26 books

The fourth in Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck series is as complex and accomplished as its predecessor, The Man on the Balcony. It’s the most successful of the series internationally, winning several awards and becoming the basis for a film starring Walter Matthau.

This time Martin Beck and his colleagues are trying to solve the mass murder of nine people, gunned down on a bus late on a rainy Stockholm night. One of the victims is a young murder detective. What was he working on? Why was he armed while off duty? Was he, despite being married, somehow involved with the nurse sitting next to him or are the killings connected to the one passenger nobody seems able to identify?

With such a high profile case, detectives are drafted in from across Sweden to assist, allowing Sjowall and Wahloo to reflect on the harsh, chaotic nature of Stockholm compared to the more rural areas of the country. The welfare state is a theme too, with the Marxist authors observing the corrupting effect of failures in the system.

And there is time to examine the role of the police themselves. The bus massacre is juxtaposed with an anti-Vietnam demonstration at the American embassy. While every available policeman is pressed into service there, tormenting those armed with no more than placards, the real criminals can work unmolested.

Martin Beck’s daughter, once proud of her father’s profession, is now 16 and tries not to mention his work to her friends. People want to pretend the police aren’t there, Sjowall and Wahloo explain, until they really need them.

It would be easy for the authors to overdo their point by throwing in one or two obviously corrupt cops but they don’t. A couple are incompetent, a few are bullies but basically they’re ordinary men (and they’re all men, in almost every book) trying to hold together a crumbling society.

This is another deeply intelligent entry in the series.

I spent most of the morning finishing this extraordinary three-part novel and most of the afternoon thinking about it - its themes and characters, narrative voice and, most of all, the sense of impending doom that permeates the last two sections. It’s a work of astounding depth, a tour de force, which reminded me of Donna Tartt’s novels in length and complexity, only with more gravitas.

Leo Hertzberg is a New York art historian looking back over twenty-five years of love and friendship. His key relationships with his wife, Erica, and their friends, artist Bill Wechsler and his muse, Violet, are ‘what he loved’ and the fact that all have been fractured by the end of the novel - as well as those with his son, Matt, and Bill’s son, Mark - is unbearably tragic. Hustvedt writes with great understanding about the power of love and loss. She explores themes of trust, empathy or the lack of it, and the grinding horror of grief. Alongside this, she writes compellingly about contemporary art in the 1980s, in particular the frenetic SoHo art scene, its dealers, critics, artists and hangers-on, its bitchiness on the one hand and magic on the other. Through Leo’s painstaking descriptions, we learn not only of Bill’s rise to fame but also of his son’s increasing involvement in the seamier side of SoHo life. This delving into club and drug culture takes the novel into darker territory mirrored in Violet’s ongoing research into hysteria and psychopathy. The last third of the book is memorably disturbing and the whole thing so impressive I intend giving it to all my friends on their birthdays for at least the next year.

Most reviews of The Gone-Away World tend to dwell on Nick Harkaway’s parentage. It’s not terribly relevant. Harkaway’s debut is speculative fiction which mixes bits of sci-fi and fantasy with a good measure of surreal humour. It has more in common with early Neal Stephenson or Michael Marshall Smith than John Le Carre.

The story opens in a post-apocalyptic world devastated by something called the Go Away Bomb. Designed to be a perfect weapon, one that simply erases bits of reality, the bomb turned out to have an awful side effect: the fallout from the bomb restructured reality, bringing people’s thoughts to life as bizarre and often horrific mutations. The only thing keeping people safe is a substance called FOX which, when pumped out of a globe-encircling pipe, neutralises the fallout.

Understandably then, news that the pipe has caught fire is not good. To the rescue come our nameless narrator, his friend Gonzo Lubitsch and their team of mercenaries. As they head for the fire, Harkaway takes us back to the narrator’s childhood with Gonzo, the development of the Go Away Bomb and the outbreak of the war. Along the way there is a very funny satire of student politics (”Society may - or may not - be teleologically oriented towards penetrative modes, but there’s no question about Aline.”), a band of pirates, a secret martial arts order and lots of ninjas.

