Author: StuckinaBook

The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon

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The Devil’s Candy is a brilliant book with a terrible title. I can’t even remember the bizarre reason given for the title, but I bought Salamon’s 1992 book after hearing it recommended on the funny Australian cultural podcast Chat 10: Looks 3 – and posting about it here, I was encouraged to start reading it straightaway by some positive comments. For those I am grateful, as this is an astonishing book.

It doesn’t feel like something that would necessarily be up my street. It’s non-fiction, as Salamon painstakingly follows the creation of the movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s famous novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. I haven’t read Wolfe’s novel, and I haven’t seen the film, and I don’t really have any interest in doing either of those things. That doesn’t matter at all. It’s completely fascinating – and a lot of that is to do with the writing and, importantly, the pacing that Salamon brings to the book.

The Devil’s Candy starts at the early stages of casting and trying to establish a final script. Not knowing who’s in the final film was an advantage for me, as it meant I had no idea who’d get the role during the discussions and auditions. I didn’t know what sort of film it would be, either, so conversations between script supervisors and directors and whatnot had genuine tension. From here, we go through 400+ pages in which Salamon observes pre-production, shooting, and post-production. Nothing is raced through; nothing is considered trivial. We spend a lot of time watching the second unit trying to get the perfect shot of a plane landing; we follow in minute detail the attempts to find a courthouse for filming. We are party to the recasting of a role to make the film seem less racist; we see an actress’s insecurities as she has to do part of a scene naked.

To anybody with a passing interest in film, or in the mechanics of an enormous production of any kind comes together, it is completely fascinating. It’s not unduly technical at any point, but you get a sense of the size of people’s roles without needing to know quite how it all works. And the central figure is the director, Brian De Palma. As director, every moment is his vision – and we follow the highs and lows of his feelings about the film (particularly as costs spiral and the studio executives get increasingly involved). It is an absorbing character study of what drives him, and how he takes on such a challenging role, all revealed piece by piece, day by day.

He may be the central figure, but it feels like the whole cast and crew are open to us. Particularly the crew; you can read between the lines that Salamon didn’t get much out of Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. We see what they do, but we don’t learn how they feel. Not that Salamon ever reveals her methods or, indeed, herself. I loved Janet Malcolm’s very individual and subjective reportage – this is the flip side. Salamon never mentions doing interviews – or, indeed, being on the set at all. She is absent from the page, and this gives the prose a feeling of god-like omniscience. She is not so much in the room as in their minds. It is oddly hypnotising.

De Palma was tense. Broderick was upset with him. She’d been insulted when he complained about the service at the restaurant and didn’t believe him when he insisted that running down Madeo was a standing joke between him and his brother Bart. One of the things they liked about the place was complaining about it.

When she woke up grumbling that she had a hangover, he said, “No wonder, you certainly had enough to drink.” Broderick was furious and hurt. She told him he;d ignored her all evening, that he hadn’t even touched her, and now he was attacking her. De Palma felt bewildered. He distinctly remembered putting his arm around her. As they rehashed the evening, they felt as if they’d been to two different parties.

The great success of this book is how steady and unshowy it is. That steadiness, the pacing I mentioned earlier, means that nothing is rushed or overdramatised; the lack of false tension means that every moment comes together into something special. And because nothing is showy, it feels as though there is no filter or bias at all – it feels as though we are there.

It’s an extraordinary book. Yes, if it were about a film I loved I might have found it still more captivating – but there is something in the fact that The Bonfire of the Vanities was a flop that makes this still more interesting. Particularly as it is not forecast in Salamon’s writing, and even the gradual realisation that the film will get mediocre reviews and make a sizeable loss doesn’t come as a ‘gotcha’ – it is part of the same pacing, as the film’s journey sort of peters out, and the book concludes. Not like anything I’ve read before, but definitely one of my books of the year.

Some recent reads in brief

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It’s one of those times that I’m going to summarise a few recent reads – I don’t have a huge amount to say about them, for one reason or another, but wanted to give them a mention. Some of them will go on my A Century of Books list; some of the others are just here because… well, why not. Inspired?! On with the show!

