Siddhartha

I’m still not sure that I fully understand Siddhartha.  It’s all about Buddhism and Hinduism and finding the right path to enlightenment; that much I get.  But it’s one of those books that make me feel that a little prior knowledge of the subject would have improved my enjoyment of it no end. 

Hermann Hesse wrote this in 1922 and it amazes me that someone from a Western background really got Indian culture back then.  It might sound naïve, but I’m so used to books of the period telling the story of colonisation from the colonisers’ point-of-view. So it is refreshing to read someone who clearly bothered to study and understand another culture rather than attempting to impose his own on the natives.  The book doesn’t actually deal with colonisation at all; it’s fully about Indian culture, unaffected by the West.

The tale is ostensibly, a simple one; Siddhartha and his best mate Govinda leave home on a spiritual quest.  After spending some quality forest time with the super strict samanas, it becomes clear that the pair disagree on how best to reach nirvana, as a result Siddhartha leaves to re-join society.  Over the years he becomes a rich and comfortable merchant with an almost functional relationship with a courtesan, Kamala.  Again he decides this is not the life for him, abandons his wealth and the (now pregnant) Kamala to return to poverty and true peace.  He runs into Govinda a couple of times along the way who as a monk is as unchanging as Siddhartha is fickle.  Govinda is chronically unable to recognise his old friend and the two have banter about philosophy and enlightenment. 

I feel that my summary of the novel is somewhat incomplete.  As I mentioned previously, there is a lot in here about Buddhism and Hinduism that I’m just slightly ignorant of.  Unfortunately, my school’s idea of religious education was Christianity with a disclaimer that there are other religions available.  What I do know is that Siddhartha was the original name of the Buddha and that he too left home young, renouncing his not inconsiderable wealth, to follow the samanas.  I remember reading somewhere that at one point he trained his body to be able to survive on one grain of rice a day; fictional Siddhartha never quite manages this, but he does learn the power of starvation.  I’m sure that the religious arguments each of the characters make are equally grounded in proper religion, but I don’t know which school of thought comes from where.  And I’m sure that knowing these things, while not essential to my understanding, did impact upon my enjoyment of Hesse’s book.

Siddhartha is a good book.  It’s wonderfully advanced in its attitude for its time, and that alone makes me want to read more Hesse.  The story is alright, if predictable.  It’s the religion that must, for some, make this book.  It’s a shame that I don’t know more as that became a barrier to engaging with the various religious arguments and in turn the book itself.  I know the basics of Buddhism: the wheel and the reincarnations, and nirvana.  I don’t know the ins and outs of the best path to enlightenment.  I wasn’t even really aware that it was a thing that could be disagreed upon (it seems like a rather un-enlightened thing to do) and my view of the novel suffered for it. 

My next read is the marvellous The Iron Heel by Jack London.  Spoiler: it’s marvellous.

Gabriel's Gift

I loved Gabriel’s Gift. That needs to be said first of all. I know I wasn’t that impressed by Intimacy, but Hanif Kureishi is back on form with this book. I don’t think I’ve ever, as an adult, read an author who writes teenaged characters so well. It’s true of Karim Amir in The Buddha of Suburbia and it’s certainly true of Gabriel Bunch.

Gabriel’s Gift is the story of the Bunch family; recently separated parents Christine and Rex, au pair Hannah and 15 year-old twins Gabriel and Archie. Archie did die when he was two, but he’s still pretty chatty with Gabriel. Rex is a musician who almost made it big playing with rock superstar Lester Jones years before the story begins and has never really been able to let go of his glory days as bassist for the Leather Pigs. When Gabriel and Rex visit Lester, he is intrigued by Gabriel’s artistic talent and gifts him a painting. This leads to both of Gabriel’s parents attempting to take the painting from him and sell it. There’s not much of a main drama, it’s essentially Gabriel encouraging Rex to get his shit together, while trying to get back a (forged) copy of his painting that his father sold. It doesn’t need to have any more plot than that, it’s short and it’s funny and that’s enough to make it a really enjoyable read.

