I wanted to read this again as soon as I finished it the first time. Though it’s a lot of work – a circuitous, fractured narrative that fills more than a thousand pages – there’s something addictive about it, which is appropriate, given that addiction is one of its key themes.

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace
Abacus 2007, Paperback, 1104 pages, £12.99

If you’re unfamiliar with IJ, start here. For this review I’ll assume a familiarity with the basic plot but I’ll try to avoid spoilers. Alongside my second reading of IJ I decided to read Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of Infinite Jest.Carlisle summarises each section of the novel and then offers analysis of the key themes and draws together the threads of the story so far. I highly recommend it; it’s like having a highly astute friend read along with you. As I completed each section of IJ, I read the relevant section of Carlisle. It definitely deepened and enriched my understanding of the book.

Elegant Complexity

Greg Carlisle
SSMG Press 2007, Paperback, 524 pages, £36.48

However, even without the guide, the structure of IJ is easier to perceive on a second reading. Reading for the first time, it’s hard to keep track of the characters and the various strands of the plot. Those things are much clearer the second time. Knowledge of where the characters will end up makes it easier to track their path through the book.

It’s also easy, with just one reading, to assume that Wallace has poured everything he can think of onto the page, that this is, as I thought after my first reading, “a collection of scenes, essays and anecdotes that DFW assembles into a vague story”. I was wrong. This is as tightly honed as a 200-page novel. Nothing here is wasted and everything is thematically relevant. It’s mind-boggling that Wallace managed to coordinate so much material and is one of the reasons why I think this is a masterpiece.

Wallace’s concerns are communication, entertainment and addiction. Our desire to be entertained, to be absorbed in something without being challenged or made to work, becomes addictive and eventually leads to our withdrawal from the world, killing our ability to communicate with others.

This behaviour is cyclical and repetitive and so is Wallace’s novel. The novel itself ends with the characters in stasis, their fates hinted at but not detailed. Denied release, the reader is left craving more, like an addict, and one can simply turn to page one and begin reading again; the cycle will continue.

Cycles and circles are everywhere in the book, from the addict’s repetitive behaviour to the “annular fusion” process that provides power for the Organisation of American Nations, to the wheels of the wheelchair-bound Quebecois terrorists.

But there are plenty of other recurrences: the colour blue, for example, and water and the idea of heads as somehow independent of bodies. Mastery over the body requires inhabiting the head – as the novel’s tennis players do – but trusting the head too much can withdraw you from the moment, which is a problem for addicts. Take Gately’s realisation, for example, as he struggles with pain and withdrawal:

“Everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”

This is so blindingly true that it seems obvious and yet it really isn’t. It’s a lesson that some of us never learn. But Gately comes to realise it:

“No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it.”

The thing that makes John ‘No Relation’ Wayne a better tennis player than Hal Incandenza is that he can forget a point as soon as it has gone. Hal’s game is affected by what has happened. Wayne’s is not. Wayne is completely in the moment.

These glittering shards of intelligence, like slivers of broken glass – bright, piercing and clear – are scattered through the novel. But Wallace isn’t entirely in his head, he writes with genuine heart too. This is one of the most compassionate novels I’ve ever read, one that comforts you just as much as it challenges you. It’s a book that begs you to understand that a realisation worked for is one that will stay with you. It’s a book that wants to show you how hard communication can be but that will, if you work, communicate that message clearly.

It’s a work of genius. It’s perhaps my favourite novel. You should read it at least once.

Related posts:

1. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Shane’s book 17, 2010)
2. Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide by Stephen Burn (Shane’s book 21, 2009)
3. White Noise by Don DeLillo (Shane’s book 11, 2010)

Close Range

E. Annie Proulx
Fourth Estate 1999, Paperback, 320 pages, £12.00

One of the themes of these reviews is what I believe to be the very art of short fiction: choosing the few words that say the most. More than any other writer today, Proulx does this. She is a master of dialect and cadence, shading in a character’s background, subculture, secrets and losses with just a sentence of dialogue.

