Where The Children of Húrin, the “first” (the order doesn’t really matter) of the Great Tales, is a long, consistent novel about Túr71st book of 2024.
Where The Children of Húrin, the “first” (the order doesn’t really matter) of the Great Tales, is a long, consistent novel about Túrin Turambar, Beren and Lúthien is a tapestry of bits and pieces, some more incomplete than others, but collaboratively make a repetitive and multifaceted look at one such tale from The Silmarillion. There is a longish (100 pages or so) prose telling of the story which I guess you could call the main body of the text, then the next 200 pages are Christopher Tolkien’s attempts at structuring, organising, and making sense of his father’s versions and drafts of the story. Some in prose, some in poetry. The second largest, around 100 pages again, maybe, is the same story told again (with slight differences) in poetry. The drafts are early Tolkien work, where the Noldor are still called Gnomes and Morgoth has the same Melko/Melkor. I’d be tempted to say that without having read The Silmarillion, you’d find little enjoyment (perhaps even sense!) in this collaborative work.
Of course, if you’ve read The Lord of the Rings, you will have read Strider’s version of the story he tells the hobbits at Weathertop; he and Arwen are a sort of reflection of the story, after all.
The Sundering Seas between them lay, And yet at last they met once more, And long ago they passed away In the forest singing sorrowless.
In 1981, Christopher Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin to say he had a book totally 1,968 pages long. This book was, as he writes in the Preface, his attempt at ‘know[ing] how the whole conception did in reality evolve from the earliest origins . . .’ His father, in a famous 1951 letter, called this story the ‘chief of the stories of The Silmarillion'. I would be tempted to agree with him, for my rating here does not reflect my rating of the story itself but the content of this book. As JRRT rightly calls it: a ‘heroic-fairy-romance’, and thought it ‘beautiful and powerful’. After all, on his wife’s grave the name Lúthien appears, and on his own, Beren.
For those intrigued: be warned, most of the book is the story told again and again, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry, and with slight differences. Even Fingolfin’s stand against Morgoth appears in one such draft, with the wording very similar to how it appears in The Silmarillion. Though a little frustrating and tiring, reading all the drafts and rehashes, one can’t help but feel a deep respect for Christopher Tolkien and the love and respect he likewise poured into his father’s work.
Next up is The Fall of Gondolin, and then the Great Tales are done. I’ve finished a few of the random extra Middle-earth tales and poems, so I am drawing ever closer to the 12-volume History of Middle-earth, which I can’t decide whether I’m brave enough for....more
Disappointing. Not a complete failure at all, but one of my most anticipated reads of the year has fallen partly flat. Maybe nothing67th book of 2024.
Disappointing. Not a complete failure at all, but one of my most anticipated reads of the year has fallen partly flat. Maybe nothing Cusk writes from now on will hold a candle to the Outline Trilogy. The magnum opus has passed and now we are left with what follows. The echoes, so to speak; because the best part, "The Diver" echoes the trilogy: we have characters in a restaurant talking about their lives: art, parenthood, marriage, it could be a scene from the trilogy, but it's not quite. I've always loved the sharpness of Cusk's prose, and the emotion she generates through a sort of coldness. Although that remains the same here, it feels passionless. I've been trying to finish this since last night. I could have easily finished it on yesterday's commute, when I got home, this morning on my day off, this afternoon or even earlier this evening. I've looked at it guiltily a few times today, but haven't been compelled to pick it up. Ironically, as a novel of 'ideas' as it's being regarded, the ideas feel more forced and less poignant than their natural occurrences in the trilogy. I hate to keep comparing, but it's natural. It is better than Second Place, which was a dud, even forgettable. I do think Cusk is one of the top writers working today, and still think that, but this felt like she was trying too hard. That's the most unnerving thing to read, a good writer trying too hard. A character even talks about the nature of an artist not being 'seen' in an artwork, but I saw Cusk hiding behind all the curtains here. Even the bits in the "The Spy" that felt a little meta were distracting, because Cusk was like the little boy's face in the window in the final paintings observed in the novel. I could see her there, peeking in. A little too contrived....more
4.5. Following my reading of The Silmarillion (at last!), and being a long time Tolkien fan, I've finally decided to go about readin65th book of 2024.
4.5. Following my reading of The Silmarillion (at last!), and being a long time Tolkien fan, I've finally decided to go about reading most of his Middle-earth books, and perhaps even all his books. (Alan also half-dared me.) The Children of Húrin is a darker tale of Tolkien's, one that appears in The Silmarillion at roughly 30 pages length. Here, it has been expanded into 250. For one, having already read the shortened version, I enjoyed it as if reading it anew. The expansion did not feel gratuitous at all. I've already come to understand that some of the stories throughout Tolkien's work appear in different forms. I'll be reading Beren and Lúthien soon, for example, which I've already heard Aragorn tell (on Weathertop to the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings), and read in The Silmarillion, too. This doesn't bore me at all.
But back to The Children of Húrin: it involves plenty of anguish, murder, imprisonment, even incest. It is around the time of Morgoth, before Sauron, and therefore a fitting place to move into post-Silmarillion. I'm not overly concerned about my reading order. My mother read me The Hobbit when I was a boy and I've read The Lord of the Rings twice. From that point, I'm just following my inspirations (and whatever I can get a hold of also dictates my order). Generally, the Great Tales are my ambition for now, though I am reading some other Tolkien things, and just finished one of his small non-Middle-earth books, which I'll review shortly. For those who are lost post-LOTR, I think this is a pretty good place to go. It is written much like the trilogy, unlike the drier and more historical/Biblical prose of The Silmarillion. The first few chapters of this might be off-putting as Tolkien sets everything up, but once the story starts, it's enjoyable and readable to the end.
