thorold hopes to avoid endless rue in Q1 22

When I was one-and-twenty
     I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
     Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
     And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
     And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

(A.E. Housman)

Well, I used lines from that poem already last year, and I'm a little older than twenty-two by now, but you get the idea. Welcome to my first 2022 thread!

For those who don’t know me, I’m Mark, from The Hague, Netherlands (but with roots in the North of England). Hiker, occasional sailor, retired bureaucrat, and (currently) incompetent beginner at bookbinding. This will be my seventh year in Club Read, assuming I counted right.

My reading interests are difficult to predict, but often guided to some extent by the quarterly themes of Reading Globally: I'm leading the "Around the Indian Ocean" theme in Q1, so expect to see a lot of duplication between this thread and that one.

The 2021 threads are here:
Q1: https://www.librarything.com/topic/327713
Q2: https://www.librarything.com/topic/331117
Q3: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333425
Q4: https://www.librarything.com/topic/335663

2021 stats:

In Q4:

I finished 47 books in Q4 (Q1: 36, Q2: 43, Q3: 55).

Author gender: F: 15, M: 32 (68% M) (Q1: 66% M, Q2: 77% M, Q3 73% M)

Language: EN 27, NL 11, DE 5, FR 4 (57% EN) (Q1: 52% EN, Q2: 33% EN, Q3 51% EN)
Translations: 2 from Portuguese (1 to Dutch, 1 to French), 1 each from Croatian and Italian

2 books were related to the Q3 Lusophone theme, 3 to the "Translation prize winners" theme

Publication dates from 1859 to 2021, mean 1992, median 2005; 9 books were published in the last five years.

Formats: library 25, physical books from the TBR 8, physical books from the main shelves (re-reads) 4, audiobooks 0, paid ebooks 5, other free/borrowed 5 — 17% from the TBR (Q1: 52%, Q2: 58%, Q3: 51% from the TBR)

37 unique first authors (1.3 books/author; Q1 1.2, Q2 1.1, Q3: 1.0)

By gender: M 29, F 8 : 78% M (Q1 70% M, Q2 77% M, Q3 72% M)
By main country: UK 10, NL 8, FR 3, DE 3, US 4, 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)
01/10/2021: 89 books (69902 book-days) (change: 28 read, 29 added)
01/01/2022: 93 books (77389 book-days) (change: 8 read, 12 added)



The average days per book still on the pile is 832 (1172 at the end of 2019; 879 at the end of 2020; 833 at the end of Q1, 919 at end of Q2, 785 at the end of Q3). Obviously the splurging on library books after a long period of not using my library card took its toll...

2021 was a much more "normal" reading year for me than 2020. I'm not quite sure why, but it's probably reassuring to find that the infection rate of my library is not increasing monotonically. There does seem to be an odd sort of seven-year cycle going on, though. Check back at the start of 2029 to see whether this was just a freak.

2022 plans

Well, there are a lot of things I could be reading in 2022, and probably a lot of other things I shall be reading that have nothing to do with any plans I might make. Some general lines, at least:

— the Reading Globally theme reads, especially the Indian Ocean in Q1
— the CR Victorian theme — I've started David Copperfield already
— the Dutch mega-novel Het Bureau, where I got up to the end of part 4/7 last year
— Toni Morrison: I started a read-through of her work last year but only got as far as Beloved before I was side-tracked
— that pesky TBR pile and its 93 books. Especially the two hefty leftovers from my 2020 Christmas books, plus The books of Jacob from Christmas 2021...
— my RL book-club, where we do still occasionally manage to finish a book

I just hope there aren't any more books about Neutral Moresnet. I'm fairly sure I've exhausted that topic by now...

Happy New Year! Your thread is always a pleasure to read, although not terribly good for keeping a manageable wishlist...

Happy New Year! Looking forward to following your reading again this year.

I'm looking forward to the Indian Ocean theme read. I'm not sure yet what I'll read and will key an eye on the thread for suggestions.

Happy New Year!
Given your amazing reading pace, wondering how long it will take until your first review!
Seriously, I'm looking forward as always to all of them

Hello Mark, I will be following your reading with interest this year. I am always impressed by how many books you read, especially since so many of the are what I would describe as serious or difficult books. But I get lots of ideas here for my TBR or wishlist. Here's to a good reading year.

>5 Dilara86:->9 arubabookwoman: Thanks all for the good wishes! I'll take your comments to heart and try to read more frivolous books in 2022 :-)

I came into 2022 partway through a long biography, so it may be a day or two before I post any reviews. But watch this space!

>1 thorold: Someone suggested that I should have chosen a photo with a French street name on it, in keeping with my subject-line. There doesn't seem to be anything really suitable in my photo stockpile. This could be another approach to infinite rue, perhaps:

Happy New Year Mark and good luck with the bookbinding. A dangerous occupation for an avid reader?

>10 thorold: This picture and your comment made me smile. I’ll be following along, mostly lurking. You always have something of interest.

Cool stats and impressed your TBR came down 12% over two years. I'm following again, of course. I've picked up a lot here over the last few years.

I'm interested in bookbinding too, though not enough to have ever approached it in any organized way. I hope you post some pictures of projects. And Happy New Year!

It's an unusually long time since I finished a book: 16 December was the last one. Various false starts, as well as seasonal distractions and the above-mentioned outbreak of bookbinding in my living room. There's a bookbinding post and a few pictures coming (>11 baswood:, >14 lisapeet:), but first it's about time for the first book of 2022, one of my Christmas books, and a follow-up to my reading about Beethoven and the Schumanns over the past few years:

Johannes Brahms : a biography (1997) by Jan Swafford (USA, 1946- )

  

Brahms is not the most obvious subject for a biography: he was a hard-working career musician, who put a lot of complexity into his music but kept his life almost ostentatiously simple. He was notoriously healthy, and never married or had a serious love-affair (plenty of flirtations, though, including one of forty years' duration with Clara Schumann). No-one has ever discovered any suggestion of him having sex with anyone other than a prostitute, but there's no mystery about the reasons for that: his experiences playing piano in sailors' dance-halls in Hamburg as a boy obviously left him with seriously distorted ideas about women and sexuality. But that's pretty much the only "dark spot" for biographers to illuminate, and it's soon dealt with.

Apart from that, there's the famous Brahmsians vs. Wagnerites divide that enlivened musical debate in the second half of the 19th century. Swafford has his fun with this, of course, but he also makes sure we understand that it was never quite as simple as that. Brahms himself was known to say positive things about Wagner's operas, and he owned a number of Wagner scores and knew them intimately. He often joked in later life that for an old man, the temptation to write operas was like the temptation to get married — he took care never to compete with Wagner on his own turf. There's also the bizarre way Brahms's (Jewish) former friend Hermann Levi became Wagner's preferred conductor after Hans von Bülow (whose wife had run away with Wagner) defected the other way to become the most respected interpreter of Brahms...

Even if his major works often took a while to work their way into the hearts of the public, Brahms was publishing a steady stream of stuff eminently suitable for middle-class people to play in their drawing-rooms or amateur choirs to sing, making him one of the first major composers to earn his living mostly from publications. Between the Wiegenlied ("Brahms's Lullaby") and the German Requiem, he pretty much offered a cradle-to-grave music service, with more Liebeslieder and Hungarian Dances than anyone could possibly want in between...

Swafford doesn't spend much time on this "mass-market" side of Brahms, but he does go into rewarding amounts of detail about the composition and reception of the symphonies, concertos and major chamber works. And that seems to be where this biography really scores: Swafford manages to make the mysterious and very technical process of composing music almost accessible for the non-musician. And that "almost" is only there because you do need at least a certain amount of background knowledge of music history and of basic concepts like forms and keys and time signatures to follow his explanations, without which you probably wouldn't be reading a book like this anyway.

The stress is on how Brahms built new and unexpected things on the existing structures of classical and romantic music: he was writing for a very informed public, and he took care to promote the wider understanding of music history, bringing out new editions of earlier composers and forcing the Viennese public to listen to Bach and Palestrina whether they liked it or not. Swafford credits Brahms with pushing through the switch in concert-hall repertoire from mostly contemporary programming — as it had been up to that point — to the canon-based programmes that still dominate things today. I suspect that's an exaggeration, but he obviously played a big part in making the listening public more aware that appreciating music implies knowing about where it comes from historically.

There are some minor things I don't like about the book: it's over-long, and Swafford repeats himself a lot when talking about non-musical background topics ("Ah yes, there's the "Antisemitism" theme from Chapter One again..."). And there's some carelessness about the use of idioms — it's not a good idea to fix in the reader's mind the image of Brahms putting failed works and early drafts "in the stove" to destroy them if you also talk about him putting pieces that need more refinement "back in the oven". But those are all very minor things, the point of this book is to talk about Brahms and his composition process and his relationships with his musical contemporaries, and that Swafford does extremely well.

“notoriously healthy” :)

I don’t have to background concepts you mention, but I enjoyed your review and all this info on Brahms.

There's a week long bookbinding course here every summer, but each year it seems I am away or people are visiting. Each year I vow "next year". Maybe this is the one.

>15 thorold: Enjoyed the Brahms review. That is odd about "in the stove" vs "back in the oven" (surely it would be a stove top simmer instead), and there's not even the intervention of translation.

>17 SassyLassy: In German it would be even worse, "stove" and "oven" would both be "Ofen".
Shades of the "often/orphan" joke in Pirates of Penzance...

Belated Happy New Year. I look forward to this year's supply of interesting writing and reviews on your thread. Cheers.

Second book of the new year, and the first for the Indian Ocean theme read — this is a paperback I picked up from a local Little Library, which has been on my TBR for a few months. I didn't notice it when I picked it up, but the back part of the book has got damp at some point, and the pages start being wrinkly and slightly discoloured just about the point where the Ibis puts to sea at last. Almost as though it was done by design..

Sea of poppies (2008) by Amitav Ghosh (India, 1956- )

  

A historical novel set in 1838, with the East India Company's lucrative opium trade stalled because of the frivolous objections of the Chinese government to the import of large quantities of addictive drugs. There are rumours that Lord Palmerston may be contemplating firm action to teach them the value of Free Trade, but that's for the later parts of the trilogy.

In this first part, Ghosh sets himself the task of getting a bunch of very diverse characters on to the schooner Ibis, sailing from Calcutta to Mauritius with a cargo of indentured labourers ("coolies", or girmitiyas). But he has a lot of scene-setting to do, and social and historical background to fill in, and after all it is a trilogy, so there's plenty of time, and the ship doesn't sail until about three-quarters of the way into the book anyway.

The book picks up a lot of the typical themes of 19th century adventure stories: disguises, rescues, accidents, orphans fending for themselves, people passing as other races or genders, cruel tyrants, pirates, prisons, shipboard floggings, and all the rest of it. There's even a widow rescued from her husband's funeral pyre in the nick of time, although sadly Ghosh forgets that you're supposed to do this from a hot-air balloon... But this isn't a pastiche of Kipling or Jules Verne: there's a hard modern edge to the threats that the characters face, and you know that it isn't necessarily all going to turn out right in the end. And, perhaps more to the point, there's a sharp postcolonial view of life that questions what it sees and doesn't allow the reader to slip automatically into identifying with the European characters.

Ghosh is evidently deeply in love with the languages of the period, from the bizarre Indianised English of the British (what would later be called Hobson-Jobson) and the peculiarities of nautical English and the very specific shipboard pidgin used to communicate between European officers and their multiracial "lascar" crew members. Not to mention Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, etc. His exploration of odd words and their origins is perhaps a distraction from the unfolding of the story, but it is a great part of the enjoyment of reading the book.

The only place where he strikes a slightly wrong note linguistically is in the character Paulette, whom he makes to speak an implausible Hercule Poirot sort of Franglais, to remind us how different she is in her background from the British around her. But she's also a clever teenage girl, who has grown up bilingual in Bengali and French, in a city where (Indian) English was being spoken all around her, and has lived in a British family for a year when we first meet her. Young people accommodate to the language around them very fast: there's no way she would still be saying "attend" for "wait" and "regard" for "look", entertaining though that is to read. She'd be much more likely to have picked up "have a dekko..."

Sample of Ghosh at his most linguistically over the top, making fun of the English in India:

The unexpected dinner invitation from the budgerow started Mr Doughty off on a journey of garrulous reminiscence. ‘Oh my boy!’ said the pilot to Zachary, as they stood leaning on the deck rail. ‘The old Raja of Raskhali: I could tell you a story or two about him - Rascally-Roger I used to call him!’ He laughed, thumping the deck with his cane. ‘Now there was a lordly nigger if ever you saw one! Best kind of native - kept himself busy with his shrub and his nautch-girls and his tumashers. Wasn’t a man in town who could put on a burrakhana like he did. Sheeshmull blazing with shammers and candles. Paltans of bearers and khidmutgars. Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. And the karibat! In the old days the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough, but we old hands, we’d wait for the curry of cockup and the chitchky of pollock-saug. Oh he set a rankin table I can tell you - and mind you, supper was just the start: the real tumasher came later, in the nautch-connah. Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! Rows of cursies for the sahibs and mems to sit on. Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives. The baboos puffing at their hubble-bubbles and the sahibs lighting their Sumatra buncuses. Cunchunees whirling and tickytaw boys beating their tobblers. Oh, that old loocher knew how to put on a nautch all right! He was a sly little shaytan too, the Rascally-Roger: if he saw you eyeing one of the pootlies, he’d send around a khidmutgar, bobbing and bowing, the picture of innocence. People would think you’d eaten one too many jellybees and needed to be shown to the cacatorium. But instead of the tottee-connah, off you’d go to a little hidden cumra, there to puckrow your dashy. Not a memsahib present any the wiser - and there you were, with your gobbler in a cunchunee’s nether-whiskers, getting yourself a nice little taste of a blackberry-bush.’ He breathed a nostalgic sigh. ‘Oh they were grand old gollmauls, those Rascally burrakhanas! No better place to get your tatters tickled.’

Zachary nodded, as if no word of this had escaped him.

>20 thorold: Great review, Mark. I enjoyed Sea of Poppies when I read it a few years ago. Will you continue with the next one? I read the second, but not the third. Thank you for typing in the long passage. What a hoot!

