thorold invokes gentle gales in Q4 2021

Welcome to my Q4 thread! The previous one was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333425

This picture is anticipating slightly — it was taken in November last year in a local park.

2021 Q3 stats:

I finished 55 books in Q2 (Q1: 36, Q2: 43).

Author gender: F: 15, M: 40 (73% M) (Q1: 66% M, Q2: 77% M)

Language: EN 28, NL 6, DE 8, FR 10, ES 1, IT 0, PT 2 (51% EN) (Q1: 52% EN, Q2: 33% EN)
Translations: 4 from Portuguese, 1 each from Afrikaans, Croatian, Ancient Greek and Icelandic

7 books (13%) were linked to the "Lusophone" theme read

Publication dates from 1841 to 2021, mean 1985, median 1998; 8 books were published in the last five years. (I'm counting The Odyssey by the translation date, otherwise the mean would come out rather earlier!)

Formats: library 4(*), physical books from the TBR 28, physical books from the main shelves (re-reads) 0, audiobooks 0, paid ebooks 7, other free/borrowed 16 — 51% from the TBR (Q1: 52%, Q2: 58% from the TBR)

(*) First library books since mid-2020!

53 unique first authors (1.0 books/author; Q1 1.2, Q2 1.1)

By gender: M 38, F 15 : 72% M (Q1 70% M, Q2 77% M)
By main country: UK 16, NL 5, FR 8, DE 2, DD 1, US 5, BR 2, and various singletons

TBR pile evolution:
22/12/2019 : 105 books (123090 book-days)
31/3/2020 : 110 books (129788 book-days) (Change: 14 read, 19 added)
30/6/2020 : 94 books (102188 book-days) (Change: 54 read, 48 added)
30/9/2020 : 94 books (89465 book-days) (Change: 39 read, 39 added)
31/12/2020: 90 books (79128 book-days) (Change: 31 read, 27 added)
2/4/2021: 101 books (84124 book-days) (change: 19 read, 30 added)
2/7/2021: 88 books (80882 book-days) (change: 25 read, 12 added)
01/10/2021: 89 books (69902 book-days) (change: 28 read, 29 added)

The average days per book still on the pile is 785 (1172 at the end of 2019; 879 at the end of 2020; 833 at the end of Q1, 919 at end of Q2). I managed to take out three or four books from the long-stay end of the pile, which brought the average down quite a bit.

Although I read more books in Q3 than in Q1 or Q2, I think that may be simply that I was reading more relatively short books — crime stories and the like. There was only one really long book, the fourth part of Het bureau.

For completeness, these are the books I listed in the "Q3 Highlights" thread:

- Bergkristall : und andere Meistererzählungen by Adalbert Stifter — fabulous writing about people and landscapes.
- Le banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs by Mathias Enard‬ — a writer I already knew about, but unlike any of his other books that I've read, a very enjoyable novel about rural life in 21st century France
- Some kids I taught and what they taught me by Kate Clanchy — a blisteringly clear view of what education is supposed to be about and the things that frustrate it
- Beyond the blue horizon : how the earliest mariners unlocked the secrets of the oceans by Brian M Fagan — seafaring before the "age of discoveries"
- Afterwardness by Mimi Khalvati — the sonnet is alive and well!

Note that there were plenty of other books I enjoyed but didn't list, because they were books I knew I was almost certain to enjoy, such as Gerald Murnane's Landscape with landscape and J J Voskuil's Het A P Beerta-Instituut. And all those French and Spanish crime-stories...

It's been some time since I had a fix of Thomas Bernhard...

Ja (1978; Yes) by Thomas Bernhard (Austria, 1931-1989)

  

We'd all be asking for our money back if Bernhard's take on the final chapter of Ulysses ended with a "Yes" to life, especially when it's set against the depressing background of a rainy Austrian village in the back of beyond and the two main cultural reference points of the narrator are Schumann and Schopenhauer. Bernhard being Bernhard, however, he even manages to find the inherent negativity in the word "yes", so we've nothing to complain about.

A 150-page paragraph of mid-period Bernhard prose, as gloriously sardonic and miserable as ever, and with his unmistakable talent for delaying the word we've been waiting for in a German sentence just beyond the point of maximum grammatical endurance. Maybe not my favourite Bernhard novel — as others have commented, it has a bit too much story and not quite enough dark humour — but a delight to read, all the same.

...and a late entry for the Lusophone theme. I took this on holiday with me and have been reading it on and off for about three weeks, the delay caused mainly by it being one of those snapping-turtle 700-page paperbacks that fight you all the way.

This seems to be one of Amado's most famous novels, partly because of the 1976 film version by Bruno Barreto — I've got that lined up to watch on MUBI.

Dona Flor et ses deux maris: Histoire morale, histoire d'amour (1966; Dona Flor and her two husbands) by Jorge Amado (Brazil, 1912-2001) translated from Portuguese to French by Georgette Tavares-Bastos

  

For the first 500 pages or so, this pretends to be a straightforward pastiche of an old-fashioned social-realist novel, the sort of thing Balzac would undoubtedly have written, had he been a hundred years younger and living in Bahia. It's all about the flimsiness of the veneer of respectability that (notionally) separates the ambitious, modern, bourgeois, Catholic residents of Salvador de Bahia from the colourful world of gambling, vice, and traditional religion that surrounds them.

Dona Flor is a respectable, self-made woman, proprietor of a celebrated cookery school for the daughters of the rich, but her first husband, Vadinho, is an irresponsible gambler and a party-animal who can't give her anything but love. When he meets his untimely end whilst dancing in drag at the carnival, Flor follows the advice of her friends and — after the required decent interval — takes the considerate, methodical and ever-so-slightly-boring pharmacist and amateur bassoonist Teodoro as her second husband. Naturally, she still has occasional pangs for her nights of passion with the late Vadinho, and Amado takes shameless advantage of her weakness to play a Latin-American novelist's trump card in the last 150 pages, producing much very entertaining chaos in the process.

This is the sort of book where you feel you must be missing out on a lot of in-jokes at the expense of Amado's friends and neighbours, but it also sneaks in quite a lot of detailed social analysis of provincial Brazil in the mid-20th century and the changes it was going through. Flor and her friends are women who have been brought up with a very narrow idea of their role in the world, but many of them have found more or less subtle ways to challenge that.

Snapping turtle paperbacks…I’m assuming you mean a manufactural deformity in the physical book, and not a snapping fiction. I would like to read Amado sometime, but preferably something shorter first. But this sounds entertaining.

>7 dchaikin: Yes, the small Livre de Poche format with that many pages means there’s a lot of spring force trying to keep the binding closed. I should have got an older and more battered copy! If you want to start with something shorter, it sounds as though Gabriela, clove and cinnamon might be a possibility, that’s about 2/3 the length of Dona Flor.

I read the children’s book The swallow and the tom cat and his last short novel The discovery of America by the Turks, but didn’t really enjoy either of those as much as Dona Flor.

——


I saw the 1976 film last night — very enjoyable, a real feeling of being shot on location in Salvador, with some lovely low-budget low-life scenes. Sônia Braga and José Wilker are both splendid — Wilker as Vadinho has to be naked for about half the film, so it’s just as well that he’s nice to look at, in a seventies-Robert-Redford sort of way. The gossiping neighbourhood ladies are fun too.

But of course you lose a lot of the complexity of the book, which has dozens of named characters with their own back-stories. Flor’s character gets simplified a bit too far — the camera isn’t allowed to take her seriously as a teacher and a businesswoman, and her story almost gets reduced to a seventies “sex as the cure for everything” message. I also thought the film was a bit unfair to the Sons of Orpheus: in the book they are treated as serious musicians, but the film just exploits them for the comic effect of a bad amateur orchestra.

A distinguished Balkan writer I didn't know about — my first new discovery through the "Translation Prize Winners" theme in Reading Globally. (I was intending to read her earlier novel Belladonna — which won a different translation prize — first, but this was the one the library had):

E.E.G. (2016) by Daša Drndić (Yugoslavia, Croatia, 1946-2018), translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth (UK, 1942- )

 

Drndić uses a reader-baffling technique a little like W G Sebald's in her fiction: she mixes fictional characters with family photos, descriptions of real events and people, tables of historical data, references to books and websites, and so on, constantly reminding us that it's our responsibility as readers to test the trustworthiness of sources. We know that her pessimistic and sometimes paranoid narrator, the clinical-psychologist-turned-writer Andreas Ban (also the narrator of Belladonna), is not Daša Drndić. Except that a lot of the time he obviously is expressing things that she feels very strongly about, and at least some of his friends and the people he admires seem to be people with connections to the author...

The book ranges widely over different topics — the Nazi genocide in the Balkans, Latvia and occupied France, the role of chess-players on both sides in the war, the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the intolerance and rabid nationalism of the new Croatia, the random and devastating ways mental and physical illnesses destroy the lives of ordinary people, and much else. Ban confronts us with a lot of hard and unpleasant historical realities, and castigates the world for its reluctance to acknowledge past evils and punish those responsible. And for our amnesia concerning the debts we owe to the past, especially the way the successor-states to Yugoslavia try to erase memories of the struggle for liberation from fascism.

A dark, difficult book, but a very rewarding one: I'm only sorry to discover Drndić so late.

--
Dustin Illingworth on E.E.G. in the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/22/dasa-drndics-eeg-and-the-joys-of-...

>9 thorold: nice discovery. Glad to read your review. ( If I could ever finish the Booker longlist I reasonable time, I might check out a translation award list. )

Something completely different... A long-standing ABE Books stored search that finally struck pay dirt a few weeks ago. By coincidence, this book also came up recently here in Cynfelyn's repostings of Guardian Top Ten lists — Ian Marchant chose it as one of his top ten railway books (https://www.librarything.com/topic/335554#7617793)

Chronicles of a Garden Railway (1968) by W A D Strickland (UK, - )

 

What did we do before there was YouTube? It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people used to write little books describing the things they had built in their spare time, with handy hints on how to construct wonderful projects out of easily obtainable materials like Bakelite, Paxolin and asbestos. Illustrated by carefully hand-drawn sketches and plans and the occasional grainy black and white photograph. It was a different world...

Bill Strickland's famous (in the same way that YouTube channels become famous, i.e. it's well-known among an extremely small and widely-dispersed set of people) description of his experience of building a "OO" gauge railway in his suburban garden is a little bit more than that, though — for a start, there's an entire generation of family life going on in the margins of the story, which takes us from 1951 right through to 1967, with the son who goes from keen amateur train-racer to trainee metalworker and ultimately is more interested in "his motorbike and his music"; the daughter who discovers a passion for miniature botany; the "tolerant" and "understanding" wife; the neighbours who unjustly suspect him of interfering with their telly... Also, where most amateur writing about hobbies goes in for very dogmatic advice and condemnation of dissent, Strickland is very relaxed about exposing the long history of things he tried that didn't work as well as he hoped.

Very niche, very out of date, but fun. I was amused to see that a previous owner of my copy had spent a lot of time annotating Strickland's list of suitable small plants for line side gardening: obviously that person at least had some practical use for the book. I don't even have a garden...

>11 thorold: You might not have a garden, but 'fess up - have you a train set somewhere?

Enjoying your reviews as always

>1 thorold: , >2 thorold: Nice poem and pictures. BTW, am I supposed to know what the 1st and 2nd Pastoral are? I didn't do Pope in my English lit degree?

>9 thorold:

She is indeed excellent. My mother's generation, and another one of us meteor-struck dinosaurs who make no sense today. I only heard of her when I came to Toronto, there is a book of hers (I think untranslated so far) about her (and others') bitter experience of being a refugee here: "The Virgin of Czestochowa Still Weeps, or Dying in Toronto" (Marija Czestochowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu). Was a devastating read even for someone in a less traumatic situation.

By that time I think she had managed to return to Europe, although post-Communist Croatia has nothing to recommend it to anyone not a religiousy-fascist git.

>12 baswood: You've got me bang to rights!

>13 Nickelini: Probably not, Pope is notoriously out of fashion and has been for a long time. I doubt if any syllabus anywhere goes much further than the Essay on Man and The Rape of the Lock. But he's still fun to read, in small doses. It was reading Alberto Manguel's favourable comments on Pope's versions of Homer that brought him to mind.

>14 LolaWalser: Yes, I was struck by the way she presents her narrator as someone who experiences life as if he still were an exile after returning from abroad to the region where he should be most at home. Obviously that's how she felt as well.

>9 thorold: I notice that I wrote “Balkan” while thinking “Baltic” in my review of E.E.G.. Both are relevant to the novel, of course, but in the historical part there is a focus on what happened in Latvia during the successive Soviet and Nazi occupations — I’ve edited it to make that more explicit.

