Book recommendations are a mixed blessing. We don't always agree and book reviews that are puffs for friends and contacts can be particularly disappointing. I can't track down who enthused about this book in the last couple of years but they were on the money. I tend to a be a bit negative about The Bloomsbury Group, finding their privileged and self-indulgent carry on a bit off-putting. I was not persuaded by my sole excursion into Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Experimental, yes, but also irritating. This book is altogether different: charming, witty and subversive but also tender in its celebration of the friendships that sustain people who find their families unsympathetic and difficult.
Vita Sackville West began the book in the Spring of 1930, just after buying Sissinghurst. Her life must have been filled with the demands of a run-down large house and gardens and she still found time to write a novel. By contrast, 88-year old Lady Slane longs for a very small house in Hampstead that she had seen thirty years before. This becomes possible on the death of her husband, the chillingly narcissistic Earl of Slane who has been Prime Minister, Viceroy of India and a much-travelled diplomat. Lady Slane decides to move, allowing her to have as little as possible to do with her children and grandchildren. Her husband had built his career on charm but he clearly only cared for himself. Having married quite young, her hoped-for life as an artist was dutifully set aside in favour of a good match and she diligently provided children and supported his life of public service.
In her excellent introduction Victoria Glendinning says that Vita was bitter about the way that women in particular were distorted by society and prevented from developing their true selves. Lady Slane takes her revenge by bequeathing a vast and unexpected legacy to the nation and out of the hands of her grasping children. All Passion Spent is a title that suggests a dispiriting after time. But this is not the tenor of the novel. It is a charming and poignant book about finding peace in this late stage of life. I am pleased not to have missed it. I look forward to reading The Edwardians, her sensational tale of the rich and their rackety house parties in the lull before the Great War. I might even give Virginia Woolf's Orlando a go since it was inspired by Vita.
Tuesday, 21 February 2017
Saturday, 18 February 2017
This year's reading and listening so far
It has been a relatively active year so far for reading and listening. Audio books have predominated because of the amount of garden and house tasking in the run up to selling our house. There have been some very enjoyable surprises from being compelled to choose from the limited number of titles available through Manchester City Libraries' online audio book service. This uses Overdrive but I suspect that their subscription only permits access to a smallish selection, which is heavy on the most popular books for adults and children. Literary fiction and non-fiction are much less represented.
13 Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926) ***
A confident whimsy about the put-upon childless sister, dispossessed of her family home on the death of her beloved father. Deciding that she has had enough of childcare for her brother in the capacity of maide aunt she decided to move to the country and become a witch. This naturally involves consorting with the devil, who turns out to look after his own.
12 Flannery O'Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge (A) (1965) *****
I have hovered around this book several times over the years and what a treat it turned out to be. Margaret Flannery O'Connor was the daughter of a Savannah realtor who had an ear and an eye for the weirdness of the South. These stories, with various excellent readers are wry, brutal and arrestingly forthright and they sing out a truth across the decades.
11 Adam Mars-Jones: Kid Gloves, A Voyage Round my Father (2015) ****
An interesting memoir that peters out a bit but beautifully written for the most part. Some very good anecdotes and the curiosity of living at Gray's Inn. Reconciling his father to Adam's gayness is a large part of the book and winning his acceptance is ultimately an anticlimax and even disappointment.
10 Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants (2007)(A) ****
I have had this on my list for a long time and how fortunate that I did not miss it. A transporting tale, beautifully written and read. The shady but exciting world of the train-transported travelling show during the Depression is excitingly realised and her love of animals radiates.
9 Michael Connolly: The Overlook (2007)(A) ***
A tale of stolen Caesium and possible terrorism, concealing another. Well plotted but increasingly unlikely and Harry's maverick carry on is all too predictable. Still, a good yarn.
8 Michael Connolly: Echo Park (2006)(A) ***
Just how many serial killers can there be? A sick society, indeed.
7 Michael Connolly: The Narrows (2004)(A) ***
Pretty good final novel in The Poet sequence. Harry Bosch has retired from LAPD.
6 Diego Marani: New Finnish Grammar (2000) ****
A striking novel, definitely not a barrel of laughs but it examines what amnesia might do to a person brain-damaged as a result of a head injury in wartime. He doggedly learns Finnish, one of the most complex languages on the planet but gets no sense of his past, turning to despair when his fragile supposed identity is found to be a chimera. A thwarted love affair and the gloom of Lutheranism complete the picture.
5 Jane Austen: Persuasion (1817) (A) **** Read by Anna Massey
An interesting novel, in that the treatment of the realities of the lives of young gentlewomen is laid out even more starkly than usual. There is a happy ending but the dangers of marriage to a sea captain are made plain. The battle of the sexes is there and Wentworth says that literature shows that women are fickle but expects that her rejoinder will be that, for the most part literature has been written be men.
4 Attica Locke: Pleasantville (2015) (A) ***
Pretty good sequel to Black Water Rising, the debut for black lawyer Jay Porter (apparently). Locke has worked as a writer for TV dramas and comes from Houston, where this is set, Pleasantville being a black aspirational middle class suburb established after WWll and the focus of the murder of three teenage girls and a dodgy mayoral election campaign.