>20 thorold: I admit Ghosh didn't pull me into the sequel, but I remember the play with the language, which was great fun. Fun review, and, well, crazy quote.

>15 thorold:

I play as a violinist in an amateur orchestra and our April (spring) concert includes Brahm's 1st symphony, and his Tragic Overture. I'm playing 1st violin and 2nd violin respectively and boy is he hard to play. Maybe if he had flirted around a bit more he would have loosened up a little bit with his composing and allowed us violins a little rest for our fingers here and there. So hard!

>23 lilisin: I can imagine! It was partly through the comments of a violinist friend that I started listening to Brahms more attentively.

Swafford talks a lot about Brahms’s long friendship with Joseph Joachim — apparently Joachim often had to read him the riot act about the unreasonable things he was asking string players to do, but it didn’t always help.

Having just read your answer to Question for the Avid Reader #2, I thought I'd tell you about a new book I've just reserved at the library (but haven't read yet!) called Rabalaïre that centers around a bicycling anti-hero. Here's the start of Marguerite Beaux's review:

Vous connaissez l’expression « avoir un petit vélo dans la tête » ? Elle ne saurait mieux s’appliquer qu’à « Rabalaïre », le nouveau roman massif, obsessionnel et totalement addictif du réalisateur Alain Guiraudie. Le narrateur, Jacques, est un quadragénaire homosexuel qui met à profit son chômage en faisant du vélo, en quête de beaux paysages et de rencontres. Un « rabalaïre », comme on dit en occitan : un type sans attaches, qui arrive d’on ne sait où, s’incruste un peu et puis repart.

>25 Dilara86: Mmm. Tempting. But 1040 pages long…. Just what I don’t need right now.

Great sample of Ghosh: Gosh!

>20 thorold:

Reading that para and what you say about the linguistic fireworks, I couldn't help flashing back to the strange and sly All about H. Hatterr--any chance you read it? It's just that it appears as if it may be an almost complementary piece to your book. Instead of the "Indianised British" there is the Anglicised Indian, Mr. Hatterr, whose language is no less baroque than that example but in the opposite direction.

>26 thorold: Oh dear! I hadn't noticed the page count when I ordered it :-( And I've just started the collected works of Louis Guilloux - that's a 1114-page doorstop! Now I understand why it was available straight away despite featuring in the new acquisition highlights.

>28 LolaWalser: No, I didn’t know about that, but it sounds interesting, especially with Salman Rushdie’s comment that Narayan and Desani are the Richardson and Sterne (respectively) of Indian literature…

All that history of loving baroque language is probably also a clue to why P G Wodehouse is so popular in India.

The next book seems to need a bit of introduction, because it's very closely linked with my current obsession with bookbinding. If you just want the review, skip to the next post.

I first came across French art historian Henry Havard (1838-1921) a few years ago, through a new Dutch translation of his travel book describing a summer holiday cruise around the Dead cities of the Zuiderzee. He wrote this in 1874, during a period when he was living as a political exile in the Netherlands, and it was an instant bestseller, rapidly translated into Dutch, English and German, and together with its two sequels it's credited with giving a major boost to the nascent Dutch tourist industry.

I was very interested to read what he had to say about the country as it was in the 1870s, and I looked around for a copy of the three books in the original French. All I was able to come up with inexpensively at the time, however, was a rather sorry-looking set still in the original publisher's temporary paper binding, liable to fall apart if you so much as looked at them.



I couldn't actually read them like that, so I ended up reading the second and third books as pdf's from archive.org

But I kept the idea in mind that I was going to do something to give the old books a useful life. I even had a recommendation from a friend of a local bookbinder who had done a good job for him on a similar project, but I somehow never got around to following that up.

Recently, with the combination of lockdowns and winter weather, I decided I would like to have a go myself. Apart from the Havard project, I have quite a few battered old books on my shelves that could do with a bit of repair, but certainly aren't valuable enough to justify paying someone to work on them. And I have a lot of journal issues in cardboard storage boxes that could do with binding...

YouTube didn't exactly make it look easy, but it did make it intelligible, and it looked as though you could get somewhere without needing to invest in a lot of fancy equipment. I found these two channels particularly helpful (both from the Southern Hemisphere, oddly enough):

https://www.youtube.com/c/DASBookbinding
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVummyss9psNW1k1w4E2IuQ

There's a lot more out there that could be relevant, of course, but a lot of what comes up when you search for "bookbinding" is more about creating interesting craft projects than about making or repairing actual functional books. I also read a couple of classic textbooks, The art of bookbinding (1880) by Joseph William Zaehnsdorf, and Bookbinding and the care of books (1901) by Douglas Cockerell.

From there it was a short step to trying it out! Most of the tools you need are things you already have (cutting-mat, knives, glue, needle and thread, awl, rulers, etc.), and most of the supplies are things you can get from shops that sell artists' materials. It turns out that I also have a specialist stationer quite nearby who stocks book cloth, grey board, and all sorts of fancy papers — and was even happy to drop an order off at my front door during lockdown. The only scarce and exotic things you need, really, are presses for holding the work and for squishing it flat: proper bookbinding presses are things you would either need to find secondhand or commission from a craftsman, but in practice you can manage with boards, clamps, and heavy weights.

 

My sewing set-up vs. Cockerell's. I still have to work on that "harpist" pose!

I got started on a few small projects where I couldn't do any real harm if it all went wrong: I made a new case for a dictionary that had lost its spine long ago and was on the point of losing its covers as well, I bound some old journals from the 1970s, and so on. I was quite pleased to find that I could produce books that seemed perfectly robust and functional, even if they were by no means perfect — it obviously needs experience to judge the right width for the spine and the amount of "square" in the boards.

That gave me the courage to tackle the Havard books. It didn't go completely straightforwardly, in particular dismantling the original bindings without further damaging the old paper was quite tricky, and I had to do a certain amount of repair. I wouldn't advise anyone to try this on books that are of any real value. But the binding part was fine, and I ended up with three quite pleasant (if still slightly clumsy) matching bindings:



I've also been busy with my stock of journals. I've gone into a kind of mass-production mode there, with about fifty volumes bound to date and another twenty or so I'd like to do. Instead of a full case-binding, I'm doing these in the same style the bindery at work used to use, with a flexible cloth spine ("simplified German binding"). I've got some volumes saved from recycling that were bound that way in the thirties, so I'm assuming it will be more than durable enough for a personal library.

 

All of which brings me to Henry Havard again. Whilst I was busy with his books about the Netherlands, I found that he'd also written a book about Flanders. I downloaded a facsimile of that from archive.org as well, but instead of reading it as a pdf on my e-reader, I had the mad idea of creating an extremely labour-intensive and unnecessarily costly print-on-demand version. After all, up until then everything I'd bound had been something I'd already read...

I cleaned up the pdf in ScanTailor, printed out the 420 pages on nice paper using a booklet creator utility to get them in the right order for folding, stitched the sections together and bound them to match the three Dutch books.

 

The result isn't bad, and was quite agreeable to read, even with the slight fuzziness you get from scan + print (I scaled the print up from the original about 10%). Obviously pointless in all sorts of ways, but quite fun to do once in a while.

So, what about the contents of the book?

La terre des Gueux. Voyage dans la Flandre flamingante (1879) by Henry Havard (France, 1838-1921)

Imagine a travel book about Flanders. It will certainly talk about bicycle-racing, beer, bandes-dessinées, surrealism, art nouveau, the Congo, and the First World War, won't it? What else is there?

Now try to imagine that book as it might have been written in the 1870s...

Havard's approach to Flanders is a little bit different from the line he takes in his three Dutch books: this doesn't really pretend to be an account of a specific journey, and there's a lot less direct description of the author's subjective experience. And he didn't have his artist-friends with him, so there are no illustrations. But there's still a lot of colourful anecdote, a lot of it from the medieval period — Havard clearly enjoys nothing more than a good Burgundian story, and regards Charles V and Philip II as the spoilsports who put an end to the really colourful phase of European history. There are some entertaining digressions where he lays into the Belgian clergy whilst pretending to praise their work, and there's a general theme of the opposition between the liberal, enlightened capitalism of the Flemish towns and the conservatism and superstition of the countryside that he sees as the defining element in Flemish history. The book takes its title from the name (Gueux/Geuzen: "beggars") ironically adopted by the 16th century rebels against Spanish authority, revived in the 1870s by Havard's contemporaries in the Flemish liberal movement.

He starts out with Ypres and West Flanders, and slowly works across to cover Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp in the closing chapters. Typically for him, he spends most time on less well-known places like Veurne and Nieuwpoort, and in the three main cities he refers us to other books for the "obvious" stuff and focuses on things he happened to notice (...usually in old manuscripts in the municipal archives) that we probably don't know about. There's a lot about the destructive armed conflicts between neighbouring towns or between trades in the same town, about the complicated relationship between the towns and their (nominal) feudal overlords, but also about the modern traces of medieval institutions like the guilds of crossbowmen and the chambers of rhetoric.

Fun, if you like that sort of thing.

>31 thorold: >32 thorold: Fascinating! Thank you for sharing. I will probably never try it myself, but I loved hearing about your experiences and seeing the photos. Keep us posted!

New level achieved, you're reading books you've published & bound yourself! The bindings look great, the text blocks are perfectly lined... very nice job.

That's really interesting. Thanks for the detail and the photos.

Very cool. I've always been interested in the mechanics of bookbinding but never actually got into the act itself.

What a nice hobby! I don't think I would be brave enough to do the same, but it seems a lot of fun (and patience)!

>31 thorold: >32 thorold: I think this is super cool, thanks for sharing.

>33 labfs39: - >38 rhian_of_oz: Thanks, all! At the level where I am it is mostly patience, really — most of the individual steps aren't that difficult, but there are a lot of them, and a lot of that is repetitive stuff.

Something completely different: a book I came across whilst looking for something else, and picked up more as a reference book than to read from cover to cover:

Toutes les lignes & les gares de France en cartes: L'annuaire Pouey de 1933 (2019) by Clive Lamming (France, 1938- )

  

(Author picture from French Wikipedia)

The Pouey company, founded in the 1880s by a former employee of the Midi railway, filled a gap in the French market of the time by publishing a useful business handbook to freight tariffs. These annual handbooks are prized by modern historians because of the accurate, very up-to-date maps of the French railway system they contained.

Clive Lamming has put together this reprint of the maps for each Département from the 1933 edition of Pouey, each reproduced with a summary on the facing page of the situation in the Département and the changes (closures) that have taken place there since 1933. The maps are reproduced in colour, but reduced from the original to fit on an A4 page, and they are at the limit of legibility. All the same, there's a lot of very interesting information here about railways that have long-since disappeared: I'm sure this is something I'll often be referring to.

Love your book binding and obscure reading. The whole description of book binding was fascinating to me, and I appreciate the pictures.

Thank you for sharing your book binding experience. Very interesting along with the pictures. You will have to let us know when you’ve mastered the “harpist pose”. :-)

>31 thorold: and >32 thorold: Good job. Standing back in admiration to your giving life back to old books.

Fascinating posts about book binding!
I certainly could use you for my copy of Balzac's Old Goriot. Although I don't think it needs anything more than a re-glue but the spine is falling off and I have to be careful with how I hold it as I read so it doesn't completely fall apart. The pages do seem to still be connected by the binding string though.

>43 lilisin: If you want to try, search for “book repair” on YouTube, and you’ll find some useful demonstrations by librarians of how to deal with books that are falling apart. (But bear in mind that they are librarians, and thus have absolutely no scruples when it comes to being violent with books…)

This was a spur of the moment purchase at the Gare du Nord last year, mostly because I was intrigued by the apparent incongruity of the eye-catching flowery cover (by Aline Zalko) on what was evidently a crime novel.

It's a cliché that you know you're getting old when the policemen start looking young, but it's even worse when you learn that that traumatic event in the policeman's distant past happened in the year 2000...

Claire Berest seems to be best-known for Gabriële, a book about their great-grandmother the Dadaist artist Gabriële Buffet-Picabia she co-wrote with her sister Anne Berest, but she's also written several novels independently since 2011.

Artifices (2021) by Claire Berest (France, 1982- )

  

(author photo French Wikipedia)

Abel Bac is a police officer with an impeccable twenty-year service record, no known vices and no private life to speak of. But he does seem to have a weak spot in the distant recesses of his adolescent memories, and there's someone out there who knows about it and is pressing on it hard, putting Abel's mental health — and his career — in peril. Not such an unusual scenario for a crime story, perhaps, except that the torture is inflicted in this case by means of highly sophisticated conceptual art installations, which all seem to be riffing in obscure fashion off a La Fontaine fable.

As a crime story it's a bit too straightforward and tightly plotted, without much room for mystery and unexpected twists, but it works well as a straight novel. The knowing send-up of the modern-art world and the unusual and relatively cliché-free personalities of the two main characters are enough to keep you interested, even if Abel's colleague Camille is a bit too much the obvious Siobhan to his (low-alcohol) Rebus.

This is one I've been dipping into for a while, but keep forgetting to write up, mostly because it lives on the "outsize" shelf:

150 jaar Nederlandse Spoorwegaffiches (2021) by Arjan den Boer (Netherlands, 1972- )

  

There's a special magic in railway posters that other advertisements rarely seem to have — maybe it's because they are so often promoting travel, adventure, and far-away places (or at least cheap tickets to the seaside), or maybe it's because of the circumstances in which we look at them. But whatever the reason, railway posters do very often seem to be memorable images that call up all sorts of pleasant associations when we see them again, even if they are from 150 years ago...

Arjan den Boer takes us through the history of (graphic) advertising on Dutch railways, looking in turn at the different purposes that posters were used for, and their evolution from dense tables of information to evocative (and often quite abstract) artworks designed to be taken in at a glance. Every artist mentioned in the book also gets an entry in a separate biographical section at the end.

There isn't very much in the book about the production processes used for the posters, or about the way railway companies deployed them and evaluated their effectiveness, although we do sometimes hear about posters that were considered too controversial in one way or another.