Proulx has released three collections of Wyoming Stories, but this is the best-known, largely because it includes the short story Brokeback Mountain. I have been a fan of Proulx’s since long before the film version of this lonely tale was released, but I hadn’t yet delved into her short fiction when I saw the film. Proulx may have won a Pulitzer for The Shipping News, but to my mind, her talent shines most in the short story form. And of all her short fiction, Close Range is the collection I love best.

The 11 stories in Close Range span the whole of the 20th Century and into the noughties, modern cowboys losing an old battle, laptops and cellular phones as impotent against the Wyoming weather as the horses and lean-tos that preceded them. The theme that runs through these stories is not futility, but hardness: rugged people living life uphill in a vast and godless land.

“You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punched with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don’t give a damn. They are too far away, like everything else.”

So opens A Lonely Coast, an observation of the last act of Josanna Skiles. Underemployed with powder on her nose, pouring herself into too-tight clothing to wriggle on a sticky dance floor, weatherbeaten lure for any cowboy who’ll take her, Josanna’s story isn’t specifically Wyoming or even American. Women paint themselves into corners all over the world, and their end is as universal as the blind desperation that fuels them. Says the narrator, “I think Josanna seen her chance and taken it. Friend, it’s easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.”

Every so often, Proulx counterbalances the weight of inevitability, which seems to serve as a lodestone for most of her stories, with a touch of magic realism.

In The Bunchgrass Edge of the World, Ottaline Touhey, fat, lonely and pretty much resigned to growing old and asexual on the family ranch, hears an empathetic voice coming from a disused John Deere tractor. The tractor becomes a friend, a lifeline and eventually, the catalyst for Ottaline’s salvation.

Pair a Spurs is another story with an unlikely spin, where a pair of silver comet spurs bewitches ornery rancher Car Scropes, drawing him to whichever woman wears them, and finally, to his own kind of madness.

The stories that stayed with me most, and the two I reach for every time I take Close Range off the shelf, are People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water and Brokeback Mountain. The former is striking for its cast of characters and snatches of dialogue; the latter for the impossibility and loss that spread through it like a stain.

People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water tells of a slow-burning and eventually fatal friction between the Tinsley and Dunmire families. Jaxon Dunmire, the eldest of seven work-raised boys, now a ranch-hardened man, is the old Wyoming, while the soft Tinsley clan, more crippled by its tolerance of mental illness than the illness itself, represents the new. Though some things change, some things don’t. Weakness doesn’t last in this place.

Brokeback Mountain is the final piece in the collection, and fittingly so: it stayed with me long after the others had gone. A story of loneliness and regret, of love only identified as such long after it was lost, there is a universality to these characters and their flaws that goes far beyond gay cowboys.

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, “pair a deuces going nowhere”, are co-workers then companions then something else entirely one isolated summer on Brokeback Mountain. Theirs is an irresistible connection, but impossible to make last — an ache we have all felt.

“Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.”

Proulx writes the way feelings feel, a punch in the stomach or a bird in the chest. Her storytelling tugs at my insides and makes me yearn for a rural life: hay bales, home preserves, lonely roads and black nights alive with wind, crickets and stars.

It’s a life I have never owned (and realistically, probably would not suit) but the country time I have borrowed on family visits to ranchland Alberta, city-kid cousin tripping around the farm after her cowboy-hatted uncle, has left its mark. Proulx’s names and places and her characters’s day to day lives resonate with a familiarity I find hard to describe. As much as they are not, these stories feel like home.

Related posts:

1. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (Sara’s book 3, 2010)
2. Runaway by Alice Munro (Sara’s book 4, 2010)
3. Dubliners by James Joyce (James’s book 6, 2010)

The Moving Toyshop

Edmund Crispin
Vintage 2007, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

Cadogan is caught up in a mystery when he arrives in Oxford for a holiday. Walking into town in the early hours of the morning, Cadogan’s suspicions are raised by a toyshop. Finding the door unlocked, he makes his way inside and discovers a dead body. Before he can raise the alarm he is knocked unconscious. When he comes to, the toyshop has gone – replaced by a greengrocer’s – and there is no sign of the corpse. Baffled, he turns to Fen for help.

