A Man Asleep

A Man Asleep is, in many ways like Things.  I can see why the two of Georges Perec’s novellas have been combined into the one volume.  The two tales were written in succession and they cover off a lot of the same ideas, themes and general existential angst.   The real problem, though, is that A Man Asleep is just not as good as Perec’s first work.

I hate second person narratives.  I couldn’t stand studying Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller… and I didn’t much enjoy reading A Man Asleep because of it.  It’s an alienating way of writing.  While it is possible to empathise and identify with male characters when they are written in the first or the third person, using “you” makes this so much more difficult. It may be because it’s so rare, but I find it difficult to not relate “you” to myself when I read it.  Because Perec’s “you” is a man it becomes jarring over the little things that men are more likely to do then women (such as sitting in bed just wearing just pyjama bottoms).  This can detract from the narrative.  The limitations of the English language also affect the second person narrative.  In French there is a difference in meaning between the two “you” forms- “tu” and “vous”- which can’t be replicated in modern English. 

There are parts of A Man Asleep that I did enjoy.  At times- when encouraging the recall of memories for example- the tone feels like that of a hypnotist.  I think this is more of a testament to the translator, Andrew Leak, rather than any particular skill of Perec himself.  Other than that there’s not so much going on.   Very little happens and no-one’s happy about it.  Like the ending of Things, it has a sense of inevitability about it but, and this sounds slightly childish, it’s just not as good as Things.  That is, essentially, the crux of why I didn’t enjoy this book as much.

I think there’s still another Perec book on The List for me to read and I am cautiously optimistic.  Perec’s one of those authors that I really have to be in the mood for, and my mood can change mid-book.  There were parts of both Life: A User’s Manual and A Void that I loved a parts that I hated.  Perec is a good author, but there are only so many ruminations on nothing a woman can take.  Even though I split reading Things and A Man Asleep up by reading Flowers for Algernon in between (bafflingly this isn’t a List Book and it really should be).  I think I just read them too close together and that I’d have had far more patience with A Man Asleep if I’d given the two books more distance.

I’m now about to start (in contrast to all this Franco-philia) England Made Me, by Graham Green.

Things: A Story of the Sixties

No-one does introspective angst quite like the French.  That may sound xenophobic or like a lazy stereotype; but it’s true and I think I can prove it.  I’m going to veer away from standard form for the next couple of blogs, if only because I’ve read two List Books in a row by the same author (blame Vintage Classics and their decision to combine two novellas into one book).  This time it’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, by Georges Perec and, although my next read is also him I am going to deal with the two stories separately. 

Things (to remove the post-hoc subtitle) is a pretty important book, according to its introduction, at least.  It’s the first novel of French writer Perec, who would go on to write other List featured gems such as the wonderfully titled Life: A User’s Manual and famed novel-without-the-letter-e, Avoid/ A Void.  The latter of these I find particularly impressive, as considering the French for “I” this wipes out the ability write in the first person almost entirely.  But back to Things; it’s more than just a prize winning novel that launched the career of an important writer.  It’s also the kind of book that captures a 1960s Parisian zeitgeist perfectly.  And it’s bloody good too.

The book itself reminds me strongly of the French New Wave of cinema.  Being written in the Sixties, it would have been at around the same time that Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were really in the swing of ridding French cinema of its certain tendencies and portraying reality.  According the story is fairly simple.  Couple Jérôme and Sylvie are two young market researchers who are in pursuit of something better in Paris.  Their lives revolve around cigarettes, nights out with friends and possessions, while they lament the fact that they have no money.  Eventually, they give up France for Sfax in Tunisia, but this does not last either and they soon return.  The novella finishes with a pessimistic epilogue of a cookie-cutter future for the pair that drips with inevitability.

Jérôme and Sylvie themselves are pretty incidental.  They are characters moved by outside events rather than ones that have any discernible effect on the plot.  The epilogue shows this; their lives are mapped out for them, no matter what their actual desires may be.  Perec also has a wonderful tendency to focus on their things, rather than the couple.  They are not introduced by name until around the third chapter, long after their possessions and one of the stand-out bits of the book is a section about their apartment before they move out, finally empty of their clutter and once again desirable.  Perec gives the feeling that Jérôme and Sylvie are transitory and the only things with permanence are just that: things. 

