1990s

Novella a Day in May: Days 20 and 21

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There’s a bit of a theme to the two novellas I’ve read in the past two days… or at least their titles.

Year of the Hare, The: Amazon.co.uk: Paasilinna, Arto: 9780720612776: BooksDay 20: The Year of the Hare (1995) by Arto Paasilinna

This novella, translated from Finnish by Herbert Lomas, starts with a journalist and a photographer hitting a hare in their care. The journalist (who is called Vatanen, we later learn) gets out to see if it’s ok.

The journalist picked the leveret up and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little forepaws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

Tired of waiting, the photographer leaves the journalist in the forest – assuming that he’ll catch up to their hotel. But he doesn’t. Instead, he decides to abscond. He doesn’t like his wife anymore, he doesn’t much like his life, and he sees the opportunity to go off wandering through Finland – with the hare.

From here is a quite episodic novella, featuring all kinds of over the top acts – from bear hunting to dangerous fires, threats of pagan sacrifice and more. I’m going to be honest… it all left me a bit cold. The blurb and puff quotes all talk about how funny it is, but I didn’t really understand the wit. I found it all a little drab – big events but very little to make the reader invest in them. Even the hare is curiously characterless. I suppose it’s a sort of deadpan humour that I have enjoyed in other contexts, but for some reason this one didn’t move me.

Juan Pablo Villalobos's “Down the Rabbit Hole” - Words Without Borders

Day 21: Down the Rabbit Hole (2010) by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, Down the Rabbit Hole comes in around 70 pages – all about a drug gang in Mexico. If I’d known that, I might never have bought it, because I really hate reading about gangs or the Mafia or anything like that. And I’d have missed out on a really brilliant little novella.

It’s told from the perspective of Tochtli, the eight-year-old son of a druglord. This is how it opens…

Some people say say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating. There aren’t really that many people who say I’m precocious. The problem is I don’t know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I’m precocious.

He is indeed pretty precocious, and he does return to those words a lot – particularly sordid and pathetic, which he uses to dismiss a lot of people. (He also uses the f-word a lot, which I rather wish hadn’t been included in this translation.)

Tochtli isn’t shielded from the things happening around them, but he sees them with a child’s incomplete understanding and lack of empathy. He knows that people become corpses at their compound, but is more interested in how many bullets are needed for different parts of the body than thinking about any morality. He is amoral; the people around him are immoral. He is more interested in his various obsessions – Japanese samurai films, a collection of hats, and getting a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia.

Tochtli’s voice is brilliantly realised in this novella, and Villalobos has created a wholly convincing viewpoint on this horrible world.

Screens Against the Sky by Elleke Boehmer (Novella a Day in May #5)

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I bought Screens Against the Sky (1990) by Elleke Boehmer in 2008 – just weeks before I started my Masters, because Elleke was running the course and I thought it would be fun to read her book before I met her. And here we are, a short 14 years later, and I’ve finally read it! I haven’t seen Elleke for almost a decade, but it was fun to think of her as I read her debut novel.

I’m not sure how autobiographical Screens Against the Sky is, but it would certainly fit – like Boehmer, Annemarie is a teenager in 1970s South Africa. She lives with her mother, Sylvie, and towards the beginning of the novel they mourn the death of Sylvie’s husband, Annemarie’s father. And begin the next stage of their relationship – as the only two people in the household, in a mother/daughter relationship that sometimes seems unhealthily close, sometimes is threatened by Annemarie’s leaps towards independence, sometimes in the sanctuary they need in grief. The title is literally about some hail-screens that are attached to the windows, but is also about Sylvie’s wish to keep the scary, vast outside world out.

The long slope of the veld leading up towards the hills drew her [Sylvie’s] own eyes towards the sky and the bleak white sun. There was too much space about. She preferred not to see it. With the chicken wire netted across the windows, she could focus on something close at hand. The screens made a web to which her skittering eye might cling.