It’s a lot of fun but not without its weaknesses. At more than 500 pages the plot would have benefited from tightening and Harkaway has a tendency towards bombastic imagery, which reads like someone trying too hard to establish a voice. Finally, the novel’s big twist is so similar to the big twist of another cult novel that even naming the book I’m thinking of would give the game away.

All that aside, this is an enjoyably quirky novel and an ideal holiday read.

I’m not terribly highbrow (anyone reading this blog will have guessed that three books ago) so I approached this book with trepidation (translated Nobel prize winner, classic literature …)  But it was great: a wonderfully absorbing read, just like the Victorian storytellers I thought I wouldn’t enjoy and then couldn’t put down, at school and since.

Essentially its a tale of a family in Cairo in the early twentieth century, set against the political turmoil in Egypt in this period.  The stern patriarch, oppressing his family into adhere strictly to religious principles whilst allowing himself the luxury of debauchery, the good-for-nothing eldest son, the smart but not-so-pretty sister and the very pretty but lazy one, the gentle-hearted mother are all there. They enjoy and suffer the same experiences - sibling rivalry and support, failures of character and unintended heroism, passionate love and marital boredom, meals and school and work and weddings - found in any family saga, albeit within a setting very different from the European  stories familiar to me. 

The differences are few but fascinating: plumpness being a key to beauty, the absolute cloistering of the women (in this family only - other respectable women in Cairo are allowed to go out, but one of the key events is the near-divorce that proceeeds from the mother, Amina, leaving the house for the first time in decades to pay a brief but reverential visit to a nearby mosque), the deeply felt and unquestioning belief that women are simply not as “human” as men.

These last two are particularly emphasised by Naguib Mahfouz  as a parallel between the family and the country struggling with changes to a way of life that has existed for centuries.

The writing is prosaic and just a little stiff, sometimes a characteristic of  translations, but here, I think, that is the original tone, since the family are so very formal and traditional.  Where he excels is in expressing characterisation through thoughts - potential “types” become real people as the reader follows the scattered, random words and phrases filling their heads in reaction to the events going on around them.

As in all good Victorian novels, this is the first part of a trilogy and I am looking forward to reading the next two.

I’m very excited because just last week I bought I am a cat by Natsume Soseki.  These stories are, I understand, required reading in Japanese schools, and were an influence on Haruki Murakami when he wrote Wind-up Bird Chronicle.  The reason I’m looking forward to reading the Meiji-era classic is that I am hoping that it will help me to “get” the contemporary classic.  I really wanted to love this book - I have so many friends who do, who claim it as one of their favourites.

I didn’t hate it, there were parts I thoroughly enjoyed: mostly those involving the cat (the opening paragraphs of “Nutmeg and Cinammon, which describe the return of the missing cat are a tender, evocative description of the physicality of the relationship between people and cats), and also whenever May Kasahara put in an appearance.  Her letters from the wig-factory kept me reading on.

The other stories, Lieutenant Mamiya’s horrific war experience and the stark horror of the Zoo Attack, are other excellent reasons to read the book.

Unfortunately, I don’t find surrealism fascinating and I didn’t respond with anything but boredom to the exploits in the well and the strange dreams and visions, and since they take up the bulk of the book, I struggled to read it. 

I’m glad I read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in the same way that I’m glad I’ve read Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk and can now kinda hope to understand contemporary cultural references.  But I’m also very relieved I’ve read it and won’t need to again.

ps I much preferred Kafka on the shore (not just because a library is central to the tale!)

Hmmm, I should have known, it was a Sunday Times bestseller and has a pink cover.  

The problem is that its not a book you’re meant to sit down and read from cover to cover.  I tried that and got fed up with being guilt-tripped because I don’t have perfectly manicured nails, and prefer flip-flops and French Sole to Manolo Blahnik.  It felt as if I had sat down and read 5 “Marie Claire”  - do they still publish “Marie Claire”, OK then, “Glamour” - mags in a row. 

It looks as if it might be fairly useful when your general knowledge of how to get through life lets you down (I’m not going to quote examples - one person’s SCART lead is another’s hedge that needs trimmed and I absolutely refuse to believe gender has anything to do with it).  Some of the “essays” by famous people - not all girls, please note - might make a fun (quick) loo read.

