The Quiet American

I saw the film version of The Quiet American years ago.  As a result, I had Michael Caine's voice in my head for the entirety of the book.  Even in my mind, my Michael Caine impreasion is shit, so it actually ended up being pretty distracting.  Despite all of this, it's a pretty good read.

Graham Greene's novel tells the story of Fowler, a cynical British reporter, and the death of his friend Pyle, your standard wided eyed young American in over his head in Vietnam after World War Two. Told throguh flashbacks, the pair naturally both fall in love with the same woman but somehow maintain their friendship. Their political differences are slightly more troubling and ultimately lead to Pyle's murder- Fowler's possible involvement in which forms part of the narrative.

The political situation is interesting, my knowledge of Vietnamese history and limited to the one war- which is clearly being built up to in the novel.  I won't go into it too much, as my understanding of it all is almost certainly faulty. But it's always nice to see the death of American idealism. Greene juxtaposes this with Fowler's cynicism so the reader sees the whole situation to be as futile as he does.

I think part of the reason that I enjoyed The Quiet American is that is plays up to so many tropes. None of the characters are believable as humans because they are such stereotypes- Fowler is the man who has seen too much and trusts nobody but himself, Pyle is has the certainty of youth and believes he will save the country. Even if the book didn't start with Pyle dying it would be so clear what would happen to his character.  And then there is Phuong. She is a screen that the two men project their desires onto- for Fowler this is sex and a reprieve from loneliness and for Pyle it is the American Dream.

This isn't Greene's best book, but it is a good one. He is one of those authors who, while usually good, occasionally transcends into beauty. The moment in The Quiet American is just a sentence after a bombing in a market place- "Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel."

Ignorance

I haven't read anything by Milan Kundera for years.  I loved him when I was about seventeen and have read pretty much everything by him.  In my youth, studying the philosophy of morality I really connected with his work.  As a result, Ignorance is the only one of his books on The List that I have left to read.  And I remember now why I like him so much.

Ignorance tells the story of two people who abandoned their Czech homeland in the years of Communism.  Following its fall in 1989 they both come back for the first time in twenty years.  The pair, Irena and Josef, meet by chance in a Parisian airport and, each sort of remembering the other, decide to get together while in Prague.  The book is actually remarkably dense for something that is fewer than 200 pages long- as well as their respective visits home, Kundera details Irena and Josef's memories of other.

The story is pretty simple, for all that's packed in there and Kundera is even kind enough to provide a brief history of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic (including why the number twenty is so important in the country's 20th Century history) for those of us who only have a vague concept of the Eastern Bloc and zero memories pre-1989.  Kundera then gors on to use said simple story as a way of exploring the concept of memory.  Irena's memories of her time with Josef are different to Josef's memories of his time with Irena.  This fact shapes their present day interactions.  It's difficult to explain without just giving the whole plot away or over-simplifying Kundera's points to an inane redundancy, but it's good. I enjoyed it.

Ironically, given my fond memories of Kundera, he also touches on the importance of nostalgia.  Nostalgia, Kundera tells us, comes from two Greek words- 'nostros' which means 'return' and 'algos'- 'suffering.'  Nostalgia is literally "suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."  He ties this all into the idea of emigration and language- each of the European languages have subtle differences in their words for the same concept.  The etymology of these various languages means that Irena especially is left living in Paris with a feeling of longing that we are told cannot be expressed fully in French.  Again, it's such a complex idea and, after telling us off of this, Kundera weaves the idea of nostalgia into the rest of the story.  He uses it to explain why both Irena and Josef decided to return to the Czech Republic and why Josef finds it impossible to stay.

As I said, there's a lot in Ignorance.  It's one of the few books that I've enjoyed that made me wish I were better read.  There are frequent references to the Odyssey- again showing the significance of twenty years- that I know I don't grasp the nuances of.  It also makes me wish I were better travelled; having lived in just two places in my entire life, emigration and the feelings associated with it are a difficult concept.  Mostly, though, this book just made me nostalgic for my education.

