A Book Blog by Books do Furnish a Room 2013

[ethan]

Excellent review of Cat's Table, books! I read this earlier in the year and also loved the writing. I did stumble at times over the first person narration, how an old man could remember events in such detail from when he was 11 years old. I kept thinking I wouldn't have stumbled if the novel had been told in third person. But as you point out it is a book about memory. This was my first Ondaatje, a friend recommends Divisadero as his best. Have you read that?

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Ethan; I haven't read Divisadero; another for the list!!

Tha Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is Garcia Marquez at his most complex and polemical. It is an uncomfortable read, disturbing at times. It is also difficult with very few chapters, no paragraphs and sentences that go on for several pages. Garcia Marquez conducts an extended love affair with the comma; his punctuation mark of choice in this book.
The novel concerns the nameless dictator of a nameless Caribbean nation; principally it is the story of his decline and death with added detail concerning his bloody reign. He has modestly titled himself “General of the Universe”. Garcia Marquez does have experience of living under dictatorship (Pinilla in Columbia and Franco in Spain).
It is a mass of influences that hits you like a torrent of water. As you would expect there is magic realism and surrealism at its heart. However the influence of Rabelais is also clear and there is a strand of mysticism running through it all. The jumps in time are reminiscent of Faulkner. It is also crude, vulgar, violent and cruel as you would expect of any analysis of the internal dynamics of dictatorship.
There are also some deeply comic moments. The dictator sells the sea around his island to the Americans who keep him in power. The sea is packaged up and sent to somewhere in Arizona; the general is given a wind machine as a present to replace the sea breezes. The cows on the island are born with the presidential mark already on them.
However, the novel is deeply depressing, polemical and focuses on excess. The General is a grotesque and the excesses are completely over the top, even though there is a dreamlike quality even to the violence and perversions.  Garcia Marquez captures the chaos and unknowing of life in a dictatorship; there is little sense of time (the General changes it at will), memories are changed at will and reinvented. The atrocities are trotted out and explained by the General. We spend a great deal of time in the General’s head and Garcia Marquez exposes what one reviewer has called “the solitary vice of power”. The General comes to see himself as a god and names his son Emmanuel.
This is a fascinating, confusing, shocking and mystical analysis of the heart of dictatorship and the heart of a dictator; charting his decline from charismatic leader to depraved beast.
8 out of 10

Starting  Journey to the end of Night by Celine

[frankie]

You reviewed a book by A. S. Byatt and I was wondering if you've read her Possession? I'm sorry, I can't remember if you have. It sounds just the type of book I would love, but I once tried reading it and while the language and style of writing was beautiful, I found it a bit difficult and heavy going (being a non-native English speaker). I think I could tackle it in the right mind-set and when the mood it right, but I was wondering if you would say Possession, or other books by her, are a bit difficult? I do wish to like her books, but she intimidates me a bit.

[Books do furnish a room]

Frankie; I read Possession years ago; it isn't that easy a read and I think Angels and Insects is a better introduction to her work.

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser

Quite an oddity; it took me a while to decide whether I liked it or not; it’s quite abstract and the protagonist isn’t someone that I would immediately warm to. The novel is written in the first person. Jakob is from a good family, with money and possibly titled who decides to go to the big city (Berlin) and join a school for servants (much as Walser did) called the Benjamenta Institute. The only teaching members we meet are the Principal and his sister.
The book is in diary form and consists of Jakob’s reflections and his philosophy; and also something of the philosophy of being a servant and being invisible with appropriate humility. Jakob is highly self-critical (sometimes irritatingly so) and there were times I was reminded of Uriah Heep. Walser’s influences are not easy to pin down. His intensely self critical nature has been compared to Rousseau in the Confessions and to a Dostoyevskian character. One of his translators has argued that Jakob has some similarities to characters in German folk tales (Brothers Grimm); the hero who braves the castle and wins the day against the odds. But victory is bittersweet because at the end Jakob is still back in the real world. Kafka was a fan and it is easy to see why and to see shades of The Castle in particular.
Jakob’s odd combination of humility and arrogance and his philosophy sometimes feel unsettling and contradictory; there are clear Nietzschean references and yet Walser is also analysing the middle class/bourgeois psyche which will have such an influence on German history in the early twentieth century. The elevation of the banal and the ultimate discovery by Jakob that at the heart it is all hollow and meaningless; the mysterious inner chambers are not all they seem; neither are the Benjamenta’s.
The foreshadowing of Nazism in characters like Kraus is startling; as is the amused tolerance of those in authority; there is a level of madness about it, but it is so simple, at times amusing; but also sad given Walser’s later descent into madness. Pretty much nothing happens on the surface, but Jakob has a hard time living with himself. A later poem by Walser sums it up;