>16 thorold:

It may amuse you to hear that there's a precedent in the genius Baltic-for-Balkan metaphor in Miroslav Krleža's Banquet in Blitva. ("Litva" is the Croatian name of Lithuania. "Blitva", incidentally, is a real word, denoting a type of chard. No special meaning here but it adds a touch of comedy to the native reader.)

The torturous conundrum of an exile in time is worse than that of an exile in place. When Hugo fled to Guernsey, his cause still lived in France. When Lenin brooded around Zürich, his life's work was yet to come to fruition in Russia. People like that are displaced but not misplaced.

The other sort, like Drndić, Ugresić, Drakulić and masses of us anonymi thrown out of time and history, our history, have no future and therefore no special place to go to and make sense of who we are.

>13 Nickelini: >15 thorold: Apparently there’s a new BBC documentary about Pope, shown last night on BBC 4, with Simon Callow playing him. I haven’t seen it, but the comment I saw on Facebook (from someone who knows Pope’s work well) was that it oversimplifies him and turns him into too much of a nice guy. TV doesn’t do “complex”.

A book that was staring me in the face from the "recent acquisitions" table at the library. As it's very relevant to the RG "Translation prize-winners" theme, it would have been rude not to borrow it.

Hans Boland's translations of Russian 19th century literature into Dutch have won all the major translation prizes. He was the 2015 winner of the prestigious Martinus Nijhoff Prize.

Het Nederlands van Tsjechov: pleidooi voor een emancipatie van de vertaalkunst (2021) by Hans Boland (Netherlands, 1951- )

  

This is essentially a masterclass in translating Chekhov into Dutch, which also acts as companion to Boland's new Dutch translation of thirty Chekhov stories. Wittily, and with a very light touch, Boland takes us through dozens of difficulties in the Russian text and shows us how he arrived at his solutions, at the same time putting forward a spirited defence for his view that the primary objective of literary translation is to allow readers from a different cultural world to enjoy the experience of reading the text in the same way that it was enjoyed by the readers it was originally intended for. He feels that the essence of Chekhov is in his irony and subversive comedy, and that that is lost if we translate him in a solemn, "Russified" nineteenth-century-classic sort of way.

Boland sees his role as something like that of a skilled and tactful copy-editor, helping Chekhov's modern Dutch alter ego Tsj. to present the material he has got from his Russian-speaking colleague Ч. in the best possible way, without misrepresenting him or intruding his own editorial personality too far. That means breaking a lot of the taboos of translation: not only playing fast and loose with the paragraph and sentence-structure of the original to make the syntax more naturally Dutch, adding lexical variation where Chekhov, having fewer words to choose from, repeats himself, and also replacing Russian standard phrases with characteristic idioms that play a similar role in Dutch (even if the literal meaning is quite different). He also does various things to make the text more intelligible to someone unfamiliar with details of Russian life, e.g. by silently replacing patronymics with surnames and making versts into kilometres (without bothering the reader with the 7% difference between the two).

I'm not likely ever to be faced with the challenge of translating nineteenth century Russian into Dutch, and I'm not sure if Boland's style of translation is the one I would be looking for in a classic text, but I still found this a very interesting look over the translator's shoulder.

---
Boland's Chekhov stories are here: De dertig beste verhalen

Tommy Wieringa is one of those writers I instinctively avoid because he is so famous and you find his books on every station bookstall, but sooner or later you find yourself at a station bookstall with nothing to read...

(And I did enjoy Murat Idrissi a little while ago — Wieringa is obviously not famous without cause.)

Joe Speedboot (2005; Joe Speedboat) by Tommy Wieringa (Netherlands, 1967- )

  

A quirky coming-of-age novel set in an archetypically shut-in small community behind the dyke of one of the Great Rivers that cross the middle of the Netherlands. Lomark is a place so obscure that when Rijkswaterstaat finally decide to build a bypass around it, they don't bother to provide the villagers with a connection, and it seems their only way out in future will be over Piet Honing's ferry.

The chronicler of Lomark life is Frans, who has lost the use of both legs and one arm in an accident in his mid-teens, and doesn't hesitate to see the worst in those around him. But he does form a bond with another outsider in the village, the boy who insists on being called Joe Speedboat, and with a couple of other slightly less marginal teens. Where Frans is necessarily someone who spends most of his time sitting in his wheelchair and watching, Joe takes life in both hands, committing himself to projects that should be well beyond his skill level, quite apart from being things no sane adult would allow him to do. Wieringa allows himself a bit of Tom Sawyerish bending of realism here to demonstrate how Joe's absolute conviction that he can do something usually permits him to achieve it, even if the results aren't always what he might wish. Joe's Egyptian stepfather Mahfouz ("Papa Africa") is credited with a similar semi-magical ability to complete projects.

This isn't exactly an escapist fantasy about adolescence, though. We're always being pulled down to earth by Frans's darkly cynical realism, and we are shown that these kids don't live happily ever after — they suffer the same fate as all the rest of us, and turn into adults who have to deal with the pointlessness, mediocrity and arbitrary pain of real life.

Wieringa is very good at what he does, there are a lot of sharp observations of provincial, working-class Dutch culture and some good jokes. But it's a bit hard to say whether there's any more than that.

---

Nice to see how the art-director at the publishers locked onto the first stock photo with a wheelchair in it, irrespective of whether it has any other relevance to the story (It doesn't. There's no beach scene, Frans can't lift his left arm and is a stranger to ecstatic expressions of pleasure...).

Another little bit of gap-filling for the Lusophone thread (in Dutch, because libraries...):

Kleine herinneringen (2006; As pequenas memórias / Small memories) by José Saramago (Portugal, 1922-2010) translated from Portuguese to Dutch by Harrie Lemmens

  

Saramago never wrote his big autobiography, the Book of temptations, often mentioned in his other novels. But he did gather the material he had for it together to compile this little book in which he looks back at his childhood, often seeming to be more interested in the process of remembering and the way early memories get confused and distorted in our minds than he is in the actual content of those memories. He's very conscious that, in his eighties, he doesn't have any other witnesses to refer to for most of the things that happened to him as a small child. Several of the anecdotes in the early part of the book are revised later, as he cross-checks them with other information and realises that they couldn't possibly have happened at the time and place he thought they did. And searching the municipal archives in the hope of resolving the puzzle of when exactly his brother Francisco died draws him off on a complete tangent that resulted in the novel All the names...

But you can also read this as simply a charming, slightly ironic account of growing up in the 1920s in Lisbon and in rural Ribatejo (where his grandparents still lived). There is plenty about poverty, family quarrels, neighbours, school, precocious sexual experimentation, expeditions into the woods, cinema, how he got his (pen-)name, and all the rest of it. Very enjoyable.

The Dutch translation comes with a useful afterword by the translator Harrie Lemmens, summarising Saramago's career after the age of fourteen and taking us through most of his novels.

And another short memoir of childhood, this one prompted by a mention in E.E.G. (>9 thorold: above). And an interesting contrast: Saramago is exploring what memory can tell us with a minimum of supporting documentation, Castellina is exploring the limitations of a detailed contemporary written account (her own diary):

Discovery of the world : a political awakening in the shadow of Mussolini (2011; La scoperta del mondo) by Luciana Castellina (Italy, 1929- ), translated from Italian to English by Patrick Camiller

  

The distinguished left-wing journalist and politician Luciana Castellina was prompted to write this book late in life when she came across her teenage diary for the years 1943-47, opening with an incongruous scene where the news of Mussolini's fall from power comes through as she is playing tennis with his daughter at the holiday resort of Riccione (they had been classmates at school in Rome), and closing with her decision to join the Communist Party in October 1947. She takes us through the diary — sometimes quoting herself, more usually paraphrasing — commenting with ill-concealed amusement on her middle-class, teenage naivety and slow progress towards understanding the dramatic historical events she was living through and gaining some sort of political enlightenment, something that only really came to her when she answered a call for young people from around the world to volunteer to help rebuild Tito's Yugoslavia, and found herself building a railway line in Bosnia.

One of Castellina's grandfathers came from a prominent Trieste Jewish family — she describes how life suddenly changed for her Jewish relatives after the German occupation and how her mother had to fill their Rome house up with clandestine old ladies from Trieste.

The title is very apt: this is a fantastic book about the process of growing up and coming to understand what kind of world we are living in. Not many of us go on to live our adult lives with her kind of commitment to changing that world for the better, but I'm sure we all have a moment somewhere in our lives when we feel we could do that.

Nice review, Mark. Sounds like a terrific memoir.

I've never read anything by Cormac McCarthy, suspecting that it wouldn't really be my kind of thing, but, when a few of his books turned up in the Little Library, I thought I would take the opportunity to test my prejudices:

All the pretty horses (1992) by Cormac McCarthy (USA, 1933- )

  

A sixteen-year-old farm boy, who for some reason has the kind of grittiness, conservatism and life-experience you normally associate with novelists in their sixties, rides around on a horse and occasionally gets shot at.

There's a lot of very striking black-and-white widescreen scenery, and a lot of questing for vaguely-defined missing items, like "manhood", "territory", and "justice". And enough omitted quotation marks and untranslated Spanish dialogue to remind the unwary that this is supposed to be Literature, not Entertainment...

Joking apart, McCarthy is obviously very good at what he does, and I imagine that this is a book that would speak very strongly to people from his part of the world who feel that they have land and horses and cattle (and manly grit) in their heritage. But it doesn't do much to open that culture to the outsider.

>24 thorold: I love this review! Talk about damning with faint praise...

>24 thorold: and yet i adored the novel (despite lacking all listed essentials) 🙂

>25 Dilara86: hee, really. Tried reading him a few times, never got very far

Interested in that memoir; thanks for the info

>25 Dilara86: - >27 cindydavid4: I'm probably being a bit unfair to McCarthy — he is obviously a very talented writer, but the things he writes about don't seem to grab me.

I've seen Simon Winder's Germania and Danubia in the history sections of bookshops, and even picked them up and felt their weight a couple of times, but I put them back not quite being able to work out what they were. Then the third in the series caught my eye in the library, and it seemed closer to home, so I thought I'd give it a go:

Lotharingia: a personal history of Europe's lost country (2019) by Simon Winder (UK, 1963- )

  

After Charlemagne's empire was split between his three grandsons by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, East Francia and West Francia went on to a fairly well-defined existence as recognisable, long-term geopolitical entities: The Holy Roman Empire and France, respectively. But the middle bit, which went to Lothar, had a much more complicated story.

The wide stripe of northern Europe running roughly along the Rhine from Switzerland to the Low Countries has been fought over, bartered, seized, inherited, passed on by marriage, and just plain mislaid so many times and in so many different and ingenious combinations over the intervening 1100 years that poor old Lothar is now remembered only in the traditional name of a part of north-east France around Metz and Nancy that isn't even a formal administrative region any more (it has been swallowed up in something called Grand Est). And of course, that makes it a historian's dream, to the extent that Simon Winder has to keep on apologising for all the marvellous and improbable anecdotes he has had to miss out of this packed but enjoyably random and subjective account of its history from "earliest times" to 1945.

Although Winder has an impressive bibliography and is conscientious about getting things right, this isn't the first book you would go to for serious history of the region: it unashamedly misses out all the boring detail of wars and genealogies and political negotiations and focusses instead on the good stories (there's a lot more on Neutral Moresnet and Mömpelgard than on the Thirty Years War). He spends much more time than a scholar would allow on his own subjective experiences of wandering around the places where these things all happened, too, and that often produces good, if irrelevant, anecdotes. All that does make it rather fun to read, as long as you are fairly tolerant of a certain kind of schoolmasterly English flippancy (Winder isn't a schoolmaster, he's a publisher, but he's obviously spent too much time around schoolmasters at some point in his life, as most of us have...). I enjoyed it, but I'm sure some people would find it maddening.

>28 thorold: That sounds like something I'd like, when I had time

>29 Nickelini: Yes — he hardly ever mentions the Swiss without using the adjective “ornery”…

>30 thorold:
LOL, yes because the Swiss have so much to be ornery about!

More random non-fiction:

The road taken : the history and future of America's infrastructure (2016) by Henry Petroski‬ (USA, 1942- )

  

I've enjoyed other Petroski books I've read, but this one felt more like a collection of material recycled from newspaper columns than a coherent book project, despite the care Petroski takes to tie everything in with Robert Frost's famous poem about decision-making processes in highway engineering.

About a third of the book is the sort of thing Petroski does best, digging into the technological and design history of everyday items — why do we have kerbstones (or curbstones, if you prefer...)? Why are "stop" signs red? Who decided that traffic lights should have the red lamp at the top? Why do American roads have a white line on the nearside and a yellow line in the middle? That's engaging, good fun, and full of interesting anecdotes.

But, after that, Petroski goes on to dig more deeply into the puzzle of why the USA, despite being one of the richest and most technologically-advanced countries in the world, is notorious for its crumbling and inadequate transportation infrastructure. And here he flounders rather. He's an engineer, not a politician or an economist, and his professional courtesy holds him back from stepping too directly into other people's fields of expertise, so all he can do is present us with case studies (mostly from his own special area, bridge-building) and show us the results of poor political decision-making, without ever venturing an opinion on the underlying causes or how they could be corrected.