Túrin is a tragic figure and it reads like a Greek epic. As I've said, even knowing the story, I found the sad moments powerful, as if reading for the first time. Tolkien never slips too heavily into melodrama (one of his great talents), and when he does, it feels epic and classical rather than maudlin and pathetic. His knowledge of old texts is the foundation of Middle-earth and all its tales. I imagine this to be one of the better, more thrilling reads of the posthumous tales. ...more
I knew I was in for a good ride when Del Amo starts his book about an abusive father and son in a contemporary setting with a chapte64th book of 2024.
I knew I was in for a good ride when Del Amo starts his book about an abusive father and son in a contemporary setting with a chapter about early humans struggling to survive. His writing is incredibly vivid and, dare I say, almost cinematic. Once you get to the father, mother and son story, I suppose it is essentially 'plotless' in that they go to a dilapidated property, Les Roches, and we watch the slow spiralling of the father. He carries what Del Amo seems to diagnose as hereditary madness, violence, etc. It's also a fantastic look (through the boy) of man and nature, man vs nature. These are some of my favourite books to read, Butcher's Crossing, , The Old Man and the Sea, etc. [1]. Throughout the novel I was wondering what that first chapter about the pack of early humans had to do with the novel, other than, perhaps, aiding the semantics, and I'll leave it unsaid how/if Del Amo returns to it or addresses it again. In the end, it reminded me of other great books about son's struggling under the confusing wrath of their fathers. Most recently Knausgaard's descriptions of his father as tyrant. Then add natural descriptions such as these . . .
He becomes aware of the smell of the mountain, a pungent scent composed of rotting vegetation, barks, bracket fungi and mosses swollen with rainwater, of the invertebrate creatures that stealthily crawl beneath the ancient trunks and the powdery rocks of the riverbed.
Driving winds and floodwaters have deposited enough alluvium within the heart of these ruins for wild roses and elderflowers to take root, and even hazel and locust trees. Their trunks have cut a path through the rubble. They rise through the yawning roof, spreading their branches above, such that the village barns and the village itself look as though once, in a far-off time, they were inhabited by fantastical creatures who deliberately built these structures so that they would blend into the vegetation.
. . . And you've got something special.
______________________
[1] As a side point, does anyone have any recommendations for women & nature / women vs nature? Of course the literary history is often man vs nature, but I'd be intrigued to discover some books about women in nature. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is Groff's newest underwhelming novel The Vaster Wilds. ...more
I went in with low expectations, because these 'lost' novels and posthumous books, you know what you're getting. It's something unfi60th book of 2024.
I went in with low expectations, because these 'lost' novels and posthumous books, you know what you're getting. It's something unfinished or rejected; you do not find Márquez's new book has been published and believe it'll usurp One Hundred Years of Solitude (because few books do, even outside of Márquez novels). But, all things considered, I enjoyed this novella. I read it in one sitting on my morning commute to work and though I haven't necessarily thought about it since, I did get absorbed in my reading of it. It could have been much worse. Though, that said, I'm glad I didn't buy it and just borrowed it from the library....more
I'm slightly behind with my Fitzcarraldo subscription, but I'll try and catch up in the coming weeks. I'm sort of drowning in pages 58th book of 2024.
I'm slightly behind with my Fitzcarraldo subscription, but I'll try and catch up in the coming weeks. I'm sort of drowning in pages at the moment (in reality: at all moments). This was the joint winner, with It Lasts Forever Then It's Over, of the Fitzcarraldo 2022 Novel Prize. Winners are published simultaneously by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and Ireland, New Directions in the US, and Giramondo in Australia and New Zealand. There were over 1,000 entries, and these two winners came out on top, which is amazing to me as I gave It Lasts Forever Then It's Over 3-stars and here I am with 2-stars for Tell.
It's a short novel but has some very long paragraphs. The book is a transcript of a gardener talking about her employer, a rich art collector, Curtis Doyle, who has gone missing. There are also lots of references to the 'crash', that slowly reveals itself too. It reminded me of Henry Green's Loving, which I half-slogged through earlier this year. I just don't go for the small politics of country manors and staff. Green's novel was the original inspiration for the English show Downton Abbey, supposedly, that was all the craze however many years ago now. I guess today's equivalent is the popular series, Bridgerton, on Netflix. I've watched none of these, but this is the sort of thing it reminds me of.
The problem with having a novel like this is it all falls on the voice. The narrator's voice just isn't strong enough to support the novel. It's colloquial and mostly dull. I kept comparing it to books like Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which is carried along by Portnoy's outlandish voice, humour and, well, frankly, all the sex talk. I was never that interested in what the gardener here was saying about her colleagues and Curtis, and without that, the novel just falls flat of anything it wants to achieve. According to the blurb, it examines 'wealth, the art world [...] social classes [...] the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people's'; none of this is particularly realised. Class comes up from time to time, the art world mostly fades from the text. I feel a lot wasn't delivered. A shame, because the transcript thing might have been brilliant, if handled better. The only breaks in the text are comprised of things like '[Pause]' or '[Indistinct]'. The novel starts,
FIRST SESSION
I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You'll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it? Because Lily is what it's about, in my opinion. And the mother is part of the story too. Father too. Goes without saying. But maybe better to pick them up later. Shall we start with the crash? Seems an obvious place.
Well, here we are again with a 1-star Pulitzer winner, like Demon Copperhead last year. Phillips has written a clunky, mostly boring55th book of 2024.
Well, here we are again with a 1-star Pulitzer winner, like Demon Copperhead last year. Phillips has written a clunky, mostly boring novel, set in a fascinating time period (post-Civil War). It felt like a shoddy Faulkner wannabe. It starts,
I got up in the wagon and Papa set me beside Mama, all of us on the buckboard seat. Hold her hand there, he said to me, like she likes. Sit tight in. Keep her still. I saw him lean down and rope her ankle to his. I was warm because he made me wear my bonnet, to keep my skin fine and my eyes from crinkling at the corners. In case someday I turned out after all. Talk to her, he said. Tell her she'll like it where she's going. A fine great place, like a castle with a tower clock. Tell her.