I would wish it on no one to be me.
Only I am capable of bearing myself.
To know so much, to have seen so much, and
To say nothing, just about nothing

 

9 out of 10

Starting A Legacy by Sybille Bedford

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Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino

Deeply strange, funny, clever, offensive, difficult to read and completely mad (did I just define post-modern novels?). Sorrentino goes hunting for tropes and he pretty much bags as many as are out there,
The plot is tenuous but revolves around avant-garde novelist Anthony Lamont and his attempts to write his new book. The characters in his novel have lives of their own. Here literary characters hire themselves out to novelists and move from novel to novel like actors. Characters appear from Finnegan’s Wake, At-Swim-Two-Birds, Dashiell Hammett and Daisy Buchanan from Gatsby also makes an appearance. The characters also have interior lives and relationships outside the novel. At times Sorrentino deliberately writes badly when writing as Anthony Lamont in his novel; it is a noble attempt and he absolutely pulls it off. This does however make for a difficult (if funny) read.
During the book its characters become increasingly disillusioned with Lamont’s writing style and begin to plan their escape and the idea of a town full of book characters at rest, having escaped from bad novels or between jobs are hilarious.
Apart from Lamont’s truly appalling novel, there are lots of letters from Lamont to publishers, friends, his sister (married to a rival novelist) and his ex-wife. As the novel goes on these letters become increasingly splenetic and paranoid and are a delight. Sorrentino also has a crack at erotic poetry and it’s difficult to describe in mere words how bad it actually is! There is a more or less unreadable brief play in the middle and a section on abstract mathematics attempting to explain contravariant behaviour (this may also be brilliant, but my maths isn’t that good).  The orgy scenes again are excruciating and mostly anatomically unlikely.
As you may have gathered this novel has lots of different aspects; some work very well, for example the stream of consciousness section near the beginning. Every now and then Sorrentino goes into list mode. The two main characters in the novel explore the cabin they are using in the novel whilst Lamont isn’t writing and they come across lots of books and periodicals. Some of these are just hilarious, some very clever and some just silly; I suspect they must have been great fun to make up.
I’m struggling to sum it up and it certainly won’t be for everyone; it is inconsistent, but the best of it is brilliant and the parodies are spot on
7 out of 10

Starting The Recognitions by William Gaddis

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Cyril Connolly: A Life by Jeremy Lewis

