I find the books on people's shelves fascinating, basically because I imagine they say a lot about the people who own and (I generally presume, unless they are in pseudo leather-bound sets) have read them. But if books say a lot about their readers, is it necessarily in one's interest to reveal all of one's reading material? This thought crossed my mind as I considered this latest little review: frankly, I am really not going to do my credibility as a reader of (at least potentially) worthwhile books any favours by revealing I am on the eighth of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, am I? And yet, well, if I'm doing this, I may as well come clean about it: I do enjoy the odd little escapist foray into the world of Mma Ramotswe and her probably very rose-tinted Botswana.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
Heading back North holiday reading: "A Week in December" by Sebastian Faulks
(Original FB note: 16 August 2010)
It's difficult not to be impressed by Sebastian Faulks, who, for me at any rate, occupies a place among the must-read British authors of the moment. I haven't read everything he has written, but what I have - Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, On Green Dolphin Street and Engleby - convinced me to pick up a copy of "A Week in December" when I happened on it some time ago. It stayed on the shelf for a while, perhaps because, though he is always good, I sneakingly felt he had never quite repeated what he did in Birdsong - a book which would be hard for anyone to surpass. Nonetheless, "A Week in Deecember" made it into the box of holiday books.
Deep South holiday reading: "The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo" by Stieg Larsson
(Original FB note: 3 August 2010)
A certain hesitation came over me before embarking on the phenomenally successful thriller (trilogy indeed). Would it live up to expectations? Would it grab me the way it seems to have grabbed so many others? Or would it be a bit of a let down? Similar hesitations arise now, because whatever I say partisans and non-partisans of Stieg Larsson seem to have strong views and adding to the pile of opinions seems rather futile. Still, the idea is I do these things, so here it is.
More holiday reading: "Lustrum" by Robert Harris
(Original FB note: 30 July 2010)
Arrrh, what better holiday reading than Robert Harris? Page-turning but intelligent and insightful. "Lustrum" is the second of Harris' Cicero trilogy (the first being "Imperium", the third yet to come), but it was the first I have read. This doesn't seem to matter too much, though it could have been helpful to have some prior acquaintance with the complex roll call of characters, I suppose.
Renewed holiday reading: "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
(Original FB note: 30 July 2010)
This is a book famous for many for the back-story of its writing and publication. It was finally published in 1980, eleven years after the suicide of its author, thanks (fittingly) to the concerted and protracted efforts of his mother, who discovered the manuscript. It deserves its fame on its own merits as well, of course, being original and bizarre and memorable and 60's zeitgeisty.
Pre-holiday reading mega-catch-up: "Stalin" by Simon Sebag Montefiore; "A Day and a Night and a Day" by Glen Duncan; "Solar" by Ian McEwan; "Game Change" by Heilemann and Halperin
(Original FB note: 21 July 2010)
Very, very remiss of me, gentle reader, but I've let the book reviews slide lately. I could claim there's been too much to do, but perhaps it's just laziness, of the sort only resolved by the enforced laziness of lying on the beach.
So to pick up the backlog in anticipation of renewed virtue over the summer holidays (it started here last year, remember?), the four books completed since the last Facebook note review. Two were consumed as audio books (unabridged): "Stalin", which was taken in bursts over time, and "Game Change" an epic 14-hour listen taken over a car journey of conveniently near identical length. The other two were read conventionally. (For the record, for those unused to audio books, I find that they stay in the memory just as well, perhaps even better than, regular books and, after a while, I can no longer recall the form of consumption. Only real drawbacks: (i) you really need a good long, lone car journey or two and (ii) you miss out on any pictures - something I guess applies to "Stalin" and might have helped fix all those Russian names better.)
So to pick up the backlog in anticipation of renewed virtue over the summer holidays (it started here last year, remember?), the four books completed since the last Facebook note review. Two were consumed as audio books (unabridged): "Stalin", which was taken in bursts over time, and "Game Change" an epic 14-hour listen taken over a car journey of conveniently near identical length. The other two were read conventionally. (For the record, for those unused to audio books, I find that they stay in the memory just as well, perhaps even better than, regular books and, after a while, I can no longer recall the form of consumption. Only real drawbacks: (i) you really need a good long, lone car journey or two and (ii) you miss out on any pictures - something I guess applies to "Stalin" and might have helped fix all those Russian names better.)
On-the-train reading no. 2 - "Invisible" by Paul Auster
(Original FB note: 22 April 2010)
I guess I've said this before: I buy and read everything Paul Auster writes. This is a principle which is independent of the fact that he seemed possibly to have lost the capacity for innovation he once had and has tended to tell similar stories in the same way of late. I've heard that criticism, and though I can see something in it, my view is that I at least owe it to Paul Auster to buy everything he writes - whatever - simply on the grounds that I owe him the favour after all the pleasure his writing has given me since his early days. Dammit, the world owes the guy a living for the rest of his life for what he has contributed, and I'm just doing my small bit. So I saw this, and I bought it.
An American recently told me, slightly bemusedly, that "no-one in America has heard of Paul Auster, but the Europeans love him". I was slightly taken aback, I had always classified him as the very exemplar of the dynamism, spare style and creativity of American writing, as set against rather unambitious, domestic, slightly limited British literary fiction. (A bit harsh on the Brits, I know, and I take it back.) However, what you could say is that Auster is the perfect exemplar of a European literary sensibility combined with the dynamism, spare style and creativity of American writing. In particular, there has always been that French connection with Auster, more or less explicit, which has added to the richness of his underlying literary culture. And yes, they LOVE Auster in France (just as, pointed out my American interlocutor on the same occasion, they love Woody Allen…).
Well the whole French thing is up front in this latest novel by Paul Auster, which features French and American characters, whose fates interconnect over 40 years in various French and American locations. The novel is, well, thoroughly Auster-esque in its mood, method and preoccupations: the role of chance, the obscurity of motivations, indecision and surprising decisiveness, the difficulty in pinning down any truth or objective view of events - and, sure enough, the central character is a impecunious, struggling writer, at least at the outset, who we end up viewing from a variety of viewpoints, first and third person in both the grammatical and literal sense. Invisibility is at the heart of the book, for sure, because you realise that what is ultimately going on here is something you can never quite grasp, but quite possibly something we ultimately live for: love, sex, revenge, self-justification, but cannot take hold of or control?
For Auster fans, this book has surprises in store, most obviously in that there is a surprising amount of sex, some of it quite shocking (because of who's involved). Paul Auster hasn't done quite this kind of subject matter before, so it does raise a reader's eyebrow, to say the least, although ultimately we find it's all part of the Auster thing, and, well, there is a twist, which I won't give away.
But the key point about this book is that the "Auster thing" is back, big time. This novel confounds those who have criticised Auster, with some justification, for drifting into self-referential metaphysics. This is a classic Auster story, challenging, real, but slippery, difficult to grasp. It's a book you read easily, to end up feeling that you possibly missed the half of it. It carried you along on its narrative, with its typically straight, unadorned yet profound language, and at the end, you wonder about the gaps in what you retained along the way. Stylistically, we are on very familiar ground. Paul Auster is a magnificent, economical writer and has once again produced a book which you read with ease and pleasure. Not a typical page-turner, perhaps, but I read this eagerly and quickly.
Recommendation: of course you should read this. Everyone should read Paul Auster, and not just because the world owes him a living. Seriously, if you like Auster, you will like this. And the prime reason you will like it is because it is vintage, authentic, real Auster, his best in years. Yay, our hero's back!
An American recently told me, slightly bemusedly, that "no-one in America has heard of Paul Auster, but the Europeans love him". I was slightly taken aback, I had always classified him as the very exemplar of the dynamism, spare style and creativity of American writing, as set against rather unambitious, domestic, slightly limited British literary fiction. (A bit harsh on the Brits, I know, and I take it back.) However, what you could say is that Auster is the perfect exemplar of a European literary sensibility combined with the dynamism, spare style and creativity of American writing. In particular, there has always been that French connection with Auster, more or less explicit, which has added to the richness of his underlying literary culture. And yes, they LOVE Auster in France (just as, pointed out my American interlocutor on the same occasion, they love Woody Allen…).
Well the whole French thing is up front in this latest novel by Paul Auster, which features French and American characters, whose fates interconnect over 40 years in various French and American locations. The novel is, well, thoroughly Auster-esque in its mood, method and preoccupations: the role of chance, the obscurity of motivations, indecision and surprising decisiveness, the difficulty in pinning down any truth or objective view of events - and, sure enough, the central character is a impecunious, struggling writer, at least at the outset, who we end up viewing from a variety of viewpoints, first and third person in both the grammatical and literal sense. Invisibility is at the heart of the book, for sure, because you realise that what is ultimately going on here is something you can never quite grasp, but quite possibly something we ultimately live for: love, sex, revenge, self-justification, but cannot take hold of or control?
