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.

And so we’re plunged into a mystery that centres on a crime committed many years earlier and a lethal genetic abnormality running through a community. Like all good fictional detectives, Erlendur is divorced and while he doesn’t have a drink problem, he does eat badly and barely sleeps. He also has a drug-addicted daughter who turns up here pregnant and trying to kick her habit.

Through his daughter Erlendur is drawn into a subplot about a bride who has disappeared on her wedding day. While the subplot is thematically relevant to the novel – family secrets, that kind of thing – Indridason doesn’t do much with it and gives it a perfunctory resolution.

The writing is sparse and reads strangely at times – I’m not sure whether that’s a product of the translation or not. Indridason has a dry sense of humour, for example he carefully avoids specifying whether Marion Briem – who provides Erlendur with a couple of tips – is a man or a woman.

Apart from the unusual genetics plot, this is a fairly straightforward detective novel. Erlendur methodically works his way to a solution but has a healthy dose of intuition and the requisite disrespect for authority. It’s not a bad book but it is an unremarkable one. I don’t plan to read any more of the series.

Related posts:

1. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Shane’s book 26, 2009)
2. The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (Shane’s book 30, 2009)
3. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)

America’s Game

Michael MacCambridge
Anchor Books 2005, Paperback, 608 pages, £11.59

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.

The NFL broke new ground in many ways but the most important was the insistence that the game was the product, not individual clubs, and therefore it was important to ensure that no one team dominated. They shared TV money from their lucrative network deals, they developed an innovative merchandising business and shared revenue from that too. They made coffee table books and funded a film division – the aim was never to make immediate profits but instead to grow the popularity of the sport. It was a visionary approach.

The book also examines some of the social effects of the sport, particularly its influence on racial integration. From the days when racially-mixed teams were not allowed to stay in the same hotel while playing in the South, to the later years when rich black players found themselves barred from white communities, MacCambridge shows that the NFL often had an important role to play in breaking down barriers.

The game attracted the attention of politicians too. Edward Kennedy delivered an ultimatum to the Washington Redskins forcing them to begin employing black players (they were the last segregated team by a long way) and Richard Nixon was so taken with the game that he would even suggest plays for the SuperBowl.

It’s obvious that a lot of research has gone into this book. MacCambridge offers remarkably well-rounded views of some of the game’s key characters – Pete Rozelle, Vince Lombardi and Jim Brown, for example. The story is well balanced between character portraits, action-packed descriptions of classic games and the tense negotiations in boardrooms and the League office.

MacCambridge’s writing is simple and clear. He seems to spend longer on the earlier parts of the history, speeding up once he gets to the 70s. By the time the 90s roll around, MacCambridge is just offering an overview. That makes sense because fans will be most familiar with the League’s recent history.

Clearly, an interest in the NFL is required if you’re going to enjoy this book but I got a lot out of it.

Related posts:

1. The Wages of Wins by David Berri, Martin Schmidt, Stacey Brook (Shane’s book 28, 2009)
2. Why England Lose by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski (Shane’s book 16, 2010)
3. Why England Lose by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski (James’s 12, 2010)

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.

Along the way he engages in a series of bizarre sexual practices – one of which is raping his own sister, another where he literally fucks his entire house, which he follows up by sodomising himself with a tree while the SS turn up to arrest him. Oh, and he murders his parents. Then he tells us that the holocaust was perpetrated by people “just like you”. Alongside the main narrative of the unfolding horror of the war (which Aue does not himself find horrifying), there is also a badly-written detective story, with two gumshoes from the Kripo trying to find his parents’ murderer. The closing pages of the novel have him being decorated by Hitler in person, during which he punches the Führer in the face knocking out several of his teeth, before killing both of his police pursuers after escaping from custody. It’s beyond ridiculous.

Worse than that, it’s badly written. The tone is homogenous and boring, and the text is probably twice as long as it should be, while Littell’s regard for his own prose is out of all kilter with its quality – the publishers trailed the novel with a pompous little booklet of extracts, essays and a letter to translators from the author.

The reason the book has received so much attention is that it won both of the major French literary prizes as well as an overwhelmingly positive press there. Littell is American, but grew up in Europe and writes in French.

I had originally planned an enormous post picking the novel apart piece by piece – I finished reading it back in May – but I’ve since decided that it doesn’t deserve the attention. It’s a profoundly bad book. Avoid it at all costs.

Related posts:

1. The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (James’s book 29, 2009)
2. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (James’s book 22, 2009)
3. Pink Pony, Catherine Carey (Kat’s book 3, 2010)

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.