Cyril Connolly is a little known character now, but he was one of the bright young things, went to Eton and Oxford. He was at school with Orwell,  at Oxford with Evelyn Waugh; friends with Auden, Isherwood, Bowra, Brian Howard, Nancy Mitford, Betjeman, Ian Fleming, Kenneth Clark (snr), Eliot and many others. This review will encompass a gay James Bond spoof and the nature of reviewing (quite current). Connolly spent much of his life writing reviews for national newspapers (in the 1940s for his own magazine Horizon). He wrote two excellent and well thought of memoirs, some collections of reviews and a rather good novel (The Rock Pool).
Lewis’s biography is not hagiographical; he had access to much more of Connolly’s papers then the only other biographer Fisher and he is honest about Connolly’s faults; the self-absorption, infidelity (he always seemed to be in love with at least two people at once), moodiness.
Connolly was a typical middle class product of the English public school system. He was brilliant when he applied himself, but seldom did. In his youth his partners were almost entirely male; most remained lifelong friends. Women came along in his 20s and he married three times. His first wife was an alcoholic; his second wife was Barbara Skelton (infamously caricatured by Anthony Powell in his Dance to the Music of Time series as Pamela Flitton). It was only with his third wife that Connolly seemed to settle, becoming a father for the first time in his late 50s .
Connolly reviewed books for most of his working life; the best and worst of jobs. He was paid to read (bliss), but did not create as much as he felt he should have. His reviews were often very sharp and he would not tolerate the mediocre. He adored Proust, Gide, Joyce. He was an early supporter of Hemingway and Waugh (he found Waugh’s later novels tedious); he championed Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in this country and was a great supporter of the French modernist movement.
Here is a sample of what he said about books and writers he found less appealing.
About one week’s selection of books; “To read all these books is to be brought face to face with the tragedy of the worthy” and “They are all books that it is worthwhile to have written if there did not happen always to have been something written on the same lines that was better”.
Even better; “What can you expect from a slug but a slug track” and “It is the inefficiency of these slop writers, stupidly churning out emotions that have already been better expressed, in a dumb replica of the language that was used to express them, that really infuriates the reviewer ...”.
He once described his feeling about reviewing; “the feeling of obscure guilt that comes after a day spent in this thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens”.
There is much more, most of it razor sharp and to the point. I do wonder what Connolly would have made of the modern scene.
I think I also mentioned a gay James Bond spoof. Connolly wrote “Bond Strikes Camp” in 1962/3. The plot is simple. A KGB colonel has come to London; he has a penchant for men in drag. M orders Bond to get into drag and allow himself to be picked up. Bond does this with some reluctance and picks up the colonel. In the ensuing clinch the colonel’s moustache comes off and he is revealed to be M. M has always had a secret longing for Bond and this was the only way he could think of to get him into bed. It wasn’t universally well received though apparently Fleming didn’t mind.
Connolly was a bon viveur, book collector and always lived beyond his means. He could be excellent company, as all his friends attested, he could also be moody and difficult. This is a competent, sympathetic and very funny biography of an increasingly forgotten literary phenomenon.

8 out of 10

Starting Galley Slave by Jean Marteilhe
 

[Books do furnish a room]

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

I did enjoy this novel; it goes at a good pace and there is a warmth about it that I appreciated. The structure of the novel is interesting. Nazneen is born in a village in Bangladesh; when old enough she is married to Chanu, a much older man who lives in England. She goes to England as a bride in her teens in 1985. The story follows her over the next years (until 2002) as she has children and mixes with the Bangladeshi community around Brick Lane. The novel also cuts to her sister Hasina back in Bangladesh periodically. There are memorable characters in the Bangladeshi community, each coping with being in a strange culture in different ways; some by blending in others by keeping apart.
Nazneen’s husband Chanu turns out to be a decent man (he doesn’t beat her); he wants a simple village girl to look after him and doesn’t allow Nazneen to learn English, as she doesn’t need it. The novel is tragic and comic, although the comedy is restrained, it is still there. Ali describes physicality very well; you do get a sense of the characters by the descriptions of physical habits and tics, by the way they wear their clothes, fiddle with their hair and so on.
Nazneen develops as the novel goes on and gradually one gets a sense of her becoming rounded as an individual, liberated almost. There are also grand themes; religion and its relation to culture, characters cut off from their origins and adrift in a foreign land, adultery, poverty, family tensions; all the stuff of everyday life and high drama. There are correlations with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. It is about how much control we have over our lives; can you go back to a dream? It isn’t a simple clash of cultures; it is more nuanced; even Karim, a devout Muslim, is a complex and interesting character. Brick Lane is also a novel about place and the geographical restriction of Nazneen’s life adds to the power of her character development. I know this isn’t a universally loved novel, but I enjoyed it.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike
 

[frankie]

Frankie; I read Possession years ago; it isn't that easy a read and I think Angels and Insects is a better introduction to her work.