Many reviews focus on the graphic and longwinded sexual assault/rape scene, but there are plenty of problematic scenes, even right at the end with the most ridiculous, dramatic and excessive climax imaginable. The characters' motives all seemed unbelievable and the writing is transparently trying to be good, and so, comes off false. Coincidentally, in my current Karl Ove Knausgaard volume, he talks about Phillips, along with Bret Easton Ellis, as being the good American authors he likes. I'd never actually heard about her, or this book, till she won.
When she's not trying to be Faulkner (the 'fool' Weed has some perspective chapters that read a bit like crap Benjy imitations), I also saw Crane's influence with the singular war scene. I just find myself frustrated by the whole thing. It felt messy, drawn-out (then very rushed at the end with everything magically falling into place like a romance novel), and tiresome. Weed's chapters, particularly, just felt gratuitous. Not a worthy winner at all....more
4.5. After studying writing for six years, it was only natural that I was most excited for Vol. 5, the volume where Knuasgaard atten57th book of 2024.
4.5. After studying writing for six years, it was only natural that I was most excited for Vol. 5, the volume where Knuasgaard attends the Writing Academy and has Jon Fosse, no less, as one of his teachers. I'm a fan of Fosse's work so I found all the descriptions and dialogue with him fascinating, and it's aged so well as he's now a Nobel winner. Knausgaard's dreams are dashed though, and he struggles to comprehend that he may not be up to being a writer (though, what dramatic irony it is to read); he, at one point, in his frustration, after his poetry is slashed in a workshop, writes a two page spread like this: 'CUNT. CUNT. CUNT. CUNT' etc., for two pages of the book. He even considers reading it out to the class as his piece the following day, but is dissuaded. The structure of the series as a whole becomes fairly turbulent here as we meeting Tonje, his first wife, and even running to the point where his father dies and the funeral, which loops us right back into the timeframe of Vol. 1.
I wasn't going to talk about Knausgaard and the series as a whole until I'd finished, but I do want to say how generally 'unlikeable' he is in this one, and yet we both still respect him and would want a drink with him. We discussed it briefly and decided on the fact that, most of the time, Knausgaard is a victim. It's his own doing, but he is a victim of alcohol, just like his father was. In that respect despite the awful things he does (there are several in this, one far more shocking than the others), I couldn't help but also pity him, deserving or not. Does his honesty, also, make his unlikeable traits more likeable, simply because he's owning up to them? Once I get to the end, perhaps I'll be able to explore that, him, and the whole purpose behind these thousands and thousands of pages. ...more
I was a sluggard in college and studied Psychology for a single year before getting an E and dropping it. This came as no surprise;54th book of 2024.
I was a sluggard in college and studied Psychology for a single year before getting an E and dropping it. This came as no surprise; the night before my exams, my parents asked me about my progress, and I admitted to them that I hadn’t started revising. However, since then, I’ve always had a vague interest in Psychology, that subject I fluffed. Coincidentally, it’s like imagining the life I didn’t lead where I revised, did well, and perhaps succeeded in my exams. Not just for Psychology, but all of my A-Levels (I didn’t try particularly hard in any of them). I saw this book on the shelf the other day and it sounded like it was somewhere between philosophy and psychology, with smatterings of literary criticism. What more could a reformed sluggard want?
For this book is marketed as such. It’s subtitle is “In Praise of the Unlived Life”, and the blurb says things like, ‘But it is the life unlived — the person we have failed to be — that can trouble and even haunt us.’ This I know too well: I’ve lived my life with my hyperactive imagination barring me from happiness at many turns. I’ve lived with my fair share of regret and jealousy, and self-loathing. Phillips starts his Prologue,
The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realises how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.
And ends the Prologue with this idea: ‘But the worst thing we can be frustrated of is frustration itself; to be deprived of frustration is to be deprived of the possibilities of satisfaction.’ Which isn’t so different from the idea that life has to be hard so we then appreciate the good. Rather empty sentiments in the wake of grief, heartbreak, etc., but repeated often enough all the same. The Prologue, actually, delivers the book’s fatal wound. It explores everything the book promises to explore, and then fails to deliver. The most focussed writing can be found in the first five pages. So, the short conclusion to this review is: it’s a failed promise. Phillips hardly writes a book on what is promised or expected, and for that, as with many other reviewers, it seems, he fails me as a reader.
Instead? Literary criticism. Mostly Shakespeare. The chapters are as follows, “On Frustration”, “On Not Getting It”, “On Getting Away With It”, “On Getting Out of It”, and “On Satisfaction”; and running through all of these chapters, are the plays: King Lear, Hamlet, Othello. He explores several novels too. The chapter “On Not Getting It” (‘it’ being anything, the poem, the joke, etc.) rambles on about Freudian ideas around childhood. As humans, we don’t like to ‘not get it’; so I was pleased (and amused), that the novels Phillips explores, I’ve read, such as Greene’s The End of the Affair and Huxley’s Antic Hay [1]. It was somehow hard to, well, get, what these ideas (getting it, getting away with it, getting out of it) had to do with the unlived life, which takes me back to the main gripe of the book. Phillips writes lots of maddening, long, digressionary sentences, like,
Knowing too exactly what we want is what we do when we know what we want, or when we don’t know what we want.