For Auster fans, this book has surprises in store, most obviously in that there is a surprising amount of sex, some of it quite shocking (because of who's involved). Paul Auster hasn't done quite this kind of subject matter before, so it does raise a reader's eyebrow, to say the least, although ultimately we find it's all part of the Auster thing, and, well, there is a twist, which I won't give away.
But the key point about this book is that the "Auster thing" is back, big time. This novel confounds those who have criticised Auster, with some justification, for drifting into self-referential metaphysics. This is a classic Auster story, challenging, real, but slippery, difficult to grasp. It's a book you read easily, to end up feeling that you possibly missed the half of it. It carried you along on its narrative, with its typically straight, unadorned yet profound language, and at the end, you wonder about the gaps in what you retained along the way. Stylistically, we are on very familiar ground. Paul Auster is a magnificent, economical writer and has once again produced a book which you read with ease and pleasure. Not a typical page-turner, perhaps, but I read this eagerly and quickly.
Recommendation: of course you should read this. Everyone should read Paul Auster, and not just because the world owes him a living. Seriously, if you like Auster, you will like this. And the prime reason you will like it is because it is vintage, authentic, real Auster, his best in years. Yay, our hero's back!
Auster in Austeresque form. Superb and a little shocking: Invisible.
I've-lost-track-of-my-idiosyncratic-numbering reading no. 1 - "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
(Original FB note: 22 April 2010)
I have to apologise. Lately, I have been very remiss in posting these occasional book reviews, which some people tell me are the only thing I should bother posting on Facebook and which some others don't seem to have registered at all. Since my epic read of "Chronic City", a book I should possibly reconsider, as its banal-apocalypse imagery keeps coming to mind as I watch an Icelandic ash cloud bring Europe to a standstill, I have actually completed two books: this one and another (last night) which I hope to post about straight after this.
So, "Outliers"…
It must be great to be Malcolm Gladwell; he is the master of a very, very clever trick. He takes something everybody knows, tells them about it, illustrating it with a barrage of telling anecdotal evidence, lays claim to a great insight and sells quadrillions of books. The really smart trick is spotting the thing that everybody knows, but which, for reasons of social, educational or cultural conditioning, they don't realise that they know. That way, the reader goes through the book saying: yes, yes, … YES! all the time. And the cash register ticks over.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not running the guy down. What he does is extremely valuable and enlightening. It's just not great thought, which doesn't actually matter too much, except that it inevitably means his books are just a bit long. Once you've got the idea, you've got it, and the accumulation of new surprising stories to illustrate it, though at times entertaining, can also be just slightly irritating insofar as you ultimately realise that each new bit simply illustrates the same point as you already grasped a while back.
Here, Gladwell tackles the question of why some people are phenomenally successful, and others, of equal intelligence, insight, strength, etc. aren't. The book takes issue with the notion that success can be ascribed exclusively to the particular qualities or attributes of an individual. He demonstrates, through a stack of examples, how chance of birth, location, timing, culture and good old fashioned luck, are at least as much to do with it as personal qualities. YES!!! You knew that, right? But Gladwell tells you in a way you hadn't quite seen it before. Smart.
In fact, on this occasion, I feel comparative culture comes into it rather more than, say, in "Tipping Point", insofar as he is arguing against a cultural disposition to believe in the myth of the extraordinary individual triumphing over all odds which is peculiarly American. I suspect a European audience will find it rather easier to accept the role of environment and luck in individual outcomes than the author seems to expect in this book.
So a hint of "yep, thanks", about this book… That doesn't stop it being a quick, straightforward and entertaining read. Illuminating too, and could be useful in countering the next person who tells you that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world because he entirely deserves to be on his own merits, which will probably happen to you in a bar in Denver, Colorado, rather than Rochdale, Lancashire.
Recommendation? I have Gladwell in my light-and-entertaining category, a bit like the tales of the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, books to be read when you need a break from "Chronic City" and the like. So yes, why not? But Gladwell's imagery won't be pervading my subconscious the next time an Icelandic volcano goes up.
So, "Outliers"…
It must be great to be Malcolm Gladwell; he is the master of a very, very clever trick. He takes something everybody knows, tells them about it, illustrating it with a barrage of telling anecdotal evidence, lays claim to a great insight and sells quadrillions of books. The really smart trick is spotting the thing that everybody knows, but which, for reasons of social, educational or cultural conditioning, they don't realise that they know. That way, the reader goes through the book saying: yes, yes, … YES! all the time. And the cash register ticks over.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not running the guy down. What he does is extremely valuable and enlightening. It's just not great thought, which doesn't actually matter too much, except that it inevitably means his books are just a bit long. Once you've got the idea, you've got it, and the accumulation of new surprising stories to illustrate it, though at times entertaining, can also be just slightly irritating insofar as you ultimately realise that each new bit simply illustrates the same point as you already grasped a while back.
Here, Gladwell tackles the question of why some people are phenomenally successful, and others, of equal intelligence, insight, strength, etc. aren't. The book takes issue with the notion that success can be ascribed exclusively to the particular qualities or attributes of an individual. He demonstrates, through a stack of examples, how chance of birth, location, timing, culture and good old fashioned luck, are at least as much to do with it as personal qualities. YES!!! You knew that, right? But Gladwell tells you in a way you hadn't quite seen it before. Smart.
In fact, on this occasion, I feel comparative culture comes into it rather more than, say, in "Tipping Point", insofar as he is arguing against a cultural disposition to believe in the myth of the extraordinary individual triumphing over all odds which is peculiarly American. I suspect a European audience will find it rather easier to accept the role of environment and luck in individual outcomes than the author seems to expect in this book.
So a hint of "yep, thanks", about this book… That doesn't stop it being a quick, straightforward and entertaining read. Illuminating too, and could be useful in countering the next person who tells you that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world because he entirely deserves to be on his own merits, which will probably happen to you in a bar in Denver, Colorado, rather than Rochdale, Lancashire.
Recommendation? I have Gladwell in my light-and-entertaining category, a bit like the tales of the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, books to be read when you need a break from "Chronic City" and the like. So yes, why not? But Gladwell's imagery won't be pervading my subconscious the next time an Icelandic volcano goes up.
Telling what you don't know you know. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
Dogged reading no. 1 - "Chronic City" by Jonathan Letham
(Original FB note: 20 March 2010)
In the last review I mentioned being 'worthily engaged on a hefty work of literary fiction, something meaty, of indisputable credentials, something described by the New York Times Book Review as a "masterpiece"' and of picking up another book in the middle of it. Well, I finally finished the hefty one, weighing in at nearly 500 pages.
This is a quintessential New York novel - maybe that's why the NY Review of Books liked it so much - but one which presents a New York which is slightly off, labouring under a multitude of metaphorical afflictions: a grey fog permanently enveloping lower Manhattan, a never-ending winter, a rampant "tiger" which ravages the city, inflicting random catastrophe... The book centres on two seemingly unlikely friends, a manic and fading (counter) cultural critic, ever high on high-grade pot, fixated on obscure films and Marlon Brando, and a once child star in a minor, but endlessly repeated sitcom, living as an affable empty vessel and playing along with the public sympathy afforded to him because his fiancée is stuck irredeemably in orbit, fading away without hope of return, cut off from the planet by a ring of Chinese space mines, but nonetheless discovering surprising depths of devotion to his unpredictable friend.
Yep, it's all a bit odd, and, in its generally plotless course takes us to virtual worlds where hologram vases are the greatest treasure, swanky parties of the great and good, salt-of-the-earth NY diners which fall victim to the tiger, and upper east side appartment blocks converted to house dogs only.
It is comedic and over the top, yet still somehow very true to a deeper level of (un)reality in alienated NY city life. It does create a powerful sense of unease at the inability of our society to distinguish between the real and the unreal, between the important and the trivial. It depicts a society where the powerful dominate through their power to falsify reality, make illusions real and themselves apparently lose any real connection with the real world. The book is not however predominantly a social satire, but seems to reflect a deeper alienation. We sympathise with the protagonists, but, I think, accept that they are hopeless cases quite early on.
Is this a masterpiece? I think it may be. But I can't help feeling that it is a masterpiece that demands just a little too much patience of us. The meanderings of the characters are sometimes, well, a little too meandering, while the language, rich and amazing, is maybe too rich and amazing when consumed slowly over 500 pages.
I blame myself to a large extent: I read this book in too-small snippets, whereas it demands focus and dedication, meaty reading sessions. All the same, it has left a powerful impression on this inadequate reader anyway.
