The Pursuit of Love

Nancy Mitford is one of those names that I’ve heard of but never really known anything about.  To be honest, I had no idea what kind of books she wrote and so assumed they be quite a lot like Muriel Spark.  I really enjoy Spark and her tales of resourceful women who seem to be decades ahead of their time.  The Pursuit of Love is kind of like that, but instead of telling the story of working class women making their own way, it’s about incredibly wealthy daughters of lords trying to find love while they make their way through the world. 

It’s mostly the story of Linda Radlett, as told by her cousin Fanny.  Linda is obsessed from a very young age by the idea of love.  She doesn’t care about whom it is she ends up loving and so marries the first man she meets, and then leaves him for the next slightly charismatic man she meets before flitting off again to a wealthy French duke.  The book manages to balance the marvellously whimsical and completely dark.  Linda is kind of a moron.  Although she’s in Paris prior to World War Two she has no concept of what’s about to happen and finds the politics of the whole thing completely dull.  This is her saving grace, really, as a character because she’s also a bit of a bitch. 

It’s a gloriously witty book.  The early parts remind me a bit of things like Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging; the wit and the charm and the ingenuity of girls who want to find out about sex and boys.  Their observations on growing up are wickedly cynical, “I think Linda realised there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilised men really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificially and art more or less perfected.”  It’s fun to see the girls develop into into women, even if Linda never really grows up.  She remains obsessed by the idea of “Hons”- the right kind of people, and “counter-Hons” well into adulthood, even going so far as to pronounce her abandoned daughter a “counter-Hon.”  Linda is free-wheeling and self-obsessed.  She’d be a nightmare to know, but it makes for terrific reading.

In contrast to this, The Pursuit of Love also manages to be romantic.  It mocks romantic tropes, but buys into them too.  When Linda and her French duke first meet Linda’s past marriages are described as like people she mistook for friends in the street, only to find out that they were strangers.  The pair do ignore the impending war partially because it doesn’t interest them, but also because they recognise that it will lead to their separation which they need to pretend isn’t on the horizon.  It’s a lovely little tale about being redeemed by love without straying into saccharine sentimentality.

The Pursuit of Love has been a total balm to my disillusionment with reading that’s been going on for the last couple of books.  I’m so glad I read it.  Added to that it kicks off with remembrances of Christmases past with a house full of family.  It really started to get me in the mood for the coming festivities.

I’m now moving on to another Margaret Atwood Tale; The Robber Bride.

At Swim-Two-Birds

First of all, let’s address the important question.  Why the hyphens?  The disappointingly mundane answer is Swim-Two-Birds is a place.  Frankly it’s a shame.  I was dying to know how birds swim.  It’s an odd book.  Reading it is a lot like being talked at by the old mad drunk in the pub.  You know the guy that I mean- the one with the jaundiced eyes who reeks of booze and spews bullshit stories about the time he met Princess Di.  The one everybody edges away from.  Unfortunately, there’s no way of edging away from a book and so the nonsense continues for 200 pages.  And we’re supposed to revel in this.  This is where I reach the crux of why I didn’t enjoy reading At Swim-Two-Birds.  I just didn’t get it. 

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the Henry Miller-esque, “let’s sit around and get drunk without any plot development because we’re writers,” type of book.  This is definitely one of those but, worse than that, it seems to be channelling Ulysses.  I fucking hate Ulysses.  It’s not just the whole set in Dublin and nothing’s happening thing, either.  I think what Flann O’Brien’s going for is comedy modernism.  The result is dreadful poetry about flowers (“O leafy-oak, clumpy-leaved/ You are high above the trees…”) and extracts from stories about telling stories that are based on other stories written in different styles going nowhere.  I’m sure that there are some redeeming features to the book but I was so bored by it all, I didn’t notice them.  Actually, that’s not quite true.  O’Brien has a certain penchant for colons that I (punctuation nerd that I am) can totally get on board with.