So when I found myself in the wrong mood, the book made me grumpy. Then, after talking about Shakespeare for 10 seemingly aimless pages, he explores an interesting idea (albeit still mostly unconnected from the book’s focus) and redeems himself. For example, in “On Getting Away With It” (which is more about artists and writers than unlived lives [2]):
The reason that believers don’t think of God as ‘getting away with it’ is that the phrase itself implies the existence of a higher authority. If it means breaking the rules with impunity — eluding the expected consequences, the usual constraints — it also acknowledges that there are rules […] Which is why, as we shall see, getting away with things is among our most confounding experiences. If, as Freud remarks, the child’s first successful lie against the parents is his first moment of independence — the moment when he proves to himself that his parents cannot read his mind, and so are not omniscient deities — then it is also the first moment in which he recognises his abandonment.
And I suppose Phillips’s conclusion to this idea, jumping from Nietzsche, is,
If God is dead it is not that everything is permitted — which would simply be his reappearance as the permitter rather than the forbidder — but that there will be no more getting away with it. I think it is worth wondering, if we can imagine such a thing, what kind of loss that might be.
So the book certainly gave me food for thought, and plenty of things to wonder about on long walks. And the psychoanalyst rears his head at times, for sentences like ‘we live as if we know more about the experiences we haven’t had than about the experiences we have had’, which sounds more like what the blurb promises us. Though Phillips hardly gives us guidance; perhaps that’s not his job? He, Phillips, enters the narrative properly only once, to describe a scene from one of his therapy sessions. A teacher came to see him, and for the first ten minutes sat in silence, like a scene in Good Will Hunting. Then,
‘If you look after me who will look after you?’ I asked, ‘Did you have to do a lot of looking after when you were growing up?’ And he replied, as though we were in the middle of a long conversation, ‘Yes, my mother was sick a lot and my dad was away.’ And I said, for no apparent reason, ‘When you were looking after your mother did anything really strange ever happen, anything you just didn’t get?’ There was a pause, and he said, ‘Often, very often, when I was getting up to fill the coal scuttle downstairs, my mother would shout down from her bedroom, “Can you fill the coal scuttle” . . . so I never know whether I’m doing it because I want to or because she’s telling me to.’ I remarked, ‘You said “know” as if it’s still happening now,’ and he replied, ‘It is happening now because I never really know if I’m doing what I want or whether I’m acting under instruction.’ I asked, ‘Is coming to see me an example of this?’ and he smiled and said, ‘Yes, and I think I’ll go now.’ He got up, walked towards the door, and as he opened it he said to me, ‘I am going back to my bean-field’; and I had this tremendously powerful feeling of affection for him, as if he had understood me, ‘Walden’ having been an important book in my life, though he had no way of knowing this.
Phillips then quotes from Walden and the idea of the bean-field. Doing something and why we do something. He gets close to unpacking, but seems to be generally opposed to it. After all, he calls a quote of Joseph Sandler’s (‘Suffering is a consequence of the distance between the ego and the ego-ideal, the distance between who I feel myself to be, and who I want to be’) ‘too neat’.
I instead engorged on the literary meat and tried to forget what I was promised. In the “On Not Getting It” chapter, Phillips uses a wide range of sources to discuss the concept behind art and ‘not getting it’. ‘When Ashbery was asked in an interview why his poetry was so difficult he replied that when you talk to other people they eventually lose interest but that when you talk to yourself people want to listen in. No one, other perhaps than Ashbery, talks to themselves in the way he writes poetry; but what Ashbery is suggesting in his whimsically shrewd way is that the wish to communicate estranges people from each other. If you talk to people, he suggests, they lose interest, if you ignore them — or, rather, if you ignore them by talking to yourself — they are engaged. As though curiosity might sometimes be preferred to consolation, listening in or overhearing preferred to communication or comprehension. And ideas that so many readers on Goodreads will understand: ‘the pleasures of resistance’; but like me, you may ask what this has to do with an unlived life. Even after reading the book, I’d say, I don’t know. That, like the Buddhist expression, the obstacle is the path. That frustration, failure, not getting ‘it’, are all key aspects of living a full life. Phillips doesn’t give us a ‘neat’ answer for that other parallel, or in my case certainly, many parallel lives we imagine.
The other day, I was talking to P. about a mutual friend who had thrown his whole relationship away because he was constantly imagining relationships with girls he knew. They, in turn, rejected him, turned their backs, and he has been left with nothing. I made a facetious remark about how our friend doesn’t seem to realise these are intrusive thoughts, like seeing a girl in the airport and imagining, for three minutes, living your entire life with her, even though you know nothing about her and will never see her again. P., one of the most happily married men I know, surprisingly agreed with me. He said, Ted, that sort of thing never goes away. So, Phillips, whatever you write about Shakespeare, we have to live with that unlived life. _________________________________
[1] This is something I was discussing the other day, too; the more you read, especially of the ‘canon’, the more you are drawn into its web. You begin to pick up on allusions more often. You are slowly drawn into the clique, the ‘know’. This writer is quoting this writer, referencing this writer, answering this writer. I’ve argued before that this has something to do with the pompousness of readers. They can’t help but flaunt how in the know they are. They are in the elite, the imaginary (but very real!) group. It’s like having a hundred inside jokes. What is Goodreads, then, but the sharing and bragging of inside jokes?
[2] Swann, my mentor, used to say to me, ‘Writing is about what you can get away with.’ He often pointed out a plot-hole in The Great Gatsby, and said, ‘Fitzgerald gets away with it, because he’s so good!’ Whilst I was reading Phillips, I was reminded of something from Ellmann’s biography of Joyce. After Ulysses was published, he supposedly got very drunk and was half-carried to a carriage by Nora. The very inebriated Joyce yelled into the street, “I made them take it,' presumably an angry brag that he had foisted 'Ulysses' upon the public’; this to me sounds akin to yelling, ‘I got away with it!’...more
This was one of the books that accompanied me around Italy last week. Once again, I found it so illuminating to read Ferrante's des53rd book of 2024.
