagant language, but I didn't feel it worked as well as some of the others in the series: maybe because Hélène is absent on her annual holidays, or because of the way Nestor becomes almost relegated to second place as an assistant of Commissaire Faroux in the official police investigation.

I'm getting down to the last few of the big pile of German books I was given earlier this year by some friends who needed to make a bit of space on their shelves. I know about Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr only because of his Ovid-novel Die letzte Welt, which I read in 2019:

Der Weg nach Surabaya: Reportagen und kleine Prosa (1999) by Christoph Ransmayr (Austria, 1954- )

  

A collection of assorted short pieces from the 80s and 90s that mostly fall under the general heading of "travel-writing", even if their geographical scope is a bit smaller than the title suggests: all but the last few short pieces inn the collection deal with Austria and its immediate neighbours. We visit a Hallig off the North-Frisian coast, and a number of unusual villages in Austria and Bavaria; we go on a bus tour with a bunch of die-hard royalists on their way to celebrate the 90th birthday of ex-empress Zita; we head for Częstochowa in the middle of the Jaruzelski martial law period; we glimpse a South Italian village in the best Carlo Levi tradition; and we ramble off with the author into a discussion of television and what it means to the people who watch it. And then, at the end of the book we get a few historical miniatures (Mehmet at the gates of Constantinople, Daedalus in Knossos, Akbar in Fatehpur, ...) as well as the truck-ride into Surabaya that the title promised us.

Ransmayr doesn't do anything very surprising with this kind of subject-matter, but he has the good journalist's instinct for picking out a few characteristic local people and their stories to provide a framework for the things he wants us to know about the place he's discussing. The writing at its best is tight and compelling — and, where appropriate, also very funny, e.g. in the Hapsburg piece — but there are a few pieces where he seems to have no very clear aim in view, e.g. the essay on television. I think he's at his most interesting when he's talking about how small communities work in the modern world, and the conflicting pressures they are under to create jobs, protect the environment, or entertain visitors.

...and something completely different: this was a recent random find in the little library.

(I suppose this could almost count towards the Lusophone world theme, since Medawar spent his early childhood in Brazil — I don't know if he ever spoke Portuguese, though...)

The limits of science (1984) by P B Medawar (Brazil, UK, 1915-1987)

  

Three short essays on what science is and what it can and can't do, by someone who was not only a very distinguished scientist but also a remarkably talented writer. And probably the sort of book that can be read and appreciated equally by working scientists, philosophers of science, and complete lay-people. Always assuming that they aren't the sort to be easily scared by references that leap back and forth between Coleridge, Shelley, Dr Johnson, seventeenth century playwrights and philosophers, and experimental work in immunology...

"An essay on scians" considers a whole raft of assertions about what science is and how it is perceived, often responding to them in unexpectedly playful ways — for example, he suggests that one of the joys of science is that essentially anyone can do it, and as a career-path it is, like sport in developing countries, a great way for ambitious young people from modest backgrounds to widen their horizons.

"Can scientific discovery be premeditated?" argues against the fashionable idea that scientists should be commissioned by funding bodies to answer specific (useful) questions: he points to numerous examples where someone researching in one field has made a discovery that turns out to be useful in quite a different area (e.g. x-rays). But he doesn't want us to call this "luck" — scientists go into such situations with their eyes open, and have trained themselves to see possible connections and crossovers.

The title-essay "The limits of science"looks into the consequences of the idea that there are certain types of question that are not susceptible to scientific examination — the famous "why are we here?" type of question. Medawar rejects the approach that these should be dismissed as not being valid questions: obviously they are questions some of us have a real need to ask. But he doesn't accept that this means we should put forward myth, metaphysics or religion as a more valid (or even equally valid) way of answering such questions. As long as they do not provide answers that can be empirically tested, he's not buying it. (But he does accept that metaphysics, in particular, can help to suggest ways of approaching difficult questions that scientists can learn from.)