They are not quite the only people in the household, in fact. There is also Simon – the garden boy, not far off Annemarie’s age. He is Black, and he introduces Annemarie to a world she had known nothing about. Her father taught her only to read world news, not local – and so she was almost entirely ignorant about apartheid, and how things were beginning to change. The most significant moment is the murder of Steve Biko, a victim of police brutality. Shamefully, I didn’t know anything about this real event – if you’re the same as me, then I recommend reading the Wikipedia article. It is a discovery that changes Annemarie’s outlook, and one of many contemporary events that leads Simon to leaving their employment. I wouldn’t say that Screens Against the Sky is a novel about apartheid, but it is unavoidably the background against which the novel is set.

But front and centre is that tortured relationship of mother and daughter – with some ups and rather more downs. The novel alternates between third and first person, the latter being Annemarie remembering this period from an undefined future. As a teenager, she rigorously recorded journals – though she no longer has them, her recollections often involve the journaling, and an approximation of what she thought she’d written. The differing perspectives come together well, often changing in a few paragraphs. It works as a patchwork.

I was a bit worried when I started Screens Against the Sky that it would be very overwritten. The style of the first few pages is certainly leaning that way, with sentences like ‘On the bedside table, painted buff eggshell off-white, lies a New English Bible, abutting on a colonnade of pill phials.’ More of this does appear later, occasionally, but the style calms down for the most part. And quite a lot of it is told in spare, effective sentences – like this:

The Reverend Guthrie brought relief. Within an hour of his eventual coming, he and Mother retired to the seclusion of her bedroom to pray. I heard her voice rising, falling and rising. I heard them pray together, prayer after prayer. I feared they might at some stage call me in to join them, so I went walking. There was an errand I had to run for which I had not yet had the time. I walked to the edge of town, a place not far from the bus depot, the site of the municipal dumping grounds. It was a wide piece of land, covered with slowly smoking ash and hidden from the road by dense bramble bushes. It smelt distinctively of rust and pus. I did not spend very long. As soon as I arrived, I felt I had to hurry home. I was right in doing so. At the gate Mother was waiting: she wanted me to be with her during the Reverend’s closing prayer She said it would help her. I walked with her to the bedroom, she behind me. She asked where I’d been. I said to town and back – for air. That was, I think, the first lie I consciously told my mother.

Screens Against the Sky is a novel written in a place and a decade that I know little about in literature, and it was rewarding to spend time there. I’d certainly be intrigued to read more by Boehmer, and found the different elements of this book very rich – I think it would merit rereading, exploring all the depths.

Notes From An Island by Tove Jansson – #NovNov Day 11

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What a lovely book. My brother got me Notes From An Island (1996, translated 2021) by Tove Jansson for my birthday – knowing my love of Jansson – and I couldn’t wait to dive in and enjoy this beautifully produced tale of an island where Jansson lived with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, known as Tooti, who created the lovely copperplate etchings and wash drawings of the island that are reproduced in this edition. You can see some atmospheric examples on the Granta website.

The island is Klovharun, and Notes From An Island is a short book following the couple from their early decision to move to this fairly unwelcoming island – until they realise they have leave it behind. They had previously lived on a much more idyllic island – but this skerry, though it seems unprepossessing and sparse, turns into an idyll of their own making. Readers of the novella Fair Play will be familiar with their life there.

An intriguing additional voice to the notes in this volume is Brunström’s – a man whose gifts were in constructing Jansson and Pietila’s house (evading authorities and their regulations where possible), and not in poetic writing. The contrast between his plebeian descriptions and Jansson’s beautiful diary entries are brought out wonderfully in Thomas Teal’s translations. Thank goodness he is on hand to translate again, as he has done for Jansson for decades.

Jansson is incapable of writing a bad or unevocative sentence. I loved her snapshots of life on this island – of companionship with Tooti, of battling the elements, of never quite knowing what nature will do – whether flora, fauna, or the unpredictable sea. Here is a small moment that I loved:

Every summer there was the same wait for swallows. Brunström had told us that they nest only in houses where people are happy, but not if the house is painted with Valtti or Pinotex. The swallows came and, as expected, put on a great show, ripping through the air like shrieking knives, around the cabin again and again, to our admiration – and then, presto, they were gone, leaving no promises behind. If only we could be like that come back only when people no longer expect us! That would be so elegant.

