Books of 2019 Part 5: The Top Ten
10) Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple
I read this straight after Goodbye, Vitamin, and obviously I enjoyed this more, but they both felt like they're from young up and coming female writers, written in unconventional formats, and dealing humorously with issues of mental health. The key point of differentiation, and ultimately the key selling point for me with this book is that it's at times laugh out loud funny. The opening section in particular is quite delightful as the characters - from the enigmatic and almost sociopathically antisocial Bernadette to her effortlessly brilliant daughter Bee (who also takes on the elusive role of narrator), and the gossipy social-climbing mums Soo-Lin and Audrey (who takes on the antagonist role) - all pit their neuroses against each other. The cast that Semple writes about here are all seemingly defined by those hang-ups, and the reason why Bernadette seems to emerge with our sympathies is that - unlike her workaholic husband Elgin or the scheming Audrey - she is aware of her own shortcomings, and just wants to be left alone to deal with them. As much of an enigma as she is, she feels the most 'normal' and more defined by who she is than by what she wants to be. Her daughter, helped by her role as narrator, also evokes that same level of sympathy but mainly because she seems to be left behind, but out of the way of the bonfire of the grown-ups' vanities. Where I felt this book lost me a bit was in trying to do too much in the latter stages, where it ties up all the loose ends without really offering a large quantity of catharsis or resolution. It offers them, but quite quickly and in the same kind of detached documentary style as the opening stages where it was piecing together the mystery of the title. It's clever, unique, moving and funny, but I feel it could have amplified all of those things by adding a bit more of a climax and a bit more of a coda. Instead it left me a little bit hungry for more, despite the fact that it neatly (and possibly too conveniently/) wrapped everything up.
9) The Age of Reason - Jean-Paul Sartre
I've had this book on my shelf for almost two decades but in French. In the senior years of high school I got it into my fat brain with its bloated sense of its own ability that at some point I'd have the French language skills to actually piece it all together. I did try to read/translate it as I went, in French, and got as far as the second page. So this year I finally bit the bullet and decided, having not practised or studied French in nearly two decades (apart from visiting France at one point and being able to order a beer and a three-course soufflé meal in French, oh and ask for directions from a security guard who told me in response to my first question that il "parle pas d'Anglais"), that it was time to try it in English. For the record, my translation of the first page in French was largely accurate. But it was worth just taking the easy route, because this is a very rewarding and engaging read. I don't think Sartre writes with any special flourishes or anything but he gets his point across clearly and efficiently while delivering an interesting story at the same time, which probably means if I ever do actually learn to read French, this would actually not be the worst book in the world to try and read. The trials of Mathieu, our philosophy teacher protagonist who prides himself on being a 'free' entity, as he attempts to extricate himself from a quandary that will cost him that freedom, are at times thought-provoking and amusingly pathetic. There's lots of reflections on the concept of freedom and the nature of interpersonal attachments from the surrounding characters who either admire, are admired by, or resent, Mathieu and who all represent and demonstrate varying degrees of personal freedom. The character of Daniel is the catalyst to the biggest catharsis of the book and has the most fascinating personal arc. Imprisoned in a secret and invisible personal cage he makes malevolent but also compassionate decisions that ultimately lead to revelations and questions of the most profound nature of liberty. I think this can be enjoyed on its surface as an entertaining interpersonal drama, but the questions it raises about life and free will are likely to stick with me for quite a while yet.
8) The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The key thing that struck me about this whole short work - especially reading it, as I did, straight after A Place of Greater Safety (my #53 book of the year, as you all know from paying attention) - was how efficient the writing here is. Of course, I'd go on to revise my assessment of London's writing in the books that followed this in the anthology, but here he doesn't write with a great deal of embellishment, or psychology: his muse here is a simple creature of instinct, habit and nature so there isn't any need to peer into the inner workings of Buck's mind. But more than just being trimmed back, London manages to imbue the straightforward action with great meaning and feeling and I was heavily invested in the story from start to finish. Yes it's mostly a survival story in the harsh wilderness and of animal against man (or against animal) in different guises and with different levels of competence at looking after the animals. So it's literally life or death for most of this and naturally I was drawn into that. But Buck's character arc is also completely compelling and captivating from domesticated house dog to wild instinct-driven beast. Like Buck, this prose is all muscle with no wasted flab, and every sentence is precise and worth reading. Singular in its purpose but very effective.
7) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This is one of those books I see everywhere in bookshops and so forth that's obviously hugely popular, but I strangely don't hear that much about elsewhere. I finally decided to pick it up and, well, I really enjoyed it. There is certainly a crowd-pleasing page turner element to it, because it's just gripping in the way Zafón weaves intrigue around the narrative of a young boy's fixation on a book and its mysterious author. At first it struck me as a less-academically minded Name of the Rose (my #21 book of 2014), but there's a far more overt literary parallel - to Les Misérables - that's adumbrated by one particular plot point of an antique fountain pen once ostensibly owned by Victor Hugo. The parallels between Zafón's villain Fumero and Hugo's Javert become more and more obvious as Fumero continues his relentless pursuit of Carax, but Zafón blends this redemptive tale with elements of medieval romance and hard-boiled detective fiction to make a deeply involving and surprisingly beguiling work about the nature of obsession set against the backdrop of - not the French revolution - the Spanish civil war. There is a lot of commentary and criticism of the class divide, with all of the rich people in this book being basically possessive, grand-standing and power-hungry arseholes (you know, rich people right). My main criticism is that Zafón tries to give his female characters agency at odds with the medieval romance conventions here, but ultimately reduces them to a patchwork combination of beautiful objects of male desire and hopeless devotees of tortured male genius. It works as a narrative about male lust and obsession leading to ruin but also has unfortunate misogynistic overtones at its most well-meaning and heartfelt. But still I really loved the experience of reading this book, and was gripped by the mystery the way I was with The Luminaries (my #2 book of 2014).
6) An Untamed State - Roxane Gay
This was a very difficult read, but necessarily so. We know we're in for a rough time in the first few pages as our narrator is kidnapped by a group of men and imprisoned in a bunker waiting for her wealthy Haitian father to come up with the ransom money. The whole first section of the book felt a bit heavy-handed, largely because I've read similar kind of things before (the horrifying torture scene in Louis de Bernieres' Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (my #45 book of 2016) is the most starkly graphic in my memory) and I knew it was going to be unpleasant, and vivid, and viscerally affecting so I sort of had to brace for that and grit teeth and keep going. But what makes this book interesting and necessary is the second half, after our narrator is freed (not a spoiler, it's revealed in early prolepsis that she will be) and the suffering she goes through to try and return to a normal state of existence. This is also where Gay's feminist exploration comes to the fore, as the men in her narrative are figures of such comic absurdity as they fumble around trying to hasten things to normalcy while also attempting to portray themselves as the victims of the whole saga following the graphic sexual violence we've just had to live through with our narrator. As a male I found it a very challenging and confronting piece of writing that made me think hard about the role I play in my marriage and - as my wife was heavily pregnant while I read this - how completely peripheral and superfluous I am to everything she was going through, yet how completely essential every small kindness I can perform is. This is first and foremost an unpleasant book to suffer through, but it's a powerhouse piece of provocative thinking and writing.
5) The Only Problem - Muriel Spark
Yep this is definitely Spark at her unpredictable best. Ostensibly this is an allegory of the story of Job (made quite explicit by the fact that the central figure is a scholar of the book of Job and his driving motivation is writing the ultimate critical essay dissecting the book), but in true Sparkian fashion it takes on a number of sudden left turns where things are never as they seem. There are lots of hilarious cynical moments throughout this, indicting the media, the authorities, but in particular the central characters and their own neurotic self-serving natures. It's also become apparent now - this is my eighth Spark novel - that I never have a good sense of which character voice is that of Spark herself. And that's a good thing. To compare her with someone like Jonathan Franzen who also writes social satires, I find it difficult to believe any of his characters' voices as belonging to them rather than him. Here Spark is in different chameleonic territory all the time, and this was a delightful way to conclude the three-book volume with this so utterly different from all her other writing. It's constantly surprising and very entertaining, with plenty of thought-provoking philosophising along the way about the nature of suffering and coping with adversity.
4) Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie
This was a very engaging and entertaining read based on what is just an excellent premise: a two-year old closed murder case is reopened when a stranger arrives and provides definitive evidence that the now-dead convicted killer was innocent. As such not only is everybody's closure on the case disrupted and their reconciliation with the fact of the murder upset, but it raises the fact that the murderer is still unknown and at large. It's ultimately just a classic country house crime fiction in that the list of suspects are limited by their presence or proximity at the time of the murder, but the upheaval of the presumption of everybody being innocent makes this an intricate psychological drama. Each member of the family suspects another and their diverse personalities and way of reckoning with the newfound suspicion makes this not only a gripping read but a curious philosophical exploration of human nature and the darker forces that drive our decision making. I hate to say that I was disappointed with any of this excellently-crafted story, but the one thing that deflated me a bit was just how conventional the denouement was. Given the ambiguity and the supposed hopelessness of dredging up evidence two years after the fact, I had hoped it would end a bit more inconclusively, maybe with a guide in one direction but otherwise providing no satisfying closure. But it ends as a typical "who dunnit? That's who" and that person confessing. I know I'm applying a post-structural lens to what is not only a piece of genre fiction but part of the definition of its generic conventions (and therefore a pretty big structuralist archetype) but the drama was so compelling that I didn't want it to end so neatly. I definitely enjoyed this more than Murder on the Orient Express (My #16 book of 2016 and the last Christie I read before this; the ABC Murders was read after this), which is an elegantly crafted story with an unconventional conclusion; this felt far more real and explored the questions that crime fiction can raise so much more deeply.
3) The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell
I bought this originally in a double volume with Troubles, Farrell's other Booker winner, and which I read last year (in fact it was my #13 book of last year). I would have read this last year too, except it accidentally got put into a box of books and kept in a storage garage for eight months. Finally unearthed it, and what a treat this was. It has exactly the same tongue-in-cheek wit and irony of Troubles as Farrell simultaneously lampoons, laments and celebrates British colonialism in its dying days. The characters here, as they find themselves in an increasingly desperate situation besieged in their small township by a rather dehumanised crowd of mutinying Indian sepoys, all have their particular quirks, comforts and agendas, borne of their particular upbringing and all with a large dash of colonial hubris. The collector Hopkins, our key protagonist, is obsessed with all his trinkets and fineries; the magistrate is fixated on phrenology and analysing the natives and his compadres in this light; the padre is dominated by a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture and won't abide any modern sensibilities being brought to bear. But besides the engaging character 'types' what really makes this book so delightful (in spite of some pretty nasty and harrowing situations) is the way Farrell weaves these, and a certain British arrogance and rigour of aesthetic, into the action and narrative. The collector at one point is considering his strategy by way of consulting Machiavelli and realises that his position is different since Machiavelli was writing of Italians, not Englishmen. At one point the young recent arrival Fleury is composing a poem for a fallen comrade, blending battle imagery with floral aesthetics and Farrell pauses to add parenthetically "(it was not a good poem)". I found myself chuckling throughout, and have to say Farrell is more than a match for the satirical heft of Evelyn Waugh. It feels a shame that he's so little mentioned outside of having won the Booker twice, because he really is a discerning observer of human nature and a razor-sharp chronicler of post-colonialism.
2) The Gingerbread House - Kate Beaufoy
There aren't a lot of books out there that make me actually shed a tear, but this one got me. A middle-aged woman, after being made redundant from her advertising agency at the age when women no longer become valuable to the industry, tries a stint as live-in carer for her mother-in-law who is suffering from dementia, accompanied by her mute teenage daughter. The subject matter is not unfamiliar to me either from art or from looking from afar at my own (now late) grandmothers who had similar afflictions, but what really brings the emotional resonance out here is Beaufoy's framing it all through the eyes of the teenage daughter. Katia, our narrator, evokes a lot of fairytale and storybook imagery - including the titular house, and the view of her grandmother as a kindly-seeming witch who can turn nasty on a dime - to communicate and reconcile herself to the situation she and her mother find themselves in. She self-reflects by holding imaginary conversations with Charlotte, of Charlotte's Web, and also invokes the Little Mermaid a lot, as a keen scuba-diver but also to draw out imagery of clashes between realities and ways of looking at the living world. Predominantly the story here is a warts-and-all (a phrase borrowed directly from the book) portrait of the carer-patient relationship relating to dementia: the unpleasant visceral details, the endless repetitions and miscommunication, the need for outlets and brief escapes for reprieve. Beaufoy's narrator has a very pure, well-meaning and strangely ethereal view of the gritty corporeal and tragic circumstances, and its bittersweet culmination is incredibly well-drawn and moving. It's a confronting read but deeply humanistic one that has a strange reassurance about how normal the feelings of anxiety and frustration and helplessness are.