"Limits" also provokes him to ask whether there is a built-in limit to the potential of science to answer questions that are susceptible to scientific investigation, just as there seem to be hard limits to things like population growth or the maximum size of aircraft. Is there ever going to be "too much knowledge" for scientists to keep an overview and do useful research into new things? He doesn't think so. The notion that there was ever a time when "one person could know everything" is silly, people have always specialised and worked in teams, and they continue to do so. Perceptively (given that he was writing in 1984, at the end of a long career), he also points out that computer databases have eliminated the need for an individual researcher to carry any but the most relevant technical knowledge around in their head.

Lovely writing, clear thinking, and only a hundred pages long. What's not to like?

And another recent find, to add to my growing list of novellas commissioned for the Dutch book promotion week. This is the 1967 gift. I've previously read de Hartog's most famous book, Hollands Glorie (Captain Jan), an epic about the crews of salvage tugs that became a symbol of Dutch resistance during the German occupation. Although he spent the first half of his life as a Dutch seafarer and writer, he moved to the US (Houston, Texas) after the war and switched to writing mostly in English, but he kept up strong links with the Netherlands.

Herinneringen van een bramzijgertje (1967) by Jan de Hartog (Netherlands, 1914-2002)

  

Jan de Hartog grew up as the child of academics in Amsterdam, but for a while in the early 1920s his mother was in hospital and he was sent to a foster-family in the Zuiderzee fishing port of Huizen. It was there that he made his first trip on a fishing boat and — as he describes it in this lightly-fictionalised account — realised that he had equally strong passions for the sea and for storytelling.

By the 1920s, it was illegal for fishermen to employ anyone under the age of sixteen, but — as de Hartog explains — almost all of them had a clandestine "bramzijgertje" (cabin-boy) on board. No-one knew how they got there, although of course it was every schoolboy's dream to put aside boring life on shore. The narrator is one of those boys, and by a suitable accident he finds himself taken on as bramzijgertje on the OD69, the smartest botter in "Oostdam" (i.e. Huizen). We get a lovely description of his experience of the Zuiderzee herring fishery in the last years before the closing of the Afsluitdijk killed it off. The entire fishing fleet (minus the Catholic Volendammers) puts into Hoorn for Sunday service, where the "illegal" boys are sent up to the gallery and somehow have to get through the tedium of two three-hour services without provoking the ire of the church dog-whipper, but afterwards there's the relief of a storytelling evening aboard the fishing boats.

Pretty much pure nostalgia, with a fair amount of de Hartog's anger at the way an entire regional culture was killed off in the name of progress and coastline-management. Splendidly engaging storytelling, anyway, and a book that probably works as well for adult readers as it does for children.

(This isn't acknowledged anywhere as a translation, but it seems to be a Dutch reworking of de Hartog's earlier English book The lost sea.)

I spent last week sailing around the Ionian islands with a group of friends; we didn't give each other much time to read, but we did spend quite some time discussing the little we remembered of the Odyssey, especially after visiting the bronze-age site on Ithaca known as "the Palace of Odysseus". It seems that there is no real evidence that the "Ithaca" of Odysseus corresponds to the island that now goes under that name, or that Odysseus ever existed — there are plenty of plausible but contradictory theories going around. But anyway, revisiting the area makes it all seem a bit more relevant, and the local people clearly attach a lot of importance to their connection with the founding documents of the western literary tradition. Time for a re-read.

The last time I read through the Odyssey from cover to cover must have been in childhood, in the famous Penguin Classics No.1, E.V. Rieu's prose translation. Which I still have on the shelf. Since then I've had to translate selected chunks at school, like everyone else, and I've read all sorts of secondary works that take the Iliad and the Odyssey as their starting points. This time, I thought I'd go for a more recent translation, and I picked Stephen Mitchell's 2013 version almost at random. Possibly more influenced by his slightly spooky facial resemblance to my primary-school headmaster than by the cheap and nasty cover design...

