26 Books

The seventh Martin Beck novel is odd because it’s thematically very similar to the previous volume, Murder at the Savoy. Once again an unpleasant and powerful man is murdered and once again it’s not obviously a bad thing. The difference is that this victim is a high-ranking policeman, brutally murdered in his hospital room.

While the last book was about the damage done by the ruthless pursuit of wealth, this one is about abuse of power, specifically police power. There’s lots of asides on the role of the police, specifically the right of the police to kill. Typically for the series, the issue is given a quirky twist at the end.

The Martin Beck series – The Abominable Man

Maj Sjöwall
Harper Perennial 2007, Paperback, 288 pages, £7.99

The writing is once again sharp, wry and full of memorable turns of phrase, such as the police car which races along “on its own bawling carpet of sound”. The characters, as ever, are drawn with economy and empathy.

The investigation builds to a finale in which a recurring character is killed in surprisingly abrupt fashion and another key figure is badly wounded. The action sequence, which recalls a high profile incident from the late 1960s, feels a little bit Hollywood but is well handled.

And so to the big one, el Jeffe, le grande fromage, the big enchilada, the great novel of the 20th century, perhaps the greatest novel yet written: James Joyce’s monumental, impenetrable, bawdy, frustrating, multi-lingual, near-incomprehensible masterpiece: Ulysses.

Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics)

Declan Kiberd (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 1040 pages, £9.99

What an astonishing book this is! It’s by far the most difficult book that I’ve ever attempted to read; I’ve had previous goes at it and not made it further than half-way. It’s funny, filthy, intelligent, democratic, earthy, detail-obsessed, beautiful, ugly, huge and above all, difficult. The difficulty is on many levels.

First is the language, which is hyper-flexible, packed with neologisms and contractions, and often using loan words or phrases from other tongues: Irish, Latin, Italian, French and Greek among them.

Second is the structure – one chapter per episode in the Odyssey – each episode using a different narrative technique, from catechism to interior monologue, from conventional narrative to play.

Third is the plethora of intertextual references to earlier episodes, to Joyce’s earlier works (Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), to Homer, to Shakespeare and countless other sources.

Fourth is the point of view, which constantly shifts between narrating the bare facts of what is happening and the thoughts of the protagonists, who are often both present in the same scene, making it difficult to even know whose thoughts we have entered.

Fifth is the sheer range of intellectual material that Joyce deploys, from gynaecological details, to the transmigration of souls, to Irish politics to Mozart and Shakespeare, to maths, to philosophy, to physics, and on and on.

Sixth is the sheer density of the prose, the most extreme example being Molly Bloom’s monologue, the concluding episode, which takes fifty odd pages, and contains just eight sentences, without any punctuation, and which is one of the most wonderful bits of writing I’m aware of. But there is also the almost totally incomprehensible brothel scene which is laid out like a play, and the so-called ‘Wandering Rocks’ scene in which the paths of several Dubliners are tracked as they move around the city over the course of an hour.

There is writing of the very greatest beauty, and of the very coarsest descriptions of sex and defecation. The Homeric parallel – both in terms of structure and the theme of exile – is all-pervading, but just as often as it provides a key, the action of the Odyssey quickly becomes irrelevant as we are plunged into the details of Stephen Dedalus’s and Leopold Blooom’s day.

So much has been written about Ulysses, as Joyce himself anticipated, but nothing can really prepare you for the mind-boggling virtuosity of it, line by line, page by page. It’s often frustrating, and very often tempting to just put it aside and stop struggling. You can read it at pace to just let the words wash over you, or you can pore over every word, decoding as you go with the help of a dozen reader’s guides. Ulysses, more than any other book I’ve read demands to be re-read.

What a way to end the year! Ulysses is in many ways the best book I’ve read. It stretches the boundaries of what is even readable, of what is communicable through language, of what writing is capable of doing. It is so richly layered that no reader’s guide can possibly explain it; besides, the sheer experience of reading Joyce’s prose is so satisfying, there’s nothing for it but to just dive in.

If western civilisation and all its works were washed away, bar Ulysses, future generations would still have the Rosetta Stone they needed to understand what it had been about. I can think of no more noble ambition for a novel.

I must have last read Crime and Punishment 20 years ago. My overwhelming feeling on re-reading it was claustrophobia: of language, of situation, of everything.