Railways have a lot of walls to cover, and those walls are seen by a great many people in the course of a day, so when they commission artwork for their advertisements they can afford to go for the best. There are quite a few unexpected names here — the famous marine painter H W Mesdag was commissioned by the Holland Railway to create posters advertising the ferry service from Harwich to Hoek van Holland; the architect H P Berlage did another (less successful) poster for Harwich-Hoek, as well as a very architectural design advertising the North Holland Tramway Company. The artwork of illustrator Dick Bruna (famous for Nijntje/Miffy) was also very present on stations, albeit in his case advertising on behalf of the Bruna family firm, which owned an important station-bookstall concession and published a popular series of paperback books. Sadly, Piet Mondriaan never seems to have designed a railway poster, but he has certainly inspired quite a few. Most posters, of course, were and are designed by specialist commercial artists, but there also seems to have been a steady trickle of railway employees who produced artwork in their spare time.

This is a big, glossy book, published to coincide with an exhibition at the Dutch Railway Museum in Utrecht. It contains reproductions, large and small, of dozens of railway posters, many of them from Arjan den Boer's personal collection, and all very clearly and sharply reproduced.

...and, while I'm busy with picture-books, here's another one that came up via Monica's proposal that we should collectively try to read the books on RebeccaNYC 's "Hope to read soon" list (see here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/337945#). I was curious about it as a book by John Fowles I'd never come across, and I managed to find a secondhand copy.

The tree (1979) by John Fowles (UK, 1926-2005) and Frank Horvat (Italy, France, 1928-2020)

  

This is a collection of some sixty photographs from Frank Horvat's series "Portraits of Trees", accompanied on the facing pages by an essay by Fowles in which he reflects on the ways he and Horvat and other creative artists engage with nature in general and trees in particular, and how impoverished we are when we only see nature in a reductive, scientific, utilitarian way. It's sometimes quite difficult to focus on his quite abstract arguments when you have Horvat's gorgeous images leaping out at you from the opposite page, but it's worth it: there's more to it than holistic seventies tree-hugging.

It is quite amusing the way Fowles insists on the complexity and interelatedness of the forest whilst Horvat is doing everything he can to sterilise and isolate his specimens. You sense that his ideal tree is the one standing by itself in a snowy French field where there is no clear distinction to be seen in the background between earth and sky, whereas Fowles imagines himself in the densely wooded dells of the Undercliff at Lyme Regis. Of course, that's an oversimplification, Horvat admits a few groupings of trees and Fowles also talks about his father's immaculately pruned fruit trees, but they don't seem to have a huge amount in common.

So impressed with your book binding. I can't imagine it being easy.

>47 thorold: Nice idea about an under the surface possible conflict of interest between the author and the photographer. In my view the photographer will always win because people look at the photographs first and last. I know I would.

>47 thorold: I just noticed Horvat posted a lot of the images on his own website, if anyone wants a look. They are quite something: https://www.horvatland.com/WEB/en/THE70s/PP/PORTRAITS%20OF%20TREES/album.htm

The tree photographs are fabulous. Seeing the photo of the book cover, I wasn't expecting so much color in many of the images (though the more muted ones are also beautiful). Each was something to savor.

A very belated happy New Year, Mark. Lovely photo at the top. You are reading some great stuff...but then my eye caught the "Tree" book, thanks for that and the link. Will stop by from time to time.

I enjoyed reading about the book binding. I would never have the patience required, but it was interesting to learn about the process. What a great skill to have!

>47 thorold: That sounds terrific. Made me think of a favorite book from a while back, Meetings with Remarkable Trees—I think more of a coffee table type book than the one you read, but a similar way of conceptualizing trees as characters in narrative.

Back to the Indian Ocean:

Afterlives (2020) by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, 1948- )

  

This novel is set against the background of Tanzanian history from the beginning of the German colonial period until after independence, through the experiences of a family living in an unnamed coastal trading town. It looks very like a sequel to Paradise: one of the characters has a back-story that matches that book very closely, but Gurnah has changed all the names to get away from that label, and there's certainly no need to have read the earlier book.

At the centre of the book is the experience of the First World War in East Africa. This is often treated in general history books as a mere sideshow to be summed up in a rag-bag chapter on "colonial actions", but of course it was enormously disruptive for the people directly involved, the thousands of African and Asian soldiers who fought it out on behalf of the colonial powers, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who found themselves in the path of the action and were robbed, murdered, raped, or forced to become refugees. We see this through the eyes of Hamza, who has volunteered as an Askari in the Schutztruppe to get away from his previous life, and who goes through most of the war as servant to a German officer, to emerge wounded and with a knowledge of Schiller and Heine that isn't going not help him much under British rule.

But really, something that's probably true for everything Gurnah writes, it's all about gloriously fluent, engaging storytelling, as much when he's dealing with the horrors of war as with the quiet contentments of everyday family life. He is supremely good at making you feel that you know these people and can identify with their way of seeing the world, even when it's completely different from anything you might ever have experienced yourself.

>55 thorold: Excellent review of Afterlives. I read Paradise a few months ago and should look for this one.

>55 thorold: I've bought and plan to read Paradise. If I like it, Afterlives might be on my list. I enjoyed reading your review, it makes me even more willing to get to this new-to-me author.

>55 thorold: happy to read this. Noting!

I've finished a book again after a long gap — caused by minor distractions and getting bogged down in several long books at once, nothing serious:

Empires of the monsoon (1996) by Richard Seymour Hall (UK, Zambia, Australia, etc., 1925-1997)

  

British-born journalist Dick Hall lived in Zambia during the fifties and sixties and worked for various African papers before moving back to the UK to write for the Observer. This is the last of several books he wrote on contemporary and historical African topics.

This is the classic three-decker sandwich: in the first part, we get an overview of the long-established trading patterns in the Indian Ocean driven by the predictable winds of the monsoon: the triangular traffic between Arabia, India and East Africa and the links between India and South-East Asia and China. Hall obviously loves a good story and an eye-witness, so he spends a lot of time on the stories of Captain Buzurg, Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and various other less well-known travel-writers, as well as on the surviving accounts of China's brief flirtation with naval superpower status in the 14th century under Admiral Zheng He. But in between also manages to slip in a pretty clear account of how it all hung together, and how little medieval Europe knew of the geography and politics of the countries around the Indian Ocean.

That ignorance was in many ways at its crassest with the first incursions by European ships, the Portuguese "voyages of discovery" around the end of the fifteenth century, which are covered in the second part of the book. The treaty of Tordesillas had given the Portuguese the — supposed — right to claim most of Africa and Asia for themselves, but the people who already lived there weren't too impressed by that legal detail. Portugal didn't have the manpower and resources to establish colonial territories in the way Spain was doing in the Americas, so they relied on setting up a few small trading enclaves, in places like Goa, Sofala, and Mombasa, and on terrorising local shipping into compliance with their trading rules using their superior naval firepower. The combination of engrained Portuguese hatred for Islam with the need to make a very small number of warships impress people over a very large area resulted in some very public atrocities that often make the activities of the Spanish Conquistadors look relatively harmless in comparison. Captured seafarers and their passengers were regularly submitted to mutilation and burning alive, preferably within sight of the shore.

Needless to say, Portugal soon faced active resistance from the Ottoman Turks (helped on the quiet by their Venetian trading partners) and competition from other European ships that started to arrive in the ocean, and the Portuguese dominion over Africa and Asia never came to very much beyond Goa and a few slave plantations along the Zambezi. One odd part of the story, that Hall spends quite some time on, is King Manuel's obsession with forming an alliance with the legendarily wealthy Christian emperor Prester John, who of course never existed either in Africa or India (the legends allowed for both possibilities). The closest match that could be found was in Ethiopia, a country that was certainly Christian, but had little to offer as an ally — Portuguese efforts to establish a presence there and convert the Ethiopians to Roman Catholicism were predictably disastrous.

The final part of the book fast-forwards us through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the post-Napoleonic period, with a focus on Zanzibar under the crafty Sultan of Oman, Seyid Said, and his successors. The political situation has some interesting parallels to the present day: Seyid spent a lot of money with British arms manufacturers (especially in British India), so the British government, committed as it was to ending slavery, tended to overlook the fact that he controlled all the main slave-markets and most of the slave-ships in the region. And had tens of thousands of slaves working on his own plantations.

Hall also looks at how European trade goods (especially guns) and the increasing incursions of European explorers and missionaries created the volatile situation in which European colonies started to be established in East Africa, in the famous "race for Africa" of the 1870s and 80s. We get cool, hard looks at colourful figures like Burton, Speke, Livingstone and Stanley, and a few reminders of the abuses that went along with the establishment of "benign" protectorates. This process is mostly just sketched in: Hall obviously takes it for granted that readers will already know the outlines of the 20th-century history of Africa, which seems fair enough.

An interesting, lively book, with a good balance of colourful narrative and hard facts. Probably not the only book you will want to read about the region — it's pretty light on India, for example — but a good overview that also comes with with a lot of detail about East Africa that will be new to most readers.

>59 thorold: this is going straight into my wishlist

Gurnah, again:

Gravel heart (2017) by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, 1948- )

  

At first glance, this is the ubiquitous autobiographical first novel every young postcolonial writer carries around in his suitcase, the story of a naive but clever boy from a modest background who has the good fortune to be sent to study abroad and made to question his assumptions about who he is and where he comes from, so that he can return home and come to terms with the unexplored rift in his relationship with his family. The sort of thing V S Naipaul could knock off before breakfast.

But of course this is Gurnah, and nothing is ever quite so straightforward. There's the obvious incongruity that the first-person narrator, Salim, is actually a generation younger than the author, growing up in Zanzibar in the 1970s and 80s. And of course it turns out that the real story is not about him, but about the catastrophic incident in his parents' lives that took place when he was too young to know about it. The Shakespearean title is already a broad hint at what is going on (and if you don't happen to know the play in question, don't worry, it's all explained later), but it takes Salim a while to work out what it's all about and what that means for him.

Gurnah brilliantly pulls off the deception of mixing his experience as a refugee and overseas student with what he's obviously learnt from the more recent experiences of his own students, and I don't think you'd ever spot that there was anything odd about it unless you happened to have an idea of how old he really is. You unquestioningly take Salim as a child of the mid-seventies. In the process, there's a lot of cunning laying of groundwork to prepare us for the narrative of Salim's father in the final chapters and teach us about what Tanzanian history in the years after the revolution did to human relationships. Enjoyable to read, and moving at the same time.

Confession - I had to google the Shakespeare play. No I am not telling anybody else. Do your own googling.

>62 baswood: It took me a while for the penny to drop too, and it’s one of the plays I supposedly know intimately through having studied it for my degree…

Got it; its a play I have not read or seen, but based on the sparknotes I read, thinkin Id like to.

I started this next one on New Year's Eve for the Victorian read-along; it took me about six weeks to read the first third of it and two days for the rest...

David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens (UK, 1812-1870)

  

Probably Dickens's best-known full-scale novel, and certainly his most personal from the numerous ways it draws on his own early life. We all love it because of the striking, scary childhood scenes: I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had nightmares about Mr Creakle's appalling school, the rat-infested blacking factory, or David's walk from London to Dover. And because — as always with Dickens — it's packed with memorable minor characters, most of them entirely gratuitous. There's absolutely no necessity in the plot for Miss Mowcher to be a dwarf hairdresser, but it wouldn't have been the same book without that. Best of all, of course, are the endlessly lovable Micawbers, the slimy villain Uriah Heep, and the feisty Miss Betsey Trotwood. But they are only the tip of a very large iceberg.

As usual, Dickens manages to get in some house-trained but still quite fierce social criticism, most of all in defence of his idea that childhood should be about fun and discovery, not being "firm" and "earnest" and prematurely taking on adult responsibilities. He also takes time off along the way to bash familiar targets like unregulated private schools, imprisonment for debt, and the continued existence of obsolete parasitic branches of the legal system (Doctors' Commons).

It's harder to get involved with what should be the main channel of the novel, the marriage plot. We know that there's only one way David's story can end, and it's hard not to find his wrong turnings along the way contrived and artificial, and to feel sorry for poor Dora who is so obviously only there in the story on condition that she can be eliminated when no longer convenient. I find myself dreaming up silly alternative endings in which Dora goes off to join Miss Mills in India where she learns to play the sitar in an ashram (David would meet her, many years later, lecturing on Eastern religions). Or Agnes gently refuses to marry David until she's finished her legal studies and taken control of her father's old firm. And it goes without saying that Em'ly really ought to return in triumph to Yarmouth with her Neapolitan husband and horde of bambini, to set up East Anglia's first pizzeria ("La piccola Emilia")...

>65 thorold: I'd too many other book and real life commitments to join in the group read as planned, but I enjoyed your review. I've not read Copperfield yet, so look forward to getting into it at some point.

>65 thorold: I enjoyed your review. It’s one of my favorite Dickens. Enjoyed your alternative endings.

This is the other Victorian read-along of Q1: I picked it up after finishing Copperfield thinking I'd read the first few chapters to catch up, then dose it to last me until March, but it isn't that sort of book. You pretty much have to finish it in one go...

Lady Audley's secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (UK, 1835-1915)

  

The title of this novel is probably one of the biggest understatements in fiction: the demure, unassuming little Lady Audley has secrets the way other people have hot dinners. Only a few pages into the novel, the reader has already been given enough hints to understand that she's guilty of just about every crime on the Victorian statute books, with the possible exceptions of piracy on the high seas and the sale of ecclesiastical offices. And those only because she hasn't got around to them yet.

Miss Braddon takes us through the unmasking of this ringleted supervillain with huge amounts of energy and with her tongue firmly in her cheek. No character is ever allowed to get very far with a moralistic soliloquy or with reflecting darkly on the evils of the world without being interrupted by some thoroughly mundane consideration, like the landlady coming in with the shaving-water or the cabbie asking for his fare. Even when the hero (finally) goes down on his knees to his girl, the reader is distracted from the young man's eloquent proposal by the creaking of joints... Braddon obviously really enjoyed what she did, as well as making money out of it.

The writing is anything but "literary": like most of us, Braddon clearly believes that clichés were put into the world to save us time and effort, and she uses them liberally. No-one says anything remotely clever or original, and the descriptions of people and places are routine and instantly forgettable. But, despite that, it's always clear, efficient and eminently readable. Everything works to advance the story in the direction she intends it to go, and we stick with her, eager to find out how it's all going to end. And there are all those dry little comments dropped in along the way to undermine any pretence at moral seriousness. Whatever we may think about the Victorians, Miss Braddon makes it clear that at least one of them wasn't having any of that nonsense...