The Odyssey (?; this translation 2013) by Homer, translated by Stephen Mitchell (USA, 1943- )

  

The Mitchell translation
Stephen Mitchell is a translator of poetry rather than an academic classicist, and I was hoping that might be a good qualification for a readable version of the Odyssey: in practice, I wasn't disappointed by his effort, but I wasn't blown away, either. He doesn't really seem to pull anything out of the text that wasn't there in earlier versions, but he does achieve a reasonably consistent, agreeable style that isn't constantly reminding you that it is a translation. He adopts a kind of compromise between prose and verse, a pentameter that uses everything it can find in the metrical toolbox apart from iambs, and thus doesn't really sound like English verse at all, unless you listen very carefully. It's often even more homely and prosaic than Rieu's prose — an effect that is enhanced by Mitchell's decision to ignore the poet's use of fixed epithets, which he treats as mere metrical stuffing. But you do get the feeling that Mitchell must have had Rieu's translation in the back of his mind as he worked: where there's no obvious reason not to, he often uses very similar expressions.

They came at last to the banks of a beautiful stream,
where the washing basins were always filled with clear water
welling up through them, to clean the dirtiest clothes.
Here they unyoked the mules from the wagon and sent them
along the stream to graze on the rich, sweet clover,
then lifted the clothes from the wagon and carried them down
into the basins, and each girl began to tread them,
making a game to see who could finish first.
Mitchell, from Book 6

In due course they reached the noble river with its never-failing pools, in which there was enough clear water always bubbling up and swirling by to clean the dirtiest clothes. Here they turned the mules loose from under the yoke and drove them along the eddying stream to graze on the sweet grass. Then they lifted the clothes by armfuls from the cart, dropped them into the dark water and trod them down briskly in the troughs, competing with each other in the work.
E V Rieu, same passage from Book 6

The text itself
What you forget when you haven't read a work through for a long time is how it hangs together: the proportions and the sequence in which the story is told are often different from what you recall. I was taken by surprise by the way the foreground story takes place within a very tight timeframe of a few weeks at the end of Odysseus's long journey, whilst most of his earlier adventures are told very compactly in a story-within-a-story section where he is explaining himself to Nausicaa's father Alcinous. Odysseus's arrival in Ithaca and his revenge on the suitors, on the other hand, take up much more of the book than I remembered.

I'd also forgotten what an obsessive quick-change artist Athena is in the story: she slips into and out of more disguises than even Sherlock Holmes can manage in one book. It seems a little pointless, since we always know it's her, and Odysseus and Telemachus soon get to recognise the signs as well.

It's a marvellous story, of course, in a lot of ways, but it's interesting that it's very much a celebration of the value of peaceful domesticity, which is constantly regretting the human loss and material damage that go together with high adventure. Even the ghost of Achilles tells us that it's better to be alive as a serf than to be the most glorious of dead heroes. Of course, it does end with rather more brutal slaughter than most of us would wish to inflict upon even the most recalcitrant of uninvited guests, but even there the poet makes Odysseus stop and protest to the goddess a couple of times before he actually starts shooting his visitors.

 
Village square, Stavros, Ithaca, with bust of Odysseus, model of "Palace of Odysseus", and various information displays about the geography of the Odyssey.

>96 thorold: I spent last week sailing around the Ionian islands Sigh - that sounds wonderful.

I'm one of those whose only exposure to The Odyssey was translating it in various classes, which somehow never made me want to pursue it. That's a shame really, as so much literature is based on it and I always felt I was missing some vital reference. Your review does make it sound like something I could tackle now though!

>97 SassyLassy: Yes, it was rather wonderful, quite apart from it being the first sailing and only the second foreign trip I've done since b.c.