1) The Fish Can Sing - Halldór Laxness
It has been a while since I read any Halldór Laxness - long enough that I don't have references to other book write-ups for the two that I've read. Interestingly this was also my second attempt at reading this and I can't remember why my previous attempt was aborted, but I think it was a long time ago when old-old job didn't allow for a lot of reading time. Regardless, I'm happy I picked it up again because this really is a completely wonderful read. It reminded me quite a lot of that oft-mentioned book, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) - in that it centres around a world-famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, and a sequence of aborted attempts to have him sing for the Icelandic public. The minor characters that populate the story are all awestruck by Gardar and talk obsessively about the celebrity he's found abroad, singing for the Pope and other notable figures. The frustrations of this are so similar to Ishiguro's piano player and his failed attempts to sleep, rest or practice ahead of his concert that I almost feel Ishiguro might have been influenced by this earlier work, if not for how culturally discrete these two books are (and how much of an innovator Ishiguro is). But this book is also quintessentially Halldór in that there's such Icelandic lore throughout, with an atmosphere of fantasy magic that ultimately - when the curtain is pulled down - is just part and parcel of the landscape and lifestyle, very down-to-earth and simple. There's a delightful irony employed throughout as our young narrator Alfgrimur sees everything through his innocent and unassuming eyes and the disparity between his simplicity and the affectations and aspirations of others takes on a surreal tone that also serves as remote contrast between the innocence of basic Icelandic workaday humility and the pretensions of other countries (Denmark in particular gets a typical Laxness prodding here). It seems that I love stories about musicians not being able to play concerts since these have topped my reading twice in three years, but I couldn't help but be utterly beguiled by the wit, the surrealism and the simply humanity here. It's a very amusing and deeply charming narrative about the power of music and the even stranger power of fame.
So that wraps up another year of reading, both punctuated and hampered by the birth of my daughter and the switching of jobs. I will see you all (Hi, Mother!) when this blog again becomes active in December 2020.
I read this straight after Goodbye, Vitamin, and obviously I enjoyed this more, but they both felt like they're from young up and coming female writers, written in unconventional formats, and dealing humorously with issues of mental health. The key point of differentiation, and ultimately the key selling point for me with this book is that it's at times laugh out loud funny. The opening section in particular is quite delightful as the characters - from the enigmatic and almost sociopathically antisocial Bernadette to her effortlessly brilliant daughter Bee (who also takes on the elusive role of narrator), and the gossipy social-climbing mums Soo-Lin and Audrey (who takes on the antagonist role) - all pit their neuroses against each other. The cast that Semple writes about here are all seemingly defined by those hang-ups, and the reason why Bernadette seems to emerge with our sympathies is that - unlike her workaholic husband Elgin or the scheming Audrey - she is aware of her own shortcomings, and just wants to be left alone to deal with them. As much of an enigma as she is, she feels the most 'normal' and more defined by who she is than by what she wants to be. Her daughter, helped by her role as narrator, also evokes that same level of sympathy but mainly because she seems to be left behind, but out of the way of the bonfire of the grown-ups' vanities. Where I felt this book lost me a bit was in trying to do too much in the latter stages, where it ties up all the loose ends without really offering a large quantity of catharsis or resolution. It offers them, but quite quickly and in the same kind of detached documentary style as the opening stages where it was piecing together the mystery of the title. It's clever, unique, moving and funny, but I feel it could have amplified all of those things by adding a bit more of a climax and a bit more of a coda. Instead it left me a little bit hungry for more, despite the fact that it neatly (and possibly too conveniently/) wrapped everything up.