What follows is reminiscent of an Ealing comedy as Fen and Cadogan chase around Oxford in search of the truth.

Crispin enjoys himself throughout, throwing in all kinds of literary gags and satirical lines. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the sort of book in which characters don’t go to the police when they’ve no earthly reason for not doing so,” says Cadogan at one point after Fen has refused to go to the authorities.

In quiet moments the pair play a range of literary games, listing “unreadable books”, for example, and “detestable characters” (”everyone in Dostoevsky”, Fen offers). Later they get a lift from a lorry driver who has become depressed by urban life after reading too much D.H. Lawrence.

Fen’s awareness that he is a character in a mystery novel – at one point he thinks up titles for Crispin’s subsequent books – is reminiscent of John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that Carr’s hero, Gideon Fell, has the same initials as Fen.

The solution to the puzzle is convoluted and slightly confusing but still fairly satisfying. However, the solution isn’t the point. This is an entertaining romp that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable speedy read.

Related posts:

1. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Shane’s book 26, 2009)
2. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Shane’s book 4, 2010)
3. The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (Shane’s book 30, 2009)

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.

Coming back to this book after 15 years, what struck me was how unflappable the prose is. There’s no breathless gosh or cripesing. Children are treated as children, but they’re given responsibilities. October’s pony – Southern Cross – has a brother who is bought by a rival rider and whose initially gentle temperament is completely ruined by harsh treatment. Despite having a rocking name and being bilingual, October and her half-Italian best friend are treated as outcasts by the school’s popular set until a nasty accident wins them sympathy.

I bought this copy of Pink Pony from the wonderful Jane Badger shop, a one-man online operation specialising in selling old books at extremely good prices. I’ve picked up a number of old Armada favourites here and it’s well worth a look. Pony books are a great read, calming and nostalgic without ever letting fantasy overtake the realities of money and they make responsibility something to aspire to.

Related posts:

1. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Sara’s book 1, 2010)
2. History: A Novel by Elsa Morante (James’s book 2, 2010)
3. Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 24, 2009)

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.

The stories are all closely linked to the later Ulysses, thematically but also through characterisation; many incidental figures from the great novel also appear here, several of the most easily recognisable in the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room. As with Ulysses, Joyce is at least as concerned with women’s lives as he is with men’s, and little injuries men do to women as a matter of course are a constant theme. As with Molly Bloom in Ulysses he gives us almost more of women’s inner lives than he does those of men.

Here his voice is perhaps slightly less cocksure than it later became, slightly more detached and ironic. One of the most loveable things about Joyce is the profound sympathy he has for his characters, and this emotion – which never becomes sentimental – is certainly nearer the surface than it is in later works. Many of these stories are profoundly moving, deeply sad in the ordinary helplessness of the lives they portray.

To my mind, Joyce is the greatest writer in the history of the English language, and Dubliners, while not the summit of his achievement, is a work of consummate genius.

Related posts:

1. Runaway by Alice Munro (Sara’s book 4, 2010)
2. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)
3. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)

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.

The Castle is probably Kafka’s most enigmatic work, and is my own favourite of his novels. In fact, I think it’s flat out one of my favourite novels, along with Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities, Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Let me illustrate why with a few extended quotations. First, here’s the narrator musing about why the Castle’s bureaucracy is behaving the way it is:

By mostly obliging him from the start in some of the more trivial matters—and no more had been at stake until now—the few easy little victories but also of the corresponding satisfaction and the resulting well-founded confidence for other, greater battles. Instead, they let K. wander about as he wished, even if only in the village, spoiling and weakening him, barred all fighting here, and dispatched him to the extra-official, completely unclear, dull and strange life. If this went on, if he weren’t always on guard, he might one day, despite the friendly attitude of the authorities, despite his meticulous fulfilment of his exaggeratedly light official duties, be deceived by the favour seemingly granted him and lead the rest of his life so imprudently that he would fall to pieces, and the authorities, gentle and friendly as ever, would have to come, as though against their will but actually at the behest of some official ordinance of which they knew nothing, in order to clear him out of the way.