So I’m not dismissing it entirely, but I’d prefer to have a copy I bought from Oxfam than pay full price.

This is my first post.  I’ve read 26 books (almost) this year but, as others have noted, it’s the reviewing that is the challenge, albeit an enjoyable one.  Quite a few of those I’ve read have already been reviewed so I’m leaving them until later, or intending to simply respond with comments.

So why choose this one to start with?  Partly because I just finished it on the bus this morning, but also because I enjoyed it, and I wasn’t really expecting it to.  I’m not especially fond of short stories and I don’t have a particular interest in the countries and cultures of Asia (yes, I mean the whole continent - Africa and Europe keep me busy enough!).  However, last year I was persuaded to read (and this is amazing because I actively avoid non-fiction) Maximum City: Bombay lost and found by Suketu Mehta and was completely absorbed and fascinated by the book and by Bombay, which helped in breaking the ice on Love & Longing, since Chandra expects his readers to be comfortable with slang, vernacular and other cultural references that would have been unfamiliar to me a few months ago.

Although I wouldn’t want that comment to detract at all from Chandra’s talent for describing place and emotion so tellingly.  I felt he really exposed the dull despair of the suicidal and the sex scenes with the divorced cop who still loved his wife were as elegantly erotic as temple carvings.  I didn’t really care for the ghost story, but the detective story had a William Gibson feeling to it (without losing its own essence).

The stories were none of them really very short, but still left me wanting more. Highly recommended.

I first read this in 1999 when it was published amid pre-Millennial fever and nine years later I found myself picking it up again, partly because I’d forgotten everything in it and partly because I’m going through a period of interest in English history, sparked by recent visits to Stonehenge, Avebury, Bath, Glastonbury and the Lake District.

It’s easy to imagine that life in “Engla-lond” in the year 1000 was a kind of Dark Ages nightmare. The Romans had left six hundred years earlier and for a long time their cities had been more or less abandoned. Most people lived in villages and their lives revolved around the hard manual labour needed to grow enough to feed themselves and their families. Apart from slavery, Viking invasions and the hardship of failed harvests, they had to endure primitive quackery, appalling punishments for wrongdoers and the clash between age-old paganism and newfangled Christianity.

Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger do an excellent job of bringing this to life in The Year 1000. The book is split into thirteen parts: the twelve months set out in a document called the Julius Work Calendar (from which the authors take simple line drawings depicting everyday working life to illustrate their chapter headings) and a final chapter, The English Spirit. It’s a comprehensive study of life leading up to, during and after the first millennium: from the position of women in Anglo-Saxon society to the development of the Englisc (sic) language; from the mass veneration of saints and their relics to the success of the wool trade and the prosperity that this brought.

The book is full of interesting facts. For example, did you know that “people took it for granted that their bodies should provide hospitality for parasites that ranged from the relatively inoffensive whipworm to the more sinister maw-worm, which could… emerge unexpectedly from any orifice, including, most alarmingly, the corners of people’s eyes”? Or that poor country folk, enduring a “hungry gap” between the gathering in of the hay in July and the August harvest, were very possibly off their heads? “Light-headed through lack of solid food… modern chemistry has shown how the ergot that flowered on rye as it grew mouldy was a source of lysergic acid” or LSD.

The authors also bring the period to life with plenty of examples of actual people: from the decadent King Eadwig who failed to appear at his coronation feast in 955AD because he was “energetically enjoying the charms of a young lady… with her mother cavorting in the same bed beside her” to the dowager queen Aelfthryth, rumoured to have murdered her son Ethelred’s half-brother in 978AD in order to secure Ethelred’s succession. There are people from all walks of life: bishops, monks, nuns, lords and ladies, kings and queens, peasants, slaves, soldiers, tradesmen and any number of manual labourers. Once the harvest was in, people could relax and even enjoy themselves with a jug or two of mead and some bawdy poetry, for example:

Q: What am I?