9) The Age of Reason - Jean-Paul Sartre
I've had this book on my shelf for almost two decades but in French. In the senior years of high school I got it into my fat brain with its bloated sense of its own ability that at some point I'd have the French language skills to actually piece it all together. I did try to read/translate it as I went, in French, and got as far as the second page. So this year I finally bit the bullet and decided, having not practised or studied French in nearly two decades (apart from visiting France at one point and being able to order a beer and a three-course soufflé meal in French, oh and ask for directions from a security guard who told me in response to my first question that il "parle pas d'Anglais"), that it was time to try it in English. For the record, my translation of the first page in French was largely accurate. But it was worth just taking the easy route, because this is a very rewarding and engaging read. I don't think Sartre writes with any special flourishes or anything but he gets his point across clearly and efficiently while delivering an interesting story at the same time, which probably means if I ever do actually learn to read French, this would actually not be the worst book in the world to try and read. The trials of Mathieu, our philosophy teacher protagonist who prides himself on being a 'free' entity, as he attempts to extricate himself from a quandary that will cost him that freedom, are at times thought-provoking and amusingly pathetic. There's lots of reflections on the concept of freedom and the nature of interpersonal attachments from the surrounding characters who either admire, are admired by, or resent, Mathieu and who all represent and demonstrate varying degrees of personal freedom. The character of Daniel is the catalyst to the biggest catharsis of the book and has the most fascinating personal arc. Imprisoned in a secret and invisible personal cage he makes malevolent but also compassionate decisions that ultimately lead to revelations and questions of the most profound nature of liberty. I think this can be enjoyed on its surface as an entertaining interpersonal drama, but the questions it raises about life and free will are likely to stick with me for quite a while yet.
8) The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The key thing that struck me about this whole short work - especially reading it, as I did, straight after A Place of Greater Safety (my #53 book of the year, as you all know from paying attention) - was how efficient the writing here is. Of course, I'd go on to revise my assessment of London's writing in the books that followed this in the anthology, but here he doesn't write with a great deal of embellishment, or psychology: his muse here is a simple creature of instinct, habit and nature so there isn't any need to peer into the inner workings of Buck's mind. But more than just being trimmed back, London manages to imbue the straightforward action with great meaning and feeling and I was heavily invested in the story from start to finish. Yes it's mostly a survival story in the harsh wilderness and of animal against man (or against animal) in different guises and with different levels of competence at looking after the animals. So it's literally life or death for most of this and naturally I was drawn into that. But Buck's character arc is also completely compelling and captivating from domesticated house dog to wild instinct-driven beast. Like Buck, this prose is all muscle with no wasted flab, and every sentence is precise and worth reading. Singular in its purpose but very effective.
7) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This is one of those books I see everywhere in bookshops and so forth that's obviously hugely popular, but I strangely don't hear that much about elsewhere. I finally decided to pick it up and, well, I really enjoyed it. There is certainly a crowd-pleasing page turner element to it, because it's just gripping in the way Zafón weaves intrigue around the narrative of a young boy's fixation on a book and its mysterious author. At first it struck me as a less-academically minded Name of the Rose (my #21 book of 2014), but there's a far more overt literary parallel - to Les Misérables - that's adumbrated by one particular plot point of an antique fountain pen once ostensibly owned by Victor Hugo. The parallels between Zafón's villain Fumero and Hugo's Javert become more and more obvious as Fumero continues his relentless pursuit of Carax, but Zafón blends this redemptive tale with elements of medieval romance and hard-boiled detective fiction to make a deeply involving and surprisingly beguiling work about the nature of obsession set against the backdrop of - not the French revolution - the Spanish civil war. There is a lot of commentary and criticism of the class divide, with all of the rich people in this book being basically possessive, grand-standing and power-hungry arseholes (you know, rich people right). My main criticism is that Zafón tries to give his female characters agency at odds with the medieval romance conventions here, but ultimately reduces them to a patchwork combination of beautiful objects of male desire and hopeless devotees of tortured male genius. It works as a narrative about male lust and obsession leading to ruin but also has unfortunate misogynistic overtones at its most well-meaning and heartfelt. But still I really loved the experience of reading this book, and was gripped by the mystery the way I was with The Luminaries (my #2 book of 2014).
6) An Untamed State - Roxane Gay
This was a very difficult read, but necessarily so. We know we're in for a rough time in the first few pages as our narrator is kidnapped by a group of men and imprisoned in a bunker waiting for her wealthy Haitian father to come up with the ransom money. The whole first section of the book felt a bit heavy-handed, largely because I've read similar kind of things before (the horrifying torture scene in Louis de Bernieres' Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (my #45 book of 2016) is the most starkly graphic in my memory) and I knew it was going to be unpleasant, and vivid, and viscerally affecting so I sort of had to brace for that and grit teeth and keep going. But what makes this book interesting and necessary is the second half, after our narrator is freed (not a spoiler, it's revealed in early prolepsis that she will be) and the suffering she goes through to try and return to a normal state of existence. This is also where Gay's feminist exploration comes to the fore, as the men in her narrative are figures of such comic absurdity as they fumble around trying to hasten things to normalcy while also attempting to portray themselves as the victims of the whole saga following the graphic sexual violence we've just had to live through with our narrator. As a male I found it a very challenging and confronting piece of writing that made me think hard about the role I play in my marriage and - as my wife was heavily pregnant while I read this - how completely peripheral and superfluous I am to everything she was going through, yet how completely essential every small kindness I can perform is. This is first and foremost an unpleasant book to suffer through, but it's a powerhouse piece of provocative thinking and writing.