>69 thorold: Fantastic review. I've read this, but clearly did not have as much fun with it as you did, and now want to try it again.

I loved all the take-downs of masculine pursuits (she can't bring herself to believe that young men actually enjoy shooting or fishing) and masculine ways of talking, as well:

"What do you think Major Melville told me when he called here yesterday, Alicia?" Sir Michael asked, presently.

"I haven't the remotest idea," replied Alicia, rather disdainfully. "Perhaps he told you that we should have another war before long, by Ged, sir; or perhaps he told you that we should have a new ministry, by Ged, sir, for that those fellows are getting themselves into a mess, sir; or that those other fellows were reforming this, and cutting down that, and altering the other in the army, until, by Ged, sir, we shall have no army at all, by-and-by—nothing but a pack of boys, sir, crammed up to the eyes with a lot of senseless schoolmasters' rubbish, and dressed in shell-jackets and calico helmets. Yes, sir, they're fighting in Oudh in calico helmets at this very day, sir."

"You're an impertinent minx, miss," answered the baronet.

>69 thorold: Fabulous review and >71 thorold: intriguing quote!

>71 thorold: I was sort of entertaining the idea of reading Lady Audley’s Secret, but your review and that quote put it firmly in my to-read list.

were you the one who recommended Autumn Rounds? Such a lovely book, Ive been to Quebec and it was fun remember some of the places they go. Didn't know much about the countryside but the descriptions were lovely. not much happens except life and love. And one of the authors that the bookmobile mentioned was Chingiz Aitmatov from Kyrgystan. blue mouse bring me water *Will have to try this one for later in the asian challenge! thanks for the rec

*cant find a touchstone for this, but Jumila is available too

>74 cindydavid4: No, I haven’t read Autumn rounds, it must have been someone else. But I did enjoy Poulin’s Volkswagen blues, so I’m sure I would have liked the other one too….

oh that does look good, on my (every expanding) TBR list

Meanwhile, it's a trifle windy here, but I've finished another one from the shelf. This is one of the SantaThing picks I received this year, an interesting choice I probably wouldn't have come across otherwise.

Lives lost (2014) by Britta Bolt (Netherlands, - )

  

"Britta Bolt" is the not-so-secret joint identity under which two Amsterdam-based expats, the German-born criminal lawyer Britta Böhler and the South African writer Rodney Bolt, publish crime stories together. Their books appear more or less at the same time in Dutch, German and English, so it's not easy to tell which language they start off in: possibly all three.

This is the second novel in a series featuring Pieter Posthumus, an Amsterdam city official whose job it is to arrange funerals for those who die in the city without any friends and relatives on hand to make such arrangements for them. Needless to say, he occasionally succumbs to the temptation to go beyond his job description and find out for himself how his clients came to die.

This time, however, a murder takes place under his nose, in the house next-door to the old-fashioned café kept by Pieter's friend Anna, on the edge of the Wallen. The victim is a promising young artist, a former rent-boy rescued off the streets by his eccentric landlady Marloes, and when the police decide to arrest Marloes for the murder it's Pieter and Anna who step in to try to establish her innocence.

It's an agreeably complex tale with a plot that revolves largely around the social changes going on in Amsterdam's famous red light area, with organised crime edging out the small local businesses that have been there for generations, and the City trying to clean the area up and gentrify it. Maybe not quite top-flight crime fiction, and a bit rough around the edges here and there (they should explain the difference between interment and internment to their spelling-checker some time...) but there's enough plot and local colour around to keep the reader amused for a few hours.

>78 thorold: Slightly OT, have you seen Still Life? It's a British movie about a civil servant who organises funerals for those who have died alone. It's not a murder mystery but is a beautiful, poignant movie that I still think about nearly 10 years later.

>79 rhian_of_oz: Thanks! I had that in the back of my mind whilst reading this book, but I couldn’t think what it was called. Quite a different kind of story, as you say, but it was certainly a good film.

>78 thorold: Britta Bohler has a booktube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrittaB%C3%B6hlerTheSecondShelf

>78 thorold: Stay safe! The storm is very heavy here right now (I'm on the German North Sea coast), and I heard on the news that it's strong in the Netherlands, too.

>82 MissBrangwen: Thanks, it’s mostly past now, I think, but we did have a very lively afternoon and evening. I trust your roofs and dykes will hold as well!

>71 thorold: Nice quote! I was not planning to read this book, but might need to reconsider now that I've read your review and this quote!

>81 kac522: Thanks for that — I had a look at one of her recent videos. Interesting, I'm still not totally convinced that I get what book tube is all about, but it's quite fun watching her talking whilst holding up a book in front of the camera, almost as though she's swearing an oath in court...

Meanwhile I got off on another complete side-track, prompted by another book from the slowly-dwindling stack of old left-wing paperbacks from East Berlin I acquired about eighteen months ago.

Mark Twain - social critic (1958; Seven Seas 1972) by Philip Sheldon Foner (USA, 1910-1994)
The gilded age: a tale of today (1873) by Mark Twain (USA, 1835-1910) & Charles Dudley Warner (USA, 1829-1900)

     

Philip Foner was a well-known historian of the US labour movement, editor of the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jack London, etc., frequently in trouble because of his Marxist associations. In recent years he's come under criticism for apparent plagiarism in some of his works.

Professor Foner examines Mark Twain's published and unpublished views on a wide range of the social and political issues of the day, reminding us that, tempting as it is just to enjoy him as a humorist, he was also a very moral writer, with strong — and rarely orthodox — views on all sorts of questions. Unlike a lot of very principled writers, he was also not afraid to admit that he was wrong after listening to argument: there were many questions where he impetuously leapt in wrong foot first and then came back with a different, more considered position after talking to people who actually knew something about it.

Of course, the big one is slavery: Twain grew up in a slave-owning family and community in the South and never seems to have questioned the rightness of that until he was well into adulthood, but when the penny finally dropped he produced some of the most influential and sympathetic literary accounts of the human cost of slavery in "A true story", Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Twain also overcame initial prejudices to become a defender of all oppressed racial minorities in America, including the Chinese workers he saw being beaten up during his time in California. His attempt to conquer antisemitism with his essay "Concerning the Jews", however, was a classic case of write first, think later. With the best of intentions he managed to perpetuate all sorts of damaging anti-Jewish stereotypes — it even ended up being (selectively) quoted in antisemitic texts of the 1930s. Feminism was another area where he started out mocking but soon became a convert.

Foner doesn't quite manage to claim Twain as a Marxist (he did, after all, engage in nearly as many unsuccessful capitalist business schemes as Balzac), but he does find plenty of evidence that he consistently supported workers' rights to decent conditions and a fair wage, and encouraged them to organise in trade unions to defend those rights. Towards the end of his life he also became a vocal critic of all forms of imperialism, including the US seizure of the Philippines and the British war in South Africa; his "Soliloquy of King Leopold" is credited with helping to end some of the worst abuses in the Congo.

----

One of the works Foner talks about extensively is The gilded age, a book I'd never heard of. So I downloaded a copy:

By 1873, Mark Twain and his Hartford neighbour Charles Dudley Warner were both quite well-known as travel-writers and essayists, but neither had tried his hand at a full-scale novel. Their collaboration on this one is said to have come about through a challenge from their respective wives during a dinner party discussion of the failings of current fiction ("Well, you should write a better one, then..."). They seem to have worked fairly briskly and without much planning, passing the manuscript back and forth between them as each finished a section. At first, it's pretty easy to see who wrote what, with Twain's story focusing on the impoverished family of "Judge" Hawkins migrating from Kentucky to Missouri and getting enmeshed in dubious land deals, whilst Warner's equally autobiographical plot deals with two young men from Yale knocking about New York in search of a worthwhile career. But the two storylines soon get firmly entangled with each other, and we get into a fast-moving satire of the political and financial sleaze of the Grant administration, with a cast of Washington lobbyists, crooked politicians, railroad promoters, and duped investors. Rather like The way we live now, but much, much sleazier. In the foreground are the irrepressible Colonel Sellers, a man who seems quite genuinely to believe in every one of the crooked schemes he is canvassing support for, and the glamorous Miss Laura Hawkins, a lobbyist who can twist any man in Washington around her little finger.

Some of the finance is a bit too complex, and the humour a little too obvious, perhaps, and the structure of the novel shows evidence of its unplanned nature, with all sorts of interesting plot lines running off into the sand and being forgotten about (Twain actually prints an apology in the end of the book for their not having managed to track down Laura's father, despite their best efforts...). But it's a lively, fast romp with some good memorable characters, and it has a serious point: Twain keeps reminding us that the reason crooked politicians exist is that citizens are too prepared to leave politics to other people.

Apart from its standing as the first major work of fiction Twain worked on, the book is also famous for the slightly sophomoric running joke of the chapter epigraphs, which are taken, untranslated, from no fewer than 47 foreign languages (including Amharic, Cornish, Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and numerous Native American languages), mocking the pretentious way many novels of the time used Latin and Greek epigraphs. They were provided by another Hartford neighbour, the scholar J. Hammond Trumbull. Disappointingly, it turns out that quite a few of them were taken from Bible translations into the languages in question, which seems rather a cheat, but they are all wittily relevant to the content of the chapters they head.

>69 thorold: >85 thorold: — It was fun being able to put Laura Hawkins side by side with her near-contemporary as a "bad girl", Lady Audley. I don't think anyone would have any trouble working out which of the two came from the mind of a woman writer. Laura has to be sexually challenging and self-confident, noticeably different from all the respectable young women in the story because her past has cut her off from decent society, whilst the whole point of Lady A is that she is outwardly indistinguishable from the modest, respectable innocent she claims to be.

>85 thorold: Very interesting essay about Twain. Thanks for that.

>85 thorold: >87 rocketjk: Very. Which Twain works have you read? Do you have a favorite?

>88 labfs39: I took a grad school literature class called Highbrows and Lowbrows in which we read Wharton, James (the "highbrows"), Twain and Dreiser (the "lowbrows). My favorite is Huck Finn. Also Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi. I remember not caring that much for Connecticut Yankee, especially the last couple of chapters. I have no memory of reading Pudd'nhead Wilson, though we probably did and I probably liked it. Tom Sawyer is fun, though considered more of a YA novel, I believe.

>88 labfs39: Obviously, Huck Finn, it’s a wonderful and very original novel. I think I read Tom Sawyer first, and I’ve read Pudd’nhead Wilson and one or two of the travel books (the Innocents abroad, certainly) and some essays and stories. I also wasn’t as keen on the historical novels, but they had some funny bits in them (Foner makes a point of how relevant they are to Twain’s contempt for monarchy and organised religion). I still haven’t got around to Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, but I think they just moved up the priority list again.

>89 rocketjk: Twain and Dreiser sounds like a good pairing.

Life on the Mississippi is great stuff, with its veneer of sincerity and authentic witness of obscure history (although I think it has dry spells - like Huck Finn).

Enjoyed all these reviews and comments popping up here. I may sit David Copperfield aside until i can focus in on it.

>91 dchaikin: There’s a fabulous steamboat chase in the early chapters of The gilded age that has almost nothing to do with the plot, but is clearly just Twain enjoying himself and showing off his knowledge. It made me want more steamboats…

>90 thorold: "Twain and Dreiser sounds like a good pairing."

Yes, that class provided a terrific learning experience for me. It was in my first semester of grad school after having been away from the classroom for nine years. We studied the four authors I mentioned, reading one novel per week. (This was, of course, in addition to my three other classes.) The professor really knew her stuff and was a terrific teacher. I might eventually have read all the Twain we read in that class (I had already read some, of course), but would probably never have read An American Tragedy or Jennie Gerhardt, both of which I'm grateful to have read in an academic environment.

My favorites are some of Twain's short stories (I think The Diaries of Adam and Eve is hysterical) and his Joan of Arc. The latter is such a departure from what I think of as his usual fare. He spent 12 years researching it and considered it his best work.

>94 labfs39: adam and eve are my favorites as well.

Lots of bad stuff happening in the world at the moment, and not much we can usefully do or say about it.

But it's also beginning to look like the first stirrings of spring here in Holland: daffodils, snowdrops and crocuses sticking their heads up (if they can find somewhere out of the wind to do so), birds singing in the trees, the first tentative knots of high school students with clipboards appearing in the streets to do field-work. And this lovely dragon display in our local children's bookshop (In de Wolken, Voorburg):


(The Jugendstil advertising panel on the left is leftover from the shop's previous existence.)

>96 thorold: I love the colours. It just make me willing to push the door and browse the book shelves.

I had the idea that this next book was suggested by someone here in CR, but it actually seems to have come out of Cynfelyn's reposting of Guardian top ten lists, specifically from Rupert Wright's list of the top 10 books about France: https://www.librarything.com/topic/335554#7625152 — anyway, edwinbcn told me he was also reading it, so it does have some kind of foothold in CR.

Footsteps : adventures of a romantic biographer (1985) by Richard Holmes (UK, 1945- )

  

This is a kind of "behind-the-scenes" of literary biography, four extended essays in which Richard Holmes describes the process of getting to know the subject of a biography and the way that process is influenced by the subjective circumstances in which it takes place — the external events of the times and the particular situation of the biographer's life. He follows Robert Louis Stevenson and Modestine through the Cevennes, Mary Wollstonecraft and her fellow English radical exiles through the revolutionary Paris of May 1968, and Shelley and his elective family through the Italy of the hippie generation, and pursues Gérard de Nerval through a cloud of seventies esoterica and tries to locate him in the new thinking on mental illness due to R D Laing and Michel Foucault. And, repeatedly, shows us that contrary to what the plots of dozens of historical novels pretend, human lives are not detective stories where clues fall into place to create a single, definitive solution. Even if you're called Holmes and the book is set in Baskerville.

