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.

Fignon was a genuine character, a rider who loved to attack and to go on what are charmingly known in the cycling world as ‘exploits’, feats of power, endurance and suffering that inspire all who watch them. He was also not afraid of expressing an opinion about his teammates or opponents, which perhaps explains why journalists liked to shove a microphone in his face at the finish of a stage.

In some ways he was lucky to win the Tour in 1983, only his second season as a pro, as he was only selected for the Renault team because of team leader Bernard Hinault’s withdrawal through injury. In pro cycling, team members may gain individual moments of glory, such a stage win, but they are required to subjugate themselves to the needs of their leader in the overall race classification, so Fignon would never have had the chance to win had Hinault been fit, even if he’d been selected.

Hinault must have been furious! Indeed, he left the Renault team to form a new team, and so Fignon was left as the Renault team leader the next year, when he won again.

After that, he was hit with a series of injuries and admits here that he never rode as well again. Despite wins in other races, he never won the tour again, even though he looked certain to do so in 1989 when starting the last stage – a time trial that year rather than the formality that the last stage is today – 50 seconds ahead of LeMond. Fignon’s saddle sores and controversial equipment used by LeMond proved to be the difference.

His book is beautifully written or at least that’s the impression left by by William Fotheringham’s translation. It’s full of anecdotes and insights into the psyche of a professional cyclist at the height of his sport. Sports autobiographies can be pretty uninspiring books, but Fignon’s is definitely an exception.

This is a book that will appeal to anyone who is interested in road cycling and, to those who are, I’d strongly recommend it.

Related posts:

1. Racing Through the Dark by David Millar
2. It’s All About the Bike by Robert Penn
3. How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil
Picador 2011, Paperback, 1130 pages, £15.00

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 book is considered a 20th century classic, a modernist landmark to rank alongside Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses. If you read James’s 26 Books review, you’ll find that this is his favourite novel. I’m afraid I cannot find the appeal at all.

This is a novel of ideas, a book about nationalism, morality, crime, justice, family, art, intellectualism, commerce, philosophy, militarism, sexual deviance, pacifism, mental health, society, the media and love. Had Musil lived, he would probably have gone on to cover umbrellas, chagrin and sausages too, for all I know. It’s a book about everything and that’s pretty much my problem with it.

The Man Without Qualities is like a map of the world in 1:1 scale or a gigantic photograph in which everything is in focus. It feels like there is no discernment. A work of art is more about what you leave out than what you put in and Musil seems unable to leave anything out. By attempting to say everything, he ends up not saying anything.

For 700 pages or so the book meanders. The long deliberations of the committee, which is led by Ulrich’s cousin, are satirised mercilessly. Having established that the committee is foolish and peopled by fools, Musil then goes on to repeat the point in various ways for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I found it hard to care. There is no emotion to connect to, just a series of abstract intellectual ideas that are ultimately meaningless.

After about 800 pages the book becomes more compelling. Ulrich’s father dies and he travels back home to settle affairs. There he meets his sister, Agathe, from whom he has been estranged for some time. They find a deep connection that draws them together and, since they are siblings, also makes them uncomfortable. Suddenly Ulrich seems to have found the meaning that he was looking for but it is forbidden to him. He and his sister are two halves that can never be properly whole.

The pair alter their father’s will so that Agathe’s husband is disinherited. Her marriage had been an unhappy one and she planned to leave him anyway. Ulrich becomes consumed with the question of whether their action was justifiable.

It’s here that Musil’s obsessive attention to the tiniest detail of intellectual process finally finds a worthy target. There is emotional weight to this dilemma. What Ulrich and Agathe have done is illegal but is it also immoral? That question finds a parallel in their relationship.

This is compelling in a way that a satire about a committee can never be, at least for me. About three hundred of the final four hundred pages in this book could be edited into a wonderful novel.

And what of the rest? I’ve tried to understand what people see in this book but I remain puzzled. The blurb on the back of my copy says: “There is scarcely a page that does not provide new thoughts or offer new insights.”

It’s certainly true that there are plenty of insightful passages and thought-provoking sections here but they are diluted amid the pages of detailed examination of nothing of consequence. Worse, Musil devotes equal time and energy to expounding ideas that are just nonsense.