 

Thank you for the tip, I'll have to think about it

 

Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino

 

What a brilliant review! I was actually laughing out loud in places. It sounds like a real mindbender. How can all that be accomplished in a novel? It's amazing that some people have the skills to pull something like that off

 

 

Cyril Connolly: A Life by Jeremy Lewis

 

I noticed on GR that you were reading this book, and it made me wonder who Cyril Connolly is/was, and now I finally know Sounds like an interesting character, and in addition he knew all those authors, too. This book is definitely going on my wishlist

 

And "What can you expect from a slug but a slug track." ? Ouch

[bobblybear]

Nice review of Brick Lane. Unfortunately I couldn't finish it. Everything about it suggested it was my kind of book, but I just could not get into it.

[pontalba]

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser

Wonderful review, it is already in my shopping cart...

 

Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino

Deeply strange, funny, clever, offensive, difficult to read and completely mad (did I just define post-modern novels?). Sorrentino goes hunting for tropes and he pretty much bags as many as are out there,

 

Starting The Recognitions by William Gaddis

 

Interesting.  Great review....I think this one will also have to go in the cart.

Cyril Connolly: A Life by Jeremy Lewis

 

 

Yup, this one too!

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

 

I've had this on the shelf for quite a while.....thanks for the encouraging review.

 

Meant to ask, how do you like The Recognitions?

Edited October 19, 2013 by pontalba

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Frankie and Bobblybear

Thanks also Pontalba; good luck with the shopping! The Recognitions is slow going, but I'm enjoying it.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

I loved this book and seem to be developing a penchant for reading books which drift along in a sedate way and in which not much appears (on the surface) to happen. Appearances are deceptive though and Wharton’s prose is beautiful and the dialogue sharp, and with depth of meaning.
The novel is set in high society New York in the 1870s; a social milieu where convention reigned on the surface, but where some of the men had slightly scandalous secrets. Newland Archer and May Welland and about to be engaged to be married and the novel follows their engagement and early married life. Newland falls in love with newcomer Ellen Olenska, who has fled a violent marriage in Europe.
This is really about the society of women; Newland Archer believes in his own moral and intellectual superiority, but he really doesn’t have a clue what is happening behind the scenes. Wharton dissects the hypocrisy of a society where customs and position take centre stage. But she also extols the virtue of stability and family life at the same time. This was really like a chess match between Ellen and May; the man being the pawn and the prize and unaware that he was either. The men in the novel are innocent in the sense that they are naive, but they are also corrupt because they are unfaithful and philandering. The women play their game to maintain family, stability and tradition; the men to follow their own devices and desires. Wharton analyses with precision and lays out the society she grew up in for all to see. A great novel and worth reading.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn
 

[Athena]

Nice review! The Age of Innocence is on my TBR. I liked Summer by Edith Wharton but didn't love it.

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Athena; I'll probably get round to Summer one day as well!

Galley Slave by Jean Marteilhe

Folio Society book picked up very cheap; this is unusual, the autobiography of Jean Marteilhe a French Huguenot. Protestantism was tolerated in France until Louis XIV came to the throne. In 1685 he rescinded the Edict of Nantes which guaranteed toleration for Protestants. Marteilhe was a Protestant from Bergerac who was arrested in 1700 trying to flee to the Protestant Low Countries. He remained imprisoned for 13 years, the last six of those as a galley slave, chained to an oar. However the exact dating is a little hazy.
Marteilhe describes the grim conditions in French jails and in the galley ships, chained to an oar. Life was brutal and often short. These really were galleys very similar to those used in the Roman era and the occupants really were slaves. The result is a fascinating and at times horrific account of life in the galleys. The galleys were used close to port and never in the winter. There are also a couple of descriptions of naval engagements with the English near the mouth of the Thames. The brutality of the regime; beatings and punishments (often fatal), poor food, awful conditions are all described. Marteilhe also describes the many acts of human kindness which often saved his life. He could have left the galleys at any time (following a period of probation) had he taken the Catholic faith, but he refused to do so.
A brief and interesting account which does not always flow but is a window into a world that has disappeared.