5) The Only Problem - Muriel Spark
Yep this is definitely Spark at her unpredictable best. Ostensibly this is an allegory of the story of Job (made quite explicit by the fact that the central figure is a scholar of the book of Job and his driving motivation is writing the ultimate critical essay dissecting the book), but in true Sparkian fashion it takes on a number of sudden left turns where things are never as they seem. There are lots of hilarious cynical moments throughout this, indicting the media, the authorities, but in particular the central characters and their own neurotic self-serving natures. It's also become apparent now - this is my eighth Spark novel - that I never have a good sense of which character voice is that of Spark herself. And that's a good thing. To compare her with someone like Jonathan Franzen who also writes social satires, I find it difficult to believe any of his characters' voices as belonging to them rather than him. Here Spark is in different chameleonic territory all the time, and this was a delightful way to conclude the three-book volume with this so utterly different from all her other writing. It's constantly surprising and very entertaining, with plenty of thought-provoking philosophising along the way about the nature of suffering and coping with adversity.
4) Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie
This was a very engaging and entertaining read based on what is just an excellent premise: a two-year old closed murder case is reopened when a stranger arrives and provides definitive evidence that the now-dead convicted killer was innocent. As such not only is everybody's closure on the case disrupted and their reconciliation with the fact of the murder upset, but it raises the fact that the murderer is still unknown and at large. It's ultimately just a classic country house crime fiction in that the list of suspects are limited by their presence or proximity at the time of the murder, but the upheaval of the presumption of everybody being innocent makes this an intricate psychological drama. Each member of the family suspects another and their diverse personalities and way of reckoning with the newfound suspicion makes this not only a gripping read but a curious philosophical exploration of human nature and the darker forces that drive our decision making. I hate to say that I was disappointed with any of this excellently-crafted story, but the one thing that deflated me a bit was just how conventional the denouement was. Given the ambiguity and the supposed hopelessness of dredging up evidence two years after the fact, I had hoped it would end a bit more inconclusively, maybe with a guide in one direction but otherwise providing no satisfying closure. But it ends as a typical "who dunnit? That's who" and that person confessing. I know I'm applying a post-structural lens to what is not only a piece of genre fiction but part of the definition of its generic conventions (and therefore a pretty big structuralist archetype) but the drama was so compelling that I didn't want it to end so neatly. I definitely enjoyed this more than Murder on the Orient Express (My #16 book of 2016 and the last Christie I read before this; the ABC Murders was read after this), which is an elegantly crafted story with an unconventional conclusion; this felt far more real and explored the questions that crime fiction can raise so much more deeply.
3) The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell
I bought this originally in a double volume with Troubles, Farrell's other Booker winner, and which I read last year (in fact it was my #13 book of last year). I would have read this last year too, except it accidentally got put into a box of books and kept in a storage garage for eight months. Finally unearthed it, and what a treat this was. It has exactly the same tongue-in-cheek wit and irony of Troubles as Farrell simultaneously lampoons, laments and celebrates British colonialism in its dying days. The characters here, as they find themselves in an increasingly desperate situation besieged in their small township by a rather dehumanised crowd of mutinying Indian sepoys, all have their particular quirks, comforts and agendas, borne of their particular upbringing and all with a large dash of colonial hubris. The collector Hopkins, our key protagonist, is obsessed with all his trinkets and fineries; the magistrate is fixated on phrenology and analysing the natives and his compadres in this light; the padre is dominated by a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture and won't abide any modern sensibilities being brought to bear. But besides the engaging character 'types' what really makes this book so delightful (in spite of some pretty nasty and harrowing situations) is the way Farrell weaves these, and a certain British arrogance and rigour of aesthetic, into the action and narrative. The collector at one point is considering his strategy by way of consulting Machiavelli and realises that his position is different since Machiavelli was writing of Italians, not Englishmen. At one point the young recent arrival Fleury is composing a poem for a fallen comrade, blending battle imagery with floral aesthetics and Farrell pauses to add parenthetically "(it was not a good poem)". I found myself chuckling throughout, and have to say Farrell is more than a match for the satirical heft of Evelyn Waugh. It feels a shame that he's so little mentioned outside of having won the Booker twice, because he really is a discerning observer of human nature and a razor-sharp chronicler of post-colonialism.