Here’s Arnheim, a wealthy German industrialist who worms his way onto the committee, considering money:

“And the same is true of morality: if our acts were unrepeatable then there would be nothing to be expected of us, and a morality that could not tell people what was expected of them would be no fun at all. This quality of repetitiveness that inheres in the workings of the mind and morality inheres also, and to the highest degree, in money. Money positively consists of this quality. As long as it keeps its value, it carves up all the world’s pleasures into those little blocks of purchasing power that can then be combined into whatever one pleases. Money is accordingly both moral and rational; and since we all know that the converse is not the case, i.e., not every moral and reasonable person has money, we may conclude that money is the original source of these qualities, or at least that money is the crowning reward of a moral and rational life.”

That “no fun at all” is wonderfully placed and is indicative of the frequent brilliance of Musil’s writing. However, the argument itself is obviously nonsense. Of course money isn’t a moral and rational force, any more than trousers or bassoons are. We can see the flaw in Arnheim’s argument immediately. He’s a fool – and given that he’s supposedly a respected author, Musil is implying that Arnheim’s readers are fools too. But why spend so long unfolding a worthless argument?

Every single character has these obsessive, laborious thought processes. In Ulrich’s case, the ideas are most often interesting and illuminating, though by no means always. Other characters are almost always talking – or thinking – nonsense. At great length. It becomes tiresome very quickly.

There is no shortage of critics far more learned and well-read than me who will tell you that this book is a masterpiece. If you are curious then you should probably make up your own mind. I can’t recommend it.

Related posts:

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (James’s book 4, 2011)
2. The Canal by Lee Rourke (Shane’s book 2, 2011)
3. The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies (Shane’s books 29-31, 2011)

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.

In common with a lot of other 19th century cookbooks (this is, in fact, a sort of greatest hits anthology. Pellegrino Artusi, the author, is best known for Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, published in 1891) there is a lot of knowledge assumed and your hand isn’t as tightly held as it might be by modern writers, keen to pick up where Delia Smith left off. In some recipes the technique is barely touched upon, although he does at least give comprehensive lists of ingredients, complete with quantities.

In describing the pleasure of eating, though, he’s completely at home and prone to long, deliriously happy passages about how much he loves to tuck in. The cuisine is Italian and some well-known dishes such as minestrone (complete with an anecdote about cholera) and cacciucco are here, but there’s very little of the pasta and risotto varieties that modern italian cooks go for. Little birds abound, as do almonds and spices but you won’t be reading this in the kitchen anyway so the actual ingredients don’t matter so much. This is a book for reading. For example:

‘All you drinkers out there can put your forks down; this herring is not for your jaded palates.’ (from ‘Civilised herring’)

‘Dear Mr Meat Loaf, please come forward, do not be shy. I wish to introduce you to my readers. I know that you are modest and humble because, given your background, you feel inferior to many others. But take heart and do not doubt that with a few words in your favour you shall find someone who wants to taste you and who might even reward you with a smile.’

‘Cheer up, for if you eat these cookies you will never die, or you will live as long as Methuselah.’ (From ‘Health cookies’)

All of the above recipes are just about possible to cook from the information given, but only if you fill in the gaps yourself. Cooking, as Artusi says, is a troublesome sprite, especially if you try to cook from this book. Reading, however, is a delight.

Nose to Tail Eating is playful and spirited in its own way but rejects Artusi’s frilly style in favour of beautifully executed brevity and simplicity. Each page has a list of ingredients on the left, a paragraph or two of explanation in bold on the right followed by some idiosyncratic but exact instructions below.

Nose to Tail Eating

Anthony Bourdain (Introduction)
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2004, Hardcover, 256 pages, £16.99

The cuisine here is British, and the comparison in style between the two books illustrates the differences in the food perfectly. Where Exciting Food For Southern Types is rambling and drawn-out like a long lunch in the sun, Nose to Tail Eating gets straight down to the business of cramming as much deliciousness as possible onto one plate. It’s hungry and eager where Artusi is verbose and anecdotal.

Which isn’t to say it’s unsophisticated, but it’s a modern, British sophistication that contrasts sharply with Victorian-era Italy. The style of writing reflects the restaurant, St John, that the recipes come from. It’s funny and readable (the recipe for haggis, in particular, is wonderful) but you could cook from it every day and be very well fed indeed.