There are plenty of modest little jokes of this kind against himself: we see him hiding behind a silly hat on the Stevenson trail, falling into a river or dropping through a Paris skylight whilst reflecting on the starry night, and constantly being put back on the right track by farmers, monks and little old ladies. But in between times he manages to sneak in brief but very convincing biographical sketches of his four main subjects and a considerable number of bystanders, and he gives us some superbly beautiful descriptive travel writing. A very lovely, human book, a real joy to read.

I arrived in the capital late one night, after hitching down the Autostrade del Sole. From a boxroom above the Via Cavour I gradually worked my way into the labyrinth of tiny streets immediately north of the Foro Romano, until by the third day I had a small annex room off the Via Leonina, with a view of pink and white washing strung above a stone fountain—or rather a stone obelisk with an iron pipe—gently splashing on to the cobbles.
This miniature piazza, itself not much larger than a room, came to symbolise modern Rome for me — it had a baker's shop, a motorcycle repair shop and a sort of bottling plant smelling darkly of old red wine. It was never quiet at any hour of the day or night, except for the two hours of siesta, when even the radios were muted. Outside each doorway stood a wooden chair with a wicker bottom, occupied either by a cat or a grannie, depending on the position of the sun. Above rose a cliff of geraniums, alternating with underwear and birdcages, until a hot blue square of Roman sky was reached.

(Opening of part 4 of the Shelley essay, p.162)

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Is it just me? Those Harper Perennial covers with the little quadrant in the bottom right corner always have me trying to smooth out a non-existent crease...

>98 thorold: Footsteps sounds like the perfect escape from today's troubles. Even reading your review was soothing. I wish I had it to hand this moment.

>98 thorold: That sounds like a wonderful book.
_____________

As a fanatic about the condition of my books, those little quadrants really bother me. Do they want us to fold up / damage the corner?

The 1999 Boekenweek gift, picked up in a little library somewhere a few months ago. I've always been a bit wary about trying Connie Palmen because of the vast media circus that surrounds the launch of each new book she writes — she's been called "the Spice Girl of Dutch literature" for her shameless pursuit of publicity, although she seems to position herself more as a literary novelist than a typical "bestseller"...

De Erfenis (1999) by Connie Palmen (Netherlands, 1955- )

  

This is the story of the young literature graduate Max, taken on by the distinguished novelist Lotte Inden as confidential secretary and carer when she is diagnosed with a progressive muscle disease. Max works on cataloguing and collating the vast assembly of marginalia and sticky notes she's been creating in her library throughout her writing career, which is to form the basis of her planned final novel, The inheritance. Meanwhile she's busy with a novel called Geheel de Uwe (quite coincidentally, the title of Palmen's next book). And the two of them have long philosophical discussions about the nature of originality, literary narcissism (something Palmen is often accused of), and similar topics, many of which Max then re-discusses with his elective aunt Margarethe, a psychotherapist. And of course Max falls hopelessly in love with the curmudgeonly old novelist as her life is taken over by the illness.

An intelligent, articulate little book, but one that left me quite unsatisfied. I didn't feel at the end of the book that I'd really learnt anything about the characters, or literature, or human nature. It felt as though Palmen just got to the end of the allotted 96 pages and stopped, irrespective of whether she'd said everything she wanted to or not.

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I like the Boekenweek gift novellas, because they offer a handy way for an outsider to get a feel for the work of prominent Dutch and Flemish writers. But I can see there's a serious danger that you could flip over from reading them when you happen to get hold of one to actively collecting them. I seem to have seventeen of the 87 that have been published since the 1930s, so I'm still a long way from the completist stage, I hope, but the balance might be starting to teeter...

Back to the Indian Ocean. I read Gunesekera's first books Reef and Monkfish Moon back in the 90s, then lost track of him somehow, apart from his odd cricket-novel The match from 2008, which didn't leave much of an impression on me.

The prisoner of paradise (2012) by Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka, 1954- )

  

This historical novel is basically the love-child of A passage to India and Paul et Virginie. An idealistic young Englishwoman (named Lucy!) brought up on Romantic poetry and Enlightenment politics arrives in the repressive, colonial society of 1820s Mauritius and is thrown together with a Sri Lankan intellectual, interpreter to a prince who has been exiled there by the British. The island is full of (justifiably) discontented slaves, convicts and indentured Indian labourers, the French-Creole settlers distrust the arrogant new British administrators, and the handful of free black Africans and Indian traders expect to be caught in the middle as soon as any trouble starts, so everyone is very much on edge.

There is plenty of local colour, with several disastrous picnics and garden-parties, a lot of Mauritian botany, a slave-revolt, and the obligatory hurricane-chapter. Maybe a few details of dialogue that don't quite ring true for the period, but overall a very competent and entertaining historical novel, just a little bit too predictable, perhaps. Certainly interesting reading if you don't know much about the history of Mauritius, but it didn't seem as witty and original as what Amitav Ghosh does with similar settings and periods.

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...and that blatantly French-Lieutenanting cover! Oh dear!

At the weekend I watched last summer's Garsington Opera production of Der Rosenkavalier on YouTube, which was of course very enjoyable, and it also reminded me that I still had this little book on the TBR pile. It's one of the last unread survivors of a big stack of German books passed on to me this time last year by a friend who was moving abroad. Since I knew nothing about Kappacher and very little about Hofmannsthal, it took a while to get to it.

Der Fliegenpalast (2009) by Walter Kappacher (Austria, 1938- )

  

This novella won Kappacher the Georg-Büchner prize in 2009. It's a glimpse of the ageing and depressed Hugo von Hofmannsthal as he spends part of the summer of 1924 in the obscure mountain resort, Bad Fusch, where he had often been as a child. He feels out of place in the post-war world, he's stuck in the middle of two theatre projects (Der Turm and Timon der Redner), unable to find the will to write, and he's troubled by what seems to be a mixture of real and imaginary health problems, as well as by real and imaginary conversations and exchanges of letters with people from his past. There's the tantalising prospect of a new friendship with a young physician, Sebastian Krakauer, but he is tied to the whims of his employer, a capricious elderly baroness, and is whisked away before Hofmannsthal can have the literary discussion with him that he's been looking forward to. We get to spend most of this time inside Hofmannsthal's head, and the experience is very like being in the overheated, fly-buzzing winter garden of the spa hotel that gives the book its title.

I found this a little frustrating as a piece of fiction, because of the way we are educated to expect that a story about a particular moment in the life of an artist will take us through some important pivotal moment — the inspiration for a new book, the start of a new love affair, or even their death. None of those things seems to be going on here, at least not in an obvious way, but it is a fascinating and quite moving little study of the process of getting old and finding that the world has moved on in directions that no longer make sense to you. Kappacher has Hofmannsthal compare himself to the figure of the dying painter Titian who was at the centre of one of his early works: the imagined Titian was discontented with everything he had already painted and eagerly planning a new work that would show the world what painting was all about, whilst the real Hofmannsthal seems to feel he will never create anything else that matches the works of his teenage years.

This doorstep (only slightly shorter than The magic mountain) was one of my Christmas books this year, and I've been reading it on and off since early January. As tends to happen with big books (cf. Copperfield above) it took me ages to motivate myself to get through the first five hundred pages, and then the second half of the book rushed by in a couple of days. Of course, seeing the region where the book is set popping up on the news over the last week has focussed my mind on it a bit as well.

The Books of Jacob (2014; English 2021) by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland, 1962- ) translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft

  

By Tokarczuk's standards, this seems like a surprisingly straightforward project: a historical novel that follows the career of a real person through a more or less linear time sequence in a well-defined historical period. There are a few minor eccentricities of form — the page numbers count down from 965, there are reproductions of pages from eighteenth-century books scattered through the text, and the narrator draws on the perceptions of a comatose granny lying in a cave, but for the rest it only really stands out by its vast size and scope, following dozens of characters over wide stretches of Central Europe.

At the heart of the story is the life and work of Jacob Frank, who in the second half of the 18th century became the leader of a millenarian cult that swept through Jewish communities in the south of the Polish Commonwealth, particularly along the Dniester in Podolia (now SW Ukraine). Jacob was hailed by his followers as a successor of the 17th century mystic and self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Like most cults before and since, they went in for community of property, free love, charismatic leaders and a notion that all existing laws about diet, sexual behaviour, relations with other religions, etc., had been rendered moot by the approaching end of the world. And, like most cults before and since, it all ended in acrimony, bloodshed and misery for everyone involved.

With a wealth of gloriously imagined period detail, Tokarczuk looks at the way Jacob affected the lives of the people around him, giving rural Jews new hope of escaping from the narrow constraints of the way of life available for them in the Polish Commonwealth, and attracting the attention of naive outsiders who were charmed by the social experiment. The cynical Catholic hierarchy clearly distrusted Jacob's ideas and the motivation of his followers in requesting baptism, but welcomed the opportunity to drive a wedge into Jewish unity. And of course it wasn't long before Jacob's followers and Orthodox Jews were openly accusing each other of unspeakable practices, laying the foundations for a solid Polish tradition of Antisemitism in the coming generations.

Reading this as an outsider, the most interesting thing about it is Tokarczuk's analysis of the way a group and its leaders can slide imperceptibly from radical idealism to embattled self-interest, but there's obviously also a certain amount of deliberate needling of her Polish readers going on here. This is a book set in one of the most iconic periods of Polish history, the half-century in which one of Europe's biggest polities was completely wiped off the map, but it's focusing on a group of Polish people who speak Polish only as a second or third language, have no Catholic heritage, and don't seem to care which king rules over them or what the country they live in happens to be called at that moment. And it's making fun of the Catholic hierarchy and the Polish aristocracy.

Tokarczuk can't resist roping in a few interesting period characters who don't have anything obvious to do with the story, like the formidable Katarzyna Kossakowska, the naive encyclopaedist Father Chmielowski, the poet Elzbieta Druzbacka, and — once we get to a more metropolitan stage — walk-ons for Casanova, Sophie de La Roche, and Empress Maria Theresa. And she follows some of her personal rabbit-holes with anatomical collections and doll's-houses featuring a little more than strictly necessary. But most of these "usual suspects" contribute something reasonably substantial.

Because of the scale, range and complexity this isn't the easiest of books to get into — most of the dozens of characters change their names at least once in the course of the book, most families mentioned go through at least three generations, and we range geographically from Istanbul to Frankfurt. But it is a fabulous, very engaging story, and Jennifer Croft seems to have done a very good job of turning it into English without any but the most minor bumps in the road.

>104 thorold: Fascinating story! I love reading detailed reviews of books I am not likely to read but are interesting nonetheless.

>104 thorold: noting! Terrific review. I still need to read her Drive Your Plow book (which is on the 2022 plan)

>106 dchaikin: I read Flights and Drive your plow a year or so ago: both very different from The books of Jacob (and from each other). Drive your plow is certainly the easiest one to get into, it’s — mostly — just a crime story with added Blake.

Walter Kempowski is a German writer I've been meaning to get to for a long time: My mother is a big fan of his autobiographical family saga Deutsche Chronik, and I've read a lot of interesting things about his project to build a collage of ordinary people's wartime memories, Das Echolot.

Kempowski came from a Rostock shipbuilding dynasty. He spent eight years in Bautzen charged with espionage, after being found with papers documenting the true scale of the Red Army's plundering of East German industry in 1948 — since his death it's emerged that he may well have been working for the American counter-intelligence service at the time.
He seems to be roughly classifiable as a kind of conservative/liberal/Christian pendant to his near-contemporary Günter Grass.

This is a standalone short novel from 1992 that was one of the books from my SantaThing haul this year. There's an English translation by Charlotte Collins from 2018.

Mark und Bein : eine Episode (1992; Homeland (UK) / Marrow and bone (US)) by Walter Kempowski (Germany, 1929-2007)

  

A few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Hamburg-based journalist Jonathan gets the offer of an assignment to write a travel piece about the Polish region of Masuria for a promotion being planned by a car company. He's interested, because he doesn't know anything about the area, although his parents — whom he never knew — came from the former East Prussia, and he himself was born on the back of a handcart during the westward trek of German refugees in 1945. And it only gets more interesting when he talks to the people around him and realises how many people in 1980s Hamburg have their roots in East Prussia, and stories to tell about it.

So Jonathan finds himself in Gdansk with a German PR lady, a rally driver, and two high-powered cars. Roots are discovered, more or less accidentally, tourist sites are visited (the cathedral in Gdansk, the castle of the Teutonic Knights, Hitler's bunker, etc.), and there are repeated encounters with a bus-load of elderly German exiles.

Jonathan has to keep revising his preconceptions as local people are friendly and welcoming, signally failing to be obsessed with what the Germans did to them fifty years ago. And hard-boiled Anita turns out to have her human side, the macho rally driver is revealed as the person in the group with the interpersonal skills needed to get local people and the Polish authorities on their side, and the members of the coach party disappointingly fail to act as though they owned the place, instead behaving with respect and consideration for their Polish hosts. The only crass and arrogant Germans he meets are a group of students from a progressive West German high school, determined to hear only things that confirm their prejudice about the evilness of all Germans before their own generation and the perfection of the socialist paradise the Poles are living in.

This feels a bit like a liberal reply to Grass's hardline satire of western opportunism and the fall of communism in Unkenrufe (I don't know which was first, they both came out in 1992), and it's obviously also closely tied in with Kempowski's other work, picking up the image of the echo-sounder and the phrase "Alles umsonst" (all for nothing). But interesting as a snapshot of the times, anyway.

>108 thorold: Thanks for that fine review. I've got to read more Kempowski.

>108 thorold: Good to read about another Kempowski book. I was thinking about All for Nothing this week after seeing pictures of refugee children. That was an excellent book. Also noting The Books of Jacob.

This was another one from that big pile of German books — a re-read this time, but I last read it so long ago that I only had very vague memories of it.

Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954; Confessions of Felix Krull, confidence man) by Thomas Mann (Germany, 1875-1955)

  

Thomas Mann tinkered with this book for almost fifty years, releasing excerpts from the work-in-progress from time to time starting in 1911, before publishing the definitive version of Part One in 1954. At that point he seems to have accepted that he wasn't going to write the remainder of the story: Part Two never got beyond a brief outline. Maybe a classic demonstration of the principle that comic fiction is much harder to write than serious intellectual stuff...?

