Reviews

For the record this is me talking

May 24, 2013 – 7:34 am

The Last Thing He Wanted
by Joan Didion

The Last Thing He Wanted

So Tim went on holiday without me and the only thing about it I am jealous of is his discovery of the Last Bookstore in LA, which looks pretty darned amazing. And because Tim is quite nice really he bought me some books there, a couple by authors he knew I’d like and one book entirely based on the recommendation of the bookseller. Now I’m not sure how long Tim spent telling this bookseller about my taste in books, but she got it so very right. I had never read any Didion (although I had heard of her and may even have one of her journalistic pieces on my wishlist) but this novel is completely up my street.

Usually this is the point where I give a very brief plot synopsis but that’s going to be quite tough here, not necessarily for fear of spoilers, but more because for most of the book I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on or what it was all about. It did all come together in the end, but I think that feeling a bit lost was an integral part of the reading experience for me.

“There were hints all along, clues we should have registered , processed, sifted for their application to the general condition.”

I suppose you could call it a thriller, maybe a political thriller. It has the right elements: spies, embassies, arms deals, shady characters, multiple identities, an unspecified island location. It even has a reporter as its central character, Elena McMahon, only she’s not there as a journalist, she’s somehow involved more deeply in the murky goings-on of an island that should be tourist heaven but isn’t. However, it’s not written like any thriller I’ve ever read before. The story is in a jumble, not stream of consciousness but not straightforward narrative either. But it’s not messy, it’s carefully constructed. There are repeated phrases and fragments, like memories someone is trying to put back together in the right order.

“Goddamn what’s the matter out there.
Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda, blue so intense you could drown again.
We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.”

And who is that someone? The story is narrated by a curious combination of omniscient narrator and background character. But how can one character possibly have all these veiled links to Elena and have access to all these government files and interviews that are supposedly being used to put together the story of what happened to Elena McMahon on that island in 1984? So are we being misled?

“For the record this is me talking.
You know me, or think you do.
The not quite omniscient author.
No longer moving past.
No longer traveling light.
When I resolved in 1994 to finally tell this story, register the clues I had missed ten years before, process the information before it vanished altogether, I considered reinventing myself…a strategy I ultimately jettisoned as limiting, small-scale, an artifice to no point…
The best story I ever told was a reef dream. This is something different.”

In some ways, this book reminded me of a good film, like Open Your Eyes or Tell No-one, in the way it unfolds, with repeated flashes of key scenes and the situation devolving further and further from safe normality. As a reader, it’s an odd experience. I never felt I “settled into” the story; more than halfway through I was still shaking my head trying to figure out where it was going (though the clues are all there, and it would be interesting to read this again to see if it’s a more straightforward read second time around) but I still enjoyed it.

My only reservation is that to sell the government side of the plot, there are forays into political language that I would characterise as mumbo jumbo, or even corporate speak. And there’s a very definite attempt to make sure you don’t know if you can trust Elena, to the point that it becomes a little alienating. But then again not knowing who to trust is half the fun of a thriller, right?

Published 1996 by Vintage Books.

Source: Present from Tim, who bought it in a real (and awesome-looking) bookshop.

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It’s all about getting people to talk

May 18, 2013 – 3:10 pm

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare at Goats
by Jon Ronson

This book was chosen for my book club and I am glad on two counts – it has made me want to watch a film that I dismissed out of hand at the time, and it has introduced me to a writer and journalist I now really really like – and yet I would never have picked it up myself.

The book follows Ronson’s investigation into “psychic spies” within the US Army. The events he unveils run from the 1960s to 2003, when he was writing the book, but the story is not told chronologically, it is told in the order in which he discovered the information, which is a little confusing but also creates the opportunity for Ronson to leave teasers and hints about what’s coming.

But what exactly is he investigating? Well, it begins with the rather bizarre rumour that a secret army unit kept a barn full of goats to train themselves in the art of staring a man to death. Ronson digs and digs and speaks to a LOT of people and discovers that the story is both sillier and far more sinister than it at first sounded.

Essentially, it all begins with Jim Channon, whose experience of war in Vietnam affected him for life. Essentially he became a hippie, but rather than leave the army he stayed and even rose in its ranks, while espousing a new philosophy to his superiors. He suggests that soldiers learn meditation, martial arts, spiritualism and other “non-lethal techniques”.

“It was heartbreaking for Jim to realize that Private First Class Shaw had died because his fellow soldiers were impulsively guileless and kind-hearted, and not the killing machines the army wanted them to be…’The kind of person attracted to military service has a great deal of difficulty being cunning. We suffered in Vietnam from not being cunning.’”