The authors of Canteen: Great British Food clearly love St John and have taken its message that simple British food has nothing to be ashamed of to heart. Their restaurants offer good food and they can show you how to make some really excellent piccalilli but I can’t work out if their hearts are really in it.

Canteen

Patrick Clayton-Malone
Ebury Press 2010, Hardcover, 224 pages, £17.99

British food is clearly fashionable, and it’s hard to know how to feel about that. On the one hand it might speak of a nation at ease with its own identity, happy to live in its own house instead of constantly aspiring to recreate the food of its neighbours, or it could just be irony making its way onto our tables.

I strongly hope not. To take your own cuisine and offer it with a knowing wink rather than a genuine belief that a good meat pie can be as delicious as bouillabaisse is a cowardly betrayal. Food, especially restaurants and publishing, can be faddy and capricious and that can lead to centuries of tradition and quiet good work being consumed in the fire of reviews and development meetings. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and I’m absolutely certain it’s not at St John. Fingers crossed, and bon appetit.

Related posts:

1. Edwardian Entertaining by Christine Smeeth (Ian’s book 2, 2011)
2. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and All About Steve by Fortune Magazine (Shane’s books 36 and 38, 2011)
3. The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri (Ian’s book 4, 2011)

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.

As with Inspector Montalbano, the detective is a route into the private lives of a country’s citizens and their most passionately held beliefs. In this case, a deeply depressed and troubled Swede finds his little regional patch invaded by the preparatory processes of a plan that should take place half a world away. He’s brought into international affairs only by accident, when a local woman is murdered carelessly by Konovalenko, a Russian who had been hired to train the killer.

The rather small personal effect of this collateral damage – the motherless family, the church that loses a devout member of its congregation – spur him on to delve into the affairs of the giants. Despite the world stage setting, each player has their own individual motive and Wallander is on the same level as the ex-KGB sociopath, the township professional murderer, the murdered woman’s husband, the bigoted boere, the keen young inestigator and the president of South Africa.

Parallels between Wallander’s family and that of Kleyn, the chief conspirator, are prominent in the latter half of the book but horrifying. Wallander’s distant father and grown-up daughter are spiky in each other’s company but share a bond of love, while Kleyn keeps a house with the mother of his daughter in it, both of whom loathe him deeply but have to hide their feelings to make sure they’re safe from his violence. The danger that the Wallanders face is the converse of that faced by Kleyn’s.

As the story progresses we see the opposite ends of the emotional scale in response to killing. Konovalenko kills at will with no remorse, Wallander is driven to the point of madness. Sweden, we see, is a deeply civilised place that can hold itself apart from the desperate animalism of other countries.

This is a surprisingly subtle book, disguised as a police thriller. Nice.

Related posts:

1. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Shane’s book 8, 2011)
2. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)
3. A Venetian Reckoning by Donna Leon (Ian’s book 3, 2011)

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.

Clues land in his lap and a clear scenario unfolds, implicating Luparello’s wife and associating the dead man’s name with a particular kind of shame and sexual fantasy. As Montalbano makes his tour of the characters associated with the Luparello family he becomes sure that he’s being fed this scenario, and plugs away at it until he establishes the truth of the matter, exonerating the wife and uncovering a completely different sexual motive altogether.

The police procedural aspects of the book are well done but rather unremarkable. Imagine an episode of Morse with rural southern Italy in the background instead of Oxford and you probably have it. Like Morse, there’s very little moving about and a lot of thinking and passing around of possibilities, but it’s well-paced and sufficiently surprising to make it stand on its merits as a piece of genre crime drama.

But the appeal lies in the culture and personal politics. The two men who find the body first call the dead man’s lawyer, not the police, in order to attract his good favour. The supposedly clean victim had another side to his character that was covered up for a set of reasons that are tightly woven together but beautifully specific to each person who kept quiet. Further information is suppressed and only comes out due to some expertly-played patronage by Montalbano himself and organised crime, surely unavoidable in any Sicilian story, is treated as though it were a messy local records office, an unremarkable part of life to be avoided if possible but engaged with as cleanly as possible if necessary.