Recommendation? Well if you are that dedicated reader, up for something which may indeed be a major work of contemporary American literature and with time and focus to give this book, then I think you could get a lot out of it. However, I am not going to take the responsibility of recommending this book - I'm afraid I found it just a bit too much work.
This is a quintessential New York novel - maybe that's why the NY Review of Books liked it so much - but one which presents a New York which is slightly off, labouring under a multitude of metaphorical afflictions: a grey fog permanently enveloping lower Manhattan, a never-ending winter, a rampant "tiger" which ravages the city, inflicting random catastrophe... The book centres on two seemingly unlikely friends, a manic and fading (counter) cultural critic, ever high on high-grade pot, fixated on obscure films and Marlon Brando, and a once child star in a minor, but endlessly repeated sitcom, living as an affable empty vessel and playing along with the public sympathy afforded to him because his fiancée is stuck irredeemably in orbit, fading away without hope of return, cut off from the planet by a ring of Chinese space mines, but nonetheless discovering surprising depths of devotion to his unpredictable friend.
Yep, it's all a bit odd, and, in its generally plotless course takes us to virtual worlds where hologram vases are the greatest treasure, swanky parties of the great and good, salt-of-the-earth NY diners which fall victim to the tiger, and upper east side appartment blocks converted to house dogs only.
It is comedic and over the top, yet still somehow very true to a deeper level of (un)reality in alienated NY city life. It does create a powerful sense of unease at the inability of our society to distinguish between the real and the unreal, between the important and the trivial. It depicts a society where the powerful dominate through their power to falsify reality, make illusions real and themselves apparently lose any real connection with the real world. The book is not however predominantly a social satire, but seems to reflect a deeper alienation. We sympathise with the protagonists, but, I think, accept that they are hopeless cases quite early on.
Is this a masterpiece? I think it may be. But I can't help feeling that it is a masterpiece that demands just a little too much patience of us. The meanderings of the characters are sometimes, well, a little too meandering, while the language, rich and amazing, is maybe too rich and amazing when consumed slowly over 500 pages.
I blame myself to a large extent: I read this book in too-small snippets, whereas it demands focus and dedication, meaty reading sessions. All the same, it has left a powerful impression on this inadequate reader anyway.
Recommendation? Well if you are that dedicated reader, up for something which may indeed be a major work of contemporary American literature and with time and focus to give this book, then I think you could get a lot out of it. However, I am not going to take the responsibility of recommending this book - I'm afraid I found it just a bit too much work.
A meaty read. And, sorry, a poor book cover.
Interposed reading no. 1 - "The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England" by Ian Mortimer
(Original FB note: 28 February 2010)
Has it ever happened to you that you were worthily engaged on a hefty work of literary fiction, something meaty, of indisputable credentials, something described by the New York Times Book Review as a "masterpiece", perhaps?, but then some little book on a shelf in a shop, in St Pancras international railway station perchance, interposed itself?
Well this book is that interloper, the one that had me standing there reading extracts in Foyles while I waited for my Eurostar back to Brussels and ultimately thinking: "well I suppose I'd better buy it now." Though I initially set it aside to wait its turn, it ended up jumping the queue, and, well, here we are.
The idea of this book is not, I think, as original or - except insofar as executed by a serious professional historian - as radical as it likes to pretend. It is simply that one should try to think of the past as a place that one might actually visit, travel round, directly experience, rather than study and analyse. Hence the notion of a "guide book", actually more comparable to some sorts of travel writing than actual guide books. In any case, the conceit works well, telling us about medieval England as if it might be possible to go there.
Fortunately, the author doesn't push his idea to the point at which it becomes a gimmick. He does not for example say: "For your your journey from London to Chester, ask directions to the Red Boar Inn in Camden, pay four groats for a horse and guard well against cut-purses", but is more along the lines: "No-one had a map in the fourteenth century, so travel between any two distant points inevitably meant taking the journey in short, say, ten-mile steps, and asking the way onward. It was wise to link up with others heading the same way to travel in groups for some protection against robbers". See the distinction?
Anyway, it works. It brings alive the human reality of the middle ages - specifically England in the fourteenth century - far better than any other book I have encountered on the subject. As you might expect, a good deal of the pleasure is in the awfulness of it to our modern eyes: the living conditions, the rigid social hierarchy, the unpredictable and savage system of justice, the casual cruelty to children, women and animals, the hygiene, the food, the disease and the unbelievable medical practices... Yes, there's all that, but it's far from just that. The author has too much understanding and sympathy for these people and their world to make them a simple horror story - indeed that's very much his point. These were people like us, living at a different time. What might we look like to a visitor from 600 years hence?
So Mortimer tries to assess the medieval world by its own standards. He is good, for example, on things like his comparison of the various options a traveller has for overnight lodging on an extended journey, looking at the relative merits of a private household (could be a good option), an inn (often not a good option), a religious foundation (a reliable but not necessarily comfortable or pleasant option) or a lordly manor (his clear preference - at least if the lord of the manor is present).
Another point where his approach seemed to me to work well, and contrasts sharply with conventional history, was his discussion of the Black Death (known then as the "Great Plague"), a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, which resulted in the population of England at the end of the fourteenth century being only about half what it was at the beginning. He tries to talk about this scourge as it would have appeared to people at the time, evoking their utter terror, incomprehension and despair when faced such wanton and widespread death.
Modern historians, correctly no doubt, often point out the ultimately progressive impact of the plague, which fatally undermined the feudal system (which, incidentally, Mortimer shows as having been lived as less unambiguously and unilaterally oppressive than we moderns like to imagine). But the conventional approach also undermines a certain kind of understanding as to how this tragedy was lived. "Imagine" he says, " a disease were to wipe out forty percent of the modern population of the UK - more than twenty-five million people. Now imagine a historian in the future discussing the benefits of your death and the deaths of your partner, your children and your friends .... You would want to cry out, or hang your head in despair, that historians could so blithely comment on the benefits of such suffering. There is no shadow of a doubt that every one of these people you see in 1348 - whether they will die or survive - deserves your compassion". (It goes on)
Don't worry, it's very far from all moral outrage about historians' treatment of our ancestors, I simply quote that because it struck me as a good illustration of the angle to this book, one that is valuable, fresh and interesting for anyone wanting a feel for this distant world which is, of course, also our world.
Recommendation? I'm not a historian myself, so don't expect me to comment on the merits of this "as history". However, I found it attractive, gripping, fascinating, surprising and something which put me altogether more in sympathy with the fourteenth century, which can't be a bad thing, can it? So, yes, I recommend it. If Foyles is to be believed this is a UK bestseller, so it looks like a lot of people have found this book appealing, perhaps interfering with their other reading...
So now back to the hefty literary fiction. That'll be the next note, interlopers permitting.
Well this book is that interloper, the one that had me standing there reading extracts in Foyles while I waited for my Eurostar back to Brussels and ultimately thinking: "well I suppose I'd better buy it now." Though I initially set it aside to wait its turn, it ended up jumping the queue, and, well, here we are.
The idea of this book is not, I think, as original or - except insofar as executed by a serious professional historian - as radical as it likes to pretend. It is simply that one should try to think of the past as a place that one might actually visit, travel round, directly experience, rather than study and analyse. Hence the notion of a "guide book", actually more comparable to some sorts of travel writing than actual guide books. In any case, the conceit works well, telling us about medieval England as if it might be possible to go there.
Fortunately, the author doesn't push his idea to the point at which it becomes a gimmick. He does not for example say: "For your your journey from London to Chester, ask directions to the Red Boar Inn in Camden, pay four groats for a horse and guard well against cut-purses", but is more along the lines: "No-one had a map in the fourteenth century, so travel between any two distant points inevitably meant taking the journey in short, say, ten-mile steps, and asking the way onward. It was wise to link up with others heading the same way to travel in groups for some protection against robbers". See the distinction?
Anyway, it works. It brings alive the human reality of the middle ages - specifically England in the fourteenth century - far better than any other book I have encountered on the subject. As you might expect, a good deal of the pleasure is in the awfulness of it to our modern eyes: the living conditions, the rigid social hierarchy, the unpredictable and savage system of justice, the casual cruelty to children, women and animals, the hygiene, the food, the disease and the unbelievable medical practices... Yes, there's all that, but it's far from just that. The author has too much understanding and sympathy for these people and their world to make them a simple horror story - indeed that's very much his point. These were people like us, living at a different time. What might we look like to a visitor from 600 years hence?
So Mortimer tries to assess the medieval world by its own standards. He is good, for example, on things like his comparison of the various options a traveller has for overnight lodging on an extended journey, looking at the relative merits of a private household (could be a good option), an inn (often not a good option), a religious foundation (a reliable but not necessarily comfortable or pleasant option) or a lordly manor (his clear preference - at least if the lord of the manor is present).
