thorold stoppeth one of (Q)3

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

It’s another new quarter, and I’m heading for Coleridge Country in the course of my short visit to the UK in the opening weeks of July…

This is a continuation of my Q2 thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/359728

Q2 Reading stats
36 books read:
33 English, 1 French, 2 German
19 Fiction, 5 Travel, 3 History, 2 Essays, etc.
30 physical books from TBR, 3 paid ebooks, 2 borrowed, 1 physical re-read

34 Unique first authors:
9 F, 25 M

(Goals)

Back to the world tour, which I left in the Russian far east at the end of Q2.

And Then (1909) by Soseki Natsume (Japan, 1867-1919) translated by Norma Moore Field

  

Sōseki’s follow-up to Sanshiro — this time we are following a young man a little further on in life, Daisuke, who finished his studies some years ago and has yet to settle to a profession. He’s thirty and under pressure from his family to make a suitable marriage, but rather distracted by the reappearance of his childhood friend Michiyo and her husband Hiraoki, three years since he last saw them. He starts to wonder whether he really did the right thing by helping them to get married…

As usual, Sōseki is fascinated by the complicated moral climate of Meiji Japan, with traditional values undermined by the new ethos of capitalist greed, whilst a sense of cultural inferiority in the face of the West is met by the aggressive nationalism of the years after the Russo-Japanese war. It’s a story where flower-symbolism is constantly being set against the new world of streetcars and newspapers, and we can be fairly sure that things won’t end well for Daisuke and Michiyo, even if Sōseki doesn’t spell anything out.

Ticking boxes for last quarter’s “landlocked countries” theme as well as the new “Danube” theme, another characteristically short piece from an always engaging Austrian writer:

Der letzte Satz (2020) by Robert Seethaler (Austria, 1966- )

  

April 1911: Gustav Mahler is on the S.S. Amerika heading back to Europe after his last New York season, with only a few months to live. Much as he did with Freud and the tobacconist, Seethaler uses Mahler’s fleeting encounters with a young ship’s steward to make us look again at the rather familiar story of the last years of the celebrated genius from an unexpected perspective. Beautifully written, as you would expect from Seethaler, but Mahler’s life has been worked over so many times that there doesn’t really seem to be any more to say about him.

More from the Danube. I read Horváth’s novel Jugend ohne Gott earlier this year.

Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (1931) by Ödön von Horváth (Austria, etc., 1901-1938)

  

Punctuated by the ironic use of Strauß waltzes and “idyllic” excursions to rural taverns and the beautiful blue Danube, this dark comedy, the piece that marked Horváth’s breakthrough as a playwright in 1931, skewers the morality of ordinary Viennese life. Naive Marianne from the toyshop falls for the glamour of racecourse wheeler-dealer Alfred and tries to steer him into a respectable life, destroying both of them, whilst Alfred’s former girlfriend, tobacconist Valerie, puts her energy into seducing the young Nazi law student Erich, who also turns out to be in it for what he can get…

I made a note of this when I read Carey’s memoir The unexpected professor a few years ago, but it’s taken me a while to get to it:

The Faber Book of Science (1995) edited by John Carey (UK, 1934- )

  

It seems an odd idea to get an English professor to edit an anthology of science writing, but it actually works rather well. Carey obviously has an eye for pieces that are sufficiently self-explanatory to be accessible to non-professional readers, but he also succeeds rather well at finding texts that show us scientists actually doing science, reasoning from observations and testing hypotheses experimentally.

Of course we get all the “big moments” — Galileo, Newton, Mendeleev, Darwin, Mme Curie, Einstein and so on — and we get pieces by most of the well-known “popularisers” (Gould, Dawkins, Feynman, etc.) but he also picks out some less obvious moments of discovery, and salts the mixture of science writing by scientists with a few teasing bits of science from poets and novelists. We probably know about Steinbeck’s marine biology and Nabokov’s butterflies, but what about George Orwell on toads, or Ted Hughes on cosmology?

Fittingly, the book finishes with Asimov’s chilling piece about the limits of world population, written half a century ago and truer (and scarier) than ever.

It’s a great book for anyone to dip into and will probably send you off down a few rabbit holes that are new to you, whatever your background, but I should think it would also be a very good choice if you need something to give to a non-scientific friend to help them understand what science is really about (besides wearing white coats and destroying the world, of course…).

Really interesting range of books and great reviews here and in your last thread. All new to me except for How to Pronounce Knife, which I agree with you about—though I think that for a first collection it was pretty strong. Anyway, noting what you've got here in case I see any of them in my travels.

Back in Holland after my trip to Yorkshire and Somerset. I did get to visit the Coleridge cottage, which was fun, even if it turns out that it’s been completely rebuilt since Coleridge and his family lived there. And I got to stop off at Foyle’s on the way back through London yesterday…

A couple more reviews to post, anyway:

Lives in Writing (2014) by David Lodge (UK, 1935- )

  

A set of essays about writers’ lives and the ways people write about them (memoirs, letters, biographies, biographical fiction), built around Lodge’s account of his own process in writing his H.G. Wells novel, A man of parts. A lot of interesting stuff, and of course Lodge is very well qualified to write about it for multiple reasons, but perhaps it didn’t quite answer the obvious question of what it is that makes us so inquisitive about the lives of the people whose books we enjoy.

I particularly enjoyed the piece about Lodge’s friend and rival Malcolm Bradbury and the essay on Muriel Spark, but Lodge’s takes on Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis (and the very different kinds of biographies people wrote about them) were fascinating too. Some of the other pieces felt a bit more routine.

This was recommended to me by a friend who is currently reading it with his virtual online naked book club. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know exactly what that involves, but the book sounded good.

There’s an English translation (by the American TV actress Molly Ringwald — I’m told it’s “oddly Americanised”) and a 2022 film by Olivier Peyon, which I haven’t seen yet.

Arrête avec tes mensonges (Lie with me; 2017) by Philippe Besson (France, 1967- )

  

This is kind of “Brokeback Vineyard” — a love story between two country lads who are in their final year of school in a small town in the Charente region in 1984. But it’s really framed more as a discussion about truth and different kinds of lying: the narrator has gone off to the big city and grown up to be a very out gay novelist, but his fiction all circles around one key event in his life without ever quite touching it, whilst his first love, farmer’s son Thomas, stuck in the country, has never quite been able to admit publicly that he loves men, and finds himself pushed into obligations of heterosexual marriage and parenthood that he isn’t comfortable with.

Whilst this is clearly a personal settling of accounts with the past for the narrator (and implicitly for Besson himself), it is also a kind of experience that a lot of readers of Besson’s generation and before will be able to identify with, and I found the description of the teenage love affair very evocative, without ever getting sentimental.

>10 thorold: that was one of my favourite books in 2023! That was a surprise: I was half-expecting to hate it (but I was curious)...

>11 Dilara86: Yes, I felt much the same way when my friend recommended it!
(Aside: I looked for the film, but didn’t find it anywhere I subscribe to, so I ended up re-watching Les Roseaux sauvages (André Téchiné, 1994) instead. Almost the same storyline, but set a generation further back!)

On to a newly-published book I bought after seeing a review in the Observer last weekend:

The History of Ideas (2024) by David Runciman (UK, 1967- )

  

David Runciman recently stepped down as professor of politics in Cambridge: he started doing podcasts during the Covid lockdown, and this is the second book of essays for general readers to come out of that process. He looks at specific works by twelve Great Thinkers who were concerned in one way or another to make the world a better place, giving each an approachable but highly-concentrated summary of what they were about: essentially where they were starting from, what they say and how that might look from a present-day perspective. You don’t need to be familiar with the trade vocabulary of political philosophy to make sense of this, but you do need to be fairly agile mentally to keep up with the pace.

Several of the people here are well-known giants I’ve read and even written essays about in the past — Rousseau, Bentham, Nietzsche — and I was pleased to see Runciman taking seriously a Victorian writer who was briefly a hero of mine in my teens, Samuel Butler. But there are others in the mix whom I know about but have never got around to looking at in detail, like Frederic Douglass, Rosa Luxemburg and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as others that I’ve only barely heard of.

A good mental workout in any case, and a book that will encourage you to think a bit more seriously about how politics works and what it’s for, and what we mean by words like “democracy“ and “liberalism”. Runciman doesn’t seem to plump for any specific version of politics that will solve all the problems of the world, but he does show us where some of the main hazards with existing models might lie.

Back to the world tour, and a quick stopover in Korea before I leave Asia for the Americas…

The Nine Cloud Dream (1689, 2019) by Kim Man-jung (Korea, 1635-1692) translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl (Germany, Korea, USA, 1960- )

  

A Korean classic, written at about the same time as The Pilgrim’s Progress in English, and with a similar kind of mix of fantasy fiction and religious allegory.

The story, with a mix of realistic and supernatural elements, is set in 9th century (Tang) China. The promising young monk Hsing-chen allows himself to be coerced into breaking his vows, first by a Dragon King who persuades him to drink a glass of wine whilst on a diplomatic mission to his Underwater Palace (sadly, we are not given any explanation about the fascinating mystery of just how you can drink wine underwater…) and then by eight fairies who are blocking a single-lane bridge and engage him in frivolous banter. As a lesson to teach him about the emptiness of worldly glory and possessions, he is made to live through a reincarnation as Shao-yu, a man from a modest background who does well in the civil service exam and rises to high office in the Emperor’s court, falling in love along the way with eight beautiful, clever and talented women who turn out to be extraordinarily good at getting on with each other and entirely free of mutual jealousy.

There is plenty of drama along the way, as Shao-yu has to overcome all sorts of major and minor obstacles. Most of the eight ladies are experts at disguise, whilst Shao-yu seems remarkably bad at remembering what they look like, even in the most intimate circumstances, so that one is able to persuade him that she is first a fairy and then a ghost, another dresses as a boy to become his travelling companion, yet another pretends she is dead and marries him under another name … and so on. It all makes Shakespeare comedy look straightforward and plausible.

The whole thing is dense with explicit and buried allusions to the Chinese classics and complicated Buddhist and Confucian religious symbolism. At another level, the courtier Kim Man-jung — writing from exile on a remote island — is using the story to comment on the foibles of the Korean court of his own day and the misbehaviour of his king, Sukjong. Fenkl provides detailed notes in case you want to follow all this up, but it’s perfectly possible to read the book just for the entertaining operatic storyline. Shao-yu and the eight ladies are all lively, witty, three-dimensional characters with more individuality than you might expect. Fun!