Familism and clientelism, the Italian politics books that I’m slowly getting through tell me, are the two dominating modes of engagement in Italian business and public life. People find opportunities for their families, and draw trusted acolytes around themselves, holding out the prospect of a better position when someone else moves on in exchange for menial and unrewarding work now. Society is made up of these more or less connected cells, the bonds of which are mystifyingly complicated until you can work your way inside. Montalbano’s job is to painstakingly and methodically work his way in and takes the reader with him. It’s a wonderful illustration of the anti-meritocratic nature of this culture, with some mouth-watering descriptions of food thrown in.

Inspector Montalbano books have also been turned into a series of television films by Rai, also in Italian, which are very good but not as vivid as this book manages to be. Video tape can look a bit washed out.

Related posts:

1. A Venetian Reckoning by Donna Leon (Ian’s book 3, 2011)
2. Open Doors and Three Novellas by Leonardo Sciascia (Shane’s book 6, 2011)
3. The Information by James Gleick (Shane’s book 11, 2011)

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.

Walter’s book has, of course, been picked over by biographers, so there is little here that will be new to people who have read a few programme notes on Mahler’s music. But I didn’t know the charming story of Mahler regularly going walking in the Alps with a kitten in each of his two coat pockets. Somehow I find it both easy and hard to reconcile that with the ruthlessly professional conductor and writer of gargantuan symphonies. If you listen to Mahler’s music with open ears, you’ll hear many examples of his mischievous wit along with his bitter irony, regretful longing and impassioned feeling. And, in fact, what more Mahlerian image could there be than the man alone in an epic landscape with two kittens for comfort against solitude?

My love for Mahler’s music is boundless, even for its flaws, for all its love of cliché and occasional melodrama. Bruno Walter’s book is almost hagiographic, but his love for Mahler and his works is shot through the entire thing, and his occasional sentimentality is forgivable just as it was in his master.

Rest in peace, maestri.

Related posts:

1. German Modernism: Music and the Arts by Walter Frisch (James’s book 6, 2011)

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.

Pasternak’s reputation in Russia is like that of Pushkin – his every word is worshipped, and his work is thought to be untranslatable because of the specifically poetic way that he used the Russian language. Having no Russian myself beyond tourist language (asking for matches a speciality), I can’t judge whether the new translation is successful, but it does not seem to be a significant advance on the old translation to me. I haven’t done line by line comparisons, but rather relied on my memory of the first couple of times I read the novel in the older translation. It may be that it’s my opinion of the novel itself that has changed, or that the new translation lacks the magical quality of the older translation, I’m not sure. But it certainly feels diminished here.

I noticed some things I’d never noticed in the novel before. The first was just how many coincidences the plot relies on, not least the central one of Antipov turning out to be Strelnikov (or vice versa); indeed the novel opens with a gigantic coincidence featuring nearly all of the main characters of the novel. Second was the number of trains – again in the opening scene, the workers’ uprising, Yuri’s family’s migration to the East, Strelnikov’s special train and so on. Third, and perhaps most important, was the extent to which the novel is critical of the Russian Revolution. Perhaps this is brought out more strongly in the new translation, or perhaps I am just better informed about the Revolution than I was when I first encountered the novel.

Despite these new (to me) discoveries, the astonishing lack of romanticism is still there, and its refusal to provide the culminations we want hits as hard as ever. It’s this that makes the film such a disastrous rendering: it seems to me that Pasternak’s novel is harsh, unsentimental and, ultimately, bleak and soaked with failure. Like Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, he turns away from the most intimate moments, even deliberately interrupting Zhivago’s adulterous idyll with Lara in her infested flat with his abduction and conscription by Red Partisans. The plot is often incoherent and it’s frequently difficult to tell characters apart or to keep track of time. I think this is deliberate on Pasternak’s part – the storm of events and their randomising effects on people’s lives is one of his main themes.

To my mind, Doctor Zhivago is a flawed masterpiece. It is quite frequently heavy going, and its structure is somewhat unwieldy. Its reliance on coincidence is a major weakness, for all that Pasternak must have used this device knowingly and deliberately. If he used it ironically, then I missed the irony entirely. It’s impossible to judge the quality of his prose once translated, of course, and so we are left only with the husk of a novel that Russians revere. His great-niece eviscerated the new translation in detail in the Guardian, with specific line by line criticisms, although many of these come because she belongs to a different school of translation (make it sound like it was written in the target language, even if that means taking liberties with the text) than Pevear and Volokhonsky do (preserve fidelity to the source text at all costs). But she scores some important points, particularly with regard to the new translation’s apparently tin ear for colloquial Russian.