Another point where his approach seemed to me to work well, and contrasts sharply with conventional history, was his discussion of the Black Death (known then as the "Great Plague"), a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, which resulted in the population of England at the end of the fourteenth century being only about half what it was at the beginning. He tries to talk about this scourge as it would have appeared to people at the time, evoking their utter terror, incomprehension and despair when faced such wanton and widespread death.
Modern historians, correctly no doubt, often point out the ultimately progressive impact of the plague, which fatally undermined the feudal system (which, incidentally, Mortimer shows as having been lived as less unambiguously and unilaterally oppressive than we moderns like to imagine). But the conventional approach also undermines a certain kind of understanding as to how this tragedy was lived. "Imagine" he says, " a disease were to wipe out forty percent of the modern population of the UK - more than twenty-five million people. Now imagine a historian in the future discussing the benefits of your death and the deaths of your partner, your children and your friends .... You would want to cry out, or hang your head in despair, that historians could so blithely comment on the benefits of such suffering. There is no shadow of a doubt that every one of these people you see in 1348 - whether they will die or survive - deserves your compassion". (It goes on)
Don't worry, it's very far from all moral outrage about historians' treatment of our ancestors, I simply quote that because it struck me as a good illustration of the angle to this book, one that is valuable, fresh and interesting for anyone wanting a feel for this distant world which is, of course, also our world.
Recommendation? I'm not a historian myself, so don't expect me to comment on the merits of this "as history". However, I found it attractive, gripping, fascinating, surprising and something which put me altogether more in sympathy with the fourteenth century, which can't be a bad thing, can it? So, yes, I recommend it. If Foyles is to be believed this is a UK bestseller, so it looks like a lot of people have found this book appealing, perhaps interfering with their other reading...
So now back to the hefty literary fiction. That'll be the next note, interlopers permitting.
The interloper
Semi-holiday reading no. 1: "Superfreakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
(Original FB note: 2 January 2010)
A bit behind, I'm afraid, with my online existence, thanks to an unusually high level of living in the non-virtual world. Weird, huh? So this was a book I actually finished a while ago. Since when I have started on another (very promising) one, in turn interrupted by reading a friend's manuscript, about which I can say nothing except that I am overwhelmed with admiration and a fair amount of envy. More on that one sometime in the near future, I hope...
On "Superfreakonomics" what to say?
If you liked "Freakonomics", you'll like this.
That's about it really.
OK, just because I don't want to short-change my faithful readers, I'll add a sentence. This is the same fascinating, oblique, surprising, and occasionally maddening stuff that made the authors' name in their first book. It's just that first time it was surprising and fun. This time it's less surprising, and slightly less fun - simply for that reason. And, if I am going to be curmudgeonly, perhaps a little more of a "so what?" reaction this time. Mind you, I can't help feeling they have a point about children's car seats...
Recommendation? If you liked "Freakonomics" you'll like this...
On "Superfreakonomics" what to say?
If you liked "Freakonomics", you'll like this.
That's about it really.
OK, just because I don't want to short-change my faithful readers, I'll add a sentence. This is the same fascinating, oblique, surprising, and occasionally maddening stuff that made the authors' name in their first book. It's just that first time it was surprising and fun. This time it's less surprising, and slightly less fun - simply for that reason. And, if I am going to be curmudgeonly, perhaps a little more of a "so what?" reaction this time. Mind you, I can't help feeling they have a point about children's car seats...
Recommendation? If you liked "Freakonomics" you'll like this...
More of the same, but not pointlessly so
Non-holiday reading no. 5- "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami
(Original FB note: 13 December 2009)
People who have read these notes before will know that I am a confirmed Murakami fan. However, I kind of came at his most famous book sideways, by way of a number of other novels which offered a more or less overtly metaphysical, more or less "magical" style. I was slightly surprised therefore to find Murakami here playing it straight. It took me a while to stop waiting for something bizarre and unearthly to happen, but, when I did, it became clear to me that this is very much in line with the others, though here in a "purer", unadorned form.
At one level, this is a relatively conventional coming-of-age love story, said by many to be autobiographical, with a man torn between love for two, very different, women. One is a floating, other-worldly character, who ends up for most of the novel in an equally other-worldly mental health care institution, to which the protagonist occasionally repairs for some soul-mending of his own, while the other, by contrast, lives with her feet on the ground (almost) and constantly challenges our hero to commit and engage - not necessarily only with her, but also with reality.
Now, if that is starting to sound familiar in its shades of metaphysical conflict, well, it is. It's just that here you don't get the overtly magical stuff, and maybe Murakami doesn't even see his story in that way.
Our hero, Toru Watanabe, is a real person with whom it is easy to sympathise. He lives in a world of change, Japan of 1970-ish, at a time of student protests and social upheaval, and in spite of his typical Murakamian detachment, cannot altogether avoid these things impinging on his own life. He ends up making his choice, but not in a way which convinces you that the choice was actually ever really his to make.
This book apparently made Murakami a novelist superstar, to the extent it drove him to leave Japan for a while, because he couldn't stand the attention it brought him. You can see how this book would be a youth cult classic, with its blend of idealism, indecision, sex, self-negation, social change, existential angst and escape. But it is more than that, pointing to the more explicit metaphysical preoccupations of other novels. And in spite of all that, and notwithstanding the time it took me to get through it (my fault, not the book's), this is a novel which reads easily.
Recommendation: absolutely. Of course. Self-evidently. This is the real thing.
At one level, this is a relatively conventional coming-of-age love story, said by many to be autobiographical, with a man torn between love for two, very different, women. One is a floating, other-worldly character, who ends up for most of the novel in an equally other-worldly mental health care institution, to which the protagonist occasionally repairs for some soul-mending of his own, while the other, by contrast, lives with her feet on the ground (almost) and constantly challenges our hero to commit and engage - not necessarily only with her, but also with reality.
Now, if that is starting to sound familiar in its shades of metaphysical conflict, well, it is. It's just that here you don't get the overtly magical stuff, and maybe Murakami doesn't even see his story in that way.
Our hero, Toru Watanabe, is a real person with whom it is easy to sympathise. He lives in a world of change, Japan of 1970-ish, at a time of student protests and social upheaval, and in spite of his typical Murakamian detachment, cannot altogether avoid these things impinging on his own life. He ends up making his choice, but not in a way which convinces you that the choice was actually ever really his to make.
This book apparently made Murakami a novelist superstar, to the extent it drove him to leave Japan for a while, because he couldn't stand the attention it brought him. You can see how this book would be a youth cult classic, with its blend of idealism, indecision, sex, self-negation, social change, existential angst and escape. But it is more than that, pointing to the more explicit metaphysical preoccupations of other novels. And in spite of all that, and notwithstanding the time it took me to get through it (my fault, not the book's), this is a novel which reads easily.
Recommendation: absolutely. Of course. Self-evidently. This is the real thing.
Non-holiday reading no. 4: "Hustle" by Will Ferguson
(Original FB note: 3 November 2009)
"Hustle" is basically a fun book, the pleasures of which are not unrelated to those of the eponymous (though unrelated) BBC TV series.
The story of Jack McGreary is set in late 1930's dust-bowl America, and features a young hero who falls in with a couple of itinerant con-artists, Virgil and Rose, who are running scams all over the South-West United States. These are the classic good bad guys, who target the weak willed and greedy (like, everyone) to relieve them of their spare cash.
Jack has a natural talent for the game, and rapidly graduates from being the useful junior partner to the guy who is evidently going to make the running. That is, unless, contrary to everyone's expectations, he makes a radically different choice… Along the way, of course, the reader is induced to ask who is conning whom and whether the (to us) obvious chemistry between Jack and Rose will come to anything.
The author is at pains to locate his tale historically, with constant reminders of the lead up to the outbreak of the second world war, events which prick Jack's conscience, but not that of his friends. Jack, indeed, has a depth which is contrasted with the mindset of Virgil, and perhaps too of Rose, but maybe we just feel that because we are in Jack's head and not that of the others.
Perhaps this is a book which should have been satisfied with being relatively shallow. The historical dimension is is nice try, but doesn't really get us that far, while the moral/philosophical musings are fine as far as they go. But not much further.
The book excels rather at character and at time and place. It does a great job of capturing the feel of post dust bowl USA and allows the reader to develop a genuine warmth towards its primary characters. You like Jack, Virgil and Rose by the end of this and are really rooting for them as the story approaches its dénouement. Before that, you cannot but love the joyous con tricks played along the way.
