Freewheeling Andy
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Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
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I'm interested. Is non-fiction included? Are short-story collections? Or is it just novels?
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I'm not plebian, but I'm no fan of caviar.
Nor am I a fan of grits.
I did like Monday's rosemary polenta, though.
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Just started on Perfume by Patrick Suskind. So far it reads incredibly easily, but I suspect it will be thoroughly nasty.
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Well, somewhere else on this site I called David Mitchell as the person writing the greatest literature in Britain at the moment. I'm sure that in a few years time my tastes will move on, but I've not read anything from Britain recently that comes close to Cloud Atlas, except, perhaps, his latest novel Black Swan Green.
It's not a book about the Japanese Yakuza, it's not an exotic babushka travelling through time from the 18th to 25th centuries.
It's a departure, to a suppsedly gentler age and place, and a gentler narrative form comes with it.
The only structural excitment comes in the form of 13 self contained story-chapters, each from one of 13 months in the life of a 13 year old boy (well, he's 13 for most of it, although clearly with 13 months he must age at least once).
Rural Worcestershire in 1982 may be the setting, and the stories may be those of an adolescent, but the themes are more universal, and this is one of those aspects that makes it a great book. The stories of being bullies, of desperation for acceptance, of outsiderhood, may seem simple, but they tell tales of the kindness of those you don't expect kindness from; they tell of guilt, of redemption. It's almost a moral novel, in the way it takes up the theme of the importance of being true to yourself, but that would make it sound trite.
It's not trite. It's wonderful. It's got a light, light touch in the writing, is beautifully easy to read, has humour lacing every page, even when darker subjects are around.
Mitchell has, like he apparently always does, moved one or two characters from previous books into this one. Robert Frobisher and Vivian Ayrs return in passing from Cloud Atlas, for example. That adds a little to the fun of the book, but it doesn't need much adding. There's so much going on.
I would struggle to recommend it high enough. Lovely, brilliant, magnificent.
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What exactly makes a "cult classic" into a cult classic? Is it that it treats obscure subjects? Is it that it offers an insight for those normally on the sidelines of society? Or is it that it's just not very good?
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole came in with spectacular recommendations from all kinds of sources (online dating women I didn't date, the blokes in Waterstones on Gower Street, old friends, newspapers), yet it didn't live up to the hype. Perhaps the joy of something like this is discovering it for yourself and discovering it's better than you were expecting. My expectations were perhaps too high.
It's not a bad book. Interesting, fascinating in places.
Ignatius J Reilly is the main protagonist, and in a cast full of horrors, such as the incompetent effete policeman who is forced to work in fancy dress, or Miss Trixie the decrepit, senile office assistant. Ignatius, though, is huge, fat, lazy, greedy, creates his own ailments, hates the modern world, and hides behind his mother. The book is, in most basic terms, how he is forced out into the world to work, and the destruction and havoc he wreaks as he continues his tirade against 20th century New Orleans and its vices.
The characters are big, the satire is strong, the comedy is there, but there was something soulless about the book to me, perhaps all the characters being slightly hateful.
The funny thing is that I think about what I've just written and it seems so negative. But I don't want to put people off reading the book, now I come to think about it. It's too interesting, and too different, to do that.
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I know I've prattled on about Cloud Atlas more than enough on here for you people to imagine that I must have immediately gone and bought the rest of Mitchell's ouevre. But I haven't, I've been reading other stuff.
But the other day I found a paperback copy of the new novel, Black Swan Green, in the airport. I've been reading it for the last few days and it's utterly wonderful. Completely different to Cloud Atlas, without the structural pyrotechnics. But the subject matter is different, and it doesn't need to be showy.
I just thought it was wonderful, and I'm now at the point where I'm having to seriously restrain myself from pelting down to Waterstones and buying Number9Dream and Ghostwritten tonight.
I love his ease with style, I love the way he creates fascinating and grim characters, I love the wry humour that comes from so many lines. I love the fact that huge sweeping themes are so subtlely covered. In Cloud Atlas about loss and death and transience; in Black Swan Green there's the obvious stuff about adolescence, but also again about transience, about prejudice, about failed relationships.
Wonderful.
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Just finished Black Swan Green.
Magnificent. Beautiful. Wonderfull. I now concur with the general mood that David Mitchell is probably the greatest British author writing at the moment (or is the British author producing the greatest writing, perhaps).
So deep, so much big theme being covered, yet with such a light touch.
Gobsmacked, I'd say.
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Pigs trotters are really, really nice (when cooked well).
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I think English is his third language. (Isn't that a bit depressing).
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I was a bit underwhelmed by Confederacy of Dunces. I'll do a review later, but suffice to say that although it's fun, I struggle to see quite how it became such a legendary cult book.
I'm now reading Black Swan Green which is wonderful, although completely different to Cloud Atlas, and far, far less showy.
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I loved Lolita when I read it, but when I went back years later I found it hard work. I was discussing it with Stewart a while back. It is an excellent book, beautifully written. I hope you enjoy it, Kell.