Happy new thread, and lots of great reviews here. I'm adding Lives in Writing and The History of Ideas to my reading list.

>13 thorold: This one sounds very interesting! Too bad there is no French translation, but I suppose I could read the English one.

>15 FlorenceArt: Looks as though there is one under the title Le Songe des neuf nuages, translated by John & Geneviève Park in 2004, but secondhand copies are quite expensive. Maybe you can find it in a library.

>16 thorold: Good catch ! My local library doesn’t have it but the Paris library does.

>12 thorold: Les Roseaux sauvages passed me by - probably because I'd just had a baby and lived in the UK far from any kind of independent cinema when it came out... I watched the trailer and it does look eerily similar to Arrête tes mensonges!

The History of Ideas sounded very interesting and useful, but then I saw you gave it 3.5 stars, which doesn't seem to be a resounding endorsement to me - but then I don't know how stingy you usually are with stars... So, is it worth hunting down? :-D

>13 thorold: The Nine Cloud Dream is on my unread shelves: I meant to read it back in March but didn't get round to it and then half forgot about it. Your post renewed my interest, though!

I seem to have a disproportionate number of essay collections on the TBR shelf at the moment. Possibly I’ve been cherry-picking the other stuff and they got left behind, but I noticed that both Paul Auster and his wife feature in this category at the moment. Time to read at least one more!

Sadly, Auster died shortly after I picked up a secondhand copy of this collection. I’ve never got very far with his fiction, but I do find him a very interesting writer in principle, whatever that means.

I’ll probably come back to this, because French poetry and Mallarmé in particular are scheduled topics for “some time soon” for me…

Talking to Strangers (2019) by Paul Auster (USA,1947-2024)

  

A wide-ranging collection of essays, reviews, and journalism from across Auster’s whole career as a writer. The first section of the book contains heavy-duty NYRB-style review-essays, some about twentieth-century giants like Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, others featuring slightly more obscure geniuses like Louis Wolfson and Giuseppe Ungaretti, but in general establishing that Auster’s chief field of interest is the poetry axis that runs from early-20th-century Paris to mid-century New York (Mallarmé to Ashbery, broadly speaking).

From there we move through a short section of more trivial pieces — a programme-note for an exhibition of paintings of Auster’s typewriter by Sam Messer, fragments of reminiscence in a lecture on Poe, an interview in which he is asked to name the most unlikely book in his library, that kind of thing — and on into a section of prefaces to other books. Here we get to see the Paris-New York axis looming up again with an introduction to an anthology of 20th-century French poets he edited, for example, as well as some glimpses into the domesticity of Mallarmé and Nathaniel Hawthorne (separately), but there also some more eccentric items, including a sports memoir and a book by Auster’s friend the high-wire artist Philippe Petit. Something that clearly gave him a lot of pleasure (as well as a lot of work) was a project for NPR radio to collect stories told by ordinary people in the US. They got some 4000 submissions and he had to whittle it down to around 200 for the book version, which must have been a colossal undertaking.

The book concludes with some more polemical stuff — speeches and op-ed pieces written for PEN or in response to political events — and an acceptance speech, the book’s title piece, in which he reflects on the odd nature of writing as a trade.

A lively book to dip into, and an interesting overview of what made Auster tick as a writer.

>18 Dilara86: I’m not very good with quantitative appreciation of books — I usually seem to default to 3 or 3.5 stars for anything that doesn’t strike me as extraordinarily good or bad.

The Runciman book is certainly worth a read if you’re coming from a similar level of ignorance to me, but political philosophy isn’t a field in which I’ve got a lot of basis for comparison of recent writing. Apart from a few very specific topics I haven’t really touched it since I was an undergraduate.

Back to landlocked countries and the Danube, with a Hungarian short-story collection. Oddly enough I bought this one “by mistake” five years ago — it has a very similar title in German to the collection of critical essays by Szerb that I was really looking for. I read several of Szerb’s novels around the time I bought this as well — he’s a very interesting writer.

There is a similar collection of Szerb stories in English published by Pushkin Press as Love in a bottle, but the contents are probably not exactly the same.

In der Bibliothek (2006) by Antal Szerb (Hungary, 1901-1943) translated from Hungarian to German by Timea Tankó

  

A slightly oddly arranged collection — in Part I there are eight of Szerb’s light, ironic stories from the 1930s, all of them with contemporary settings except for “Fin de siècle”, which makes fun of a couple of British poets (thinly-disguised versions of Yeats and Chesterton) in the heady atmosphere of 1892 London, and “Love in a bottle”, where it is the hapless Sir Lancelot who is at the sharp end of Szerb’s wit.

At the heart of all the contemporary stories is Szerb’s continued amusement at the new social complications of living in the inter-war world, with its sensational abandonment of the old rule that upper-middle-class girls were sexually off-limits until marriage. His viewpoint characters — usually young Hungarian scholars doing research into medieval texts in London or Paris — repeatedly find themselves baffled by the erotic twists and turns arising out of this new way of conducting relations between the sexes, perhaps most entertainingly in “In St Cloud,” where the lights go out during a French garden-party and the narrator has to work out which girl it was he was kissing so passionately in the dark, or in “In the library,” where the young man’s amusing campaign to seduce a serious-minded student is suddenly destabilised when he realises that it is she who has been stalking him. (This one made me think of Garbo in Ninotchka…)

But then there is Part II, with six of Szerb’s stories from the early 1920s in a quite different mode, all historical and deadly serious in a Kleistian sort of way, including another Arthurian venture, a retelling of part of the Parzival story, where we get a few glimmers of irony, but nowhere near enough to keep us awake. The only story I really enjoyed in this section was “The Tyrant”, from 1923, an unusual story about the relationship between a misanthropic ruler and the young page who is the one person whom he allows to become at all close to him. That one would surely make a great film.

>21 thorold: I have only read two of Szerb's novels, Journey by Moonlight and the Pendragon Legend, but enjoyed them both. I should seek out more of his works.

>20 thorold: Thanks! it could be good fit for me, then :-)

Back to the world tour again, and it’s about time I moved on to a new continent. I enjoyed Álvaro Enrigue’s Muerte subita a few years ago. This is his lockdown novel:

Tu sueño imperios han sido (2022; You dreamed of empires) by Álvaro Enrigue (Mexico, 1969- )

  

A densely-packed story, set between lunch and dinner on the momentous eighth of November, 1519, when Hernan Cortés arrives in Mexico City as the guest — or prisoner? — of the emperor Moctezuma. We follow the principal characters — the emperor and his sister, the mayor of the city, Cortés and his mistress/interpreter and a (fictional) captain in his small party of Castilian adventurers — through the confusing corridors of the palaces and temples, in a situation where no-one quite knows what is going on or what (if anything) the emperor is trying to achieve. Hallucinogenic drugs come into it too, of course, and only confuse things further.

Enrigue is playing with our ideas about the inevitability of past events, of course. Few big events in history have ever been as contingent as Cortés’s more or less accidental “conquest” of Mexico, and it’s pretty clear that in the world of this novel, it isn’t necessarily going to come out the way we think it did in “real life”. Whatever that is.

There’s a lot of things going on under the surface here — Enrigue goes to some length to de-hispanisize (is that a word?) names and concepts from pre-colonial Mexican culture, so even with the quick glossary he gives us in his preface we are often struggling to work out what people are talking about, and then we get odd bits of destabilising content, like the T-Rex song Moctezuma finds himself jiving along to four and a half centuries too early in one of his trances. Obviously significant, but we’re left to ourselves to work out why…

Continuing my exploration of Percival Everett, whom we saw in Cleveland a few months ago:

Telephone (2020) by Percival Everett (US, 1956- )

  

Everett already seems to be playing games with your mind before you even open this book — it’s called Telephone, for no very obvious reason, but the cover image shows three vignettes of someone holding an old-fashioned military-style compass in their left hand, pointing in different directions between NW and NE. Your guess is as good as mine…

The point of the novel seems to be to investigate the difficult situation we find ourselves in when something bad is happening around us and we find ourselves powerless to do anything constructive to help. Narrator Zach Wells, who teaches palaeontology at a university in California, is faced with this when his young daughter is diagnosed with an incurable degenerative disease, while an admired colleague at work is struggling to meet the university’s demands for academic success. And then he finds little notes in Spanish, appealing for help, tucked into the secondhand clothing he buys on the internet and decides that they must be from victims of human trafficking.

It turns out to be the third and most quixotic of these three situations where he is able to make at least a small difference — thanks to accepting the help of some strangers he happens to meet along the way — and it seems to be this intervention that gives him the strength to be able to carry on facing the other two, where his help has turned out to be essentially useless. But Everett doesn’t spell this out. It’s up to us to work out what we want to take from this book, strewn as it is with apparently random bone fragments, chess moves, medieval paintings and passing bears. But no obvious telephones (or compasses). We have to do the palaeontology ourselves…

>25 thorold: The reason for the title and the compass design on the cover:
https://lithub.com/on-percival-everetts-almost-secret-experiment-in-a-novel-in-t...

Aha! It’s all a trick to get us to buy three copies… :-)

It does make you wonder what’s the point of a literary experiment if you have to get the publisher to announce it before anyone realises that it is an experiment. It feels disconcertingly like those YouTube videos where the maker keeps tweaking the title and the thumbnail to see which gets the most views.

I’ll file it next to my (single) copy of How to be both.

Deventer book market yesterday, the biggest in the Netherlands — only the second time I ever managed to get there, since I’m rarely around in the first week of August. Very busy, very big, but a lot of good stuff on offer if you could elbow your way through the crowds (people got more spread out as you went on, this picture is of the first bit you get to coming from the station). I came back with a fairly heavy backpack…



…and my haul, kitchen scales for scale:

>28 thorold: Beautiful picture of the book fair, but wowzer, the people. I lol that you weighed your books. :0 I've only read books by two of those authors: Minco and Kertész. A good reminder that I have two more books by Kertész sitting unread on my shelves.

>28 thorold: Not typical summer reading, but intriguing haul.

Where would we be without kitchen scales?

Back to the Danube. I read this in Dutch because that’s what the library had, but it’s widely translated, of course. Another book that is liable to add weight to the TBR shelf (cf. >28 thorold:)!