Because, unlikely though that might seem if you don't know it, this is a picaresque comic novel. Of a sort, anyway. Mann conceived it as a kind of anti-autobiography, a parody of the worthy and self-important memoirs of a Great German Artist (he seems to have had Goethe in mind particularly, but a lot of the time it also feels as though he's mocking himself).

Felix Krull, born in the 1870s in a small town on the Rhine, has drawn the logical conclusion from his bourgeois, provincial German upbringing that the only way to get ahead in life is to lie, cheat and steal, whilst doing all you can to avoid getting tied up in human relationships. With a great deal of pompous prose and circumlocution, he tells us about his marvellous successes in life, most of which turn out to be defeats and humiliations by any objective standard. He fails high school, gets out of military service only by faking an epileptic fit, and earns a living hailing cabs outside theatres, pimping for a Frankfurt street-walker, and then working as a lift-boy and waiter in a Paris hotel. It's only in the final chapters that he achieves some sort of temporary glory, swapping lives with an aristocrat who prefers suburban bliss with his girlfriend to being sent on a world tour by his parents. And even there, the world tour has only got him from Paris to Lisbon by the end of Part One, and we have our reasons to suspect that he won't get much further.

There's quite a bit of sharp social observation along the way, as well as some moderately racy chapters where the lovely Felix is being pursued by would-be lovers of either gender, or is doing a bit of dilly-dallying on his own account. But there also some long digressions that seem to have slipped out from drafts of the Magic Mountain whilst the author wasn't paying attention, including a 20-page science lesson Felix gets from a fellow traveller in the restaurant car of the Lisbon express, which only seems to be there to feed the running joke about the way Felix grabs and relentlessly recycles every fragment of general knowledge that comes his way.

If you're after the racy memoirs of a (fictional) rogue this possibly isn't the best place to start, but it's definitely worth reading for the "other side of" Thomas Mann it exposes to us. Thomas Mann might have had his limitations as a comedian, but he still had plenty to say with this book.

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— Something else that occurred to me was how many parallels there were to John le Carré's (partly) autobiographical novel A perfect spy. He obviously had this in the back of his mind.

>111 thorold: Nice review.

Several works by Thomas Mann and Kafka are on my TBR list for this year,

Another Boekenweek novella that turned up recently (cf. >101 thorold:).

This is the 2009 gift. Tim Krabbé is a well-known journalist and chess-player, also an amateur cycle racer. Amongst other things he wrote the widely-translated cycling novella De renner (1978; The rider).

Een tafel vol vlinders (2009) by Tim Krabbé (Netherlands, 1943- )

  

An engaging, often quite charming, but ultimately very painful story about a father-son relationship and the terrors of growing up. Possibly a bit too obviously constructed to be really convincing, though, especially the rather twee title-image of the table full of butterflies and the atrocious Maori-Greek pun that's buried in the central quest-story.

This is one that I added to the TBR pile in January 2018 when I was busy with my "Wordsworth project". In the event I hesitated to read it then because I was afraid there would be a lot of overlap with my reading of The Prelude and Stephen Gill's William Wordsworth: a life, which was probably a wise move, but I wasn't expecting it to stick on the pile quite so long:

Adam Sisman is a biographer who's written about Johnson & Boswell, John Le Carré, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and numerous other literary figures.

Wordsworth and Coleridge : the friendship (2006) by Adam Sisman (UK, 1954- )

  

A very straightforward account of the complicated relationship between the two giants of the first generation of English Romantic poets. Sisman for the most part steers clear of speculation and theorising and gives us a critical summary what we know from first-hand accounts, taking us through their (surprisingly similar) backgrounds and the radical politics of the 1790s to their first meetings and the year they spent in Somerset together, then the German interlude and the Wordsworths' move back to the Lake District.

Although Sisman is reluctant to draw any explicit conclusions, he seems to confirm the picture we have of William Wordsworth as an efficient, ambitious poetry-making machine, remorselessly processing the input from Dorothy's sharp eyes and Coleridge's lively intellect and turning it into marketable verse, whilst Coleridge flutters from one grand plan to another, talking non-stop but never finishing anything, and destroying his physical and mental health with drugs, alcohol, and the pursuit of the Other Sara. The young Coleridge, in particular, must have been a fascinating, magnetic personality, and we have to wonder how he had the insight to take up with someone as superficially dull as Wordsworth and stick to him. I suppose, with a lot of hindsight, it's only thanks to his association with Wordsworth that we remember him as anything more than the author of a couple of brilliant, but isolated and random, poems, but no-one would have predicted that in the 1790s.

As with most biographies, it's a shame this one had to follow the two poets into the later stages of their lives, so that we have to close the book on them as ageing, pompous and reactionary bores, rather than the reckless firebrands they (almost) were in their twenties...

>114 thorold:

From a biographical point of view, Coleridge and Wordsworth are an interesting pair because they were older than the core circle of the Romantic poets---Shelley, Keats, Wollstonecraft, etc --- yet they outlived most of them.

Last year and on-going, I started my own thematic reading focused on the Romantic period, with works, letters and biographies about the Shelleys, Keats, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Byron, Peacock, DeQuincey, Coleridge and Wordsworth. I will soon start reading the Wordsworth biography by Stephen Gill you reviewed last year. It seems these authors are all not very popular on LT. Dorothy Wordsworth Grasmere Journals is really a nice work of just under 150 pages, but still only finds less than a few hundred readers.

I hadn't heard of Adam Sisman and was surprised that he is styled as a writer specialized in biography. I am a bit suspicious when writers tackle various biographies of all kinds of writers, Johnson, John Le Carré, Hugh Trevor-Roper, etc. Most biographers are specialized in their subject, not in their craft. I think the past 20 or 25 years have seen many biographies written by journalists. They have the advantage of a very readable style which makes their books much more accessible to the wider public than biographies written by academics. I couldn't find any website that described Sisman as a journalist.

I can't be sure whether it is your or Sisman's conclusion that it is only thanks to his association with Wordsworth that we remember him as anything more than the author of a couple of brilliant, but isolated and random, poems. Neither do I know what else Sisman writes about in relation to Coleridge.

I myself do not know so much about Coleridge, and haven't access to Richard Holmes's biography on Coleridge right now. But I read a selection of Coleridge's letters last year, and was astounded by their depth. Coleridge stopped writing poetry at the age of 30, and is then described as a critic. He read and introduced the German enlightenment philosophers to England, but I am not aware of any essays written by Coleridge, but is seems his prose writing was highly esteemed.

Picturing Wordsworth as "an efficient, ambitious poetry-making machine keen on producing marketable verse, doesn't sound very sympathetic either. Who knows what Wordsworth would have been worth without Dorothy and Coleridge's support and collaboration?

>114 thorold: I remember reading of this book when it was first published, but it fell off the radar. It is now back firmly midscreen, even if it's a shame this one had to follow the two poets into the later stages of their lives, so that we have to close the book on them as ageing, pompous and reactionary bores, rather than the reckless firebrands they (almost) were in their twenties... Loved that thought.

>115 edwinbcn: Excellent point about generalist biographers versus subject specialists who write biographies.

>115 edwinbcn: Yes, I didn’t know much about Coleridge and I was hoping the Sisman book would bring me up to speed, but it’s really no substitute for a proper detailed literary biography. Sisman doesn’t say much about his interest in German romanticism, apart from his (apparently futile) work on translating Schiller and Lessing.

Sisman’s background seems to be as an editor in some big publishing houses, but his approach is at least moderately scholarly — primary sources where possible and detailed references. What he is strong on is the changing network of relationships between Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Southey, the Lambs, and Charles Lloyd (who gets the blame for a lot of the quarrels in the group), with Hazlitt and De Quincey flitting around the edges and writing it all up for posterity.

Those thumbnail characterisations were my own, possibly unfair, condensations of what I took from Sisman’s account. It’s obvious from the Gill book, if nothing else, that there was a lot more than that to Wordsworth, and I assume there was more to Coleridge too. And in fairness to Sisman, he does make it clear that there were some Wordsworth masterpieces — like Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode — that had little or no input from Dorothy or Coleridge.

I’m thinking about having a go at Hazlitt next, mostly because I know so little about him. But probably not right away.

Meanwhile, clearing yet another Boekenweek novella off the TBR shelf...

This was the 2021 gift. Hanna Bervoets has published half a dozen novels and a theatre play since 2009, and has won numerous Dutch literary prizes. Unusually for a Boekenweek novella, this one has already been translated into several other languages, including English.

Wat wij zagen (2021; We had to remove this post) by Hanna Bervoets (Netherlands, 1984- )

  

Bervoets takes us into the scary world of the content moderators, the overworked, underpaid heroes whose job it is to protect the reputations of social media companies us users from all the nastiness lurking out there on the internet.

Her narrator, Kayleigh, has tried to pay off her debts by taking a job with an agency that does content moderation for a big social media company. She tells us about all the routine unpleasantness of that kind of work — long shifts, demanding targets, paranoid security rules, arcane guidelines that change from day to day about what is and is not "acceptable". And gradually we get to see what constant exposure to images of violence, pornography, conspiracy theories, fake news, and all the rest of it does to the people who have to work with it. The sight of a workman on the roof of a nearby building leads the whole office to jump to the conclusion that there's a suicide attempt going on. Co-workers start believing flat-earth theories or holocaust deniers. Kayleigh's girlfriend Sigrid gets nightmares after learning about the suicide of a girl whose self-harm video she had previously vetted as being "within the rules". And Kayleigh herself starts, without noticing it, to behave in ways that shock her when Sigrid points them out to her after the event.

This kind of book always seems to run into the problem of finding a good balance between journalism and fiction, and I had the feeling that Bervoets was squeezing just a bit too much information into the tight format of the novella, so that the development of the characters suffered a little. But still a very interesting read.

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I liked the cover image by Leonie Bos — one of the most striking Boekenweek covers I can remember, even if only marginally relevant to the story.

>118 thorold: what constant exposure to images of violence, pornography, conspiracy theories, fake news, and all the rest of it does to the people who have to work with it

I'd never considered this before, but now I'm curious.

>118 thorold: the problem of finding a good balance between journalism and fiction

Does it have to be either journalism of fiction? Possibly, although on the website of the CPNB I couldn't immediately find the answer to that, the organization may intend to promote fiction. The genre of creative non-fiction would perhaps be interesting, although I am not aware of many examples of that genre in Dutch literature.

I have always been a bit disdainful about the Boekenweek gift, probably because it was a free gift, but since a few years I am more appreciative, and have come to realize that the gift of a book of 80 - 100 pages is in fact very generous, especially because in most cases they are by renowned authors.

>120 edwinbcn: I don't think there's any law that it has to be fiction: Geert Mak's De brug was a travel piece, David Van Reybrouck's Zink was oral history, and Annejet van der Zijl's Leon & Juliette was a kind of family history, for instance.

The thing with Wat wij zagen was that the author obviously decided that fiction was the most effective way to communicate the problem of working with content moderation, but because of all the research she'd done (there's a page-long bibliography) and the many things she felt it important to tell us about she ended up with a rather artificial construction, with a lot of characters who were only there to illustrate one particular aspect of the problem each, so it felt bit like being in a children's TV show.

>121 thorold:
Yes. I was thinking about Geert Mak's De brug. On their website is says their mission is to promote "the good book". One of the earliest edition is Hella S. Haasse's Dat weet ik zelf niet. Jonge mensen in boek en verhaal which is more like an essay, although I believe the CPNB now has a separate Boekenweek essay.

The two early Boekenweek gifts written by Haasse are the only two I purchased. I distinctly remember I received the first in 1981, when I was 14 years old. According to my LT catalogue I have 22 of them, which corresponds very well with the years I lived in the Netherlands, not counting the years before 1980.

I put Patrick Gale's new novel on my Christmas list, not realising that it was only due to come out this month — I decided that those three months on the virtual TBR entitled it to jump the queue and be read straight away. I've been reading Gale's novels since a mutual friend gave me one about thirty years ago, so you can probably count me as a dedicated fan. He started out in the eighties writing quirky social comedy featuring musicians, Quakers, lots of LGBT characters and odd bits of magic realism, but he's gradually shifted towards more mainstream (historical or social-problem) literary novels.

This one made me raid my poetry shelves for background material...

Mother's boy (2022) by Patrick Gale (UK, 1962- )
Secret Destinations: Poems 1977-1988 (1989) by Charles Causley (UK, 1917-2003)
Penguin Modern Poets 3 (1962) by George Barker, Martin Bell and Charles Causley

  
   

Charles Causley is a poet who tends to come with epithets like "much-loved" — he was never a heavyweight Nobel-track intellectual, but he had a big popular following and probably counts as the most respected of the generation of British poets that emerged around the end of World War II. He wrote a lot of poetry for children, and he became a familiar voice on the radio, both of which must account for a good deal of his popularity, whilst his Cornish, working-class, war veteran background was something people found easy to identify with at the time. But, crucially, he also had the gift of expressing complex ideas in deceptively simple language (and making it rhyme!).

The selection of Causley in PMP3 includes must of his best-known early poems, such as the unforgettable "Timothy Winters", a poem you feel should be hanging on the wall of every social-worker dealing with child poverty, the enigmatic sonnet "The prisoners of love" ("The prisoners rise and rinse their skies of stone / But in their jailers' eyes they meet their own"), the ever-quotable "The seasons in North Cornwall" and the gloriously tricky "Nursery rhyme of innocence and experience". All wonderful, and at least a little bit perplexing.

On this re-reading I was also stopped in my tracks by "At the grave of John Clare", which must date from Causley's time training as a teacher in Peterborough, where he imagines Clare walking "With one foot in the furrow" and "the poetry bursting like a diamond bomb". Quite.

Secret Destinations closes with "Eden Rock", a poem that must have become a firm favourite with GCSE examiners, if the number of YouTube hits for "analysis of Eden Rock" is anything to go by. Causley imagines his parents, both in their twenties and with a picnic already set out, waiting for him on the other side of a river together with the terrier Jack.

I hear them call, "See where the stream-path is !
Crossing is not as hard as you might think."

I had not thought that it would be like this.

