26 Books

This is another of my delves back into the history of detective fiction. Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue is widely credited as being the first detective story.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Vintage Classics)

Matthew Pearl (Introduction)
Vintage Classics 2009, Paperback, 160 pages, £5.99

Poe’s hero, C Auguste Dupin, is clearly the progenitor of many a literary detective, not least Sherlock Holmes. Between pipes and from the comfort of his armchair, Dupin picks apart the mysteries as narrated by his slower-witted friend and companion. It’s a formula that would become very familiar indeed.

Dupin appeared in just three stories, all of which are included here. The title story is the most famous and the most successful. The story of two women slain in their locked apartment may have a fairly silly conclusion but the approach Dupin takes to solving the puzzle is a familiar one. His analysis of newspaper reports of the crime and his careful examination of the scene allow him to determine the identity of the killer.

In the second story, The Mystery of Marie Roget, Poe transposes a real-life New York murder to Paris and has Dupin show that the assumptions made by police are likely to be wrong. Since the real murder remained unsolved, so does Poe’s fictionalised version, which makes for an unsatisfying read. All that is here is Dupin’s dissection of a series of newspaper reports. It’s repetitive and dull but it does at least have the distinction of being, in all likelihood, the first detective story to be based on a real crime.

The Purloined Letter, the third and final outing for Dupin, closes the collection. As a mystery, it’s more satisfying than …Rue Morgue. It’s also nowhere near as silly. However, as a story it remains – like …Marie Roget – rather flat.

All three stories are important and influential. However, the modern reader is unlikely to find them very entertaining.

This 1890 novel, Hamsun’s first, is widely considered to be a major influence on 20th Century literature. Hamsun wanted to write fiction that explored the psychology of characters and here he takes us inside the head of a starving writer in Kristiania, now known as Oslo.

Hunger

Knut Hamsun
Canongate Books Ltd 2006, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

The writer, who remains unnamed, cannot afford food and eventually becomes homeless. We follow his train of thought, his rantings and his bizarre ideas as he teeters on the edge of madness. He’s an egotist whose reach, it seems, exceeds his grasp when it comes to writing but he’s not dislikable.

In his introduction to this edition, Paul Auster argues that it is impossible to empathise with the narrator but I found the opposite. While he can be frustrating at times and the pranks he plays on various strangers are bizarre, I found myself sympathising with his predicament.

The writer swings between pride and desperation, sometimes refusing help and at other times begging people for assistance. He always seems to misjudge the situation, begging those who won’t help him and refusing those who want to help. Throughout, Hamsun makes him utterly convincing.

Hunger has been translated three times and this translation, by Sverre Lyngstad, is excellent. At the end of the book is an essay by Lyngstad in which he compares the previous translations with his own. He’s merciless in his dissection of the mistakes of his predecessors, which makes the essay quite amusing but it’s also a good illustration of the challenges a translator faces.

Hamsun was a fervent supporter of the Nazis in his old age, somewhat clouding his Nobel Prize-winning career. Regardless of what became of its author, this book is a must-read.

It may seem unlikely, given the title, but Dead Souls is a comedy. Envisaged as a trilogy, only the first part was published during Gogol’s lifetime. Elements of the second part, which Gogol attempted to destroy shortly before his death, were published posthumously.

Dead Souls (Penguin Classics)

Nikolai Gogol
Penguin Classics 2004, Paperback, 512 pages, £9.99

Dead Souls is a social satire detailing the efforts of Chichikov, a mid-ranking gentleman turned social-climbing conman, as he travels the Russian provinces with a bizarre plan. Chichikov approaches landowners and offers to “buy” those of their peasants who have died since the last census. Russian law at the time dictated that landowners had to pay tax on the serfs they had at the last census, regardless of whether they are still alive. By taking these ‘dead souls’ off the hands of the landowners, Chichikov appears to be doing them a favour. But what does he want them for?