Reading between the lines we can see the processes generally identified (by Americans) as failures in the US political system operating: conflicts of interest and ideology between Federal and State or local authorities; the short-term thinking built into the election-cycle and the alternation of Democrat and Republican power; the voters' insistence on getting expensive public services whilst refusing to allow the government to pay for these through borrowing or taxation; the prioritisation of glamorous new projects over dull maintenance work; the difficulty of coming up with fair evaluations of economic benefit versus environmental cost; the delusion that public-private partnerships will magically generate free beer for voters, and so on.

Petroski doesn't come up with any suggestions about how these, rather fundamental, issues could be overcome. Nor does he address what outsiders might argue is the really interesting question: how is it that the USA in the 20th and 21st century has always been such a rich, successful and powerful country, despite the crumbling state of its roads, bridges, ports and everything else? Could it be that it is actually a good strategy in the modern world to spend public money exclusively on prisons and the military...?

Another recent Margaret Drabble book I missed when it came out:

The pattern in the carpet : a personal history with jigsaws (2009) by Margaret Drabble‬ (UK, 1939- )

  

I was rather hoping this would come in a box, like The unfortunates, but with odd-shaped pieces you have to put together in the right order to make a 300 page book. Sadly it doesn't. But that's just about the only thing that disappointed me in this gloriously wide-ranging, unpredictable, clever and sympathetic celebration of jigsaw puzzles and the author's Auntie Phyl.

Drabble shoots off down every conceivable side-track, to look into not only the history of the puzzles themselves, but the way they relate to other toys and games, as well as to crafts and adult pastimes. She examines her memories of childhood holidays at her aunt's house, a B&B in a village on the Great North Road, and of her adult relationship with her aunt in old age (both of which involved doing jigsaw puzzles together, of course) and tries to make sense of where the borderline falls between kitschy nostalgia and permissible aesthetic appreciation of the artefacts of the past. She's pretty sure the brass warming-pan she rescued from her aunt's house is on the wrong side of this line, somehow, but she's hanging on to it anyway.

There's a lot here about Perec and La vie: mode d'emploi, but also about Jules Verne and his use of the Goose Game, and Southey and Coleridge on their "Aunt Hill". Meanwhile, passing by on the A1 are Doctor Johnson — who might have been more relaxed if he'd agreed to play draughts sometimes — and the mad poet John Clare. Drabble finds jigsaws and jigsaw imagery in the most surprising corners of fine art and English literature, gets to put together one of John Spilsbury's original Dissected Maps in the British Library (the pieces for Scotland and Corsica are missing), and is taken on a tour of the unexpected mosaics and interlocking pieces of London by a helpful cabbie called Kevin.

This is a book that will tell you a lot of things you didn't know you needed to know, and will probably leave you with an odd urge to get out one of your old jigsaw puzzles. Apart from that, I'm not quite sure what it is for or how to classify it, but I enjoyed it very much.

>33 thorold: The feelings of achievement and relief when a jig saw is completed, there is nothing quite like it.

I cannot do those. As a early childhood teacher, Id often work on ones before the kids do, so i wont look like a fool! I greatly admire people who have such patience. Always love the finished project. My brain just doesnt work that way!

>33 thorold: I absolutely need that book!

Every year, January 6th in this house is the date when two different puzzles with the same number of pieces are exchanged by two people. They must be done without looking at the picture ever. The goal is to finish first - a wonderful way to find out just what an obsessive you might be! It's great fun looking for the most maddening puzzle ever for that other person.

...where the borderline falls between kitschy nostalgia and permissible aesthetic appreciation of the artefacts of the past Part of the difficulty there may be that as with real world borders, aesthetic borders tend to shift as well. This year's warming pan find may be next year's who knows what. I'm glad Drabble seems to stick to keeping what pleases her.

wow, interesting date..... sounds like a fun challenge!

>36 SassyLassy: >34 baswood: Drabble seems to be more interested in unfinished puzzles than in completing them, it sounds as though her ideal is to have one always on the go and try to fit a couple of pieces whenever she gets tangled up in her writing. She hates the idea of competitive solving.

She avoids committing herself to either the look-at-the-picture or the don’t-look-at-the picture school of thought, though — she talks about the attractions of both. I’m inclined to the “don’t look” school, I enjoy watching the picture emerge out of blocks of pieces in unexpected ways. But I’ve never been fond of the really maddening ones. We used to have a big “Fall in New England” puzzle at home when I was a child: no obvious top and bottom, just varying colours of leaves all the way down. It seemed to come out every year in the Christmas holidays, and got put away again, incomplete, after we went back to school.

I think the warming-pan quandary is more about authenticity than shifts of fashion — it has personal value for her because it has been in her aunt’s house since her grandparents’ time, but she wonders whether they can have bought it as a functional item, or whether such things were already then being made purely to be decorative.

In 2019, I read Jacob van Lennep's diary of his student walking tour of the Northern Netherlands in the summer of 1823 (Lopen met Van Lennep — edited by Mathijsen and Geert Mak); I was also vaguely aware that the grown-up van Lennep was responsible for giving Amsterdam its drinking-water supply, and that at some point he had had a big fight with Multatuli. Clearly there were some interesting blanks to be filled in somewhere, it was only a case of waiting until the library got a copy of Professor Mathijsen's recent biography...

Jacob van Lennep: een bezielde schavuit (2018) by Marita Mathijsen (Netherlands, 1944- )

  

Jacob van Lennep's lifetime (1802-1868) corresponds to a period when the Northern Netherlands was very much not the happening place in European culture. Britain, Germany, France, and even the Southern Netherlands (Belgium from the 1830s on) were modernising, industrialising, philosophising, and producing internationally-relevant writers, painters, musicians and scientists by the bucketful, whilst the Northern Netherlands was still stuck deep in the post-Napoleonic economic dip, and had trouble seeing beyond the tip of its own perfectly-formed seventeenth-century nose. There's really only one mid-19th-century Dutch writer who has had any long-term influence in the wider world, and that's Multatuli (E Douwes Dekker), the whistle-blower of Dutch colonialism.

Van Lennep was versatile, talented, witty, privileged, and above all provided with apparently inexhaustible reserves of energy, and his contemporaries — even those who didn't like him — treated him as one of the leading Dutch literary figures of the age, but his vast body of prose fiction, non-fiction, verse and stage-work was almost entirely taken up with a Romantic/antiquarian, Walter-Scott-like interest in Dutch history that proved to be of little interest to later generations of readers. He also shared Scott's rather conservative (absolutist, anti-Catholic) political attitudes, quite out of tune with the spirit of 1848.

But that doesn't stop him from being an interesting figure from a period of Dutch history we don't often hear much about, apart from the big constitutional questions. Mathijsen has obviously had plenty of experience teaching 19th century literature to students who don't know their Alberdingk Thijm from their Thorbecke, so she tactfully and efficiently fills us in on the historical background as she goes along, and takes care to situate van Lennep within that background. In fact, the book often comes close to turning into a cultural history of early to mid 19th-century Amsterdam, which I found fascinating, since so much of it was stuff I only knew about very sketchily.

Despite his huge output of published work, what's probably van Lennep's most-read work nowadays is, ironically enough, a private diary he never intended for publication, describing a walking-tour of the Netherlands he took with another privileged Leiden student in the summer vacation of 1823, getting to know the country in which both of them expected to take up official posts later on. That diary is very revealing in the way it shows the apparent contradiction in van Lennep's character between his serious, socially-concerned side and his drinking, gambling and womanising. Oddly-enough, as he got older, it seems to have been the serious side that became less important: the wildness became more discreet, but it never went away. Even in his sixties he was still fathering illegitimate children, and no-one ever seems to have painted him without giving him a mischievous twinkle in the eye.

Mathijsen has fun disentangling some of this misbehaviour, which, needless to say, is the only bit of van Lennep's life that is not vastly over-documented in the family archives. The most interesting puzzle is Geertruijda Elisabeth Tulle, born in 1822 (when Jacob was 19), but only legally acknowledged as his daughter in 1855. The circumstances suggest that her real mother must have been someone out of Jacob's own social circle, the working-class woman who registered her birth being paid to act as foster-mother. Mathijsen hazards a couple of guesses as to who it might have been (entertainingly, almost all the women in van Lennep's life at this point were called Henriette...), but concludes, regretfully, that there simply isn't enough evidence to be sure.

Altogether, a very interesting and engaging biography of someone who did quite a few important things in his life — not only preparing the first comprehensive modern edition of Vondel, but providing Amsterdam with numerous statues and a safe, clean water supply, and shepherding the two prickliest pseudonymous writers of the age, Multatuli and De Schoolmeester, into print for the first time. Not that Multatuli thanked him for it: there was a long period of acrimony and law-suits over the first edition of Max Havelaar, in which Multatuli has tended to get the last word, leaving van Lennep with the reputation of the scoundrel exploiting the poor unknown. Mathijsen treats Multatuli's accusations of copyright theft as paranoia and misunderstanding, but she does concede that van Lennep probably went too far in "taming" the book for publication. Quite apart from his habitual conservative repugnance at the whole idea of a protest novel, he had sons and sons-in-law working in Indonesia, and many of his close friends were involved in the colonial trade.

And a short novella by French/Belgian writer Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt:

Madame Pylinska et le secret de Chopin (2018) by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (France, 1960- )

  

The young Éric-Emmanuel has been fascinated by the music of Chopin since hearing his adored aunt Aimée playing it when he was a small child. But his piano-lessons have never brought him to the level where he can play Chopin adequately. When he comes to Paris to study (literature) at the ENS, he takes the opportunity to look for a more advanced teacher, and finds his way to Mme Pylinska, the Miss Jean Brodie of the keyboard, who gets him to do all kinds of absurd-seeming mental and physical exercises, none of them actually involving a piano. And, of course, this, coupled with his love for his aunt and a few possibly reincarnated animals, brings him to the point where, just once, he can treat the master's music in the way it deserves. And shows him the way into his real career as a writer...

Enjoyable romantic nonsense that would obviously make a great film, wittily told, but not a book anyone really needs in their life.

>39 thorold: enjoyed the history lesson

>40 thorold: “ but not a book anyone really needs in their life.” - there are a few of those around.

Funny you've just read an Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt: I've just been down a France Musique rabbit hole, and watched a filmed radio programme called La Tribune des critiques (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OBp4JQAyZA) where he and three other guests listen to different versions of the Ride of the Valkyries, the Barber of Seville overture and Offenbach's Barcarolle, then give their opinions. He comes across as quite knowledgeable and passionate about music! I was tempted to try his writing, but now that I've read your review, I'm not sure...

>42 Dilara86: He does seem to know what he's talking about musically. I assume that the student pianist in the story isn't completely fictional.

I've only read two of his books (this and Odette Toulemonde), so don't write him off on my evidence! I get the impression that he's a very clever, fluent and witty writer, but he aims his books at a public who don't want to be challenged too far. Which is fair enough, and calls for quite a lot of skill: Alexander McCall Smith does much the same thing, and he's certainly worth reading when you're in the right mood.

>40 thorold: I had a college professor who claimed that Chopin cannot possibly be played by anyone under 40. Which would eliminate Chopin himself.

>40 thorold: >44 kac522: And, wouldn't you know it, just when you've finished one library book that claims that being in love improves your ability to play Chopin, another one comes along...

I became curious about Clare Morrall because she was mentioned on one of those old Guardian Top Ten lists that Cynfelyn has been reposting, "Isabel Wolff's top 10 books set in the Midlands" (https://www.librarything.com/topic/335554#7631322). She and Jenny Colgan were the only writers in the list I hadn't heard of. The library had several of her books, not including the one in the list, so I picked this one because I usually like novels about musicians:

The language of others (2008) by Clare Morrall (UK, 1952- )

  

An agreeable, often very funny novel about music and the difficulty of making sense of the rest of humanity when you are somewhere on the autism spectrum. I felt it was slightly spoilt by the way all the female characters (except the main viewpoint character, her mother and her mother-in-law) were competent, resourceful, tactful domestic angels and almost all the male characters were infantile monsters who seemed to exist only to sleep, have tantrums and be fed. Obviously not an unrealistic view of the world, but a somewhat monochrome one...

I enjoyed your superb review of Jacob van Lennep: een bezielde schavuit, Mark.

Back to the 19th century in the Low Countries, with more Moresnet than you could possibly be neutral about:

Moresnet: opkomst en ondergang van een vergeten buurlandje (2016) by Philip Dröge (Netherlands, 1967- )
Zink (2016) by David Van Reybrouck (Belgium, 1971- )

    

(Photo of Dröge by Vincent Boon, from philipdroge.nl — obviously there's something very interesting going on to the right of the camera in both these author photos...)