The collection has opened with a set of poems about Causley's relatives and his childhood in Launceston, then moves on via trips to Australia and Canada and a few translations from German and Spanish. The poem about Arshile Gorky's "The artist and his mother" (the cover image of some editions) is striking in its unspoken autobiographical subtext: looking at the serious, prematurely adult boy standing beside his care-worn but dignified mother, it's difficult not to imagine that it's a picture of Charles and Laura Causley...

Patrick Gale puts the relationship between Charles Causley and his mother at the centre of this loosely biographical novel. Apart from Charles's war-service, they lived together for the whole of their joint lives. Charles's father Charlie was gassed in the First World War and died in the early 1920s.

Laura is the main viewpoint character throughout most of the book, building up our idea of Charles as an intensely private person we can only see from outside. Gale makes her into a very convincing, sympathetic character. In 19th and early 20th century England, "His mother takes in washing" was pretty much the most socially damning thing you could say about someone: laundry work was considered demeaning and humiliating, the last step on the downward ladder before you got to prostitution or the workhouse. But Gale treats Laura more in the way that Zola writes about Gervaise in L'Assommoir, as a self-confident and hardworking professional who has mastered a difficult skill and provides an important service for her clients. She is even allowed to be proud of the high-quality work she does for Launceston's only house of ill repute and to get the best of a snooty churchwarden who isn't happy about the altar-cloths going in the same tub as Ma Treloar's stained sheets.

Charles has to be in the foreground for the wartime chapters, of course, as we follow his naval service as a coder, a job that Gale wants us to see as at least a metaphor for his later work as a poet, if not the thing that actually triggered him into taking his writing in that direction. There's no real evidence one way or the other about Causley's love-life, although there are plenty of ambiguous hints in the poems. Gale uses the freedom he has as a writer of fiction and some slim documentary clues (a letter, and the poem "Angel Hill") to give him a couple of wartime romances with other sailors. Whether or not they really happened in that way, they work in the context of the novel, and they help to give it a bit of shape and create a well-defined ending at the point in 1948 when Causley has settled into his new career as a primary-school teacher and is beginning to publish his first poems.

A very enjoyable and satisfying novel, which I somehow ended up reading the whole of in three sittings (and it's not a short book). So the cover blurb that says "unputdownable" must be fairly near the mark...

——
Patrick Gale reading “Angel Hill” and talking briefly about how he wrote the novel: https://youtu.be/-1zG9ZrXTEU
An old LP with Causley reading some of his poems: https://youtu.be/Zqn-CWewqq0

ETA: A shame about the cover. Children in old-fashioned bathing suits are nearly as much of a cliché as headless women. Surely they could have come up with something more original — there’s endless scope for Cornish landscapes, family photos, or pictures of saucy sailors…

>123 thorold: Fantastic review. Thank you for including so much about Causley's poetry as well.

>124 labfs39: Great review. I've only read one Patrick Gale novel but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Your review reminds me to get back to him.

This was a birthday present from my nephew: it seems to have been a big bestseller when it came out, but I didn't come across it at the time.

Prisoners of geography : ten maps that explain everything about the world (2015; updated to 2016) by Tim Marshall (UK, 1959- )

  

Despite the title, this isn't really a book about maps at all, it's a thumbnail guide to the geopolitics of the mid-2010s written by an experienced foreign correspondent. His "ten maps" cover parts of the world where there are important military or economic conflicts, which seems to mean everywhere except the central Pacific, Antarctica and Australasia. An ideal book to put on your shelf if you were (for instance) a bumbling Old Etonian suddenly promoted to Foreign Secretary of a former global power and hadn't read anything more recent than Xenophon.

Marshall has the journalistic gift of serving up all the relevant facts in a very compact and efficient form that can easily be read through in the taxi on your way to the meeting, as well as giving you two or three slightly more obscure items you could safely drop into a conversation to convey deeper levels of knowledge. Nothing very profound, but a useful primer if you don't read the foreign news very often.

With the hindsight of six years since the book was last updated, Marshall made some good but perhaps obvious calls — in particular his view that "Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet" (ch.1) and his prediction that Afghanistan would have to be handed back to the control of the Taliban sooner or later (ch.7) — but he also seems to have let himself be misled by Brexit rhetoric into predicting the imminent collapse of European unity, and he failed to reckon with the USA's four-year holiday from grown-up (geo)politics and the collapse of the Nicaraguan Grand Canal project.

Ror Wolf is a German author I've been meaning to try for some time: I picked this book because the English translation appears on RebeccaNYC 's "Hope to read soon" list (see >47 thorold: above and here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/337945#).

Wolf grew up in Saalfeld in Thuringia, but moved to the West in 1953 to study. His work seems to be somewhere in the space between hardline academic modernism and surreal absurdist comedy, and he was known especially for his radio soundscapes and his football-inspired plays. He died in February 2020.

Zwei oder drei Jahre später : neunundvierzig Ausschweifungen (2007; Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions) by Ror Wolf (Germany, 1932-2020)

  

This collection originally appeared in a shorter version in 2003; the 2007 edition I read contains two extra digressions and is about 50% longer than the earlier one (the English translation is also based on the 2007 edition).

The original 47 digressions are all very short, many of them only single paragraphs. Like some of Thomas Bernhard's early pieces, these are mostly framed in the format of a newspaper fait divers, in which we learn the protagonist's occupation, where they are from (and sometimes their age), and are told what they did — or what happened to them — and the place where it happened, but learn little or nothing about the context. Wolf goes further than Bernhard, though, in playing with our narrative expectations by either claiming not to know essential details or telling us that he chooses to withhold them, and he likes to use negative descriptions — someone was "not of memorable appearance" or "not acting in a significant way". The whole idea is to tease the conventions of narrative storytelling and bring them into the foreground by denying us an actual story that has some sort of point.

There are also wider things going on that bridge the stories: place names seem to be taken at random from all over the German-speaking area (and sometimes North America), but they come in assonant groups — a man from Ulm meets a man from Olm in Elm. Any attempt to make geographical sense out of the stories is frustrated immediately. There's also a lot of play with certain obvious symbols — hats, cigars, snakes — that don't have any obvious symbolic reference, and Wolf loves to throw in references to unexplained authorities — "Schleitz tells us...".

The slightly longer pieces in the contiguous forty-seven expand this structure into surreal dream sequences, in which a series of this kind of inconclusive incidents and encounters takes place without any clear logical connection.

The "Penultimate Digression" is a bridging paragraph, and the "49th Digression" is a longer first-person narrative in twelve chapters, that claims to be the narrator's life-story but actually consists of a series of dreamlike episodes, the longest being a sea-voyage in which the narrator's ship repeatedly sinks leaving him to be picked up as sole survivor by the next passing ship and a coast-to-coast walk across Africa in which the narrator claims to be the first person to have done this journey without knowing whether he was going East to West or West to East.

Despite the unreal framework, everything is pinned down to specific dates with the author's lifetime, but the narrator also likes to refer to events in his past or future by the chapter in which they occurred, even when they are not actually mentioned in that chapter. And then, of course, the whole thing ends with a pastiche of the opening chapter of The Maltese Falcon — the narrator is a detective, and a mysterious naked woman dressed in black comes to his office to tell him a strange tale. Except that the point seems to be the telling of the tale, there's no suggestion that she wants him to investigate it. And he doesn't choose to share the tale with us.

Robert Walser's footprints are all over this book, of course, and Wolf acknowledges that by bringing in an only slightly veiled reference to Walser's death in the snow (with actual footprints) in the last chapter.

You need to be in the right frame of mind for this sort of book: I can imagine that a lot of readers would be saying "Yes, I get the point" by about page three, but it's worth carrying on, there are a lot of little jokes and absurd leaps to keep you amused and puzzled.

This is someone I hadn't heard about before, but came across whilst reading about Arab traders on the Red Sea. My ereader proposed these three books to me as a trilogy for a bargain price, but they aren't anything of the sort: two volumes of memoirs and a novel that are all set more or less in the same time and place.

Les secrets de la Mer rouge (1931) by Henry de Monfreid (France, 1879-1974)
Aventures de mer (1932) by Henry de Monfreid (France, 1879-1974)
Les deux frères (1969) by Henry de Monfreid (France, 1879-1974)

    

Les secrets de la Mer rouge: Henry de Monfreid came from an artistic French family and grew up on the Mediterranean coast doing a lot of sailing with his parents. He studied engineering and worked in the dairy industry for a while: after the collapse of one of his business enterprises he moved to Djibouti in 1911, working as a coffee-buyer travelling around Ethiopia. Eventually, in 1913, he made the career-move that he's most famous for, buying a sailing dhow in Djibouti and using it to trade in the southern Red Sea. In the 1930s, he moved back to France and started to make a name for himself as a writer of adventure stories. Like many adventure-writers of the time, he was captivated by fascist ideas and became very close to Mussolini and Pétain, although this didn't seem to do his long-term career any harm: in old age he was still scheming with friends like Cocteau (who bought drugs from him) to get himself elected to the Académie Française.

In this first volume of memoirs, he describes his adventures during his first year as a skipper, pearl-fishing, trying to set up a cultured-pearl farm, and doing a bit of light espionage and gun-running. There's a lot of fascinating, detailed description of the natural hazards of sailing on the Red Sea, with its many reefs and hidden rocks, powerful tidal currents, and sometimes very dangerous local winds. But he also writes a lot about the people he's working with, their jobs — especially the hazards of the pearl-divers' lives — their families, the communities they come from, and so on.

Being a European adventurer of the time, of course it almost goes without saying that he speaks fluent Arabic and Somali, dresses in local style, and has converted to Islam. But despite all that, the colonial authorities still find it a nuisance, in the prickly political situation of 1913-14, to have a rogue Frenchman going around doing all the illegal things you have to do to make money out of running a dhow. So, eventually, goaded by British complaints about the number of people shooting at their troops with French-made guns, the authorities in Djibouti decide to get him out from under their feet by (as he tells it) framing him for something he didn't do and then allowing him to volunteer for the trenches instead of going to jail.

I don't think Monfreid really expects us to take everything here as literal truth — there are some very Tintin-esque moments, like the one where he sinks a pirate dhow by tossing a lit stick of dynamite on its deck at just the right moment. But it's a great story, if a little rambling, and it's obviously told with a great deal of affection for the region and its culture and people.

Aventures de mer: This book continues Monfreid's Red Sea adventures when he returns to the region after a brief period fighting in Europe. He's apparently been declared unfit for military service because of a lung problem: it's interesting that he's still able to do some terrifying long-distance swims despite this (and the malaria and Spanish 'flu that strike him down at various points in this book...).

He describes continuing his business of transporting French arms and other unspecified contraband across the Red Sea (he always denied being involved in slaving, but he seems suspiciously well-informed about the mechanics of the trade in "luxury" slaves — eunuchs and young girls — that continued well into the thirties).

We're also told about his project to build a bigger ship, including a catastrophic trip to Ethiopia to buy timber, during which he comes close to death from 'flu and one of his men is mistaken for a horse-thief and killed by a poisoned arrow. The new ship is not a success, but Monfried (literally) picks up the pieces and starts again.

However, the biggest story in this book is really the one about Monfried being caught up in the war, which — from his perspective — was essentially a conflict between Britain and France to determine who would control the oil-fields after the collapse of Ottoman power. He is arrested by the British on two occasions, both times getting away by a mixture of guile, luck, and the faithful assistance of his crew-members. When he's confined on a British warship for a few days he confesses how much more he likes the British, as individuals, than the French authorities, despite his strong resentment for the results of Britain's devious colonial policy, which hurts the local people as much as it does France. He reserves particular contempt for T E Lawrence, whom he accuses of genocide by the "classic" British method of giving guns to both sides in a regional conflict and standing back to let them wipe each other out. Still, his time in the wardroom of the destroyer must have been quite amusing to watch, given that only one of the British officers could speak French and none of them Arabic, and Monfried of course was a true Frenchman of his time without a word of English...

Les deux frères: This is a bit of romantic adventure fiction — if anything, more like an opera libretto than a novel — in which Monfried figures mostly as narrator, with only a couple of encounters with the characters as passengers on his ship to bring him into the story, set on the coast of the Red Sea ca. 1914. The plot is loosely based on Schiller's Robbers — a young Somali blacksmith is in love with a beautiful girl, but he needs Rs. 1000 to pay off her mother. By enlisting as an askari in the French army he will get a premium of Rs. 500, which is enough to put down a deposit on his fiancée, but his evil brother is also scheming to get hold of the girl (and his brother's money). We get a delightful tale of desertion, shipwreck, identity-theft, slaving, murder, a thrilling prison escape, and much, much more.

Had this actually been written in the times when it was set, we might have been impressed with Monfried's enlightened attitude to his African characters. They are treated very straightforwardly as human beings with all the normal positive and negative qualities of human beings, who simply happen to have grown up in a different cultural, geographic and economic setting from the (presumably) European reader. Monfried knows the people he is writing about and broadly understands how they come to have certain attitudes and ways of behaving that might be quite different from "ours", and he manages to present them as people whose problems we can identify with. But of course he's writing in 1969, and by that time European writers couldn't take their right to speak on behalf of non-European characters for granted any more, so we look a bit more critically, and realise that despite his obvious affection and sympathy, he's a product of the times he grew up in, and can't help being crass and patronising from time to time. And that's before we even start on his female characters...

Good opera, but probably not the best place to look for an understanding of Somali culture.


Southern Red Sea after the First World War

>128 thorold: Wow. Those look great. Thanks for the review.

>129 rocketjk: I should have added: the two memoirs at least have been translated to English.

>130 thorold: Thanks for letting us know that. I will see what's available on biblio.

As usual, lots of interest here.
>127 thorold: the narrator claims to be the first person to have done this journey without knowing whether he was going East to West or West to East no sunrise/sunset or metaphorical? Sorry, it just sounds odd, but does add to the mood!

>128 thorold: de Monfreid is one of those names which hovers in the background for me without being sure who it really is. These look like a lot of fun. Amazing he lived as long as he did.

>132 SassyLassy: Ror Wolf: obviously it’s meant to be absurd, but even knowing that I had to stop myself from thinking of all the ways it couldn’t possibly work.