Part of the reason that this book is so good is Kureishi’s skill at writing teenagers. Gabriel is easily the most likeable character in the book, which isn’t hard as his parents are useless. But he’s still clearly teenager. Sometimes, when adults try and make teens likeable, they make them too grown up- just little adults and Kureishi doesn’t do that. Gabriel is still, at times, petulant and immature. He is more than a little xenophobic towards Soviet born Hannah, referring to her home town as “Bronchitis.” Yes, his parents are far more immature- his father is a hopelessly impractical dreamer who finds it difficult to cope with his son’s talents. Gabriel’s mother is, quite frankly, a lush. So Gabriel becomes the voice of sanity while retaining his youthful tone. I know when I read The Buddha of Suburbia I compared it to the early Adrian Mole books, and this is the same. I’m so impressed at how Kureishi utterly nails it again.

The only elements of the novel that don’t seem necessary are Gabriel’s other gifts. Early in the book he seems to draw a chair which then materialises. It quickly disappears and, other than as a reason for Gabriel to lay off the weed, it is not mentioned again. It’s an interesting bit to read, but it doesn’t entirely fit in or make sense in the context of the rest of the novel. Gabriel also spends a lot of time talking to Archie. Archie does talk back, and while it’s implied that this is actually Archie, I don’t believe it. Considering the rest of the book the idea that this is just Gabriel talking to himself and wanting to hear a response is far more likely. It’s a device that simply needs more exploring to be properly intriguing. There’s also a mini-cameo by The Buddha of Suburbia protagonist Karim Amir which adds nothing and is a little jarring, but that’s only 200 or so words long, so I can forgive Kureishi that.

It’s a difficult thing to write about people who are selfish and petty and make them likeable; neither Christine nor Rex should be any fun to read about, but they are. It doesn’t matter that for most of the book they are both being terrible parents but they stay funny. Gabriel is the same. Even when he’s acting like a teenager, Kueishi makes him enjoyable to read about.

Next up is a trip to the Buddha of Buddhism in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.

Fathers and Sons

It’s been a while since I tackled any Russian literature, other than Gogol’s super short The Nose.  I love the stuff; I just haven’t been in the mood for it.  I have to be in a certain mindset to cope with the gravity and philosophising that crops up in all the Russian literature I’ve had experiences with.  It might not be in all of it, there may be some light-hearted modern Russian culture (if the memes are to be believed, Putin clearly has a sense of humour), but it’s not so much in the classics.  Dostoyevsky wasn’t really one for a pun.

Anyway, finally being in the mood for misery and the philosophy of ethics, I embarked up Fathers and Sons.  It’s not bad either.  Essentially, it tells the story of a son Akardy who has recently graduated from university and his visit to his father Nikolai and uncle Pavel, and various other visits the pair make .  Arkady brings with him his friend Evgeny Vasilev Bazarov nihilist and buzzkill extraordinaire.  The book focuses on the difference in morals and beliefs between the two generations, while featuring quite a lot of Bazarov going around and spoiling everyone’s fun.  He’s spoilt and worshipped by his parents and is unfathomably ungrateful to them.  At one point he and Pavel have a duel simply because they hate one another.  He’s fairly awful to Arkady, who hero-worships him. And yet, despite all this, he’s oddly likeable.  Or at least good to read about.

It’s tricky to say why I enjoyed this book.  The plot is fairly simple, and the ending inevitable; and the philosophy isn’t what appealed to me.  I did enjoy the difference between the generations.  Nikolai and Pavel discuss an argument with their mother when they were young, Nikolai explaining to her that she could never understand his position as they were simply of different generations and she needed to make way for the young.  Naturally, these two are less than happy to make way for the young when they are the elder generation.  Of course, this is problematic when it becomes clear that Bazrov’s way is deeply flawed to the extent that even Arkady grows sick of it and turns back to something that more closely resembles his father’s morality. 

Fathers and Sons is also a fascinatingly important book.  It’s widely regarded as being responsible for popularising the term “nihilism” long before The Big Lebowski.  It was also one of the first Russian novels to become properly popular in the Western world.  It’s not hard to see why this book did travel; it provides a quick and easy to understand tale of what was going on in Russian culture and politics at the time of the novel and over the thirty or so years prior to its publication.  Without this book, there may have not been an audience for what came after- this would mean no Anna Karenina, no Crime and Punishment.  The influence of Ivan Turgenov is too far reaching to measure.

So that’s Fathers and Sons: important and entertaining.  I’m still not entirely sure why I like it.  All the bits I marked to look back at so I could write this just seem to involve Bazarov being a jerk to various characters.  It’s humourless jerkery too.  It really shouldn’t have been nearly as enjoyable as I found it. 

