The three books here represent three very different approaches to food, but they share a purpose: joy in eating. You might hope that all cookbooks would have that in common, but unfortunately you’d be very wrong.
Exciting Food For Southern Types is a gourmet’s book. It’s hardly about cooking at all, and the recipes are sketchy and difficult to follow.
Yet more detective fiction, this time in the guise of espionage and the Secret Service.
Oddly for a secret agent, James Bond has been roped in to investigating a diamond smuggling operation. A dentist in Africa gives the stones to a man in a helicopter who takes them to London to be cut, and they’re sent off to America to be sold.
I don’t re-read books very often, as regular visitors to this site will know, but this is my second reading of Take Your Eye Off the Ball this year. Strictly speaking, it’s somewhere between a re-reading and a new book, since this Playbook Edition updates the original with more than 50 pages of new material.
The main changes are in updated examples from last season as well as new sections on this year’s NFL Draft and an added chapter on the special teams game.
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.
This year I re-read three of Franzen’s books in preparation for his new one, Freedom. James’s scathing review has given me pause, but I expect I will cave and read what is being billed as ‘The Great American Novel’ at some point in 2011.
I read The Discomfort Zone in 2006, when it was first published, and was struck by the similarities between the author’s own life and the fictitious lives he conjures up in The Corrections (which I had read several years earlier). The reviews that nudged me towards The Discomfort Zone had focused on the self-deprecating humour Franzen uses to the lever his personal history to a mass-market-appeal level of funniness and universality. On first reading, several years ago, I was disappointed: not so funny. What humour there was was muffled by details; the anecdotes themselves were too few and far between. Yet four years later, it’s a different book – or more accurately, I am a different reader.
This is the second part of Broch’s groundbreaking trilogy The Sleepwalkers. Its title in German is 1903. Esch oder der Anarchie, and as I mentioned in my post on the first part of the trilogy, Penguin’s decision to translate it so inaccurately is inexplicable. Again, it’s not a new translation, but there’s surely no reason not to correct this stupid mistake.
Thankfully, this is only of tangential interest to the book as a whole, which is magnificent. Esch is a book-keeper who is wrongfully dismissed from his job. He ends up involved in an female wrestling business, although his resentment at the forces that have cost him his book-keeping job constantly eats away at him.
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 I said in my review of Stephen Hero I could not understand Ian’s hostile reaction to A Portrait, the novel for which it was a prototype, and promised to report back. Here I am, even more in love with this wonderful book. Perhaps my increased regard for it is largely due to Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce that I read immediately before this, but the simple fact is that this is one of the great 20th century novels.
Very, very little writing can achieve the physical impact on me that music can. Joyce’s writing can, of course, be very crude – Leopold Bloom taking a shit is not the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read – but it can also soar. There are a few pages of such outstanding beauty in A Portrait that I was left stunned after reading them. It’s like listening to the late Beethoven Piano Sonatas – a strange, unsettling, complex, profound, delicate, sensual, emotional experience. It’s an extraordinary thing for writing to be able to achieve.
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.