I am a strange creature for I satisfy women…
I grow very tall, erect in a bed,
I’m hairy underneath. From time to time
A beautiful girl, the brave daughter
Of some fellow dares to hold me
Grips my reddish skin, robs me of my head
And puts me in the pantry. At once that girl
With plaited hair who has confined me
Remembers our meeting. Her eye moistens.

Suggestions in Comments please (it’s not the obvious). If no-one gets it, I’ll put the answer in my next post.

Though it has been a long time since my last post, I am officially back on the horse and have lots of books to catch up on. Unfortunately, the ones at the top of my list are a little bit hazy in my memory…

The fourth book I read this year (months ago now) was David Golder. It is the story of a successful banker, who after a long career making a large fortune, begins to question the mission for wealth that has driven him for so long. Golder’s daughter and wife demand money in large quanitities, and he is addicted to the rush he gets from the risky deals that earn him so much of it. When his health falters, he begins to regret the state of his family life, and wonders whether his escape from poverty as a child into the world of extreme wealth has made him any happier.

Némirovsky’s depiction of the glamourous world of wealthy Europeans in the 1920s is initially attractive, but the vacuousness and insincerity of Golder’s circle soon becomes clear. However, this is not a totally straightforward lesson warning against greed. Golder’s choices in life are acknowledged to have been difficult ones. Had it been better to live the emotionally dysfunctional but financially secure life he has chosen, or would he have been happier remaining poor and hungry in Russia? Némirovsky acknowledges the appeal of wealth as a way to determine one’s own path, but the fine line between this freedom and destructive greed is shown to be a difficult one to walk.

This is the first Patrick Gale novel I’ve read and there’s no doubt it’s impressive. Gale writes with tremendous sensitivity and the stories he weaves together in Notes From An Exhibition are engaging and moving. However, I struggled as the book progressed with a sense that interwoven stories do not (necessarily) a novel make and came away feeling I had been witness to the creation of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle rather than anything so conventional as a novel with a plot.

The Middletons are a family living with mental illness. Rachel, mother to Garfield, Morwenna, Hedley and Petroc, has suffered from bi-polar disorder all her life. A successful artist, she is a complex woman: strong, gifted, inspirational, yet at times selfish and even cruel. Her paintings are constructed through patient layering of brushstrokes and the same could be said of Gale’s writing. The portrait of Rachel that emerges is a subtle and many-layered one revealed from the points of view of all her children as well as her husband, Antony, and long-lost Canadian sister, Winnie.

The action - such as it is - centres around Rachel’s death from a heart attack and the family’s consequent coming together for her funeral. The details of this - the Cornish setting and simple Quaker gathering - are beautifully evoked. Gale’s writing is seductive in its sureness and it’s hard not to be wooed by his beautiful yet troubled cast. No one in this novel is straightforward. Every character (with the exception perhaps of Antony) has a back-story worthy of its own Hollywood movie: there are love children and bastards and prodigal daughters and one-night stands and stolen identities and untimely deaths - the list goes on; Barbara Hepworth even makes a cameo appearance with obvious allusions to the question of motherhood versus creativity.

The trouble is that most of this stuff has already happened and, interesting as its revelation is to the reader, what we really want is to know how it’s going to affect things now. Gale avoids this. For example, he spends a great deal of time setting up a sense of ‘trouble in paradise’ re. second son Hedley’s gay relationship. Why can’t Hedley go back to London and his long-term lover, Oliver? Is it because he’s jealous of Oliver’s burgeoning friendship with pushy female artist, Ankie, rumoured to be on her way to Cornwall at this most inappropriate of times? This is potentially interesting, particularly when we discover that Rachel’s estranged sister Winnie is also about to spring a surprise visit, not to mention the prodigal Morwenna. All this is revealed in the final third of the novel and could make for an explosive dénouement. Instead, Gale manages to restrict all conflict to the past and although we get a sense of the awful impact of Rachel’s illness on her family, it’s not played out at or after her funeral. For me, this is a missed opportunity if not an actual flaw. There’s no doubt Gale’s exploration of character in Notes From An Exhibition is superb, it’s just a shame it’s at the expense of plot.