The Castle is probably Kafka’s most enigmatic work, and is my own favourite of his novels. In fact, I think it’s flat out one of my favourite novels, along with Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities, Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Let me illustrate why with a few extended quotations. First, here’s the narrator musing about why the Castle’s bureaucracy is behaving the way it is:

By mostly obliging him from the start in some of the more trivial matters—and no more had been at stake until now—the few easy little victories but also of the corresponding satisfaction and the resulting well-founded confidence for other, greater battles. Instead, they let K. wander about as he wished, even if only in the village, spoiling and weakening him, barred all fighting here, and dispatched him to the extra-official, completely unclear, dull and strange life. If this went on, if he weren’t always on guard, he might one day, despite the friendly attitude of the authorities, despite his meticulous fulfilment of his exaggeratedly light official duties, be deceived by the favour seemingly granted him and lead the rest of his life so imprudently that he would fall to pieces, and the authorities, gentle and friendly as ever, would have to come, as though against their will but actually at the behest of some official ordinance of which they knew nothing, in order to clear him out of the way.

What an extraordinary piece of prose! The bureaucracy, in this interpretation, behaves in accordance with laws it does not even know about! It is ‘gentle and friendly as ever’ even though it will come ‘to clear [K.] out of the way’. This consistently strange world is entirely Kafka’s own. That block of prose could not possibly have been written by any other author.

Here’s a shorter but still extraordinary passage:

“Who cares about your father’s work? Klamm is waiting for news, but instead of rushing there head over heels, you spend your time carting dung from the cowshed.” “My father is a shoemaker,” Barnabas said, undeterred, “he had orders from Brunswick, and I am Father’s apprentice.” “Shoemaker—orders—Brunswick,” K. cried bitterly, as if trying to make each word forever unusable.

As if trying to make each word forever unusable. Again, only Kafka could have written that.

Here’s an exchange between K. and one of his two assistants (who always put me in mind of the Marx Brothers, although in Harman’s translation and, one assumes, Kafka’s text, they are far more put upon and bullied by K. than I remember):

“Threats like that don’t frighten me,” said Jeremias, “you don’t want me as an assistant, you even fear me as an assistant, you are particularly fearful of assistants, it was only out of fear that you hit dear Artur.” “Perhaps,” said K., “but did it hurt any less because of that? Perhaps I will often be able to show my fear of you in the same way. If I see that your assistantship isn’t giving you much joy, I will, despite all that fear, take the greatest pleasure in forcing you to do your duty. And indeed this time I shall make a point of getting hold of you alone, without Artur, and then I can devote special attention to you.”

What a classic Kafka touch, that one could be afraid of assistants in general, but also that K. would concede that point as a matter of course! And here’s K. doing his bit to ensure that the bureaucracy is enforced at every level; even while battling it, he adopts its own coercive procedures. This is Kafka’s unique insight into bureaucracy: that it has no controllers, but is a entity with a mysterious life of its own, one that we all participate in both as victim and as perpetrator.

One final quote:

This babble of voices from the rooms had something extremely cheerful about it. First it sounded like the jubilation of children getting ready for an excursion, then like wake-up time in a henhouse, like the joy of being in complete accord with the awakening day, somewhere there was even a gentleman imitating the crowing of a cock.

This is like the opening paragraph of Metamorphosis, where Kafka spells it out: “It was no dream.” Here there is actually a man making the sound of a crowing cock.

Passages like this are strewn throughout the dense text of The Castle. Harman’s translation retains Kafka’s eccentric punctuation and paragraphing, things which become more extreme as the novel progresses. And, faithful to Kafka’s text, it ends in mid sentence.

This is a remarkable and singular work of genius, and one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. The translation is excellent – see Coetzee’s essay for exhaustive detail on that – and puts all the other ones I’ve read to shame. I simply can’t recommend it highly enough.

Related posts:

1. Stranger Shores by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 40, 2009)
2. Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler (James’s book 57, 2009)
3. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (James’s book 41, 2009)

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.

It’s tempting to be quite hard on Ambler’s plot and the rather clumsy way he has of trying to spring surprises on you. He’s also very keen on the Agatha Christie technique of having a limited number of known characters confined to a specific space, in this case a ship bound for Genoa (Italy had not yet entered the war on the Germans’ side). But I think it would be wrong to do so. There are the seeds of many spy clichés here, but Ambler can’t be blamed for the way his techniques have been used since he used them.

Like Epitaph for a Spy, Journey into Fear is an enjoyable thriller, very much of its time, but a nice diversion nonetheless.