He even wrote a treaty, The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, a strange combination of inner peace and unusual torture techniques that news reports reveal were being used in Iraq in 2003.

Which is where the book turns from quirky to serious journalism. Not that it is any way tough or hardgoing; Ronson is a very entertaining and engaging writer. He digs out the key details, the anecdotes that bring a person to life.

The book is funny yet disturbing. The concept of “non-lethal” stretches very very far, in fact at one point there’s a conversation about whether it can include something that leads to death a few weeks later.

The shocking part is not that the US Army employed terrible methods of interrogation/torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay; that’s pretty much common knowledge. The surprise is that many of those methods have their roots in hippie pacifism, the same roots that led General Albert Stubblebine III to be convinced that if he could just concentrate hard enough, he’d be able to walk through walls.

“‘That’s what the First Earth Battalion did,’ said Jim. ‘It opened the military mind to how to use music.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘it’s all about getting people to talk in a…in a what?’
‘A psycho-spiritual dimension,’ said Jim. ‘Besides the basic fear of being hit, we have a mental, spiritual and psychic component. So why not use that?’”

Through all the disparate details unearthed by Ronson, the line from crazy hippie to crazy evil is definite if occasionally fuzzy, but the crazy is ever-present. And these aren’t random outliers but respected career professionals within the army.

I loved this book but the reaction at book club was more tempered. There was some frustration at the muddled timeline but also at the lack of any clear conclusion or final revelation. To some extent I think that’s just the nature of this particular beast. The book was published in 2004, while US activity was at its height in Iraq and Guantanamo. The revelations about what really happened there were already appearing in the press and have continued to come out. That’s not the story Ronson is telling, it’s just one facet of it, but because it’s the most awful part it feels a little like a dropped conclusion. If anything, though, the revelation would be whether any of those original founders of the “psychic spies” really were pacifist hippies or if they were just extremely odd and possibly dangerous. And whether the secret unit still exists.

Published 2004 by Picador.

Source: Amazon.

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A sunburst split the seams of the clouds

May 14, 2013 – 9:34 pm

The Monsters of Templeton

The Monsters of Templeton
by Lauren Groff

A good friend mentioned this book to me because it features a friendship between two girls, one of whom has lupus, and that was enough to interest me. However, that is just one plot thread in a novel that has so much going on you could easily accuse it of that typical feature of the debut novel – that the author threw everything into it – except that that sounds like a bad thing and I really really enjoyed this.

I tried describing the story to Tim and I think overwhelmed him with all the stuff, and yet it doesn’t read like a plot-heavy novel because the writing is lyrical and the elements are given room to breathe, not rushed through. I’m not quite sure how Groff achieved this in just 360 pages but I suspect it is because she has wound everything up together, so that it is all linked.

“We have run through the dark orange days of July, run through the summer mornings soft as mouse fur, through the drizzle, through the baking heat…This is called solace, our morning run.”

The central character is Wilhelmina, or Willie, Upton, a 28-year-old archaeologist who turns up on her mother Vi’s doorstep heartbroken and lost after a disastrous affair with a married man. She has come home to Templeton, the small New York town where she not only grew up, but was the direct descendent of the town’s founder, the semi-legendary Marmaduke Temple. Vi decides that this is the moment to reveal to Willie that she is not, as she had been told, the result of free love in a San Francisco hippy commune, but instead that her father is someone in Templeton, someone Willie has known all her life. But Vi doesn’t tell Willie who, instead she gives her a clue about his ancestry, sending Willie digging through the town archives and old family letters. Alternate chapters are narrated by characters from the town’s past, giving both a flavour of the history of the town and clues to Willie’s quest.

Back in the life Willie has run away from in California, her best friend Clarissa is seriously ill, having been diagnosed with lupus on the brink of multiple organ failure and now months into a treatment regime that is kept quite vague, frustratingly for me as I had an obvious interest in that part. This was inevitably the thread that was going to be hardest for Groff to sell to me and to be honest I think it was done pretty well, with only a couple of minor misfires. Clarissa teeters between exhaustion and boredom/frustration at being home and not able to work, which rang pretty true for me. Her boyfriend Sully cares for her but is angry at Willie for not being there, for having disappeared first on a months-long archaeological dig and now back to her mother.

“There was a painful rubbery silence then, when the noise of the crowd down at the park burbled up to the house and a few chirps from the frog-pool began to rise and the grandfather clock ticked and ticked in the dining room.”