3 Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)(A) ****
An extraordinary book, which I failed to get round to as a child, but which is the oddest children's book. It includes hired 'nancies' from Cuba, dressed as women, child abuse and the murder of a sea captain by Emily, aged 10. The thrills of a wild childhood are beautifully evoked, presumably based on tales from Hughes's mother, who was brought up in Jamaica. Also the economic context and the hostile black/white relations after slavery was abolished. Hughes was 29 when this was published, after Charterhouse and Oriel.
2 Philip Kerr: If the dead rise not (2009) ****
The sixth Bernie Gunther novel and my first. PK turns out to be very prolific but none of his books have been filmed yet. Bernie is an ex KRIPO homicide cop who is no keen on the Nazis. The writing is very well researched and, like Flashman, Bernie manages to turn up at various events in European history and encounter notorious figures. In this novel he is mistreated by Nazis and A US Jewish gangster, ending up 20 years later in Cuba, doing some work for Meyer Lansky during the Battista régime.
1 Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)(A) *****
Off to a cracking start with a reminder of how good is this surreal, magical real novel, which he wrote in 1939-40. Beautifully read for Naxos by Jim Norton, the charm of rural Ireland and the love of language and talking come across loud and clear.
Thursday, 16 February 2017
2017/14 My Brilliant Friend: Elena Ferrante ***
L'amica geniale (2011, English Translation 2012)
This edition: 2015 by Blackstone Audiobooks, read by Hilary Huber
My cultural life has been greatly enriched by audio books in the car, the workshop, the garden and the kitchen. Generally I only listen to unabridged versions. Anything else is usually too short and usually a disservice to the author, not that some wouldn't benefit from editing. Dickens springs to mind, particularly the excruciating patois of his many unfunny comic characters. True, he wrote to deadlines in instalments but it is a pity that Trollope or Thackeray couldn't have taken him to one side for a quiet word. But my putative reader's patience is wearing thin and I will get on with this brief review.
I do not feel any special need to read fashionable books but Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan sequence has been very successful; it was time to give it a try. We do not know a great deal about the author, despite efforts to reveal her, but she is said to have been born in 1943 in a poor neighbourhood of Naples, which she escaped through intelligence and application to her education. The novel seems highly autobiographical but who can tell? Elena, the daughter of a porter at the town hall and a crippled mother with a cast in one eye is overshadowed by her friend Lina, the daughter of the neighbourhood cobbler, who has a fierce intelligence. Their lifelong friendship underpins the novels. This first book covers their childhood from seven to seventeen and ends with an imminent row at Lina's wedding. By this point it is clear that Elena, who went on to high school pushed by an influential teacher, has gradually become alienated from her background and is on a trajectory towards an educated middle class life. Lina decided to stay in the neighbourhood but has chosen to marry the well-off grocer's son to escape her family.
The translation seems quite reasonable and the reading is assured. Although the oppressive sense of the neighbourhood and the conventions and taboos are very clear, the book never really came alive for me. There is little sense of humour and surely laughter would have been a vital means of fighting the often dire circumstances the people of Naples faced following World War II? The hostilities between the small family businesses who did well out of the war and the poorer inhabitants adds to an archaeology of grudges and feuds. Who was a communist and who a fascist? The Camorra are mentioned but mafia activity is only a minor theme. Eventually the predictably stifling nature of these densely populated streets, with their strutting boys and men fighting and upholding the honour of the girls and women needing are just too dispiriting. I think that I am unlikely to go back for more.
This edition: 2015 by Blackstone Audiobooks, read by Hilary Huber
My cultural life has been greatly enriched by audio books in the car, the workshop, the garden and the kitchen. Generally I only listen to unabridged versions. Anything else is usually too short and usually a disservice to the author, not that some wouldn't benefit from editing. Dickens springs to mind, particularly the excruciating patois of his many unfunny comic characters. True, he wrote to deadlines in instalments but it is a pity that Trollope or Thackeray couldn't have taken him to one side for a quiet word. But my putative reader's patience is wearing thin and I will get on with this brief review.
I do not feel any special need to read fashionable books but Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan sequence has been very successful; it was time to give it a try. We do not know a great deal about the author, despite efforts to reveal her, but she is said to have been born in 1943 in a poor neighbourhood of Naples, which she escaped through intelligence and application to her education. The novel seems highly autobiographical but who can tell? Elena, the daughter of a porter at the town hall and a crippled mother with a cast in one eye is overshadowed by her friend Lina, the daughter of the neighbourhood cobbler, who has a fierce intelligence. Their lifelong friendship underpins the novels. This first book covers their childhood from seven to seventeen and ends with an imminent row at Lina's wedding. By this point it is clear that Elena, who went on to high school pushed by an influential teacher, has gradually become alienated from her background and is on a trajectory towards an educated middle class life. Lina decided to stay in the neighbourhood but has chosen to marry the well-off grocer's son to escape her family.
The translation seems quite reasonable and the reading is assured. Although the oppressive sense of the neighbourhood and the conventions and taboos are very clear, the book never really came alive for me. There is little sense of humour and surely laughter would have been a vital means of fighting the often dire circumstances the people of Naples faced following World War II? The hostilities between the small family businesses who did well out of the war and the poorer inhabitants adds to an archaeology of grudges and feuds. Who was a communist and who a fascist? The Camorra are mentioned but mafia activity is only a minor theme. Eventually the predictably stifling nature of these densely populated streets, with their strutting boys and men fighting and upholding the honour of the girls and women needing are just too dispiriting. I think that I am unlikely to go back for more.
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