26 Books

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.

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner
Vintage 1996, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

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.

Fatherhood, it turns out, puts a big dent in your reading time.

The Great Gatsby (Penguin Popular Classics)

F Scott Fitzgerald
Penguin Classics 2007, Paperback, 192 pages, £2.00

As I’m sure that Ready or Not, Mr Croc doesn’t count towards the 26 I decided to rattle through a couple of books I’ve had in the pile for some time, the first being the Great Gatsby. I’ve been rattling considerably more slowly than I had expected.

It’s probably no surprise that having just read a book about crime fiction I should turn next to one of the classics of the genre. Trent’s Last Case is significant because it was one of the first novels to subvert the conventions of the genre – and it did so in 1913, before the genre even reached its so-called golden age.

Trent’s Last Case

E. C. Bentley
House of Stratus Ltd 2008, Paperback, 240 pages, £10.14

Philip Trent is a gentleman detective who works mostly for newspapers. When the story opens he has already earned a degree of fame for solving several high profile cases. He is called in to investigate the death of Sigsbee Manderson, an American businessman who has been found dead at his country home. Manderson was unpopular with most people who knew him so there is no shortage of suspects but what’s baffling is how he came to be shot dead in his garden without any sound being heard.

James Joyce is most famous for his epic masterpiece, Ulysses, but his early work is probably just as highly regarded by critics. Dubliners – his first substantial work of fiction – is a set of fifteen short stories of varying length, the longest and last of which, The Dead, is one of the great masterpieces of the genre.

Joyce’s writing here is much less densely packed than it is in Ulysses, and is consequently a much easier read. But below the surface is a rich range of allusion, and a pervasive sense of melancholy hangs over the entire collection.

Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics)

Joyce James
Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

Joyce’s heroes here are flawed, working or lower-middle class people, living real, scarred lives in a Dublin overshadowed by the Catholic Church and the British Empire. As with much of Joyce’s work, Parnell’s downfall is an ever-present cloud on political life.

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 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.

I sat down to read this collection of Tolstoy’s (mainly) later stories, and immediately felt as if I was in the company of a great and wise old friend. Tolstoy’s humanity is all-encompassing, and even though these stories are mainly from the period after his religious crisis and conversion, his deep moral sense is still universal. It would be easy to dismiss these stories on the basis of their overtly Christian content, but Tolstoy’s idea of Christianity was certainly unique, and probably closer in many ways to Buddhism than anything else.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (Vintage Classics)

Leo Tolstoy
Vintage Classics 2009, Hardcover, 528 pages, £25.00

Many of the stories here are concerned with sex, and the nature of sexual obsession. The most powerful of these is The Devil, in which a member of the Russian aristocracy is brought low by his obsession with a peasant woman. Tolstoy wrote two endings to this story, both of which are presented here, although the one in which Irtenev commits suicide is clearly the better of the two in my mind.

Also in the collection are the famous The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, the title story and Hadji Murat, all of which are superb.

Master and Man is a little masterpiece, having just two characters, and being astonishingly concentrated. For the entire story, both Vassily Andreich Brekhunov (master) and Nikita (muzhik) are lost in a blizzard, trying to get to the next village. Tolstoy never lets the action flag, despite moments of reflection, and still finds the time to give us insight into his protagonists’ souls. The scene in which Vassily Andreich decides to protect Nikita from the cold by lying on top of him, in which he finds spiritual peace and dies, stands comparison with the greatest scenes from Tolstoy’s oeuvre; Prince Andrei lying wounded on the field at Austerlitz, Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei on the ferry, or Levin and Kitty proposing to each other by miming the writing of letters on the table top (there are so many of these scenes in Tolstoy that I could go on and on).

The Kreutzer Sonata is reminiscent in many ways of Anna Karenina, in that it deals with marital infidelity, jealousy and their consequences, only in much more compressed form. Tolstoy is consistently able to give us scenes of great emotional power after only a few pages, scenes that would take another author hundreds of pages to develop.

Hadji Murat is in many ways an outlier, in that it deals with miliatry action in the Caucuses, and is not specifically religious, and I suspect that this is the thinking behind the translators’ (the excellent Richard Pevear and Larrissa Volokhonsky) decision to include the earlier and somewhat disappointing The Prisoner of the Caucuses. Like War and Peace, Hadji Murat is based on real characters and events, and in large part on Tolstoy’s own military experience. It’s a very modern tale, almost cubist in the way that it tells the story from multiple angles, never allowing us to see an overall picture of the entire story, constantly prompting us to fill in the gaps for ourselves.

Only The Prisoner of the Caucuses and Diary of a Madman are in any way disappointing (and the latter of these bears no comparison at all with Gogol’s great tale of the same name). The rest of the stories here are outstanding masterpieces of the short story genre, and are as great as anything Tolstoy wrote.

Tolstoy was a miraculous writer. While there are other writers who challenge the reader more, produce finer prose, and are more innovative, Tolstoy is a writer it is impossible not to love with all one’s heart. I recommend these stories to absolutely everyone.

I’ve never read any Wodehouse. The idea of a posh twit gadding about town with his servant just didn’t appeal to me. Still, I kept hearing how funny his books are so I thought I’d give one a try. It turns out my prejudice was wrong: Wodehouse is indeed funny and enjoyable.

Carry on, Jeeves

P. G. Wodehouse
Arrow Books Ltd 2008, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

The stories here are formulaic. Bertie Wooster or one of his friends gets into some kind of difficulty, usually involving an inappropriate engagement or a threat of disinheritance, and Bertie turns to Jeeves for help. Jeeves’s plan back fires at first – or at least appears to until the manservant comes up with an ingenious twist that saves the day.

There’s nothing challenging in these stories and the characters being satirised are now so familiar that they are basically stereotypes. I suspect they were caricatures even at the time, though. That’s not really the point.

Everything is there only to showcase Wodehouse’s witty, descriptive writing: “Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with muscles of a welter weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table.”

It breezes by effortlessly and each story is like being wrapped in a warm blanket by a roaring fire. This is about as good as comfort reading gets. I’ll certainly be going back for more.

Eric Ambler would have been 100 years old this year. To celebrate, Penguin have published five of his pre-war thrillers, novels that influenced many subsequent writers, including John Le Carré. Epitaph for a Spy is an endearingly naïve addition to the genre. A Hungarian teacher holidaying on the French Riviera goes to pick up some photographs he’s taken and is unexpectedly arrested by the police.

Epitaph for a Spy (Penguin Modern Classics)

James Fenton (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2009, Paperback, 240 pages, £9.99

It turns out that he’s somehow picked up the wrong camera, of the same make as his own, but on the film he’s had developed – not his own – there are photographs that only a spy would be interested in.

This being a rather camp spy story, our hero – Josef Vadassy – is required to play an increasingly bizarre role as the police’s eyes and ears in the hotel he’s staying at. The novel is narrated in the first person by Vadassy, and he’s kept in the dark about the police’s plans in case he reveals them to the real spy, all of which establishes a narrative framework that allows Ambler to keep us in the dark about what’s really going on. There’s a distinct Agatha Christie feeling to the story, with its strictly limited cast of characters, all of who seem to have been bussed in from central casting.

Epitaph for a Spy is a pleasing enough diversion, but it’s far too silly to take at all seriously. The writing is likeable enough, but to modern readers the plot is probably a little too predictable and lacking in thrills and spills. At its core is a fierce anti-fascism that was certainly in advance of its time, but the genteel setting removes it from the source of this anti-fascist anger, and robs it of the life-or-death conflict that is at the centre of the most compelling spy stories.