And then there’s the monster. Yes, an actual monster. On the day Willie arrives back in Templeton, a huge dead creature is found floating in the lake that the town is built on the edge of. The creature is dragged to the shore and then away to a laboratory where a series of biologists fail to identify it. But the residents of the town know that it was their monster, that it had been there in the lake longer than the town, and without it everything feels wrong, empty somehow.

This last thread was the one I found difficult to reconcile with the rest of the novel. There’s a touch of the mystical or fantasy in the story of the monster. In the historical sections of narrative we learn that troubled souls have always been drawn to the monster (indeed, a number have committed suicide by walking into the lake) and Willie herself may be one of these characters linked to the monster. It’s a fairly clear metaphor for the life of the town and for Willie’s emotional state and sometimes I liked the touch of surreal that it added to the novel, but at others I found it a little out of place.

There is so very much going on in this novel that I haven’t yet touched on. There’s the complicated mother-daughter relationship between Vi and Willie. Hippie feminist Vi appears to have found God and a drippy priest for a boyfriend, much to Willie’s chagrin. And Willie wants to curl up and be a child again just as Vi has found herself ready to move on from being a mother above all else. There’s the similarly complicated friendship between Willie and Clarissa, college buddies who can get on each other’s nerves as well as love unconditionally, who can hold back and keep secrets from each other but also at times be brutally, painfully honest.

There are many more subjects covered, such as the concept of home or belonging to a place, and the importance to some people of having a family history to draw on (though Clarissa, an orphan, seems to feel more drawn to Templeton as a home than Willie is). And of course the mysteries and secrets behind every door, behind every face. Whether it’s a broken heart or something much darker, everyone is hiding something.

“Outside, Templeton was still a pigeon gray, but over the far hills a sunburst split the seams of the clouds and blazed one stamp of trees a strange green-gold. I had dressed in a short yellow sundress from high school because I felt so sad and only that dress seemed to hold an element of light in it.”

Between the chapters there are old photographs labelled with the names of characters going back to Marmaduke Temple and even the last native people who lived on the land before the town was founded. It was perhaps not surprising to find, on reading the author’s note, that the fiction was loosely based on Groff’s hometown of Cooperstown, right down to the town’s famous author – James Fennimore Cooper – who wrote semi-fictional accounts of his town and the characters in it. In fact, readers more familiar with Cooper’s writing than me will probably know that he called his fictional town Templeton and many of the historical character names used by Groff are also his. Groff has written a love letter to her hometown and an homage to its great writer.

Despite its everything but the kitchen sink storyline, this novel is beautiful, with interesting, sympathetic but fallible characters and a very skilled use of multiple voices to bring a whole town to life. Perhaps it would be more generous to call it multi-layered, which it certainly is, as well as intelligent and probing. I will definitely look out for the author’s other books.

Published 2008 by Hyperion.

Source: Borrowed from a friend.

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Spring reads in brief

May 9, 2013 – 8:20 pm

Predictably, having dared to enjoy just a smudge of the lovely weather we had before everything turned to rain, my lupus is flaring and my brain is therefore fried. So rather than write pages on each book I have enjoyed lately, I will just crib together my notes into something hopefully coherent.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
or the Murder at Road Hill House
by Kate Summerscale

So when I first heard about this title somehow I didn’t realise it was non-fiction – and it reads like it. My own fault, I know, but even as historical non-fiction goes it is not stylishly written. It is however, very very interesting and absorbing. It recounts the case of the murder of an infant son at an English country home in 1860 and the ensuing investigation by Detective Inspector Whicher, one of the original police detectives when Scotland Yard was founded. Although the style was dry, I couldn’t forget that it was the story of a real-life murder and therefore found it very eerie and unsettling – I couldn’t read it last thing at night after having difficulty sleeping the first night I did that! What I really liked was the background of detective fiction versus real police detectives – I found it fascinating that they emerged together, each learning from other, and could happily have had more of that. It was, however, a bit repetitive – a character might have been introduced just a few pages before and at their next mention would again get a full explanation of who they are. But for all its faults, this was a compelling read. I didn’t want to put it down and easily got into the habit of reading after work rather than watching TV.

“The family story that Whicher pieced together at Road Hill House suggested that Saville’s death was part of a mesh of deception and concealment. The detective stories that the case engendered, beginning with The Moonstone in 1868, took this lesson. All the suspects in a classic murder mystery have secrets, and to keep them they lie, dissemble, evade the interrogations of the investigator. Everyone seems guilty because everyone has something to hide. For most of them, though, the secret is not murder. This is the trick on which detective fiction turns.”

Published 2008 by Bloomsbury.

Source: Borrowed from the library.