7 out of 10

Starting The Rector's Daughter by F M Mayor
 

[Books do furnish a room]

A Legacy by Sybille Bedford

I have decided that I do not read enough female authors and so I intend to make sure that at least one of the books I am reading is written by a woman. Sybille Bedford is not very well known. Yet listen to what has been said about her. Julia Neuberger called her the finest woman writer of the 20th Century (not sure I agree), the novelist and critic Francis King called A Legacy one of the greatest books of the 20th Century and Bruce Chatwin (no mean writer himself)  described her as “one of the most dazzling practitioners of English prose”. I can guarantee that had a man had such plaudits then he would be well known and read by all and sundry; yet Bedford only died in 2006 and she seems to be mostly forgotten. She was a close friend of Aldous Huxley and his wife and was also friends with Mann and Brecht. She had written critical articles about the Nazis and was living in the South of France as the Nazis closed in. She needed a passport to escape and Huxley and his wife arranged a marriage of convenience to one of W H Auden’s male friends. The marriage was soon ended but Bedford retained the surname. She had a fascinating life and her main relationships were with other writers; Evelyn Gendel and Eda Lord. I now have Quicksands, Bedford’s memoirs on my tbr list.
The novel is partly autobiographical a portrait of two families (one Catholic, one Jewish) in pre World War One Germany. It captures the tensions in German society, the rise of militarism, the Catholic agrarian south vs the more cosmopolitan north (Berlin). It also explores the tensions of a marriage between a Jewish family and a Catholic family. It is a saga that spans generations and we see the central characters grow up and begin to grow old. There are some good comic turns from the minor characters (servants, grandparents etc) but the themes are powerful; madness, adultery, betrayal, financial ruin. The men in the novel tend to be moody, often distant, often feckless and idle and struggling to come to terms with a rapidly changing world. The women form something of a sisterhood (admittedly fragile at times) and tend to be the strong ones. There is a sense of gloom about the passages set in Berlin; they are very claustrophobic and so well written.
Bedford is a remarkable writer of conversational passages; although she does make the reader work sometimes. I’m reading The Recognitions at the moment and she has the same habit Gaddis has of launching into dialogue whilst not mentioning to the reader who is involved! Incidentally the two novels were published about the same time.
This is the first of a trilogy of autobiographical novels and I would highly recommend it

8 out of 10

Starting Justine by Lawrence Durrell
 

[Books do furnish a room]

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Thoroughly enjoyable and difficult to categorise. This debut novel is 700 pages long and bowls along at a very rapid pace. It is a very funny generational saga about brothers Martin and Terry Dean and Martin’s son Jasper. It’s pretty much totally unbelievable and there is extraordinary level of cynicism about life and the human condition; something which should delight even the most misanthropic.
It is set in Australia and ranges across France and Thailand as well. There are philosophical elements and the whole thing reminded me of an Arabian Nights type tale (or tales as we rotate voices between Martin and Jasper). There is an interesting childhood illness sequence which one critic has compared to Vonnegut and Marquez; a stretch too far, but the same critic also compares it to an intelligent stand up routine and this is much nearer the mark. A couple of quote will illustrate;
“There were no two ways about it: I was in a crisis. But recent shifts in the behaviour of different age groups made it hard to know what type - How could it be a midlife crisis when the forties were the new twenties, the fifties the new thirties . . . I had to read the lifestyle supplement to make sure I wasn't going through puberty."
“You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue.”

There are plenty of one-liners;
“To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah's witness, uninvited and tireless”
"Paris-perfect city to be lonely & miserable in.”
I’ve been struggling to find the right words to describe this and I think nihilistic about sums it up. It feels like something that one ought not to enjoy, a forbidden pleasure and at times it gets way to preachy in its cynical sort of way and there I think Toltz yields to the temptation of speaking through his characters.
The female characters are secondary and mainly foils for the men; the Rupert Murdoch character is fun and there are several rather amusing criminal thugs, one neat twist and lots of mayhem. Toltz makes serious points along the way about parenting, bullying and sometimes the meaning of life. It is very funny and remarkable for a first novel. The flaws are many, but mostly forgiveable and I would certainly read another novel by Toltz

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Stone's Fall by Iain Pears

[Marie H]

Ooh, that was a great review of A Fraction of the Whole   . 