If Only They Didn’t Speak English (2017) by Jon Sopel

I heard Sopel speak at the Hay festival, and he was very good, so I was pleased when I found a cheap copy of his book. The subtitle is ‘notes from Trump’s America’, but it’s really about the path that led to it – or trying to introduce non-Americans (specifically Brits) to the culture and identity of Americans that might have made way for so dreadful a president. (Sopel doesn’t quite say that Trump is dreadful, but he’s not far off.)

The title comes from the idea that, if Americans didn’t speak English, we Brits would find it easier to recognise that it’s a whole other culture. Sopel devotes chapters to guns, patriotism, race, exceptionalism, faith, and so forth. He assumes a complete lack of knowledge from his reader – even explaining who Rosa Parks is. I think Sopel is better when speaking than he is at writing (which is perhaps just as well, given that his job is reporting) but I still really enjoyed it. I’d love to read something similar about England, to be honest (I suppose Kate Fox’s Watching the English is pretty close.)

The Cat’s Cradle Book (1940) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This was a lovely gift from Jane a while ago, who knows that I (a) love Sylvia Townsend Warner and (b) love cats. Her novels are a mixed bag for me – I love Lolly Willowes but really dislike some others – but she is a wonderful short story writer.

This collection is framed as being a series of stories passed down the generations by cats – so they’re pretty Aesopian. A rather long introduction looks at how the framing narrator discovered the stories, and then goes into the stories themselves. It was fun to read it, but I think Warner is much better when she’s talking about the poignant or unusual moments of everyday life.

Concert Pitch (1934) by Theodora Benson

I liked Which Way?, which I read in the Bodleian years ago, and picked this one up in 2012 in Hay-on-Wye. It’s all about the romances and feuds of a bunch of actors, and… it’s not very good. I never quite managed to disentangle the characters, because they’re all very similar, and I found it a bit of a trudge to get through. Oh well.

None Like Him (2016) by Jen Wilkin

My church small group read this book together, over the course of many weeks. Supposedly it’s aimed at Christian women, but there isn’t really anything in it that would exclude men. Rather, each chapter goes through the attributes of God – eternal, omnipresent, infinite, sovereign, and so forth – and looks more into them. And each quality is slightly unnerving when you first think about it and, the more you read about it, the more you realise it’s amazing and joyous.

Stuart Turton picks his five favourite detective novels

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As the paperback of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has just been published by Raven Books – or The 7.5 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in some markets – I asked the author, Stuart Turton, if he’d tell us about five of his favourite detective novels / murder mysteries. I’ve only read one of the books he’s chosen (Agatha, naturally), but am now intrigued by several of the others. Would you add your voice to recommend any of the others? Over to you, Stu!

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Most of the time, we’re not allowed inside the heads of famous detectives. Pry into the brain of Holmes or Poirot for too long and you’d end up hating them within 10 pages. Worse, you’d probably see the plot cogs at work, as there really isn’t much to them beside genius deductions and mandated quirks. The Big Sleep lets us into the head of private investigator Philip Marlowe, who’s a curiously sensitive soul. He takes far too much to heart, is hurt when he’s betrayed, and spends a lot of time hating the world he’s chosen to inhabit. When I finished that book, I wanted to take him for a beer and give him a hug. For me, Marlowe feels real in a way most superstar fictional characters don’t. I wish he was my mate.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

There’s loads to admire about this book, including the solution, and the dread Christie heaps upon the reader with every page, but my favourite thing is the slapdash nature of the characters. The opening pages basically give us a bunch of stereotypes delivered in a line or two. Arrogant playboy drives fast car, etc. It’s only as they start getting picked off then begin to reveal their true natures and we realise that Christie was using those stereotypes against us, allowing the reader to see them as they want to be seen.

LA Confidential by James Elroy

It’s rare I have to read a book three times to understand what’s going on, or that I’d have the patience to read a book three times over, but LA Confidential jabbed it’s filthy, depraved claws into me and wouldn’t let go. The staccato writing style takes some getting used to, and it doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for plot recapping, preferring to believe the reader is as smart as the characters inhabiting the novel. And yet… man, it’s good. It’s brutal, believable, elegiac, superbly plotted and, above all, immensely entertaining.

Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

This is a murder mystery told over 20 years, where the victim and the detective are almost the least important parts of the story. At the centre of the story are childhood friends Ryo and Yukiho, who maybe the most unsettling creations to ever sit at the heart of a genre novel. We followed them through school into adulthood, creepy events following them from one place to the next. I’ve truly never read anything like this, which is enough to hoist it straight onto my favourite crime novel list, but the ending left me reeling for days afterwards.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett 

This book is often lumped together with Raymond Chandler’s work, a situation not helped by Humphrey Bogart playing both Sam Spade (Hammett’s protagonist) and Philip Marlowe (Chandler’s protagonist) in the movies. They are nothing alike. Chandler was a better writer, but Hammett had an eye for eccentricity that Chandler lacked. He was also far less sentimental. The Maltese Falcon concerns the search for a priceless object by three unsavoury characters, who are happy to murder, manipulate and lie to their hands on it. Unfortunately for them, Spade is better at all of it than they are. Brilliant.

#1944Club: One Week To Go!

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Just a quick warning to get those 1944 books off your shelves – starting next Monday, Karen and I will be running the reading challenge where we ask everybody across the blogosphere to grab one or more books published in the same year. This time, it’s 1944 – our first wartime year – and together we’ll hopefully build up an interesting picture of 1944.

Any sort of book is welcome – novel, non-fiction, short stories, poetry – and any country or language, so long as it was first published in 1944!

I’ve got zillions of unread books from the year, it seems, so I’ll have to see what most appeals…

The Oakleyites by E.F. Benson

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I’m not doing well for A Century of Books choices at the moment, because I keep deciding that I ABSOLUTELY MUST read something written at the wrong time. Recently I was convinced that nothing would suit except for an E.F. Benson, and all the remaining slots of my ACOB list come after he died – so, sorry ACOB, but I turned to 1915’s The Oakleyites. For context, this falls roughly in the middle of Benson’s extraordinarily prolific output, and a few years before he started what would become the Mapp and Lucia series.

There are definitely marks of Lucia et al all over this, particularly in the first half of the novel. Oakley-on-Sea has the same sort of community – dimly aware that the rest of the world exists, but also certain that the only part of the world worth considering is Oakley. People vie for dominant position in society, and a newcomer is treated like the epoch-altering event that it is – especially when the newcomer is a noted (albeit not necessarily respected) novelist, Wilfred Easton.

There are even events in The Oakleyites that are directly repeated in the Mapp and Lucia series – such as an exhibition of paintings in the village hall that are judged by the community. A brief mention of a guru shows that Benson had such things on his mind. I don’t recall a replica of the three daughters squabbling over what they’ll receive as inheritance when their father dies (even while one of them, a Christian Scientist, maintains that he is not ill and could not be) – but it’s all of a piece. And it’s all great. Benson has such an eye for politely feuding communities. And that seeps in the narrative, as well as the dialogue – as a vegetarian, I self-deprecatingly laughed at the following:

Mrs Andrews had a sharp nippy way of movement and speech, and the brightness of eye which is noticeable in vegetarians and is attributed by them to their perfect health and entire absence of toxic ferments in the blood, might apart from that be supposed to have a sort of hungry look about it, which no amount of cauliflowers wholly dimmed.

Our focal point is Dorothy, who is nobler and less ambitious than other Oakleyites. No Lucia she. She is a bit subtle in her interest at Easton’s arrival, but not deceptive – and furiously embarrassed that she once read a paper about how unworthy his novels were to be feted. If Oakley has a moral compass, it is Dorothy.

It is also Dorothy who takes us into a different world within Benson’s oeuvre. For she is a spinster (of all of 35) and wishes that her life had not turned out quite as it has – and starts to wonder if Easton might make her a suitable husband. In Dorothy’s storyline, Benson gets rather more serious and earnest than one might expect. Increasingly so, as Dorothy’s sister Daisy arrives – selfish and dramatic, and not necessarily in an amusing way.