The Siege of Krishnapur

The Siege of Krisnapur was not the book that I was hoping it would be. I wanted a book about the British in India in which the British ones aren't the good guys; one that actually shows the damage we did and justifies the various uprisings that took place during the years of the Empire.  This book doesn't quite do that, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

J.G. Farrell's book tells the story of the Brits in the fictional Krishnapur leading up to and during the tine of the titular siege.  There's a bunch of fairly stereotypical period drama foder- romances, religion, disagreements about the causes of cholera- that kind of thing.

What I like about the book is thatb even though the characters are all fundamentally quite likeable, Farrell gives the audience enough distance to see why there would be mutinies.  At their core the British characters are all a little ricdiculous.  They are concern by fashion and The Great Exhibition- they constantly reaffirm that they are the more civilised and advanced race but do nothing to back up their claims. 

One of the beat examples of this is the funniest part of the book.  The Catholic Padre is trying to persuade Fluery (a young man finally starting to treat the siege as something more than a great adventure) of the existence of God using William Paley's argument for intelligent design.  He does this whill the pair are being attacked.  The whole thing is a great juxtaposition between the Church stating all life is sacred as it is designed by God and the immediate and actual need to kill to survive.  It is my favourite part of the book by a long way, mostly because it ends with the science that the Brits hild so dear being tamped down in a wonderfully ironic way.

There's quite a lot of good stuff about women running through The Siege of Krishanpur. Fluery's widowed sister Miriam is also caight up in the siege along with his romantic interest Louise Dunstaple, and Fluery has some opinions about how they should be behaving.  He believes, during an early dinner, that Lousie is behaving quite correctly in sitting quietly and not giving her opinion on the topic of 'progress' (what else).  Fluery believes that "a woman's special skill is to listen quietly to what a fellow has to say and thereby create the sort of atmosphere in which good conversation can flourish." Naturally, he approves of Louise. He applies simular standards to Miriam, becoming frustrated when he believes she is flirting with an older, married man.  What saves me from hating Fleury is what I mentioned earlier- Farrell's ability to make characters ridiculous.  Fleury is unable to regulate Miriam's behaviour because she raised him, he only believes himself to be the authority.  He can't even get her to stop calling him by the childhood nickname 'Dobbin.'  Miriam, in contrast to this, fully understands that as a Victorian woman she is expected to bend to the whims of a husband- recently widowed she intends to stay this way rather than obtaining a new man to tell her what to do.

I enjoyed The Siege of Krishanpur more than I thought I would.  It's not an absolute page turner but it's aolid abd it's funny. I still haven't got my bliatering critique of the British colonisation but I'm not really likely to- at least not from a British author, but I liked what I did get. I've been meaning to read sone of Farrell's work for quite aome time and this book has certainly whetted my appetite for the other two of hia that I have waiting for me further down The List.

The Temple of My Familiar

So, it's been an age since I've written a blog post. I have still been chipping away at the 1,001 books but this is marking a new and concerted effort to get back into the habit of writing. The book that I decided to do this with is The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker. I feel, in retrospect, this was a poor choice.

I found the book so hard to get into. It's a mish-mash of multiple characters and their stories, all of which are linked in the loosest of ways, rather than any conventional narrative.  There were times upon finishing one story that I had no desire to keep reading and move on to another character. The stories are too up and down, too loosely linked to make the thing unputdownable or to make me want to go back to it when I wasn't reading it. It's a shame, really, because the bits that are good really are very good.  I am going to do my level best to concentrate on those bits.

Let's start with Fanny.  I like Fanny. She is free spirited and fun and the best character by a country mile.  To be honest, the whole book would have been better if it was just about her.  Fanny, we find out 100 or so pages into the book is the granddaughter of The Color Purple's Celie.  Raised by Celie and Shug from that book she is fantastically outspoken and comfortable defying convention.  She divorces her husband, Suwelo- not because she doesn't love him but because she doesn't want to be a Married Woman any more.  She leaves her academic career teaching Women's Studies because she is sick of explaining her femininity to men and her blackness to white people.  All I can say is that she is one of the few characters who ends up with a real narrative- her story is by far the most interesting.  Fanny feels like a breath of fresh air in the book, I can think of no other way to describe it.

