26 Books

This Icelandic detective novel is the third in a series starring Inspector Erlendur, however, it was the first one to be published in the UK. To further add to the confusion, it’s also available under the title Jar City, which was also the name of the film based on the book.

Tainted Blood

Arnaldur Indridason
Vintage 2005, Paperback, 224 pages, £6.99

Erlendur is investigating the murder of an elderly man, found dead in his flat with a cryptic note left on his body. Were it not for the note, it would appear to be a burglary gone wrong. Some of Erlendur’s colleagues suspect burglary anyway but Erlendur knows better and finds a link between the man and the death of a young child 40 years earlier.

I’ve read several books about American football this year. The others were about specific aspects of the game but this one is an overview of its history. MacCambridge rejects the common view that the modern NFL was born with the 1958 championship game. Instead he goes back to the 1940s and looks at how the owners of the teams back then laid the foundations for what has become the most popular spectator sport in the US and one of the richest sports in the world.

America’s Game

Michael MacCambridge
Anchor Books 2005, Paperback, 608 pages, £12.17

MacCambridge details the backroom deals that made it possible for the league to flourish as well as the action on the field that made the game so compelling to spectators. Often the two are linked – whenever the popularity of their sport waned or the popularity of baseball grew, the NFL owners would tweak the rules to increase the excitement of the game.

If I hadn’t made the mistake of trying to read J.M.G. Le Clézio’s tedious and dreadful Terra Amata, which remains unfinished and therefore unreviewed, The Kindly Ones would easily be the worst book I’ve read this year. Unlike Le Clézio’s stinker, Littell’s book is at least readable in the literal sense, but it has no virtues beyond that.

The Kindly Ones

Charlotte Mandell (Translator)
Chatto & Windus 2009, Hardcover, 992 pages, £20.00

Max Aue is a homosexual member of the SD, a committed Nazi and an active participant in the holocaust. He is present, Forrest Gump-like, at virtually every significant event of the war, from the massacre at Babi Yar to the battle of Stalingrad (which he is transferred into after the Germans’ encirclement is complete), to the fall of Berlin.

This is the translation of The Castle that I mentioned in my review of J.M. Coetzee’s Stranger Shores, the first from the text as Kafka left it. The Castle was, like all Kafka’s novels, unfinished at his death, and was prepared for publication by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod. Brod’s view of Kafka’s work has clouded it in layers of biography and sainthood for decades, his approach being to smooth the rough edges of the fiction and laud the private man.

The Castle

Mark Harman (Translator)
Random House Inc 1999, Paperback, 352 pages, £10.99

Like most people, I first read Kafka in Edwin and Willa Muir’s translations. Mark Harman praises those translations in his introduction to his own, but it’s difficult to see them as anything other than unacceptable in the light of the new text.

A likeable English armaments engineer, who we only know as ‘Graham’ (his surname), is in Istanbul talking to the Turkish government about their naval gun requirements, when he is attacked in his hotel room in what at first appears to be a robbery gone wrong. This being Ambler, Graham has in fact stumbled into a spy story as the central character.

Journey into Fear (Penguin Modern Classics)

Norman Stone (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2009, Paperback, 224 pages, £8.99

Ambler’s formula is that an innocent Englishman suddenly finds himself at the centre of a story that involves people of several nationalities, ranging from friendly, through ambivalent to hostile. Written in 1940, the hostiles in Journey into Fear are Germans, while the friendlies are made up of a stereotypical collection of French, Spanish and Turks.

The Facts is subtitled ‘A Novelist’s Autobiography’. It opens with Roth writing a letter to his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Even when he says he’s writing his biography, he can’t do it straight. As a nod to this, I’ve categorised The Facts in both the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories.

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (Library of America)

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2008, Hardcover, 800 pages, £30.00

In The Facts, Roth covers the years leading up to the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, including some scenes from his childhood and college years. The most compelling passages cover Roth’s first marriage, its breakdown and the death of his first wife, and his frank admission that he was glad she had died.

Lolita is probably one of the most controversial books ever written. Quite why is a bit of a mystery to me; it’s about as far from pornography as it is possible to get. Lolita is a work of pure novelistic play and anyone scanning its pages for cheap erotic thrills is going to be very disappointed.

The Annotated Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov
Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 544 pages, £15.00

This is probably the most multi-layered novel I know. On the surface, there is a beautifully written novel about a paedophile taking his step-daughter on a road trip around the United States, but below it there are myiad correspondences with other works of literature, and a hidden detective story. There is word play using puns, anagrams, spoonerisms and neologisms, and this makes it at least as dense as Ulysses (to which it frequently refers), although it is both significantly shorter and easier to read.

The Counterlife is the fifth part of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman series, and is by far the most ambitious and complex of them. Whereas Roth had previously played with the semi-autobiographical novel form, here he smashes it to pieces. The Counterlife is like a cubist painting; Roth uses it to examine the various possibilities that his characters face given a difference of one event in their lives.

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (Library of America)

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2008, Hardcover, 800 pages, £30.00

Formally, it is dazzling. It is composed of fragments of ‘manuscripts’, letters, reminiscences and conventional narratives, but never to the detriment of the writing which is, as always with Roth, wonderfully precise and clear.

This is a horrifying book. It gets painfully close to the innermost machinations of the handful of politicians close to Stalin from his accession to undisputed power following Lenin’s death to his urine-soaked death more than a quarter of a century later. It is based on extensive research in the recently opened archives, and contains voluminous quotes from correspondence between Stalin and members of his entourage.

Stalin

Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix 2004, Paperback, 852 pages, £9.99

For all those reasons, it’s a very welcome book. But, regrettably, it suffers from being massively overwritten. Far from being the sober, scholarly narrative that one has come to expect from modern British historians such as Richard J. Evans, Ian Kershaw, Richard Overy, Orlando Figes and Robert Service, it is written in a ghoulish prose that sets out to judge the protagonists at every turn. Make no mistake, these are historical figures who need to be judged, but such judgement should be considered not sound like it has come from the pen of an airport thriller writer.

The Post Office Girl was left unpublished at Zwieg’s death, and it’s perhaps easy to see why; it’s not the masterful miniature that one is familiar with from Zweig’s other novellas.

The Post-office Girl (New York Review Books Classics)

Joel Rotenberg (Translator)
The New York Review of Books, Inc 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

It’s a rather heavy-handed critique of capitalism and of class, things that for sure require criticism but need a somewhat more subtle treatment than this. Christine is a lowly Post Office worker in a provincial Austrian town, who suddenly receives an invitation to stay at a luxury hotel with her aunt.