Bonjour Tristesse (Essential Penguin)

Francoise Sagan

Cecile, the teenaged narrator of Francoise Sagan's short novel Bonjour Tristesse, is precocious in the extreme, having become both confidante and partner in crime for her father since leaving school, and yet there is also something almost animalistic about her behaviour, as she sets about destroying her father's relationship with a woman who threatens the small amount of freedom that she has eked out for herself in 1950s France.

The strange thing is that, despite her appalling behaviour, and the inevitably tragic consequences that result from it, I couldn't really bring myself to dislike Cecile; perhaps there is, in the end, too much of the neglected child about her, especially as she vacillates between antagonism, affection and guilt in her feelings for her father's fiancee, Anne, and her insecurities about her first serious love affair.

This is not to say that there are any villains in the book, particularly; Cecile's father Raymond is a feckless, womanising middle-aged widower, but takes no real part in the action of the story, his jilted lover Elsa is merely a rather silly young woman, given false hope of winning Raymond back by Cecile, Cecile's lover Cyril is equally easily manipulated through his passion for Cecile, and Anne, the one who suffers most in the book, seems to be guilty of nothing more than being aloof, and attempting to bring some order to Cecile's life.

It doesn't sound like much, but it is a beautifully written book, incredibly evocative, and the characterisation involved in the creation of Cecile, a true enfant terrible, is wonderful. It is amazing to think that Sagan was only eighteen when she wrote the book, and it is definitely worth a read.

Running Wild (Modern classics)

J.G. Ballard

Running Wild by J. G. Ballard, by comparison, concerns terrible children of a far different nature, and is a bleaker, more disconcerting novel as a result. Part of this bleakness lies in the narration itself, still in the first person, but this time related by a criminal psychologist, very much after the fact, and in a clinically unemotional tone.

The psychologist in question has been sent by the home office to investigate the massacre of thirty-two adults, and the disappearance of thirteen children, from a private housing-estate, and almost from the beginning the reader is given clues to what really happened.

The real mystery, then, is why the adults were killed, and this was where the book kind of fell down for me. Ballard leads the reader to an obvious conclusion about the killers' reasons (trying desperately not to spoiler!), but, frankly, I wasn't convinced- although others may be.

The essential difference between the two books, I think, is that Ballard seems to be trying to get across his opinions and fears for modern society, where Sagan is more concerned with the aesthetics of her work. In the end, then, yes, Running Wild certainly made me think, and I am glad that I read both books (they are certainly both worth reading, in my opinion) but Bonjour Tristesse was a much more enjoyable book.

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It may not appear to be so to the casual observer, but I have been reading! Unfortunately, while I made every attempt to select books that I thought looked good or expected to be interesting and well-written, I haven’t been entirely successful. The two books I’ve read most recently (excluding the Georgette Heyer I dipped into, because everybody already knows that I love her books) have been disappointing to wildly different degrees, but nonetheless left me with a craving for something more powerful.

From a Crooked Rib (Penguin Modern Classics)

Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (Women and Psychology)

Alphonse

The Coma

Alex Garland

The Coma by Alex Garland (he of The Beach fame- which I have never read) is a short book, coming in at ninety pages of prose, but heavily illustrated by the writer's father, the political cartoonist Nicholas Garland, and it is certainly not a complicated story, which is where the books strengths really lie.

The simple, linear plot, albeit with a twist or two, allows the writing style to shine. There is no doubt that Garland is a master of his craft, and Carl, the narrator of the story, is certainly a sympathetic character, which contributes to the book being a thoroughly enjoyable read.

The essential plot premise is that Carl, attacked and beaten unconscious while trying to defend a girl, late at night, on the underground, awakes from a coma and tries to put his life back together, but things are not as simple as they at first appear, and the story takes on an eerie, claustrophobic feel, greatly enhanced by the faceless, monochromatic figures and twisted, distorted humanoid creatures that populate Nicholas Garland's woodcuts.

There is also a certain amount of humour woven throughout what might have otherwise been a rather harrowing narrative, especially in the conversation that Carl has with a confused bookshop assistant after he discovers that Moby Dick, in his consciousness, consists of only the line 'call me Ishmael' repeated over and over again, and that several other classics have been reduced to the literary equivalents of sound bites.

