I have read William Dalrymple before, The Last Mughal (2006). This astonishingly powerful account of the Indian Mutiny (or the "First War of Independence", as I now know it to be termed in India) made a huge impression on me, to the extent that when, in preparation for an upcoming trip to India, I spotted the name "Dalrymple" in the travel section of Nottingham Waterstones, I could hardly not pick up the book.
City of Djinns is an autobiographical account of a year spent by a young William Dalrymple, together with his newlywed wife, Olivia, in Delhi. The book is a mix of the personal recollection of an (initially) rather wide-eyed Brit decamping in the chaos that is Delhi and the learning he acquires while there: tales of the British Raj (a brief interlude), the Mughal empire it supplanted and indeed the preceding centuries, fading into the semi-myth, semi-history of the Mahabharata. Correspondingly, the book provides a marvellous introduction to the reality of contemporary Delhi (though the 12 years since its publication have wrought many changes, I suspect) as well as to the history with permeates the city, both through the monuments and sites any tourist will visit (Humayan's Tomb, the Red Fort...) and through the oral tradition and backstreet religion the casual visitor will find it much harder to encounter directly.
I am, I confess, a bit behind. Two subsequent read books lie between me and Canada, which is a shame, as this book deserves comment while still entirely fresh in mind. So apologies, both to the book and to those who read this.
Richard Ford is a consequential writer, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a man whose personal appearances can fill theatres. Indeed, he recently appeared at Bozar in Brussels, where 300 people grilled the "legendary author" about his life and work. I was not there, thus adding another #fail to laxness in sitting down to write about this admirable book.
I had never read anything by Ford before, so came to Canada completely fresh. The book, a nice rough-cut hardback edition, was a birthday gift from my most literary friend, Neil, and recommended itself sufficiently to jump the queue of books on the "to read" shelf upstairs.
Canada is about consequences. Here, the consequences flow from a seemingly anomalous event in the life of a otherwise ostensibly rather bland Midwestern family (though, beware, consequences apply here too), the decision of the parents to rob a bank. The story is told by their son Dell Parsons, 15 at the time, from a perspective which is both contemporary and from the perspective of fifty years later, when Dell looks back to his life-defining event. The tone is meditative, the pace slow. Ford is not interested in twists and turns, dramatic tension, but with looking at perceptions and at how events play out and the effect they have on his characters, Dell, and, to a lesser extent, his twin sister, Berner. The first line of the novel, one of the best I have encountered for a while, encapsulates nicely how it is going to go.
First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
A first for Himoverthere, at least since the inception of this blog: a book in French! I have always rather thought that there were enough books in English to keep me fully occupied, so, franchement, why add a complicating factor to my leisure reading. Lazy, yes, I know...
In this case, however, the book was a gift from a French friend. We're talking about someone with whom I almost always speak English and who, while he is irredeemably and irrepressibly French in most ways, is anything but a cultural imperialist. Consequently, I was inclined to pay heed to this unusual recommendation. As we will see, just as well.
Parenthetically, there has actually been one non-English language book reviewed here before, Gomorra, the astounding and courageous exposé of the Neapolitan mafia by Roberto Saviano. In that case I could at least direct non-Italian speakers to a translation (and a film). Here, however, I can't find any trace of a translation into English, and indeed I wonder whether it ever will exist, given just how French this book is. So apologies in advance for any frustration I might create among those who don't have the option of reading the French original.
OK, so the book.
It starts with a hypothesis. The famous semiologist, Roland Barthes, was killed in a stupid and unnecessary road traffic accident (as most road traffic accidents are) in Paris in 1980. But what if it wasn't an accident? Barthes, as it happens (this is true), was fresh from lunching with then putative presidential candidate, François Mitterand. Might foul play have been involved?
