Beloved

I’m not sure how I feel about Beloved.  I don’t know if it can be chalked up to a busy week and only being able to grab the odd moment to read in, but I found the book so difficult to get into.  It’s a Pulitzer Prize winning book and Toni Morrison herself has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I feel as though it’s a book that I very much should have loved.  It’s miserable as hell too.  That’s usually a plus when it comes to great literature.  But something about this book just didn’t hit the spot for me.

The novel tells the based on a true story tale of Sethe, a slave who escapes her home after sending her children to live with their grandmother in another state.  She is later discovered by a posse and murders her infant daughter rather than allow the child to be recaptured.  As I mentioned earlier, this story’s based the real life tale of Margaret Garner.  Finding this out has, of course lead to some mad research on Wikipedia and her life was just fascinating as it was appalling.  After escaping from slavery across a frozen river, Garner killed her two year old daughter Mary (fathered by Garner’s owner Alfred Gaines) so that she wouldn’t be subjected to the same life.  Garner was never tried for murder, partially because the state of Ohio couldn’t decide whether to try her as a person or as property, and when she was returned to Gaines he moved her so frequently that she couldn’t be found to be arrested.  Only the bare bones of this story survive into Beloved.  In fact, in comparison to the truth, Morrison’s tale is actually quite cheerful.

Set 18 years after the baby-murdering events, Sethe is living as a free but albeit lonely woman with her surviving daughter, Denver and a lot of guilt. Her sons, unable to stand the ever present ghost of their sister have both run away and the pair are living a reclusive life. It’s at this point that fellow ex-slave Paul D shows up, seeming to make things better for a while until he is driven out of the house by the ghost of Sethe’s unnamed baby girl, known only as Beloved.  It’s an obscure novel, each chapter of part two is told from the point of view of a different character.  I don’t object to this method of story-telling, and other than Beloved’s adamant refusal to use punctuation (a serious pet hate of mine), the different character’s voices are all clear and distinct.  I particularly enjoyed the section narrated by Denver who, as the story progresses, is the only character whose motives remain clear and who actually shows some likely (if incredibly optimistic) character development.

As Sethe descends into what can only be described as madness, a community that hates her rallies around to save her.  There are even no repercussions when she attacks a white man.  Paul D, driven away by Beloved and the Sethe’s past returns to her when she explains that she killed her child through kindness.  Through all this former shut-in Denver sparks up the self-confidence to leave her mother’s house and become a part of the community.  Yes, the book’s about to be about coming to terms and doing what is necessary to move on, but I just don’t buy it.  It might just be me, but it seems like a wildly improbable happy ending to 18 years of utter misery.  I know it’s just a story, but it is a million miles away from Garner’s death from typhoid after watching her second daughter drown.

Next on the list is the first long book I’ve read since this blog began; Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

The New York Trilogy

As I mentioned last time, I am ever so slightly enamoured with Paul Auster.  He is one of the best discoveries I’ve made doing the list thing.  Reading The Book of Illusions made me feel like I was at university again, it reminded me so much of some of the first year film criticism.  It’s the story of a lonely man writing the biography of a fictional silent comic, Hector Mann.  It may as well have been a true history of Fatty Arbuckle or Buster Keaton, Auster nails the tone so completely.  I love the book because I read it at exactly the right time; it reminded me of everything I loved about my degree just as I was beginning to really miss being at university.

Another of my loves is the detective novel.  I have a real thing for noir.  I’m sort of devastated about Lauren Bacall’s death.  A lot of the books I’ve already crossed off the list are of a hardboiled variety.  In short, Auster plus detectives is just what I want. 

The New York Trilogy doesn’t disappoint.  Or at least two thirds of it doesn’t.  The book’s split into three short stories all about obsession: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room.  The first two of these are so obviously linked by theme.  They’re practically the same story- man watches another man and becomes obsessed.  But I’m not mad for Ghosts.  Every character in the story is name after a colour in a way that ends up being reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs.  Yes, I know this book pre-dates the film and so it wasn’t intentional, but calling characters Mr White, Mr Brown, Mr Black makes it inevitable.  More than this, the main character is simply known as Blue.  He’s the only one whose name isn’t a common surname and it seems like Auster’s doing it on purpose to make him impossible to connect with.  And then, there’s this moment; a phrase Auster uses which is just wonderful, “Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever.  It can never be changed, never be otherwise.”  As a result, I’m just utterly confused about the whole matter.

The other two stories I love.  My only criticism of City of Glass is the introduction of a character called Paul Auster.  It’s a pet peeve of mine, but it drives me mad when authors give characters their own name, as if anyone reading will really question whether it’s actually a true story or not (spoiler: it’s not.  It never is).  City of Glass and The Locked Room contain obvious links to one another: overlapping character names, stories about writers, but that’s not it entirely.  The stories seem in some way to be two sides of the same story, one focussing on an obsessed watcher and the other on an obsessed man being watched.  And despite all City of Glass has going for it, The Locked Room is by far my favourite.  It all comes back to The Book of Illusions.  The Locked Room tells the story of a writer obsessed by writing the biography of a fictional author who, much like Hector Mann, disappears before the story begins.  It’s not a detective story about a detective; rather it’s about an author researching his subject and the story of an extraordinary life.  Naturally, the books written are the least important part of the author’s life.  What remains in both is something else Auster mentions.  The idea that one life is many things, people change their jobs, their locations, their friends and as a result lives have many stages.  It's this that's captured so well in The Locked Room and, if I'm honest, so much better in The Book of Illusions.