His plan is little more than a MacGuffin and not terribly important to the novel. Instead, the focus is on Gogol’s portrayal of the various landowners Chichikov meets. For Gogol, they too are dead souls, as is Chichikov himself.

Gogol’s writing, translated here by Robert A Maguire, is exquisite. There is some wonderfully descriptive writing and his characters are drawn with wit and precision. Gogol’s narrator is endearingly strange, frequently wandering off into poetic asides about the state of Russia or a certain kind of person.

It’s a voice that would nowadays be described as postmodern. At one point the narrator apologises for the characters he’s bringing to us: “And so, readers should not feel indignant towards the author if the persons who have been appearing so far have not been to their taste. This is Chichikov’s fault, he is fully in charge here, and wherever he takes it into his head to go, we must plod along in the same direction too.”

The Penguin edition presents the scraps of Gogol’s second volume after the first. It’s worth reading as a curiosity but is altogether more cumbersome, with a heavier tone and no clear sense of direction. Of course, it’s highly unlikely to be anything like what Gogol would have wished to have published.

Clearly, Dead Souls should be judged solely on the first part. Elements of it reach across to Dostoevsky, back to Homer and extend forwards to Kafka. It’s a masterpiece and essential reading for all.

I picked up Rock Crystal because I saw somewhere – I can’t remember where – that it was W.G. Sebald’s favourite book.

Rock Crystal (Jewel)

Adelbert Sifter
Pushkin Press 2000, Paperback, 80 pages, £5.00

It’s a very slim volume that contains a single story of two children who get lost on in a snowstorm while crossing an Alpine pass on Christmas Eve. They struggle against tiredness, and are saved because their grandmother has given them a flask of coffee extract to take to their mother. They drink the coffee extract – their first encounter with any kind of stimulant – and make it through to the morning as a result.

It’s a beautifully written miniature that recalls the central episode in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain when Hans Castorp loses himself – literally and metaphorically – while skiing in a snowstorm. There’s no introductory essay here, so it’s hard to know if this correspondence is relevant – had Mann read Rock Crystal? – or whether it is just incidental. According to Wikipedia, Mann knew and admired Stifter’s work, saying he was “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature”, so I think that the link must at least be subconscious, if not more than that.

Rock Crystal has the delightful feel of a fairy tale, with a constant sense of dread hanging over the beautifully described action. It’s a tiny, perfectly-formed masterpiece.

Among the shelves of ‘classics’ in bookshops there are some that you think you probably ought to read, some you think would really be enjoyabe and a few that you’re just curious about. I’ve been curious about War of the Worlds ever since I can remember.

The War of the Worlds

Brian Aldiss (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2005, Paperback, 240 pages, £7.99

It’s been sitting on the bookshelf for almost as long as I can remember too, a leftover from an effort to make an Amazon order up to the free delivery price years ago. Finally I got round to opening it up and I can’t say I’m any less curious having read it.

Like a lot of Victorian and Edwardian books with action in them it’s a yarn. There’s no suspense or action on the part of the protagonists that leads to the resolutions, they’re just bystanders watching the action. The unnamed narrator tours the south of England running away and hiding from the Martians, completely powerless but giving us a picture of the events.

As everyone surely knows, it’s not resistance from the humans that sorts out the invasion but terrestrial diseases that they have no immunity to. As we work towards that we see only two fighting machines being destroyed by earthly weapons (one by a lucky shot and one by a suicidal ramming ship crew) and the total breakdown of English society.

Narrator guy runs around trying to get to his wife who he sent to Leatherhead in the early chapters, meets some people who are equally useless, and eventually sees the final death of the invaders. The death scene itself is rather moving, as the human personal voice seems to step to one side to describe the lingering hoplessness more objectively. As soon as they’re dead, we’re back to hiding in taxi huts and not really knowing what to do.

Contemporary references abound which means you spend a lot of time flicking to the footnotes at the back, which is a bit of a pain for such a lightweight text. It’s like listening to Lenny Bruce.