From this premise follows an truly extraordinary and most diverting story. Yes, it appears, play was indeed foul. Barthes, when picked up off the road and whisked to hospital, was oddly without any personal identity document, indeed anything about his person (this, I have read, is also true). As the story unravels, we discover that a document of extreme potency was stolen from him in the course of the "accident", a document with the power to influence political and historical events, a document revealing to its readers the (hitherto hypothetical) seventh function of language.
This is one of those purchases based on little more than the anticipated need for a shorter, quicker, lighter read (post-Franzen), a vague wish to read something by a new (to me) author, and some Waterstone's in-store marketing. Short and quick it certainly was, but "light" might be doing it something of a disservice.
Picking this book up in a bookshop, this book looks like a fairly standard-issue work of crime fiction, albeit with the apparently fashionable twist that it is foreign. (I suppose that, after Scandinavian noir, it was time for a dalliance with the German Krimi.) On reading however, this is rather distant from your standard whodunnit, with over half of the book elapsing before the (I am told) familiar figure of defence counsel, Konrad Biegler, comes on the scene to deal with a crime we only discover to have occurred at that point. Prior to that, the story is entirely the life story of the central protagonist, Sebastian von Eschburg.
Eschburg hails from a fading, dysfunctional aristocratic Bavarian family, living out a childhood between a slowly disintegrating Schloss and a cold-showerly traditional boarding school and a slowly disintegrating family. Slowly, at least until the day when the young Eschberg goes hunting with his father, witnesses the evisceration of a deer and something even more traumatising. The boy, later man, lives, somehow seemingly almost contentedly, on the borders of autism, observing the world rather than participating in it, perceiving reality not as most do, but in shades of colour. It is a predisposition he turns to his advantage, as he becomes a photographer, increasingly feted in the art world, though also increasingly drawn to dark, edgy and even criminally pornographic subject matter.
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| Ferdinand von Schirach |
On 18 October, along with some 1500 other people, I went to the Bozar concert hall in Brussels, to see the latest crowd-pulling international star packing them in the course of a European tour. No, not Barenboim; not Yo-Yo Ma either, but superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen. He who has been said to embody The Great American Novelist.
For an American writer to pack out an event in a major concert hall, in a city where English is not even the national language, is fair evidence of his status, and indeed, after we had all endured a rather embarrassing and unnecessary introduction from Flemish writer Saskia De Coster, Franzen delivered for the fans, answering questions from interviewer Annelies Beck (who, by contrast, did a great job) and from the audience with dry and witty aplomb. He also read two extracts from Purity, one relating the purloining of a nuclear missile for the purposes of enhanced sexual gratification in a trashy Texan relationship, the other a conversation between leading character, Tom Aberant, and his former wife, Anabel Laird, aka Penelope Tyler, in the course of which he is persuaded via a rambling, disconnected exchange to go to visit her (something they, and we, know to be a terrible idea). The latter extract in particular showed off Franzen's extraordinary talent for combining great emotional depth with painful but laugh-out-loud comedy. As it happens, I saw this same extract cited by Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times, who did a recent Lunch with the FT interview with Franzen, as having left her "slack-jawed with admiration", but wondering "what his ex-wife would have made of it".
I have remarked on those Franzen sentences before, the ones that stop you in your tracks with admiration for the sheer skill with which he employs language. Purity offers many such moments, though - and I can bring no hard statistics to the table on this - perhaps not with the sheer number of them as we saw in The Corrections or in Freedom. This novel felt just slightly more concerned with the story, in slightly more of a hurry to get on with it, and in fact I was surprised at the speed I was turning the pages, especially in the earlier parts of the novel. Of course, this is still a long book, and a correspondingly long read, but somehow it felt just slightly less effortful than the two previous blockbusters.
I have read William Dalrymple before, The Last Mughal (2006). This astonishingly powerful account of the Indian Mutiny (or the "First War of Independence", as I now know it to be termed in India) made a huge impression on me, to the extent that when, in preparation for an upcoming trip to India, I spotted the name "Dalrymple" in the travel section of Nottingham Waterstones, I could hardly not pick up the book. 
