Review: To the Back of Beyond by Peter Stamm
I’ve made a nice discovery in this Swiss author. Told in short chapters alternating between the daily progress of an abandoning husband and his abandoned wife, the writing is terse and well-paced but uneventful until suddenly we are taken by surprise by an unexpected and entirely satisfying twist.
Nothing is explained or justified. You are left to simply imagine what it would be like to either abandon or be abandoned. Captivating!
What a summer that was. There was really nothing else I could do in that heat but read. Here’s a selection of the books I got through. I really should take more time to review them properly as they were nearly all excellent.
There were more, but memory fades.
I dropped into Goodreads to see what people thought of the so-called classic because I for one was deeply disappointed. I had read it before but so long ago that I didn’t remember much, not even that it was so disappointing.
Before writing this review, I had a look at some of the 1-star ratings and was not at all surprised to see that many are by women. I know that if I were a woman I’d be very angry about the disgusting way women are treated in the book. Actually, as a man I am too.
I would sum up what I’ve read as occasionally very funny, often repetitive, occasionally on the ball as social criticism, misogynistic in the extreme, but mostly juvenile nonsense for young boys who can’t get it any other way.
Actually, there’s not much more to say. It doesn’t deserve to have so much ink spilt on it. Imagine, 20,354 reviews (as of today) on Goodreads.
Review: Germinal by Émile Zola
So I felt like reading a classic. Reputed to be Zola’s premier work, I decided to give it a go and now I know what it means to be a classic. What an amazing work! I should have expected no less from the author of J’Accuse but following exposure to the Zola musical (… Les Misérables) I confess I had feared melodrama.
We spend 500 pages in the company of miners, middle-management and mine-owners and frankly their world is no less savage than the world Solzhenitsyn described to us except that the prisoners are free men who choose to be there (since they’ve nowhere else to go). Apparently Zola did a week’s research by going to visit mines in the north of France but I have to say he came across to me as an expert, so elaborate were all the technical details described. We spend time down in the mines, watching children, women and men doing back-breaking work in wet and extremely hot conditions. We see the wretched hovels they live in and (to my surprise) the daily promiscuity which seems to be their only relief. I was ready for the wretchedness but not for the full-tilt action which carries the reader along. We’re back in a time (1860’s) when Marx has spoken and the worker’s are beginning to assimilate his ideas. The First International (Workingmen’s Association) is in existence. Anarchism is in the air. And idealists like the book’s hero Étienne Lantier are making the first tentative steps to redress the balance between labour and capital. We also meet the easy monied classes and I found Zola to be fairly even handed (if occasionally ironic) with his treatment of them.
This is not, in my view, a modern book. It is a tale, but, well told and worth your time.
Le Metropol by Eugen Ruge
Several years ago I read In Times of Fading Light, also by Ruge. I remember only that it was readable but it had no great impact on me. This is not the case here; this book is un-put-down-able.
Presented in novel form, because the facts are interpreted and decorated by the author, this is the ‘true’ story of a minor character in the Stalin Purges as she waits with her husband for more than a year in a hotel room to learn what will become of them. The story is filled with a cast of young European idealists (using their real names) who moved to Russia in the early 20th century in support of communism and who found themselves caught up in Stalin’s hysteria in the 1930’s. It’s about denunciations and ostracisations as people run for cover. It’s about millions of good people being subdued by mere thousands of bad ones.
In an epilogue, the author fleshes out for us how he developed the story from research in his grandmother’s file in the Russian archives, much in the way the opening of the Stasi archives was described in that marvellous film The Lives of Others. We learn how most of them ended up executed or murdered in work camps and the amazing destinies of some who were exiled but unable to return to their home countries because they were communists.
Oh, the pleasure of holiday reading. No distractions. Time to waste.
This was a nice collection, mainly light-hearted with few of great distinction. A few police procedurals, two court cases, some general silliness and some worth remembering.
Miracle à la Combe aux Aspics by Ante Tomić (Croatia) … a light-hearted romp through the antics of a family of Croatian hill-billies searching for wives. Silly but entertaining.
Terra Alta by Javier Cercas (Spain) … a police procedural where the investigator is a minor player in the squad. Different.
Impossible by Erri de Luca (Italy) … an investigating magistrate questions a political activist suspected of a murder. Intelligent conversations but all a little too pat for me.
L’Île des Âmes by Piergiorgio Pulixi (Sardinia) … a police procedural in a location that was new to me. Challenging!