A new translation of a great novel is always an important event, providing the opportunity to view the book from another angle. But the next time I read Doctor Zhivago, it will be in the older translation; the new one, for all its supposed precision, robs it of its red hot core and leaves it lessened as a result.

Related posts:

1. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Shane’s book 8, 2011)

“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.Depending on your view, Sciascia either writes literary fiction about crime or crime fiction with literary preoccupations. In truth, it doesn’t really matter which.

Though most of Sciascia’s fiction was written in the Sixties and Seventies, after which he focused on essays, he returned to the crime genre towards the end of his life and wrote the four novellas in this volume.

The title story is set in Palermo under Mussolini and tells of a judge who has to decide whether to give a death sentence to a man accused of murdering three people, one of whom was an important local fascist. Though the man is unquestionably guilty, the judge does not want to impose the death penalty even though he knows that failing to do so would damage his career. Furthermore, a higher court would in all probability overrule his decision and sentence the man to death anyway. Thus his dilemma is irrelevant in practical terms but it is the moral question that Sciascia explores in fascinating depth: should you stick to what you believe is right even when doing so is pointless?

The second story, Death and the Knight, was written in 1988 – a year before Sciascia died – and deals with a terminally ill policeman who is caught in a murder investigation that is crippled by corruption. Sciascia’s interest is in the detective, rather than the investigation.

A Straightforward Tale follows and it is indeed straightforward. A diplomat is found dead in his remote house but what appears to be a suicide does not make sense, leading a police Brigadier to dig further and expose a murder. Sciascia highlights the rivalry between the local police and the Carabinieri and leaves the ending somewhat open but this is still the most conventional story in the book.

The first two stories both contain lots of historical detail that is probably well known to Italians but which will not be obvious to foreign readers. Sciascia often delivers this detail in a style that feels better suited to an essay than a novella and this is particularly true in the final story, 1912+1. Here Sciascia examines a celebrated murder case from 1913 and proposes his own solution. This is more like a speculative essay than a novella and I found it the least effective story in the book, though perhaps a lack of historical knowledge played a part there.

All four novellas are preoccupied with injustice and corruption. There are no comfortable endings to be found. Though this is something that gives the stories a literary feel, it’s also a fairly common feature of the Italian crime genre. Sciascia’s writing, thoughtful and philosophical, transforms these themes into art.

Related posts:

1. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)

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.

What’s so remarkable about Madame Bovary is that there are hardly any sympathetic characters. Emma herself is stupid, selfish, unfaithful, self-indulgent and compulsive. Charles, her husband, is weak, compliant, irresponsible and blind to his wife’s infidelities. Emma’s first lover, Rodolphe, is haughty, callous and mean. Léon, who Emma imagines to be her great love, is petty, self-interested and cowardly. The pharmacist, Homais, is greedy, mendacious and a charlatan. The money-lender, Lheureux, is a swindler and usurer. Only the lowliest members of the cast, Justin and Hippolyte, attract the reader’s sympathy.

And yet, Flaubert never passes overt comment on any of his characters; in his naturalistic style, he simply presents the action for the reader to form their own opinion on. In one sense, this presentation is almost pitiless – there’s a sense in which his characters are sent out into the world without protection. Think of the way that Tolstoy explains Prince Andrei’s arrogance or Pierre’s naïvety or Old Prince Bolkonsy’s increasingly deranged behaviour – Flaubert gives himself no such luxury.

The story that Flaubert tells is ripe for melodrama – his ironic use of Bellini’s operatic melodrama Lucia di Lammermoor at a decisive point in the story is instructive – and yet he tells it in a profoundly un-melodramatic way. The melodrama is all in Emma’s head. Her life disintegrates under the weight of her infidelity and the debts she accumulates, and we know that this is what is happening to her, but she does not. This lends the telling a tragic character that otherwise would be missing.