The Books of Magic
story by Neil Gaiman
art by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess and Paul Johnson

Tim has spent years recommending this to me and I finally gave in. This trade paperback is a compilation of the mini series of comics that Gaiman wrote that turned into an ongoing series with other writers at the helm. I think we have the first few of those as single issues in the library. But I digress. In the mini series we meet teenage boy Timothy Hunter who is told by a group of strange men that he has the potential to become the world’s most powerful wizard, and does he want to know more? The four strangers take it in turn to introduce Tim to the various forms that magic takes, from performance artists in San Francisco to faerieland and even time travel. It is a beautiful book with fantastic characters but it left me with a similar feeling to the first volume of Sandman – where was the story? I suppose because it’s the set-up for a longer project, nothing is really resolved, everything is just introduced, but the longer series isn’t Gaiman so I am torn now as to whether I want to carry on.

“[We must] show him what magic truly is, and what it was, and what it may become. It is up to the four of us to ensure that he chooses his path correctly. Are we all in agreement? Doctor Occult?”
“I agree. I will show him the Far Lands.”
“Mister E?”
“If you are too soft to dispose of him, then I suppose you must educate him. If he gets that far then I will take him to the end.”
“Constantine?”
“Yeah, fair enough. I’ll give him the grand tour, introduce him to the runners, give him an idea of the starting price…Just what the world’s been waiting for. The charge of the trenchcoat brigade.”
“I heard that, John Constantine.”

First published as single issues 1990–1991 by DC Comics. This compilation published 2001.

Source: I bought it from Excelsior! comic bookshop in Bristol.

Claudine and Annie
by Colette
translated from French by Antonia White

This is the last in the series about Claudine and, oddly, not only is it the first to not be narrated by Claudine, but she’s not even the main character. This book is narrated by new character Annie, a young, closeted Parisian woman whose husband has left on a long voyage and who gradually starts to disobey her husband’s orders as she makes the most of Parisian society, including strengthening her friendship with a certain Claudine. Though Annie is interesting enough, I was disappointed to find that this is barely even a Claudine book at all. Claudine is now so happy and settled in her life that the most interesting thing about her is her effect on other people, so it does make sense, but it still wasn’t the same, and in some ways seemed a blatant method of depicting another fall from innocence. This novel doesn’t veer into soft porn like the previous ones but it would certainly have been risque for its time in the descriptions of relationships. The characters are all wonderful, I just would have liked more Claudine.

“He has gone! He has gone! I keep saying these words to myself; now I am writing them down on paper to find out if they are true and if they are going to hurt me…I am afraid to move, to breathe, to live. A husband ought not to leave his wife – not when it is this particular husband and this particular wife.”

Claudine s’en va first published 1903.
This translation first published 1962 by Secker & Warburg. Reissued by Penguin.

Source: I bought it from a secondhand bookshop.

See also: my reviews of Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris and Claudine Married.

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An infinite sadness took hold of him

April 29, 2013 – 8:54 pm

Dan Yack

Dan Yack
by Blaise Cendrars
translated from French by Nina Rootes

Probably the most serendipitous book find of my life was in the Oxford branch of Blackwells Bookshop about eight years ago. From their bargain bins I randomly picked up a book I had never heard of by an author I had never heard of and I completely loved it; in fact it’s one of my top three or four books ever. That book was The Confessions of Dan Yack by Blaise Cendrars, which is actually the second book about Dan Yack, so for years I had been intending to read this earlier novel but somehow it just sat there on the TBR.

This is a stunning piece of writing. If everything was written this way I would probably find it frustrating but in this case it works. It blends the poetic and the banal, even baseness. A couple of pages might include high adventure, stream of consciousness, erotica, boredom, detailed descriptions of settings and switch between multiple points of view.

“The Neva flowed past at eye-level. The rushing current swept the timber-barges down at full speed; crouched and menacing, they ploughed through the close-packed waves that were ruffled up the wrong way by the harsh wind of dawn. Sudden shivers rippled the wet fur of the river as it stretched itself nervously and arched its back.”

In its 130 pages we follow multi-millionaire playboy Dan Yack from St Petersburg to Liverpool to the Antarctic to Chile. Yack is an eccentric and initially appears frivolous and unthinking but gradually reveals both good business sense and a good heart. However, I never did completely warm to him – the combination of seal hunting and his never having read a book didn’t exactly make him my ideal hero – but I was certainly intrigued.

“Dan Yack suddenly fell silent. He felt uneasy again. His legs sagged. He was overwhelmed by fatigue. An infinite sadness took hold of him, drained him, blew him up again, oppressed him.”

