26 Books

Pony books get a terrible press. They summon up thoughts of pink-faced young gels in breeches smacking crops against their boots and “winning through” to win umpteen rosettes in implausibly competitive country shows.

Well, Thelwell’s certainly full of these caricatures, and the frankly terrifying Saddle Club series from the 90s scared any competitive edge out of my horse-mad tween self, but pony books from the 40s through to the 60s are wonderful, which was why it was so nice to find a couple hanging around my parents’ house.

As a child, Pink Pony was one of my favourites, up there with St Clare’s and Malory Towers as a totem of a childhood that was far removed from my own suburban London life. Half-French October (brilliant name) spies a beautiful strawberry roan foal in a field one day. Her parents have promised her a horse of her own and she talks them into letting her own it and break her in herself. Bearing, in mind she’s barely 12 when this pony appears, what 12-year-old do you know who could a) commit do that sort of challenge and b) what parents now would let her? Let alone having a pony in the first place, bloody expensive things that they are.

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.

Lolita is probably one of the most controversial books ever written. Quite why is a bit of a mystery to me; it’s about as far from pornography as it is possible to get. Lolita is a work of pure novelistic play and anyone scanning its pages for cheap erotic thrills is going to be very disappointed.

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.

Oh my God that’s good.

The Big Sleep

Ian Rankin (Introduction)
Penguin 2005, Paperback, 272 pages, £8.99

Not even one page in and my faith in literature and Chandler especially have been completely restored.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

It’s as though Poodle Springs never existed and I’m back knowing that boos aren’t a waste of time and this whole activity – lying around drinking tea and looking at words one after the other – isn’t a ridiculous thing to do after all, it’s the best way I can think of to spend my time. I’m going to sit here and read books about this guy in the blue suit until my eyes pop out and the kettle blows a fuse.

Thank Christ for that.

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.

This is the second of the three novels Milan Kundera has written in French since he published Immortality, which, like his earlier novels, was written in his native Czech.

Identity

Milan Kundera
Faber and Faber 1998, Hardcover, 132 pages, £12.99

Here, he speculates on the meaning of identity, and what can happen if, for a split second, we fail to recognise a friend or lover, or mistake a stranger for a loved one. Like his other two French novels, Identity is a model of concision and lightness – he has moved from the seven-part novels of his Czech language days to shorter, more focused single-part books.

As always with Kundera, we are presented with a dazzling display of his intellect and insight, a meditation in the form of a novel, ranging over an array of references, but never in an obscure way. Indeed, Kundera has been attacked for, in effect, dumbing down since his exile from his home country in the 1970s. But where others see simplification, I see precision and economy of expression, and a novelist saying exactly what they want to say, completely in command of his art.

I profoundly hope that we’ll see another of Kundera’s wonderful late novels before too long.

Ignorance is Milan Kundera’s most recent novel. It is a modern play on the Odyssey (and hence another in my series of Homer inspired books this year).

Ignorance

Milan Kundera
Faber and Faber 2002, Hardcover, 208 pages, £16.99

We’re fond of thinking that a return to something that was lost is a beautiful and fulfilling experience, but Kundera shows how the return is actually empty, and that we can never recapture what we once had.

He reminds us that when Odysseus wakes up on the beach at Ithaca, he does not recognise his longed for homeland: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Or at least his memories of home, the force that has sustained him over his twenty years of absence, have proved to have been inaccurate, an idealised version of reality.

We can never return, because we cannot form an accurate and lasting picture of it, and nostalgia – literally ‘return home-pain’ – is indeed an affliction.

As usual, Kundera ranges over a bewildering array of material, with an economy and beauty that renders it at the same time approachable and complex. I may have given the impression that this is some kind of essay, and there’s always a suspicion of that with Kundera, but in fact his themes are woven into a beautiful and poignant story of two exiles seeking their own return, who are met with incomprehension when they are unable to find it.

The third of Kundera’s novels to be written in French (rather than in Czech), and bearing all the hallmarks of his late style, Ignorance is a masterpiece of precision.

Broch’s title for this, the first volume of his The Sleepwalkers trilogy, was actually 1888. Pasenow or Romanticism, but it’s been presented here simply as The Romantic. It’s not clear why. It’s not a new translation; to my knowledge there’s only been one into English, by Willa and Edwin Muir, who are chiefly famous because they were also the first to translate Kafka into English, but thankfully there are not the same textual problems with Broch’s great novel as there are with his more famous colleague’s.