Flaubert is famous for the quality of his prose, and in Lydia Davis’s new translation he has found a worthy modern champion. In her introduction, Davis highlights several examples of syntactic oddity in Flaubert’s style and shows how she has rendered these into English. Perhaps the most striking of these is the ‘comma splice’, in which two ideas are joined by a comma where one might normally expect a semi-colon or full stop, for example in the sentence: ‘Night was falling, rooks were flying overhead’. This lends the text a certain strangeness that I find very beautiful.

There are many pages of wonderful writing, much of it full of a dry humour. The comedic highlight of the novel is Rodolphe’s declaration of love during a boring agricultural fair, in which Flaubert intercuts lines from a town worthy talking about livestock with Rodolphe’s words of seduction. Thus, Flaubert defuses a moment that would normally be one of romantic transport by ludicrous juxtaposition:

“You and I, for instance–” he was saying, “why did we meet? What chance decreed it? It must be that, like two rivers flowing across the intervening distance and converging, our own particular inclinations impelled us toward each other.”
And he grasped her hand; she did not withdraw it.
“For all-around good farming!—” cried the chariman.
“A few days ago, for example, when I came to your house…”
“To Monsieur Bizet, of Quincampoix—”
“Did I know that I would be coming here with you?”
“Seventy francs!”
“A hundred times I’ve tried to leave you, and yet I’ve followed you, I’ve stayed with you.”
“For manures—”

And on it goes. Contrast this with the way that Levin proposes to Kitty in Anna Karenina, for example. Tolstoy takes the declaration of love entirely seriously, which is right, because it is heartfelt. Flaubert shows us just how duplicitous Rodolphe is by showing his romantic nonsense up with these interjections from the bourgeois prize giving ceremony (for manure!).

Here is how Rodolphe’s words affect Emma:

It was the first time Emma had heard such things said to her; and her pride, like a person relaxing in a steam bath, stretched out languidly in the warmth of the words.

I could die happy if I wrote a single sentence as good as that in my entire life. And yet Flaubert deployes the most extraordinarily apposite metaphors on almost every page. Here, Emma has just finished reading a rambling letter from her father:

The letter was a tangle of spelling mistakes, and Emma followed the gentle thought that clucked its way through them like a hen half hidden in a hedge of thorns.

A few pages later, Emma has temporarily adopted a more restrained approach to her life, which Flaubert speculates is a ‘voluptuous stoicism’ (the perfect paradox to explain her situation). Enjoy Flaubert’s wonderful prose for a moment:

Never had Madame Bovary been as lovely as she was during this time; hers was that indefinable beauty that comes from joy, enthusiasm, success and that is nothing more than a harmony of temperament and circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure, and her ever-youthful illusions had had the same effect as manure, rain, wind and sun on a flower, developing her by degrees, and she was at last blooming in the fullness of her nature. Her eyelids seemed shaped expressly for those long, loving glances in which her pupils would disappear, while a heavy sigh would widen her delicate nostrils and lift the fleshy corners of her lips, shadowed, in the light, by a trace of dark down. Some artist skilled in depravity might have arranged the coil of her hair over the nape of her neck; it was looped in a heavy mass, carelessly, according to the chance dictates of her adulterous affair, which loosened it every day. Her voice now took on softer inflections, her body, too; something subtle and penetrating emanated even from the folds of her dress and the arch of her foot. Charles, as in the early days of his marriage, found her delicious and quite irresistible.

Look how subtly Flaubert tells us about their relationship when he refers to it as Charles’s marriage. A lesser writer would have said ‘in the early days of their marriage’. No word is misplaced in this amazing novel.

Madame Bovary is an incredible masterpiece, and surely one of the greatest novels ever written in any language. It’s as fresh now as it was when I read it in a vastly inferior translation as a teenager and again in my twenties. Lydia Davis’s translation is remarkable; it is both smooth and strange, surely the hallmarks of Flaubert’s unique style. If you haven’t read Madame Bovary, you should remedy that as soon as you can. It’s an unforgettable and unique work of genius, and as close to perfection as a novel has ever come. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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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.

The narrative is often characterised by a viciously ironic tone, and never more so than Malaparte’s accounts of some lavish dinners hosted by Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of occupied Poland. These scenes are presented in a way that suggests that they must be invented, but one cannot be sure. In them, Malaparte (as narrator) plays along with Frank’s vanity, always finding a joke that will get him out of trouble when he has gone too far. He alone among the guests is not a sycophant. Frank’s hypocrisy in these scenes is quite extraordinary, not something that’s difficult to believe of a mass murderer like him.

