Fateless

I feel a bit guilty about this, but I wasn’t that keen on Fateless.  It seems as though books about the Holocaust and concentration camps, especially those written by survivors should have a sense of gravitas that’s appreciated by all, even if you don’t actually enjoy reading about it.  I want to blame the fact that I basically read this book in my lunch breaks and write it off as just being in the wrong mind set to read serious literature in the thirty or so minutes a day I have to relax at the office.  It’s not that though.  Imre Kertész says part of the way through that he was surprised to find himself bored by his time in Auschwitz.  I feel much the same way.

And it is just the concentration camp bits that I couldn’t get into.  There are sections before and after Gyuri’s stay in Buchenwald that are really interesting.  The train journey between the camps and the missed reunion with his family are so good.  Or well written.  And there are other parts, I concede, that are fascinating.  There’s a running obsession with prisoner numbers.  Those with numbers in the hundreds or early thousands have a near celebrity status, there’s even an incident when we meet someone with an elusive two digit prisoner number.

Part of it, I think, is simply my being thrown.  We are taught that the Holocaust was a terrible thing and those in concentration camps suffered unimaginable horrors.  So, when these horrors are described as every day and mundane, it’s hard to know how to take it.  I feel like the journalist who appears near the end of the book; insisting that it must have been horrific and wanting that to be exploited while Kertész patiently explains that even suffering, when spread over a long enough period of time, becomes common place.  The issue with the common place is that it doesn’t exactly make for a thrilling read.  Likewise, it’s hard to get excited by entire paragraphs dedicated to comparisons of soup and bread rations between concentration camps.

It’s difficult because I’m aware that I’m finding excuses for not liking Fateless partially due to the subject matter.  It the story was about fictional suffering, I’d be so much quicker to write the book off.  But I have this niggling feeling that it’s probably just not socially acceptable to admit to finding the experiences of a real life concentration camp survivor tedious.  Even if that’s exactly how Kertész is going out of his way to present said experiences.  See what I mean about wanting there to be more suffering?  I’m a bit concerned that rather than a lack of anything in the novel itself it’s rather me that’s wanting for something, and that’s the crux of my unrest.  I’m just sort of worried I may have missed the point of the book altogether. 

Next up is Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.  Swing by again soon.

The Lambs of London

Peter Ackroyd isn’t one of my favourite authors.  Due to its popularity, I had to wait an age to get Hawksmoor out of the library because it looked so interesting.  My logic ran: murder- brilliant; history- wonderful; history murder- best thing ever.  It wasn’t.  Things so rarely are.  Naturally, I left checking The Lambs of London a while for quite different reasons.  I don’t think I was wrong in my reticence.  In brief, it’s a book about a woman who loves a man who discovers a wealth of previously unseen Shakespeare texts, but things are not as they seem…

Now, I like Shakespeare.  I really like Shakespeare.  I’ve been to the Globe and I’ve seen the RSC and countless other Shakespeare productions.  Once, at the Edinburgh Festival, I even saw a three woman hour long version of Macbeth.  It was terrible.  The logistics of any of the scenes where the witches talked to anyone alone were a nightmare.  But, I think there might be a bit too much Shakespeare in The Lambs of London.  Or, at least, there’s a rank over appreciation of him.  It’s a tale full of learned men so busy genuflecting at the sycophantic alter of the Bard that they miss the most obvious plot twist since Secret Window.  It turns out (spoiler alert) that those previously undiscovered documents are fakes.  I’m not sure if the point Ackroyd’s trying to make is that maybe it’s time to get over Shakespeare, or at least to not believe in a thing so blindly that common sense is waylaid, because the writing’s so dry it’s very difficult to care.  I think this book might only be on the list because it’s chosen by academics who see in it parodies of their disliked colleagues.

Again, this is a book based on a true story and again, it’s the case that the truth is far more interesting than fiction.  Mary and Charles Lamb, two of the central characters, did exist and even wrote a book together about Shakespeare.  Far more fascinating is the forger at the centre of the tale: William Ireland.  Ireland was a real person who, in the 1790s, forged a lot of Shakespearian documents and even went as far as claim he discovered two new plays.  One of these, Vortigen and Rowena, even made it to the stage.  The real problem I have is with Ackroyd’s characterisation of Ireland.  In The Lambs of London, Ireland is a boy who does everything to impress his father.  I’m not sure why, Samuel Ireland’s a bit of a wanker.  Ackroyd doesn’t explain why Ireland so desperately craves his father’s approval and pride and that’s the downfall of this story.  It’s more concerned with actions than motives and without the motives in place; any actions themselves are difficult to relate to.  The book becomes simply: person x did thing y followed by a lengthy discussion about the wonder of Shakespeare.  Ackroyd’s an historian, not an author and it shows.  It’s a real shame, because I do really like Shakespeare.

I’m currently reading Fateless by Imre Kertész, so swing by soon for that.

