26 Books

“Ah, I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour by eight seconds!” – “No monsieur, I’m the guy who won it twice.” Despite winning the world’s greatest cycling race twice, Laurent Fignon is still famous as the man who lost to Greg LeMond by just eight seconds in over three thousand kilometres and 87 hours of racing.

We Were Young and Carefree

Laurent Fignon
Yellow Jersey 2010, Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99

Fignon, who died in 2010, takes the unusual step of recounting the most famous incident of his career at the start of his book with the following anguished words:

Come on, let’s burst the abscess before we really get started. The would has to be left open. Let it bleed away in silence. It will bleed a good while yet.

(There’s more than a hint of Amfortas about that paragraph!) While this decision makes for a more exciting opening than a load of guff about his childhood, it does somewhat hurt the architecture of the story.

Well, I finished The Man Without Qualities, which is more than its author managed to do. Robert Musil died in 1942, aged 61, a mere 21 years after he began writing this mammoth book. The published edition runs to more than 650,000 words and it’s thought that the finished work would have been twice as long. I suspect that Musil would never have finished, even if he had lived until 81, or 101, or 181. The book would just have gone on and on and on.

There isn’t much of a story here. Ulrich, the ‘man without qualities’, is disconnected from life. Having spent time as a poet, a soldier and, more recently, a mathematician, he has come adrift. His father suggests that he take a job as secretary to a count, which leads to his involvement in a committee charged with organising a celebration to mark the Austrian emperor’s 70th anniversary.

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 (Penguin Great Food)

Pellegrino Artusi
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 128 pages, £6.99

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.

Whoosh, away from Italy, north to Sweden and another detective, Kurt Wallander.

The White Lioness (Inspector Wallander Mysteries)

Henning Mankell
Vintage 2009, Paperback, 576 pages, £7.99

The crime story here is more ambitious and international in scope, involving an assassination plot of famous real-life South African political figures, fictional contract killers and the landcapes of two radically different countries.

Another Italian detective, but this one’s home grown. Salvo Montalbano is a Sicilian police inspector and this is his first appearance in print.

The Shape of Water (Montalbano 1)

Andrea Camilleri
Picador 2005, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

The story concerns a man found dead in a car in a wasteground well known as a trading place for prostitutes and drug dealers. He’s Silvio Luparello, an engineer and uncorrupted politician. He’s wealthy and aristocratic, so the well-worn crime trope – this case must be finished quickly to avoid publicity for the powerful friends of those in charge of the police – comes into play and Montalbano feels under pressure.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death, so there could be no more appropriate time to review Bruno Walter’s highly personal book about his friend and mentor.

I found it in a beautifully preserved first edition on a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye and read it in no time at all. It’s a very slim volume, packed with personal reminiscences and the musical isights of one of the 20th century’s finest conductors on perhaps (we have no way of knowing today) its finest.

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.

Doctor Zhivago

Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)
Harvill Secker 2010, Hardcover, 544 pages, £20.00

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.

To describe Leonardo Sciascia as a crime writer might be to do him a disservice. From the evidence of these stories at least, his concerns are more literary than those of a typical genre writer; he is more interested in examining the motives and desires of those committing and investigating crime than he is in detailing whodunnit and how.

“Open Doors” and Three Novellas (Vintage International)

Leonardo Sciascia
Vintage Books 1994, Paperback, 293 pages, £12.14

That said, to elevate Sciascia above the genre simply because he is more literary is probably to perpetuate the stereotype that genre writing cannot be literary writing. Of course if one defines ‘genre fiction’ to mean ‘non-literary fiction’, and many do, then it is obviously true that there can be no overlap between the two but such a definition could be just such an example of the lazy stereotype.

Madame Bovary is an utterly remarkable novel, as much for what it does not contain as for what it does. It is a profoundly anti-romantic novel, and is completely devoid of sentimentality (although not of sentiment). As with Wagner’s music, anything that came after it was either a reaction to it, or against it, but it could not be ignored.

Madame Bovary (Penguin Hardback Classics)

Lydia Davis (Translator)
Penguin Classics 2010, Hardcover, 384 pages, £20.00

It is, by common consent, the first ‘realistic’ novel. This idea has always been problematic, because such novels are not actually realistic at all – the author (or, rather, the narrator) knows everything about the inner lives of the characters, in a way which is entirely impossible in real life. Sometimes, this style of writing is known as ‘naturalistic’, and that’s perhaps closer to the effect Flaubert achieves, the primarily characteristic of which is the unobtrusive yet keenly intelligent narrator.

This is a completely unclassifiable and utterly remarkable book. I confess that I had never heard of it or its author until I read Milan Kundera’s recent collection of essays, Encounter. I happened across it in Daunt Books – one of my favourite bookshops – and bought it on the spot.

Kaputt (New York Review Books Classics)

with an introduction by Dan Hofstadter Curzio Malaparte
New York Review Books 2007, Paperback, 437 pages, £8.99

It’s by no means an easy read, for several reasons, not least that it’s impossible to know what is real and what is invented. The entire book is a mix of reportage, history, fiction and dream. Broadly speaking, Malaparte’s narrative covers the German advance into Russia in 1941 and ends in 1943. But that’s far too literal a way to describe something so elusive and free.