The zinc-ore mine at Kelmis, south of Aachen, had been in use since Roman times, but it suddenly became very important around the beginning of the 19th century, when the Liège industrialist Jean-Jacques Daniel Dony invented a new and highly efficient process for refining zinc. Napoleon — possibly encouraged by the ingenious portable zinc bathtub with built-in water-heater that Dony had given him — awarded him a fifty-year concession to exploit the mine. However, it was the post-Napoleonic settlement of the Congress of Vienna that was responsible for turning Kelmis into a fascinating geopolitical anomaly as well: through an unfortunate drafting error, one article of the treaty assigned the village and its mine to Prussia, and another gave it to the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The problem wasn't discovered until the border commissioners got down to serious work in 1816. When the problem was referred to higher authority, it became clear that neither of the mule-like monarchs was going to back up an inch, so the Treaty of Aachen specified that the part of the the commune of Moresnet containing Kelmis and the mine — a triangle with an area of about 3 sq km and 250 residents — would be treated temporarily as a neutral zone. A joint committee would be established to find a more permanent agreement. Of course, anyone who's ever been involved in public administration knows what happens when you do that: in this case, 98 years of inactivity at the highest level while the people on the spot came up with ever more complex workarounds for the problems. Moresnet was clearly one of those political problems where any solution was likely to be more damaging to the people taking the decision than the minor inconvenience of letting it drag on.

During the nineteenth century the mine prospered and Neutral Moresnet acquired various other typical "small-country" industries, such as smuggling, alcohol production, draft-evasion and baby-farming. The village grew to a population of around 4000 by the end, roughly equally divided between Germans, Belgians, Dutch and "neutrals", these last being descendants of the original 250 and officially stateless.

Attempts to resolve the status of the region and eliminate the illegal activities were usually smothered by lobbying from the mining company, which was owned by the prominent Brussels business dynasty, the Mosselmans. Even after the exhaustion of the mine at the end of the century, they carried on refining zinc there, taking advantage of the legal vacuum and favourable tax-regime. The Belgian government was also reluctant to sign an agreement that would have resulted in people who considered themselves Belgian ending up under German rule. In the early twentieth century there were even some attempts to turn Moresnet into an independent country with Esperanto as its official language (Google "Amikejo march" for the proposed national anthem).

The Germans ultimately rendered the whole question moot by invading Belgium in 1914 (and again in 1940 and 1944...). During the two world wars Neutral Moresnet was treated as part of Germany, and from 1920 it and the surrounding villages were assigned to Belgium by the Versailles treaty.

Dröge and Van Reybrouck were obviously both prompted to write about Neutral Moresnet by the bicentenary in 2016. Dröge's book is a fairly comprehensive history, starting with Napoleon's bath and ending with the Versailles treaty, and with plenty of interesting anecdotal detail as well as a bit more background about the diplomatic and legal situation. He has fun with some of the more colourful characters, like Fanny Mosselman, who bridges the roles of 18th century royal mistress and 20th century businesswoman, and really deserves a book to herself...

Van Reybrouck's 60-page essay was the 2016 Boekenweek gift — he sketches in the historical background, but his main interest is in the oral history he put together talking to modern residents of Kelmis about their early memories and family history. At the centre of his book is the baker Emil Rixen, born in 1902 to an unmarried German woman and adopted (for a fee) by a Moresnet family, who grew up to change nationality five times without needing to leave home, and to serve (against his will) in the armies of two different countries.

I've previously read Binet's HHhH — a non-fiction-novel about an assassination during World War II — and La septième fonction du langage — an absurd detective story where the suspects are members of the elite of literary theory. Both clever and enjoyable, but with no obvious connection with each other or with this novel:

Civilizations (2019) by Laurent Binet (France, 1972- )

  

What if Americans had invaded Europe in the sixteenth century instead of the other way round? We all know that tiny handfuls of Conquistadors managed to snag improbably large swathes of territory for Spain on the strength of a marginal technological advantage, a huge amount of luck, and a consciousness that they had nothing to lose. How might it have worked out if that playing-field had been slightly more level, and what consequences might it have had for Europe?

Binet's alternative branch of history starts out with the Vikings penetrating much further south along the American coast than is usually accepted, with a shipload under the command of Erik the Red's daughter Freydis (because, why not?) getting as far as Cuba, leaving a trail of antibodies, horses, ironworking skills and the worship of Thor behind them. As a result, Columbus has a bit of a hard time in the Caribbean and never gets home, but his Taino hosts have time to profit from his geographical knowledge and reverse-engineer his ship and firearms.

Some forty years later, in 1531, a couple of shiploads of Americans under the leadership of exiled Inca emperor Atahualpa and his Taino mistress Higuénamota arrive in Lisbon at a moment when the local authorities have been rather distracted by a devastating earthquake. And before anyone has fully realised what is happening, they have hijacked Charles V's empire in a kind of mirror-image of the way Hernan Cortés took over Montezuma's.

The novel is a lively romp in which just about anyone who was anybody in the sixteenth century has at least a walk-on part, and there are plenty of more and less subtle jokes buried in the text. In fact, I half suspect Binet of having put the whole complex structure together just so that he can have the Mexican conquerors build a pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre...

On a more serious level, as becomes clearer from the epilogue in which Cervantes and El Greco debate the relationship between humanist values and religious belief with Michel de Montaigne (again, because why not?), Binet is using the novel to make us think about what we really mean when we talk about "European civilisation," "the Christian tradition," and the like. The hybrid European/American empire he postulates for Atahualpa, in which Sun-worship is the state religion but Catholicism, Lutheranism, Judaism and Islam are all officially tolerated and the Inquisition has been abolished, is more liberal and humanistic in practice than any "traditional" European state of the the time, and it also manages to maintain European peace for an unprecedented length of time (until the Mexicans turn up and destabilise things again...).

An interesting and entertaining read, with some great characters, especially Higuénamota, who loves to shock people like Luther by appearing on formal occasions in her national costume (i.e. none). But I think it might have worked better if Binet had found a way to overcome the technical imbalance without requiring Americans to rely on knowledge they had got from visiting Europeans. Couldn't there have been a stray Chinese ship landing on the coast of Peru?

A follow-up to Jacob Van Lennep (>39 thorold:) — I remembered that I had a copy of this on my poetry shelf, but when I got it out to re-read it turned out to be such a nasty edition — given out in exchange for chocolate-wrappers by the Kwatta steam chocolate factory of Breda ca. 1910 — that it was hardly legible. I found that the library had a 70s reprint of the illustrated edition which was much pleasanter to read:

De gedichten van den Schoolmeester (1859; illustrated edition 1872; reprint 1975) by De Schoolmeester (Gerrit van de Linde, Netherlands, UK, 1808-1858), edited by Jacob Van Lennep and illustrated by Anthony de Vries (1841-1872)

  

Gerrit van de Linde was one of three jolly young men who got to know Jacob Van Lennep when he was invited to speak to a student club at Leiden in 1831. It must have been quite an evening, as they all remained close friends for the rest of their lives. But Gerrit was a little bit too jolly for a future parson, and in 1833-34 he suffered a series of calamities of the kind that normally only happens to the heroes of 19th-century novels. Within a very short time, he got a serving-girl pregnant, was ejected from the university when it emerged that he'd been having an affair with the wife of one of his professors, and had to flee the country because of gambling debts. Somewhere along the line his respectable fiancée terminated their engagement as well.

Gerrit set off for the colonies, but only got as far as London, where he had to learn English rapidly and soon found a new fiancée, Caroline de Monteuuis, whose father ran a school in Boulogne. Some generous loans from Van Lennep helped them to start a new life together running a "Collège français" in Highgate(*). Van Lennep also published many of Gerrit's poems in the annual he edited, "Almanak Holland". Since Gerrit's real name was still too hot to handle in the Netherlands, they appeared under the pen-name "De Schoolmeester".

After Gerrit's death in 1858, Caroline asked Van Lennep to put together a collection of her husband's poems, sending him all the manuscripts she could find. He seems to have done a lot of tidying up and correction, including adding a line or two where poems were obviously unfinished, and he filtered out some of the more risqué stuff — it seems modern scholars are still scratching their heads to work out what was original and what was Van Lennep. Van Lennep was also quite creative in his "biographical note", where he managed to imply that Gerrit left Leiden as a result of a failure of his father's investments, and was oddly silent about the scandals many of his readers probably remembered...

The poems were a big success, and remained in print for many years. Readers old and young loved the comic absurdity of van de Linde's leaps of logic, his unexpected juxtapositions of formal and informal language, his refusal to take anything seriously, and his sheer verbal agility. The subject-matter and light touch are obviously influenced by the Ingoldsby Legends and Punch, but the astonishingly sure-footed way that van de Linde ignores the normal rules of rhyme and meter — and always gets away with it — is all his own. Not many people in the mid-nineteenth century were doing that, in any language.

Illustrated editions started to appear from the 1870s, and many different illustrators had a go at the poems (cf. https://www.kb.nl/themas/nederlandse-poezie/dichters-uit-het-verleden/de-schoolm... but the ones most people seem to remember are those by Anthony de Vries, which pick up the absurdity of the poems perfectly.



---
(*) Remember the Porter in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall? — "I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour."

>48 thorold: wow that sounds like such a fun book!

>49 thorold:

A fondness for daft verse and daftness in general seems to have been around for as long schools existed. I'm reminded of Johann Galletti, the proverbial absent-minded professor whose howlers students religiously collected (Das größte Insekt ist der Elefant)--17th to 18th century, just about when public schooling started to spread.

>50 Nickelini: Yes

>51 LolaWalser: I'm sure there's something about long-term contact with children en masse that warps the brain — I've seen many cases of that among my friends and relatives... :-)

Interesting too that one of the "unsuitable" poems Van Lennep omitted from the collection was a short poem (from a private letter) in which van de Linde comically — but obviously at least half-seriously too — writes about how much he hates being someone who every morning has to put up with a run-down classroom and "the snotty noses, the donkey-questions / the unsightly nail-chewing / the itchy louse-hunting / the dirty white collars / and the soul-destroying teasing of Youth".

---

A short book that I somehow never realised I hadn't read:

Tonio Kröger (1903) by Thomas Mann (Germany, 1875-1955)

  

In this 1903 novella, Mann picks up a slightly different version of the autobiographical character from Buddenbrooks as a schoolboy in Lübeck, torn between the traditions of his mercantile, Nordic father and his flighty, artistic, Latin mother.

The fourteen-year-old Tonio is hopelessly in love with the magnificent, blond, blue-eyed Hans, the character who would be Captain of the First XI in a British school story of the time; two years later he is pining for the equally unattainable (but rather more sketchily described) blonde Inge, the doctor's daughter.

We skim a few years ahead to the artistic south (Schwabing, the arty quarter of Munich at the time), where Tonio is now an acclaimed poet and is rather pompously lecturing his painter-friend Lisaweta on the demands creative work makes of the artist. She doesn't seem to mind: they didn't have podcasts in those days, and it's something to listen to as she paints. But her comment that Tonio is really still bourgeois under his aesthetic varnish throws him slightly off-balance, and he decides to make a journey back home to explore his relationship to his Baltic roots.

When Tonio's quiet Danish seaside hotel is invaded by a party of noisy weekenders, he notices a couple of teenagers who look exactly like Hans and Inge, and watching them dancing together in the evening he comes to the conclusion that the only way forward for him as an artist is to find a way to embrace his bourgeois side at the same time as pursuing his abstract, aesthetic ambitions. This doesn't seem to provide him with a way to embrace either Hans or Inge, though...

Interesting, as it's clearly a very personal document in which Mann tries to work out a dichotomy in his nature as an artist that he never really did resolve, and which is perhaps one of the most interesting things about him as a writer of his time.

>52 thorold: I really enjoyed this review. I'll have to read more Thomas Mann sometime.

>53 dchaikin: Thanks!
This — or Buddenbrooks — would be a good place to start. But I think you’ve already tackled some of the scarier ones…

>55 dchaikin: just bumbled through The Magic Mountain with some help from better readers. Buddenbrooks might a good next stop. I’ve also thought about dedicating a year to reading him.

>49 thorold: love that footnote! You have so many interesting books and I wish I could read them all

m sure there's something about long-term contact with children en masse that warps the brain — I've seen many cases of that among my friends and relatives... :-)

Hee, yup teaching has certainly done that to me! Yet I liked my job, unlike the author!

A history book from the library pile:

Continental drift : Britain and Europe from the end of empire to the rise of Euroscepticism (2016) by Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon (USA, 1979- )

  

I have on my shelves a history of aviation that was published in 1902, about a year before the Wright brothers made their first successful powered flight. This is much the same thing, a history of postwar attitudes to European integration in British politics that was published in 2016, on the eve of the Brexit referendum. It's lovely, detailed, thorough historical writing by someone who's clearly read more briefing papers, cabinet minutes and politicians' memoirs than most of us could bear even to think about, but you can't help feeling that it's missing a certain amount of important context...