I suppose you might call this a Modernist take on the adventure novel. The bulk of the story centres around Yack deciding to treat his heartbreak by spending a winter in the Antarctic. On a whim he invites three impoverished artists he meets at the end of a long drunken night of debauchery to join him.

I suppose one of the attractions for me of this book was the Antarctic setting. Cendrars ran away to sea as a teenager so he was almost certainly writing from true experience of the endless days turning into endless nights. Certainly that section had many of the same details and much of the same unease, even terror, of other books I have read with an Antarctic setting.

“Nine times out of ten, the weather was overcast, but when it was not, the night outside was like a fairyland. The icy cold was always intoxicating…sometimes, there is an austral dawn that shakes out its crackling draperies at the level of the ice; it is yellow, green, shot with fugitive gleams and punch-flames.”

The storyline is incredible, in a literal sense, but that’s almost beside the point. Cendrars unveils the human psyche, the revelation is what truly matters to Yack, not what happens to him. But while that sounds terribly serious, the book is actually a lot of fun, with an odd sense of humour, or at least a sense of the ridiculous.

“Deene had to wait a while before he could get a word in because a little nasal phonograph was filling the narrow cabin with a young, charmingly artificial female voice. Dan Yack swore it was a buxom little blonde, wiggling her hips as she sang…
‘Sir,’ the captain began determinedly, ‘I—’
‘Wait,’ said Dan Yack, ‘let me change the cylinder. It’s amazing…Can you see the old tart who’s singing now, Captain?…The sweat’s rolling down from under her ridiculous wig…She’s wearing thick blue stockings with garters at the knee, I adore that! What a marvellous invention!…Wait a minute, I’m going to have you listen to the cries of a sea-lion that’s having its throat cut.’”

While Modernist, this is certainly not an especially modern story. It is full of sexism and racism, not to mention the hunting (Yack’s family fortune is largely based on whale hunting). And yet I loved it. I was utterly spellbound. Huge credit must go to the translator here because every sentence was perfect. I quickly gave up picking out quotes because every line is quotable.

“Outside the storm raged. A sheet of corrugated iron was ripped from the roof. Then a pile of barrels came crashing against the door. The wind besieged the house.
It raged for many days and nights.
The first blizzard.
A white-out.
Winter.”

Apparently Cendrars was one of the founders of, the pioneers, of Modernism and it seems a shame that he is not read widely. I seriously must not wait another eight years to pick up the other Cendrars title on my TBR.

First published 1927 by Editions Denoël. This translation published 1987 by Peter Owen.

Source: I bought this secondhand, probably via Abe Books.

Challenges: This counts toward the 2013 Translation Challenge and the 2013 TBR Pile Challenge.

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A dictionary of loss

April 26, 2013 – 6:27 pm

Mr Chartwell

Mr Chartwell
by Rebecca Hunt

Since this book came out I had wanted to read it and finally persuaded my book club to read it for April – only to get the date of our meeting completely wrong and then get in a reading funk that meant it took me over two weeks to get through this thin little novel. I suspect this reflects unfairly on the book, because it never gripped me and yet I thought it was great.

The Mr Chartwell of the title is a large black dog who turns up on the doorstep of mousy librarian Esther and asks to rent her spare room. He is a bizarre combination of obnoxious human being and actual dog, but we gradually realise he is far more complicated than that. He is the physical manifestation of depression and shares out his attentions between Esther and a certain Winston Churchill.

Mr Chartwell, also known as Black Pat, is a repulsive character, as of course he should be. He irritates, demeans, distracts and tires out his victims. The setting is 1968, on the eve of Churchill’s retirement, so he is by now a dab hand at dealing with Black Pat’s visits, while Esther is completely new to it and takes most of the novel to figure out what is going on.

“A shirt dropped on the floor had developed a modest beauty, cultivating the painterly creases of a restaurant napkin. On the windowsill was a small balding plant. The magic of the late light made it gorgeous and exotic.
Esther stared from the bed, blind to these things. She lay on her side of the mattress. A hand explored the other side and it was a dictionary of loss. Up came the hand, disturbed by something disgusting. A tuft of collected fur. Over the bed, over everything.”

It really is a very original and interesting premise. It’s a clever way to depict depression and anxiety, giving an explanation that is at once nonsensical and yet makes a lot of sense. Several times, Black Pat comments how easy it is to give in to him, how he becomes a friend but of course he is a hated enemy so how can that be?

“She did nothing. The noble action was no action, for to discuss the dog would violate a guarded privacy, exhuming the bones of a family of secrets. It would be grave robbery. The dog’s genius was to make orphans of hope and brotherhood, and she was united with Churchill in their isolation.”