With holiday trips out of the way for the time being, it was a good moment to go back to the library yesterday, and I came up with this useful follow-up to >96 thorold:

Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey : a biography (2007) by Alberto Manguel (Argentina, Canada, etc., 1943- )

  

A nice, compact cultural history of different ways of reading the founding epics of Greek culture, from the ancient Greeks themselves right through to Margaret Atwood and Derek Walcott. As erudite and wide-ranging as you would expect from Manguel, but lively and accessible at the same time. Some predictable stuff — Keats and Chapman's Homer — but also plenty of less obvious insights, like the odd ways stories taken from Homer came into the north European folktale repertoire via Arabic literature. Or the Counter-Reformation prejudice against Greek culture that left Homer largely unread in Catholic Europe in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, to the extent that Miguel de Unamuno could be appointed professor of Greek in Salamanca in 1891 despite having no knowledge of that language. (Manguel points out that Racine made Greek socially acceptable again in France.)

Inevitably, in such a short book, there isn't space to explore everything — Henry Fielding only gets a brief mention, for instance, and Christa Wolf is missed out altogether. But, true to his origins, Manguel does give us a short discussion of the Argentinian epic Martin Fierro, whilst the closing chapter is mostly taken up by a discussion of a story by his own mentor, Borges.

This probably isn't a book that will make you read Homer if you never saw the need to before, but it is helpful in giving a bit of perspective on the sort of role the Iliad and Odyssey have played in Western culture over the past three millennia. And it's a great pleasure to read for its own sake.

...and since I went to the library, I couldn't very well come back without the regulation Gratuitous Technical Book:

Dawn of the electronic age : electrical technologies in the shaping of the modern world, 1914 to 1945 (2009) by Frederik Nebeker (USA, - )

  

Frederik Nebeker is a historian of science based at the IEEE History Center, Rutgers

In 1914, electricity was already a fairly well-established technology in most developed countries, but its use was pretty much confined to three main areas: telecommunications, lighting and transportation. Thirty-one years later, at the close of World War II, there was a huge electronics industry looking to switch to peacetime products, there were several electronic digital computers in operation, William Shockley and his colleagues at Bell Labs were heading towards the development of the transistor, manufacturing industry was almost completely based on electric power, and there was practically no area of human activity where electricity wasn't used as a power source or for transmitting control and monitoring signals.

Along the way, we also saw the creation of permanent R&D establishments in both government and industry, with targeted research programmes. And electrical and electronic engineering became professional disciplines with their own qualifications, teaching programmes, professional bodies, standards committees, and all the rest (even in-house historians!).

In principle, the story of how this happened and how it changed the way we live is a fascinating one, but because electricity appears in so many different applications and contexts, it turns out that you can't really disentangle it from all the other things that were going on between 1914 and 1945. Lenin was obsessed with the electrification of the Soviet Union, whilst Hitler and Mussolini both owed a lot of their success to effective manipulation of new technologies like p.a. systems, cinema films and radio broadcasts, but how meaningful is it to focus on that one aspect of their careers in a book that also has to cover the construction of hydroelectric schemes, the development of radar, the social effects of broadcast radio, telephones, and refrigerators; the role of the telephone operator, the early days of medical imaging; the automobile self-starter, and a thousand other trivial and not-so-trivial applications of electricity? Nebeker often seems to get lost along the way, and it becomes quite hard to see any kind of plan or analytical insight in the book. It's never quite analytical enough to be social history, but it's rarely quite specific enough to be technical history either: Nebeker's explanations of developments in electronics are often hair-raisingly imprecise.

It doesn't help that the IEEE obviously didn't put more than the minimum of funds into the project, and that clearly wasn't enough to pay for any kind of editing. The book is a mess, even by the standards of 21st century technical books, full of grammatical errors, unintended repetitions, and minor inconsistencies — Nebeker seems to be a specialist in quoting two different but quite similar statistics for the same thing in different parts of the book, for example. And the picture editing was clearly even more on-the-cheap than the text. It doesn't look as though they allowed him to use anything that wasn't royalty-free.

I'm chartreuse-green with envy about the Greek sailing trip. But my time will come...! :)

I actually watched archive films about the damming of the Zuiderzee, not very long ago... brought back memories of my dad and his Dutch colleagues and various roads not taken.

Medawar's nice. I still tell people to read his essay on scientific fraud.

Yes, I should read more Medawar. I did read the fraud essay a long time ago, I think.