It’s pretty much totally unbelievable and there is extraordinary level of cynicism about life and the human condition; something which should delight even the most misanthropic.

It sounds just the ticket for me - I love a streak of misanthropy! (I could do with emoticon for that too... )

That book is now on my public library reservation list  .  

An misanthrope made happy!   

[frankie]

A great review on A Fraction of the Whole! This sounds something I'd definitely like

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Frankie and Marie; I really enjoyed A Fraction of the Whole!

 

The Rector's Daughter by F M Major

Another unexpected surprise by a relatively unknown female writer. I read the penguin modern classics edition; it is also published by virago.
Flora Mayor was a remarkable woman; she read history at Cambridge in the early 1890s; a great achievement. She then became an actress before turning to literature. She wrote short stories and several novels, which were well regarded. She was a writer of ghost stories which were greatly admired by M R James (the greatest writer of ghost stories ever!). Again I wonder why she is so little known. There is no individual biography of her. There is a joint biography of Mayor and her friend Mary Sheepshanks published in the 1980s by virago, called Spinsters of This Parish: The Life and Times of F.M.Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks.

This is again one of those novels where not a great deal actually happens, but it is a sharp and perceptive analysis of the human heart, human relationships; loss, love, friendship and loneliness. The story is a simple one. Mary Jocelyn lives with her father a clergyman in a small isolated village in East Anglia in the early twentieth century. It is a quiet life; she nurses her sister Ruth until her death, visits locals and manages the household. Mary is in her 30s and there is no thought of marriage. Mary reads, writes occasional poetry and is thoughtful and Mayor portrays her as quiet, introverted with strong passions beneath the surface, but most of all as the intellectual equal of any man. Into her life comes another clergyman, just moved into the area, Robert Herbert. Herbert’s father was a close friend of Mary’s father and he begins to visit regularly. They begin to spend time together and a friendship based on mutual intellectual interests, a love of nature and general steadiness develops. They fall in love in a slow steady sort of way and become to all intents and purposes engaged.
Then Mr Herbert goes to visit relatives and suddenly he is engaged to a much younger and prettier woman (Kathy). Mary is heartbroken, but tells no one. She continues to be isolated and awkward in company, whilst Robert and Kathy marry. After some happy months they both become disillusioned and Kathy goes to stay on the Riviera with a “fast set” of whom Mr Herbert does not approve. Mary and Robert begin to see a little more of each other and it is clear they do have strong feelings for each other. One day Robert suddenly kisses her (her one and only kiss); they are both shocked and Mary leaves very quickly. She is tortured by this for the rest of her life and turns to writing poetry and caring for her aging father. At this time Kathy has to return home as she becomes partially disfigured as the result of a medical issue. This brings Robert and Kathy closer together and Robert soon forgets Mary. Kathy is mow isolated, lonely and bitter and turns to Mary for support, which Mary provides. When Kathy recovers she no longer needs Mary. The rest of the book follows Mary and her inner life over the next few years as she nurses her father and has to move out of the Rectory after his death.
It is all beautifully written and the characterisation is superb. None of the characters are one-dimensional. It would have been easy to make Robert Herbert unsympathetic, but he isn’t. It would also have been easy to make Kathy empty headed and entirely frivolous, but she is not. The minor characters are also strong. Mary herself is a tremendously complex and interesting character; there is a lot of repressed feelings and emotions between her and her father, which are barely spoken of. But Mary is so very believable and one does feel great sympathy for her; this is what makes the novel so devastating.  Susan Hill is a strong advocate of this book, calling it one of the best of the neglected classics. She is right; it is a masterpiece.
There are few laughs (but there is a light ironic humour), no action, it is rather sad; but it is an exceptional novel about human relationships which should be on everyone’s reading list. 

9 out of 10

Strating Orlando by Virginia Woolf

[Athena]

Great review ! This book is on my wishlist.