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I've happily eaten snails and frogs legs; I've eaten a weird rodent (called labba) in Guyana; I've eaten snake and alligator; I've eaten a bizarre mix of roast pork, blood and intestines when in Portugal (although I struggled); I was eating cold marinated octopus in Italy last year. Although some of these are a bit extreme. I'd generally try the local speciality, whatever it was, unless it's andouillettes, which I've never got past the smell of.
And probably the same would apply to storstromming if the opportunity arose.
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Always try weird local stuff, even if I haven't a clue what it is.
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I've not read any more yet. I've go t a stupidly big to-read shelf at the moment, and frankly the more I thought about Babylon the less I really liked it. There was too much of the drug stuff, I thought.
What would you point me towards?
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You've done most of it already, Kenny.
The obvious one you're missing is The General Of The Dead Army, which I love. It's about an Italian general going to Albania post WWII to try and recover the bodies of fallen soldiers, and his encounters with a German officer trying to do the same, and of the obstructions put in their way by Albanians who resent their presence after what they did during the war.
It's so wonderful, but it's one of the bleakest books I've ever read.
I take it, from that list, that you are a fan.
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I didn't spot The Old Man And The Sea in there. I've read that, too. Along with, obviously, For Whom The Bell Tolls. I can hardly remember either of them, though, having read them so long ago.
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I've not read any of your Steinbeck or Hemingway choices. My Steinbeck is limited to the obvious Grapes of Wrath, Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. All of which are great, of course. I think Stewart's been reading Steinbeck this year.
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On the grill
1 - pieces of aubergine (salt and dry them to draw moisture out).
2 - Wide cup mushrooms brushed with olive oil on both sides, when cooking the back put some brie in
3 - veggie skewers, as earlier
4 - corn on the cob
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My Idea Of Fun was quite good, although felt very derivative - if you tried to write a Martin Amis book with Irving Welsh's attitude, it's where you'd end up. I tried the short stories (can't remember what they were called) and found it was more of almost exactly the same, which doesn't work if your trick is to shock.
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I tried when I was a teenager and got very lost after about 100 pages, confused particularly by remembering which count or baron or whatever was which, particularly as they switch between proper name and the russian patronymic.
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What a good and interesting list.
Broken April is a woinderful book by one of my favourite authors. It's so dark and nasty and unredeemed, though, and some people I know have had problems with it. If you want to read more I'd most recommend The File On H, followed by the spectacularly dark General Of The Dead Army.
A few of Kadare's books end up as being rather simple, and might frustrate. The second most recent - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, for example, is nothing like as good as some of the earlier stuff.
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A quick big up to Dirt Music by Tim Winton, too, which I loved. The only other of his I read "The Riders" is very weird and disturbing, but nothing like as enjoyable
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But just because there are other books that cover autism, say, or emotional vacuum better than Curious Incident, that doesn't mean Curious Incident has no value as an adult book.
That would be like arguing that because Kafka's Amerika covers the feeling of alienation in immigration better, there's no value in a book like Jonathan Raban's Waxwings.
Anyway, I found Curious Incident not only enjoyable, but I thought it had more depth and told more stories than would make it exclusively a childrens' book. Perhaps Haddon is not a magnificent writer who can show even more subtleties, but that doesn't stop the book itself being both and adult and childrens book - which is, I always feel, something of an achievement in itself.
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I think you two are misreading the book. It works as a kids book, but it functions as an adult book too. I never read Paddy Clark, so can't fully comment on the comparison, but the emotional vacuum was part of what was engaging about the book. The things left unsaid by the narrator gave the book subtleties and depth that will never be picked up by, say, a 12 year old.
Just because a book is short, and simple, doesn't mean it doesn't bring impact.
It also has to be linear, I think, given the subject matter.
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Hehehe! Lovely pun.
I really liked the very contrived but very tenuous connections between the layers. That was, to me, one of the real delights of the book. The connectedness of the stories gave you a pointer to the connected themes. If they'd stood alone it would just be a colleciton of short stories; if the links had been stronger it would have been clunky.
Andy the Olympian
in Reading Challenges
Posted · Edited by Freewheeling Andy
OK. Here goes. I'm taking the beginning of this year as my start point.
Green have been read this year (or are being read)
Red are in the "sitting by the bed" pile.
I'm adding little blue stars where I know I've read books from the country, but not within the challenge time.
Afghanistan
*Albania - The successor, Ismael Kadare
*Algeria
American Samoa
Andorra
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda
*Argentina
Armenia
Aruba
*Australia - Due Preparations For The Plague, Jeanette Turner Hospital
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belgium
Belize
Benin
Bermuda
Bhutan
Bolivia
*Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
British Virgin Islands
Brunei
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
*Canada - Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Cape Verde
Cayman Islands
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Chinese Taipei (Taiwan)
*Colombia
Comoros
Congo DR
Congo Republic
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
C