Related posts:

1. Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler (James’s book 43, 2009)
2. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)
3. The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans (James’s book 38, 2009)

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.

The Facts is less playful and certainly less innovative than Roth’s other works from the same period, and he can’t avoid playing coy with the truth/fiction divide even here. It’s Roth’s way of saying that whatever he writes is in some sense fictional, but that the truth of his life is substantially less interesting than the fictions he invents.

The book ends with Nathan Zuckerman’s reply to Roth. His advice? “Don’t publish – you are far better writing about me than ‘accurately’ reporting your own life.”

Related posts:

1. The Counterlife by Philip Roth (James’s book 54, 2009)
2. The Humbling by Philip Roth (James’s book 26, 2009)
3. Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 27, 2009)

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.

Nabokov’s style is unbelievably polished and there are frequently sentences of great beauty. Take this, for example:

Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provencal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept.

This is deliberately reminiscent of Proust. In fact, hardly a sentence goes by without an allusion to or pastiche of some great prose master.

Lolita can be read and enjoyed in a normal edition, with no key and with minimal footnoting, but this edition, annotated by Alfred Appel, Jr., allows one to explore the almost endless depths of the text in ways that one would otherwise not be able to.

For all its brilliance though, there is still the question of what Lolita is for. Nabokov is without question a brilliant writer, but is there anything here other than word games and a felicitous style? After having read Lolita twice now, I’m still not sure.

Related posts:

1. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (James’s book 41, 2009)
2. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (James’s book 22, 2009)
3. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)

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.

The jumping-off point for the novel is Zuckerman’s brother’s death on the operating table. Henry has decided on surgery because the medication for his heart condition has destroyed his love-life by making him impotent, even though he could continue living an otherwise normal life without it. Nathan tries to persuade him not to have the surgery, even after Henry confides in him about an affair he’s been having with his assistant, and out of which Nathan begins to sketch a novel. This novel.

The second section is a massive jolt from the first. Rather than dying, Henry has survived the surgery and emigrated to Israel where he has joined radically observant Jewish settlers building on the West Bank. He has come under the influence of a charismatic sect leader, and Zuckerman visits him to try to talk some sense into him.

In the third part, Zuckerman is flying back to London from his unsuccessful mission to Israel when his plane is hijacked by a fanatic whose acquaintance he has made in Jerusalem (bizarrely, by playing catch with him beside the Wailing Wall). Much of this section consists of letters written by Zuckerman on the flight.

In the fourth, it is Nathan who has had the heart trouble. He starts an affair with Maria, an intelligent, middle-class Englishwoman and decides that he needs the surgery in order to be able to live a full life with her. Now it it is he who dies on the operating table, and the remainder of the section is narrated by Henry – who in this alternative history is neither dead nor in Israel. He desperately tries to recover the manuscript fragments that Nathan has left behind that would uncover Henry’s affair.

On to part five, and Nathan is not dead. He’s landed at the end of a ‘quiet flight’ and is back in London. He’s now living with the woman he was having an affair with, except this time he doesn’t have heart disease. In this section, Roth turns his laser glare on racism, and anti-Semitism in particular, in the English middle and upper classes. Maria’s mother is barely able to keep a civil attitude towards him, and he and Maria argue about it. Later they eat in a fancy restaurant, where Zuckerman is racially abused and causes a scene that results in the breakup of their relationship. The remainder of the novel consists of letters between Nathan and Maria examining this dilemma from all angles.

As I said, it’s dazzling. While it probably sounds confused from my plot summary, it is quite the opposite in practice. It’s a gigantic riff on fiction itself, as the entire Zuckerman series is, but here it reaches its apotheosis. Roth is in perfect control of all of his characters, and of his ambitious structure. This is the perfect post-modern novel: it is formally inventive, but for a purpose not just for play, although it is playful too. Where in other hands formal experimentation such as this can feel forced or mannered, with Roth it is an absolute delight.

The Counterlife is a complex, ambitious and beautifully written novel. I think it’s Roth’s masterpiece. I urge you to read it.

Related posts:

1. The Facts by Philip Roth (James’s book 56, 2009)
2. The Humbling by Philip Roth (James’s book 26, 2009)
3. The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (James’s book 29, 2009)

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.

All too often, Montefiore uses cartoonish language to describe Stalin and his colleagues, words like ‘magnates’, ‘vizier’, ‘cronies’ and so forth. Here’s a particularly egregious example:

Malenkov stood up and ran forward, chins aquiver, with the desperate grace of a whippet sealed inside a blancmange.