I've got several other big books on the go, but this one crept in first, a slightly unplanned read of a book I just grabbed to have something to read on the train. It's one of the last of my random pile of German books from earlier this year.

Kaminer is a Russian who's been living in Berlin since 1990 and has made his name, first as a radio journalist and then as a writer, as an outsider commenting humorously on German life. I first came across him through his 2007 book about allotment-garden culture in Berlin, Mein Leben im Schrebergarten.

Die Reise nach Trulala (2002) by Wladimir Kaminer (Russia, Germany, 1967- )

  

As with Bill Bryson (who does for the British and Americans pretty much the same thing Kaminer does for the Russians and Germans), Kaminer gets rapidly less funny the more of his books you read: he's something of a one-trick pony. All the same, he's a fluent and entertaining writer, and there's a lot of good stuff in this collection of essays about the collision between the romance of travel as an idea and the reality of other places.

He writes about the disappointment other people have experienced in going to Paris, about the decline of Russian illusions about the American Dream, and about his own experience of visiting Copenhagen without seeing Denmark (he gets sucked into the pothead culture of Christiania and spends three weeks listening to the same conversation every night). He also tells us about his friend who — despite Kaminer's warnings that there was nothing to see there — went to the Crimea to look for traces of Joseph Beuys and discovers a whole culture of local people who have reinvented themselves as descendants of the Crim Tatars who (supposedly) looked after Beuys when his aircraft crashed, and who now live off the flocks of German art-historians who come to the region every summer to spend their research grants. We clearly shouldn't take everything we read here entirely literally...

>101 thorold: Sounds fun, despite your warnings. I've not read Bill Bryson either (despite one of his titles languishing on my TBR for 25 years), but I feel like I can guess enough about his style to get what you mean by it becoming jading after a while. I think I feel like that with David Sedaris' writing after a while. The biting humour becomes very same-old after a while.

Still, this book by Kaminer sounds quite fun.

>102 AlisonY: If you read him, stick with his non fiction, or the 2 or 3 of his early books. Over time I found him less witty and just more judgemental and mean. However I absolutely loved Mother Tongue and One Summer, America 1927

>102 AlisonY: >103 cindydavid4: For Bryson, I think my favourites were Notes from a small island and A walk in the woods. But they were the ones I read first, after that saturation started to set in.

It looks as though Kaminer hasn't been translated into English much, so the saturation problem is unlikely to arise unless you read him in German. (Russendisko seems to be the only one that has made it into English)

A different topic: a few years ago I read John Huth's marvellous The lost art of finding our way, a physicist's take on traditional navigation. More recently, I read Christina Thompson's Sea People: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific, which does its best to look at the history of navigation in Polynesia from a non-European viewpoint. Now a book that tries to put it into a global context:

Beyond the blue horizon : how the earliest mariners unlocked the secrets of the oceans (2012) by Brian M Fagan (UK, USA, 1936- )

  

Brian Fagan put together his long professional experience as an archaeologist and anthropologist with his even longer private experience as a small-boat sailor to create this fascinating global overview of what we know about seafaring as it was practiced before the era of scientific navigation, at what motivated people to sail out of sight of land and at what tools and techniques they had available to them to be able to do it (reasonably) safely and repeatably.

He looks separately at the history of seafaring in Polynesia, in the Aegean, in the Indian Ocean, in Northern Europe, and on the West coast of North and Central America. What is immediately striking is how early in the development of human societies in all those regions there were communities that relied on trade with other communities, in some cases a very long way away, to supply themselves with certain essential commodities. Obsidian and, later, metals for making tools; important ritual objects like cowrie shells; even wood for building boats had to be imported in some parts of the world (notably the Arab peninsula). It's astonishing to realise that there was regular trade between Arabia, India and the East African coast long before the rise of Islam.

In the Pacific and the Indian Ocean predictable seasonal reversals in wind direction must have helped to make it possible to voyage into "the unknown" and know that you would be able to get home again, but in all parts of the world navigators seem to have relied on variations in the same basic techniques of ocean navigation — using stars to follow lines of latitude to known destinations; using wave patterns, clouds, and marine life as clues to the proximity of land.