Monfreid — yes, he seems to have been one of those infuriating examples that demonstrate that you can have an entirely reprehensible life and still get to enjoy it. Not many people would take the trouble to churn out adventure stories at the age of ninety. He must either have been a workaholic or very short of money (probably the latter, since Wikipedia also mentions that he’d mortgaged a collection of “Old Master” paintings that proved on closer inspection after his death to be all his own work).

This is another one from RebeccaNYC 's "Hope to read soon" list.

How fiction works (2007; revised 2018) by James Wood (UK, 1965- )

  

Hiding behind the dreadfully self-helpish title of this little book(*) is a thoughtful examination of the main elements of prose fiction, explicitly cast as a 21st century reworking of E.M. Forster's famous lecture-course Aspects of the novel. Wood looks at the usual suspects — style, form, dialogue, characters, and so on — and gives us a quick resumé of where the big names of world literature stand on those points and how (selected) contemporary writers are dealing with them. Wood evidently isn't setting out to be either polemical or prescriptive, he seems to feel that the writers he appreciates most are those who work within a given framework whilst pushing out its boundaries, rather than those who slavishly adhere either to past convention or to new theoretical doctrines. The great writer is one who does something unexpected, that no-one else would have done at that point, but that with hindsight is the obvious right thing to do.

I don't think this is likely to be a very useful book for someone setting out to be a creative writer, especially if you want to write genre fiction, a topic that is clearly of no interest to Wood. But it would be an excellent preparation for a reader setting out to (re-)read Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Henry James.

---
(*) Wood jokingly comments that he really wanted to call it He knew he was right

Getting to the end of Q1, it occurred to me that I haven't read anything in Spanish for quite some time. This is one that's been on my TBR since March 2019. I read Señas de identidad in 2017. There's a third book, Juan sin tierra, that completes a kind of trilogy of novels of exile, but since none of them has a conventional narrative they aren't a trilogy in the usual sense of having linked characters and plot.

Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (1970; Cátedra edition 1985; Count Julian) by Juan Goytisolo (Spain, 1931-2017) edited by Linda Gould Levine (USA)

  

Count Julian of Ceuta is supposed to have been a 7th century Christian Visigothic ruler who facilitated the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by forming an alliance with the Muslim invaders, and has thus established himself in Spanish tradition as a notorious betrayer. As Goytisolo wryly notes, recent historians seem to be in broad agreement that, assuming he ever existed, he probably had another name, didn't live in those times, and didn't necessarily betray anyone. But, all the same, Goytisolo, a left-wing, gay, Spanish writer, living in political exile in Tangier and frequently attacked in the Franco press for his "treacherous" and "unpatriotic" ideas, feels an affinity with Julian, and in this novel he develops his fantasy of a reconquest of Spain by the Moors, which will sweep away the hypocritical ideas of Spanishness cultivated by Franco and the Catholic hierarchy.

Goytisolo's point, of course, is that it's absurd to speak of any kind of set of ideas, genes, or physical or moral characteristics that make up the "Spanish character". Even the famous "Olé" of the bullfight is an Arabic borrowing ("wa-l-lah"). You can be Spanish without being a stoical, Catholic Francoist, but you can't be Spanish without owing a great deal to the Moorish part of Spanish history.

It's a complicated book, full of — amongst many other things — linguistic games; multi-level parodies of texts from the Golden Age, the Generación del 98, and the Franco era; grotesque or sordid sex-scenes; an idiosyncratic rebellion against the tyranny of "full-stop-capital-letter"; snakes that are never just snakes; the uncensored version of Red Riding Hood; a James Bond film; a certain part of Isabella the Catholic that has become a giant tourist attraction; and, as a recurrent theme, the topography of Tangier, with a special focus on its public toilets and bath-houses. There are lots of pages that you need to read and re-read to make sense of them (I was grateful for Prof. Levine's notes in the edition I was using), but you can't say that it ever gets boring! Wonderfully caustic and original.

>135 thorold: Fantastic review of what sounds like a fascinating, if unusual, book.

>136 labfs39: Definitely unusual!

This is a little book that's been on my TBR since March 2016 — I think it's still something I picked up in the charity shop at work. Saroyan is one of those names I vaguely knew about as "Great American Writers" without much idea of what kind of writer he was. Judging by this, he seems to have been a kind of Armenian-American Steinbeck (simplifying excessively...).

With hindsight, I probably shouldn't have read this straight after Goytisolo! This is the sort of book that's best read at least thirty years ago.

The human comedy (1943) by William Saroyan (USA, 1908-1981)

  

This was Saroyan's own novelisation of a screenplay he'd written for MGM, which perhaps accounts for its almost unbearably decent, optimistic, American-Dream-celebrating tone.

It's 1943, and the small town of Ithaca in California's San Joaquin Valley is a place where the locals are happy to lecture you on profound truths of human nature at a moment's notice at any time of day or night, whilst ev'ry prospect pleases and only sports teachers are vile. The young men are away fighting a distant and seemingly endless war (it's not called Ithaca by accident, evidently), and child-labour is a lesser evil than the unspeakable thought that women and girls might be forced to go out to work, so fourteen-year-old Homer (!) is working nights delivering telegrams whilst his even younger friend August sells newspapers on street corners. Long live the free market!

There are a lot of lovely little scenes in this book — the raid on the unripe apricot tree, the scene where Homer's little brother Ulysses (!!) gets caught in a patent trap and no-one knows how to release him, and best of all Homer's impromptu lecture on noses in Ancient History. But it's not really enough to defeat the unrelenting niceness and the dead hand of narrative inevitability: we know from the start that there's only one way a story about a telegram boy whose brother is away in the war can end.

When I read Gravel heart (>61 thorold:) I was wondering why Gurnah made his "autobiographical" narrator a generation younger than himself. It must have been because he'd already used a more straightforward version of his own early life in this book:

Desertion (2005) by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, 1948- )

  

There are all kinds of desertions going on here: the relationship between an English traveller and an East African woman in 1899 ends — inevitably — in a way that hurts her (and her descendants) more than it does him; much the same thing happens with Britain's withdrawal from Zanzibar at the end of 1963, leaving an unviable minority government and a messy revolution waiting to happen; and the narrator also feels his own failure to return to Zanzibar and his family after completing his studies in Britain — he's been advised to stay away for his own safety and theirs — as a kind of desertion.

Using an exploitative sexual relationship to stand as a metaphor for colonialism is not exactly original, but it's never put as crudely as that of course. Gurnah presents it with his usual magnificent storytelling flair, presenting his imagined lovers of 1899 just as vividly as the more autobiographical parts of the story, set in a family rather like his own in the Zanzibar of the years immediately before independence. Tremendously engaging characters and a convincing portrayal of family life in both cases.

I was reminded that I still had this on the TBR when Sophie von La Roche popped up in the final chapters of The books of Jacob (>104 thorold: above), a few weeks ago.

Die profanen Stunden des Glücks (1996) by Renate Feyl (Germany, 1944- )

  

Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807) counts as the first German woman writer to earn a living from sales of her books, and as an important bridge between Enlightenment and Romantic literature. She was a close friend of the poet Wieland, and corresponded with many of the great figures of the French and British Enlightenment, but she was also a kind of mentor figure to the young Goethe and Schiller, and as grandmother to the many Brentano children she was linked to just about everyone who was anyone in literary Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her novels encouraged their middle-class, female readers to take control of their own destinies, and she edited and published a pioneering women's magazine, Pomona.

The young Goethe flirted simultaneously with Sophie and her daughter Maxe, drawing on Maxe's appearance and Sophie's book as inspiration for Werther; later on Sophie's granddaughter Bettina had a gigantic (but possibly one-sided) crush on him...

Feyl's historical novel picks up Sophie's life at the age of forty in 1771, when the publication of her first novel Fräulein von Sternheim has shot her from being the very ordinary wife of a senior official in the court of the Electorate of Trier to major literary celebrity, and follows her career up to the publication of her final novel in 1806, by which time she counted as a near-forgotten figure from an earlier period. Dealing with characters who over-documented almost every detail of their lives in implausible quantities of letters, diaries and memoirs, Feyl doesn't do much with the extra freedom the fictional form gives her: It's more like a dramatised biography than a real novel, with the imaginative input limited to lines of dialogue. The focus is on Sophie's sense of obligation towards her children and husband and the way she follows the logic of this into becoming "someone who writes for money", quite against the conventions of her time and class.

Don't expect a nineties take on Lotte in Weimar, this is a fast, light read, but very enjoyable, and a good way into the period if you don't know how everyone fits together.

---
See my Q2 2019 thread for more about Bettina and Goethe: https://www.librarything.com/topic/305485#6853021

Another Boekenweek novella that turned up recently. Hella S. Haasse was one of the most distinguished post-war Dutch novelists, and had the unique distinction of being commissioned to write the Boekenweek gift three times: in 1948 (Oeroeg/The Black Lake, probably her best-known book), 1959, and 1994.

When I read Transit by Anna Seghers, the LT touchstone insisted on always linking to this book of the same title; interesting to see that the balance has now swung the other way. Also that it's apparently not possible to make touchstones point to two different books of the same title in the same post, even with the "double-colon" trick...

Transit (1994) by Hella S. Haasse (Netherlands, 1918-2011)

  

The cover art of this one immediately made me think of Sandrine Bonnaire in Agnes Varda's 1985 film Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), and indeed there seem to be a lot of parallels between these two snapshots from the lives of teenage girls estranged from society and living rough. But maybe only at an obvious, superficial level: Varda starts with a defined ending and works backwards, whilst Haasse takes care to fill in a past for her character Xenia ("Iks"), but to leave the future undefined.

Xenia has returned to Amsterdam, homeless and penniless, after a year or so of travelling around Europe doing odd jobs where she can. She wants to resume contact with the two friends she left behind after their grand project to travel the world was broken off in acrimony, but Daan seems to have turned into a broken and uncommunicative junkie, whilst Alma has disappeared — apparently into sex-work. Whilst she attempts to pick up the pieces, she finds temporary shelter with an elderly philosopher who has withdrawn from the world in disgust after his experiences in Paris in 1968. And, inevitably, they use the opportunity to share their experiences of the many things that are wrong with the (modern) world.

Haasse has written a lot of short fiction in her time, and clearly knows how to handle the form: this somehow feels like a much more substantial book than it actually is, as though there were hundreds of extra pages that had been written and then deleted because they weren't really necessary. Very impressive, and moving.

This is one I started reading around the beginning of January — it got put aside to make way for something more urgent, and then forgotten about. Time to finish it off, since it's the end of Q1 and I'm on a roll...

Oddly enough, it's another book that started off as a film script, like The human comedy (>137 thorold:):

Jakob der Lügner (1969; Jacob the liar) by Jurek Becker (DDR, 1937-1997)

  

A dark comedy, set in the ghetto of an unnamed Polish city towards the end of World War II, and obviously drawing on Becker's own childhood experience of the Łódź Ghetto. Jakob Heym, an undistinguished man who has spent the last twenty years in a snack-bar serving up potato pancakes in winter and ice-cream in summer, accidentally overhears a news report about the progress of the Red Army towards Poland. He can't keep this to himself in the information-starved ghetto community, but he equally can't admit to the humiliating circumstances in which he overheard it, so on the spur of the moment he is inspired to tell his friend Kowalski, in the strictest confidence, that the has a secret radio receiver. Naturally, the news is all around the ghetto in a matter of hours, people are soon pestering him for more news, and he finds himself gradually led from one lie to another.

We hear a lot about "the information war" these days: that's exactly what's going on here, and what was going on in the DDR at the time Becker wrote the book: the news that Jakob is able to pass on, sketchy and mostly false though it was, gave the Jews in the ghetto the glimmer of hope that help was on its way, which they needed to carry on living and fighting back at least within themselves, even if there was no real way they could resist the Germans.

But this is also a moving and often funny book about human beings and the way they act under pressure. Little acts of bravery, irrational bits of pettiness and generosity, and especially the wonderful description of the long friendship between Jakob and his neighbour Kowalski, who aren't quite sure any more after several decades whether they love or hate each other.

>141 thorold: Lots of interesting reviews coming up in this thread, in the past few days!
I had never heard about Jacob the liar but it sounds fascinating. I take a note and will probably try to locate a copy!

>142 raton-liseur: Yes, I'm clearing up some low-hanging fruit on the TBR shelf.
I think this will be the last one for the Q1 thread, another Boekenweek novella:

Gala (2003) by Ronald Giphart (Netherlands, 1965- )

  

The sudden death of showbiz agent Panc creates complications for everyone around him, not least those busy with the organisation of a spectacular gala evening in Utrecht's Tivoli to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of the agency. But narrator Meija is in a particularly complicated situation, having only recently embarked on a secret affair with him. There's every risk that the elegant gala is going to turn into Jerry Springer.

Giphart has fun mocking Dutch celebrity culture, throwing in apt bits of advice from the 17th century Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián in between the pop songs, evening dresses and designer cocktails, but it's hard not to get irritated by his idea of a female narrator — she spends the entire ninety pages talking about men...

Oh well, that seems to be it for sunny March: the first of April has turned out to be our first snow-day of 2022...

Anyway, you can find the new Q2 thread here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/340923

It may take a day or two before I get round to posting stats and things.

>134 thorold: I've had How Fiction Works on the shelf forever, and do intend to read it—it's in that category, for me, of things I want to read in lieu of ever having taken a literature course. I'm interested in thinking about ways to read and consider the novel, which is an idea that never even occurred to me for much of my reading life. I think maybe now I'm old enough to get it? Maybe.

>145 lisapeet: I think maybe now I'm old enough to get it?

— Well, there's only one way to find out! :-)

Really, almost everything that's written about literature is easily accessible to interested non-academic readers, apart from late-20th century literary theory/semiotics/linguistics. One useful litmus-test is to check the index for "Lacan" — if he gets more than one or two entries, stay well away from it...

"Studying literature" isn't like "studying law/maths/medicine/Hebrew" — for the most part it's not about being initiated into secret techniques unknown to outsiders, it's more like a controlled and disciplined environment in which you're made to practice the systematic application of common-sense to what you read, and to articulate the results of that in trade-language.

The Wood book seems to be aimed at the sort of people who read his reviews in the Guardian or New Yorker, not at students.

>137 thorold: Sounds like I need to add this one to my "Odyssey" theme....