Claudio Magris is (emeritus) professor of German in Trieste. He’s written a lot about the literature of Hapsburg and post-Hapsburg Central Europe. This is his best-known non-academic book.

Donau: biografie van een rivier (Danubio, 1986, 2020) by Claudio Magris (Italy, 1939- ) translated from Italian to Dutch by Anton Haakman

  

Magris travels from the source(s) of the Danube in Bavaria to its mouth(s) in the Black Sea, and we get some entertaining reflections on what he sees along the way, but this isn’t so much a conventional travel book as a crash course in Central European literatures and cultures. For a lot of the time, he is seeing the world less through his own eyes than through those of the writers who have lived there and written about those places. Not just the big names, the Kafkas, Musils and Canettis, but also a lot of more obscure writers whom you’re unlikely to know about unless you have a special interest in a given area. He tells us about them in charming, witty style, so that we take in the information without it ever quite coming across like a lecture course.
The book is also fun, of course, because without quite realising it, Magris was capturing a snapshot of an epoch in Central European history that was just about to end: he was travelling in the very last years of the Iron Curtain. He often stops to reflect on the political realities of the places he is travelling through, and on the recent history that has made them what they are, but this isn’t really a political book. If you want to read in detail about the horrors of Ceaușescu‘s Romania or post-1968 Czechoslovakia, you will need to look elsewhere. Magris is recording them as countries in which writers are constrained but can still find interesting things to say.

>31 thorold: That sounds very interesting, Mark. I'm adding it to my wishlist.

One of the writers Magris made me aware of is Marieluise Fleißer, who spent most of her life in the very provincial Bavarian town of Ingolstadt on the upper Danube. In the few short years between leaving the convent school and settling down to run a tobacconist’s shop with the local swimming champion, she managed to get to know Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht and established a reputation for herself as one of Weimar Germany’s most daring avant-garde dramatists. Her career was interrupted by personal conflicts with Brecht and by the rise of the Nazis, but she managed to make a comeback in the last years of her life. Some of her plays have been performed in English versions, but I don’t know if there are published translations available.

Ingolstädter Stücke (1926, 1971; 1928, 1968) by Marieluise Fleißer (Germany, 1901-1974)

Eine Zierde für den Verein: Roman vom Rauchen, Sporteln, Lieben und Verkaufen (1931, 1974) by Marieluise Fleißer (Germany, 1901-1974)

   

Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt) was Fleißer’s first completed play, given a single performance by Brecht’s youth company in Berlin in 1926, then lost in the back of a drawer until she was persuaded to rework it for a new production in Wuppertal in 1971.

The central characters are two teenagers, Roelle, a misfit bullied by his classmates, and Olga, who is pregnant but whose boyfriend feels he’s exhausted his responsibilities by sending her with an inadequate sum of money to a back-street abortionist who turns out to have given up business. In proper Brechtian style, there’s no real sequence of action, we get an apparently random series of scenes between different combinations of characters, some naturalistic and others not. There’s a lot of more-or-less biblical (or Dante?) imagery going on, and the play’s climatic moment is when we are at a fair, looking on from backstage, behind a wagon, whilst Roelle, urged on by a couple of surreal barkers, is supposed to be testifying to a hostile crowd about his encounters with angels. It doesn’t get much more Brechtian than that, does it? But of course, this is Ingolstadt, and that also means that at least one character has to end up in the Danube…

Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Sappers in Ingolstadt) was premiered in Dresden in 1928, with a revised version being produced by Brecht’s company in Berlin the following year. Fleißer revised it again for a new production in Munich in 1970. The play was very controversial, even in Weimar Berlin, because of its explicit sexual content, and the Brecht version had to be cut substantially to satisfy the censors.

The story takes as its starting point the arrival of a North German sapper regiment in Ingolstadt to build a bridge across an arm of the Danube as a training exercise (something that actually happened in 1926). Since the town has never had a garrison — and we’re in the middle of the post-WWI man-shortage — the local girls are very excited by the arrival of all those soldiers. But this isn’t a Jane Austen story: what they are looking for is the opportunity for some straightforward non-binding sexual fun. And it’s not long before the maidservants Alma and Berta have snagged themselves some choice men in uniform. But things are complicated by a bullying sergeant, and by the young men of the local swimming club, who seize the opportunity to steal some wood from the bridge site to repair their crumbling jetty. Fleißer doesn’t take any prisoners, and nothing and no-one comes out of the exercise entirely intact, least of all the notion that there is such a thing as provincial respectability.

——

Fleißer’s only novel, originally published in 1931 as Mehlreisende Frieda Geier (“Flour-rep Frieda Geier“) and reissued in slightly revised form under the present title (“An ornament to the club: a novel of smoking, sport, love and sales”) in 1974.

The story has strong autobiographical elements, with the author appearing twice, once as Frieda, a clever, strong-minded young woman who works as a travelling salesperson for a flour company, and once as Frieda’s little sister Linchen, a student in a repressive, narrow-minded convent school. Their parents are dead, and Frieda is paying her sister’s school fees and is determined that Linchen should make something of her life. The nuns seem to have other ideas…

Frieda is involved with Gustl, the local swimming champion, who has just broken away from his parents to set up his own tobacconist’s shop in the town. He’s a good guy, within his limits, and Frieda clearly enjoys being with him (and the sex!), but she soon comes to realise that the 20th century has yet to reach Gustl’s corner of Bavaria, and the chances of his accepting the idea of marriage as an equal partnership are nil. He is a “child of nature”, as the narrator puts it, as ironically as she can. If Frieda stays with him, it will be as unpaid assistant in his shop. The idea of Frieda as having a career of her own, or as breadwinner for Linchen, just can’t penetrate his felt hat. Moreover, Gustl is beginning to realise that he has time in his life for either women or training, but not both. (We get a tantalising suggestion that it might really be men who turn him on, but this unfortunately isn’t developed further.)

An entertaining narrative, with lots of fun poked at Bavarian macho culture along the way, even if we know that in real life Fleißer didn’t end up having Frieda’s chance to say “no” to a life behind the counter, largely thanks to having her literary career messed up by the Nazis.

Jules Verne on the Danube:

Le pilote du Danube (1908; The Danube pilot) by Jules Verne (France, 1828-1905)

  

An act of bravado leads to someone making a daring and slightly ridiculous journey; it all gets mixed up with a criminal/political conspiracy of unnecessary complexity, with a touching love story somewhere along the way as well. And it looks as though our hero is going to be too late until the dramatic twist in the last chapter… You always know what you’re getting with Jules Verne, but it’s usually quite an entertaining ride.

This was one of Verne’s last books, published posthumously in 1908 and tweaked for publication by his son Michel. After a raucous fishing competition in Sigmaringen in the summer of 1876, one of the members of the Danube Angling Club proposes to travel down the river from source to Black Sea, living on the fish he can catch along the way. Another man quickly offers to join him. Needless to say, neither of them is who he says he is, and they both have ulterior motives for making the trip.

What with all the disguises and a cast of pilots, pirates and policemen (plus a pure and peerless maiden), we could be forgiven for thinking we’ve strayed into G&S territory, but it’s all deadly serious, and we are in the middle of a very prickly situation in the Balkans. Quite a fun story, but there’s quite a bit of crude patching-in of travelogue (possibly Michel’s handiwork), where we find ourselves — for example — reading a three paragraph list of the wonderful tourist attractions our heroes didn’t have time to see in Regensburg.

Back to the world tour, which I left in Mexico…

Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004; Memories of my melancholy whores) by Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia, 1927-2014)

  

A late novella by the Colombian Nobelist, playing around with ideas about old age, love and loneliness whilst doing his best to shock his readers and stir up a bit of controversy.

The narrator, a veteran journalist who has been running away from love all his life, decides to treat himself on his ninetieth birthday to a night of pleasure with an underage prostitute. It doesn’t quite work out like that — the girl has been sedated to calm her nerves and he finds her fast asleep and doesn’t have the heart to wake her, so they do nothing more than sleep in the same bed — but there is something about the experience that makes him want to repeat it, and he soon becomes obsessed with the girl and convinces himself that it is love, even though they have never both been awake at the same time during any of their encounters and he knows almost nothing about her, least of all her name. So we know it’s all nonsense and delusion, that he is being tricked just as much as the girl is being exploited, but GGM writes it in such a captivating way that we can’t help being drawn in to sympathise (at least a little bit) with the would-be child sex abuser. Disturbing.

>35 thorold: I must say that I enjoyed reading Melancholy Whores. In my review I wrote: "A commentary on growing old, it reminded me of Bohumil Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. But Garcia Marquez writes with affection for his characters about the ecstasy of first love." Perhaps I should have been more disturbed than I was. It seemed so ridiculous in its extremes that I never took it seriously.

>36 labfs39: Yes, I think you can take it both ways — GGM allows us to assume that it was in another time and country where the conventions were different, but I felt he also makes the narrator’s nights with the girl concrete enough to be disturbingly creepy.

I’ve started on Canetti, but first I wanted to clear another old Boekenweek novella off the TBR shelf, since I’ve just added several more to it. This one has been translated into numerous languages: the Italian translation was by Primo Levi, which says something about the impact the book had at the time.

De nacht der Girondijnen (1957; The night of the Girondists) by Jacob Presser (Netherlands, 1899-1970)

  

The 1957 Boekenweek novella, originally published anonymously, was written by the distinguished Dutch historian Jacob (Jacques) Presser, best-known for his research into the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands during the German occupation. Here, he compresses that catastrophe and his own experience into 88 pages of fiction set mostly in the notorious Westerbork transit camp in Drenthe, where Dutch Jews were held before being sent to Auschwitz. Presser himself survived the war, sheltering with the family of a fellow-teacher in Gelderland, but his wife was caught by the Germans and deported via Westerbork.

The teacher who narrates the story is an “assimilated Jew” who has accepted that deportation and death are inevitable as long as the Nazis are in charge, but who has done his best to postpone them as far as possible by joining the Ordnungsdienst, the “Jewish SS” who help the Germans (and Dutch military police) to run the camp, with the hateful task of deciding who is sent on the weekly train to Poland and who gets to live another seven days. We get plenty of opportunity to reflect on the way such extreme situations distort ordinary morality, but also about the point at which the tables are turned and rebellion (however futile) against unstoppable evil becomes necessary again.