This was one of the books that accompanied me around Italy last week. Once again, I found it so illuminating to read Ferrante's descriptions of Naples before stepping out onto the streets of Naples myself. It takes books to a higher level. I'd read a passage about the blue shadow of Vesuvius in the background, then look out of a train window and see it there before me, too.
Ferrante is a writer I've just never got to, and I always imagined this to be a dense read for some reason. I was surprised to find the opposite, the pages fell away from me. I would open it in a short captured moment, just before going out for the evening, just before breakfast, and read thirty pages without realising. I'm a sucker for a bildungsroman and this is no exception. The characters are richly portrayed, the small feuds of childhood, and the relationship between Elena and Lila captivated me like they have captivated many others. It reminded me of relationships I've had in my life. In fact, I imagine it's the same for many. There's the idea of the person we love, feel connected to, even through difficulties. Friendship is, after all, incredibly complex. Love and jealousy can exist together quite happily. Ferrante says the four books are really one book, they just had to be published as four, so though I should hurl myself straight into the next (and I'd like to), I have a few other things to read first; but the book is constructed well enough to give the impression that the characters are somehow frozen, waiting for my return. ...more
1.5. I'm a fan of Meiko, but have never read Hiromi. Maybe she's as good, but this (her newest translated book, coming out next mon52nd book of 2024.
1.5. I'm a fan of Meiko, but have never read Hiromi. Maybe she's as good, but this (her newest translated book, coming out next month sometime), was not the book to prove her worth to me. The idea far outweighed the execution, which is more painful to swallow than simply a bad book. The narrator is taught, by her old school janitor, to travel in her dreams. She travels to the Edo period, and the Heian. Though she is dreaming, it is written as if it is happening, so it feels more like a time-travel book. In the present, the narrator is dealing with her husband, her childhood sweetheart, who, despite having numerous affairs and being generally shitty to her, she loves. In her dreamscapes, she takes on several traditional Japanese women roles, one such role being something similar to a Handmaid from the Atwood novel - her only purpose is to entertain men with her body. Eventually, it turns into a bad version of Mishima's tetralogy, in that the janitor who taught her this gift also appears recurrently in these dreams. Feelings for him also begin to arise. The whole plot seemed to be centred around the narrator being used (at one point she is raped, too), and mistreated, in the dreams and in reality. She never seems overly bothered by this. The plot trudged along. The writing was childishly simple. I don't think I cared about any two pages of the whole novel. However, for established fans of Hiromi? Perhaps another enjoyable book.
Thanks to Granta for the advanced copy, anyway....more
At quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a yo
50th book of 2024.
At quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.
Begins, Knife, somewhat with a false promise. I don't know what I expected, exactly, but it wasn't quite this; but I don't want to unfairly hound him. I am very interested in violence as a subject, especially since I taught martial arts for many years and had my own school. The concept of a man who had been attacked (I have been 'attacked' a few times myself, but never with a weapon) and nearly died, only to turn over and write, put me in a state of awe. The pen is mightier than the sword, indeed.
But what most of the book is dedicated to is writing about how amazing his wife is and how much he loves her. I'm not one for declarations of love, really, so this already puts me cold. And secondly, Rushdie is now on his fifth wife, so I'm sceptical of any grand declarations of such after so many marriages. I understand these are personal reflections, but they hold true to my experience with the book. I actually rolled my eyes at points, like when he records his wife saying, "And what we have is the greatest story, which is love." Vomit.
I also found the writing disarmingly simple, even poor. Rushdie is a skilled writer, I believe that, but I guess he dropped all the style and just went for honesty. I can't, really, fault him for that. With that in mind, the most interesting part of the book is when he turns to fiction: he has an imaginary conversation with his attacker, which spans for quite a few pages. I'll quote a chunk of it below because I found the discussion particularly interesting. This is part way through the imagined conversation, and it is Rushdie speaking first in this extract, which you can probably guess by what is said.
I'd like to talk about books.
There's only one book worth talking about.
Let me tell you about a book about a book. It's written by the Turkish author Pamuk, and called "The New Life". In this book there's a book that has no name, and we do not know anything about what's written on its pages. But everyone who opens this book has their whole life changed. After they read the book they are not the same as they were before. Do you know a book like that?
Of course. It is the book containing the Word of God, as given by the Archangel to the Prophet.
Did the Prophet write it down immediately?
He came down from the mountain and recited, and whoever was nearby wrote it down on whatever came to hand.
And he recited with complete accuracy. What the Archangel said: word for word. And then they wrote it down with complete accuracy also. Word for word.
That is obvious.
And what happened to these pages?
After the Prophet's life ended, his Companions put them in order, and that is the Book.
And they put them in order with complete accuracy.
Every true believer knows this. Only the godless would question this, and they don't matter.
Can I ask you a question about the nature of God?
He is all-encompassing. All-knowing. He is All.
It is in your tradition, is it not, that there is a difference between your God and the God of the other People of the Book, the Jews and the Christians. They believe, as it says in their books, that God created Man in His own image.
They are wrong.
Because, if they were right, then God might have some resemblance to men? He might look like a man? He might have a mouth, and a voice, and be able to use it to speak to us?
But this is not correct.
Because, in your tradition, the idea of God is that He is so far superior to Man, so much more exalted, that He shares no human qualities.
Exactly. For once you are not talking garbage.
What would you say were human qualities?
Our bodies. How we look and how we are.
Is love a human quality? Is the desire for justice? Is mercy? Does God have those?
I am not a scholar. Imam Yutubi [the YouTube star the attacker supposedly watched] is a scholar. He is many-headed and many-voiced. I follow him. I have learned everything from him.
I don't mean to ask for your scholarship. You agree that your God has no human qualities, according to your own tradition. Let me just ask this. Isn't language a human quality? To have a language, God would have to have a mouth, a tongue, vocal chords, a voice. He would have to look like a man. In his own image. But you agree that God is not like that.
So what?