2) The Gingerbread House - Kate Beaufoy
There aren't a lot of books out there that make me actually shed a tear, but this one got me. A middle-aged woman, after being made redundant from her advertising agency at the age when women no longer become valuable to the industry, tries a stint as live-in carer for her mother-in-law who is suffering from dementia, accompanied by her mute teenage daughter. The subject matter is not unfamiliar to me either from art or from looking from afar at my own (now late) grandmothers who had similar afflictions, but what really brings the emotional resonance out here is Beaufoy's framing it all through the eyes of the teenage daughter. Katia, our narrator, evokes a lot of fairytale and storybook imagery - including the titular house, and the view of her grandmother as a kindly-seeming witch who can turn nasty on a dime - to communicate and reconcile herself to the situation she and her mother find themselves in. She self-reflects by holding imaginary conversations with Charlotte, of Charlotte's Web, and also invokes the Little Mermaid a lot, as a keen scuba-diver but also to draw out imagery of clashes between realities and ways of looking at the living world. Predominantly the story here is a warts-and-all (a phrase borrowed directly from the book) portrait of the carer-patient relationship relating to dementia: the unpleasant visceral details, the endless repetitions and miscommunication, the need for outlets and brief escapes for reprieve. Beaufoy's narrator has a very pure, well-meaning and strangely ethereal view of the gritty corporeal and tragic circumstances, and its bittersweet culmination is incredibly well-drawn and moving. It's a confronting read but deeply humanistic one that has a strange reassurance about how normal the feelings of anxiety and frustration and helplessness are.
1) The Fish Can Sing - Halldór Laxness
It has been a while since I read any Halldór Laxness - long enough that I don't have references to other book write-ups for the two that I've read. Interestingly this was also my second attempt at reading this and I can't remember why my previous attempt was aborted, but I think it was a long time ago when old-old job didn't allow for a lot of reading time. Regardless, I'm happy I picked it up again because this really is a completely wonderful read. It reminded me quite a lot of that oft-mentioned book, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) - in that it centres around a world-famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, and a sequence of aborted attempts to have him sing for the Icelandic public. The minor characters that populate the story are all awestruck by Gardar and talk obsessively about the celebrity he's found abroad, singing for the Pope and other notable figures. The frustrations of this are so similar to Ishiguro's piano player and his failed attempts to sleep, rest or practice ahead of his concert that I almost feel Ishiguro might have been influenced by this earlier work, if not for how culturally discrete these two books are (and how much of an innovator Ishiguro is). But this book is also quintessentially Halldór in that there's such Icelandic lore throughout, with an atmosphere of fantasy magic that ultimately - when the curtain is pulled down - is just part and parcel of the landscape and lifestyle, very down-to-earth and simple. There's a delightful irony employed throughout as our young narrator Alfgrimur sees everything through his innocent and unassuming eyes and the disparity between his simplicity and the affectations and aspirations of others takes on a surreal tone that also serves as remote contrast between the innocence of basic Icelandic workaday humility and the pretensions of other countries (Denmark in particular gets a typical Laxness prodding here). It seems that I love stories about musicians not being able to play concerts since these have topped my reading twice in three years, but I couldn't help but be utterly beguiled by the wit, the surrealism and the simply humanity here. It's a very amusing and deeply charming narrative about the power of music and the even stranger power of fame.
So that wraps up another year of reading, both punctuated and hampered by the birth of my daughter and the switching of jobs. I will see you all (Hi, Mother!) when this blog again becomes active in December 2020.
posted by Sean's Beard at 2:24 PM
1 Comments:
Loved reading your blog. Thanks for the tart and chips.
I can see why your No 1 would be in that spot. But I found this your best review piece:-
"as a male, I found it a very challenging and confronting piece of writing that made me think hard about the role I play in my marriage and - as my wife was heavily pregnant while I read this - how completely peripheral and superfluous I am to everything she was going through, yet how completely essential every small kindness I can perform is.
What a wonderful insight for you.
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