>37 thorold: The Night of the Girondists looks like something I'll have to track down. A quick online search shows that it was published in English translation, originally (in England) under the title Breaking Point but later under its original title. The book's entry in the entertaining Neglected Books website shows the book's original covers in both the U.S. and England: https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=2662. The cover of the the first edition in England is quite powerful.

>38 rocketjk: Interesting! The style of that UK cover art looks familiar, but I couldn’t find the name of the artist in a quick search. The publishers obviously thought there wasn’t much chance of English-speaking readers picking up an unexplained allusion to the history of the French Revolution. (I admit to looking it up myself, I only had a vague idea where the Girondists fitted in.)

On to Elias Canetti, who died — it turns out — thirty years ago tomorrow.

Jules Verne’s Pilot (>34 thorold:) comes from Ruse (then called Rustchuk), on the Danube in Bulgaria, but of course he’d never heard of Elias Canetti or Michael Arlen, who were both born there. Claudio Magris (>31 thorold:) had, of course, and went to the trouble of visiting Canetti’s birthplace whilst he’s passing down river. And sending Canetti a postcard to tell him about it, which I thought was rather sweet of him.

Die gerettete Zunge (1977; The tongue set free) by Elias Canetti (Bulgaria, UK, 1905-1994)

  

The first part of Canetti’s memoirs takes him up to the age of sixteen, in 1921, when he left Zürich. We read about his early childhood in Ruse (Bulgaria) and Manchester, and about the wartime years as a schoolboy in Vienna and Zürich. He has a wonderfully clear-sighted way of digging out his childhood memories, but sometimes seems to forget that he is writing about a small child who deserves a little bit of leeway when we are judging his moral attitudes and literary preferences.

At the heart of the story is the young Canetti’s relationship with his mother, initially often absent or at least eclipsed by servants and by his father, but at the centre of his life after the father’s early death. As eldest son he is projected into the “little father“ role at the age of six, feeling a responsibility to look after his mother but also jealously asserting a privileged relationship with her that shuts out potential new men in her life. (She gets her own back by imposing a taboo on any thoughts of erotic love on his part, which he claims he respected throughout his teens.)

This is a writer’s memoir as well, of course, so it’s also the chronicle of his discovery of writers and ideas, turning during the Zürich years into a rather detailed catalogue of his experiences of the men who taught him at the Cantonal Grammar School. And even more interesting, it’s a chronicle of his complicated relationship with languages: Spanish (Ladino) was the normal language within his Sephardic family, but as a small child in Ruse he was also speaking Bulgarian with the servants. Then, when he was six, the family moved to Manchester and there was an English nursery-maid and an English primary school, but within two years he was going to school in Vienna and speaking German. That lasted three years, and then they were in Zürich and he had to deal with an entirely different (spoken) version of German.

A wonderful, sharp, critical account of bourgeois Mitteleuropa a hundred years go from a very particular perspective, fascinating both in itself and for what it tells us about Canetti’s development and his way of seeing the world.

A fun find in a local Little Free Library, to which it will shortly be returning. This was a bestseller when I first came to live in the Netherlands, although I didn’t read it, since my knowledge of the language wasn’t really sufficient back then to make it worthwhile finding out about the way clever/fashionable people were deforming it…

Turbo-taal (1987) by Jan Kuitenbrouwer (Netherlands, 1957- )

  

It’s always fun to see someone ranting against the evils of modern times and the decline of good language use when those modern times have faded back into the distant past.

This book was all the rage when I first settled in the Netherlands in the late eighties. Kuitenbrouwer takes a swing at deformations of the Dutch language perpetrated by the Usual Suspects, which in his case are young people, yuppies (anyone remember them and the threat they once posed to our culture?), the “fast sector” (advertising, media, fashion, design), the “soft sector” (health and social care), and people involved in business, meetings, or computers (he takes exception to wording like “How does WordStar run under CP/M on this machine?”). Interesting that in the eighties Dutch politics was still considered far too boring for politicians to qualify for a chapter of their own.

He also looks at some of the classic mechanisms through which language picks up temporary or permanent changes: borrowing from English, French and German, which has always been a big thing in Dutch; slangy distortions of words or grammar; abbreviations; euphemism; new libraries of metaphors that turn into clichés — he especially picks out military and transport terms here. I was amused to see him pouring particular scorn on two very Dutch forms of this: the overuse of the verbs fietsen (to ride a bike) and sluizen (to pass a ship through a lock) in metaphorical senses. Something that intrigued me was his assertion that the common “German borrowing” Umfeld was actually a Dutch imagining of a German word that had never existed until the Dutch started using it. He doesn’t give any evidence for this, but it would be fun if it was true. A quick search didn’t tell me any more than that it only starts to appear in German corpora after 1975, so it’s certainly a recent invention, whether Dutch or German.

As you would expect, at least two-thirds of the modish language misuse Kuitenbrouwer takes exception to either never caught on in the first place or has gone the way it came, whilst much of the rest has quietly become assimilated into the mainstream. The end of civilisation as we know it is always a bit further away than we think (until it isn’t, obviously…).

>41 thorold: It always confounds me how people who want to freeze language exactly the way they know it (which is probably not even the language of all other people in their area and class age) don't see the contradiction in it. Because if mid-20th century Dutch is inherently better than late 20th century, why don't we follow that logic and go back to the 19th century? But wait, surely it was even better in the 1700s? How do you decide which version is the correct one? Of course, the answer is they were all correct for the people who spoke them, and weird for everybody else.

I remember when I was a child, my father (educated in Jesuit schools) speaking with scorn about the "latin d'église" (used for communication between scholars throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance) which was of course a corruption of classical Latin, and how it was a progress when scholars reverted to the "true" Latin language.

Years later I heard another story, which was that the Middle Ages Latin was actually a thriving language that connected scholars throughout Europe, and reverting to classical latin (I suppose it was in the enlightenment age? This is all vaguely remembered hearsay) in effect killed it, made it a dead language. So was that really progress?

>42 FlorenceArt: Quite! The idea that the language we were taught as children (not necessarily the way we actually spoke…) is the only correct one is obviously a deep-seated human instinct, independent of logic and of what we know about how language really works. Even people who have studied the history of language fall into the trap sometimes.

To give Kuitenbrouwer a bit of due credit, he manages to avoid the “slippery slope” argument, and he recognises that mostly people are innovating with the language because they want to be seen as creative or fashionable, not through laziness or ignorance. But he is very prescriptive and keeps insisting on the “correct” way to say things.

I actually read a fiction book that addressed similar themes about language - The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine. It ended up giving me a lot to think about and reversing some of my more snobbish ideas about language and grammar.

Catching up on threads and the Korean classic in >13 thorold: sounds right up my alley. Will definitely be putting that one onto my to-by-soon mental pile.

>34 thorold:
You always know what you’re getting with Jules Verne, but it’s usually quite an entertaining ride.

And maybe that's the real enjoyment behind Verne. You know you'll always be entertained.

>41 thorold:
I have no problem with the adaptation of language as spoken. But I do hope that the written language keeps its polish and beauty. I struggle when verbal ticks become "acceptable" mistakes in the written language. For example 'should've' becoming 'should of' verbally, which then causes people to start writing the incorrect 'should of'.

>45 lilisin: I agree. There’s so many examples.
Mischievous pronounced mischievious for example, then spelled the incorrect way.
And I have noticed mostly in the US “tooken” for “took”.

Languages evolve but not in one generation.

The most glaring example used in all English-speaking countries is “like”, which is used commonly as a meaningless filler.

Like-
I was like happy to like going like to the movie.

>42 FlorenceArt: - >46 kjuliff: Fun! Not many of us dare to venture an opinion about a Nobel prize winner we’ve usually (let’s be honest…) barely heard of. But language deformation is nearly as safe a topic as the weather, we are all allowed to have an opinion there… :-)

I find things like “should of” irritating, of course, but ultimately they don’t matter, except for what they reveal about the person writing them (careless, uneducated, not using autocorrect on their device, …). There’s never going to be a situation when writing “should of” instead of “should’ve” (or “should’ve” instead of “should have”) makes a sentence ambiguous or difficult to understand. But it might make the difference between getting the job and not getting the job if you use it in your c.v.

(That paragraph was a pain to write: you really have to torture the iPad to make it let you use “should of” in a sentence. Every time you touch the text in any way, it corrects it for you again. My admiration for people who manage to make that kind of error unselfconsciously is growing rapidly!)

“Like” and other padding words have been around since time immemorial. They are just part of the phatic function of language, and I suspect we only notice them when they are being used by people who belong to a group with different conventions from our own, e.g. teenagers. And they are just out to provoke adults anyway…

I heard a podcast by Valerie Fridland about this topic and it was interesting and entertaining. Her book is Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. I keep meaning to read it . . .

And it's worth noting that "like" isn't always mere padding. In one of its most common usages -- "she was, like, let's go to the mall, and I was, like, yes!" -- it indicates that what follows is paraphrase rather than an attempt to quote the speaker's exact words.

>47 thorold: Ha!
There’s never going to be a situation when writing “should of” instead of “should’ve” (or “should’ve” instead of “should have”) makes a sentence ambiguous or difficult to understand

I don’t agree. Chaucer is full of grammatical errors and still understood even though only by a select few.

Rules change. It used to be de rigueur to have the verb apply to the collective noun as in,
“A group of sailors was in town”, but now at least in the UK it is “A group of sailors are in town.” It’s now correct English to have the verb apply to the last word prior to it.

As for “like” - I’ve seen it used in first-person in books by mature writers of good standing, though mostly instead of “said”.

“I’m like let’s go to the Picasso exhibition.”
And I’m like, “I hate Picasso.

Oxford Languages defines its admittedly informal use as

“ used to convey a person's reported attitude or feelings in the form of direct speech (whether or not representing an actual quotation).
"so she comes into the room and she's like “Where is everybody?”"

>50 kjuliff: I don’t agree — I think you do, actually. We’re both saying that minor errors don’t usually matter to intelligibility. Obviously I didn’t manage to express that clearly enough :-)

Yes, that I’m like… construction is a tightening up of language that seems to have appeared in our lifetimes. In the “old days” it was more usual to hear “And I, like, said, ‘I, like, hate Picasso’…”

- - -

I went to the library yesterday and got distracted by another Very Short Introduction. This one is by Ritchie Robertson, who used to be, like, Professor of German in Oxford.