Ritournelle by Dimitri Rouchon-Borie (France) … novel based on a true court case arising from the mindless violence of a group of thugs. Sickening and compelling.
L’Anomalie by Hervé le Tellier (France) … fantasy exploring the idea of a bifurcation in time where the same airplane lands twice, after a three month interval, producing a kind of parallel universe for the affected passengers. The idea was fun for a while but I think the author failed to sufficiently exploit a good idea. The style reminded me of Andreas Eschbach, but I think he’d have drawn more out of it.
★★★ Le Silence des Carpes by Jérôme Bonnetto (France) … the best so far! A guy whose life is coming apart takes off to the Czech Republic on a whim and rediscovers himself through immersion in Czech culture and a diverting missing persons project. Quite a gem! Intelligent, imaginative and completely plausible.
Eichmann à Buenos Aries by Ariel Magnus (Argentina) … a fictionalised account of Adolf Eichmann’s secret life in Argentina until he was “renditioned” by the Israelis to stand trial in Jerusaleum. Heavy going and not a great read.
★★★ La Rose des Vents by Andreï Guelassimov (Russia) … interesting piece of (fictionalised but ‘true’) naval history where a Russian naval crew disguised as merchant seamen take a flat bottommed cargo ship across two oceans to reach their own eastern coast in a voyage of exploration to see if the River Amur is navigable (and therefore suitable to defend the territory against the aspirations of the Chinese and the British).
★★★ Le Metropol by Eugen Ruge (Germany) … a fiction based on the show trials in 1936/7 USSR. We follow a minor character lodged at the State’s expense in the ‘luxurious’ Hotel Metropol awaiting her fate at the hands of the State. All about her, early morning arrests are sweeping up ‘enemies of the nation’ and everyone is denouncing everyone else. A MASTERPIECE. See also.
Review: The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small by Neil Jordan
The Enlightenment. Probably my favourite period in History. Sometimes I think I’d love to have been there to observe it and participate, to be enflamed by the new ideas doing the rounds (in pamphlets that had to be concealed), to fight heroically for The Rights of Man. And then I realise that it would have been just a frightful time to live, unless you were born on the right side of the tracks, and had the wherewithal and the education to indulge in this intellectual experiment. And then, of course, I wonder, if you were born on the right side of the tracks, why would you give up all your privileges? It would be like turkeys voting for Christmas. And you start to understand that even those heroic thinkers who set Enlightenment rolling had no conception of how far it would have to roll before anything resembling liberté, égalité or fraternité would materialise or indeed if it ever would.
Neil Jordan’s fabulous book has my head spinning again. It is not heavy and moralistic; rather it is poetic, but it is about Enlightenment. Lord Edward (FitzGerald) is clearly a man ahead of his time, ready to absorb new ideas. It can’t have been easy but you start to understand that a man like him might feel that he had less to lose than, say, his brother who was Duke of Leinster and the sole inheritor (among his 18 siblings) of the estate. The ante was somewhat lower. It seems he got that wrong; he had lots to lose!
Well it’s true that reading this book raised so many emotions in me. But its also true to say that this book is a little gem and Neil Jordan can be easily forgiven for casting it in such a poetic and rose-tinted light. I couldn’t put it down. This is not a biography of Lord Edward, more a glimpse from the wings through the eyes of his negro man-servant Tony Small, whose own story, it turns out, is as extraordinary as his “master’s”. Jordan gets right inside Tony’s skin and even if it’s likely that Tony did not always see his circumstances in such a tolerant light, it is likely that he knew he had been saved from a much more cruel existence by Lord Edward (“call me Ned”) who has many characteristics to be praised when held up against the light of the times.
It’s written by accomplished cinema director Neil Jordan so I was not surprised to discover that the tone and style were very cinematic; short chapter which felt very much like scenes. Jordan writes poetically, with a light touch which made the book very easy to read. I galloped through it.
The Lord Edward he describes is heroic but flawed, full of contradictions. Clearly a modern thinker unfettered by classist views, I was troubled by his constant whoring, using girls from the lower classes while holding up his female peers as untouchables. All in all, the Irish gentry, as portrayed (and I realise I’m reading a novel), come across as a tolerant bunch of people who chat away cordially with their exotic servant while they dress him up as some kind of marionette (see picture), and have him sleep in the stable and travel on the roof of the coach or the open deck of the ship in all weather. Their arrogance in wishing to be address as “My Lord” or “My Lady” and their belief that nobility is a birthright and not a assessment of character make my blood boil. If I have any criticism it is that Jordan raced through the United Irishmen years when Edward had finally risen above those conceits.