Crime and Punishment

Richard Pevear (Translator)
Vintage Classics 1998, Paperback, 592 pages, £7.99

The student Raskolnikov murders a wizened old money-lender, almost as a thought-experiment – he never actually uses what he steals, but leaves it buried under a stone. He is at odds with everything: society, family, convention, life. He feels himself to be a genius, a new Napoleon for whom laws are irrelevant.

Dostoevsky’s skill is that we still sympathise with such an apparently repugnant character, and still hope that the law won’t catch up with him, inevitable as that is.

Once again, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us a brilliant translation, shorn of the Victorian gloom that seems to surround other renderings, keeping Doestoevsky’s sometimes haphazard, hyper-expressive style.

Ultimately, one is left with the impression of grinding poverty, of mental illness and of the deepest love and compassion.

The Prague Orgy is a ‘epilogue’ to the trilogy of Zuckerman novels that precede it: The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson. Together, they form a volume that Roth called Zuckerman Bound.

Philip Roth

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2007, Hardcover, 700 pages, £23.22

This is a comparatively short book – some 60 or so pages – and deals with Roth’s attempts to track down an unpublished manuscript by a Yiddish author in Czechoslovakia. Roth was helpful to a number of Czech writers, visiting a number of times before he was banned from the country, so we can assume that his picture from behind the Iron Curtain is accurate.

For me this is the least successful Zuckerman book – one can’t say novel – that I’ve read, but it’s still entertaining even if it feels somewhat dated now. The wonderful Library of America edition also contains the curiosity of an adaptation for TV made by Roth himself.

The Anatomy Lesson is the third in Roth’s Zuckerman series of novels. With both his parents dead, and estranged from his brother, Zuckerman has a undiagnosable pain in his neck that prevents him from writing, leaving him stricken on his back, with nothing to do but have increasingly one-sided sex with his nurse.

Philip Roth

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2007, Hardcover, 700 pages, £23.22

Out of very unpromising material – an author unable to write – Roth generates a profoundly intelligent and funny novel about grief, guilt, pain, nostalgia, literary criticism and (of course) sex.

Roth is astounding. He’s been writing non-stop for decades – another novel is due out next year – and yet he’s always intelligent, funny and provocative. All his novels (at least the ones I’ve read) are written in wonderful flowing prose, and are constantly thought provoking, profound and multi-layered. Horace Engdahl can go fuck himself: if Roth’s not worthy of the Nobel then the prize is not worth having.

This is the second of the three novels Milan Kundera has written in French since he published Immortality, which, like his earlier novels, was written in his native Czech.

Identity

Milan Kundera
Faber and Faber 1998, Hardcover, 132 pages, £12.99

Here, he speculates on the meaning of identity, and what can happen if, for a split second, we fail to recognise a friend or lover, or mistake a stranger for a loved one. Like his other two French novels, Identity is a model of concision and lightness – he has moved from the seven-part novels of his Czech language days to shorter, more focused single-part books.

As always with Kundera, we are presented with a dazzling display of his intellect and insight, a meditation in the form of a novel, ranging over an array of references, but never in an obscure way. Indeed, Kundera has been attacked for, in effect, dumbing down since his exile from his home country in the 1970s. But where others see simplification, I see precision and economy of expression, and a novelist saying exactly what they want to say, completely in command of his art.

I profoundly hope that we’ll see another of Kundera’s wonderful late novels before too long.

David Foster Wallace’s monstrous Infinite Jest is one of the few books I’ve read where it’s not possible to be certain what actually happened. As I noted in my post on his novel, Wallace is determined to interrupt and frustrate, making use of a fractured timeline, different points of view, many narrators and an array of acronyms and endnotes. A reader’s guide is pretty much essential.

David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”

Stephen Burn
Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. 2003, Paperback, 96 pages, £7.99

Burn provides a fairly useless chapter on Wallace’s life (but not his recent death) and then moves onto the meat of the novel itself. As I did, he sees parallels with Greek myths, although not specifically the Odyssey, and he rather convincingly links the Narcotics Anonymous 12 step programme that Don Gately follows with the labours of Hercules.

He’s insightful about a lot of things that I had missed – in particular the significance of a missing year of the plot – The Year of Glad (which is the “very last year of subsidized time”), a year that is especially important in Hal’s story. We know that he attends the emergency room and he and Gately dig up the head of James O. Incandenza, Hal’s father, which may or may not contain the master copy of the entertainment (i.e. the film Infinite Jest), but Burn here fleshes out more of what may or may not have happened from references strewn throughout the thousand pages of the novel.