Grob-Fitzgibbon is particularly interested in the relationship between the decline of Britain's status as an imperial power and openness towards European union. He shows us Churchill and Ernest Bevin in 1945-51 (separately) arguing for a union of European countries ("...under British leadership", we should understand) that would defend our respective colonial interests and stand up to the Americans and Russians on equal terms — an idea which Bevin gave up when he realised that he would never have been able to stand up to Stalin over the Berlin blockade without US help. The foreign policy emphasis under Eden shifted back to the colonies and Commonwealth, but from 1956 on there was a general shift towards accepting that Britain was close to going bankrupt, and her colonial interests were historical and sentimental, rather than economically or geopolitically relevant. The Americans clearly had only a minor passing interest in what Britain did, so it was the Continent or nothing. As far as De Gaulle was concerned, of course, it would be "nothing", so not much came of that until he was finally pushed out and Britain joined the EEC in 1973.

Grob-Fitzgibbon interestingly notes that the immediate run-up to 1 January 1973 was the first time that opinion polls showed the British public having any serious doubts about the wisdom of joining the EEC. As long as the French were standing in the way, everyone wanted it, but from the moment it became a reality there was anguish about what we would do without unlimited supplies of New Zealand Cheddar. The arch-imperialist Enoch Powell formed the nucleus of anti-European movements on the right, harking back to "Britain's great days", whenever they might have been, whilst, more seriously in the short-term at least, the left wing of the Labour Party identified it all as a capitalist plot, and the party in general grasped it as a useful thing to disagree with the Tories about (notwithstanding the fact that it was Harold Wilson who had previously argued most strongly for joining). So there was the farce of the 1975 referendum, with half the Labour Party opposing the (Labour) government and half the Tory party supporting it. Plus ça change!

I found the first part of the book, covering periods I don't remember living through, quite interesting, but I felt the later parts got bogged down in narrative detail rather, without very much comment or analysis. Also, the very tight focus on political events and the exclusively Westminster point-of-view made it difficult to come to any real conclusions about what was going on. We hear a lot about correspondence between ministers and the governments of Commonwealth countries, for instance, but Grob-Fitzgibbon hardly ever gives us any figures about the actual amount of trade involved (and when he does, there's nothing to compare them with). Equally, we hear a lot about the results of meetings with foreign leaders as seen by the British, but the closest we get to hearing what the other side thought of it is an occasional follow-up note from a British ambassador in that country.

It's another minefield topic, I'll just say I found this man's lectures most enlightening:

Prof Dorling (Uni of Oxford) - Brexit and the End of the British Empire

That's from 2019. There's also a book, Rule Britannia : Brexit and the end of empire.

ETA: found a short vid, 5 minutes, from this year (June, 5th anniversary of Brexit):

Rule Britannia - Brexit and the End of Empire

>58 LolaWalser: Thanks, yes, that looks interesting. More interesting than the book I just finished, anyway :-)
The school textbook point was something I’d been wondering about, too. Not sure about his analysis of the vote, that all went a bit fast for me in the lecture, but it sounded plausible. I’ve bookmarked the book to read on Scribd.

I found Fintan O’Toole’s The politics of pain quite enlightening too.

>59 thorold:

Not sure if you mean the long or short video; it's been a while since I listened to the lectures (there's more on YT) but it was back when it all resonated uncannily with the ascendance of Trumpism. I've forgotten the details now, but his breakdown of the Remain/Leave votes by geography etc. was unbelievably like the American gerrymandered patchwork. And with that same precariousness of outcome based on few votes etc.

Nationalism. I've finally understood the problem was that I was taught that the fascists lost. No. As long as we uphold capitalism we shall have to reckon with fascism.

>60 LolaWalser: Yes, it was the lecture he gave at Keele I watched, shortly after the book came out by the sound of it. I've started dipping into the book — more later.

In the meantime, just for a change, one off the TBR pile rather than the library pile:

Über Menschen : Roman (2021) by Juli Zeh (Germany, 1974- )

  

As the punning title already hints, this is another look at the rural Brandenburg setting of Zeh's previous novel Unter Leuten. But in the far from normal lockdown-spring of 2020, this time.

Thirtysomething copywriter Dora has fled Berlin after the stresses caused by two people working-from-home in the same small apartment opened up the existing cracks in her relationship with journalist and Greta-groupie Robert, and she and her dog are now camping out in the country house she bought a little while ago with a vague idea of doing it up. Fortunately, the village turns out to have good broadband, but it doesn't have much else apart from a volunteer fire brigade. She's fully expecting to get no welcome from the locals, who are obviously all going to be hardcore AfD voters conditioned to dislike everyone and everything that comes from Berlin...

And of course it turns out to be a little bit more complicated than that. In a village neighbours are neighbours, even if they have nothing else in common with you, and you can't simply ignore them as you might in a city. And in Dora's case the man next-door turns out to be an appalling neo-Nazi with a criminal record for violence, who also happens to be a good neighbour keen to help Dora get her place fixed up and habitable. And a skilled craftsman. Which doesn't in any way cancel out his repulsive views and harmful acts, but does force Dora to see him as a complex human being rather than as a sociopolitical type to be slotted into the "bad" category.

Dora folgt einer Unterhaltung über die Qualität der neuesten Mähroboter und denkt, wie wenig Polarisierung es in Wahrheit gibt. Kein Ost und West, unten und oben, links oder rechts. Weder Paradies noch Apokalypse, wie es Medien und Politik häufig schildern. Stattdessen Menschen, die beieinanderstehen. Die sich mehr oder weniger mögen. Die aufeinandertreffen und sich wieder trennen.

The moral seems to be that we lose out on the complexity of human characters as city-dwellers in our self-selected safe-spaces. Which is fair enough, and Zeh handles it elegantly and wittily, without ever falling into the trap of creating a "good Nazi". Along the way, she also has a lot of other clever and amusing observations of the strange ways German life has reacted to the Covid-19 crisis. Not as complex and comprehensive a novel as Unter Leuten, but still very rewarding.

In other news, I've been busy with a big sort-out and rearrangement of my non-fiction section, which has resulted in piles of books on the floor everywhere over the last few days, but is now coming to a conclusion. It was prompted, as these things usually are, by it taking far too long for me to find a book I was looking for.

Taking advantage of the fact that LT had already added DDC/MDC symbols to about 90% of the books, I decided to use that for the reorganisation. Of course, that meant that I had to learn enough about how the classification works while I was putting those books on the shelves to be able to classify the others — and, as it turned out, to reclassify quite a few that had egregiously wrong or inconsistent data. I was over halfway through that before I found out about the useful tool on classify.oclc.org that gives you stats about the various symbols different libraries have attached to a book. And of course, as always happens, I found all sorts of little errors in tags or other data that I needed to correct as I went along, so it all took ages. One book of memoirs was incorrectly tagged "poetry" but, despite that, had been incorrectly shelved in the fiction section. I think that was the most extreme confuser to sort out.

Along the way, I found fifteen stowaways — books that have been hiding out in my library since before 2007 without ever being catalogued. But also four books that were missing in action. Two of those were textbooks lent to a young man on his way to college. He is now a full-time academic, so I can't have needed them in the last eight or nine years, might as well write them off. The other two I suspect may have wandered to the Little Library without being checked out here. Or they might be hiding somewhere...

And a lot of dust, and miscellaneous extraneous objects that had found their way onto the shelves. I kept finding out of date youth hostel handbooks and old calendars — I can't think who puts them there...

All in all, three full days to sort about 1600 books. And I still haven't decided whether I want to add labels, or to allow the Dewey order to randomise itself gradually over the course of the next few years.

And an early Herta Müller novella:

Reisende auf einem Bein (Traveling on one leg, 1989) by Herta Müller (Germany, Romania, 1953- )

  

This was the first book Müller wrote after her move to Germany in 1987, and it's a nervy, tentative sort of account of the classic refugee experience of having definitively left one place but not quite having arrived in another.

Irene leaves the country she grew up in — unnamed, but obviously Romania — to come to Germany, and we follow her through the succession of temporary states of life involved in the immigration and resettlement process — hostels, an assigned flat, and endless interviews with security officers and bureaucrats that absurdly echo the ones she's had to deal with in the dictatorship she's been obliged to leave. Several tentative and unsuccessful relationships with men, some collage-making, and a lot of passive observation of what's going on around her but somehow not touching her in Berlin. And of course no clear ending, because you never stop being a displaced person.

---

I really like this Fischer cover with the ambiguous seed-pod canoe (are they peas?) — the illustration is credited to Martin Pudenz

Cool about Muller. As for your reorg - not sure if that was work (as in housework) or fun, but entertaining. That’s a lot of books.

>64 dchaikin: Mostly fun, really, but it achieved useful housework goals as well. And it overlapped with a spell of very dull weather when there wasn’t much motivation to go outdoors. And of course it’s always interesting to look at books that have been there for years and almost forgotten about. As if I haven’t got enough on the TBR pile…

>61 thorold: The moral seems to be that we lose out on the complexity of human characters as city-dwellers in our self-selected safe-spaces.
As a rural dweller, I do really notice this whenever I visit my friends in the city, as I was doing just this week. No matter the city I visit, urban dwellers seem to live in echo chambers of their own beliefs, without being challenged to consider how they would live among others with whom they have nothing in common, but with whom they might actually be able to pass some time comfortably if the occasion or need arose.

Greta-groupie - indeed!

>62 thorold: I love doing this kind of reorg, but no Dewey for me; LC all the way! It somehow makes more sense to me. Some of my books do have labels, depending on the era they were organized. However, the labels are on the lower right hand corner of the back cover, so that the shelved books don't make me look completely nerdy, but they can be easily seen if needed.

>63 thorold: That is a lovely cover. The book sounds excellent too.

>66 SassyLassy: Back-cover labels seem a good compromise. I tried a few experimental spine labels but it looked very school-libraryish and I quickly removed them again. I’ve come up with a simple design with the classification symbol and a QR code linking to the book’s LT page. I don’t know how useful it will be in practice, of course. Or whether I’ll have the patience to stick them on all my books before I reclassify them some other way…

I made an arbitrary choice between Dewey and LC, for no real reason except that the Dewey information on my books seemed to be a bit more complete. My feeling is that it doesn’t really matter much what you use in a home library, as you’re allowed to be as idiosyncratic as you like about how strictly you apply the rules. Classification in the real world is all about consistency and transparency, so that a big population of users can make sense of what you are doing, but that doesn’t apply in the home. In the end it’s just about having a vaguely sensible arrangement of books and a clearly defined place for each book, so that you stand a chance of finding that little pamphlet on obscure subject X that could have been shelved in at least three different sections and has probably slipped out of sight between two bigger books, wherever it is.

The book mentioned in >58 LolaWalser:

Rule Britannia : Brexit and the end of empire (2018; updated 2020) by Daniel Dorling (UK, 1968- ) and Sally Tomlinson (UK)

   

Five years on, it's still a mystery to most of us why the the Brexit referendum was allowed to happen, why it came out as it did, and how the British government managed to convince themselves that, having held it, they were obliged to act on it, even though there was no sane way to disentangle all the things in British life that had EU membership built into them, starting with the Irish border.

Professors Dorling (a social geographer) and Tomlinson (an expert on the complicated relationship of race, ethnicity and education) look into the whole sorry story with a focus on the way it all relates to perceptions of (innate) British "greatness", which of course all turn out to be predicated on distorted folk-memories of colonialism, Trafalgar, and the two world wars.

The book is a bit scattershot in its approach: there is some interesting stuff about how the inertia of the education system kept on teaching us about imperial glory well into the seventies, about who actually voted "leave", and about the relationship between inequality, privilege, wealth, the Tory party and the billionaires who funded the advertising for the "leave" campaign. It's all very topical — including a final chapter added in the second edition that brings the story up to summer 2020 — and wittily presented. But it rarely goes into very much detail, and it doesn't really come up with a single clear explanation for why it all happened. Probably because there isn't one, or if there is it will only start to become clear when the dust has had a bit longer to settle.

As it is, it tells us little more than that there were a few rich people who had a personal interest in leaving the EU, a few ambitious politicians prepared to identify with any cause that would advance their careers, and a very narrow vote that was largely determined by the different level of motivation to go out and vote between "leave" and "remain" supporters. Most of that we almost certainly knew already.

What I did find unexpected was Dorling's analysis of the referendum voting, where he points out that most commentators, trained to reading election results in terms of which areas are red and blue on the map, forgot that this was a vote based on aggregate numbers, not the local outcomes in voting-districts. According to his reasoning, it was not decided by the famous "working-class leave vote" in places like Stoke and Sunderland that so spooked the Labour Party, but by middle-class people in prosperous (Tory) districts in the South and South-West of England, where the population and the turn-out were both much higher. In the North, most working-class people didn't bother to vote at all, but there was generally — as you would expect — a higher level of turn-out among "leave" supporters than among people who supported the status quo, resulting in all those districts changing colour on the map.