Life is hopeless, this book seems to say. You don’t really have any control over anything and big schemes come to nothing, no matter how superior your intelligence or technology might be. Run around and look for your wife, there’s no real point to anything.

Is that really the subtext of this incredibly famous book? That there’s no meaning to life and you might as well just hide under a hedge until everything goes away? Curious.

Venus in Furs is famous chiefly because its author gave his name to the phenomenon that we now call masochism.

It’s frankly not really worth of any attention. It’s overwrought, hysterical, silly, baroque and tedious. Thankfully it’s short.

Venus in Furs (Penguin Classics)

Larry Wolff (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 160 pages, £8.99

Penguin bill it as “as shocking exploration of masochism”, but in fact it has no power to shock us now. It all feels a bit like a strange mix between Sunset Boulevard and the Carry On films.

Without the ability to shock, the writing is left staid and repetitive. It is also, and this I didn’t expect at all, revoltingly mawkish. There is not one character here who we can care about or empathise with, and no writing that catches the imagination.

There are only so many original stories in the world and all stories are versions of those archetypes, at least that’s how the theory goes. Whether you believe there are seven, eight, 20, 36 or some other number of original stories, The Odyssey is in there somewhere. It’s the original version of The Quest – a story we’ve been re-writing ever since.

I hadn’t read it before, in fact my knowledge of the classics is so poor that I barely knew the story. If you’re like me, here’s a summary: It’s been 20 years since Odysseus left Ithaca to fight the Trojan War. In the meantime more than 100 suitors have descended on his home in an attempt to woo his wife Penelope and convince her that her husband is dead. Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, sets out to find news of his father, who is alive but whose journey home has been thwarted by the gods and a series of adventures.

The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)

Bernard Knox (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 1997, Paperback, 560 pages, £14.99

As James noted in his review last year, the structure of The Odyssey is remarkably complex. Odysseus, our hero, doesn’t appear for some time and when he does his story is told in both the present and in a series of flashbacks. It’s even more impressive when you realise that this story would have been told orally. It requires an attentive audience.

Both orator and audience would have been helped by the poem’s repetitive nature. Certain phrases and rituals are repeated throughout, adding an internal rhythm to the narrative.

The oddities of the time make the story hard to relate to in places. Despite his desire to return home, the conventions of hospitality require Odysseus to stop as a guest with those who ask, often for years at a time. He’s not much of one for mercy either, brutally slaughtering the servant women who had sex with the suitors.

Strangest of all, though, is the role of the gods, who pretty much move the humans around like pawns. It makes it hard to get that involved in the story – the gods will do as they like anyway. That may be Homer’s point – it’s not worth worrying about things too much since fate is out of your hands. It’s best to barbecue another pig’s thigh and relax.

Everyone should read The Odyssey because of its importance in the history of literature. It’s an important work but one which, I’m afraid, had little emotional impact on me.

It has a murder mystery, two love triangles and the story of a fractious family but none of that conveys the depth, power and thoughtfulness of this novel. The Brothers Karamazov is a masterful examination of free will, truth and personal responsibility.

Fyodor Karamazov has three sons, one, Dmitri, by his first wife and two more, Ivan and Alexei, by his second. Rumour has it that he also fathered an illegitimate fourth son, Smerdyakov, who now works as his servant. Dmitri is a reckless, drunken womaniser like his father. Ivan is a rationalist drawn to atheism by the suffering in the world. Alexei is an idealist, a novice monk and a passionate believer in the goodness of people.

The Brothers Karamazov

Richard Pevear (Translator)
Vintage 1992, Paperback, 816 pages, £9.99

Fyodor and Dmitri are in love with the same woman, Grushenka, a temptress who is not well thought of by the villagers. Adding to the tension between father and son is Dmitri’s insistence that Fyodor owes him money. Dmitri has deserted his fiance, Katerina, to pursue Grushenka and, to complicate the story further, Ivan has fallen in love with Katerina.