[Marie H]

Another good review .

I think that The Rector's Daughter by F M Major is somewhere in my TBR piles   . 

[Janet]

I've had that on my wish list for ages. Good to hear you enjoyed it.

[Books do furnish a room]

The Rector's Daughter is worth reading;

Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike

This is an odd book. John Updike was something of an expert on the President before Lincoln; James Buchanan. He wrote a play about him and had intended to write a historical novel about him. Instead he shoved most of what he knew into this book. It is ostensibly about Alf Clayton a history lecturer. When the Northern New England Association of American Historians (NNEAAH) ask for memories and recollections of the Ford administration Clayton puts together all his notes about Buchanan, about whom he had been writing at the time and this takes up about half the book. Interspersed are Alf’s recollections about what he was doing at the time. Essentially this comprises of a series of sexual escapades. Alf is unfaithful to his wife (whom he dubs The Queen of Disorder) with his mistress Genevieve (whom he dubs The Perfect Wife), the wife of a colleague. He moves out and is then unfaithful (several times) to his mistress. His mistress finally sees sense and gives him the elbow and he returns to his wife.
The historical part of the book has been criticized as being rather boring, but actually I found it the most interesting; mainly because I knew very little about Buchanan. This being Updike, there is a lot more going on! One of the Elephants in the room is Nabakov and more specifically Pale Fire. The structure is similar where a particular subject is an excuse for a more personal tour-de-force.  However there is a joke at the centre in the form of the pay off; “the more I think about the Ford Administration, the more it seems I remember nothing” There are also several amusing pokes at deconstructionists and Derrida.
However there is one thing you cannot get away from; and that is Updike’s extensive and somewhat detailed descriptions of Alf’s sexual exploits. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised given Updike’s past history.
Several points occur;
1) Some of the descriptions of sexual relationships would undoubtedly be contenders for the bad sex award
2) Some of Alf’s attitudes towards women felt to be to be very unpleasant and demeaning. Describing someone you are making love to as a “witchy incubus” even in your head strikes me as maladjusted. Sentences like “Her wetness had become so extreme I kept slipping, like a man in smooth-soled boots on a mudbank” suggest to me that there is a total disconnection with the woman involved and almost an alienness and I feel there is an unspoken loathing there which I find disturbing. The question I then ask is whether this is Updike observing and satirising men, or is it what he really thinks. I am not sure, but I tend towards the latter. All the women in the book are sexual foils, not intellectual ones. There is no meeting of minds, just a meeting of bodies, which alienated this reader because the meeting of minds for me is primary and is inseparable and an integral part of the physical incarnation.
3) This is sex as a burden, almost like one of Marley’s chains, something inescapable because that’s what men have to do. It is a gloomy view of sexual relations with no sense or understanding of femininity. It felt to me deeply misogynistic.
The whole contrivance doesn’t work, but the bits about Buchanan were at least informative.

3 and a half out of 10

Starting Restoration by Rose Tremain
 

[Books do furnish a room]