I have a difficulty in taking the book seriously.  Part of this is because I just can’t tell if the book’s being serious or not.  There’s one point where it becomes wankily pretentious about the ability of the reader to know characters in books vs plays.  It’s insufferable and I’m only about 90% that it’s intentionally so.  One of the barriers to my taking the book seriously is the author’s photo.  O’Brien- or rather Brian O’Nolan, to use his real name- looks quite a lot like Bruce Campbell dressed as Al Capone.  It’s the same photo as is on his Wikipedia page.  Check it out if you don’t believe me.  It’s one hell of a chin.

Basically, I was unimpressed by the book.  Again, it’s probably not that bad but it’s everything I hate about modernism in one place.  The comedy elements also mean that these are over emphasised- so it kind of ends up being even more modernist than the standard fare which doesn’t help matters at all in endearing the book to me.  I get what O’Brien was going for and I think he got there; but it didn’t produce something that was particularly fun to read.

Up next time around is Nancy Mitford’s In Pursuit of Love.  I’m all done with work until after Christmas, so I’m hoping to get some serious reading done in the next ten days or so.

What Maisie Knew

I don’t have that much personal experience of divorce.  No-one in my family’s really done it- aside from one second cousin (or similarly obscure relative).  And Steph’s divorce dissolved into a sitcom like farce of not letting my great grandmother find out.  It was fun when I was ten, but I’ve never quite figured out why it was necessary.  I’ve since found out that my great grandmother was divorced herself, and at a time when it was actually a bit scandalous.  Anyway, the point is that my main frame of reference for the effects of divorce on the children is anecdotes from friends and Jacqueline Wilson books.  And Jaqueline Wilson wrote about it far better than Henry James.

What Maisie Knew is the story of Maisie Farange and her family.  Her parents wage war over who gets to keep her in the divorce as though she were the good china.  Neither parent is particularly interested in her for reasons beyond cheap point scoring and one-upmanship.  The end result is a (clearly super-responsible) judge decreeing she be shipped back and forth between the two every six months.  Or, at least that’s the idea.  Both her mother and father are chronically incapable of sustaining a monogamous relationship and soon enough they’re off cheating on their new spouses.  Maisie then passes into the care of her cuckholded stepfather and her governess Mrs Wix.  It sounds like a good story, but it’s kind of… completely unengaging. 

I’m not sure if it’s a problem that I have with the way James writes.  I love gothic horror, but The Turn of the Screw bored me half to tears.  I had the same issue with What Maisie Knew- it’s difficult to write about a book that I couldn’t connect with in any meaningful way.  There are bits in it that I know, objectively, are funny but they didn’t hit the mark.  For example, Maisie’s stepmother describes her father as a man who changes in everything every three days, but is completely consistent in the amount he hates her mother.  Usually, I love people being pithy and scathing.  It’s one of my favourite things.  And I don’t know why I don’t love it when James does it.  It’s infuriating.  Maybe I just overtaxed myself with the recent travelling and reading binge I went on.  Fingers crossed that I can get back into the groove for my next read…

I’ve just started Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.  I’m not quite sure yet why it needs so many hyphens.  

Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow

I was so looking forward to reading Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.  I’ve mentioned my love for a good crime novel before and I’m a big fan of the Nordic Noir that’s been all over the place in the last couple of years.  So, the amount I didn’t enjoy this book was a huge surprise and, more than that, a huge disappointment.  I can’t put my finger on exactly why I found it so difficult to engage with the book, but I have a few theories…

On the digital version I have of the 1,001 list the book’s called Smilla’s Sense of Snow.  This is a much better title; there’s alliteration, the fact that the “Miss” has been dropped brings it in line with Anglian names- in short, it’s a better (if less literal) translation.  It’s not something I’ve noticed, or really considered to any extent before, the only time I remember noticing it was in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls which is an English book written as through it were translated literally from a Spanish text.  It may be because I know about the alternate titles I spent a lot of the book considering the role of the translator.  There are parts that are clunky in a way that is clearly down to the translation and I think that creates a barrier to enjoying the narrative.  There are two forms of the word “you” in Danish and choses to explain this explicitly at one point, even though there’s enough implication to explain the same.  It makes me wish “thou” was still in common use in English, just so we could avoid the confusion.