Oh, I love Jansson’s writing so much. And I loved this addition to Jansson’s oeuvre in English. It is short, but it is not a minor work. It is perfect.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan – #NovNov Day 2

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I bought Amsterdam (1998) by Ian McEwan around the time I read Atonement – so probably around 2003, i.e. half my life ago, more or less. I’ve been up and down with McEwan, but have somehow never read this Booker prizewinner – and now I have, it is right up there with my favourites of his.

I had assumed – you can see why – that the novella took place in Amsterdam. While there are moments there, the full impact of the title isn’t clear for a while, and much of the novel takes place firmly on English soil. It opens with the funeral of Molly Lane, and conversation between two of her former lovers. Clive is a composer, writing a symphony for the millennium; Vernon is the editor of The Judge, a newspaper that has been slowly declining for a long time and may be on its last legs.

Vernon and Clive have more in common than their mutual lover (deceased). They have been friends for a long time, and have still a friendship that is equal parts affection, competition, and disdain. McEwan is very good at the spiky sort of witty unpleasantness of a certain sort of man, and both these men are in that category. He’s also good about creative processes, and I think he writes well about musical composition. I say ‘I think’, because I can’t do it and have no idea what composers would say, but it worked for me.

Creation apart, the writing of a symphony is physically arduous. Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up to two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and deletions; amending again until the bar is right, and playing it once more on the piano. By midnight Clive had extended and written out in full the rising passage, and was starting on the great orchestral hiatus that would precede the sprawling change of key. By four o’clock in the morning he had written out the major parts and knew exactly how the modulation would work, how the mists would evaporate.

I shan’t say too much about the plot, but both men come up against moral quandaries – harming someone, or at least not preventing harm, in the name of their art/profession. McEwan’s spin on this is that neither of them really see the moral dilemma in their own lives, but only in each other’s. And neither is nice enough for this to be a learning experience. Amsterdam is perhaps a dark comedy. Or maybe a light tragedy.

So, I thought it was brilliant – and a page-turner too. The only reservation I have is what a blank space Molly is. Yes, she is dead before the book begins, but McEwan never really gives us any sense of her vitality before she died, or why so many men were attracted to her. Or maybe she is meant to remain an enigma.

Another great Novellas in November read – keep checking out Cathy and Rebecca‘s blogs to see what everyone else is reading!

Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden

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I absolutely loved Molly Fox’s Birthday a year or so ago, and so over Christmas I thought I’d treat myself to one of the other Deirdre Madden novels that I’d since been stockpiling. I went on Twitter for advice, but nobody seemed to have read the ones I had – so I picked the shortest one: Nothing is Black from 1994.

Claire lives in a remote coastal area of County Donegal. I have to admit that, until now, I hadn’t realised that Ireland had a north coast – but turns out that Northern Ireland is really only the north-east of the island. You probably all knew that. She lives in a stark and sparsely populated area, living an almost perversely minimalist lifestyle – only the barest, most functional furniture; few local friends; few efforts to stay connected with her past. She’s an artist, and practices each morning by making a quick watercolour sketch of the ever-changing landscape outside the window of her ugly, practical house.

Rather reluctantly, she lets her cousin Nuala come to stay. She lives in Dublin, but it might as well be a thousand miles away. This is the idea of Nuala’s husband. Neither of them are particularly enthusiastic about the idea – which Nuala combats with talking, and Claire with silence.

They drove out along the coast road. Claire would have admitted that the place where she had chosen to live was bleak, but she thought that it had its own magnificence too. It certainly didn’t have the lushness and prettiness people often expected to find in the countryside. To appreciate this area properly required a certain way of seeing things. Because of the wind coming in off the Atlantic, it was never static. Claire liked that about it, and she liked the colours, not bright, but often vivid, with the contrasts of the low, soft plants against stone.

This isn’t an ‘Enchanted April’ type of novel, where unlikely companions become firm friends. But Madden expertly takes us through the paths and wounds that have led to these two women’s unhappy circumstances. Nuala has started shoplifting. Claire has deliberately isolated herself. But these are only the outer signs of much deeper matters – and, even in a very short novel, Madden finds space to gently develop them.