Techniques of boat construction varied around the world, though: the invention of the outrigger meant that there was no urgent need for Polynesians to build anything more substantial than a canoe, whilst the Aleutian kayak was always the perfect hunting craft for northern waters, as long as there were sea-lion skins available to make it from. Elsewhere reeds, balsa wood, and eventually split planks were used, although planked construction on a large scale had to wait for the invention of the nail (there were limits to the size of hull that could be built with stitched planks).

A very interesting book, shaped by Fagan's ability to give us a clear digest of the mass of archaeological literature on the subject and season it with his own practical insights into what does and doesn't make sense from a seafarer's point of view.

>104 thorold: yes re those books of bryson. Theres another that was good neither here nor there: travels in europehis first travel book, and I remember trying so hard to keep from laughing while I was reading it the tube in london. People were looking at me very strange

...and a last-minute oddball entry for the Lusophone thread:

Gods toorn over Nederland (2008; original: A ira de Deus sobre a Holanda) by José Rentes de Carvalho (Portugal, Netherlands, 1930- ), translated from Portuguese to Dutch by Arie Pos

  

The young José Rentes de Carvalho, a political exile from Salazar's Portugal, arrived in the Netherlands in 1956 to do some research for the commercial attaché at the Brazilian embassy, a job he expected to take him a few weeks. One thing led to another, as it often does in such cases, and fifty years later Rentes found himself still living in Amsterdam, after a varied career as journalist, businessman and university teacher. He still writes in Portuguese, though. After the revolution he started to be able to publish his novels and non-fiction in Lisbon (although in practice he seems to be better known in Dutch translation).

This book is partly a look at Dutch life as he has experienced it over the long period he has been here, but it's mostly a kind of self-diagnosis to work out what the condition of being a long-term expat does to the way you see the world. He traces his experience through the familiar stages that start with amused contempt for the strange customs of the host country (especially those surrounding food and drink, hospitality, and sex — all of them very bizarre to a Southern European), progress to a deepening understanding of and admiration for the social and political values that the Dutch pride themselves on, and then eventually descend into a pessimistic awareness that Dutch citizens and their political leaders are just as subject to self-interest, mediocrity, indecisiveness and hypocrisy as everyone else in the world.

Of course, when he's dealing with such a long period of time, Rentes also has to allow for the enormous changes that have taken place in the Netherlands in the period that he's been living here, from a small and very provincial place recovering from the blows of the war to a relatively rich country that sees itself as a global force in politics and business, but which is struggling with the social changes resulting from mass immigration. Rentes looks at some of the big events in that story — Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and comes to depressing conclusions about the country's future. Possibly he doesn't allow sufficiently for the other thing that affects most long-term expats: age-related pessimism. As we all know, it's not just our host country that is going down the drain, but our country of origin (all long-term expats will agree that, whichever country they came from, that country is now governed by a bunch of corrupt baboons) and everywhere else too.

Given that I arrived in the Netherlands at the same age as Rentes (but some years later), and have also stuck here for unclear reasons, I found this quite a fascinating read. Ask me in about 25 years if I agree with him...

>105 cindydavid4: Yes, I liked that one as well, come to think of it!

Gods toorn over Nederland sounds fascinating; unfortunately it doesn't seem to be translated into English. I hope to be fluent enough in Portuguese in the next two or three years to be able to read books in that language.

>108 kidzdoc: I’m sure you’ll be there soon. Once you can read Spanish, reading Portuguese is little more than a bit of lateral thinking and some new spelling rules. Spoken Portuguese seems to be more challenging!

I’m pretty sure I’d never have come across Rentes de Carvalho as an author in any other way than by browsing the classified physical collection in a big library. Anywhere else he would probably just slip through the net. Now I know about him, I’m curious to read some of his earlier works.

—-

So much for Q3 — it went even more quickly than usual.

My Q4 thread (still under construction) is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/335663