I have a long-standing love of silly comedy; top of my list would come Monty Python and, of course, the inestimable Blackadder. Looking for a short, funny read on my bookshelves, then, it was almost inevitable that I would turn to The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, with its tagline declaring it ‘a Blackadder for the high seas’. I won’t lie, it doesn’t quite come up to that standard for me, and, in any case, with it’s cast of ridiculously stupid pirates, almost equally stupid scientists (including a young Charles Darwin), wicked clergymen, and a lot of monkeys, it has more in common with Monty Python, by my reckoning. Still, it is pretty funny, if you like that kind of thing. Which I do.

The plot, such as it is, is this; the Pirates, bored with their life of ham, grog, and arguing over what exactly the best bit about being a pirate is, they are easily tricked by a long-standing adversary into attacking the Beagle, thinking it’s a Treasury ship. Of course, it’s not, and the Pirates end up agreeing to help Darwin, whose theory of evolution apparently consists, at this point, of believing

that a monkey, properly trained, given the correct dietary regime, and dressed in fancy clothes, can be made indistinguishable from a human gentleman. I believe he would cease to be a monkey, and become more a …a Man-panzee

and whose brother has been abducted by the Bishop of Oxford, who has some pretty hinky schemes of his own going on. Suffice it to say, it carries on in much the same way, and the pirates soon find themselves in London, attempting to foil the dastardly Bishop’s plans. It’s hardly intellectual stuff.

In fact, I quite often found myself getting exasperated with the constant puns, but whenever I got to the point of putting the book down, I’d find myself laughing out loud at something, and it would keep me reading for another few pages, up to the point where I would start to get exasperated again, and then the whole process would start all over again. It’s not high literature, and it doesn’t pretend to be, but, after reading quite a few books recently that, however good they were, ended sadly, it was nice to read something that was simply silly, light-hearted fun.

I don’t know if I will ever read the other three Pirates! books that Gideon Defoe has written, but I think reading The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists was a great way to spend a couple of sunny hours in the garden, and is the perfect way to refresh your reading palate, so to speak, after writing essays, and reading nothing but “serious” literature for a while.

With some books I find that I react to them in quite a visual way, which often seems to be because I’m emotionally involved in the book and find it particularly evocative. It’s quite a personal reaction. Manja by Anna Gmeyner is one of those books that’s done that for me.

I missed out on Persephone Reading Week recently, mostly because I hadn’t heard of Persephone books until I read about them in relation to that project. When I became clued-in as to what it was all about, though, I looked through their fascinating catalogue and skipped out to buy a copy of this book.

It’s about a group of 5 children in Germany in the inter-war years with the book alternating between focus on the group of friends, and the adults who form part of their world and their own stories (starting with the conception of each of the children). The eponymous Manja is at the heart of the group, and the book in a more general sense. It’s a book that really resonated with me. I do think that it’s wonderful, although hard to read.

Really what I want to do, though, is a little experiment: a ‘visual response’ to the book. I’ll preface this with the immediately obvious fact that I am no artist, not even a little bit. And I’m not trying to be: I don’t think you can create high art from an hour or so of ‘picture collage’ and a few Google image searches (or maybe you can, but I really can’t); but I don’t think that stops us from trying to explore our own relation to a book through the medium of pictures!

So here goes…

After tinkering around in Photoshop for a while, this is what I came up with. It’s just touches of the colours, the images, the structure that I took from the book. It’s somewhat representative, for instance with the inclusion of ‘the wall’, which is where the children gather, but it’s far from a replica of the story – no spoilers!

As you’d expect during the period in which this covers (1930s Germany), the young boys are part of Hitler Youth. This has always been an aspect of Nazi Germany that I’ve found sinister and distressing. This is a picture from the German Federal Archive of a branch of Hitler Youth meeting with Goring on his birthday. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-16515 / unknown / CC-BY-SA)

There are a few locations that are really important in the book, and one of them is a bridge which features several times. I don’t know what it looks like, but I don’t think it was wholly unlike this: the Ludendorf bridge, near Reimagen taken from Wikimedia Commons.

It’s just a few of the things which continued to have an impact on me after I put the book down, but perhaps it’s a little insight into the tone of the book. At any rate, I enjoyed it!

Studying The Cherry Orchard towards the end of last year, I found out that, in some quarters, Chekhov is actually more highly regarded as a short story writer than he is as a playwright. There were even comparisons to Guy de Maupassant, arguably regarded as one of the most, if not the most, accomplished short story writer ever. With that in mind, then, there was really no contest to which book I would choose to read first when the Penguin Great Loves collection arrived in my letterbox; hands down, it was going to be the selection of Chekhov’s short stories, A Russian Affair, and so I set to reading the short volume with gay abandon. Only to be horribly, horribly disappointed.

I will accept some of the blame for this; my expectations were far too high. The stories in A Russian Affair are also, to be honest, by no means bad. They are, like Chekhov’s plays, well-written, and full of touches of ironic humour, ridiculous characters, and genuine pathos. Having said that, the similarity with the plays was actually one of my main problems with the book, as, like with the plays, I found it incredibly difficult to sympathise to any great extent with any of the characters. While this doesn’t really impinge upon my enjoyment of the plays, however, where my interest in finding out what happens to various people, and the comic depiction of their various foibles, carries me along, on the smaller canvas that a short story provides it really lessened the enjoyment I found in reading the book when I couldn’t dredge up any empathetic feelings for the characters.

The second problem I had with the selection of stories in A Russian Affair was that it almost became like reading the same story again and again; there is a male central character, he falls in love, or thinks he does, something makes him reconsider or holds him back, and he moves on or disappears. The same depressing pattern, over and over again. Similarly, there was something about Chekhov’s characters that almost made it seem as if they had been popped out from a mould, and I found that quite irritating. Part of me feels like I am being too harsh, but looking at the book again, only two out of the five stories even offer a variation on a theme; the other three seem to end in almost exactly the same way.

Nevertheless, I refuse to post an entirely negative review, and, despite all I have said, A Russian Affair doesn’t deserve one. As I said before, Chekhov’s writing is wonderfully clear and unsentimental, and, even though, for me, that tone didn’t work for these “love” stories, I could see it working well in stories with a different theme, and I would not rule out reading more Chekhov short stories in the future. I am also willing to admit that this collection may well have suffered from a comparison with the generally excellent books that I read in May. Nevertheless, A Russian Affair is not a book I will be recommending to people, but if you’re a passionate fan of Chekhov’s plays, and, unlike me, you really feel you connect with his characters, then there is probably much you will enjoy in this thin volume of stories. It just really wasn’t for me.

In place of a Wednesday Waffle, I want to point out a great post on Racialicious today on literature of colour, and I recommend giving it a read.

I personally think it’s fairly clear that the reading and writing of literature is not free from questions of race (or other political issues); creativity does not happen within a social and cultural vacuum, and expectations and assumptions inform the activities of both writers and those responding to their work.

Having read through the comments as well, I would certainly second the commenters in recommending Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which is an excellent novel touching on these themes. Having said that, I haven’t yet read anything of Toni Morrison’s that I didn’t love, and I’m still wanting more. So I think I’m going to take some time out to send a little book-love to her today. Can’t wait until I find her most recent novel in a charity shop (bookshop books are going to be out of my price range for a while)!