I’m now back to Hanif Kureishi and more parent-child relationships with Gabriel’s Gift.

A Maggot

John Fowles seems bound to disappoint me.  I had such high hopes for The French Lieutenant’s Woman when I read it- it starts so well.  But, it rapidly went downhill and I ended up not really enjoying it.  Despite this, I had high hopes for A Maggot.  It’s written in a cool style (that’s the technical term), with transcribed interviews, letters, and cuttings from a period magazine.  To clarify, that’s a magazine contemporary to the time the book is set in.  And yet… I couldn’t get into it.  Some parts were great (and I’ll come to those) but I just felt let down by the book as a whole.

A Maggot tells the story of the disappearance of Mr Bartholomew and possible death.  Keen to find his son, the mysterious Duke gets involved and an investigation begins.  This largely involves a lawyer interviewing everyone who can still be tracked down.  Bartholomew forms a travelling party, telling each member a different story to explain his travelling to Devon.  While there, he takes his servant Dick Thurlow and a prostitute he has hired for the journey Rebecca Lee into a cave.  Versions of what happens in this cave vary wildly, despite the fact that Rebecca is the only one able to tell the tale.  Consequentially, what starts as a fairly routine whodunit soon descends into women being raped by Satan, or possibly aliens and time travel.  It veers a bit off course at the end.  There’s also quite a lot about Quakerism and Shakerism.  To be honest, I’d never heard of Shakerism before and these themes don’t really add to the story.

I think this book disappointed me as it tries too hard to be complex as a narrative, but retains the idea of a very simplistic morality (at least for its female character).  I quite liked the Satan explanation.  This may well be personal preference speaking, but in fiction I’ll take the supernatural over aliens any day of the week.  We know, when Rebecca gives her testimony that she is pregnant and the idea that the child she is carrying could be Satan’s is far more interesting than the actual explanation (a convoluted tale about it being Dick Thurlow’s).  I feel like such a hypocrite, but it’s a shame that the Satan-baby isn’t the actual truth, especially as I get annoyed at the fact that her testimony about the aliens is seen by the male lawyer as less believable that a man’s story of Satan despite the fact that the man wasn’t even there.  I know the book is set in, like, 1736 and these are probably fairly accurate attitudes of the time, but still.  It’s even more annoying as Rebecca is a character of polarised morality.  When she is a whore, she is the lowest of the low, but once she returns to Quakerism, she is sickeningly pious.  It seems that there is very little ambiguity around her morality.  The only reasons she is disbelieved are her gender and her religion.  She is unquestionably moral by the end.  And people, even the very religious, aren’t actually like that.

So there we have it; A Maggot.  A disappointment.  I still hope one day to read a book by Fowles and actually enjoy it all the way to the end.  Truthfully, though, I don’t see that happening for some time.  Maybe I’ll give him a break before I pick up The Magus.  I feel like I say this about a lot of books, but A Maggot would have been so much better if the sexism had been less prevalent and had the aliens not gotten involved.

After a fairly lengthy break from it, I’ve moved back to Russian literature.  It’s now the turn of Ivan Turgenov’s Fathers and Sons. 

Little Women

I have a good friend who absolutely loves the film version of Little Women.  Reading the book, though has seriously made me question her judgement.  It’s one of the few great classics that are on The List that I hadn’t worked my way around to previously and I think that was to my detriment.  It’s not an awful book by any means.  I am just too old and too well read to appreciate it any more.  I’m sure, had I been the sort of teenager to appreciate this sort of book, I’d have gotten much more enjoyment from it when I was younger.

The story, for the handful of you not aware, is of the March sisters; Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy and a year in their lives when their father is away fighting in the American Civil War.  There’s little actual overarching plot, rather each chapter is more like a short story loosely linked to the last which shows another way in which the girls develop.  My main issue with this structure is that Louisa May Alcott turns each chapter into a moral lesson for the sisters and that gets incredibly boring.  The March sisters’ main hobby, it seems, is self-flagellation.  It’s no fun to hear over-wrought remorse and promises to be better made over some imaged slight.  Oh no, Jo uses slang; let’s moralise until she improves, Amy is vain; with the will of God and some proper penitence she won’t be soon.  Ad infinitum.  There’s one part where Meg just gets a bit tipsy on champagne.  Her first experience getting drunk is hours of remorse for foolishness and a feeling her hangover is completely deserved along with holier-than-thou recriminations from her mother.  My first experience with a hangover involve far too much vodka the night before and then the day spent in bed trying to convince my parents it was food poisoning.  They didn’t go for it.  There was regret but only because I felt so sick.  These incidents make the March clan neither believable nor likeable.