Part of the reason that Things has really struck a chord with me is that I am at the same point in my life as Jérôme and Sylvie and I can see my life going the same way.  I’m not sure how, but I appear to have fallen into something that could well be described as a career and that maps out paths for me that Perec seems to be suggesting I will end up taking, no matter my view on the thing.  In Things, Perec doesn’t suggest anything as trite as fate takes over, he just understands how the majority of lives run and although there are subtle (and not so subtle) differences between Paris of the 1960s and Norwich of the 2010s, the general course of a human life hasn’t changed terribly.  And Perec is predicting a mediocre future.

Join me next time for the introspection of Georges Perec part deux: A Man Asleep.

The Butcher Boy

I didn’t really enjoy The Butcher Boy.  I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I really struggled to get into the book.  It’s not bad, as such, just difficult to get the hang of.  I think some of it has to do with Patrick McCabe’s style.  It’s a stream of consciousness narrative with a main character who fairly awful for most of the book and I was reading it in half hours snatched during lunch breaks and before going to sleep at night.

The Butcher Boy tells the story of Fancie Brady, a boy growing up in an unnamed Irish town an unspecified period of time ago.  From the start he’s utterly unknowable and remote.  He’s the kind of boy that my mum would have disapproved of me hanging out with when I was ten; he and his best friend spend most of their time scaring chickens and shouting at fish.  There’s clearly not much to do for fun in their town, so when the middle class Nugent family move there the boys become obsessed with their son Philip.  When the friendship goes south after a comic stealing incident, Joe grows up and straightens while Francie continues on with his campaign against the Nugents.  After a stint in a priest run reform school (complete with sexual abuse) and a mental institute, Francie realises that Joe has out grown him and, so, murders Mrs Nugent.  These aren’t really spoilers; most of it is given away on the first page.

I think part of the reason that I didn’t like the book is that Francie is a dick.  His personality flaws may actually just be symptoms of a mental illness, but it’s fairly uncomfortable to spend 200-odd pages in his company.  He persecutes the (admittedly snobby) Nugents for next to know reason and has no concept of how deeply unhappy and unwell his mother is.  It would be much nicer if he showed any empathy for anyone throughout the entirety of the novel, and make him a character much easier to empathise with.  Even the sexual abuse couldn’t tug at my heart strings.  It felt very clichéd and even a little lazy of McCabe to have paedophilic priests.

I did, however, like the ending of the book.  There are spoilers here.  Francie tells the story of how he meets his best friend Joe as a young child, hacking away at a patch of ice in the street.  Francie joins him and they form a fast friendship that last years.  Decades later, in his mental hospital, Francie meets another man, while he is hacking away at ice in the yard.  It’s nice and cyclical and, even if I don’t particularly like him, I like that Francie has a chance at a happy ending.

Overall, I’m not sure I got this book completely.  I can certainly see why it was on The List; it’s different and pretty original and I’m sure if I’d have read it at a different time when I was able to get into it, I’d have loved it.  It’s a shame, because I do love stories about murderers and I was so looking forward to this one.  Maybe it’s another case of my expectations being far too high for the book to have a chance to deliver on them.  And it’s a pity, but it was probably pretty inevitable that I was going to be let down by The Butcher Boy.

My next read is Georges Perec’s Things. 

In Watermelon Sugar

Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar is very much a book of its time.  It’s a story set in a commune and was, unsurprisingly, written in the 1960s.  It’s an incredibly easy read, I think I finished off the entire thing in less than a day.  But a lot of that stems from the fact that each of the chapters is only around a page or two long, if that.  The book slips away through these miniature moments and events which only partially form a cohesive narrative.  It’s also completely addictive to read because of the length of the chapters.  Each one is a small hit of story, of events which may or may not be happening.

