26 Books

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

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 1997, 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.

This is the fourth in my series of five reviews of short fiction collections. Close Range is Annie Proulx’s first collection of Wyoming Stories — spare tales of lives lived and lost in a harsh and lonely land.

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.

Written a decade or so after the Golden Age of crime fiction, Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop is a comic novel that delivers a devious mystery without ever taking itself seriously. Its hero is the self-regarding academic Gervase Fen who, in this case, comes to the aid of his friend, the poet Richard Cadogan.

The Moving Toyshop

Edmund Crispin
Vintage 2007, Paperback, 208 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.

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)
Schocken Books 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

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Vintage Classics 2007, Paperback, 592 pages, £8.99

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, 160 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.