The God of Small Things

Forgive me, but this is basically a disjointed list of things I like about a book…

The God of Small Things is a novel that reminds me of that quote from The New York Trilogy that I was going on about a few weeks ago.  The whole, “Something happens… and then it goes on happening forever,” situation.  It’s structured around one event in the lives of a family and it’s largely about how one moment in your life can be turned into the event which defines it; the idea that the memory of a terrible thing outlasts the terrible thing because we cling to it as a means to define ourselves.   In the case of Arundhati Roy’s book, it’s the death of the twin protagonists’ cousin, Sophie Mol.  The concept that, “Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive,” to be precise.  This is so true of human nature.  Every year at this time television schedules are littered with documentaries about the World Trade Centre which serve to give no new information but only solidify events in our collective memories.  It’s an idea which I really like, considering my personal ambitions to read 1,001 books on an arbitrary list, it will surprise few that the nature of obsession appeals to me. 

Another thing I like about this book is the wandering narrative.  Yes, it is about the death of a child and although this is alluded to throughout, there’s so much extra in the story.  Roy builds the entire history of the family, taking the time to give each character their own backstory.  So rather than privileging just the main characters with motivation and personality, there’s a complex family unit.  It also means the book isn’t evenly balanced, which I love.  There’s an entire family history up until the death of Sophie Mol and then (and not to get too cheesy about it) the family is torn apart, the twins being separated and their mother banished.  Naturally there’s also a completely non-linear narrative structure; I don’t think I’ve mentioned anything yet that isn’t given away in the first chapter.

It’s also fascinating to read a serious book with so many female characters.  It’s something that’s quite often focused on in the world of film and television, but it happens in books too- women being marginalised.  But the Kochamma family is led by women who have largely escaped patriarchal figures.  The only adult male in the family is shown to be just as hopeless at love as the women and is largely present as a comic figure who feels he needs to take control of his women but never manages it.  Even if no-one in the story is particularly capable, it’s so refreshing to read about women who don’t centre their lives around men (save for the odd moment of pining). 

On top of all of the above there’s this wonderful tone when the story focuses on eight year-old twins Rahel and Estha.  Throughout the narrator remains a third person omnipotent job, but when describing the events that involve the children, it becomes more childlike.  Shorter sentences, simpler words or childish word play.  It’s largely subtle (they are intelligent children after all), but it’s there and it makes the whole thing more enjoyable and the terrible things more terrible.

At the moment I am just whizzing through Lambs of London, by Peter Ackroyd, so come back soon for more blog.

Things Fall Apart

A friend of mine finds watching the Michael Cimino film Heaven’s Gate incredibly frustrating because she says you can see the good film in there, it’s just been so poorly edited that it’s lost.  That’s sort of how I feel about Things Fall Apart.  It’s one of those books I’ve heard a lot about without actually hearing anything about. One of the everyone knows it, some studied at school type books that (I suspect) very few people have actually read.  Like a slightly obscure Dickens.  And, like much Dickens, I wasn’t that impressed.

The problem is, this isn’t a bad book.  I just read it far too late.  If I’d have read it when I was thirteen or so, no doubt I’d have a great appreciation for it.  The blurb claims that this is a classic tragedy and, while it does have that narrative arch- Okonkwo’s succeeds because of his resolve and ambition, but these ultimately cause his downfall- it’s not really that tragic.  Achebe uses such a simple syntax through that everything seems at a distance.  I really think this might be the first book I’ve read in about a decade that doesn’t even whip out one metaphor.  He spends half of a 164 page book setting the scene and telling us of far more traditional customs than are relevant at the detriment of character development.  The marriage of secondary characters’ daughters is not important, the feelings of the main character when his daughter is on death’s door could be.  There could be at least an explanation when she recovers.  The first part almost reads like a guide to another culture, all foreign words written in italics, emphasising their other-ness, with near total indifference to its characters.

When the plot finally does get going and Okonkwo is banished from his village, there is too little of the book left in which to tell a story.  It’s ostensibly about the British colonisation of Africa through missionaries, but the tale lurches forward years at a time, providing only a snapshot of life at each point.  By the end, Okonkwo’s waging war on some bloke who’s only been around for three pages and it’s impossible to care that both have gone too far.

I realise that literally everything I’ve said about Things Fall Apart is negative, but I don’t hate it.  Some of the customs are incredibly interesting, the idea that the reason so many children die is because they are all the same child reborn and infected with an evil spirit is fascinating.  My problem is, the entire novel reminds me of the kind of thing studied in school.  It wouldn’t be out of place on any year nine SATs curriculum as a reading comprehension text, the dreadfully boring kind that takes hours because of the illiterates pissing about in the back row (NB trying to convince someone who’s been teaching you for months that you now have Tourette’s because you saw it on TV is stupid, futile, and insensitive).  I don’t know why Achebe just didn’t make the book a little bit better.  He’s clearly got talent, but at every turn he chose the most simplistic route.  There is so much potential for character depth and introspection and literary devices that is not capitulated upon.  Maybe the most damning thing of all is that my favourite bit is the Yeats epigraph…

Next time on the blog: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.