However, Alex Garland certainly doesn't make any attempt to answer all of the questions that he poses in the book, and by the end of the story the reader is left knowing as little about Carl, in many ways, as they did in the beginning. Personally, I don't mind an unresolved ending to a story, as long as it is well written, but I don't think The Coma is for everybody, and if you don't like to have as many questions after finishing a book as you did when you started, then The Coma is not for you.

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Use it to draw a line, of course!

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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

ZZ Packer

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a wonderful collection of short stories by ZZ Packer, with a host of charmingly eccentric, sometimes beligerent, characters at their heart.

The title story concerns a young woman's experiences after starting at Yale, both as a woman of colour in a predominantly white environment, and as someone coming to terms with their own sexuality, and it ends, typically for this collection, on a note of combined melancholic ambiguity and tenuous resolution.

In all of the stories, not much happens, but the lack of action becomes an event in itself, and, more often than not, a catalyst for change, or some form of epiphany; from a fight that doesn't happen in 'Brownies', to an apocalypse that fails to materialize in 'Doris is Coming', the non-events in the characters' lives routinely lead them down unexpected paths that are a joy to discover.

Added to this, Packer's writing style is wonderfully well observed, and quietly witty, and she shows that she has an amazing grasp of language. The only thing that slightly annoyed me was the persistent editorial mistakes in the book; at least once in every story there seemed to be some small error, with either a word repeated, missed out, or misspelled, and while these mistakes don't detract from these wonderful little stories, it did get annoying after a while. Still, it is well worth putting up with any number of minor mistakes to read such a beautifully written collection of subtle, original stories. 

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Malaria

Susan Hillmore

I'm going to be completely honest and say from the start that this is not going to be a long post, mainly because, two days after finishing it, I am still trying to figure out what the hell Malaria is about.

There's a quote from the Guardian reprinted on the cover, going on about the 'powerful, lyrical prose'; certainly, there are lots of beautifully written passages in the book, but that's not very helpful when sometimes the author gets so lyrical that you can barely tell what you are supposed to be reading. It took me half of the book to work out that it seemed to be set in the near future, based on a quote on the cover, and the fact that there's only one herd of elephants left in the world, on the island of Mannar, but, frankly, I'm not even sure about that.

The annoying thing is, this could have been a beautiful, good book, if it had been, say, about the horrors of civil war, or environmentalism, or sickness, or family drama, or post-colonial malaise, or loss of religious faith, but the fact that Hillmore tries to tackle all of those subjects, in a book less than 150 pages long, means that she doesn't really write about anything; as soon as you start to get your bearings, and really get your teeth into one part of the story, she focuses on something else entirely, to the point where I was close to actually screaming, it was so irritating.

Also, for a book that's entire blurb, practically, is about a man journeying through the jungle with elephants, I was a little surprised when the journey didn't take up even a quarter of the novel; it seemed just a little misleading. In the end, I decided that this must just be because not even the publishers could tell what the heck this book was supposed to be about.

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The Land of Green Plums

I confess that I’d never heard of Herta Muller before she recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I read about her then, and when I saw The Land of Green Plums in my local bookshop, I thought it looked interesting, and I decided to give it a go.

I’m very glad I did, although it’s a book I find quite hard to write about. It’s narrated, in the first person, by a student who has moved from the countryside to the city, seeking an improvement in living situation. She and a group of fellow students spent time together, trying to find a way to survive, identity intact, in Ceaucescu’s Romania. A difficult prospect.

From reading around a little, I’ve found out that the book is semi-autobiographical and incorporates many of Muller’s own experiences. Which doesn’t change how I feel about the book or interpret it, but does perhaps make the choice of first person narration particularly interesting.

Stylistically, I found it initially somewhat hard to get into. It’s a hard thing for me to explain and I’m not sure I’ll get this across properly, but I think it seemed almost as if, because the characters themselves found it hard to be other than detached (from their lives, from each other) and because of the style in which it’s written, the reader is looking on the ‘action’ with a bird’s-eye-view of the narrator engaging in her bird’s-eye-view of her own surroundings.