Benson was not a novice novelist at this point, but I did find that The Oakleyites wasn’t a universal success. It’s a curate’s egg. But too many scenes – whether comic or not – lingered too long, so it felt a bit odd to move between them. And the mix of sombre and comic tones didn’t quite work, for me. They remained too separate, as though they belonged in different novels.

I still enjoyed reading it, and it’s always interesting to see a novelist do something a bit different – but I wouldn’t recommend you seek it out over Benson’s zillions of other novels, and I doubt I’ll re-read. But, still – a mediocre Benson is better than no Benson at all.

The Pelee Project by Jane Christmas

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When Post-Hypnotic Press sent me codes for various Betty MacDonald audiobooks, they kindly threw in one for The Pelee Project (2002) by Jane Christmas. Having listened to it, I can see why – it has a very similar premise to Onions in the Stew. But it is also extremely different – largely, I think, because of when it was written.

Jane Christmas is in a car crash that should have killed her, but somehow she walked away unscathed. But it was one of those wake up calls that happen more often in fiction than in memoir – she realises that she has been living on the edge for too long, with a fast-paced Toronto career, several failed marriages and relationships, and children that she doesn’t manage to spend enough time with.

Long story short – she moves to Pelee Island for a year, with her teenage daughter, with a contract to write a column about the experience for the newspaper at which she had previously been a copyeditor.

On the island, she has to get accustomed to its vagaries. Milk (bagged! Canada!) has to be pre-ordered, and the shop is only open at certain, fairly unpredictable, times. Everybody knows everybody, and many of them have lived on the island all their lives. It is a close-knit community that also has to serve tourists in season – but she is not there in season; she has come during winter.

Christmas writes engagingly and often amusingly about her experience – her confusion, her settling in, and the friends she makes. It quickly becomes clear that she is changing her views on life, and only her engaging tone stops it becoming too twee in its “rural life saved me” aesthetic. If it were fiction, it might have crossed that line.

This was the early days of the internet (or at least the early days of it being a big deal), so she gets instant feedback on her columns in a way that Betty MacDonald could never have done. But a more significant difference is the tone. MacDonald highlighted all the hilarious mishaps of her life on an island – whether a fridge floating away or a neighbour dumping her savage children on her – while Christmas is all about psychological transformation.

She keeps talking about the ‘new simplicity’. As somebody who has lived in villages and a city, I can tell you that nothing is simpler in the countryside. Christmas’s fast-paced career-driven life seems entirely like a normal job, and her ‘new simplicity’ is simply a long holiday. For people who have jobs on the island (i.e. all of them), their life is just as likely to be fast-paced, except they have less access to shops.

As somebody who loves living in a village, I do find the whole city vs village thing (where ‘city’ is all modern and ‘village’ is all atavistic) somewhere between disingenuous and insulting. I didn’t mind too much in this book, as I had to just choose to let it go, but it’s all rather odd – and not something you’d find MacDonald doing. There are only two main differences I’ve noticed about the way people live in a village and the way they live in a city – people are friendlier to each other in a village, and it’s not as convenient to get a pint of milk.

Perhaps an island is a bit different, and maybe it was even more different in the early 2000s – I don’t know. But it is interesting that Christmas (admittedly winningly) turns her memoir into some sort of self-help book, whereas MacDonald just writes a very funny book. Christmas later became a nun, and wrote the brilliantly-titled book And The There Were Nuns all about it, so perhaps the island was one step on some sort of spiritual journey? Whatever it was, it was enjoyable to listen to – even if not wholly convincing as an exploration of the ‘new simplicity’. (And, yes, I listened to it as I commuted from my village to my not-at-all-fast-paced career in the city.)

On needing a frame of reference

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My book group recently read Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto – published in Portuguese in 1992 and translated by David Brookshaw in 2006. It was chosen by a member of the group who is from Mozambique – and the novel is about the Mozambican civil war. Sort of.

It takes place in the midst of the civil war, at least, mostly in an area that has been devastated by it. An older man (Tuahir) and a young boy (Muidinga) are travelling together – it is not clear what the relationships between them is, and Muidinga doesn’t remember all the details of his recent past – though he does remember his lost brother Juney. They have left a refugee camp, and wander until they find a bus to camp out in, even if it is filled with massacred bodies and has been burned.