It’s a memorable phrase, certainly, but not one that it behoves an objective historian to deploy, and it’s not attributed to a source or footnoted, so one can only assume that this is Montefiore’s own coinage. There are innumerable examples of this type of thing strewn throughout the book. He also has an annoying tic where he describes a character as follows: “This [insert cartoonish description] was [insert thing person was known for]“. For example: “this self-anointed Messianic hero worked hard to envelop his protégés in an irresistible embrace of folksy intimacy”. This recurs again and again until it becomes sickening.

Montefiore’s own prejudices are also a problem. He frequently refers with distain to the proletarian background of the protagonists, as though a shoe-maker’s son has no business being the leader of a nation, per se. He’s particularly snobbish about Khrushchev, no genius certainly, but Montefiore consistently emphasises his lack of intellect and his illiteracy, as though these things were Khruschev’s fault. There’s also a bizarre footnote when he praises Queen Victoria’s ‘graciousness’ for allowing an ageing Gladstone to be seated in her presence. I find this type of snobbery almost impossible to take.

The same thing applies to the leaders’ appearances. He has a particular problem with Yezhov – a outstandingly brutal murderer even in this group – which is reasonable enough, but he constantly stresses that Yezhov was short (’practically a dwarf’) and bisexual. These are perhaps biographical facts that we can be informed of once, rather than used as evidence of his depravity, but they do not inform us in any way about how he came to be the man he did, and Montefiore provides no evidence that they were linked in any way. Montefiore seems to be trying to suggest a connection between the ‘depravity’ of Yezhov’s sex life with his crimes, but that seems almost unbelievably stupid. And, in any case, what is ‘depraved’ about being bisexual? It’s all very puzzling, and again detracts from the historical value of the book, and it’s something that he comes back to time and time again – Stalin’s yellow eyes, Malenkov’s corpulence, and Mekhlis’s weasel face, and on, and on.

I mention these problems because they fundamentally undermine the book and its claim to historical impartiality, and this is a great pity, because we are still not as horrified by Stalin as we are by Hitler, and that is something that desperately needs to change. Stalin was a monstrously callous waster of human life, both of strangers and of his closest comrades. He was responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens, often condemning them to death as part of a quota.

Like Hitler, though, he could also be personally charming, kind and thoughtful. He was adored by his people and by his domestic staff. He lived a life of comparative simplicity, although this changed after the war. The account of the war is patchy, and there are far better accounts if that is your specific area of interest (Richard Overy’s Russia’s War is particularly good).

While the reliance on documents is laudable, Montefiore’s style fails to blend these into a smooth narrative, and the text is broken up by including several quotations per paragraph, but mixed in with Montefiore’s colourful commentary, so it becomes difficult to track what is reported documentation and what is interpretation. He also has a bizarre habit of including the sign-off on almost every telegram or letter he quotes, so the text is littered with ‘Communist Greetings! J.Stalin’, or ‘let Nikolaenko find calm and fruitful work, J.St.’ Since it’s clear from the context who is being quoted, what purpose does this serve?

This is a necessary book. Anyone interested in Stalin, Soviet history specifically or world history generally should read it, but it is a great, great shame that it suffers so many fatal flaws. For the best one-volume biography of Stalin, you should turn to Robert Service’s biography of the Vozhd, but there are telling details in Montefiore’s account that can only help round out an understanding – and a horror – of the most brutal dictator of the catastrophic 20th century.

Related posts:

1. The Eitingons by Mary-Kay Wilmers (James’s book 51, 2009)
2. Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes (James’s book 45, 2009)
3. Trotsky by Robert Service (James’s book 42, 2009)

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.

At first, Christine is enthralled by this world of glamour, wealth and apparent gentility, but quickly finds that she is not of sufficient breeding to be treated as an equal by its denizens. It is this that turns her against the rich, rather than their inherent evils. Ultimately her reaction is class-jealousy rather than anything else. One can be against a class without wanting to belong to it, and I think that’s a more powerful story. But maybe Christine’s story is more realistic than I would prefer to admit.

The novella is split into two distinct sections, and the continuity between them is not that great. In the second part, Christine and her lover decide to rob the Post Office. Christine is convinced by a combination of desperation, sexual obsession and her newly minted envy of the rich. In fact, the two parts could stand on their own to the advantage of both; as it stands, the linkage between them is so clumsy that it diminishes both parts.

Like all of Zweig’s prose, there are wonderful pieces of writing and characterisation in The Post Office Girl, but I feel that his other other books, for example the brilliant Beware of Pity, are a better place to turn for someone starting out with his work.

Related posts:

1. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (James’s book 37, 2009)
2. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)
3. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Ian’s book 3, 2010)