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction (2004) by Ritchie Robertson (UK, 1952- )

  

Does what it says on the tin: a quick overview of Kafka’s life (and the false assumptions we might have made about it), a look at the reader’s experience of Kafka, and then a dive into a small number of key topics arising from his work: the body, institutions, and metaphysics. Robertson doesn’t seem to push any particular line, other than to persuade us to read Kafka carefully and attentively, although he does steer us away from getting too invested in Kafka as a Jew, or as a Czech, or as a religious thinker. The point seems to be that he’s a writer who works out complicated philosophical problems of the modern (post-Nietzsche) world through fiction, and doesn’t necessarily come to any clear answer.

>51 thorold: I do agree. My Picasso example was a bad one though.

Grammar seems to be a constant struggle for me. As >45 lilisin: says (I could have said "like >45 lilisin: says!), I hope that written language retains some of its "polish and beauty", and I would add, structure. I am somewhat more relaxed about spoken language, although there are certain things that drive me around the bend, "verbing" being the most extreme.

Reporters have a big role in the dumbing down of language. The confusion between "less" and "fewer", "number" and "amount", and their tendency to fail completely in reporting percentage changes make me wish the major broadcasters would bring back their books of standard usage, but that's just me being cranky. As others have said, the world moves on; best to keep working on my own errors in usage instead of criticizing those of others.

"Borrowing" from other languages is something that doesn't bother me as much. Living in a bilingual country, on streets of towns and cities where both official languages predominate, you* will often hear people switch from one language to another within the same sentence, based on the topic under discussion, or the language of the slang which fits better.

*Perhaps I should have said "one" will often hear, but that is a construction I cannot bring myself to use, no matter how correct it may be, as it always has a ring of privilege which sets my teeth on edge. Edited to add this makes me the despair of my parents, cousins, and sibling, all of whom use it whenever required.

>48 japaul22: Sounds interesting, and great title. That was not a complete sentence, merely a comment, so how to punctuate it?!

The Danube again, and a book that seems to have been written at least partly as an answer to the Claudio Magris book. I’ve been meaning to try Péter Esterházy for some time, but all the books I’ve looked at have seemed to be a follow-up to some other book, so it’s a bit difficult to know where to start. He was probably the best-known Hungarian novelist of the late 20th century, as well as being a direct descendant of the people who used to employ Joseph Haydn as a liveried servant. In Dutch because library, but there is an English translation as well:

Stroomafwaarts langs de Donau (1991, 2002; The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube)) by Péter Esterházy (Hungary, 1950-2016), translated from Hungarian to Dutch by Robert Kellermann

  

A complicated postmodern novel that keeps teetering on the edge of not being a travel book about a journey down the Danube. Or about multiple journeys: in 1963 the thirteen-year-old PE gets involved in an escapade with his dodgy uncle Roberto as they travel between Donaueschingen and Vienna; in the present (Gorbachev-era) day a rebellious travel-writer engages in increasingly fractious correspondence with the mysterious employer who has commissioned him to write about the Danube, and occasionally we find ourselves transported back to the eighteenth century and we are on a boat with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

But the book keeps going off in strange directions. We get fascinating digressions about travel books that might or might not exist (usually not, it seems, especially that one by the pesky Italian from Trieste…), or historical anecdotes that don’t quite fit with what we know (Hindemith’s illegitimate son, who sells sausages in the park; Klaudia Mágris, the Hungarian George Sand…?). And when we get to Budapest, we plunge straight into a pastiche of Calvino’s Invisible cities.

In between there’s a lot to reflect on about Central Europe, and Hungary in particular, during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, and quite a lot of fun, as well as a whole bunch of allusions I almost certainly missed. Fun, but maybe a touch past its read-by date.

The bear puffed out its chest. "I'm a very rare sort of bear," he replied, importantly. "There aren't many of us left where I come from."
" And where is that?" asked Mrs. Brown.
The bear looked round carefully before replying.
"Darkest Peru. I'm not really supposed to be here at all. I'm a stowaway!"

Back to the world tour, and on from Colombia to Peru, a country which has given the world two great literary exports we all know about: Mario Vargas Llosa and Paddington Bear. Since I took García Márquez for Colombia and I’m probably going to take someone equally obvious for Chile when I get there, I thought it best to try for an author new to me this time, and the local library came up with this. Santiago Roncagliolo has written mostly crime stories and non-fiction about Peruvian history. His most widely translated book is Red April. This one doesn’t seem to be translated (much):

La noche de los alfileres (2016) by Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru, 1975- )

  

Four men recall a series of events they were involved in when they were pupils at a Jesuit school in a middle-class suburb of Lima in 1992. What starts out as a childish gesture of revenge against an annoying teacher soon turns into something much darker, in an environment where adolescent angst, broken families and the traumatic effects of years of violent disorder seem to have conspired to break down moral boundaries.

It’s a deeply disturbing story, but it’s often also uncomfortably funny, as Roncagliolo draws us deep into the minds of the four teenage boys and their various loves, rivalries and family problems. He expertly manages the four rotating (and always slightly inconsistent) first-person narratives and the seemingly inescapable logic of the spiral of practical circumstances through which the situation escalates from puerile to tragic. If you stepped back for too long you would probably find all sorts of holes in the logic, but, like a clever film thriller, the momentum of the story is such that you don’t want to put it down and start thinking about how that would actually pan out in real life.

And, of course, in the background he is giving us plenty to think about: loyalty and betrayal; the step from childish to adult relationships with our parents; how we move from adolescent smirking about sex to first love (or don’t); and, perhaps above all, the power of fear to drive our actions in wrong directions. Uncomfortable, but oddly compelling.

Staying in bear-country, I’ve been listening to a lot of Sibelius in the last couple of weeks, so it was time to take this short novel off the TBR shelf at last:

The Year of the Hare (1975, 1995) by Arto Paasilinna (Finland, 1942-2018), translated by Herbert Lomas

  

A classic, if slightly tongue-in-cheek, novel of rebellion against the conformity of organised society. A Helsinki journalist discovers the hollowness of the urban life he’s been leading when he gets the chance to bond with a wild animal, and he spends a mad but very fulfilling year getting back to nature. In the course of which he gets drunk numerous times (this is Finland, after all) and manages to commit no fewer than 22 crimes against the laws of bourgeois society, culminating in an unauthorised expedition into the Soviet Union. Some hard-hitting satirical points, an upbeat message about the power of expressing your individuality, and some endearing animal moments. What’s not to like?

The English translation, by the veteran poet and prolific Finnish translator Herbert Lomas (an unusual example of a translation being done by someone a generation older than the author) sometimes feels a little awkward, largely because of the way Lomas has translated the author’s informal language with 1940s-vintage British military slang.

>56 thorold: I enjoyed this one too, Mark, when I read it back in 2016.

>56 thorold: This one has been on my wishlist since 2010! Who knows, I might even read it some day.

>56 thorold: I think I might try this one - interesting thoughts about the translation

>59 SassyLassy: Your — slightly off-topic but not unwelcome — bear comments disappeared before I had the chance to react. Probably just as well, the last thing I need is to go down a sidetrack of bear-related adult fiction just now — https://www.talpasearch.com/search?query=Novels+about+bears%2C+not+for+children

I think Shardik put me off realistic bears, though…

——

No bears in this one (although there is a Teddy). A few more hares, though, and a lot of bird-imagery. I read it as a follow-up to Life after life, which I read a couple of months ago.

I was a bit uncomfortable with this book, since one of its great centrepieces is a description of a mass bombing raid on a city where my mother’s family were living at the time, and she’s often talked about what it felt like to be sitting in an air-raid shelter as a small child, with bombs falling and guns firing in all directions, and no idea of what you were going to find when you came out.

But it is a valid and important topic for literature: it’s something that has shaped the world I live in. Where I grew up there were abandoned airfields all over the place (I live on a WWII airfield now!), and everywhere I go in north-west Europe there are still streets of old houses with odd gaps in them, incongruous patches of 1960s housing in old city centres, or monuments in the corners of fields or on the shores of lakes marking where a damaged Lancaster or a Halifax came down on its way back to the North Sea. And bombing of civilian targets is a topic that sadly — disastrously — still comes up in the newspaper headlines every day. We need to have clear ideas about it.

A God in Ruins (2015) by Kate Atkinson (UK, 1951- )

  

A second visit to the Todd family from Life after life, this time seen from the viewpoint of Ursula’s younger brother, Teddy. Where the focal point of the first book was Ursula’s experience of a city under aerial bombardment in the London Blitz, we now go into the experience of the young men who had to fly bombers in the Allied campaign of mass bombing raids on civilian targets in occupied Western Europe.

As you would expect from Atkinson, it’s a tour-de-force of research convincingly condensed into the personal experience of her characters. She doesn’t hit us over the head with military and aviation jargon, and she doesn’t attempt to rewrite Catch-22, but she gives us enough to take us into the — very technical — world of these quite ordinary boys (the average age was around 22) who found themselves facing extremely unpleasant working conditions with enormous risks, whilst uncomplainingly doing a job they had been told was essential to the project of defeating the Nazis, but which must have been extremely repugnant to most of them.

Of course, the central paradox of the book is that Teddy, having flown many missions and seen colleagues failing to return, and having reconciled himself to the statistical inevitability of an early death, finds himself having to live out the remaining three-quarters of a normal adult lifespan. This turns out to include having to deal with the cruelly early death of someone close to him as a result of the lower-probability but equally inevitable lottery of cancer.

As a complete novel, I felt this didn’t work quite as well as Life after life. Atkinson put so much work into getting the World War II part right that the other parts of the book felt a bit shallow, and she clearly let anger get the better of her when she was writing about the commune or the Villiers family. But there were still some lovely moments, like the part when middle-aged Viola gets caught up in a Saturday night of horrific hen and stag parties in York. Atkinson, even when off her best form, is still pretty good by most standards.

>60 thorold: Thank you for this thorough and thoughtful review I’ve read both Life after Lifeand God in Ruins but so long ago I cannot remember the details. I liked the Todd family books better than her later novels.

I remember the Blitz part of the book God in Ruins. I can remember realizing the severity of the Blitz when I lived in London in the early 1970s and people still spoke of it in daily conversations.

I smiled when I read about Atkinson describing “moments, like the part when middle-aged Viola gets caught up in a Saturday night of horrific hen and stag parties in York”. Those moments stuck in my mind. So Northern England. So cringe yet so evocative of peoples’ fun and failings.