When Fyodor is murdered, halfway through the novel, all the evidence points to Dmitri, though both his brothers believe him to be innocent. The second half of the novel is the build-up to Dmitri’s trial.

It’s a long book – 800 pages – and Dostoevsky takes his time setting out the story. For a while it seems that each new character will get a chapter detailing their life so far, which slows the pace of the story down considerably. However, it pays off in the end. Even the seeming digressions, for example the long section devoted to the life and reminiscences of Zosima, Alexei’s elder, prove ultimately to be thematically relevant to the whole.

It was one such digression that, for me, was the highlight of the book. The Grand Inquisitor, the ‘poem’ Ivan relates to Alexei to explain his religious doubt, is so strong that it has been published as a stand-alone piece of philosophy. In it, Jesus returns to Spain in the time of the Inquisition and is arrested. The Grand Inquisitor tells him that he has hindered the work of the Church by offering mankind free will when all people want is to be looked after and kept secure. As a threat to the Church’s control, he will have to be killed.

It could be removed from the novel without any damage to the narrative and yet it, along with the life of Zosima mentioned above, is in fact the heart of the novel. I suppose that could be seen as a weakness. It’s certainly odd for a major part of a novel to be thematically essential but irrelevant to the narrative and yet Dostoevsky gets away with it. It fits with the sedate pace and the sprawling vision of the novel.

The unnamed narrator is happy to spell out his prejudices and frequently offers accounts of events that he did not witness. This drifting between omniscience and subjectivity could also be seen as a flaw in the novel but in fact helps to raise questions about the nature of truth, another of Dostoevsky’s themes.

It’s difficult to praise this novel highly enough. It’s a simple and engaging story examined in the deepest and most profound way. I’d recommend it to all.

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.

What is there to say that has not already been said about The Odyssey? Is it even possible to calculate its effect on Western Literature? There are echoes of it in almost everything you ever read, and I’ve set myself the task of reading Odyssey-related books this year (one of them is causing me some difficulty; no prizes for guessing which one).

The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)

Bernard Knox (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 1997, Paperback, 560 pages, £14.99

Of course, above anything else, The Odyssey is a wonderful story, full of adventure and exploits. It’s must less realistic than The Illiad, strange as it may sound to say that considering the gods that fill Homer’s other great epic. In The Odyssey, we have the Cyclops, the Sirens, Aeolus and his bag containing the winds and Circe’s magic to name only a few of the characters who are neither gods nor men.

Odysseus is a wonderful hero, full of intelligence and guile – “wily Odysseus” as he is frequently referred to by Homer. Fagles’s translation has the feel of a great epic, and is at pains to keep the ritualistic elements of the text – “wine-dark sea”, “Dawn with her rose-red fingers”, “deathless gods” and so on. In his introduction, Bernard Knox speculates that these formulaic passages were key to the process of recitation and improvisation, giving the poet a framework within which to work. Here it emphasises the epic form, and gives the text a lovely rhythm.

Fagles favours translation into blank verse, and tries to retain the metre of the original text. Obviously I can’t judge whether he’s succeeded there, but it does have a wonderful lilting quality to it.

The structure of The Odyssey is fascinating. It starts with Telemachus (Odysseus’s son) at home on Ithaca desperate for news of his father and humiliated by his mother’s suitors. Only some way in do we join Odysseus, and his story is told partially in the present, partially in the past and partially through his own reminiscences of his journey home from Troy. For most of the time, he’s incognito, reluctant to reveal himself in case he angers men in addition to the gods. The final books deal with Odysseus’s revenge on the suitors, and only the final book seems out of place (there is some debate about its authenticity).

The morality of Homer’s time is very different from our own. Odysseus thinks nothing of savage revenge and punishment. No man can escape the fate decided for them by the gods, not even Odysseus himself, and yet we know that his fate is to avenge himself on his enemies. Homer’s ability to sustain the dramatic tension even though we know the outcome is remarkable.

Everyone should read The Odyssey, and I’ve never read a better version of it than the one by Robert Fagles.