Recommendation: yes, this was another book bought on the strength of its cover (hmm, getting to be a habit), but also another one which totally lives up to (and I mean UP to) its cover. If you like the cover - and who wouldn't? - you'll like this book too. I did. So give yourself a treat and read it.
The story of Jack McGreary is set in late 1930's dust-bowl America, and features a young hero who falls in with a couple of itinerant con-artists, Virgil and Rose, who are running scams all over the South-West United States. These are the classic good bad guys, who target the weak willed and greedy (like, everyone) to relieve them of their spare cash.
Jack has a natural talent for the game, and rapidly graduates from being the useful junior partner to the guy who is evidently going to make the running. That is, unless, contrary to everyone's expectations, he makes a radically different choice… Along the way, of course, the reader is induced to ask who is conning whom and whether the (to us) obvious chemistry between Jack and Rose will come to anything.
The author is at pains to locate his tale historically, with constant reminders of the lead up to the outbreak of the second world war, events which prick Jack's conscience, but not that of his friends. Jack, indeed, has a depth which is contrasted with the mindset of Virgil, and perhaps too of Rose, but maybe we just feel that because we are in Jack's head and not that of the others.
Perhaps this is a book which should have been satisfied with being relatively shallow. The historical dimension is is nice try, but doesn't really get us that far, while the moral/philosophical musings are fine as far as they go. But not much further.
The book excels rather at character and at time and place. It does a great job of capturing the feel of post dust bowl USA and allows the reader to develop a genuine warmth towards its primary characters. You like Jack, Virgil and Rose by the end of this and are really rooting for them as the story approaches its dénouement. Before that, you cannot but love the joyous con tricks played along the way.
Recommendation: yes, this was another book bought on the strength of its cover (hmm, getting to be a habit), but also another one which totally lives up to (and I mean UP to) its cover. If you like the cover - and who wouldn't? - you'll like this book too. I did. So give yourself a treat and read it.
Non-holiday reading no. 3: "K Blows Top" by Peter Carlson
(Original FB note: 9 October 2009)
So a continuation of the Cold War theme, but this time in the form of history. This book relates the surreal, prolonged visit of Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev to the United States in 1959 at the (accidental) invitation of President Dwight Eisenhower.
I have occasionally come across foreign policy types in my professional life. My impression is generally one of smart, agitated individuals who constantly worry about the possibility of "slights", real or perceived, of governments "taking offence", of "signals" and "messages", of perceptions or - at worst - diplomatic "incidents". Somehow, it has always to me a somewhat effete world, with an ethos more suited to a gossipy boarding school than to the real world where things, as we know, can get rather nasty.
Well, this book is a great antidote to that view of foreign affairs, though it is utterly impossible to imagine such an uncontrolled and unpredictable official visit happening in today's security-obsessed and media-oriented world. The book's subtitle is "A Cold War Comic Interlude", and indeed much of this is indeed really funny. Krushchev basically runs amok for ten days, ranging from Washington, to New York, to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to rural Iowa and back to Camp David. Along the way, he rages, clowns around, hams it up outrageously and famously, on one occasion, blows his top. He encounters American politicians, mega-capitalists, actors and a surprising number of ordinary people. He dines memorably with Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and Shirley McClaine. Basically, he has a whale of a time. He generally wows his audience of Americans, who, in general, seem far more attracted to him as a celebrity than hostile to him as a Communist dictator.
In the midst of all the fun and games, however, there are constant reminders that this explosive individual controls one of the two great military arsenals in the world, including of course nuclear weapons, not least because Krushchev constantly reminds his audiences of the fact and indeed repeatedly threatens to use them. Was he serious? Maybe not, as the Cuban missile crisis subsequently showed, but his audiences must indeed have looked askance at this funny little fat guy who periodically waves his missiles in the air.
It's a fascinating story, from a fascinating period, and a great read. This is not however a serious history book à la Beevor, researched in obscure archives, but largely reconstructed from press reports and Krushchev's own memoirs. So if you aren't looking for academic rigour but are in the mood for a great real life yarn and easy reading, you'll like this.
Recommendation? You've just had it. I liked it, I think most people with any interest in the period and the characters involved will too.
I have occasionally come across foreign policy types in my professional life. My impression is generally one of smart, agitated individuals who constantly worry about the possibility of "slights", real or perceived, of governments "taking offence", of "signals" and "messages", of perceptions or - at worst - diplomatic "incidents". Somehow, it has always to me a somewhat effete world, with an ethos more suited to a gossipy boarding school than to the real world where things, as we know, can get rather nasty.
Well, this book is a great antidote to that view of foreign affairs, though it is utterly impossible to imagine such an uncontrolled and unpredictable official visit happening in today's security-obsessed and media-oriented world. The book's subtitle is "A Cold War Comic Interlude", and indeed much of this is indeed really funny. Krushchev basically runs amok for ten days, ranging from Washington, to New York, to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to rural Iowa and back to Camp David. Along the way, he rages, clowns around, hams it up outrageously and famously, on one occasion, blows his top. He encounters American politicians, mega-capitalists, actors and a surprising number of ordinary people. He dines memorably with Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and Shirley McClaine. Basically, he has a whale of a time. He generally wows his audience of Americans, who, in general, seem far more attracted to him as a celebrity than hostile to him as a Communist dictator.
In the midst of all the fun and games, however, there are constant reminders that this explosive individual controls one of the two great military arsenals in the world, including of course nuclear weapons, not least because Krushchev constantly reminds his audiences of the fact and indeed repeatedly threatens to use them. Was he serious? Maybe not, as the Cuban missile crisis subsequently showed, but his audiences must indeed have looked askance at this funny little fat guy who periodically waves his missiles in the air.
It's a fascinating story, from a fascinating period, and a great read. This is not however a serious history book à la Beevor, researched in obscure archives, but largely reconstructed from press reports and Krushchev's own memoirs. So if you aren't looking for academic rigour but are in the mood for a great real life yarn and easy reading, you'll like this.
Recommendation? You've just had it. I liked it, I think most people with any interest in the period and the characters involved will too.
Non-holiday reading no. 2: "Ascent" by Jed Mercurio
(Original FB note: 24 September 2009)
I have to admit, this is a book I bought principally on the strength of its cover (and its blurb), but that doesn't mean it let me down. This shortish book is the story of a Soviet fighter pilot and 60s cosmonaut, a story which takes us, in a deliberately straightforward and linear narrative, from the rubble of Stalingrad to the Far Side of the moon, via North Korea and the Russian arctic.
The book is a curious mix of a Boy's Own page-turner and a reflection on Valour and Fame, worthy of a Greek epic. Somehow, you end up really caring about the flawed and driven exemplar of Soviet heroism who is the subject of this book, and indeed his wife, unsung hero she also, whose name we never even find out - known only as "the widow", including throughout the course of her married life.
This is a terrific tale, written in a deceptively simple style with no distractions. It is full of boyish technical detail, which does not however at any point get in the way of a ripping yarn. How it also manages to achieve a metaphysical depth seems something of a mystery, though, by the end of the book, you are strongly conscious of that level.
Recommendation: you may have gathered that I liked this, so of course I recommend it. It may help though if you're a boy - a lot of this is about planes, rockets, missiles and airborne heroics. Wonderful stuff!
The book is a curious mix of a Boy's Own page-turner and a reflection on Valour and Fame, worthy of a Greek epic. Somehow, you end up really caring about the flawed and driven exemplar of Soviet heroism who is the subject of this book, and indeed his wife, unsung hero she also, whose name we never even find out - known only as "the widow", including throughout the course of her married life.
This is a terrific tale, written in a deceptively simple style with no distractions. It is full of boyish technical detail, which does not however at any point get in the way of a ripping yarn. How it also manages to achieve a metaphysical depth seems something of a mystery, though, by the end of the book, you are strongly conscious of that level.
Recommendation: you may have gathered that I liked this, so of course I recommend it. It may help though if you're a boy - a lot of this is about planes, rockets, missiles and airborne heroics. Wonderful stuff!
Cold War and MiGs - stirring stuff!
Non-holiday reading no. 1: "American Pastoral" by Philip Roth
(Original FB note: 17 September 2009)
OK, back by popular demand (well a couple of people vaguely enquired), here is the first non-holiday reading book review. Actually, this one was started during the holidays, but only finished last Monday, which tells you something about either the book, relative time available for reading, or both...
Philip Roth is a master. You see this, you feel this, on every page, with every sentence. This is a Great Writer, a Grand Old Man of contemporary literature. There's a reason for this - the geezer can really write. I, for one, keep coming back for more - I have consumed much of his recent work (it helps that he has taken to writing slim volumes), and there's one more waiting in the "pending" section of my bookshelf ("Indignation"). In this case, I decided, during a pre-summer trip to the bookshop, to try something meatier, an acknowledged major work.