I’d also missed the significance of 8th November as a date in the novel, and that that was also the date that X-Rays were discovered (in 1895); Burn speculates that this is significant because Wallace is trying to provide us with a look inside his characters’ souls, and he provides some fairly compelling evidence that this is not just a coincidence.

He also provides a very useful timeline that rearranges the events of the novel in chronological order, which has the side-effect of showing how much more subtle the effect is when arranged in Wallace’s order, but also helps to lift the veil from some of the more obscure elements of the plot.

This is a useful and intelligent look at a modern masterpiece, but if you’re going to read Infinite Jest, I suggest you only read Burn’s study guide after having done so.

This is a retelling of the Odyssey in the form a play commissioned by BBC Radio 4. It’s respectful of the Homeric tradition, but mixes that with modern idioms. It feels playful and ironic.

Homer’s Odyssey

Georgina Wu (Cover Design)
Faber and Faber 2007, Paperback, 272 pages, £12.99

Armitage sticks with the chronology of the original so that the story is told from first Telemachus’s present perspective, then Odysseus’s present, then in flashback narrated by Odysseus, then back to Odysseus in the present. The play format means that each line spoken is preceded by the character’s name, and this slightly skews the sections of the story that Odysseus narrates to the Phaeacians (i.e. the flashbacks) so that they become indistinguishable from current events in the timeline as they are bring told. Armitage counters this by topping and tailing each flashback section with a short scene labelled ‘In the Hall of the Phaeacians’.

The theme of return is never less than front and centre. When Nausicaa tries to persuade Odysseus to stay and recuperate before heading back to Ithaca (after twenty years!) her mother, Arete, has this great line:

Haven’t you been listening?
Every step of the way something has tripped him up.
Opportunities have been traps.
Open doors have been prisons.
Invitations have been life sentences.

He won’t be sidetracked again.
We won’t offer the same temptation.

This beautifully captures Odysseus’s plight – bear in mind the importance of hospitality in ancient Greek culture. An invitation to stay would oblige Odysseus to do so. Odysseus replies:

So compassionate.
So… understanding.

Armitage’s version is great fun and beautifully crafted, written with enormous respect for the Homeric tradition, but not slavish adherence. The result is well worth a few hours of your reading time.

James Wood is the literary critic on the New Yorker, and a contributor to the London Review of Books. All of which means that when he says ‘fiction’ he really means ‘literary fiction’. You’re not going to find an analysis of Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code here.

How Fiction Works

James Wood
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2008, Hardcover, 208 pages, £16.99

It is broken down into chapters, themselves subdivided into numbered sections. Chapter titles include ‘Narrating’, ‘Detail’, ‘Character’ and ‘A Brief History of Consciousness’.

Wood uses some of his favourite works to illustrate what his conception of the novel is (ultimately, this is a book about novels, not a more general work about fiction as the title might suggest), a view that is somewhat skewed towards novels in English. He’s clearly indebted to Kundera’s masterful The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain, but he dismisses these with a rather contemptuous remark that ‘occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text’, which is a ridiculous and indefensible thing to say about someone as widely and brilliantly read as Kundera is. Not to mention the fact that Kundera has written several masterpieces, while Wood’s own excursions into novel writing have been markedly less noteworthy.

That said, Wood is a highly perceptive and intelligent critic, and clearly loves great writing, a depressingly rare trait these days, when it’s hard to figure out if a given critic actually likes any writing at all given how often they are to be found slagging new work off.

This is a book I shall return to, as I regularly do to Kundera’s essays. Like them, it’s a fascinating and well argued look at the novel.

The fifth book in the Martin Beck series, The Fire Engine that Disappeared, has left little or no impression on my memory beyond the basic outline of the plot.

The Martin Beck series – The Fire Engine That Disappeared

Maj Sjöwall
Harper Perennial 2007, Paperback, 288 pages, £7.99

An apartment building that is under observation by the police explodes, and all signs point to a suicide. In an apparently unrelated incident, Martin Beck’s name is found on a piece of paper in the apartment of another victim. Is there a link?

Aside from this, Martin Beck himself takes a comparative back seat in the investigation, and his socially inept colleague Gunvald Larsson comes to the fore.