So if God is above language—so far above it as He is so far above all that is merely human—then how did the words of your Book come into being?
The Angel understood God and brought the Message in a way that the Messenger could understand, and the Messenger received it.
Was the Message in Arabic?
That's how the Messenger received it and how his Companions wrote it down.
Can I ask you something about translation?
You do this too much. We are going in one direction and then you swerve across the road and start driving the other way. Not only a butterfly but a bad driver.
I only want to suggest that when the Archangel understood the Word of God and brought it to the Messenger in a way that the Messenger could understand, he was translating it. God communicated it the way that God communicates, which is so far above human understanding that we cannot even begin to comprehend it, and the Angel made it comprehensible to the Messenger, by delivering it in human speech, which is not the speech of God.
The Book is the uncreated Word of God.
But we agreed that God has no words. In which case, what we read is an interpretation of God. And so maybe there could be other interpretations? Maybe your way, your Yutubi's way, is not the only way? Maybe there is no one correct way?
You are a snake.
Can I ask what language you read the Book? In the first language or another?
I read it in this inferior tongue in which we are speaking now.
Another translation.
One could easily say, as people say about Plato, that the Socratic dialogue lends itself to the writer talking rings around his adversary, especially since the latter is imagined. But I found it the most interesting part of the book around lovey-dovey remarks and the breakdowns of his recovery and the processes he went through.
Other than that, strange Mandalorian references, quotes from writers you wouldn't expect, like Jodi Picoult, and bits about Martin Amis and Paul Auster, both of whom were alive but struggling, and the former then dying. We lost Auster, obviously, after this was published....more
Two days ago, I was looking into the crater of Vesuvius. Photographs don’t capture the immensity of standing before it. My girlfrie51st book of 2024.
Two days ago, I was looking into the crater of Vesuvius. Photographs don’t capture the immensity of standing before it. My girlfriend and I stared for a long time, in silence, at the sheer drops of the sides. I was surprised to see little trees growing in the bottom. The sides were like landslides. Behind us, spanning out, were the cities of Pompei, Herculaneum, Naples. I said to my girlfriend, How strange it is to be standing here now, peering into its eerily quiet crater, when Pliny the Elder was killed trying to get here, when everyone else was fleeing.
Daisy Dunn begins her biography of Pliny (the Younger, but also the Elder):
The crisis began one early afternoon when Pliny the Younger was seventeen and staying with his mother and uncle in a villa overlooking the bay of Naples. His mother noticed it first, ‘a cloud, both strange and enormous in appearance’, forming in the sky in the distance. Pliny said that it looked like an umbrella pine tree, ‘for it raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches’. But it was also like a mushroom [1]: as light as sea foam — white, but gradually turning dirty, elevated on a stem, potentially deadly. They were too far away to be certain which mountain the mushroom cloud was coming from, but Pliny later discovered it was Vesuvius, some thirty kilometres from Misenum, where he and his mother Plinia were watching.
Vesuvius isn’t the focus of the book at all, though Dunn frequently calls back to it. It becomes, instead, a readable, well-researched biography about Pliny the Younger, from that moment he sees Vesuvius erupt. It has the hallmarks of any Roman life-story, with politics and murder. Pliny ended up leading a fulfilling life, both as a politician and lawyer. As I’ve said in my other classical reviews, I studied Classical Civilisation for three years, and though I never studied Pliny directly, he was friends with other famous writers of the period, such as Tacitus and Suetonius, both of whom I studied for a year. Dunn, like many writers of the Roman era, includes all sorts of interesting (and funny) throwaway remarks, such as one Roman man who tried to have sex with the statue of Aphrodite of Knidos [2], then later killed himself with shame. For these reasons, I’ve always believed, it’s one of the most interesting periods of history to study. In my years of study I went through Cicero, the men I mentioned above, Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Hannibal, etc., and found it all as interesting as the rest. The emperors that feature in Dunn’s book I never studied, but I knew the regular anecdotes Dunn uses about Nero, Domitian, and Trajan. The famous anecdote from Tacitus about the former, for example: he kicked his pregnant wife to death.
So I learnt a lot about Pliny the Younger’s career, marriages and so on. He had a lovely villa and Dunn includes some of the imagined reconstructions of his property that have been created over the years. The most interesting thing she explores, towards the end, is the idea of immortality. Pliny the Elder’s immortality was secured as soon as he ordered his fleet towards the erupting Vesuvius, not away from it. Dunn notes how desperate Pliny the Younger was to reach the same immortality, and in fact, by his desperate trying (mostly through writers such as Tacitus and Suetonius), he was in danger of not securing it. She suggests that trying too hard to be made immortal isn’t as effective. Of course, the Younger got his desire, and is as immortal as his uncle; he wrote, after all, the only surviving eye-witness account of the eruption. I wonder if he ever imagined us writing about him still today; he hoped so, anyway.
The saddest thing is despite both their fates being so tangled up with Vesuvius, I didn’t see a single thing about them in the pathetic gift shop at the top of the volcano. ________________________________ [1] I found a few of the descriptions made by Pliny quite unnerving in their similarities to the mushroom clouds of the atomic bomb.
Will you come to my funeral? She looks down at her coffee cup in front of her and says nothing. Will you come to my
48th book of 2024.
Kairos starts:
Will you come to my funeral? She looks down at her coffee cup in front of her and says nothing. Will you come to my funeral, he says again. Why funeral—you're alive, she says. He asks her a third time: Will you come to my funeral? Sure, she says. I'll come to your funeral.
I have a "piece" of the Berlin Wall, which I bought many years ago when I was in the city. As you can imagine, there are hundreds of little chunks of "Wall" in packets to sell to tourists. They all have faded bits of paint and old graffiti on them. At the time, I thought I really was buying a piece of history for five euros. I also bought a Russian hat with a hammer and sickle badge on the front. One time, walking drunkenly through a seaside town in England, a load of Eastern Europeans shouted from their window, I love your hat! Where did you get it? I thought for a moment and then yelled back, Berlin! And they laughed, both at me and with me, I think.