>68 thorold: it’s depressing, especially because it’s not just Brexit, but the mindset that led towards it (and to trump and Poland etc)

>68 thorold: I'd agree that there is probably not one single explanation for the whole sad debacle.

Is this book mainly anglocentric, or does it discuss the 62% remain vote in Scotland, and various scenarios there?

>70 SassyLassy: There's surprisingly little about Scotland — just a passing mention that independence is now more likely.

This is a book I found out about from edwinbcn's thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/328995#7620723) — I saw the library had a copy, and it ticks a lot of my boxes: 1950s Oxford, the Caribbean, the Naipauls...

Letters between a father and son (1999) by V S Naipaul (Trinidad, UK, 1932-2018), edited by Gillon Aitken (UK, 1938-2016)

  

Your letters are charming in their spontaneity. If you could write me letters about things and people — especially people — at Oxford, I could compile them in a book: LETTERS BETWEEN A FATHER AND A SON, or MY OXFORD LETTERS. What think you?
— Seepersad to Vidia, 22/10/1950

As so often happens, Seepersad's confidence in his son's abilities as a correspondent turned out to be misplaced, and the eighteen-year-old clearly had more interesting things to do in Oxford than write lively descriptive letters to his family back in Trinidad. The letters he did write turn out to be mostly about family matters, money, writing, and schemes for smuggling cheap cigarettes into Britain. Oxford life is mentioned only in passing, if at all. And in between, there are long gaps, filled with the usual complaints and enquiries as to what is going on.

Sir Vidia understandably seems to have been rather lukewarm about this project, which shows him mostly as a grumpy, selfish adolescent, but he didn't block it, and he left all the editorial work to his longstanding agent Gillon Aitken — even if it is his own, rather more marketable name that appears on the cover.

Aitken has done a remarkably good job with the materials at hand, though, cleverly seeing that it reads best as a triangular correspondence between Vidia in Oxford, his elder sister Kamla in India (where she was studying at Benares Hindu University) and the parents and remaining siblings in Port of Spain. The third major writer in the family, Shiva, was still at primary school in the early fifties. By stringing various people's letters together, it turns into an interesting story of a family strung halfway round the globe by the effects of colonialism.

Of course, the other great interest in the book is the odd coincidence that father and son were both at the same stage in their development as writers of fiction, and both riding on the wave of the early fifties Caribbean writing boom, with Henry Swanzy looking for poems and stories for the BBC's successful Caribbean Voices programme, and their fellow-Trinidadian Sam Selvon bringing out his first novels to great acclaim. Seepersad, who was clearly jealous of Selvon, his sometime colleague on the Trinidad Guardian, was an experienced journalist just breaking into short story writing and trying to put together a novel, whilst Vidia was working on the university paper Isis as well as selling one or two stories a term to Swanzy. Whilst doing his best to swallow the uninspiring Oxford English diet of the day, which was still dominated by dense clumps of Anglo-Saxon, Spenser and Milton. And of course one of them tragically died young and the other went on to win the Nobel Prize...

If you want to know about V S Naipaul's early years, you're better off reading the novels and The enigma of arrival. But this is still interesting, in unexpected ways.

>72 thorold: Hmm — just wondering if my parents still have my letters home from university? I remember myself as a very dutiful, possibly even excessive, correspondent, writing every week and telephoning maybe once a term, if I could find change and a working phone box. But I may be deceiving myself: the evidence might tell a different story...

>68 thorold:

Ack that was fast--I hope you found it worthwhile. I too was fascinated by the vote analysis.

>73 thorold:

I miss writing and receiving letters. E-mail displaced them but never replaced them, now I communicate in a couple words or stickers.

>74 LolaWalser: Yes. The physicality of letters is important, like the physicality of books — when I find a stash of old letters in my files, handling them brings back an echo of what it felt like to receive them. And that whole excitement that went with opening the envelope...
I seem to have read quite a few collections of letters lately — difficult to imagine that people in fifty years time will be reading the Collected Emails and Tweets of {insert living writer}.

Meanwhile, just when you think you've exhausted the supply of post-Wende Brandenburg villages...

Vor dem Fest (2014; Before the feast) by Saša Stanišić (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, 1978- )

  

Fürstenfelde, between two lakes in the Uckermark north of Berlin, has all the typical problems of rural life in the New Bundesländer — an ageing and shrinking population, unemployment, neo-nazis, declining services, Wessies turning the few desirable properties into craft centres and potteries, Dutch farmers buying up the arable land, and so on. And of course it has seen more than its fair share of horrors over the past four or five centuries of border wars and political turmoil. Plenty of scope for a panoramic realistic novel like Juli Zeh's Unterleuten, which came out two years later.

But Saša Stanišić doesn't quite do that: he is writing a multiple-PoV community novel celebrating the oddities of the villagers, and he touches on all the obvious problems of 21st century life in small communities in the Uckermark, but he compresses it all into an unusually tight timeframe, in the night before the annual village festival, when all kinds of crazy things happen to people in the village as tragedies and folktales from centuries ago start to get mixed up with their present-day lives.

It's partly a charmingly comic view of the oddity that can flourish in small communities, partly a hard look at how big events trample on people, but mostly a celebration of the way history is defined both by the endlessly diverse individuals whose acts it summarises and by the endlessly diverse ways we read it and react to its stories. Very interesting.

>75 thorold:

That does sound interesting. I read something by him but can't remember what I thought. I am brokennnn

>76 LolaWalser: I read something by him— Herkunft?

I decided that it was far too long since I'd re-read something off my own shelves. In particular, I've been neglecting P G Wodehouse...

The ice in the bedroom (1961) by P G Wodehouse (UK, 1881-1975)

  

I'm not quite sure why, but this has always been one of my favourite late-period Wodehouse novels. It doesn't have any of his big-name serial characters in it, and there's no really spectacular set-piece, but it is one of a handful of novels set in the idyllic London suburban paradise of Valley Fields, which is of course based on Wodehouse's memories of Dulwich where he was at school around the turn of the century, and where he lived during his brief career as a trainee bank official.

Naturally, there is nothing in his picture of the three adjoining suburban villas — Peacehaven, Castlewood, and The Nook — that even remotely suggests that we might be in the era between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP. This is a prelapsarian world, without a hint of sex, drugs or rock and roll, in which even the serpents are still benign, and life is all about borrowing lawn-mowers over the garden fence.

We have the usual immaculately-constructed plot involving — besides the inevitable pair of young lovers — an Old Etonian police constable, a local historian who breeds rabbits, a Romantic Novelist who ill-advisedly wants to break into serious literature, an Extra Waiter with a basket of snakes, and three crooks who are trying to recover some stolen jewellery that's been stashed on top of the wardrobe in Castlewood. Needless to say, all of these are brought together in a single chaotic evening that hilariously resolves (almost) all the problems in the plot.

Re-reading, I particularly enjoyed the character of Leila Yorke (née Lizzie Binns), the robust author of romantic fiction. She's clearly a kind of tongue-in-cheek self-portrait of Wodehouse, with a lot of entertaining little quips about the perils of being a well-known author of "trash".

(This was originally published as The ice in the bedroom in the US in February 1961 and as Ice in the bedroom in the UK in October 1962. I happen to have a copy of the US first edition, so I'm sticking with the definite article...)

ETA: The jacket design, the most sixties thing about the whole book, is by one of the top designers of the time, Paul Bacon. Which probably says something about how important an asset Wodehouse was to Simon & Schuster.

Doing some very minor book repairs and researching how to do them by watching YouTube videos (with the usual contradictory advice) made me curious to find out a bit more about how books are put together.

I'm fully aware of the irony (perhaps "heresy" is a better word) involved in reading these two classic bookbinding manuals as pdfs from archive.org (and in scanning them in the first place), but it turned out to be the only really affordable way to get hold of them, short of ordering them as POD paperbacks — which would have involved the unfortunate authors revolving in their graves even more rapidly...

The art of bookbinding (1880) by Joseph William Zaehnsdorf (UK, 1853-1930)

Bookbinding and the care of books (1901) by Douglas Cockerell (UK, Canada, 1870-1945)

  

Joseph William Zaehnsdorf ran the high-quality bookbinding firm established by his father, who moved from Hungary to London in the 1830s. His book is clearly aimed at apprentices in commercial bookbinding firms (given the tone of some of his disparaging comments, one can't help suspecting that throwing books at incompetent apprentices was something he did quite a lot of...). The emphasis is on keeping costs down whilst giving the customers decent quality: if there's a machine that does a better job than a workman he doesn't hesitate to recommend it. In fact, there is a lot of (presumably paid) product-placement going on, for materials as well as machinery and tools: Zaehnsdorf would have had no trouble adapting to the world of YouTube.

The pace is brisk, and in some places it would be hard to follow unless you already had a rough idea of how everything works. But it's fun for all the barbed comments about various ways to do things wrong, and for the airy way he talks about the "workmen" and "females" who make these mistakes...

Douglas Cockerell has quite a different perspective from Zaehnsdorf, even if both of them are hoping to improve the quality of book production. He was heavily involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, having been trained by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. His brother was William Morris's secretary. He taught at what became the Central School of Art and Design, and wrote this book as a textbook for his students. It's a thing of beauty in itself, and it focuses on bookbinding and book design as a craft, paying little or no attention to horrid things like machines and cloth bindings. The most interesting parts are the chapters where he goes through the process of how you would design the decoration for a leather binding, and there are also some interesting chapters on the archival qualities of bookbinding materials. People were just beginning to notice around 1900 that all was not well with the industrially produced leathers and papers of the last seventy years or so, and Cockerell was involved in a big research project to find out what caused their rapid decay. Obviously all the detail of this was superseded long ago, but it's still fascinating to read about.

Sample page from Cockerell:
 

Before the Feast I think this one might appeal to me especially as I will soon be involved in organising our first village festival: post-covid.

>77 thorold:

No, it had "gramophone" in the title, I think I abandoned it.

>78 thorold:

Watch out, soon you'll find yourself hoarding rags and investigating bespoke paper-making... :)

>80 LolaWalser: How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone Lots of streamof consciousness with some bits of hard reality in between. The stories are so painful, its hard to finish.. About the balkans war

>79 baswood: We should put together a reading-list for you: I'm sure there's a lot more village-festival literature out there. How about J B Priestley's Festival at Farbridge, A S Byatt's The virgin in the garden, ...

... And you need to watch Tati's Jour de fête, of course!

A little book that caught my eye in the language section of the library:

'Zwanen paren bij het leven...' ... en andere instinkers en uitglijers in ondertitels (2012) by Bartho Kriek (Netherlands, 1950- )

 

Bartho Kriek is not only a subtitler but also a respected Dutch literary translator whose credits cover the whole range of modern American literature, from William Faulkner to Paul Auster. He's recently published his first poetry collection.

Writing subtitles for foreign-language films and TV shows is an odd example of an activity that grows in inverse proportion to the global importance of a language. In the Netherlands, where a large proportion of what's shown on TV and in cinemas is foreign made, it was good for around 700 full-time jobs at the time Kriek was writing. But you only have to watch a few hours of Dutch TV for it to become obvious that subtitlers must work under high production pressure (and thus, probably, for low pay) and don't have time to check their work properly, or to research topics they don't already know the vocabulary for.

The subtitles of popular TV shows have a fair claim to be among the most widely-read texts in the Dutch language. But the whole point of subtitles is that we shouldn't even notice that we've been reading them, if the subtitler has done a good job. If they contain obvious errors or out-of-context phrases — like the 19th century sea-captain in The Onedin Line who was famously made to say "I'll phone you" instead of "I'll call on you" in the Dutch subtitles — they interrupt our enjoyment of the show and call attention to themselves. Kriek has been collecting this kind of error for some time (it must be over forty years since a new subtitler worked on The Onedin Line!), and he uses his little book to tabulate some of the most frequent problems of translation that happen in his field.

The most obvious and memorable — and often comical — are the terms which are misheard and mistranslated — a classic example is "M.O." (modus operandi) in police shows, which often gets heard and translated as "ammo", a word that confusingly almost makes sense in context ("He used the same ammo"). But Kriek cites lots of other examples, like "bird"/"birth", "van"/"fan", "pans"/"pants". These are the kind of things that make you wonder whether the subtitling isn't being done by a machine-translation system.

Another set of problems is with knowing when to translate a term literally and when to replace it with its counterpart in Dutch culture. When a detective says "take him to the station" it's usually a police station that's meant, but if you translate it with the Dutch word "station" then it turns into the place where the trains stop. Kriek complains about translators who turn "parole board" into the unintelligible "paroolcommissie" instead of using the rough equivalent in the Dutch justice system, "reclassering".