What I took away from the novel was less a highly detailed account of what life in Romania would have been like in Ceaucescu’s ‘reign of terror’ (as the back of the book states), but a hazy-yet-cutting evocation of the mood of the period, and the feeling of living where you are being watched, and controlled, and threatened from all angles. In this way, it managed to be a really very powerful book.

What you shouldn’t expect from it is a history book. It’s not a fictionalised history of the period, and you won’t really learn anything about Ceaucescu or anything particularly specific about Romanian history. That’s not really what the point of the book is, though. Where Muller excels is in the sense of threat; the difficulty of sustaining relationships where state control was everywhere and freedom of speech nonexistent; and the corrosion of the possibility of constructive interpersonal relationships under such a regime.

Challenges for which this book is applicable: the Global Challenge (Europe)

Alphonse’s Analysis

Alphonse

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Portrait Of A Marriage (WN): Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Nigel Nicolson

Portrait of a Marriage is the story of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, told partly by Vita's own unpublished autobiography, written during a particularly turbulent time during their marriage, and partly by Nigel Nicolson, her youngest son, after his discovery of her journals after her death, and it is a wonderfully compelling story.

Despite the fact that both Vita and her husband were both, at the very least, bisexual, their enduring love for one another is touchingly displayed in both Vita's account of her tempestuous relationship with Violet Trefussis, whom she eventually left in favour of Harold, and in the letters Vita and Harold wrote to one another, quoted by Nigel Nicolson in his sections of the book.

Despite the fact that Harold and Vita lost interest in each other physically within the first few years of their marriage, and each had numerous affairs, with the full knowledge of the other, they were incredibly happy with one another, apart from the brief period of Vita's affair with Violet, until Vita's death in the early 60s.

The quote on the front cover of the book says that the story is 'The most convincing and enthralling of love stories'. I would add that it is also one of the most unusual; a relationship that most would consider doomed not only survived, but flourished under the umbrella of mutual infidelity and physical indifference to one another.

That the marriage was so successful must surely not only be down to forgiveness, and immense trust and understanding on the part of Harold Nicolson especially, but also to the bravery of both Vita and Harold in being willing to go against all the moral precepts of the society in which they lived, and to do what was in the best interests of the both of them, and their immense and lasting mutual happiness. 

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan

In stark contrast to this is Ian McEwan's fictional account of Edward and Florence's relationship in On Chesil Beach, and the single incident that drives them apart.

I have to say, for the first part of the book, the story didn't make much of an impression on me, and I felt that McEwan's narrative style here perhaps stopped from identifying with the characters at first, admirable though it was. Also, I have little to no knowledge of the period in which the story is set, and about as much interest. At this point, it's fair to say, I couldn't really summon up much interest in either of the two main characters. However, once I started to get into the main body of the story, specifically Florence and Edward's backstory, I really began to love the book.

I have always loved Ian McEwan's style of writing, which has a beautiful lyrical quality to it without ever losing the sense of what he is saying, or degenerating into purple prose, and On Chesil Beach is no exception. There is something rather beautiful in the inevitability of the confrontation between Florence and Edward, made more tragic by their innocence and naivety, and the fact that they are both convinced of their own maturity, and their ability to survive in the adult world.

The whole novel seems to function as a kind of intensely beautiful elegy for what might have been, yet never was, and a subtle exploration of how one single moment or action can entirely change, perhaps even destroy, two people's lives.

Yes, On Chesil Beach is not perfect, perhaps, but then very few of the books I have come across in my lifetime are. Nevertheless, I thought it was, in the end, a wonderful story, and it left me intensely moved.

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There's a really interesting post at Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes on an essay by Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier was dismissive of novels which involved lots of – or perhaps even not that much – research, and Mark Athitakis makes some good points in response.

What I'm wondering, though, is why research specifically is being identified as a problem, something that hinders literature.

From the original article:

But the culture of explanation, the illusion of mastery, extends also to our novels. So much contemporary American fiction also seems researched, worked up, instrumentalized, by skillful minds eager to display their skills. Writers go prowling through eras of history or fields of science in search of their next project, disguising the absence of a calling as curiosity. They become experts. (And critics call the results of their expertise “richly imagined.”)