The book left me wanting more. As luck would have it, lightning often strikes twice and another novelist took on the same theme at the same time as Jordan, so I will begin reading Words to Shape My Name by Laura McKenna next week. Stand by for a comparative review.
Review: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
This is the kind of book you think you must have read already. Everyone has heard about it and it seems to have always been there. My friends agree that it “must have” been on the curriculum when we were finishing school back in the early 1970’s.
Actually, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. I didn’t recognise the story. The writing was heavy going and yet admirable. Conrad, writing in his third language is a wordsmith of the highest order. I found it flowery at times, never easy but … unputdownable.
I’m sure that the modern reader will find much to criticise in a book written in and about colonial times. It is very important to remember, however, that Conrad was very much a man ahead of his times but using the language of the times. He was a humanist and his Heart of Darkness did much to shed light on the abuses of colonialism so I can easily forgive him the vocabulary he uses.
It is, I think, a story about guilt and redemption. Jim, unable to forgive himself for failing to act as he would have wanted to act during an emergency, flees the “civilised” world becomes “Lord” over a forgotten tribe. The structure of the book is very unusual, nearly all of it being in the form of reported speech as the narrator, Marlowe, who in some manner became Jim’s mentor, relates Jim’s story over dinner to a group of gentlemen. As he is rarely present at the events he describes, much of the book is hearsay and was somewhat contrived in my eyes. Nevertheless, it gets a big thumbs up from me as a book deserving of its classic status.
Well it seems that, in my nostalgic tour of short favourites, I kept the best for last …
Review: The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
In some imaginary country, bordered to the north by a vast desert, separating it from unnamed hordes of potential invaders, Giovanni Drogo comes of age and signs up for a military career. Posted to Fort Bastiani, he senses almost immediately that he wanted more, and yet …, he yearns for action, honour and heroism.
This is a book about the passage of time and the human tendency to wait for a “cheque in the post”. Time passes, little happens, routine sets in. Already, at only 25 years of age …
Drogo no longer thought of the others, of the comrades who had escaped in time; … he consoled himself with the sight of the officers who shared his exile; it never occurred to him that they might be the weak ones, the ones who had been beaten, the last people to take as an example.
Chapter 22,Page 205
Written on the eve of World War II, it is easy to imagine that Buzzati captured perhaps the mood of the time, the sense of the inevitability of history and the uselessness of trying to swim against the tide.
Most of all though, this is a work of sublime, exquisite writing, the kind of book I read in total awe of a writer who can articulate thought and experiences I have imagined but could never hope to express.
… and next …
If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller … by Italo Calvino
If on a winter’s night a traveller
outside the town of Malbork
leaning from the steep slope
without fear of wind or vertigo
looks down in the gathering shadow
in a network of lines that enlace
in a network of lines that intersect
on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
around an empty grave
what story down there awaits its end?
I’m not a great one for reading poetry, but the above reads like one. It’s the chapter headings for the book. Nice, and part of the artistry that is this postmodern work from Italian intellectual Italo Calvino. The following definition which I came across, I’ve forgotten where, aptly describes this work:
Postmodernism seeks to disrupt the grand narrative, and expose the artifice of writing.
Review: I had fond memories of reading this, 30 years ago. It seemed to me that this was a book for bibliophiles, drawing out in detail what it means to us to choose a book and read it. I had forgotten that it is also a very difficult book. Actually, researching it a bit I learned that Calvino later “explained” the structure of the book as springing from his collaboration with some French mathematicians and writers (the Oulipo group) and I have to say it went right over my head. Suffice it to say that the book is experimental. Alternate chapters (titles above) launch us into new and completely different books, and reveal the extraordinary imagination and writing ability of Calvino. The remaining chapters are numbered and speak directly to us and draw us into them. Indeed, the story chapters sometimes speak to us too. I found the numbered chapters increasingly difficult as the book progressed; not a sentiment I remember from my first exploration.
Two writers sprang to mind as I read: My first impression, a new one since I hadn’t come across Butor when I first encountered Calvino, was of stepping into Michel Butor’s La Modification which centres you, The Reader, in the action and is written in the formal second person (vous). The second was Paul Auster who is most striking for his liberal shrinking of ideas for novels into the pages of his novels, showing an extravagance with his ideas which suggests the prospect of writer’s block is one he doesn’t fear.
My conclusion: a landmark book which I remembered for decades as a truly notable work and which drew my taste firmly towards postmodernism, but, a book you need to work with to appreciate.
Asynchronists 