What an extraordinary piece of prose! The bureaucracy, in this interpretation, behaves in accordance with laws it does not even know about! It is ‘gentle and friendly as ever’ even though it will come ‘to clear [K.] out of the way’. This consistently strange world is entirely Kafka’s own. That block of prose could not possibly have been written by any other author.

Here’s a shorter but still extraordinary passage:

“Who cares about your father’s work? Klamm is waiting for news, but instead of rushing there head over heels, you spend your time carting dung from the cowshed.” “My father is a shoemaker,” Barnabas said, undeterred, “he had orders from Brunswick, and I am Father’s apprentice.” “Shoemaker—orders—Brunswick,” K. cried bitterly, as if trying to make each word forever unusable.

As if trying to make each word forever unusable. Again, only Kafka could have written that.

Here’s an exchange between K. and one of his two assistants (who always put me in mind of the Marx Brothers, although in Harman’s translation and, one assumes, Kafka’s text, they are far more put upon and bullied by K. than I remember):

“Threats like that don’t frighten me,” said Jeremias, “you don’t want me as an assistant, you even fear me as an assistant, you are particularly fearful of assistants, it was only out of fear that you hit dear Artur.” “Perhaps,” said K., “but did it hurt any less because of that? Perhaps I will often be able to show my fear of you in the same way. If I see that your assistantship isn’t giving you much joy, I will, despite all that fear, take the greatest pleasure in forcing you to do your duty. And indeed this time I shall make a point of getting hold of you alone, without Artur, and then I can devote special attention to you.”

What a classic Kafka touch, that one could be afraid of assistants in general, but also that K. would concede that point as a matter of course! And here’s K. doing his bit to ensure that the bureaucracy is enforced at every level; even while battling it, he adopts its own coercive procedures. This is Kafka’s unique insight into bureaucracy: that it has no controllers, but is a entity with a mysterious life of its own, one that we all participate in both as victim and as perpetrator.

One final quote:

This babble of voices from the rooms had something extremely cheerful about it. First it sounded like the jubilation of children getting ready for an excursion, then like wake-up time in a henhouse, like the joy of being in complete accord with the awakening day, somewhere there was even a gentleman imitating the crowing of a cock.

This is like the opening paragraph of Metamorphosis, where Kafka spells it out: “It was no dream.” Here there is actually a man making the sound of a crowing cock.

Passages like this are strewn throughout the dense text of The Castle. Harman’s translation retains Kafka’s eccentric punctuation and paragraphing, things which become more extreme as the novel progresses. And, faithful to Kafka’s text, it ends in mid sentence.

This is a remarkable and singular work of genius, and one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. The translation is excellent – see Coetzee’s essay for exhaustive detail on that – and puts all the other ones I’ve read to shame. I simply can’t recommend it highly enough.

Related posts:

1. Stranger Shores by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 40, 2009)
2. Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler (James’s book 57, 2009)
3. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (James’s book 41, 2009)

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.

Nabokov’s style is unbelievably polished and there are frequently sentences of great beauty. Take this, for example:

Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provencal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept.

This is deliberately reminiscent of Proust. In fact, hardly a sentence goes by without an allusion to or pastiche of some great prose master.

Lolita can be read and enjoyed in a normal edition, with no key and with minimal footnoting, but this edition, annotated by Alfred Appel, Jr., allows one to explore the almost endless depths of the text in ways that one would otherwise not be able to.

For all its brilliance though, there is still the question of what Lolita is for. Nabokov is without question a brilliant writer, but is there anything here other than word games and a felicitous style? After having read Lolita twice now, I’m still not sure.

Related posts:

1. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (James’s book 41, 2009)
2. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (James’s book 22, 2009)
3. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)

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.

Related posts:

1. Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler and Robert B Parker (Ian’s book 10, 2009)
2. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)
3. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Shane’s book 26, 2009)

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.

Related posts:

1. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy (James’s book 46, 2009)
2. The Castle by Franz Kafka (James’s book 58, 2009)

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.

Related posts:

1. Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler (James’s book 57, 2009)
2. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (James’s book 22, 2009)