26 Books

Well, I finished The Man Without Qualities, which is more than its author managed to do. Robert Musil died in 1942, aged 61, a mere 21 years after he began writing this mammoth book. The published edition runs to more than 650,000 words and it’s thought that the finished work would have been twice as long. I suspect that Musil would never have finished, even if he had lived until 81, or 101, or 181. The book would just have gone on and on and on.

There isn’t much of a story here. Ulrich, the ‘man without qualities’, is disconnected from life. Having spent time as a poet, a soldier and, more recently, a mathematician, he has come adrift. His father suggests that he take a job as secretary to a count, which leads to his involvement in a committee charged with organising a celebration to mark the Austrian emperor’s 70th anniversary.

This was Nabokov’s first novel in English. It can be read as the story of one man’s search for his brother, a novel about literature or a post-modern intellectual puzzle. However you choose to approach it, it functions brilliantly as all three and it’s a worthy addition to my mini-exploration of post-modern and experimental fiction.

The book’s narrator, known only as V, is writing a biography of his half brother, the noted author Sebastian Knight. V feels that Knight, a Russian who made his name writing in English, has been unfairly treated in a recent biography and plans to set the record straight.

Pasternak’s novel is largely famous in the West because of David Lean’s film adaptation of it, and that’s a great, great shame. Although I greatly admire Lean’s masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia, his Doctor Zhivago is an intolerably schmaltzy, romanticised version of the book, in love with image rather than word, in a way that I can’t help but feel Pasternak must have hated. The final insult is the hysterically melodramatic climax Lean invents for his hero, instead of the muted, shambling, poverty-striken Yuri that Pasternak gives us. If you love the film, the book is not for you.

Pasternak famously accepted and then refused the Nobel prize which was awarded in large part for his novel, and it was only in the dying days of the Soviet Union that it was published in his homeland. It originally appeared in Italian translation and quickly afterwards in an English version. The translators this time are the renowned husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and this is the first new version in English since its original appearance in the late 1950s.

Madame Bovary is an utterly remarkable novel, as much for what it does not contain as for what it does. It is a profoundly anti-romantic novel, and is completely devoid of sentimentality (although not of sentiment). As with Wagner’s music, anything that came after it was either a reaction to it, or against it, but it could not be ignored.

It is, by common consent, the first ‘realistic’ novel. This idea has always been problematic, because such novels are not actually realistic at all – the author (or, rather, the narrator) knows everything about the inner lives of the characters, in a way which is entirely impossible in real life. Sometimes, this style of writing is known as ‘naturalistic’, and that’s perhaps closer to the effect Flaubert achieves, the primarily characteristic of which is the unobtrusive yet keenly intelligent narrator.

I’m very surprised to find that I found The Brother’s Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s final masterpiece, to be nothing of the sort. Instead, I thought it self-indulgent, flabby, morally nonsensical, overwritten and – worst of all – boring.

Now, clearly this is not the accepted wisdom on this novel; the writer I revere above all others – Kafka – loved it, for example, so it’s a judgement that may say more about me than it does about the book. But I’ll try to show why I reached this conclusion, if I can.

This is the first time I’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four since I was a teenager, and it hasn’t aged well at all. I plan to write a fairly lengthy essay on it in due course, but suffice to say that I think its quality as a novel has been vastly overestimated, especially in the UK. I’m not sure how it is thought of outside the English-speaking world, but to a native speaker, it’s a very poor excuse for a novel.

Actually, I think it’s really a political tract in very flimsy and not at all alluring novelistic clothing. Aside from this, its primary failure is one of characterisation. One might be able to argue that the dehumanising element of repressive regimes is the main theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and thus that dehumanised characters are entirely appropriate, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when we are granted privileged access to Winston’s mind and yet still find him to be a cypher. Still less that he falls in love with a character as grey as Julia. O’Brien’s assertion that Winston is the ‘last man in Europe’ doesn’t say much for men, and I’m sure that’s not the effect Orwell was looking for.

Other than the King James’s Bible, is there are more influential or important work in English than Hamlet? It’s an astonishing thing to read it again after many years, and the see hardly a page go past without a readily recognisable quotation leaping out. What’s still more remarkable is its incredible density, its richly suggestive and multivalent language.

The benefit of reading rather than hearing Shakespeare is that one gets the chance to unpack this density, and the time and space to think about it anew. The drawback, of course, is that it is robbed of its tension and its inherent drama, the drama which is its raison d’être.

As with his other novels, Franz Kafka never finished this book, and he never gave it a definitive title. In letters, he referred to is as Der Verschollene, which has variously been rendered as The Man Who Disappeared or, as here, The Missing Person. It was Kafka’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who published it under the title Amerika. Despite the inaccuracy, it is still known by that name today, hence the compromise of calling it Amerika: The Missing Person.

Brod named it thus because the novel is set in a Kafkaesque version of early 1900s America, although there are so many oddities about it that it feels just as much like Kafkaland as his other novels. There are obvious errors of research, like the Statue of Liberty holding a sword rather than a torch, and the Brooklyn Bridge joining New York to Boston. None of which, it should be clear to anyone with half a brain, matters a jot.

The struggle to find time to read in between looking after a new baby continues, and some might say it’s probably not best to take on a big slab of dead Russian when your reading takes place in snatched moments on tube trains, but I’m so glad I did.

I have always thought of Crime and Punishment with a little wince of guilt, as I based part of the dissertation for my degree on the Raskolnikov character without actually having read the original text, so I’d avoided it until now as I was worried that I might have been completely mistaken in my borrowed analysis, so it was with an increasing sense of relief that I turned the pages and discovered a tight, stifling portrait of a man struggling with depression and guilt at having failed to live up to his own opinion of himself.

Published in 1930, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying follows Anse Bundren, his sons and daughter on their journey to bury Addie, Anse’s wife and the childrens’ mother. The story is a patchwork of the viewpoints of 15 different characters, each of whose ‘narration’ is simply a stream-of-consciousness monologue. The effect is as entrancing as it is bewildering.

While there is much to admire in the novel – the strong evocation of place, for example, and the ear for country vernacular – it’s the unusual narrative technique that makes the greatest impression. Faulkner makes the reader work hard; his characters do not provide helpful recaps of prior events or of their relationships with one another, which is exactly how real people think. The result is a story that emerges slowly, with questions often remaining unanswered for long periods and the reader forced to fill in the blanks with guesswork.