The characterisation is excellent. While it may seem clichéd to have a mousy librarian sinking into depression, Esther’s colleagues Beth and Corkbowl add a bit of liveliness and variety to the workplace. And Churchill’s brash, often aggressive conversations with Black Pat make an interesting contrast to Esther’s meek acceptance. I did find that Churchill spoke a little too much like a speech-maker, in wise aphorisms (except when he was swearing at Black Pat) but perhaps he really did speak like that. I would imagine Hunt did some research on him.

The quote on the front cover of my copy calls it “original, tender and funny” and I largely agree. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny but between the ridiculousness of the talking dog and gentle humour provided by characters in a more everyday way there is definitely some fun. And the issue of depression is certainly explored tenderly, carefully keeping its extreme depths at a distance, though they are certainly acknowledged. But really this is more about the lower-level, longer-lingering depression, a constant anxiety that has to be kept in check, the ongoing battle to get on with life.

“‘I aspire to have the smile of Tess of the D’Urbervilles…Hardy wrote that she had a smile like roses of snow.’
…Esther took in the exhibition of teeth. No roses of snow, it was a split haggis stuck with shards of coconut bark.”

First published 2010 by Fig Tree. Published in Penguin Books 2011.

Source: I think I bought this myself from an actual proper bookshop.

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Book and film: “I just know that another kid has felt this”

April 17, 2013 – 9:15 pm

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky

I must admit that this book came on my radar because of the film, but both book and film sounded right up my street so I thought I’d check it out. I was completely right – this is a very sweet story. I’ll start with my thoughts on the book.

Charlie is starting high school and as a coping mechanism he starts writing anonymous letters about his life to a stranger, as an alternative to keeping a diary. He documents his discovery of girls, drugs, music and sex but this isn’t a straightforward coming of age tale.

“My brother started saying how my sister was just a ‘bitchy dyke.’ Then, my mom told my brother to not use such language in front of me, which was strange considering I am probably the only one in the family with a friend who is gay…
‘Are you high?’
And again my mom asked my brother not to use such language in front of me, which was strange again because I think I’m the only person in my family who’s ever been high…Then again, maybe my whole family has been high, and we just don’t tell each other these things.”

Charlie is socially awkward and, we gradually realise, suffers from some form of depression and/or other psychological disorder. What it is is never stated outright but there are hints that things in his past have affected him badly. He begins as a thorough outsider but gets taken under the wing of brother and sister Sam and Patrick, who cheerfully embrace alternative culture, in the form of music, drugs and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Charlie is also “adopted” by a schoolteacher who gives him extra books to read.

There are a lot of characters who are damaged in some way, often having suffered horribly as young children, and it is one of the book’s strengths that it acknowledges that this has affected them without making it define them. It is in many ways a joyous book about the good times of being a teenager, and yet serious issues are tackled.

“I just know that another kid has felt this…all the books you’ve read have been read by other people. And all the songs you’ve loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that’s pretty to you is pretty to other people.”

There are lots of books, songs and films referenced; music in particular is key to the friendships depicted. Which lends itself very nicely to, say, a film soundtrack.

In the world of book-versus-film-adaptation, this is a bit of an unusual case. It’s Chbosky’s only novel to date; he seems to have carved a career as a film and TV writer. Indeed, he wrote the screenplay for and directed the film of this book. So it’s unsurprising that it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, with the same tone and the same key moments.

There are some differences. Some plot strands are necessarily jettisoned, which makes the film less nuanced (I’m thinking particularly of Charlie’s brother and sister here, who both had bigger roles in the book). When reading the book I thought there were hints that Charlie might be autistic to some degree, but there was no sign of that in the film. In the film I felt that the Rocky Horror Picture Show got much more emphasis than I’d expected, which reminded me a lot of Fame (indeed, the two have a few things in common and might make a good double bill).

Overall, I enjoyed both film and book. Neither is a classic but they’re certainly better than average and do a good job of balancing tough subjects with a happy, even optimistic, attitude to life.

Published 1999 by MTV Books.

Source: I bought this secondhand.

Challenges: This counts towards the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge.

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Crime and Punishment read-a-long week 10 to the end

April 14, 2013 – 1:29 pm

Read-a-long

Once I realised there were only just over 100 pages of this tome left, I couldn’t drag out reading it for another three weeks, as per the official schedule, so I read straight through to the end. Before I get to the spoilers for this final discussion post, I thought I’d write a few thoughts about the book as a whole.