Well, I'm sort of out of the bits of The Temple of My Familiar that I enjoyed and I don't think that I expressed exactly what I enjoyed particularly well.  On to the bits I didn't like. I can probably write more eloquently about them anyway.

One of the characters, Lissie, has had thousands of past lives.  These come out in photographs- she is never the same person twice on film.  Lissie's story is essentially just that of the lives she has led and while some of them are good and interesting none are more so than the life she is currently living.  Her past lives seem like a distraction from who she is rather than a part of it.  She is the trope of 'wise old woman' and she plays it easily enough that Walker's reliance on the supernatural feels like a cheap and unnecessary trick that I am not convinced works. Yes, part of Lissie's character is how her husband Hal and multiple men over the years have accepted and been fascinated with her past but these moments just made me wonder why Lissie on her own wasn't enough.  I would have preferred Lissie with one life: not trimmed down but distilled- with superfluous stories about the time she was a lion.

There were a few parts in the book when it seemed like the characters were only acting to shock.  Lissie has past lives, Arveyda has an affair with his wife's mother, said wife ends up sleeping with Suwelo.  There are great moments in the book but they are few and far between. This is a sort of sequel to a book that I have a great affection for- one that I studied for my A-Levels.  I care about Celie and Shug too much to really enjoy a book that doesn't use their potential and instead relegates them to the sidelines as dotty old ladies.

Next time it's JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur... hopefully with less of a hiatus.

The Country Girls

Reading the blurb of The Country Girls, I was sure I knew what I was getting into. It would be like Love in a Cold Climate- a fun boo about teenage girls growing up and finding love, or heartbreak.  Then the protagonist's mother died in the first few chapters and she was removed from the care of her drunken and abusive father and I accepted that I might be wrong.  Except I wasn't.  Not entirely.  There are aspects of that in Edna O'Brien's novel, but there's also a fair amount of darkness and angst.

As I mentioned, Caithleen Brady's mother dies the day she finds out that she has been awarded a scholarship to a fancy nun-school.  Soon she and best friend Baba are off to stay in the strict convent, stripped of all the luxuries of home.  It's all very A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, really.  Anyway, the pair eventually get kicked out and, rather than returning to their provincial home town for good, hotfoot it to Dublin in search of independence and love.  

I really enjoyed this book.  Baba and Cait are funny and relatable- even if Baba is, essentially, a cow.  Baba  is rich and pretty, while Cait has to rely on her wits to get by.  Cait follows Baba into mischief even when she'd rather be sensible- she tries to flirt by discussing James Joyce while Baba encourages men to buy them expensive drinks.  It's a friendship pattern that I think most women would recognise from being young.  Pretty much everyone has (or had) a friend who is a terrible influence- and terribly fun.

I also liked its darkness.  Cait, for all her cleverness and sensibility, is terribly naive.  Her main love interest through the book is the dubiously named Mr Gentleman.  Naturally, he is anything but and starts courting Cait shortly after her mother dies.  He is married and she is fourteen at the time.  Rather than seeing this as a fairly textbook case of grooming (which it certainly is) Cait falls for it hook, line and sinker.  Cait is a character who is so desperate for the ideal love that she latches on to the first man she meets who appears to embody it, regardless of the age difference.  Mr Gentleman's obvious inappropriateness and the fact that he is clearly taking advantage of her, removes the comedy of Cait's naivety.  She is a swooning maiden being led into a trap laid by a predator who showers her with gifts and insists she keep their love a secret. 