It brought a smile to my face and I remembered with fondness both my time in England and my reading of God in Ruins.

Adding my thanks for your review of A God in Ruins. Regarding bomb shelters, I was entirely unaware until I read Erik Larson's nonfiction work, The Splendid and the Vile, just how horrid the conditions were inside the London bomb shelters during the blitz (refuse and standing water and such), especially during the early days until somebody (Churchill's daughter, maybe?) made improving those conditions into a "cause."

"Of course, the central paradox of the book is that Teddy, having flown many missions and seen colleagues failing to return, and having reconciled himself to the statistical inevitability of an early death, finds himself having to live out the remaining three-quarters of a normal adult lifespan."

I've always found it interesting--somewhat perplexing, in fact--when wandering cemeteries, to be confronted, as is very common in the U.S. (I'm not sure about other countries, though it seems like I've seen it in Europe), with the gravestone of someone who lived for 85 years but on which the fact that this person fought in a war for two or three years when they were in their late teens to early 20s is something that the person, or his/her family, felt must be prominently displayed. This fellow (usually but not always a man) lived 60 years after his war experience, and yet those few years lived so relatively early on are considered the most salient, often given an even more prominent mention than spouse- and parenthood. I intend no disrespect to veterans here, and I assume (I've never served in the military) that one lives during combat conditions with an intensity that in some ways may never be replicated later, but still I wonder about this. I wonder sometimes whether this represents a glorification of war in our culture, or whether there's something at play that, never having been in combat myself, I simply don't understand. (Mark, I hope you're OK with this digression. I can delete if you'd rather.)

>62 rocketjk: Please don’t delete digressions, that’s what we’re here for!

I was struck by the way veterans are venerated in the US (at least posthumously), that’s not really a thing anywhere else that I’ve lived. It’s very rare to see any mention of war service on a tombstone unless the person actually died on active service, or they were important enough to have a detailed epitaph. I found it puzzling to see prominently labelled “Revolutionary War graves” in Ohio, until I’d worked out that they must have been veterans who got land grants and lived to a ripe old age. Obviously there are veterans’ associations in the US that take care of burying their members.

>63 thorold: I too am struck “by the way veterans are venerated in the US”. In Australia one would never say to an ex-serviceman (we dot use the word “veteran”) “Thank you for your service”. It’s still sounds odd to my ears. And it’s not the norm for any military service to be mentioned on gravestones.

It is even felt a bit crass to display the Australian flag in front yards of private houses. In my own family we didn’t even know my oldest uncle had been awarded medals for fighting in New Guinea in WWII, until after his death when we discovered he’d been receiving a service pension.

That being said we do have ANZAC Day , a public holiday with parades that celebrate the Australian Army’s defeat at Gallipoli, but that is really our national day. We also observe Remembrance Day on 11/11.

Small towns may have a cairn displaying the names of those that fell in the two world wars, and wreaths are usually put there on Anzac Day.

There’s a complexly different attitude to ex-servicemen in Australia than the US. Less glorification, but more a quiet unspoken respect.

>62 rocketjk: And what strikes me as odd too is that very often these veterans never spoke of their war service in life, but after their death that is what is most celebrated/remembered on their tombstones and with flags placed on their graves on Memorial Day, etc.

>64 kjuliff: "Thank you for your service" is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to, I believe, the second Iraq war. I doubt whether very many people ever said that to a Vietnam War veteran until, maybe, after the Iraq war. The phrase, in my opinion, is more virtue signaling on the part of the speaker than an actual expression of thanks to the veteran. I've read statements by Iraq War veterans who don't care for the phrase at all, for it ignores the very real possibility that the veteran him/herself may very well be ambivalent at best about the experience.

>65 labfs39: Agreed.

>66 rocketjk: Interesting about the phrase. I have occasionally said it to a vet (often Korean War vet) who is wearing a ballcap advertising his service. I think that if it is still that important to them, than I can at least acknowledge it. These vets are in contrast to the ones I was thinking of above who never spoke of their service and were usually WWII vets.

>60 thorold: No bears in this one (although there is a Teddy).
And an Ursula! Which comes from the word for bear, so Atkinson must have been thinking about bears on some level.

>60 thorold: On reflection, I thought the last thing your thread might need would be to go down a sidetrack of bear-related adult fiction at any time!

That's quite a list. I did enjoy Last Night in Twisted River.

I think I may be moving very slowly toward reading Kate Atkinson

>63 thorold: I had the same reaction too in the US - How could this 93 year old possibly have been fighting in a war?

"Thank you for your service" sets my teeth on edge. It's not used here.

>66 rocketjk: "Thank you for your service" was a counterreaction to the perception that American hostility to the Vietnam War led people to heap abuse on veterans of that war. There are stories about Vietnam vets being spit on, for instance; while there is no documentation of an actual incident of that, I have no doubt that some Vietnam vets took abuse for their participation in an unpopular war. When America's relatively controversial military escapades in the Middle East began, the left was particularly careful not to let their anti-war position not be mistaken as anti-military service, and that led to the popularity of "thank you for your service."

>62 rocketjk:, >63 thorold: All U.S. veterans are entitled to a headstone at no cost through the Veterans Administration (VA). My dad's grave would not have a marker if it hadn't been for the VA:

https://www.cem.va.gov/hmm/#:~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Veterans%20Affairs,o....

Thanks all — interesting thoughts. I suppose in the end it’s an arbitrary social convention whether you focus attention on those killed in war, as tends to be the case in Britain and France (for example), or whether you try to give those who survive it a little credit in their lifetime. The differences in approach might have something to do with demographics, too: when I was growing up, just about all adult men in a certain age-group were war veterans of some kind. It would have been very odd if they had all gone around with that written on their hats. These days it’s a much smaller group, and perhaps easier to overlook.

- - -

Back to the Danube. This is a fairly obscure Dutch novel that popped up in the library catalogue, and references both the Magris and the Esterházy books. Muiderman has written several more novels since then.

Souvenir Utopia (2013) by Hans Muiderman (Netherlands, 1946- )

  

(Author photo hansmuiderman.nl)

Over a series of short trips, narrator Jean and his friends Frans and Willem, all born in the Netherlands in 1946, travel down the Danube from Donaueschingen to Budapest in Jean’s camper van, with their bikes loaded in the back, and Claudio Magris’ Danube book as their travel-guide. But this isn’t just a tourist trip: Jean has a hidden agenda, trying to piece together what was going on in his family in Scheveningen around the time of the Hungarian Uprising, when he was ten years old. And how this all relates to his mysterious doctor-uncle Ahrend S., who was said to have been “wrong” in the war.

The novel uses this set-up to reflect on the way Dutch people who had been too close to the Nazis were treated after the war during the period of “Bijzondere Rechtspleging” (special justice), and the traumas that this process passed on to their children.

This had some nice things in it, but ultimately it reads too much like what it is, a first novel by an experienced travel writer. The observation is spot on, but the development of plot and characters is all over the place, and there are far too many ideas tossed in that never get developed at all.

This one will be a bit niche for non-Dutch people, but I’ve been fascinated by Schokland since visiting it once on the way back from Friesland about seven years ago. (It’s one of the few places in the Netherlands that is quite difficult to get to without a car. The North-East Polder is really the back of beyond…)

A year or two ago I read Vriend’s book about the effects of the construction of the Afsluitdijk on the Zuiderzee fishing communities, which was also written in collaboration with the Zuiderzeemuseum, like this one. She’s a historian who grew up on a farm in the North-East Polder.

Het eiland van Anna (2024-03-29) by Eva Vriend (Netherlands, 1973- )

  

(Author photo by Jelmer de Haas, www.evavriend.nl )

In the middle of the geometrical landscape of the North-East Polder, there’s an odd bump. Maybe four kilometres long and less than half a kilometre wide, it rises to just above sea-level, four or five metres above the surrounding fields. This is one of the Netherlands’ World Heritage Sites, the former Zuiderzee island of Schokland, landlocked since the polder was created in the early 1940s. When you look out from the former coastline it’s surprisingly easy to imagine the fields replaced by sea water, but what it’s much harder to get your head around is that this place was once home to a community of some 600 people. They were evacuated to the mainland in 1859, when the government decided that paying them compensation to leave was a better use of taxpayers’ money than attempting to continue to maintain the island’s struggling flood defences.

Eva Vriend sets out to give us an impression of what it must have been like to live on the island before the evacuation, but her main interest in this book is in finding out how the Schokkers and their descendants up to the present day experienced the heritage of their lost homeland. As an arbitrary focal point for her story, Vriend picks a woman called Anna Diender (1910-1988), whose family home, dismantled and moved from Schokland to Kampen by her grandparents in 1859, now stands in the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen (of course, the museum is doing a tie-in exhibition to go with the book, but for reasons that will become apparent at the end of the book, it’s not actually in Anna’s house).

Vriend follows the traces of Anna’s family back a couple of centuries in the island’s archives, and she talks to Anna’s living relatives to find out what they know about their Schokker ancestors and how much (if anything) that means to them. Whilst writing the book, she borrows the lighthousekeeper’s cottage on Schokland to use as an office, and she does all the usual oral history stuff, singing in a Schokker choir, organising “story markets” in the mainland Schokker-diaspora communities (Kampen, Vollenhove and Volendam), and visiting care-homes with her tape-recorder.

Life on the island must have been tough. The only source of income was fishing, which could be very rewarding in good times, but was of course very risky work, and very seasonal. There was no reliable fresh water supply on the island, nowhere to grow winter fodder for livestock, and the island was liable to flooding every time a westerly gale coincided with a spring tide. Families got used to moving up into their netting lofts for a few days when this happened. In the disastrous winter floods of 1825, the whole island was underwater, and about 80% of the houses were destroyed. The community being so small, there was also something of a shortage of fresh genetic material. Vriend calculates that more than half the marriages were between people who shared an ancestor no further than four generations back. It didn’t help that, in a typically Dutch twist, the larger village at one end of the island was Catholic and the smaller one at the other was Protestant, with only a precarious boardwalk over a tidal marsh connecting the two…

The second part of the book turns into a fascinating study of how a small migrant group that has only very marginal cultural differences from the communities it is moving into can still maintain a kind of group identity, generations after everything that distinguishes Schokkers from the rest of us should have ceased to be relevant. What really struck me is the way that group identity started to become relevant for them around the time the last island-born people were dying out, in the 1940s, and reached a peak in the 1980s, when the Schokker Association was set up and soon had about three times as many members as there had been people living on the island. Vriend draws parallels with more recent migrant groups in the Netherlands, and she also takes the time to go and talk to someone from Kiribati, where they are facing the prospect that a Schokland-style evacuation is likely to become necessary as sea levels rise. All very interesting!