I struggled with this novel. Erpenbeck is clearly a skilled writer, but this book, despite being only 300 pages long, took me over a week to read. It's dense, full of allusions to opera and poetry and music, and plods along aimlessly. A woman chance meets an older, married man. An age-old novel idea. This time, it's set in 80s Germany and is against the backdrop of the East-West divide. The historical side of it was interesting, though I never quite got Erpenbeck's point. I guess the divide of the city and the divide of their love? A little contrived, though. As much as I tried, I never got fully invested in their story, either character, or the prose that sometimes gives two or three pages paragraphs. I'm not adverse to big paragraphs (I'm a modernist lover!), but with this, it was like wading through oil at times. The mini twist at the end felt cheap, too, a little tacked on. I respect the skill but think it was used for the wrong reasons. ...more
Waterboarding, I told my mother. It's when someone places a cloth over your face, then continuously pours water over it. It feels
46th book of 2024.
Waterboarding, I told my mother. It's when someone places a cloth over your face, then continuously pours water over it. It feels like drowning. It is drowning. And you're going to do it, she said. Yes. My mother sighed. This has to be one of your brother's ideas.
So starts What I'd Rather Not Think About, now shortlisted for this year's Man Booker International. Marketed as a book of vignettes dealing with grief, I was prepared for another sparse and disappointing read, something like last year's Western Lane. But I was pleasantly surprised by Posthuma's (come on, with a surname like that, you have to write about death) novel. The surviving twin copes with the loss of the other to suicide. Drowning, coincidentally, which makes the first few lines of the novel above even more prophetic (I'd forgotten that waterboarding is the first line of the book till I wrote them out). It's light on the touch but some of the vignettes moved me. I think about death far too often, particularly recently, and having a brother myself, found the book doubly moving. I haven't read many Dutch authors, so a nice opportunity to do so.
And what are the chances? When I was at the station the other day reading this on the platform and waiting for my train, Swann, my old professor who infrequently appears in many of my reviews, appears, and we spend the journey catching up. His wife is Dutch, so he said he'd remember the writer's name and tell her about it. I wonder if he did....more
Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more. All its glittering viscosity wa
45th book of 2024.
Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more. All its glittering viscosity was left in its wake, for the split instead revealed a dry and compact surface, whose purplish-brown hue made it resemble the sliced end of a miniature bresaola.
So starts Verdigris, as you can see by the front of this & Other Stories publication. This publisher is the reason I've started writing out the first few lines of the book in my reviews, because how often we shop in the physical world and turn our eyes to the first few lines, and however good a review is online, we cannot flick to those first few lines. The opening of this book presents one of its great obsessions - slugs. It is a book about an aging housekeeper who is suffering from memory-loss. The thirteen and a half year old boy who lives in the house befriends him (despite his monstrous appearance), and strives to find out the truth behind his limited (and quickly diminishing past). It involves lots of slugs, dead Frenchmen beneath the ground who talk, giant rabbits without eyes, murdered Nazis and more. It's a dialogue driven mystery, essentially, which boils to a disturbing and surprising final scene. The heart of the novel is focused on the idea of the double and doppelgangers: perfect for any horror/gothic novel. I enjoyed it as it went along but eventually I grew a little bored of the mystery and the ending, though dark and surprising, left me a little cold and flat. Glad I read it as I don't often get to read contemporary Italian fic (in recent years all I can think of Claudia Durastanti and Lahiri's newest collection of stories which she wrote in Italian)....more
Today when I awoke from a nap the faceless man was there before me. He was seated on the chair across from the sofa I’d been slee
37th book of 2024.
Today when I awoke from a nap the faceless man was there before me. He was seated on the chair across from the sofa I’d been sleeping on, staring straight at me with a pair of imaginary eyes in a face that wasn’t.
So starts, Killing Commendatore, at last, the final Murakami novel for me to read. I’ve read all 14 of his novels, some of his short story collections, some of his nonfiction… It’s taken many years of on and off reading to get here.
I did not like 1Q84 and I was happy to accept that Murakami was a writer for my early 20s. He was one of my big writers at university. I have so many memories of sitting and drinking straight spirits and reading his books, sometimes cover-to-cover, feeling like one of the lonely but content narrators. I found Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage mostly forgettable. All this is to say, I went into this novel with almost no expectations other than the warmth of nostalgia. But, I’ll give Murakami this: it did exceed my expectations. Anyone who has read him knows what they’re going in for and it’s what you get. But Killing Commendatore, though slow, is a very well plotted book. As it progresses, it gets stranger but in its strangeness, makes sense; Murakami, as ever, connects the unconnectable.
I took issue with the 13-year-old girl obsessed with her flat chest. It’s hard not to. I did revisit the interview Murakami did with Meiko Kawakami but found it unfulfilling. Kawakami fails to ask the real questions, more than just the portrayal of women but the sheer amount of rape in his novels. There is a singular rape here in Killing Commendatore, that happens in a magical realist way.
It didn’t need to be 700 pages, I think it could have easily been 500 but sometimes, in the right mood, reading the long meandering passages about cooking spaghetti, thinking about classical music and cars, it’s bordering mindful. I thought about 4-stars a few times but in the end it was too long, I didn’t love every aspect of it, and in the end I can only look at it on the shelf and say, Yeah, I liked it. It’s good.
Looking back on Murakami’s whole career, I still call The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Dance Dance Dance as my favourites. The latter is an unusual one for a favourite, but it has a special place in my heart. And the story “Drive My Car” once had me tearing up on a train leaving university, for it addressed the very hurricane I was in with one of my girlfriends at the time. Funny how all-encompassing some things can feel until you’re out of them. I like to credit Murakami a little for helping me at the time, at least. ...more
Samson was deafened by the sound of the sabre striking his father’s head. He caught the glint of the flashing blade out of the co
44th book of 2024.