Everyday British and American idioms lead to a surprising number of mistakes, even though they are something that any translator ought to be familiar with.

I think my favourite example from the book was the line "After all he put you through..." — the subtitler somehow saw a comma where there wasn't one, and turned it into a story about a switchboard operator.

What Kriek gets most worked up about, though, is the tendency for the English syntax of the original to drift into the translation, and lead the subtitler away from the obvious, natural Dutch phrase a real person would use in this context to an artificial construction that might or might not be grammatically correct, but certainly isn't easy for the viewer to understand.

An interesting and often very funny look into the nuts and bolts of a process that we don't usually get to hear much about. Kriek writes intelligently and wittily, and clearly knows what he's talking about. It's just a pity that the book itself is a self-published typographic disaster area.

And a linked pair of crime novels by Maarten 't Hart (who used to be a biologist in his day-job):

De kroongetuige (1983) by Maarten 't Hart (Netherlands, 1944- )
De zonnewijzer (2002; The sundial) by Maarten 't Hart (Netherlands, 1944- )

   

Whilst Leonie is away consulting gynaecologists about her infertility, her husband Thomas seizes the opportunity to go out on a couple of illicit dates with the glamorous library assistant (sorry, that's a tautology, isn't it...) Jenny. But Jenny fails to return to her room after their last evening out, and when the police start to investigate her disappearance, it's Thomas who is soon at the centre of their enquiries.

Up to this point, the book is a first-person narrative by Thomas, and it looks as though we are in for another of those middle-aged-professor adultery novels that novelists seem to enjoy so much more than their readers do, but then he's arrested and we switch to Leonie's point-of-view, and it all suddenly becomes much more interesting and unpredictable as she decides to find out for herself what has really happened to Jenny, whose body hasn't yet been found. The police have their own grotesque theories about all the ways a pharmacologist with out-of-hours access to the lab could dispose of a body, but Leonie is convinced that Jenny has disappeared for reasons of her own, and is still alive somewhere. However, what she discovers turns out to be rather disturbing...

This is a nice, tight crime story, very much in the dark Patricia Highsmith tradition — 't Hart drops in a mention of Highsmith to acknowledge this, but we could have worked it out for ourselves from all the creepy-crawlies and significant birds that pop up in the text for no immediately obvious reason. Including the obligatory slugs and snails, of course, but also plenty of spiders. The real charm of the book is in the way we are made to revise our view of Leonie, from the grey-mouse character that she is in Thomas's account, defined purely by her frustration at not being able to have children, into a self-confident independent actor who is able to argue with the arrogant (Popper-reading!) policeman Lambert.

One thing that has aged rather is 't Hart's satirical treatment of the Women's Movement — Jenny's feminist friends are determined to make her a posthumous figurehead of their campaign against male violence, and they angrily attack Leonie for pursuing the idea that Jenny is neither dead nor a victim.

---

Leonie from De kroongetuige returns nearly twenty years later — now free of Thomas, but still in Leiden and on the fringes of the pharmacology department — in De zonnewijzer, where she is confronted with the sudden, but apparently natural, death of her friend Roos. It turns out that Roos had no surviving family and has left everything to Leonie, provided that she moves into Roos's apartment and looks after the cats. The notary half-seriously suggests that Leonie should try wearing some of Roos's clothes and her perfume to make the change less abrupt for the three cats, but she somehow finds herself drawn into adopting more and more of her friend's look, not least the gigantic fingernail extensions that were her most distinctive feature.

And of course there turn out to be hidden corners in Roos's life that emerge as Leonie starts to adapt to her new career as cat-sitter, as well as unanswered questions about her death, and before we know where we are we're in another murder mystery.

't Hart has fun playing around with ideas about how much we can or can't adopt another person's personality, with copious reference to Schopenhauer, and he also amuses himself teasing the Leiden life-scientists by making the mystery hinge — or at least appear as though it's going to hinge — on a device that was already a tired cliché of crime fiction in Wilkie Collins's day, the little-known Asiatic poison. As though late-20th-century pharmacologists couldn't come up with anything better than that...

A nice, lively story, with some provocative questions, and some great minor characters, especially the down-to-earth building contractor Freek, whom 't Hart obviously loves letting loose on the unfortunate academics.

>82 thorold: I think my favourite example from the book was the line "After all he put you through..." — the subtitler somehow saw a comma where there wasn't one, and turned it into a story about a switchboard operator.

Ha! Tho it doesn't need to be just translated films. In the movie 'up', the captain keeps talking to Otto; I got it was the robot, but still didn't make senes till my dh said No its name is Auto. Oh, ok then

A recent French novel, an impulsive pick from the library by a writer I knew little about:

Profession du père: roman (2015) by Sorj Chalandon (France, 1952- )

 

Sorj Chalandon's best-known novels, Le quatrième mur and Retour à Killybeg, draw on his long experience as a foreign correspondent for Libération, but this one is obviously more related to his difficult childhood, although it's also set against the background of the Algerian war and the OAS campaign of terrorism.

Growing up in provincial France in the early sixties, narrator Emile always has difficulty when the school asks him to fill in a form with a box for "Father's occupation" — you can't very well put "secret agent" or "terrorist" without attracting adverse comment from classmates, and the other jobs his father likes to reminisce about are all some way in the past — parachutist, pop singer, pro footballer, Pentecostal minister, etc. Even his much-vaunted close relationship with General de Gaulle is no use, as they have since quarrelled over Algeria.

We realise of course, a long time before Emile does, that his father must be seriously mentally disturbed. The comic quality of his claims to be an OAS assassin and the French equivalent of the Fifth Beatle is soon lost when we learn about the violence he uses against his wife and child when he feels he has been thwarted or undermined in some way, and the way he frustrates all their attempts to get out of the closed world of their little apartment. Emile goes to school and his mother to her job in the offices of the bus company, and that's it. No stranger is allowed into the flat, and relations with all friends and relatives have been cut off.

The point of the novel seems to be to explore the way Emile and his mother tacitly conspire to treat their family life as though everything is completely normal, and to cover up for the father without ever openly admitting that there's something wrong. There are obviously strong psychological forces that make families close ranks against the outside world, even when they are clearly in intolerable situations where you would think that common sense would make them ask for help. I suppose we've all seen that sort of behaviour happening in small ways.

Disturbing, but oddly also quite charming in its evocation of the period. And sometimes darkly funny.

>82 thorold: We should put together a reading-list for Bas:

And I've gone and started one here! —

https://www.librarything.com/list/43319/all/Fêtes-worse-than-death-—-Village-...

>78 thorold: Irony / heresy indeed!
Bookbinding seems like something that could really carry you away. Each summer a course is offered here, but unfortunately always at a time when I am not here. Maybe this year.

>85 thorold: Just found this writer on amazon Canada French books, so will give him a try.

>86 thorold: Great fun.

>86 thorold: Interesting, a few people have been getting creative there already. I’m sure there’s a lot more, especially detective novels, just a matter of remembering which one in each series is the one with the festival in it…

>87 SassyLassy: Yes, I have a feeling that bookbinding is one of those things it’s really worth paying experts to do for you, but I have a couple of potential projects of no great importance (i.e. things I can afford to mess up) that I might try sometime.

>86 thorold: Thats a pretty good list. Having been involved in organising village fêtes in England and France I can assure you that nothing exciting or out of the ordinary has ever happened, but of course it could..................

I am a bit worried that at our next fête we might all get wiped out with Omicron. Wasn't there a Benny Hill sketch which was based on the Archers where he wiped out all the characters?

>89 baswood: I don't remember the Benny Hill sketch, but it sounds likely.

Another library book I picked off the shelf for no very obvious reason other than curiosity:

A brief history of the paradox : philosophy and the labyrinths of the mind (2003) by Roy Sorensen (USA, - )

  

Roy Sorensen was philosophy professor at Dartmouth College when he wrote this book, more recently he's been at the University of Texas, Austin, and at St Andrews.

A paradox, A paradox,
A most ingenious paradox!
We’ve quips and quibbles heard in flocks,
But none to beat this paradox!
               (W S Gilbert)

Philosophy advances, on the whole, by asking simple questions that have unexpectedly difficult answers. When it turns out that a plausible argument leads from apparently sensible premises to an absurd or contradictory result, philosophers descend on it in droves, and sometimes spend multiple millennia trying to work out what has gone wrong. This is — as Terry Pratchett liked to point out — bad news for tortoises and for the reputation of Cretans, but at least it creates work for Athenian shipwrights...

Of course, the result is that in writing a "history of the paradox" directed at general readers, Roy Sorensen has ended up simply putting a slightly new spin on the traditional Anaximander-to-Wittgenstein narrative of western philosophy. It's different enough in its approach that you won't be bored if you've already worked your way through one or two similar histories (I read Anthony Kenny's book a few years ago), but it doesn't cover very much really unfamiliar ground. Sorensen is quite brisk and lively, covering the ground in under 400 pages, and he sticks to the point without going off into the usual digressions into the private lives of the philosophers. (We do get the G H Hardy taxi anecdote, but there seems to be a strict rule that that has to be included in all popular philosophy and pure-maths texts...)

This is another tie-in with people like Joe Ackerley, E.M. Forster, Angus Wilson and James Kirkup — Francis King was a gay writer who found postwar Britain uncongenial and spent a long time working for the British Council abroad, mostly in Japan. This book draws on his early childhood in India, where his father served as a police officer.

Act of darkness (1983) by Francis King (UK, 1923-2011)

  

Penguin have done their best to make it look like a supernatural horror story, which is obviously what they thought would sell in the early 1980s, but in fact this turns out to be a kind of murder mystery, set in a dysfunctional British family in a country house in 1930s colonial India. The actual crime only happens a third of the way into the book, and we discover the who of the crime quite quickly, but the real mystery here is why, and that is only fully unwrapped nearly fifty years on, in a Patrick-Whiteish epilogue set in the Sydney art world.

The mystery aspect of the book is fun, and its digging into ideas about guilt and atonement is interesting too, but the real reason for reading it is its minute and detailed dissection of the complex mix of social, sexual and cultural tensions going on in the Thompson household against the background of the crumbling Raj.

It struck me as a very visually-constructed novel too, I'm sure it would have made a great TV miniseries back in the day, when the Raj was in fashion — but the LGBT plot lines might have been a bit challenging for British TV in the eighties. King's reputation for getting into difficulties with the libel laws would have put producers off as well.

More from V S Naipaul:

A writer's people : ways of looking and feeling (2007) by V S Naipaul (Trinidad, 1932-2018)

 

This is a kind of memoir, a set of five linked essays in which Naipaul reflects on his interactions with some of the main literary threads in his complicated background.

"The worm in the bud" looks at Caribbean writers who played a role in his early awareness of literature: his father, his fellow-Trinidadians Edgar Mittelholzer and Sam Selvon, and Derek Walcott, whose debut collection of poetry was much talked about in Trinidad in 1949, even though Naipaul himself only actually saw it much later. He talks about his admiration for Walcott's verse, but, being who he is, he can't help inserting a snide suggestion that Walcott only found his true voice once he had discovered the insatiable appetite of American universities for unchallenging postcolonial literature...

"An English way of looking" is another essay that mixes praise and blame, talking about his long friendship with Anthony Powell, who acted as a kind of literary godfather to Naipaul, introducing him to editors and getting him jobs. With some embarrassment, Naipaul admits that although he greatly enjoyed Powell's company and appreciated his help, he had always taken his status as "distinguished British writer" on trust, and it wasn't until requests for obituaries started coming in that he had a proper hard look at "Tony's big book" and realised that he found it mediocre, dated and clumsy. That forms a framework for him to launch into a wider discussion of the postwar literary scene in England, with various little barbs aimed at Greene, Waugh, and co.

"Looking and not seeing" and "India again" are about Indian ways of looking at the world, and focus on four sets of memoirs. Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography is clearly a book he's re-read many times, and he is fascinated by Gandhi's character and the way the "Indian" persona he built up for himself brought together all kinds of disparate cultural ideas picked up in England and South Africa; an obscure memoir by an Indian migrant to Surinam, Rahman Khan, who was roughly contemporary with Gandhi, seems to be more an illustration of how Indians can travel the world without ever (mentally) leaving India, whilst the memoirs of Nehru and the anglophile Bengali intellectual Nirad Chaudhuri throw other perspectives on Indian politics and the legacy of imperialism. This is interesting as far as it goes, but Naipaul spoils it rather by using it as a platform to launch a blanket dismissal of post-independence Indian (-diaspora) literature as generic American-writing-school stuff.

In between the two Indian pieces is "Disparate ways", where he uses a critique of Salammbô (compared unfavourably to Chapter II of Madame Bovary) to stake his claim on the French and Latin cultural traditions, contrasting Polybius's cool, professional account of Carthage with Flaubert's artificial and rather operatic approach. Without ever mentioning Edward Said, who must have been in Naipaul's bad books for some reason!