I am not sure why I enjoyed this book so very much.  Yes, I see flashes of my teenaged self in both Baba and Cait but that doesn’t explain it entirely. It sounds cheap to say, but it was nice to read something that was easy.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was nice to read and everything but fuck me did it take some mental effort.  So many of the books on The List seem to be just like that and so it’s nice to find one that is simple and enjoyable without the effort of trying to remember your Shakespeare or Greek classics that you probably never learned to begin with.  It may have a fair amount of God in it, but thankfully a working knowledge of the Bible isn’t essential to enjoy The Country Girls.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

So... James Joyce.  I am not shy in voicing my distain for Ulysses.  It's not the best book ever written.  To me, it seems deliberately difficult. I don't care what point you're making- there is no need to go 200 odd pages without a full stop.  But one of my housemates loves A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and so I thought I would give Joyce another go.  I have to read Finnegans Wake at some point anyway, so I might as well get this one over with.  This is Joyce's first novel and I think this might be as comprehensible as he gets.

The novel is referred to pretty much everywhere as a Bildungsroman which is essentially a wanky term for coming of age story.  That's pretty an allegory for this book; something simple made unnecessarily complicated.  It is literally just a story of a kid growing up in Ireland.

Stephen Dedalus is a boy who grows into a man.  This is the story.

Dedalus, the internet tells me, is a reference to Daedalus- Icarus's father in Greek mythology.  This is the first in a long list of references in the book that I so far didn't get that I don't even know they existed.  To steal a line off Donald Rumsfeld, "there are unknown unknowns" when it comes to the references in this book.  I assume there are more.  I pretty much stopped looking after the first one, else this blog would have descended very quickly into things that the internet tells me this book is about.

I know everything that I'm writing makes it sound like I hated the book. I didn't.  It's just okay.  The story is actually quite interesting and the development and growing complexity of the language when Stephen a child is good. It was interesting to read this book straight after Go Tell it on a Mountain, so many of themes are the same- young men struggling to grow up with the expectations of the church- and some parts about death match almost word for word.  It is fascinating that while the modes of worship are worlds apart, the core messages and fears that Christianity imposes on its young seem to be universal.

Modernism so often just seems like showing off about how much you know, about how much you've read (yes, I understand the irony of using this blog to bitch about that) and sometimes it prioritises that over narrative.  In pushing to add layers to their characters, something can be lost.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man still worked for me because there is still a story when the allusions are stripped away.  My issue with Joyce always comes back to Ulysses.  It is not just that I think the book overrated, it clouds people's judgement.  If Ulysses had not been written, I am not confident A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would be remembered.  It serves to contextualise Joyce's genius rather than to shine in its own right.

My next book is another foray into Irish religion.  It's The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien.

Go Tell It On The Moutain

I have been meaning to read Go Tell It on the Mountain for what feels like ages. The only other book that I've read by James Baldwin is Giovanni's Room and you may remember just how much I loved that.  On top of that, one of my friends adores this book and never misses an opportunity to tell me to read it.  I'm pretty sure he suggested we stay in Harlem when we went to New York because of Go Tell it on Mountain.  What I'm trying to get across is that there was a lot of hype around this book.  Naturally, it didn't live up to it.

Baldwin's first novel is the semi-autobiographical tale of Johnny Grimes, who while growing up in Harlem in the 1930s is expected to follow in his father's footsteps and become a preacher.  This isn't the really interesting part of the book.  The middle of the book's three sections, The Prayers of the Saints, is dedicated to the stories of James's aunt Florence, his father, Gabriel, and his mother, Elizabeth.  They broadly tell the story of Florence's escape from the South to New York, Gabriel's first wife and lovechild from an affair and Elizabeth's life before marrying the much older Gabriel.

Earlier in the book, Florence's distaste for her younger brother is revealed without reason, but Gabriel is slowly built up as a hypocrite.  He is a furious preacher; righteous and terrifying, and desperate to keep hidden his affair with a local girl and the child that results from it.  But Baldwin doesn't let the story stay so simple.  Yes, Gabriel is a flawed man who has no desire to fix his flaws, but he also has a tragic life.  Gabriel's mistress dies in childbirth and he is unable to claim pride in his son- instead he is relegated to the side lines and has to watch him make mistakes.  His marriage to Elizabeth is almost an act of kindness, but he is not kind to his children.  Baldwin makes us understand Gabriel's cruelty without justifying it.