Journey to the End of the Night

This is undoubtedly one of the great novels. It is misanthropic in the extreme; the author really doesn’t like anyone, including himself. Often written in the vernacular, brutal, comic and ranging over three continents and a World War. There is a strong element of the autobiographical in it. It has also influenced more great writers than you can shake a sock at. The list is a remarkable one; Beckett, Sartre (briefly). Genet, Barthes, Miller, Bukowski, Heller, Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Kerouac, Gunter Grass, Burroughs to name a few. Burroughs and Ginsberg both visited him towards the end of his life. Journey was published in 1932 and was his first novel; it is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement.
Those of you who know me may be sensing a but! Well, mostly the foibles of writers are forgivable; we all have them. Celine had his fair share.
In 1937 Celine wrote a tract called Trifles for a Massacre; the first of three tracts. They were rabidly anti-Semitic and racist. Celine threw his lot in with the Nazis and argued for an alliance between France and Germany.
“Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is.”
“We do not think enough about the protection of the white Aryan race. Now is the time to act, because tomorrow will be too late.”
Once France had fallen Celine supported the Nazis. The head of propaganda for the Nazis in France, Payr, was of the opinion that Celine was too extreme to be helpful.
After the war Celine had to leave France as he was wanted as a collaborator. His opinions did not really change; he became what we would now term a Holocaust denier and in 1957 said that white Aryan Christian civilization ended with the battle of Stalingrad.
John Banville called this the best novel ever written by a far-right sympathizer and I think he may be right.  It is also pertinent to bear in mind that many of Celine’s fellow writers fell for the Soviet system rather than fascism. Coincidentally I am reading The Gulag Archipelago at the moment and Stalin also murdered many millions of his fellow countrymen in the name of peace and an ideal society. The difference with those who followed the Soviet path is that most of them abandoned it when it became clear what Marxist-Leninist practice actually involved. Celine stuck to his beliefs.
Celine is in the tradition of Balzac, Zola and many of the great French writers. There is also a touch of the Don Quixote about it with the character of Robinson (who crops up fairly regularly) acting as a sort of Sancho Panza. There is a sort of picaresque nihilism about the narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu. The malarial hallucinatory passages in French colonial Africa are pure Heart of Darkness and the industrial passages in America have a touch of Upton Sinclair.
It is ultimately a pessimistic reflection on life. Some may look at ordinary life and people and see nobility, beauty and struggle; Celine sees ugliness, bestiality and pointlessness. I was reminded of the end of a poem by Larkin to sum the whole thing up

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

5 and a half out of 10

Starting  Triple Fugue by Osbert Sitwell

[Books do furnish a room]

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I first read this many years ago; before I knew very much about Virginia Woolf and her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, to whom this is dedicated. The background is vital because it adds so much and because it helps the reader to reach an understanding of Woolf’s generosity. It is as ever, beautifully written and drifts splendidly through the centuries and the key is Vita and their circle.
As Woolf was writing this her affair with Vita was beginning to wane as Vita was moving on to other lovers. The two women were very different and Vita was much more sexually active and interested in a variety of people. For Vita the thrill of the new was important. Woolf recognised this.
One of the keys to the book is Vita’s ancestral home, Knole. It is faithfully represented as Orlando’s home estate in the book, down to the heraldic leopards and the visit of Queen Elizabeth the First. Vita had lost Knole because a woman could not inherit; here Woolf gives her it back.
Many of the characters represent people both knew. The Russian princess Sasha is Violet Trefusis, Nicholas Greene is Gosse, Archduchess Harriet/Archduke Henry   was Lord Lascelles (one of Vita’s many admirers), Shelmerdine is Vita’s husband Harold Nicholson. Orlando’s poetic work The Oak Tree is equivalent to Vita’s poetic work The Land.
There is a great deal of imagery here; some of it in the form of private jokes/codes.  The “porpoise in a fishmonger’s shop” is one such (no idea what that one means). The imagery around the goose that crops up a couple of times even confused Vita (Vita was much more literal than Woolf)! It is interesting to consider that originally Woolf had conceived it as an illustrated book with photographs and pictures. Woolf’s portrayal was an accurate one. Harold Nicholson found it difficult to conceive that anyone else could know the private Vita that he knew and thought it was a lucky accident (it wasn’t, Woolf was very perceptive). Mary Campbell (another of Vita’s lovers) was also surprised how accurately the private Vita was portrayed.
On top of this being a love letter to Vita, it is so much more besides. The nature of gender and biography are explored. It is also interesting to note that Woolf was also writing the lectures that became A Room of One’s Own. Orlando is part of the train of thought Woolf had about the revolutionary potential of women’s friendship. A new world opens when like each other and are no longer seen as rival’s for men’s affection/approval.
It is a tender and humorous love story/letter, almost a faitytale, not meant to be taken in the same vein as more serious work (To The Lighthouse), but it captures the imagination and sold much more than anything Woolf had written previously. It is a work of brilliance with a lightness of touch.
9 out of 10

Starting Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

[Brian.]

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you think of Foucault's Pendulum, it's been on my TBR for a while now.