I’m currently reading Beloved by Toni Morrison.  It may take some time as I’ve gone about it by way of a cheeky re-read of Stephen King’s Carrie, that’s a story for another place, though.

Nowhere Man

I really wanted to hate Nowhere Man.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First off it’s quite a lot more fun to write incredibly bitchy and vicious things than it is to sing the praises of something, secondly there’s an author’s photo on the inside cover of the book and Aleksandar Hemon looks a lot like G.O.B. from Arrested Development.  It might be the Norfolk Libraries sticker covering half his face, but there’s something about his dark intensity that just screams, “It’s an illusion.”  I really wish I could show it to you.  But, alas, I cannot.  And, Nowhere Man is actually a pretty decent read.

It’s the story of Josef Pronek, only it’s not.  Unlike The Years, it is actually a pretty coherent tale by the end.  It just takes a while to get there.  By this, I simply mean there are multiple narrators (the odd first person some third person omnipotence) and a non-linear narrative structure.  One narrator details Pronek’s life until he leaves for America, explicitly excepting the time Pronek spends in Ukraine, the next comes along and fills the gaps.  This holds true until the final chapter, which is more concerned with the life of a Captain Evgenij Pick, a Russian warmonger living in Shanghai who once used the name Josef Pronek as an alias.  A quick Google brings up an archived Wikipedia page suggesting Hemon based this character on a real person, but it’s impossible to tell.  The story seems too incredible to be fictional and the chapter is so disjointed from the rest of the book that I’m still not sure why it’s there.  The book is linked to others written by Hemon, but I somehow doubt that would clear the matter up. 

The novel’s also shockingly un-political.  I have no knowledge of the political events affecting Sarajevo in the early nineties.  Being more interested at the time in bright colours and learning to talk than Eastern bloc coups, I never really caught up.  But, reading the blurb for the book, I expected a story of a young man displaced by war and full of angst to return home.  And that’s not at all what this is.  The political events are only obliquely referenced: headlines in newspapers, characters asking Pronek about “back home,” an evacuation from Ukraine more motivated by a dying father than political unrest.  If the surface of the novel is to be believed, Pronek is a character who is not involved in the political ramifications.  He cannot return to Sarajevo, but he’s perfectly happy where he is.  There are only hints at anything deeper.  Pronek may be shockingly unsentimental when it comes to his family, but becomes nostalgic for traditional Bosnian music.  Never mind that he was brought up on The Beatles.

The thing about this book is it’s good.  In some parts it’s great.  I enjoyed it.  I don’t actually have that much negative to say about it.  Except, it’s one of the books that I’ve come across on the list which I’m not sure belong.  Sometimes it’s difficult to see why a particular book has made the cut and this is one of those cases.  I’m not sorry I read it, I just didn’t find it excellent and there must be more than 1,001 truly excellent books knocking around out there.

The next book up is Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.  I adored Mr. Vertigo and The Book of Illusions, so my hopes couldn’t be higher.  I may need to prepare for disappointment.

The Years

If I’m honest, I’m not Virginia Woolf’s biggest fan.  Or any kind of fan of hers.  In fact, I’m a little of the opinion that her suicide note was the best thing she ever wrote.  It’s wonderfully poignant.  I’d heard bad things about her for quite a while, but after reading (and loving) Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I decided to give her a go.  Mistake.  I was horribly disappointed by Mrs Dalloway and Orlando is quite frankly ridiculous.  Nonetheless, third time being the charm, I embarked upon The Years (if not with a fully open mind) and it’s kind of… really good.

The book tells the story of the Pargiter family between 1985 and 1930.  Or, at least that’s what the blurb on the edition I got from the library proclaims.  In reality, it tells mundane events in the lives of a few of the seven Pargiter children, their cousins, their children and their cousins’ children.  It largely skips the major events of the time period in favour of focusing on dinner parties and trips to the country.

And okay, Woolf could tell the story of the characters in a far more comprehensive way- one character (Delia Pargiter) disappears for years, cropping up only in the odd obscure reference to how she is handling the death of a character who is never introduced.  Similarly her brother Edward and sister Milly slip out of the narrative after the first chapter only to appear at a raucous family reunion in the last.  But the fragmented storyline works.  Once you accept that this is not the story of a family over forty-odd years, it’s the inconsequential moments within that story, the book becomes completely enjoyable.  As long as the reader is happy to fill in the dramatic events (the births, marriages, deaths and the heartbreaks) that we know must happen in between.