As Athitakis' points out, he criticises Philip Roth's The Humbling for falling victim to this 'culture of explanation' based on, well, very little indeed.

What's also not noted by Wieseltier is that quite often novels can really benefit from some thorough research, when it is accompanied by imagination and skill. Yes, I know I've based on about Helen Dunmore quite a lot recently, but The Siege really is a good example of this. She works in a lot of meticulously researched information, giving historical context, and in that book it really supports and enriches the book. It's not done in an 'I've spent ages looking things up and must include it all in my book, no matter whether it fits or not' way; instead, the flashes of detail give the whole book a sense of atmosphere, and descriptive passages are written beautifully, albeit based on concrete information.

Equally, taken the other way round, a lack of detail can be really jarring. Both my mother and I loved Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach but the detail of its setting in time doesn't necessarily work, and my mother noted a few historical inaccuracies. They were admittedly minor, but slips such as that do have the power to jolt a reader out of a novel. While it might not always pay off to incorporate minutely detailed point after pointedly minute detail, getting it wrong really isn't so great.

So I find the Wieseltier's comment, above, quite misleading. What really seems worth criticising is material that feels compelled to lump in additional detail for the sake of it, making the narrative itself clunky and disjointed. I'd agree that that's the case for some novels. Wieseltier just seems to trying to chase down the wrong culprit, which seems more simply to be: bad writing.

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Penguin Great Ideas : Why I Write

George Orwell

I can't help but feel that Penguin have misnamed Why I Write. After all, Orwell's subject in these essays is not really writing, but politics.

Despite the fact that I have enjoyed everything else that I have read by Orwell, finishing the essays in this particular book was a real struggle for me. This is the latest of his works, chronologically speaking, that I have read, and it is very different in tone from the others. Although his clear, journalistic style of writing is still much in evidence, this was the only thing that recommended the book to me, and the slightly satirical bent that I admired so much in his other work is notably missing. However, much of the text concerns the political situation in England during the second world war, and it is difficult not to find Orwell's dire predictions about the future of Europe faintly ridiculous when you know what happened after Orwell had written these essays.

What I really found disagreeable, though, was Orwell's stance of moral superiority; he dismissed, seemingly, the entire population of war-time Britain. From the Communists, the Socialists, and the Labour Party, to the Tories, the Capitalists, and the working-class, nobody seemed to escape from Orwell's scathing criticisms, and I found it highly disappointing.

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (Canongate Myths)

Margaret Atwood

A much more rewarding reading experience was provided by Margaret Atwood, in the form of The Penelopiad, part of the canongate myths series, and a modern retelling of the story of Penelope, the 'faithful' wife of Odysseus. 

Penelope is a much more vibrant character in Atwood's story than she is in The Oddysey, unsurprisingly, but Atwood has done more than just bring her to life; Penelope 'sets the record straight' on more than one subject in the story, narrated by Penelope herself from the underworld.

I was entirely captivated by Penelope's intelligent, clear narration, even while recording her rather dull surroundings in the afterlife, and she is much more intelligent, and much more aware of Odysseus's transgressions here than she was in Homer's story. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the tragic elements of her life are very moving, especially the killing of her twelve favourite maids, and the necessity of hiding her grief.

The killing of the maids is also a very prominent element in the story itself, as, interspersed with Penelope's recounting of periods from her own life, the maids form a Greek chorus. For me, this was less successful than Atwood's voicing of Penelope, but, then, I am prejudiced against both second-person and collective first-person narration, in general, so there was little chance that I would like these sections, however well-written. Still, some were more enjoyable than others, especially the mock anthropologicy lecture that the maids give, and the pastiches of traditional song forms such as the sea-shanty were very well done, and much more effective in bringing the maids to life for me than most of the prose sections. Still, over all it was a very good read.

The Canongate myths series has been going for a few years now, and I am constantly surprised at the ingenuity of the writers that they commission, and the wonderfully exciting work that they produce. It is wonderful to see such ancient stories reimagined and made more relevant to a modern audience, and I can only hope that the series continues for a long time to come. 

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