The main narrative, such as it is, is the story of an unnamed narrator living in a commune, iDEATH.  Our narrator is in the process of writing the first book to arrive in the commune for 35 years; it’s not really entirely clear at any point whether this is due to some kind of apocalyptic nightmare, or just the severe and intentional isolation of the community.  Anyway, our communees are happily living together with their casual attitudes to sex and sharing of the cooking responsibilities when along comes the ex-communicated inBOIL and his gang.  The commune knows that something is coming, and all of them apart from outsider Margaret are scared of what inBOIL is going to do.  He eventually shows up in iDEATH with his gang and violent intentions.  Death follows.  Not even iDEATH.

There are some brilliant parts to this book.  I don’t think I fully understand them, but they’re brilliant nonetheless.  Take, for example, the narrators parents.  They’re eaten by tigers when he is a child.  He isn’t particularly upset about this, tigers are predators and so the narrator feels that he can’t resent them for eating other animals.  Besides, they help him with his arithmetic.  They’re very cultured and might not really be tigers (consumption of human flesh aside).  As I said, it’s difficult to understand, and it sounds pretty ridiculous when I try and explain it.  The Sun too, in an entirely non-ridiculous way, changes colour daily and produces different coloured watermelons dependent on the day of the week they are sown and harvested. 

The whole iDEATH thing is kind of jarring too.  Braugitan was, of course, writing before the time that Apple took over a good portion of the world.  Apple’s subsequent domination of culture makes the whole thing feel like it should be a parody, or some kind of oblique satire about the cult of the iPhone.  And it’s not.  I’m not really sure why the commune is called iDEATH and I have no idea why it’s stylised as it is.  Granted, Steve Jobs was by all accounts a total hippy, so it’s very plausible that he read In Watermelon Sugar and thought the stylisation was just stellar. 

In Watermelon Sugar is a good read, all allusions to the Apple Empire aside.  There’s probably loads going on that I missed because I was reading it so quickly or because I know nothing about communes that I haven’t seen on Louis Theroux documentaries.  On the plus side, iDEATH is pretty benign in comparison to the ones Louis Theroux visits.  There’s not a paedophile or a religious fanatic in sight.  And I really love the bit about the tigers.

I’m now on The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe.

Shame

I’m not sure how I feel about Shame.  It contains a lot of elements found in many of Salman Rushdie’s books that I usually quite like; things like a not quite linear narrative and all that magical realism jazz.  But I wasn’t wild for Shame.  And the reasons that I didn’t like it are things that have cropped up time and time again in the blog.  I didn’t like the (supposed) main character and it’s about a subject that Rushdie presupposes knowledge of but that I, in reality, know virtually nothing about.

The novel begins with a focus on the life of Omar Khayyam, a three-mothered rich boy named after the famous poet.  Although he is raised in virtual confinement, at age 12 he bargains away his shame to be allowed to attend school.  While studying to become a doctor, Omar meets Iskander Harappa- the country’s future Prime Minister.  Omar goes on to marry the much younger Sufiya Zinobia, daughter of Iskander’s hated rival Raza Hyder.  In contrast to Omar, Sufiya is a character doomed to carry the unfelt shame of others.  Naturally, this causes problems within the marriage.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t like this book in part because I could not stand Omar.  A character without shame can quickly become one with questionable morals; and they’re always difficult to engage with.  During his years of isolation, Omar learns hypnotism.  As a teenager he quickly goes on to use this to rape and impregnate the girl he is trying to woo.  She is then forced to marry another, much older, man, leave her home and upon her solo return to live her life in solitude.  Omar suffers no repercussions for his actions.  This happens fairly early on in the book and, I know I’m not really meant to like Omar as a character, but things like this mean that I can’t stand him.  After the raping, I don’t want to spend another 200 pages in his company.  As much as he is pushed to the side in his narrative, he’s still there. 

The plot that takes over from Omar’s storyline is an analogy for the history of Pakistan.  Or at least an incident in the history of Pakistan.  The figures of Iskander and Raza are (according to the internet) representative of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq respectively.  As I said, I don’t really know anything about the history or the politics of it all and I think Rushdie does assume that his reader has some kind of knowledge of everything.  It makes it kind of difficult to get into the book at times.  Allegories definitely lose something when you’re not sure of the actual original story.