The Romantic (Penguin Modern Classics)

James White (Introduction)
Penguin Books Ltd 2000, Paperback, 208 pages, £6.99

On the face of it, this is a conventional 19th century novel (although it was in fact written in the early 1930s); the plot could easily have been conceived by Joseph Roth or Sándor Márai, but in Broch’s hands it becomes something much more.

Joachim von Pasenow is a soldier who feels a sense of shame and dishonour whenever he puts on civilian clothes. His severe father is angry with him for what he sees as Joachim’s lack of honour, even though Joachim’s devotion to soldering is complete. Joachim’s brother, Helmut, is discovered early on in the book having committed suicide. This, rather than Joachim’s dutiful service, exemplifies his father’s sense of honour.

Joachim is torn between an advantageous dynastic match with the daughter of his parents’ near neighbours and the more earthy charms of a Czech whore he meets in Berlin, Ruzena. He treats his intended, Elizabeth, as a paragon of virtue and chastity, and the idea of any kind of sexual thought about her fills him with utter shame. Meanwhile, he carries on his affair with Ruzena. The end of the novel is a genuinely hilarious wedding night scene, given what we know of Joachim’s liaisons with Ruzena. This isn’t a case of hypocrisy on Joachim’s part: to him, Elizabeth and Ruzena belong to entirely different categories.

Perhaps he most interesting character is that of Eduard von Betrand, a friend of Pasenow’s who seduces Elizabeth in the course of a single day’s riding but fails to act on his conquest. What’s odd about this is that Joachim is constantly worrying about Bertrand’s malign influence over his life, despite there not being any evidence of such an influence. It comes as a shock when Broch quite nonchalantly shows that what had previously seemed to be paranoia on Joachim’s part is actually justified. But one still wonders whether Joachim believes his suspicions.

This is the ambiguity that sits at the heart of the novel and makes it so much more than a conventional novel. Is it realistic? Or are we actually experiencing only Joachim’s point of view when his story is being told? There is a lack of ambiguity when he is ‘off-stage’ that lends an even greater air of unreality to the times when he is front and centre.

Broch uses metaphor in a very distinctive – one might say Kafkaesque – way, which is to say that he often uses metaphor when other writers would use simile – for example, a man can become a uniform rather than be represented by it. In that sense he’s quite similar to Gogol, although he doesn’t take it to the same extremes.

The Romantic is a magnificent, brilliantly written novel on its own, and becomes ever greater when placed in the context of the trilogy. It’s a shame that it isn’t better known in this country because it’s every bit as important as Kafka’s work.

Crushed by the misery of Red Dust, I turned, halfway through, to Thurber for some light relief. But not just any Thurber: My Life and Hard Times is regarded with breathless awe by the Tozer family. We’ve read it countless times, we know some bits by heart, we quote it to each other at gatherings – in some ways you could say it is our bible. I get solace from it during my own hard times and, as this was definitely one of them, I picked it out from my shelf of vintage Penguins and settled down to be comforted by a world-view that would seem, superficially at least, to be the opposite of Ma Jian’s.

Thurber is a genius. He has a knack for picking up on the absurd, the hopeless and the just plain ornery and making them hilarious. His tales of early 20th-century small-town chaos in My Life and Hard Times are comic gems. Some of the tales are legendary (The Night the Bed Fell on Father, The Night the Ghost Got In); some deserve to be better known. All are steeped in a culture that, being a century removed and located in the American mid-West, can seem like another planet to a Brit like me. What is a Victrola? A Pope-Toledo? Who is Lionel Barrymore (“he was beginning to quiver all over like Lionel Barrymore”)? No matter. Thurber’s humour derives partly from his woefully wonderful characters and the absurd situations in which they find themselves but mostly from a world-view that, though confused, put-upon and constantly shaking its head at the non-appearance of the Deus ex Machina that would explain it all, is ultimately resigned to its fate.

Accompanying the stories are some of Thurber’s best-known cartoons. My favourite illustrates his maternal grandmother who “lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on”. This affected me so badly as a child that I still have difficulty believing it isn’t the case. So, in a sense, I have become a Thurber victim – crushed by circumstance, expecting the worst. Perhaps, after all, his world-view is not so far-removed from Ma Jian’s: the difference being that at least he has the luxury of being able to laugh about it.