Interesting for what it tells us about Naipaul's background, and fun in the way of things that are shamelessly opinionated but leave the reader with plenty to disagree with.

I got side-tracked into a slight case of binge-reading over the past few days...

I had the first three of these on my shelves already, and I think some of the others (read as ebooks this time) were re-reads too, but I don't really remember which.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982) by Sue Townsend (UK, 1946-2014)
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984)
True Confessions Of Adrian Albert Mole, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Susan Lilian Townsend (1989)
Adrian Mole: the wilderness years (1993)
Adrian Mole: the cappuccino years (1999)
The lost diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 (2001)
Adrian Mole and the weapons of mass destruction (2004)
Adrian Mole: the prostrate years (2009)

    
     

Sunday July 18th
My father announced at breakfast that he is going to have a vasectomy. I pushed my sausages away untouched.

It's surprisingly easy to forget at this distance, nearly forty years on and post-Harry-Potter, but Adrian Mole was the British publishing sensation of the 1980s. Sue Townsend sold over six million copies of the first two books in the UK within the decade, which put her a long way ahead of niche authors like Jeffrey Archer, Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford as the bestselling writer of the eighties. And yet, she was exactly the sort of "sponger" Mrs Thatcher was keenest to demonise: a working-class single mother from the East Midlands who left school at fifteen without any proper qualifications...

Like many other great comic writers, Townsend started out as a playwright, when she was persuaded, in her early thirties, to go to a writing workshop at a local theatre. A couple of successful stage plays were followed by a BBC commission for a short series of radio plays about a teenager called Nigel Mole (later changed to Adrian to avoid confusion with the hero of Down with skool!). And the rest, as they say, is history.

A lot of the appeal of Adrian Mole is quite simply down to it being very clever comic writing. All the diaries are full of brilliant one-liners and more sophisticated buried jokes, some that you would probably only spot on a third or fourth reading. There are brilliant set-pieces in which absurd situations are brought about in the most natural and plausible way imaginable. But it also succeeded commercially because of the way Townsend was able to sneak a lot of the hard realities of Thatcherite Britain into a superficially innocent narrative: it was a book that you could enjoy whether you were an adult or a teenager, working-class or middle-class, on the left or on the right. Re-reading forty years on, it's striking how multi-culti it was: even in the early eighties this very mainstream book was full of non-white, non-heterosexual and non-stereotype characters. Reading it obviously didn't reform British society and overcome its prejudices, but it might have mitigated a few of them.

Townsend talked about the diary form as a very easy one to work with: she felt that you could do anything you like with it, provided you stuck to a linear time-sequence. (And a single point of view, obviously.) In a way, teenage Adrian is just an updated Mr Pooter, reporting on things that don't make sense to him but are much clearer to us, and getting into embarrassing or humiliating situations that he tells us about in a disarmingly frank way (going to A&E with a model aeroplane stuck to his nose after a failed attempt to try glue-sniffing). His overestimation of his own literary talents and his failure to understand other people (especially women) often make him a little bit contemptible, but this is always offset by his honesty, kindness and compassion. The way he is constantly being seduced by elderly people into becoming their unpaid carer is much more important to us than his conviction that his experimental novel Lo! The flat hills of my homeland and his serial-killer sitcom The white van are masterpieces. We can't help liking him and feeling that, if we had the bad luck to get into situations like those he is constantly finding himself in, we probably wouldn't do much better at maintaining our dignity.

Brief notes on the many sequels:

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984) — this is a direct continuation of the teenage Secret diary, really part of the same book to all intents and purposes.

True Confessions Of Adrian Albert Mole, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Susan Lilian Townsend (1989) — It looks as though Townsend was trying to break away from the compulsion to write sequels: the next few years of Adrian's life after Growing pains are compressed into a few letters and radio talks, and the book is padded out with a few pieces of Townsend's journalism in her own voice, as well as the short but very funny Margaret Hilda Roberts, a fragment from the diary of a neurotically overachieving schoolgirl growing up as a grocer's daughter in the thirties. She helps her father water down the dandelion & burdock, ticks off poor people for their improvidence and her headmistress for inefficiency, and has the local bobby arrest an unemployed cyclist called Tebbit for vagrancy. Townsend claims to have found this at a car-boot sale in Grantham, and expresses her regret that we have no way of knowing what happened to Margaret in later life...

Adrian Mole: the wilderness years (1993) — Back to diary format, opening with Adrian lodged in Pandora's box-room in Oxford and working — on the strength of his non-existent biology "A"-level — on the newt desk at the Environment Department. The story takes us on to a Soho restaurant and to Adrian's epiphany at a writers' workshop on Naxos, with some nice comic scenes along the way, but there's always a sense here that Townsend hasn't really got a feel for the adult Adrian yet, and she makes him unnecessarily autistic to force comedy out where it doesn't belong.

Adrian Mole: the cappuccino years (1999) — A few years on, Adrian is much more grown up as he finds himself implausibly turned (briefly) into a cable TV chef and has to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, against the background of the rise of New Labour, with Pandora sitting at the right hand of the Tony. It's fun to see a walk-on appearance from the upstart diarist Bridget Jones at one point — Adrian does a few entries in her style, but soon gets bored with it.

The lost diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 (2001) — Adrian is a single father, bringing up his sons on one of the worst council estates in Leicester, against the background of Millennium hysteria and 9/11.

Adrian Mole and the weapons of mass destruction (2004) — The framework for this book is Adrian's futile campaign to get his deposit back for a holiday on Cyprus that he has cancelled due to the threat to the island from Saddam's famous weapons. The travel agent refuses to believe that there are any such weapons, and Adrian's letters to Tony Blair asking for evidence he can use in his case remain unanswered. Meanwhile, Adrian becomes a victim of the consumer credit boom, buying things he can't afford on his salary as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop: not least his studio flat in the prestigious Rat Wharf development, where he is terrorised by a swan that looks like Sir John Gielgud. And Glenn is sent off to "somewhere sandy" by the army.

Adrian Mole: the prostrate years (2009) — Sue Townsend had more than enough direct personal experience of serious illness and its treatment in the last years of her life, and she puts that to good use here, in an uncharacteristically dark episode. Adrian's idyllic family life in a Leicestershire village is threatened by the usual external things — the pub, church and post-office all seem to be in danger — whilst his marriage, his job and his health are all under attack too. And the economy is falling apart, whilst his mother has somehow been persuaded to appear on Jerry Springer. This is probably the least obviously funny part of the cycle, but it does have its fair share of comic moments, and Townsend treats the emotionally difficult subject-matter with lightness and sensitivity.

>93 thorold:

The first book came out when I was just a year or so younger than Adrian. It was one of the funniest things I had ever read. I know I read the second book too (the parents are divorced in it?) but I missed the rest of the series, due to Life.

Pandora, Nigel, Norway, Baz, Boz, and Dez (or approximately), and that geriatric oldster Adrian was doing chores for... wow, that's better recall than for the stuff I read yesterday.

>94 LolaWalser: I was a bit older than that, and came to Mole a bit later, but I agree about how memorable the characters were. I remember the TV version as well, with Julie Walters as Adrian's mum, and the theme song by Ian Dury...

Something completely different: the name J M A Biesheuvel has a special resonance for me, because he happened to be the author of the 1988 Boekenweek gift (Een overtollig mens), which was the first piece of Dutch literature to enter my library, a few weeks after I arrived in this country. As I'd never heard of Boekenweek, I was very puzzled to find an extra book in my shopping bag — I almost took it back to the bookshop. It was some time before I was confident enough in Dutch to read it, but the author's name stuck in my mind:

Een Schiedamse jongen: speciale uitgave Maarten Biesheuvel 80 jaar (2019) by J M A Biesheuvel (Netherlands, 1939-2020), edited by Erik de Bruin (Netherlands, 1983- )

  

Maarten Biesheuvel grew up in Schiedam, a small town known in the 18th and 19th centuries as the centre of the Dutch gin industry, which has kept quite a bit of its historic character despite being swallowed up in the 20th century by the relentless expansion of Rotterdam and its port. Maarten's father worked in the offices of a big shipyard, and in his teens Maarten worked in the docks and he went to sea on merchant ships and oil tankers a few times before returning to Schiedam to finish high-school and go on to Leiden university.

This collection, put together by Erik de Bruin to mark Biesheuvel's 80th birthday, brings together stories from throughout his writing career that draw on those early experiences in Schiedam. Much of Biesheuvel's writing was autobiographical in form, but he was first and foremost a storyteller, and it's very obvious when it's all put together like this that he routinely improved on the boring facts — several times we get contradictory versions of the same anecdote. In the case of the story about how the Biesheuvels' house was destroyed by a bomb when Maarten was five years old, de Bruin even includes a photo to show that the house was still intact in 2019 — it was their neighbours a few doors down who were bombed out. But never mind, it's all very enjoyable, and it gives us a vivid picture of life in a Protestant family in Schiedam in the forties and fifties and of what it was like to work in the port and aboard ship in those days. And there are plenty of piquant stories of teenage sexual adventures (which generally end in farce).

Biesheuvel seems to have been a specialist in nested anecdotes, as well, and many of the stories here go three or four levels down, most notably in "Reis door mijn kamer", a forty-page tour of the objects in his study that takes us down several very deep rabbit holes into all kinds of corners of the author's past. "De Zoon" is another one where we almost lose track of the frame-story as characters tell us stories about characters telling stories about characters telling stories. In this one Biesheuvel even seems to make fun of himself by including a literal rabbit-hole descent at one point.

I enjoyed reading your sort of tribute to Sue Townsend and her Adrian Mole books. They have completely passed me by - I previously thought that I wouldn't enjoy them, now I am not so sure.

>93 thorold: Wow - I'd completely forgotten about the Adrian Mole series. How did it hold up 40 years later? I'm guessing given the number of books you romped through that it still worked. I'd no idea she'd written so many sequels to the original.

I think I tried one a while back and didn't appeal to me. May need to try again!

It's not every day that Wole Soyinka publishes a new novel. Obviously I had to get to this one sooner or later...

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021) by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1934- )

  

Soyinka has never believed in making life easy for the reader, and this — his first novel since 1972 — is no exception: the action of the plot keeps getting interrupted by long satirical asides that may or may not have something to do with the story. It's almost more of an extended essay with narrative interludes. But it's powerful stuff: Soyinka treats Nigeria with all the kid-glove delicacy of a 21st century Jonathan Swift.

His slightly fictionalised Nigeria is a kleptocracy where there is no longer any meaningful distinction to be made between politics, religion and organised crime. They are all just ways of getting to power and wealth whilst trampling on the faces of the ordinary people and bamboozling them with meaningless spectacle. In earlier times he might have held out some hope for the postcolonial world from African spirituality, but by now — or at least for the purposes of this satirical attack — he's clear that "tradition" and "religious law", whether they are indigenous or come from one of the two great imperialist religions, are just mechanisms the strong use to impose their will on the weak and satisfy their own desires and ambitions, whether at the level of the family or the state.

A bleak picture, and Soyinka doesn't show us any handy way to escape from it. The honest, upright characters in the story are never more than a pinprick annoyance for his arch-villains. But I'm sure he did cheer up innumerable readers by giving the most evil of the evil organisations in the book the name "Human Resources". We always knew... I'm sure a lot of evil HR managers will be getting this in their Christmas stocking.

More from Francis King (>91 thorold:)

Frozen music (1987) by Francis King (UK, 1923-2011)

  

A fairly simple little novella looking at India before and after independence. Rupert, recently divorced, is travelling around with his elderly father Philip and the latter's new wife, Kirsti, who is Rupert's age. They want to visit the grave of Rupert’s mother, who died during an earlier family trip to India in the 1930s, when he was still a child. And of course it all leads to a lot of readjusting of perspectives and revising of memories. It's really more an expanded short story than a compressed novel, and King uses the extra space to sketch in minor characters like the group's Indian driver, Rajiv, and the hotel manager Mr Solomon, whose father had worked for Rupert's uncle. Slight, but very nicely done.

Thank you for your review of the latest Soyinka. It's on my wishlist.
I bought a second-hand copy of The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole last summer, but haven't read it yet. And now I really want to, but I have library books to finish first...
By the way, your last touchstone took me to Frozen: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack :D

>101 Dilara86: Oops! Touchstone fixed.
That’s a fun list of touchstones, though — at least half are something to do with the film Frozen, a few just have the words “frozen” and “music” somewhere near each other, and only half a dozen or so are actually alluding to Ruskin’s famous phrase. In King it’s the title of the architecture book the father is supposedly writing.

The Mole books are fairly quick reads, it shouldn’t take you long, even if there are quite a few potentially baffling eighties British cultural references…