I’m ridiculously gone for this book.  I even like the way Woolf won’t shut up about the bloody smog.  In a way that’s severely reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock it’s always coming along and interrupting the story, creeping about and wrapping itself around buildings.  It’s almost completely unnecessary, I think.  And yet; I want to say it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to proceedings, but it doesn’t add a thing.  Atmosphere, maybe.  The best I can say for it is it is appropriate.  The novel completely fails to have a plot as is conventionally understood and Woolf’s obsession with the weather is just another (utterly British) method of focusing on the minutiae. 

My next book will be Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man.  And, as I’m only 90 pages or so in, it may be some time.

The Ghost Road

So, the basics first off.  The Ghost Road is the third book in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy.  I read Regeneration itself when I was 18 and studying it for my A-Levels.  It tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War protest, and his subsequent time in Craiglockhart hospital.  If I’m honest, the main parts of the story I remember are Sassoon’s discussions about poetry with fellow patient Wilfred Owen.  I skipped book two in the trilogy- The Eye in the Door (this in itself is big news for me, as I do like to read a complete trilogy in order).  All of this meant that I wasn’t too sure what to expect when it came to The Ghost Road.  Less sex, definitely.

The book follows two characters from Regeneration, real person Dr William Rivers and significantly more fictional Billy Prior, in the last few months of World War One.  As Prior shags his way through England and France, Rivers mopes, reminisces and occasionally does his job. 

I think I’m making it sound like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I really did.  The two stories play out almost entirely separately, barring one conversation and a few letters and it’s not until Barker gets all thematic that there’s a connection between the two.  Ultimately, it’s impossible not to draw links between the futile lives of soldiers unable and unwilling to stay away from the front and the concept of “Mate”- described as “a state of which death [is] the appropriate outcome"- that Rivers encounters.

There’s also a wicked strain of dark humour in the book that’s much appreciated.  It’s no real task to make a book that is, essentially, about the death and disease of a lot of people sad, but Barker makes it funny too.  One of Rivers’s patients is convinced his penis has been cut off and pickled by a nurse, and then he’s mortally offended when asked how he urinates.  Naturally, this dries up somewhat when the business of dying actually starts, but futile massacres do so rarely get belly laughs.

There’s another of Pat Barker’s books I have lined up.  It’s been sitting on my shelf for months, but (going by blurb alone), it’s about the War too, and its general inescapability.  There’s a childish part of me that’s been resisting reading it because the horrors of World War One are everywhere now we’re approaching the centenary.  It feels like you can’t turn on a history programme or even the One Show without some clued up expert shuffling in and muttering “War is Hell.”  Reading this has changed my mind (not about the documentaries- none of them can express the pity of war and all that as well as a single Wilfred Owen poem), but about reading Another World.  It’s definitely getting bumped up the list. 

Next time, I’ll be writing about much hated Virginia Woolf’s The Years…

The Idea

When I graduated from university, I was so happy to be done with reading lists.  I'd never seen them as the evil some people do and they introduced me to books I loved, my third year housemate will attest to my gleeful love of the Hollyoaks-eque drama of Matthew Lewis's The Monk.  But, for every wonderful book, there would be one I forced my way through, so the idea of freedom in what I could read was a staggering prospect.  Of course, I quickly remembered that I am just the worst at being decisive and that I actually crave structure.  So, I dug out my old copy of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (okay, I downloaded a copy of the list from the internet), formatted it into a spreadsheet and input formulae to calculate the number and percentage of books I'd read.  The result was a pitiful 86- I join you today half way through number 264.   That's 26.27373% of the way in, for anyone who cares as much as I do about the numbers.

The fact that I'm more than a quarter of the way in does mean that there are some wonderful books and authors that I've missed the chance to blog about.  Absolute classics, like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye are long gone, as are authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Kurt Vonnegut.  And then there are other books that are gone, the ones that quickly became my favourite type- the ones I would never have thought to read were it not for the list.  In the last six months alone, these have included Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, which led to hours on Wikipedia researching the historical truth behind Prince Sado, The Poisionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and, most recently Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres.  I could go on for hours...

There are rules further "only read books on the list" that I have imposed upon myself.  Following one summer of glutting on the entire works of Jane Austen to the point of frustration, I came up with these five guidelines to provide variety.  They apply to any six books read consecutively and run as follows:

1. No two books by the same author.
2. There must be books written in at least two different centuries.
3. There must be books written by authors from more than one continent.
4. There must be at least one book not originally in the English language.
5. There must be at least one female author.

The rules, of course, will change as necessity dictates.  I anticipate running out of female authors at some point, and some of the foreign language books aren't actually available in English at the moment (my dedication does draw the line at learning a new language to read a book).   But there you have it, my life's goal- at my current rate I should be able to achieve it within ten years.

So stay tuned for my first book (or 264th, depending on how you look at it).  It'll be The Ghost Road by Pat Barker, the third of her Regeneration trilogy about World War One.  I'm only half way through, but it's fairly historically accurate, so I think I might know how this one's going to to end.