Another of my issues was that the book’s reputation precedes it.  Most of my generation probably know about Little Women because there’s a Friends plot line about it.  Essentially, Rachel convinces Joey to read it as it’s her favourite book.  There’s this whole thing in that episode about the fate of Beth and it ends with Joey hiding the novel in the freezer because he doesn’t want to read about her dying of Scarlet Fever.  Beth has literally no personality, so I was quite looking forward to the drama of her death.  Unfortunately, Alcott doesn’t actually kill her off.  So, I did some digging and it turns out that the American version of Little Women is a two volume novel which includes what is published in the UK as Good Wives.  Essentially, this meant that after my initial relief that it was over; I was faced with a second behemoth of tedium.  It was a bad day for me.  In short, though, Good Wives is better.  Things happen.  Beth dies and everyone else gets married.

Alcott has a habit of not using characters to their full potential.  Jo has some wonderful moments.  Firstly, she is clumsy.  As someone who is very clumsy, this appeals to me; especially as Alcott doesn’t do it in that ditzy rom-com way.  Jo sets fire to her dress and breaks things all over the place.  It’s great.  I do that.  She is free spirited and independent at the beginning of the novel but throughout the book is chastised for everything that makes her interesting.  Eventually she becomes as bland as her sisters.  Her father returns and is very happy with her new found lack of personality.  She’s marriageable now, and marries someone far too old and dull for her.

I can see why this book is on The List and it certainly deserves that place.  Alcott was writing for people younger than I am, and it’s hard to remember that sometimes with the book.  I kept mentally comparing it to Pride and Prejudice.  The five Bennett sisters are far more witty and intelligent than the Marchs and Litte Women is so much harder to enjoy.  Because it is for children, the book feels less well developed than anything Jane Austen wrote- even when the subjects are comparable. It is, in short, hundreds of simply written pages of people you wouldn’t want to know.  They’re so deadly dull.  Lizzy Bennett could have really livened things up.

I’m now about to start A Maggot by John Fowles.  

Cause For Alarm

I really enjoyed Cause For Alarm.  It’s a brilliant spy novel and not at all what I was expecting, but in a really good way.  I’ve read a couple of John Le Carre’s books and so thought I knew what I was getting into; that Eric Ambler would be similar.  He’s not and it’s wonderful.

Cause for Alarm tells the story of Nicky Marlow, a down on his luck engineer who takes a job in Milan following a downturn in the British market.  As I far as I could discern, Marlow makes machines that make weapons, or parts of weapons.  I really should know, but this part of the novel at least wasn’t particularly interesting or essential.  The key points are really that it’s 1937, he’s in Italy and involved in weapon production.  With hindsight, this is probably something the British should have been working on in 1937 too, but never mind.  After having his passport confiscated by the authorities, Marlow becomes embroiled in espionage.  Probable Nazi General Vagas pays for reports of all sales, while American busybody Andreas Zaleshoff pays him to feed Vagas false information.  Naturally, this all goes to hell at some point and Marlow and Zaleshoff spend about a third of the book on the run.

There are a couple of things that I loved about this book.  The first is that Marlow is the worst at spying.  He spends the book following the orders of Zaleshoff and never really being confident in his actions.  As soon as he lands in Milan, Marlow is in over his head and really just wants to go home to his fiancée.  Even she, from England, manages to deduce more than he does; helping him work out that his correspondence is being steamed open and read.  Marlow pretty much blunders his way through the novel and it’s so refreshing to see.  Le Carre’s books are so full of complex plots and twists that are orchestrated by genius spies that it makes a nice change to be in the company of a hero who isn’t a hero.  In fact, there are no professionals on the side of the good guys.  Even with Zaleshoff’s help, Marlow spends 80-odd pages fleeing trouble.  The protagonists are so much more relatable for it.