- - -

Niggle: the publishers have saved money by putting the illustrations on the author’s website instead of in the book ( https://www.evavriend.nl/het-eiland-van-anna-beeld-en-geluid/ ). The advantage of this is that you get some audio files as well, but what happens when the website disappears and the book is still around?

The cover photo, oddly, doesn’t show Anna, but a contemporary of hers, Trientje Smit-Holtland, whose father was the last lighthousekeeper of Schokland in the 1930s.

If you’re interested in the topography, you can see maps of Schokland through the years on topotijdreis.nl

Present day: https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/2018/@181475,516564,8.85
1936: https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/1936/@181475,516564,8.85
1858: https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/1858/@181689,516713,8.35

>73 thorold: Interesting story, and I love the topo site! I wonder if IGN has something similar for France. (ETA: they do, but it feels rather clunky.)

>73 thorold: Government planners never seem to learn. Over one hundred years later this is still happening to people, and there are still resettlement communities which retain the "very marginal cultural differences" to which they were moved, as long as one of those differences wasn't religion, in which case it was a whole different kettle of fish.
https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/politics/resettlement-program.php

I understand your fascination with Shokland. There is an abandoned community which I visit whenever in Newfoundland, as it is perhaps the easiest to access, being a hike through scrub and a sort of causeway rather than a boat ride. Sadly over the years the houses are disappearing and the horses which used to be found there have disappeared.

Sitting there, it is difficult to understand why the Smallwood government ever listened to Parzival Copes, born in Canada, but who incidentally went to high school in Amsterdam and became a member of the Dutch resistance before returning to Canada after WWII. Your review makes me wonder if he perhaps picked up some of his ideas while living in the Netherlands.

>75 SassyLassy: Hmm. A lot of parallels there! Including the stipulation that they had to remove their houses to avoid the chance of people returning. But Dutch houses are obviously flimsier than Newfie ones: they dismantled them, rather than floating them across to the mainland. They couldn’t afford enough wood to build floors.

In the case of Schokland it’s hard to criticise the decision to evacuate, however. Most of the islanders seem to have agreed with the government that the island was unsustainable as a place to live. The only argument some of them gave for staying there was that they were nearer to the fishing grounds. As long as the Zuiderzee was tidal it was never going to be safe to live on Schokland.

The main problem in getting it done was the Victorian-liberal frame of mind, which took it for granted that poor people were responsible for their own poverty, and saw any government action to help them as a way of encouraging them in their wastefulness. The discussion went round and round in Dutch politics for years, and then they had to persuade mainland towns to accept the indigent Catholic fishermen and their families…

>73 thorold: It reminds me of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, used as inspiration for This Other Eden. A marginalized people (mixed race), living on a sparse island with limited genetic diversity, forced off their land in 1912 "for their own good", and any structures that were not moved off the island were razed to discourage resettlement. Maine was not as kind as the Dutch, however, as eight residents were sent to an asylum and there was no compensation.

Getting back to Kate Atkinson (>60 thorold:) made me realise I’ve been neglecting crime lately, so…

Big Sky (2019) by Kate Atkinson (UK, 1951- )

  

Jackson Brodie is back, this time against a setting on the Yorkshire coast where we seem to move back and forth at dizzying speeds between Whitby, Scarbro’ and Brid’, where most of us spent our childhood holidays — or, if we didn’t , we can at least imagine that we did. Atkinson confesses in an afterword that she has compressed the geography a little. She also takes the opportunity along the way to make fun of a few of our favourite TV detective shows and their fondness for this kind of nostalgic location. But I have to admit that I was particularly drawn into this book by the way one of the opening scenes is set against the background of the Naval Battle in Peasholm Park, which is apparently still just as tacky as it was fifty years ago. Pure nostalgia…

Brodie himself is a bit too much of a generic detective to be really interesting on his own, but there are plenty of other viewpoint characters here, involved in different ways (investigators, victims, bystanders, etc.), it’s a complicated plot with different investigators converging on the same suspects, and there is a lot of interesting interplay between viewpoints. The biggest joy of the book, though, is in the character of Crystal, who looks like a mere caricature of a bimbo-trophy-wife when we first read about her, but reveals another fascinating and unexpected layer of personality every time she comes on stage. Funny in the way she keeps undermining our expectations, but also intensely realistic as a portrayal of the way people sometimes manage to reinvent themselves after a bad start in life. She reminded me of the kind of people I kept meeting when I was studying with the Open University.

- - -

Peasholm Park : https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-battle-of-peasholm-park-1927-scarborough...

After >12 thorold:, a few political philosophy books crept onto the TBR pile…

Looking at injustice in a way that privileges the victim’s point of view is something that ties in nicely with >78 thorold:, as it happens.

The Faces of Injustice (1990) by Judith N. Shklar (Latvia, USA, 1928-1992)

  

In three lectures given at Yale in 1988, Shklar breaks down what we mean by the concept of injustice — which is a lot broader than just “the opposite of justice” — looks at the complicated relationship between injustice and misfortune, and looks at the importance of a sense of injustice as a political instrument in shaping the societies we live in.

She argues — in prose that is almost scarily clear and accessible to non-philosophers — that instead of getting hung up on what makes the perpetrators of injustice interesting (tyrants, criminals, abusers of public office and those of us who aren’t prepared to stand up and do our duty as citizens), we need to focus on the experience of those who experience injustice, whether as victims or as concerned fellow citizens. Listening to those who feel they have a grievance needs to be a key part of democratic decision making. In a world where there is inequality, judges or political leaders can never entirely avoid disappointing the expectations of some people when they do something (or fail to do something), but at least they can try to respect the rights of all parties to be heard, and the voice of the weak should count for more than the voice of the strong (although it won’t, of course).

A reprint of an old engineering book I picked up somewhere. Reprinted in the 1980s on what may well have been even nastier paper than they used for the original…

The Electric Railway (1889, 1980) by Fred H. Whipple (USA, - )

  

The company consider the electric system safe in crowded streets with proper precautions taken as to overhead wires, and a thorough examination of the condition of the wires is made each day so as to prevent the wires from falling into the streets, which they claim can very readily be done. The rail is used for the return circuit and there is scarcely any shock caused by accident, unless a person would have a foot on the rail and take hold of the wire. Several curious people have been shocked, but beyond being knocked down there has been no further trouble. In the case of two people one was cured of rheumatism and the other of lumbago by these shocks.

Unintended comedy aside, this is a lovely example of someone cashing in on a new technology to harvest advertising revenue — electric streetcars had only been in commercial operation for about two years when it came out. And the technology was still improving week by week, so Whipple must have dashed it off in no time flat. It’s as though someone brought out a book on “Large language models for pleasure and profit” in early 2024.

Tellingly, the experimental “friction drive” tram he features on the front cover (and whose maker paid for a full-page ad) is one of the many ideas covered in the book that never came to anything. Whipple makes a few wrong guesses along the way — especially when he pours scorn on the whole notion that New York would ever want underground railways when elevated ones have worked so well — although he does have the grace to admit that he will look very silly if any of the current projects to build tunnels should actually come off…

The book isn’t just a period piece, though: there is a quite nice rapid introduction to electrical engineering from the Ancient Greeks to Werner Siemens, and there are good overviews of the available motor, dynamo and prime-mover (steam engine or hydro-turbine) technologies at the time. There is even a chapter on how to buy belts. Whipple gives a survey of electric tramway projects in the US and Canada to date, with the technologies they are using and some figures on the results achieved. He also summarises the main advantages of electric traction vs. horse or cable systems, even if some of his arguments are a bit odd. For instance, he points out that electricity allows you to construct elevators, so you can have multi-storey car depots. I doubt if anyone ever tried that.

But it is commercial boiler-plate prose, really. There are some lovely bits of bad writing that almost make you wonder if they could have been testing a ChatGPT prototype in Detroit in the 1880s, e.g. here:

Appliances of various makes work well together; methods of construction are similar or dissimilar, as the conditions necessitate. As commonly used, some "systems" have merits not to be found in others, while others possess superior points lacking in some. To get the best of all is what the operators of street railways most desire, and it is with this object in view that so much attention has been given to the lines in operation.

More crime. Fun, since my parents have just been on a coach tour to most of the places mentioned in this book (not looking for shallow graves).

Standing in Another Man's Grave (2012) by Ian Rankin (Scotland, 1960- )

  

Rebus is retired and working in a New Tricks-style cold case unit, but he manages to blag his way onto an active investigation when — not for the first time in his career — he decides that a set of apparently unrelated disappearances must be the work of yet another Scottish serial killer. This brings him together with Siobhan again, as well as bringing in his long-established nemesis Rafferty, and the more recent Malcolm Fox, who has been set up by the author as a kind of anti-Rebus. So it’s quite like old times, except that Rankin seems to have lost some of the anger that used to drive these stories. Rebus has got to the point where he doesn’t even notice any more when he’s told that he’s Off The Case, which rather undermines the drama.

Some nice bits here and there, and it’s fun seeing Rebus forced out of his natural element into scary places like Inverness and Pitlochry, but not a patch on pre-Reichenbach Rebus.

A minor classic of Flemish literature from the man who brought us Cheese. This was part of my haul from Deventer a few weeks ago.

Het Tankschip (1942) by Willem Elsschot (Belgium, 1882-1960)

  

In early September 1939, the narrator and his wife are invited for a jaunt to the Ardennes by their brother-in-law, Antwerp ship-broker Jack Peeters, who wants to try out his powerful new car. They arrive in Bastogne, book into a local hotel, and are busy buying souvenir hams when they hear the news of the outbreak of war on the radio. Jack is surprisingly happy about the news, and explains it to them over a bottle of champagne in the hotel bar.