Samson was deafened by the sound of the sabre striking his father’s head. He caught the glint of the flashing blade out of the corner of his eye and stepped into a puddle. His already dead father’s left hand pushed him aside, so that the next sabre neither quite struck nor quite missed his ginger-haired head, slicing off his right ear. He managed to reach out and catch the falling ear, clutching it in his fist before it hit the gutter. His father, meanwhile, collapsed right onto the road, his head split in two.
So starts The Silver Bone, Kurkov’s newest translated novel from the Russian. I half-expected him to show up on the longlist again (he did last year with Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv), and also expected him not to make the subsequent shortlist. I say this as a Kurkov fan: I don’t think he deserves it with these novels. I adore Death and the Penguin, but there’s been something missing from the other novels of his I’ve read.
I never really got the claim that Kurkov is a ‘Ukrainian Murakami’ before, but I finally understand and agree now. Kurkov, like Murakami, is one of those writers where once you’ve read a few of their books, you know what to expect. Rather than being repetitive though, it becomes almost comforting. It builds a kind of nostalgia and despite The Silver Bone being set in 1919 Kyiv, the tone made it feel very akin to the other Kurkov books I’ve read, so you get the impression they are all existing in the same ‘universe’ (like when people talk about ‘Pynchonland’). Prodominantly, Kurkov characters are like Murakami characters in that they are incredibly passive: they don’t actually do much. They wander about, they think about things, they drink and call on the same few faces. They always accept strangeness with the same Kafkaesque acceptance.
For this reason, it seems like The Silver Bone hasn’t been very well-received among people I follow on GR. It’s a ‘crime’ or a ‘mystery’ but the titular bone doesn’t arrive until page 200 of 278. The first glimmer of mystery isn’t roused until past page 100. But it was exactly what I was expecting: oddball characters, subtle surrealism (in this case, Samson can still hear out of his severed ear, wherever he chooses to leave it), readable, but listlessly plotless. If you go in looking for a good yarn, a classic crime fiction book, you will be disappointed. If you’re familiar with Kurkov’s dry, black humour, and the languishing nature of his characters… Then this is an enjoyable and fairly typical read. Book 2 is going to be published sometime in 2025 (The Heart is Not Meat) and Kurkov is in the process of writing the third as we speak. Or, well, as I speak. As I write....more
After a few days of the virus in my body I come down with a fever, which is followed by an urge to return to a particular novel.
42nd book of 2024.
After a few days of the virus in my body I come down with a fever, which is followed by an urge to return to a particular novel. It’s only once I sit down in bed and open the book that I understand why. There’s an inscription on the title page, made in blue ballpoint and inimitable handwriting:
So starts The Details. And despite reminding me of the opening of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (whereby the narrative begins after diagnosing illness (in Sebald’s case, ‘emptiness’)), people are quick to call this Proustian (of course, anything that deals with memory must be Proustian). If any writer-adjective is chosen, it should be Cuskian, though it isn’t as profound as the Outline trilogy it resembles. But it does propel itself along simply with life stories. The four parts of the book are dedicated to four people from the narrator’s life. In that way, the whole novel is comprised of character studies.
It's very readable, you could read it in one sitting without a struggle. It does have its issues. The penultimate line of the first part referring to the ‘details’ of said character felt too ham-fisted and I had a horrible fear that she would end every part with some variation of this, closing off each with a remark about their ‘details’, but thankfully that wasn’t the case. I like novels that make allusions to other novels and several are referenced in this: The New York Trilogy, The Man Without Qualities, and If On a Winter's Night a Traveller.
I’m surprised it made the shortlist because it seems quite mundane, but then, it's universal in its mundanity. Easy to read, enjoyable, but I wasn’t blown away. 3.5....more
Three Jewish boys in 1907 Poland are on the road to what could be an imaginary place, Lublin, to sell brushes. They fight, tell joke38th book of 2024.
Three Jewish boys in 1907 Poland are on the road to what could be an imaginary place, Lublin, to sell brushes. They fight, tell jokes, stop for plenty of pisses and stories.
"An alter moid, who needs but cannot find a husband, agrees to meet the most undesirable man in Mezritsh and a date is arranged. The night of the date, there's a knock on the door. When she opens the door, the old spinster sees a man with no arms or legs sitting in an invalid's chair on wheels. "How can I marry you?" she asks, "you have no legs." "Which means I can't run out on you." "You have no arms." "I can't beat you." "But are you still good in bed?" she enquires at last. "I knocked on the door, didn't I?"
'What does a Russian bride get from her husband on her wedding day that's long and hard?' a restored Elya asks his friends. 'A new last name!'
'What do you call a beautiful girl in a Russian town?' Elya is going for two in a row. 'A tourist.'
'A rabbi wanted to try pork,' says Elya. 'He drives his carriage one night to a distant Polish inn and order this forbidden food. And plenty of it. Just as the waiter sets down a whole roast pig with an apple in its mouth, the doors opens and a group of men from his synagogue enter. They stare at the rabbi in disbelief. "What kind of farkakta is this?" the rabbi greets them, throwing up his hands. "You order an apple and this is how they serve it?"
And so on, and on. But for all the jokes, puns, play fights and tomfoolery, a thread of unease runs through the book. Someone else aptly refers to it as "the walking of Godot"; and, it's quite clear, that Wilkinson doesn't want us to feel too comfortable. There are frequent references to the future. And with so much lightheartedness, the darkness at the end of the book feels like the only payoff we should expect. And Wilkinson serves it to us like a roast pig with an apple in its mouth....more
Matthew Ted
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