Ambler also has a fantastic turn of phrase.  He is a joy to read because of it.  When writing home to his fiancée, Marlow describes his (female) secretary thusly, “she has two dark pools of mystery where her eyes ought to be, a complexion like semi-transparent wax,” and about Zaleshoff he writes, “you received the impression that you were watching a very competent actor using all the technical tricks in his repertoire in an effort to make something of a badly written part.”  It’s a wonderful example of the hard-boiled style that people just don’t use any more.  It’s a real shame that that style was side-lined into genre fiction and then discarded, because it’s so entertaining to read.  I’d love to read a hard-boiled rom-com.

Cause For Alarm isn’t a perfect book but it’s damn good one.  It suffers, like most spy novels from the time, of a lack of women.  Marlow’s fiancée, Claire, mostly exists as a contrasting concept of home.  And even Zaleshoff sister, Tamara, who is his helpmate, is not around for any of the espionage heavy lifting.  It’s a small thing that could have improved the book, but really it’s a minor quibble.  All in all Ambler’s book is a cracking tale of pre-World War Two Italy.  Again, this provides a nice contrast from the plethora of books set at the timethat focus solely of Hitler because, really, Mussolini was a shit bag too.

I’m now on Lousia May Alcott’s Little Women.  I know, I know- I should have read it by now but I’m finally onto this classic.

Evelina

Evelina or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World isn’t the book that’s going to pull me out of my reading slump.  I think that’s the first thing to say about Frances Burney’s book.  It’s a Eighteenth Century sentimental novel (i.e. romantic drama) that clearly influenced Jane Austen in spades.  The problem is; Jane Austen so far exceeds Burney’s talent that Evelina becomes a bit of a drag to read. 

Burney’s book tells the story of country girl Evelina who is, naturally, not really a simple country girl but the beautiful daughter of a very rich and important man who, despite her unquestionable legitimacy, refuses to acknowledge Evelina as his child.  Intent on keeping Evelina away from the influence of her long absent grandmother, to stay with old friends of her guardian, Reverend Villars.  Of course, these old friends do anything but keep her out of trouble and drag her to the bright lights of London, along with its dances, operas, ballets and numerous suitors.  400-pages, one boringly obvious pantomime villain and an engagement to the utterly dishy and morally irreproachable (not to mention stinking rich) Lord Orville later, Evelina’s father is finally ready to accept her as a daughter.  There’s some nonsense side plot about a half-brother with pseudo-incestuous intentions too.  But it all ends in a wedding, that’s how you know it’s a comedy.

As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t wild about the book and part of that is because of the style.   It’s an epistolary novel but the main body of it consists of long run on letters from Evelina to Reverend Villars.  The shear length and volume of Evelina’s writing makes the style null and void; it may as well just be a first person narrative.  It’s really frustrating because I wanted it to be like Les Liaisons Dangereuses which uses the epistolary form to such incredible effect and only came four years later than Burney’s book.  But whereas Pierre Choderlos de Laclos uses the style to switch between characters’ views and show the duplicity of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, Burney only gives her main character a voice.  The fact that most of the letters are to the same person means that not even the tone varies greatly.  It’s such a wasted opportunity.

Evelina herself is also pretty dull.  We’re forced to be in her company and listen to her idle thoughts for so bloody long and they are so boring.  Aside from a few incredibly bitchy moments (“I fear you will think this London journey has made me grow very proud, but indeed this family is so low-bred and vulgar, that I should be equally ashamed of such a connexion in the country, or anywhere.”)  This is her own family she’s talking about.  Mostly, though, Evelina spends her time mooning over Lord Orville and being disgustingly nice and proper towards just everyone.  She needs to transgress a bit.  It’d make her far more interesting.

Evelina in itself is not a bad book.  It’s not wonderful, by any means, but it is not dreadful.  If I were less familiar with Austen or if I hadn’t read Les Liaisons Dangereuses, I would have liked it better.  Burney is similar to both, but comes up short in comparison.  Evelina simply doesn’t have the gumption of Lizzy Bennett and no-one writes a letter like the Marquise de Merteuil.  It’s a book full of potential ruined by its protagonist.  Burney has these flashes of brilliance, but the whole book feels too much like missed chance.  I can see a brilliant book in there, but it gets lost in all the small mistakes Burney makes.

My next read is spy novel Cause For Alarm by Eric Ambler.