For one thing, I still think I could have found a better translation. It has been interesting seeing excerpts quoted over at Unputdownables that were significantly different from what I had read. I started out reading the Penguin Popular Classics edition from 1997, which I found dull and depressing. I switched (or rather started over) to the Oxford World’s Classics edition translated by Jessie Coulson in 1953 and updated by Coulson in 1981 and initially found it a much better read. However, when other readers started raving about beautifully written or moving passages I looked at my edition and thought ‘Really?’. So there’s that.

The story seemed very slow. I mean, essentially, all the action happens in the early chapters, the rest of the book is the psychological effect of those actions. But there are a lot of characters and none of them is straightforward, in personality or in motivation, which makes guessing where the story is going quite tricky. There are a lot of intellectual discussions about not only crime and punishment, but also class, philosophy, love, society – there’s certainly a lot to get your teeth into. So while I didn’t find the story gripping, I did always find it interesting.

I would not say this was an instant favourite for me, or even highly ranked among classics I’ve read. I recognise it as a great piece of work but for me it was an intellectual exercise not an enjoyable read. I’ve heard it said that often people love either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy but rarely both, so perhaps I’d best give Leo a go.

And now for some thoughts on those final chapters. In weeks 10 and 11 I read from part 5 chapter 5 to the end. The official discussion posts will go up at Unputdownables every Friday. Unavoidably, the following will be pretty darned spoilerific.

There are so many characters who come across as just as or even more creepy than Ras, I had to keep reminding myself that he’s a murderer. But then in those moments when he tries to justify his murders a chill would go up my spine and I would, just for that moment, intensely dislike him.

“Although he judged himself severely, his lively conscience could find no particularly terrible guilt in his past, except a simple blunder, that might have happened to anybody… ‘What makes what I have done seem to them so monstrous?’ he asked himself. ‘The fact that it was a crime? What does the word mean? My conscience is easy…Many benefactors of mankind who did not inherit power but seized it for themselves should have been punished at their first steps. But the first steps of those men were successfully carried out, and therefore they were right, while mine failed, which means I had no right to permit myself that step.’”

Porfiry’s handling of Ras is clever if bizarre. He pretends friendship, pretends to have a scrap of evidence and pretends to enjoy debating the philosophy of murder and power just to persuade Ras that he must confess.

“His breath failed and he could not finish. He had listened with indescribable agitation while this man, who had seen right through him, repudiated his own judgement. He dared not, he could not, believe it. Eagerly he had scrutinized the still ambiguous words to find something more precise and definite.”

I thought from quite early in the novel that Ras would end up confessing, but I’ll admit there were times I was almost persuaded that instead he would run away or kill himself or even that a key piece of evidence or witness would turn up so that he could be arrested. However, there are increasing signs towards the end that Ras is headed for prison camp in Siberia.

“He wandered aimlessly. The sun was going down. A particular sort of dejection had recently begun to show itself in him. There was nothing violent or poignant about it, but it carried with it a premonition of perpetuity, weary, endless years of cold deadening depression, a presage of an eternity on a hand’s breadth of ground.”

Dunya doesn’t half attract some horrid men, huh? Although Razumikhin is completely lovely so at least she has him. But Svidrigalov, like Luzhin, goes to great lengths to make himself look better (and Ras look worse) to win Dunya. Of course, she is too smart to be fooled and Svidrigalov, unlike Luzhin, gives up when Dunya rejects him. And Dunya is of course one of two great positive influences on her brother (the other being Sonya). In fairness, Razumikhin tried to be but just couldn’t understand Ras well enough to help him the way the women could.

“‘It was to escape the shame that I wanted to drown myself, Dunya, but the thought came to me, when I was already standing on the bank, that if I had hitherto considered myself strong, then the shame should not frighten me now. Is that pride, Dunya?’
‘Yes, Rodya, it is pride.’
The almost extinct fire flared up again in his lustreless eyes; it was as though he were pleased that he could still be proud.
‘And you don’t think, sister, that I was simply afraid of the water?’ he asked, with an ugly smile, looking into her face.
‘Oh, stop, Rodya!’”

As for that epilogue – talk about redemption and the power of being loved by a good woman! It’s interesting that Sonya is that epitome of the good woman who is beloved by all, considering her background. But then, it seemed to me that at no point did Dostoevsky judge her or even her profession negatively. Those characters who tried to use it against her were all proved wrong for doing so. But of course Ras was also using her unfairly, right up to the last couple of pages.

“Do I love her? … Oh, how low I have fallen! No – I wanted her tears, I wanted to see her terror, and watch her heart being torn and tormented! I wanted something, anything, to cling to, any excuse for delay, some human being to look at!”