So he's a Master. He is. But, and you knew there was a but coming, right?, I still can't work out if I actually ENJOY reading Roth. With the shorter recent books - all on gloomy subjects such as old age, loss of vitality, death - this was maybe not such an issue; they are short. But here, you're in for the long haul: this is a substantial read. That applies in all senses: this is a book which has something to say and says it powerfully. It's about the American Dream falling apart, for one man - the made-it-in-WASP-America Newark Jew - and for America in general. The insight into a character and a mind is extraordinary - there is real depth here. Yet it is also a bit of a slog: you get the idea early (at least you think) and then it is laid on you more and more. The effect is slow and cumulative. But the effect is powerful. This is not a book you will forget in a hurry.
Recommendation: don't read this if you want thrills and spills; don't read it if you want entertainment; don't read it if you want to finish it quickly and read something else. Otherwise, if you want to see what the mature Roth does, and how he does it: read it.
Philip Roth is a master. You see this, you feel this, on every page, with every sentence. This is a Great Writer, a Grand Old Man of contemporary literature. There's a reason for this - the geezer can really write. I, for one, keep coming back for more - I have consumed much of his recent work (it helps that he has taken to writing slim volumes), and there's one more waiting in the "pending" section of my bookshelf ("Indignation"). In this case, I decided, during a pre-summer trip to the bookshop, to try something meatier, an acknowledged major work.
So he's a Master. He is. But, and you knew there was a but coming, right?, I still can't work out if I actually ENJOY reading Roth. With the shorter recent books - all on gloomy subjects such as old age, loss of vitality, death - this was maybe not such an issue; they are short. But here, you're in for the long haul: this is a substantial read. That applies in all senses: this is a book which has something to say and says it powerfully. It's about the American Dream falling apart, for one man - the made-it-in-WASP-America Newark Jew - and for America in general. The insight into a character and a mind is extraordinary - there is real depth here. Yet it is also a bit of a slog: you get the idea early (at least you think) and then it is laid on you more and more. The effect is slow and cumulative. But the effect is powerful. This is not a book you will forget in a hurry.
Recommendation: don't read this if you want thrills and spills; don't read it if you want entertainment; don't read it if you want to finish it quickly and read something else. Otherwise, if you want to see what the mature Roth does, and how he does it: read it.
Heavy Roth
Holiday reading no. 8: "D-Day" by Antony Beevor
(Original FB note: 23 August 2009)
The second big historical tome of the holiday (c.f. holiday reading no. 1 - Ed. it was "Masters and Commanders" by Andrew Roberts; review lost, I'm afraid), on a not unrelated subject but with an entirely different perspective. If you read either "Stalingrad" or "Berlin: the Downfall 1945" by Beevor, you will know pretty much what to expect: an astoundingly detailed narrative history of epic events, ranging from the personal anecdote of the soldier on the ground, to the actions of generals and staff officers at headquarters. The amount of research behind this is mind-boggling.
Overall, I have to say that I tend to get a bit lost in the detail: this or that battalion, division or whatever, and I kept having to flick back to the maps to make head or tail of what was going on. In fact, this difficulty (is it just me?) doesn't really matter very much, because the strength of the book is the endless authoritative and highly evocative detail. As a lay reader, I will accept that Beevor has done his research and allow myself to be immersed in the narrative detail of soldiers at war.
Ultimately therefore, for this reader, it is the impressions that count - and what impressions they are. Though the nature of the war related here does not (quite) match the utter barbarism of the Eastern Front, Beevor's account leaves you in no doubt that this was a mind-bogglingly savage and destructive episode. He communicates extremely well the confusion which often reigned during the invasion and which led, amongst much else to thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of unnecessary deaths caused by mistakes and "friendly fire". There were all manner of atrocities and war-crimes on both sides, albeit perhaps with different psychological origins, some great callousness about civilian casualties for the sake of military expediency, errors of judgement galore, ridiculous rivalries and conflicts between the allies and, yes, innumerable instances of heroism and self-sacrifice.
This WAS a most extraordinary endeavour, and one without which the world would certainly today be a very different place, probably a much worse one. But however necessary it was, this book, with its almost omniscient authoritativeness, is a great antidote to viewing the D-Day landings and the ensuing fight through any kind of romantic spectacles. It was necessary, but it was inevitably very, very nasty.
Beevor does not attempt to draw "big" historical conclusions. He sees is job as just to tell it like it happened. This is actually a little frustrating: the reader is left hungry for a little interpretation which never quite comes. But a few big ideas emerge clearly:
Logistically, this was an extraordinary undertaking. The scale of the resources and manpower and the effort to get them together were astonishing.
The actual landings, for all their horrors (especially on Omaha Beach) were less costly than military planners expected, but the month or so following was the reverse. A war of attrition, with huge casualties on both sides, developed. This was not expected, in some cases could have been avoided with better leadership, and led to enormous death and destruction in Normandy. Ironically, this hold-up may have been beneficial for the rest of France, because the battle didn't have to be fought there.
The Germans were undoubtedly the more effective and professional fighters. The Allies won because of their huge advantage in resources and because of their total domination in the air. Hitler's obsessive refusal to allow tactical withdrawal didn't help either.
Montgomery's reputation doesn't come out of it too well. He comes across as a massive egotist and not a particularly good general, obsessed with his image. The Brits were poorly served by his command.
De Gaulle was another irritating primadonna. His allies had to put up with him for big picture political reasons, but it must at times have been very, very hard...
Recommendation? If the subject interests you, read it.
(This is the last "Holiday Reading" book review. Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" is begun, but it won't be finished before the return to office life. I thought writing about the books I read was probably more interesting than relating the latest day at the beach or the latest meal out in Pescara, but who knows? Normal Facebook service will now, I suppose, be resumed.)
Overall, I have to say that I tend to get a bit lost in the detail: this or that battalion, division or whatever, and I kept having to flick back to the maps to make head or tail of what was going on. In fact, this difficulty (is it just me?) doesn't really matter very much, because the strength of the book is the endless authoritative and highly evocative detail. As a lay reader, I will accept that Beevor has done his research and allow myself to be immersed in the narrative detail of soldiers at war.
Ultimately therefore, for this reader, it is the impressions that count - and what impressions they are. Though the nature of the war related here does not (quite) match the utter barbarism of the Eastern Front, Beevor's account leaves you in no doubt that this was a mind-bogglingly savage and destructive episode. He communicates extremely well the confusion which often reigned during the invasion and which led, amongst much else to thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of unnecessary deaths caused by mistakes and "friendly fire". There were all manner of atrocities and war-crimes on both sides, albeit perhaps with different psychological origins, some great callousness about civilian casualties for the sake of military expediency, errors of judgement galore, ridiculous rivalries and conflicts between the allies and, yes, innumerable instances of heroism and self-sacrifice.
This WAS a most extraordinary endeavour, and one without which the world would certainly today be a very different place, probably a much worse one. But however necessary it was, this book, with its almost omniscient authoritativeness, is a great antidote to viewing the D-Day landings and the ensuing fight through any kind of romantic spectacles. It was necessary, but it was inevitably very, very nasty.
Beevor does not attempt to draw "big" historical conclusions. He sees is job as just to tell it like it happened. This is actually a little frustrating: the reader is left hungry for a little interpretation which never quite comes. But a few big ideas emerge clearly:
Logistically, this was an extraordinary undertaking. The scale of the resources and manpower and the effort to get them together were astonishing.
The actual landings, for all their horrors (especially on Omaha Beach) were less costly than military planners expected, but the month or so following was the reverse. A war of attrition, with huge casualties on both sides, developed. This was not expected, in some cases could have been avoided with better leadership, and led to enormous death and destruction in Normandy. Ironically, this hold-up may have been beneficial for the rest of France, because the battle didn't have to be fought there.
The Germans were undoubtedly the more effective and professional fighters. The Allies won because of their huge advantage in resources and because of their total domination in the air. Hitler's obsessive refusal to allow tactical withdrawal didn't help either.
Montgomery's reputation doesn't come out of it too well. He comes across as a massive egotist and not a particularly good general, obsessed with his image. The Brits were poorly served by his command.
De Gaulle was another irritating primadonna. His allies had to put up with him for big picture political reasons, but it must at times have been very, very hard...
Recommendation? If the subject interests you, read it.
(This is the last "Holiday Reading" book review. Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" is begun, but it won't be finished before the return to office life. I thought writing about the books I read was probably more interesting than relating the latest day at the beach or the latest meal out in Pescara, but who knows? Normal Facebook service will now, I suppose, be resumed.)