So, long story short, I did not love Shame.  There are bits of it I do love and it’s all the magical realism.  Omar has three mothers; unsure of his biological one as the other two had simultaneous sympathetic pregnancies.  Unfortunately, this is my favourite part of the novel and it’s over about 20 pages in.  I don’t think that it’s a bad book, in all, it’s just not as good as a lot of Rushdie’s other stuff.  It’s kind of a come down compared to the last of his books I read, TheGround Beneath Her Feet.  I think that this might be the last of his books I have to read on The List and I’m a bit sad that it wasn’t a better one.  There are a lot of better books by Rushdie to end on.

Next time’s blog is In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan.  I read it all in one day and I’m still not sure what watermelon sugar is.

Tipping the Velvet

I remember Tipping the Velvet when it was on TV years ago.  I must have only been about twelve or thirteen and decided to watch it on the telly recently installed in my bedroom because some of it is set in Whitstable.  My dad worked there at the time and he had told me all about the filming.  Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I, at twelve or thirteen, was far too young to be watching stuff like that- even now the only bit that I really remember involves a pretty painful looking leather strap-on.  In retrospect, that’s probably why it took me so long to convince my parents to let me have a TV in my room at all.  It’s a fantastic book, though.  Sarah Waters is brilliant at the good story simply told type book.  And, I assume, it’s well researched and factually accurate.  I don’t know enough about Victorian sub-culture to claim otherwise. 

For those not familiar with it, Tipping the Velvet is the story of Nancy Astley, an oyster girl who falls in love with the musical halls and one of their rising stars, Kitty Butler.  Leaving behind the Kentish coast for the capital, she becomes involved in Kitty’s male impersonation act as the pair fall into a relationship.  The novel follows Nancy as her various relationships fall apart and through her time as a rent boy and tart for the wealthy Diana.  Eventually, she ends up growing up and settling down, leaving behind childhood romances for actual proper love.  In all these respects, it’s pretty much just a coming of age story.  One with the snazzy backdrop of Victorian London and the counter culture of lesbianism in the late 1800s.

I think one of my favourite things about the book is the fact that it isn’t just about lesbianism.  Throughout, Waters plays with gender in a terrific way.  Despite her secure sexuality, Nancy is pretty gender fluid.  When she first dresses as a man for her and Kitty’s act, she is deemed “too masculine” and she uses this later to pass as a man during her rent boy days.  As this evolves she becomes more comfortable in trousers than in skirts, she is Diana’s “boy.”  Nancy is comfortable adopting male characteristics and uses this to emphasis her natural androgyny.  But she manages to do this, while retaining her female sexual identity.  It’s quite fascinating.

I was less impressed, however, by the end of the book.  It’s horribly contrived.  Nancy manages to run into literally every woman she’s ever slept with in the space of about an hour in the same place.  It’s unrealistic in the extreme and just unbelievable.  It’s such a shame because it detracts from the book as a whole.  It’s impossible to stay with the narrative when exes are popping up from every nook and cranny which means the final conclusion to the book ends up feeling like a cheap rom-com as opposed to the well-crafted historical drama of the rest of the thing.  Added to this, Diana returns because of her involvement in the ridiculously named Suffrage magazine, Shafts.  Despite the fact that it sounds like low grade porn, this was a real magazine and it actually sounds like it was quite a good one for the time.

So, there we go: Tipping the Velvet.  I liked it.  It’s pretty much what you’d expect from a coming of age drama set in a time when the sexuality it is exploring is forbidden.  It’s far more simple plotwise than the only other of Waters’ books I’ve read, The Fingersmith, but this is necessary.  Nancy’s not so book-smart, and I don’t think she’d cope well with too many twists or turns in her life.  She has simple motivations- love, a roof over her head- and a warm bed.  Tipping the Velvet is just the story of how she get these things.

Next time is Salman Rushdie’s Shame.