Some examples. Here, Malaparte tells the guests about a Russian Jew’s defiance towards a German officer:

“‘Du bist Jude, nicht wahr? – You are Jewish, aren’t you?’ asked the officer.
“‘Nein, ich bin kein Jude – No, I’m not Jewish,’ replied the workman, shaking his head.
“‘Erto? Ti nie evrey? Ti evrey! – What? You’re not Jewish!’ repeated the officer in Russian.
“‘Da, ja evrey – Yes, I am a Jew,’ replied the workman in Russian.
“The officer looked at him a long time in silence, then he asked slowly: ‘And why did you deny it a moment ago?’
“‘Because you asked me in German,’ answered the workman.
“‘Shoot him!’ said the officer.”
A fat, jolly laugh came from Frank’s wide-open mouth. All the guests laughed niosily, leaning back in their chairs.

Here’s an extraordinary passage in which he describes Himmler’s representative at Frank’s court:

I felt as if I saw him for the first time at that moment, and I was startled. He was looking at me, too, and our eyes met. That man was in his middle years, not more than forty; his dark hair was already graying at the temples, his nose thin, his lips drawn and pale, his eyes extraordinarily light. They were gray eyes, perhaps blue or white, like those of a fish. A long scar cut across his left cheek. Suddeny something began to worry me: his ears; they were extremely small, bloodless, waxlike, with transparent lobes – the transparency of wax or milk.

There came to mind a tale by Apuleius, in which the ears of one Ambrose had been gnawed by lemurs while he watched a corpse, and they had been replaced by waxen ears. There was something softish, almost naked in the Gestapo man’s face. Although his skull was strong and rough hewn, and the bones in his forehead looked solid, well-knit and extremely hard, the face seemed, nevertheless, that it might give way at the touch of a finger, like the head of a new-born babe; it looked like the skull of a lamb. His narrow cheekbones, his long face and slanting eyes were also like a lamb’s; there was something at the same time bestial and childish in him. His brow was white and damp, like sick man’s; and even the perspiration oozing out of that soft waxen skin recalled the perspiration that feverish sleeplessness brings to the foreheads of consumptives as, lying on their backs, they await the dawn.

This Proustian quality is quite deliberate, and the comparison is invited; after all, he calls the opening section of the book Du côté de Guermantes. While there certainly is the element of the grotesque in À la recherche du temps perdu – look no further than the Baron de Charlus – it never reaches the heights of strangeness and absurdity that it does in Kaputt.

But that’s not to say that this sense of absurdity is altogether comfortable. In one section, Malaparte describes a pogrom in the Romanian city of Jassy, which he almost certainly was not present at. His description of it is remarkable, but also repugnant. His almost complete inability to sympathise or to identify with the victims renders it extremely sinister. Here’s an example:

We backed against the fence surrounding Marioara’s house, and at that moment two soldiers who came running from the turn in the road fired at us without stopping. We heard distinctly the thud of the bullets against the fence. A sunflower, bending its head, peered at us with its round, polyphemic, impersonal eye, the long yellow lashes half-curled over the great black pupil. I turned to the sky. Suddenly she said in a low voice: “Oh, frumos! frumos! – Oh, beautiful! beautiful!” I lifted my eyes to the sky and a shout of wonder escaped my lips.

Admiration for the extraordinary way he sees the parallel between a sunflower and the eye of the Cyclops is contrasted with revulsion at this ecstasy in the face of such wanton violence. This feeling pervades the entire book.

Malaparte was a highly ambiguous figure, who originally supported Mussolini, but who was later imprisoned. A friend of Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, Malaparte was simultaneously connected at the highest levels of the dictatorship and under constant suspicion. Such ambivalence is shot through this incredible book.

I can’t think of a book that I’ve read that’s anything like Kaputt. It’s a completely singular, highly problematic, but astonishingly powerful and brilliantly written work. Too much of what we read (and write) is conventional, morally certain, poorly written and lacking in wit. Kaputt is none of these things – so, with due consideration for its many flaws, I strongly recommend it to everyone.

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