In that bus, Muidinga finds a notebook detailing the adventures of Kindzu, and Muidinga reads the story aloud to Tuahir. Later, he continues the story as they leave the bus and walk on – though Tuahir has manipulated a path that leads them in circles.

The writing is rich and deep with imagery. It is evocative even while it doesn’t quite cohere into understandable patterns. Here’s a quick example:

After all, I was born at a time when time doesn’t happen. Life, my friends, no longer lets me inside it. I am condemned to perpetual earth, like the whale that gives up the ghost on the beach. If one day I try and live somewhere else, I shall have to carry with me the road that doesn’t let me depart from myself. 

I don’t speak Portuguese, but certainly the translation never felt awkward – it seemed to mimic the right sort of confusion for the narrative, if you see what I mean. And what I have not mentioned is this is also a work of magical realism – so, fantastic things happen to the characters (both in Kindzu’s notebook and in the ‘real’ world of Muidinga and Tuahir). People turn suddenly to dust; dead people come back to life. Nothing is quite as it seems, and there is no sense that anything is expected to be. Unlike fantastic fiction, where these moments would surprise the characters, the tenets of magical realism mean that everything is accepted.

And so on to my title. I realised that I’d never before read a book so utterly foreign to me, in every sense of that word. And I hadn’t before realised that I need some frame of reference in order to work out what I think of a novel – and how I react to it.

This is partly (but only partly) because I don’t know anything about Mozambique. Except the capital, since I learned all the world capitals! It was useful having the guy in book group who could explain the context – not just of the civil war, but of many moments that was allusions to Mozambican myths or sayings or historical figures. It added to the tapestry. But my main issue was the magical realism – because, I realised, I have never read a magical realist novel before.

Fantasy, yes. Sci-fi, yes. And fantastic fiction – to the extent of writing a doctoral thesis on it. And I’ve read academic works about the concept of magical realism – but I can’t remember ever reading a real example. And I found it unsettling.

I eventually realised why. It wasn’t that I dislike fantastic things happening in literature – it’s that I need there to be rules around them. In, say, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker (of course!), Norman accidentally conjures Miss Hargreaves into being. His whims dictate her personality and traits – and that is the limits of the fantastic. The novel’s rules are not our rules, but they a consistent and bound. If anything can happen at any point, then there is no consistency in the world’s rules – but, more importantly, there are no bounds for what our emotional response is intended to be. There are no stakes, because there is no firm foundation.

I’m sure plenty of readers can emotionally engage with magical realism and the characters in them. There are probably plenty on my side of the equation. But I felt, without a frame of reference either in the world of the book or outside it, that I had no clue how to engage with Sleepwalking Land. I finished it without even knowing if I’d like it or not. I’d certainly read something else by Couto, if he ever wrote/writes something non-magical-realism – otherwise, at least I have more frame of reference for my next one.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Guess who has a cold? It’s ME. Doh. But I’m hoping that it’ll be out of the way before I see SHANIA TWAIN next Tuesday. I’m very excited about that. First in line for tickets, gotta see that show for sure. (Full marks if you know that Shania reference.) Anyway, I hope you’re having a great weekend – and here’s a book, a link, and a blog post to help you along.

1.) The book – Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is now out in paperback, so I thought I’d let you know if you were waiting for a less heavy edition to read! (And you can check out the ‘Tea or Books?’ episode where Rachel and I discussed it alongside Agatha Christie.)

2.) The link – is sneakily also a blog, but it’s a piece in the Guardian about Sophie Baggott’s blog, reading 200 books by women from different countries across the world. Presumably not all different countries, since I don’t think there are 200 countries.

3.) The blog post – check out JacquiWine’s excellent review of Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. If you’ve not read it yet – please do!

In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm

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After reading Two Lives by Janet Malcolm, you may recall that I went on a Malcolm buying binge. Four of her books arrived more or less at once, none of them matching remaining A Century of Books years, but I allowed myself to cheat on ACOB with In the Freud Archives from 1984. Sadly my edition is not the lovely NYRB Classics edition pictured, but it’s much nicer than mine.