There's a lot about this novel that I am sure I didn't get.  It was another book read on a coach.  And while coach trips are great for the sheer volume of reading I can get done, they're not the best for quality. There is a lot of Bible stuff going on in this book.  The closest thing I've read to (most of) the Bible is Doris Lessing's Shikasta and I'm only about 90% sure that what I think was happening in that book was happening.  My point is, that Go Tell it on the Mountain is one of those books that would so clearly be enhanced by similar experience.  Growing up godless, I don't get the all the allegories Baldwin's going for and I can see that I'm missing out.

Although I mentioned that Go Tell it on the Mountain didn’t live up to the hype, that was only because the hype was so high.  Giovanni’s Room astounded me.  It was revolutionary in ways that very few books are.  And this book is great, but it isn’t saying something that left me gobsmacked that it even got published.  Giovanni’s Room may not be as famous, but to me it’s more important.  And it’s a shame, because if I’d have read this first, I am sure I would have loved it just as much as my friend does.

Next up: more God!  It’s James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Pierre et Jean

Pierre et Jean is brilliant.  The only other work I've read of Guy de Maupassant is Bel Ami and I remember that being good.  Not blow your socks off amazing, but good nonetheless.  I'm not sure if Pierre et Jean just struck a chord with me, reading it as I was going to visit my family.  But I loved it.  It's simple and intriguing and, even after six hours on a coach, gripping.

The book tells the story of two brothers, Pierre and Jean.  When the younger, Jean, is named as the sole beneficiary to a family friend's fortune, Pierre becomes jealous.  This soon leads to suspicions about Jean's true paternity and a little bit of a mental breakdown over his mother's (perceived) loss of honour.  That's pretty much it.  It's a very short story- focusing more on Pierre's various obsessions with success, his brother's good luck and his mother's honour- rather than a complicated plot.  And the story works well for it, much more would have felt unnecessary. 

From the beginning, Pierre is jealous of Jean.  It is not just linked to the money.  Pierre sees his younger brother as a better specimen: more driven, more handsome, loved better.  The family is held together by the fact that neither brother has actually managed to fly the nest.  Pierre’s jealous is benign.  When the money comes into play, Jean scoops up a flat that Pierre has had his eye on.  He is directly stopping Pierre's happiness and so Pierre allows himself to listen to the idle gossip surrounding his mother and the unusualness of his brother's inheritance.  In his view, he is driven to it.

My favourite thing about the novel is its ending.  Pierre confronts Jean with his suspicions about their mother and she overhears the brothers talking.  Instead of confirming or denying it on the spot, she waits for Pierre to leave before revealing the truth to Jean. While she says that this is because she now lives in fear of Pierre, it almost vindicates his jealousy.  He is not the son who is trusted with the truth.  In fact, he is never told it.

Pierre et Jean is good in a way that is a bit clichéd now.  The brothers are polar opposites- Pierre dark haired, impetuous and indecisive about his life; Jean is fair, rational and kind.  Jean has a plan.  But the book feels as though it were written before these things became clichés.  In de Maupassant's hands they feel as though they are natural character traits first, and foreshadowing points second.  Having said that, I was kind of hoping that it would have been the other way around- that Pierre would have been the one to come into a great fortune and for Jean to have to deal with not being the golden boy all of a sudden.  I think there could have been more emotional complexity in that story and it's one I'd like to have read.

I am now onto (okay have already finished) Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin.   After that there are no more coach books.  

To The Lighthouse

To The Lighthouse is a modern classic.  Everybody says it, so it must be true.  I mean, I'm not too sure how this compares to other works of Virginia Woolf like Mrs Dalloway in regards to books that academics like to get their knickers in a twist about, but it's definitely up there.  And it's good. I know that's damning it with faint praise, I mean to, it is good- I'm just not sure that it's all that.  I know that whenever it comes up I'm quick to point out that Modernism just isn't my thing, and I think it's just a case of that.  For a Modernist tale, it is good.