A year earlier, it seems, he was contacted by the mysterious Mr Boorman via a small ad in the Journal de la Marine marchande. Boorman told him that a friend of his, a shipbuilder in France, was in trouble with the tax authorities and needed to unload an asset to a foreign owner urgently. He wanted Peeters to become nominal owner of the tanker Guadeloupe — free of charge — and sell her on for a share of the profits, which were bound to be huge if war should break out.

If you’ve ever deleted an email from a Nigerian prince, you probably have an idea of where this might be going: indeed, Boorman’s spiel seems to have all the hallmarks of the professional conman. But you’d be wrong. Elsschot is actually entrapping us into a clever satire attacking the capitalists who welcomed the outbreak of war for all the wrong reasons. It’s perhaps even no coincidence that the nested-narrative format echoes Heart of Darkness.

Engaging and fun, but somehow you feel that there ought to be more here than a 70-page novella. Elsschot claimed that the story was based on something he had been told by his own brother-in-law, who was in shipping, and he hinted several times that he was working on a continuation of the story, but nothing ever emerged.

A little detour to Berlin. I read Brussig’s Helden wie wir a few years ago and found it interesting but a little too adolescently sniggery — this one covers similar ground, but from a more romantic perspective, and it was rather more enjoyable to read. Maybe you could call it a similar register to Adrian Mole?

Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (1995; The short end of the Sonnenallee) by Thomas Brussig (Germany, 1965- )

  

The Sonnenallee has been split unequally by the Berlin Wall, and Mischa and his friends are growing up on the short end of it, the part that was allocated to East Berlin. They experience the same kinds of problem as kids anywhere else — they fall in love, hopelessly or not, they are exasperated by the behaviour of their parents, they quarrel with teachers and petty authority, they worry about how their lives are going to turn out, and they try to listen to the right music, read the right books, and wish for the right clothes, hairstyles and personal transport. Like all young people, they push against boundaries, but in the DDR these boundaries can turn out to be a lot harder than they are elsewhere, leading to comical and sometimes frightening situations.

Brussig wrote this book in a rush, when he realised that he had a lot of extra Sonnenallee material he hadn’t used in the film he wrote it for. Of course, the tie-in novel had to come out no later than the release date of the film, so there was a sharp deadline, and that comes across in the taut, fast-paced narrative and the brilliantly laconic dialogue. (And the scene where Mischa boasts to Miriam about how he records his feelings in his diaries, and then has to write seven years worth of retrospective diary entries for her in a single night...) He makes it clear that this isn’t supposed to be read as an account of East Berlin as it really was, but as “pleasant memories of unpleasant times”. When we remember our childhood, we do so in particular ways, and that always has more to do with nostalgia than with accurate socio-political analysis. It’s a feel-good book, and that’s a good thing, but we shouldn’t try to read more than that into it.

Still catching up with Percival Everett’s back-catalogue. I haven’t seen the film American fiction, which seems to be based on this book.

Erasure (2001) by Percival Everett (US, 1956- )

  

College professor Thelonius “Monk” Ellison has written a string of experimental postmodern novels reworking themes from angling, woodworking and Greek drama, largely unread except by other professors who write experimental novels. His agent keeps urging him to “write something more Black,” but Monk comes from a family of doctors in Washington DC and can’t even play basketball.

Eventually, though, he gets so riled up by the success of a cheesy Black-suffering-novel that he is provoked into writing a savage parody of the kind of racist ghetto-fiction middle-class white readers expect from African-American writers, a dreadful and foul-mouthed first-person narrative that drags in every negative stereotype about self-destructive young Black men. Of course, when he gets his agent to send it off to a few publishers as a joke to see what will happen (under a nom-de-plume), they miss the point entirely and turn it into the next big bestseller. Monk needs the money to support his ageing mother, so the runaway success comes at a good moment for him, but it becomes increasingly hard to live with the artistic betrayal of pretending to be the ex-con novelist Stagg R Leigh, author of Fuck: a novel, a book that is being hailed on all sides for its “authenticity”.

The parodies, mercilessly sustained long beyond the point at which they would be merely funny, are brilliant and very telling, as are the bizarre interposed dialogues between Great Modernists, and there are some hilariously awful sex scenes, but this is also a tender and sensitive novel about families and identity and the pain of watching a parent being taken from you (and from themselves) by the cruel work of dementia.

>84 thorold: I'm glad that Erasure worked for you. I found it a lot less effective than you did. C'est la vie. I do agree that Everett's handling of Monk's relationship with his mother, and of her descent into dementia, is quite well done. I believe this was Everett's first novel, and I am looking forward to reading his other books, especially James. American Fiction is based on Erasure, which I thought was well worth seeing.

I’ve had quite a few books on the go in parallel lately, and I’m making an effort to finish at least a few before I go on my next trip. This one belongs to the Danube theme-read, a second novel from a young German writer I didn’t know anything about. She’s a musician as well as a novelist, and her family comes from the Banat.

Wohin ich immer gehe (2021-07-16) by Nadine Schneider (Germany, 1990- )

  

(Author photo by Lauren Gutwin from nadine-schneider-autorin.com)

Johannes escaped from Ceaușescu‘s Romania by swimming the Danube, a couple of years before the regime collapsed. Since then, he’s been working in Germany, building up a new life with the help of his best friend Giulia, and has been avoiding contact with his Banat-Swabian family. But now he has to go back home for a funeral, and old wounds are reopened…

A nicely-crafted little study of migration and the baggage we carry with us when we try to leave our old lives behind, but nothing very special.

>85 rocketjk: I believe this was Everett's first novel

Erasure was Everett's twelfth novel; his first had been published almost twenty years earlier. It did get a lot more attention than his earlier work, though.

>87 KeithChaffee: That's right, now you mention it. I remember thinking when I read it, this reads to me like a first novel (especially given how well received his later novels are), and then looking him up and realizing how many he'd written previously. Somehow, though, it was that "first novel" impression that stuck with me. Which just goes to show you . . . something or other. :)

>87 KeithChaffee: That makes sense — part of the joke is obviously that Everett was in a similar situation to the narrator, as the author of a stack of novels that were only of interest to a small group of readers.

- - -

Reading books by people whose blogs or podcasts you enjoy is usually a mistake: nine times out of ten, they are full of stuff you’ve already read in small chunks. On the other hand, buying books by people whose blogs or podcasts you enjoy is generally a good thing — it supports their work and makes you look as though you are fully in touch with all these new media.

This one reminded me rather of the days when my sister or I would proudly come home with a new “forbidden word” from the playground, eager to try it out, and be sent off by our English-teacher father to look it up in the OED and work out where it came from and what it really meant. Which was fascinating, but of course took the allure of the forbidden away…

Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology (2023) by Jess Zafarris (USA, - )

  

(Author photo jesszafarris.com)

An entertainingly cosy etymological stroll through some not at all cosy bits of the English language, looking at the words we use to insult and demean each other or to relieve our feelings, the words we use to talk about sex and identify body parts, the language of violence, war and the supernatural, and so on. Zafarris chattily introduces us to where each word comes from, how its meaning in English has evolved over the centuries, and what it generally means in present day use. There are plenty of little jokes along the way, as well as some more serious points about why we should be careful about using some of these words in contexts where they could be harmful, but she resists getting drawn into much in the way of broader analysis: basically the book is just one- or two-paragraph summaries of a few hundred words, divided into categories. It’s something to dip into rather than to read in a single sitting.

Sometimes the historical sketches seemed rather oversimplified, but if you want scholarly you can always look in the dictionary. They do the job, and I didn’t spot anything that looked egregiously wrong along the way. Good fun, and probably an excellent gift for a word-loving teenager (7-70).

I’m back from a couple of weeks in western France, during which I unaccountably seem to have gained a little weight, but only managed to read one and a half books. One of those was the long-awaited return of Commissaire Adamsberg, a book that came out about a year ago. I picked it up from a station bookstall on the way through Paris.

Sur la dalle (2023) by Fred Vargas (France, 1957- )

  

Adamsberg returns to Brittany to deal with a series of unusual murders in a small village that happens to have a very sympathetic restaurateur. The obvious suspect is Josselin de Chateaubriand, a local man who bears a striking resemblance to his celebrated distant ancestor. Since it would be politically embarrassing for such an iconic figure to be arrested as a serial killer, Adamsberg’s brief is to look beyond the obvious, something he achieves at least in part by meditating at length stretched out on the capstone of a dolmen.

The plot is complicated by the thirties-style intrusion of a gang of professional criminals, which feels a little bit too much off-the-shelf for an offbeat Vargas novel, but there is plenty of other material to amuse us, including a lot of very good food and several opportunities for the members of Adamsberg’s team to display their various quirks. Plus a hedgehog and a donkey…

Good fun, but maybe not quite as original as some of the earlier stories in the series.

Someone recommended this to me years ago…

Contact! A book of glimpses (2010) by Jan Morris (UK, 1926-2020)

  

An entertainingly random selection of short pieces gleaned from about fifty years of Morris’s notebooks, most of them only a paragraph or two long, capturing the wonderfully unexpected quality of human encounters. We never quite know from one piece to the next which decade or which continent we are going to be in, or whether Morris is going to be writing as a man or a woman, as a soldier, a journalist, a travel writer, or just a private person going about their ordinary business. We go from Harry’s Bar to Harry Ramsden’s and Harry S Truman; from Tuaregs to Turkomans, from rural Wales to urban Tokyo. If there’s a theme, it’s the remarkable way in which other people can surprise us by failing to live up to our preconceptions — or, very occasionally, by being disturbingly predictable…
A lovely reminder of why Morris was such a great travel writer.

- - -
Since all my Facebook friends seem to be posting about how they (almost) met Maggie Smith, I thought I’d quote this piece:

Do I know her?

Now and then I chance to see in real life one of those nameless and numberless actresses of television, encountered in the Underground, perhaps, or browsing at a bookshop. At first I think I really know her. Who could she be? Is she a publisher, or a fellow author? Did we meet on an aircraft, or at a literary festival some-where? Like one of those nagging fragrances one cannot place, or a tune whose words we can never quite remember, her presence tantalizes and disturbs me. But then with a touch of melancholy I realize that I know her only by proxy, through the medium of the TV screen.

Some people in these circumstances introduce themselves anyway, and perhaps one should: I sometimes notice that if I chance to catch the woman's eye she will give me one of those closed-lip actress's smiles, turned up a little too resolutely at the corners of the mouth, as if she is dying to be recognized.

…and it’s the end of another quarter. Where did that one go?

The new thread is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364645