I researched quite a lot about Freud for my DPhil – or, more specifically, how his ideas permeated to the middlebrow public of the 1920s and ’30s, and how they often ridiculed his ideas. Malcolm is looking at rather a different world connected to Freud – fast forwarding a few decades, and exploring the in-fighting between the various custodians of his ideas and legacy.

I think Malcolm might be a Freudian herself, and takes his legacy seriously – but it would difficult to take it as seriously as the people in this work of reportage. (But it is more than reportage.) Kurt Eissler is a respected psychoanalyst and head of the Freud archives. He brings in a young scholar, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who has a background in Sanskrit but the sort of personality that can make people believe he should be in control – and he is lined up as the next Curator of the Freud Museum (waiting only for Anna Freud’s death). And then there is Peter Swales, the self-styled ‘punk historian of psychoanalysis’, whose modus operandi is writing people enormously long letters detailing their failings (and then circulating these letters widely).

As a cast, they feel like they belong in a Muriel Spark novel or something by Beryl Bainbridge. They are forthright, obsessed, and deeply distrustful of one another. And much of their rivalry and animosity stems from whether or not they believe that Freud went back on the concept of the ‘seduction theory’. Of such matters are careers and lives made, it seems. Dramatic papers are published; people are fired and sued and verbally attacked. While 99% of us don’t care either way, this is the lynch pin of the fraught relationships between Swales, Masson, and Eissler. The former pair are particularly astonishing creations – because, while real people, one feels they must have been put through Malcolm’s eye for the absurd.

And yet this is an earlier work than Two Lives, and Malcolm feels a little less adventurous in her writing. She is still very much a presence, but (perhaps because her subjects are alive) she is more of an observer than a shaper of her topic. Long sections are devoted to the words of her subjects, and I felt that I missed her unique view of the world in those moments – I wanted her to intervene and twist things slightly, bringing the shock of the new in her muted way. That talent of hers is definitely there, but a little too muted; too restrained.

If her style and interventions are more cautious, she has still done an exemplary job of showing us who these people are – letting them be hoist by their own petard, perhaps. It’s all a bit dizzying, and her genius shows itself best in that she discovered the issue and focalised it in the way she did. Whether or not you have the remotest interest in the legacy of Freud, I recommend you discover how it has obsessed these lives – and it confirms my belief that I will read absolutely anything Malcolm turns her eye to.

A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel is up there with Oliver Sacks as one of those writers who exudes so much warmth and humanity in simply writing about himself and the world he observes. I’ve loved reading his books about reading – and he seems to have an inexhaustible store of them – and stalled in his book on curiosity, but I had yet to read A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books (2004). In it, he revisits twelve of his favourite books – from June to the following May, slightly oddly. Maybe he had the idea in June and couldn’t wait.

Manguel has an amazingly eclectic taste. While my favourite books would span a couple of countries and the best part of a century, Manguel’s cover centuries and the whole globe. Margaret Atwood mingles with Goethe; Cervantes with H.G. Wells; Sei Shonagon with Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Each chapter is an enjoyable, curious meander through a book and Manguel’s life – heavy on the book and light on the life, but certainly a bit of both. Often Manguel will throw us right into the middle of his thoughts, not pausing to explain what the book is (and I’d be very impressed if anybody was familiar with all twelve disparate books). It feels a bit like a notebook of jottings – rather like Wittgenstein’s notebooks – because observations follow observations; a few pages of analysis are followed by a couple of quotations and then the gossip from the postwoman. What holds it all together is Manguel’s inquisitive personality – his clear love of literature, and the vitality he sees in it, and passes on to the reader.

Undeniably, I enjoyed the chapters most where I’d read the book in question. That was only three – The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I was familiar with a couple of others (who doesn’t know Sherlock Holmes?) but some meant nothing to me at all. That made me feel a bit more lost at the opening of each chapter, but I wasn’t here for specific literary criticism – more for the immersion in the delight of a life of reading. On that front, Manguel more than delivers.