The novel is split into three parts and the story, such as it is, follows the Ramsay family (Mr, Mrs and eight children) on two days ten years apart- these are dealt with in parts one and three of the book.  The first day follows a visit by friends to the Ramsays at their summer home in the Hebrides.  I'm not sure why anyone would have a summer home in the Hebrides, but still.  The family talk about visiting the lighthouse, don't visit the lighthouse and then there's some chat about soup, a brooch and the (in)ability of women to be as good artists or writers as men.  Standard dinner party fodder. Ten years later, in part three, most of the interpersonal relationships detailed in part one have fallen apart, but Mr Ramsay and his two youngest children do eventually reach the lighthouse.

My first issue with the book is the children.  I feel like, in both life and literature, eight children is too many children.  It's impossible to keep track of them all.  I've read the book very recently, and I could only name half of them for you now. 

On a more serious note, I did like the middle section.  I feel like this is a little bit hypocritical, having banged on about hating Modernism and then saying that my favourite part was the most Modernist bit.  But, whatever.  The section is called Time Passes and focuses on the constant rather than the transitory human lives.  The abandoned summer home is described in detail, Mrs Ramsay's death given only a couple of sentences.  Her death and the deaths of two of her children are sudden- we're given little context and no warning or closure.  They are realistic deaths.  And, in being so realistic, you experience a sense of loss.  The deaths are concise in a way not even Ernest Hemingway could have managed.  They are not overwrought.

I find Woolf difficult as a writer.  She is someone I want to like more than I actually do like.  I can read her work and see the objective goodness- the quality of it- but still, I have trouble warming to her.  This is despite A Room of One’s Own.  Maybe one of the problems was that I was reading this on a coach- it’s neither easy, nor is it relaxing reading Woolf and I think I could have enjoyed To The Lighthouse more in a more appropriate setting.

Another coach-read net: Pierre et Jean by Guy du Maupassant. 

To Have and Have Not

Ernest Hemingway is one of those authors whose books can put hair on your chest.  His entire oeuvre screams masculinity.  In the hands of a less talented writer, his works would have no doubt slipped into caricature.  To Have and Have Not is no exception to this rule.

Told with Hemingway's signature sparseness, the book follows the tale of Harry Morgan. Morgan is a retired cop running booze and the occasional person between Cuba and Florida.  The story picks out a few of his jobs when he is down on his luck as well as focusing on his married life.  To Have and Have Not also focuses on the "haves-" the rich contingent of Key West.  The stories of Harry and the wealthy provide a stark contrast. 

The bits about fishing and the sea are pretty okay.  The thing that I loved about this book, though, was the relationship between Harry and his wife Marie.  Marie is amazing.  She supports Harry and spars with him.  She loves him.  So often in crime stories, the woman puts up with the crime or ends up hating the man and it is not the case in this book.   Hemingway puts such care into showing that these two love each other.  He does this through a (somewhat surprising) sex scene told with only dialogue. He does is with the way off track speculations of writer and Key West big shot Richard Gordon.  The pair has a real chemistry and reading it made me want to watch the film again.  Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were perfectly cast.  I found it almost impossible to read the book without thinking of them.

Hemingway's novel is set in during the Great Depression. Like many stories of days gone by, though, it still rings true today.  This is a book about a man who is struggling to keep his family afloat in a time of great financial hardship.  Harry only takes starts taking the illegal jobs because he cannot make honest money.  While his crimes are going on, we are also shown what it is like for those that do have money.  Richard Gordon and his friends have lives that resemble a soap opera.  The rich have the time to get divorced, to be unhappy, while the poor are working to survive.  The rich have no idea about what the lives of the poor are like, despite their education.  The evident split between the rich and the poor is still reflected today.  And the lack of communication between the two classes makes the book still feel relevant. 

So, there you have it: To Have and Have Not.  I liked it. I mean, there's a lot to be said for brevity.

 

My next read is Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.