Holiday reading no. 7: "The Bookseller of Kabul" by Åsne Seierstad
(Original FB note: 12 August 2009)
I had been vaguely conscious of this book for a while, having noticed it in the airport bookshop without ever quite buying it. I am not quite sure why, but I think I thought it was a work of fiction, rather than the literary reportage it actually is. In the end I picked up a second-hand copy on impulse against €1.50 in an honesty jar.
The author is a Norwegian journalist who spent spring 2002 - the period immediately following the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul - living with a "middle class" Afghan family in their home in a much-deteriorated Soviet-style appartment in the city. She writes about the life of the family as if not there, and does not therefore herself feature in the narrative. This is literary "fly-on-the-wall", I suppose. The bookseller of the title is the head of the family, someone who is successful in business and a westernised liberal by local standards, though this is a description one learns considerably to relativise in both respects by the end of the book.
Inevitably, the book mostly sees things from the perspective of the women in the household. This is the period when most women in Kabul were still wearing the burka when outside the house - glimmers of liberalisation are starting to appear on this score by the end of the book - but it is very clear that the burka is only one, and perhaps the least important, of the symptoms of the utter subjugation of women in Afghan society, even at its liberal, middle-class end.
Both the author and the critics say that this book helps understand the nuances of this extemely traditionalist Muslim society, and helps you not to jump to easy, simplistic conclusions about how the people in it feel about their lives. This is true, but you also come out of this book feeling increasingly pessimistic about the chances of anyone's life in Afghanistan improving very much anytime soon. The power of tradition and the second-class status of women, even in the minds of the victims themselves, just seems too great. This is a place where people have nothing and lock themselves into a way of life seemingly designed to keep it that way.
Aghanistan, from being somewhere no-one very much thought about before 9/11, has of course been the focus of much interest since then. The novels of Khaled Hosseini have in the meantime told us much about life in that benighted country. Having read "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" (particularly the latter), I felt on fairly familiar ground here, getting angry and depressed about the extraordinary waste of personal potential represented in the Afghan way of life, and the consignment of so many people to lives of little more than abject slavery. Hosseini perhaps tells it more powerfully, but this account by Seierskad adds something by virtue of being a first-hand report of everyday life, without novelistic intent. It is well-written, and 276 pages fly by very easily.
Recommendation? If you're interested at all in Afghanistan and perhaps on the background to the current situation there, then this book is definitely worth a read, even it is probably a bit out of date by now ( though I imagine much less than it should be). If you haven't read them, I would recommend the Hosseini novels too, probably ahead of this.
The author is a Norwegian journalist who spent spring 2002 - the period immediately following the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul - living with a "middle class" Afghan family in their home in a much-deteriorated Soviet-style appartment in the city. She writes about the life of the family as if not there, and does not therefore herself feature in the narrative. This is literary "fly-on-the-wall", I suppose. The bookseller of the title is the head of the family, someone who is successful in business and a westernised liberal by local standards, though this is a description one learns considerably to relativise in both respects by the end of the book.
Inevitably, the book mostly sees things from the perspective of the women in the household. This is the period when most women in Kabul were still wearing the burka when outside the house - glimmers of liberalisation are starting to appear on this score by the end of the book - but it is very clear that the burka is only one, and perhaps the least important, of the symptoms of the utter subjugation of women in Afghan society, even at its liberal, middle-class end.
Both the author and the critics say that this book helps understand the nuances of this extemely traditionalist Muslim society, and helps you not to jump to easy, simplistic conclusions about how the people in it feel about their lives. This is true, but you also come out of this book feeling increasingly pessimistic about the chances of anyone's life in Afghanistan improving very much anytime soon. The power of tradition and the second-class status of women, even in the minds of the victims themselves, just seems too great. This is a place where people have nothing and lock themselves into a way of life seemingly designed to keep it that way.
Aghanistan, from being somewhere no-one very much thought about before 9/11, has of course been the focus of much interest since then. The novels of Khaled Hosseini have in the meantime told us much about life in that benighted country. Having read "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" (particularly the latter), I felt on fairly familiar ground here, getting angry and depressed about the extraordinary waste of personal potential represented in the Afghan way of life, and the consignment of so many people to lives of little more than abject slavery. Hosseini perhaps tells it more powerfully, but this account by Seierskad adds something by virtue of being a first-hand report of everyday life, without novelistic intent. It is well-written, and 276 pages fly by very easily.
Recommendation? If you're interested at all in Afghanistan and perhaps on the background to the current situation there, then this book is definitely worth a read, even it is probably a bit out of date by now ( though I imagine much less than it should be). If you haven't read them, I would recommend the Hosseini novels too, probably ahead of this.
Holiday reading no. 6: "Time to Think" by Nancy Kline
(Original FB note: 11 August 2009)
Hmmm. What to say about this one? First, I suppose, full disclosure; this is the unfinished book review. The book that is, not the review (though this is the second time of writing as the original version was just complete, but unsaved, as the batteries went out on my iPod). Some 96 pages into this 250 page tome, it suddenly dawned on me that life is too short, or at least the holiday is, and reading this had become a tedious chore.
So what's the problem? There are real insights in this book and some great tips on dealing with certain situations, and I am absolutely convinced that Nancy Kline is a great teacher with enormous personal charisma. But the book...
It comes down to four things, I think: language, repetition, pat schematics and, erm, dodgy thinking.
But first, what's it all about? Kline's theme is how to unleash the potential of people and organisations through creating the optimal conditions for individuals to think. Really think. These conditions, and there are ten of them, enumerated for us, give rise to a "Thinking Environment". That being in place, it is important to eliminate the assumptions that block real thinking through "Incisive Questions", to heap on positive encouragement in a ratio of 5:1 to critical or challenging observations, and above all to Listen. Really listen. At that point, people are liberated, no longer think and say to please (parents, peers, organisations), but become truly creative.
You might by now have picked up on the language issue. That infuriating Insistent Captitalisation of Quite Ordinary Ideas. This is a spurious appropriation of everyday concepts, to the extent that one expects almost to see the dreaded TM floating mid-air after the offending words. Do me a favour! Or should that be Do Me A Favour? And don't worry, this is just an example; for the connaisseur of teeth-on-edge English usage, this is the book for you.
Repetition also has you screaming at the book: "I got it first time!". An idea is no better for being repeated ten times, but repeated the ideas are. Ad nauseam. Maybe this is an issue of transference from classroom to page, but in any case, not only does it make the book much longer than it need be for very little added value, it is also just plain annoying.
Then there is the inevitable spurious (there's that word again) exact number of everything. Ten conditions for a Thinking Environment (not nine, not eleven), the 5:1 ratio of encouragement to criticism. There is even an explanation of how this last figure was arrived at, an explanation which does extraordinarily little to add to its credibility. Why is it that management consultants think we won't be able to cope with prime (or varying) numbers?
The underlying disconnect with reality is the final bugbear. There ARE good ideas here, but please don't expect us to think this is The Answer. As usual, there is little space for nuance and complexity here - just look at the brief chapter (with which I would not fundamentally argue) on male conditioning (inimical to a Thinking Environment) for evidence of this. I'm sorry,your Thinking Environment is not the answer to every problem at every time.
All this is a shame as this is NOT arrant nonsense; it is just packaged as arrant nonsense.
Doubtless the fact I did not finish the book undermines my opinions somewhat, but, then again, if a writer can't get your attention or hold your respect in the first 100 pages, there is a problem. I skipped ahead, in the hope that better was coming, but just kept coming on things which confirmed my thoughts, albeit rapidly hardening into prejudices by now.
Recommendation? Do the professional training course, go to the lecture, meet Nancy Kline in person, but the book? - forget it.
Hmmm. What to say about this one? First, I suppose, full disclosure; this is the unfinished book review. The book that is, not the review (though this is the second time of writing as the original version was just complete, but unsaved, as the batteries went out on my iPod). Some 96 pages into this 250 page tome, it suddenly dawned on me that life is too short, or at least the holiday is, and reading this had become a tedious chore.
So what's the problem? There are real insights in this book and some great tips on dealing with certain situations, and I am absolutely convinced that Nancy Kline is a great teacher with enormous personal charisma. But the book...
It comes down to four things, I think: language, repetition, pat schematics and, erm, dodgy thinking.
But first, what's it all about? Kline's theme is how to unleash the potential of people and organisations through creating the optimal conditions for individuals to think. Really think. These conditions, and there are ten of them, enumerated for us, give rise to a "Thinking Environment". That being in place, it is important to eliminate the assumptions that block real thinking through "Incisive Questions", to heap on positive encouragement in a ratio of 5:1 to critical or challenging observations, and above all to Listen. Really listen. At that point, people are liberated, no longer think and say to please (parents, peers, organisations), but become truly creative.