So that’s it. Finished. My detailed thoughts on the rest of the book can be found here. After a couple of extra short books as a reward I’m quite tempted to pick up another huge chunk of a book! Have you read Crime and Punishment? What are your thoughts on it?

First published in the Russian Messenger in 1866.

Source: Borrowed from the library.

Challenges: This counts towards the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge.

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This is not only something in my mind

April 11, 2013 – 6:44 pm

The Small Hand

The Small Hand
by Susan Hill

After I finally got round to reading I’m the King of the Castle last year I decided I really should more of Hill’s work, especially her ghost stories. I bought this on a whim. I suspect it’s not her best.

This is in many ways a classic ghost story. It’s set in modern times but with an older protagonist and recognisable settings (an empty house, fusty libraries, a remote monastery in France, the botanical garden in Oxford) so it has the atmosphere of those Victorian ghost stories.

“All I could hear were the birds settling down, a thrush singing high up on the branches of a walnut tree and blackbirds pinking as they scurried in the undergrowth. I got out of the car and, as I stood there, the birdsong gradually subsided and then there was an extraordinary hush, a strange quietness into which I felt I had broken as some unwelcome intruder.”

Rare book dealer Adam Snow is on his way home from visiting a client when he gets lost in poorly signposted country lanes and finds himself at the entrance to an old abandoned country house. While standing at the edge of the overgrown garden he feels a small child’s hand in his own, but of course there is no child there. This begins both a small obsession with the house and a series of ghostly episodes that threaten to drive Adam crazy or even kill him.

“As I stood in the gathering stillness and soft spring dusk, something happened. I do not much care whether or not I am believed. That does not matter. I know. That is all…I know because if I close my eyes now I feel it happening again, the memory of it is vivid and it is a physical memory. My body feels it, this is not only something in my mind.”

I found this novel a bit predictable though still a good ride and beautifully written, but it didn’t scare me. At all. Which is a real failing in a ghost story. And I even read this alone in bed late at night.

I did like the spooky settings, particularly the mountain-top monastery with its amazing hidden library and the descriptions of stillness and quiet there. I could imagine a fantastic mystery story set there, but maybe I’m just thinking of The Name of the Rose!

Published 2010 by Picador.

Source: I bought it secondhand.

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This is a disaster movie directed by Satan

April 8, 2013 – 8:19 pm

Dead Air

Dead Air
by Iain Banks

Timing, huh? Ever since my GCSE English teacher put beautiful posters of Banks’ book Whit on the classroom wall I have intended to read his books and just not got round to it. When planning my Easter read-a-thon Tim picked this book out from my TBR and I finally became a legitimate Iain Banks fan just a couple of days before learning the very sad news of his terribly ill health.

Ken Nott is a London DJ, an extreme liberal who likes to shock. He’s a good guy, except when it comes to relationships because he is major cheatypants.

The story opens with a hedonistic party. Drugs, scandal, bitching and bad behaviour are cranked up high and then news filters through that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. In the aftermath of 9/11, Nott’s brand of humour is right on the edge of uncomfortable, using liberalism as a form of attack. He says a lot of things any left-wing person might say now, 11+ years later, but few would have dared to say in those heightened days.

“That day, sitting in the ruins of the abandoned party…we kept going out onto the terrace to look at the Canary Wharf towers, tall against the skyline less than a mile away, half expecting to see them hit by a plane and crumble with the same awful grandeur as the first tower. ‘It’s Pearl Harbor II,’ we said. ‘They’ll fucking nuke Baghdad.’…’The barbarians have seized the narrative.’ ‘Fuck, the bad guys are re-writing the scripts…this is a disaster movie directed by Satan.’”

Between saying crazy things to the wrong people and being an ass when it comes to women, Nott gets himself into trouble in various ways, so when his life comes under threat, there are all sorts of possible reasons for it, most of which are red herrings.

I must admit I came to like Nott and even found myself thinking he talked a lot of sense. But the story definitely got better when it became a thriller, albeit a literary one. And it was funny. Gotta love a book that’s both literary and funny.

“Liberals…They’re my kind of people. Liberals want niceness. What the hell is wrong with that? And, bless them, they do it in the teeth of such adversity! The world, people, are disappointing them all the time, constantly throwing up examples of what total shites human beings can be, but liberals just take it all…and they keep on going…sending cheques to good causes, turning up at marches, getting politely embarrassed by working-class oafism and just generally getting all hot under the collar…I’m telling you, it’s a sick, sick nation that turned the word ‘liberal’ into an expletive.”

Published 2002 by Little, Brown.

Source: I’m pretty sure I bought it from a real live bookshop but a long time ago now. Too long ago.

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