Another of my gripes was the constant reference to Smilla’s age.  She’s thirty-seven.  This is not old.  Someone really needs to tell Peter Høeg this.  I’m sure that what he’s going for is a criticism of Danish culture and its treatment of single women; he certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to its racist attitude to Greenlanders, but he misses.  Throughout Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, she is so negative about her age and it doesn’t fit with the rest of the book.  Smilla gives not one shit about what she is supposed to do according to society, but takes incredible care to ensure that no-one sees her bald spot.  She uses the phrase, “at my age” or something similar more than my eighty-something year old grandmother and has exactly the same attitude of incapability towards some things.  If she were a man or even the maverick she professes to be, at thirty-seven she’d still consider herself in the prime of her life.

My third issue with the book was a petty and personal one.  The latter half of the book is taken over by massive ice-breaker ships and docks.  I cannot stand ships.  The idea of industrialised boats and their grime reminds me of the smell of my father’s car when I was a child.  He works with boats and would leave his equipment in his car almost permanently until the stench of the dirt had seeped into the seats.  It would always give me splitting headaches on long car journeys and Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow gave me the same kind of headaches. 

I feel a little cheated in all.  There are wonderfully cynical moments; any book that includes the phrase, “nothing corrupts like happiness,” should be a personal favourite instantly.  But these moments are too few and far between.  Smilla sees herself as a renegade, but she’s financially dependent upon her wealthy father still, through choice rather than necessity and, to honest- she’s just kind of a dick.

My next read is What Maisie Knew by Henry James. Considering my past experiences with James, I have a bad feeling about it.

The Golden Notebook

After reading two of her books I’m still not too sure what to make of Doris Lessing.  There was this moment in Shikasta where everything fell into place and I could finally enjoy the book.  I kept expecting that moment in The Golden Notebook, but it just didn’t come.  That’s not to say that this is a bad book at all, it’s just bloody heavy going and I’m not convinced that the pay-off is worth the effort of wading through the book.  It tells the story of Anna Wulf, writer.  While most definitely not suffering from writer’s block she fills four notebooks with ponderings about separate aspects of her life, finally combining them in the titular golden notebook.

I won’t be entirely negative about this book, because there are parts of it that I really enjoyed.  Mostly these moments occur in the black notebook, which is about Anna’s past and her writing life.  One section of it tells a story set in Southern Rhodesia during World War Two and it’s just fantastic.  I think that I liked this bit because it’s simply the part with the most coherent narrative. Nowhere else in The Golden Notebook do people have such clear cut motives.  I get that Lessing is recreating how directionless people actually are and the fact that life is made up of these open ended narratives, but at 576 pages this is a really frustrating read.  There’s a part with a wonderful cliff-hanger in one of the Free Women sections of the book (these chronicle Anna’s current life).  One character attempts suicide and even this, when the narrative resumes goes off at an unexpected and undramatic tangent.

I also really wanted to like this book because it’s full of politically aware and forward thinking women.  Anna and her friends love to discuss socialism and sex and are, for the time, frank about both.  But again, they drift.  Everyone ultimately ends up disillusioned with socialism before it even kicks off and, yes this reflects history but it’s still immensely unsatisfying.  And, as much as I want Anna to be a feminist, after a string of unsuccessful affairs she reveals that her ultimate goal in life is to get married.  She doesn’t need a husband; she’s financially independent and able to look after her daughter.  It’s a ridiculous goal to have.

Ultimately why I don’t like this book is because it feels like an overlong joke.  Throughout, Anna insists that she is not suffering from writer’s block and that she does not want to write another novel.  It’s abundantly clear to basically everyone else that this is a lie.  Anna eventually overcomes this denial about 540 pages into the book and by this point it doesn’t even feel like character development, simply because her character’s been deconstructed to the point that there is no character to develop.  Anna’s character is confused throughout.  She refuses to be defined as a writer at one point in the book because this is just one part of her life, but as the four notebooks show, each element of her life blends into others.  No, she is not one thing, but an intrinsic part of what she is is a writer.  I think I’ve read this book too young.  It’s definitely one of those stories that I feel like I didn’t enjoy because I missed something.  I’m not a mother and I don’t have experiences of socialism that I can compare Anna’s to and I’m just left feeling a bit naïve.

I am currently reading artsy Danish crime thriller Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, by Peter Høeg.