You might by now have picked up on the language issue. That infuriating Insistent Captitalisation of Quite Ordinary Ideas. This is a spurious appropriation of everyday concepts, to the extent that one expects almost to see the dreaded TM floating mid-air after the offending words. Do me a favour! Or should that be Do Me A Favour? And don't worry, this is just an example; for the connaisseur of teeth-on-edge English usage, this is the book for you.
Repetition also has you screaming at the book: "I got it first time!". An idea is no better for being repeated ten times, but repeated the ideas are. Ad nauseam. Maybe this is an issue of transference from classroom to page, but in any case, not only does it make the book much longer than it need be for very little added value, it is also just plain annoying.
Then there is the inevitable spurious (there's that word again) exact number of everything. Ten conditions for a Thinking Environment (not nine, not eleven), the 5:1 ratio of encouragement to criticism. There is even an explanation of how this last figure was arrived at, an explanation which does extraordinarily little to add to its credibility. Why is it that management consultants think we won't be able to cope with prime (or varying) numbers?
The underlying disconnect with reality is the final bugbear. There ARE good ideas here, but please don't expect us to think this is The Answer. As usual, there is little space for nuance and complexity here - just look at the brief chapter (with which I would not fundamentally argue) on male conditioning (inimical to a Thinking Environment) for evidence of this. I'm sorry,your Thinking Environment is not the answer to every problem at every time.
All this is a shame as this is NOT arrant nonsense; it is just packaged as arrant nonsense.
Doubtless the fact I did not finish the book undermines my opinions somewhat, but, then again, if a writer can't get your attention or hold your respect in the first 100 pages, there is a problem. I skipped ahead, in the hope that better was coming, but just kept coming on things which confirmed my thoughts, albeit rapidly hardening into prejudices by now.
Recommendation? Do the professional training course, go to the lecture, meet Nancy Kline in person, but the book? - forget it.
Holiday Reading no. 5: "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami.
(Original FB post: 7 August 2009)
I was introduced to Murakami's work a two or three years ago by a friend who included the book he recommended in a category (obviously pre-established in his mind) of "life-changing books". That book was "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", and I would not dissent from the categorisation, if one accepts that lives change in slight and subtle, but nonetheless significant, ways. I've read another three Murakami books since that first one and though none quite touches it (because it was the first?) for life-changingness, on each occasion one re-enters the strange, surreal, metaphysical and bewildering world of the Japanese dreamweaver with surprising ease.
In "Kafka on the Shore", Murakami does it again, mixing an engaging real-world narrative - here about a 15 year-old runaway and an unworldly cat-tracker (he does it by talking to them), with a supporting cast of characters including a librarian of oddly indeterminate sex, an ex-tough guy lorry driver who learns to love Beethoven and talk to cats, a somewhat mysterious roving "concept" who variously takes on the form of "capitalist icons" such as Johnnie Walker or Colonel Sanders, and an ethereal middle-aged beauty with a melancholy, oedipal personal history - with increasingly metaphysical episodes which may or may not be (probably not) of this world.
Getting the idea?
I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff, which, I should emphasise is highly readable narrative, but feel that maybe "Kafka" gets a little too overtly metaphysical to be as satisfyingly and mysteriously peplexing as the "Wind-Up Bird".
One small point: curiously, the fact of this being Japanese is decidely NOT part of the wierdness and mystery of these books - Murakami's Japan is instantly recognisable as the modern environment we all inhabit. It's just that, well, strange, unaccountable things happen.
Recommendation: of course. However, as you may have gathered, if you're new to Murakami, I would suggest starting with the "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". (I put my money where my mouth is; I just gave a copy to my brother-in-law for his birthday.)
I was introduced to Murakami's work a two or three years ago by a friend who included the book he recommended in a category (obviously pre-established in his mind) of "life-changing books". That book was "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", and I would not dissent from the categorisation, if one accepts that lives change in slight and subtle, but nonetheless significant, ways. I've read another three Murakami books since that first one and though none quite touches it (because it was the first?) for life-changingness, on each occasion one re-enters the strange, surreal, metaphysical and bewildering world of the Japanese dreamweaver with surprising ease.
In "Kafka on the Shore", Murakami does it again, mixing an engaging real-world narrative - here about a 15 year-old runaway and an unworldly cat-tracker (he does it by talking to them), with a supporting cast of characters including a librarian of oddly indeterminate sex, an ex-tough guy lorry driver who learns to love Beethoven and talk to cats, a somewhat mysterious roving "concept" who variously takes on the form of "capitalist icons" such as Johnnie Walker or Colonel Sanders, and an ethereal middle-aged beauty with a melancholy, oedipal personal history - with increasingly metaphysical episodes which may or may not be (probably not) of this world.
Getting the idea?
I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff, which, I should emphasise is highly readable narrative, but feel that maybe "Kafka" gets a little too overtly metaphysical to be as satisfyingly and mysteriously peplexing as the "Wind-Up Bird".
One small point: curiously, the fact of this being Japanese is decidely NOT part of the wierdness and mystery of these books - Murakami's Japan is instantly recognisable as the modern environment we all inhabit. It's just that, well, strange, unaccountable things happen.
Recommendation: of course. However, as you may have gathered, if you're new to Murakami, I would suggest starting with the "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". (I put my money where my mouth is; I just gave a copy to my brother-in-law for his birthday.)
 |
| Cats are a significant part of this... |
Holiday Reading no. 4 - "The Kappillan of Malta" by Nicholas Monsarrat
(Original FB note: 4 August 2009)
I am told that this is a landmark work of Maltese literature, originally published in 1973. A gift from a Maltese colleague.
This is either a novel masquerading as history, or history masquerading as a novel. Since I enjoy both history and novels (witness the summer selection), this is fine by me. The book is centred on a simple Maltese priest, Dun Salvu, nevetheless of noble Maltese lineage, who finds himself and his vocation under the bombs of World War II during the surprisingly pitiless siege of Malta. Surprising to me anyway, as, though I knew about Malta holding out in the War, I had no idea how brutal the siege actually was. Historically, the novel makes that point extremely well, while interspersing the text with episodes of Maltese history demonstrating that dogged resistance in the face of often gruesome suffering is basically what the Maltese do.
As a narrative, the novel veers quite surprisingly. For much of it's length one seems to be in the presence of a relatively uncomplicated world view, where faith and the old values vanquish all, to the extent that you build this assumption into the reading of the book. However, Dun Salvu reserves quite as few surprises for the reader in the last quarter of the book (significantly also the last forty days - and nights - of the narrative) which do not turn out in the straightforward manner one might expect. Indeed, the ending of the novel leaves many narrative questions open and issues unresolved. By then, to put it in a nutshell, we know that Malta will make it, but are left wondering about the fate, spiritual and temporal, of several of the main characters, including the valiant priest, to whom, by this stage, we have become quite attached...
Recommendation? Curious about Malta and her self-image? Then this is for you. Try not to be put off by the small print packing the 400+ pages - this is really a very readable and flowing book. The novel has a memorable and, as I say, ultimately surprising and even ambiguous central character, but does rather leave the reader high and dry at the end - unless of course this is really more about Malta then any of its characters.
This is either a novel masquerading as history, or history masquerading as a novel. Since I enjoy both history and novels (witness the summer selection), this is fine by me. The book is centred on a simple Maltese priest, Dun Salvu, nevetheless of noble Maltese lineage, who finds himself and his vocation under the bombs of World War II during the surprisingly pitiless siege of Malta. Surprising to me anyway, as, though I knew about Malta holding out in the War, I had no idea how brutal the siege actually was. Historically, the novel makes that point extremely well, while interspersing the text with episodes of Maltese history demonstrating that dogged resistance in the face of often gruesome suffering is basically what the Maltese do.
As a narrative, the novel veers quite surprisingly. For much of it's length one seems to be in the presence of a relatively uncomplicated world view, where faith and the old values vanquish all, to the extent that you build this assumption into the reading of the book. However, Dun Salvu reserves quite as few surprises for the reader in the last quarter of the book (significantly also the last forty days - and nights - of the narrative) which do not turn out in the straightforward manner one might expect. Indeed, the ending of the novel leaves many narrative questions open and issues unresolved. By then, to put it in a nutshell, we know that Malta will make it, but are left wondering about the fate, spiritual and temporal, of several of the main characters, including the valiant priest, to whom, by this stage, we have become quite attached...
Recommendation? Curious about Malta and her self-image? Then this is for you. Try not to be put off by the small print packing the 400+ pages - this is really a very readable and flowing book. The novel has a memorable and, as I say, ultimately surprising and even ambiguous central character, but does rather leave the reader high and dry at the end - unless of course this is really more about Malta then any of its characters.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)