Do you ever get that ‘difficult second novel’ feeling with an author you love, even if isn’t actually their second novel? This was Madden’s fourth, and actually written fourteen years before Molly Fox’s Birthday – but I suppose I was no longer surprised that she was such a wonderfully perceptive writer. Which is to say, Nothing is Black is beautifully, poetically, sensitively written – but at this point I’d have been surprised if it weren’t.

Throughout, Claire’s painterly mindset influences the narrative. Just as the playwright in Molly Fox’s Birthday was always thinking of words and staging, even if this only came through to the surface of the narrative in the subtlest ways, so colour and form threads through everything in Nothing is Black. It’s done so cleverly and naturally – it matches the world and characters that Madden has created, and their preoccupations and concerns. Unusually for me, I think this could have been longer. I suppose, because she has created fully realised people and is showing us their existence, rather than a particular set of plot points they go through, there is no end to the interesting things she can tell us about them.

Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham

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Fresh off reading The Snow Queen, I went to my Cs shelf to see what else was waiting by Michael Cunningham. Well done for stockpiling, past Simon – I had a couple to choose from, and opted for Flesh and Blood (1995). It’s 466 pages long, and if you’re familiar with my reading prejudices, you’ll know that I tend to be a bit scared of a long novel. But I decided to trust Cunningham on this, and I’m really glad I did. What a novel.

Flesh and Blood follows three generations of the same family, from 1935 to the far future, though the bulk of the novel takes place between the 1950s and 1990s. Constantine Stassos is a Greek-American who hopes his life with Mary will be the 2.4 children and white picket fence of the American Dream. He works in constructing homes, and is busy constructing his own too – trying to overlook his own short temper and Mary’s slightly other-worldly lack of contentedness.

They have the children. Sensitive Billy who can’t keep himself from being combative; beautiful Susan who oscillates between confidence and uncertainty; eccentric Zoe with her thirst for the new. As they grow up, and as we see one or two scenes in the family home each year, the cracks start to show. The reader is taken through the perspectives of almost every character, and we can piece together who they are from within their minds and from the vantage of all their family members. I thought moments like this – where Susan is watching her younger sister climb a tree – said what paragraphs of exposition wouldn’t achieve:

”She’ll fall,” Susan said, though she believed that Zoe was rising towards an accident, more endangered by the sky than by the earth.

And, later, they are at Billy’s university commencement ceremony – but he and his father have yet another falling out, and Billy disappears.

”We’re going,” Constantine told her. ”Come on.”

”That’s silly,” Susan said. ”If Billy’s being a brat, let him be a brat. There’s no reason for us to sit through commencement with a bunch of strangers.”

Mary couldn’t help marvelling at her elder daughter’s fearless shoulders, her staunch certainty, the crispness of her dress. She knew to call Billy a brat. She knew the word that would render his bad behaviour small and transitory. Mary couldn’t imagine why she so often felt irritated with Susan for no reason, and why Billy, the least respectful of her children, the most destructive, inspired in her only a dull ache that seemed to arise, somehow, from her own embarrassment.

The years keep going, and we get to the new generation – and to the new friends, lovers, and communities that the children move into. Billy is gay, as we have been able to tell from the outset – even if we hadn’t been prepped by the fact that it’s a Michael Cunningham novel. He doesn’t tell his parents, though they know. I shan’t spoil the paths of all the characters, but as the decades pass they include children, affairs, drug addiction, AIDS. There is a drowning that is the most beautifully written death scene I have ever read. People talk about ‘bad sex awards’ and how difficult it is to write good sex scenes, but I think writing good death scenes must be just as hard. For this one, Cunningham spends pages taking us through the waves and the thoughts, flowing in and out of metaphor. It is mesmeric and stunning and the greatest display of his extraordinary use of language in a novel that is full of extraordinary uses of language.

Some authors write a gripping plot that can make you race through a long book. Some write beautifully, pausing for striking imagery, and playing with how the right balance of sentences can reveal deep truths about their characters. Somehow, Cunningham is both. The novel is leisurely, allowing every moment to be saturated with meaning. But I also couldn’t put it down. I miss it so much. I don’t know how he does it, but Cunningham makes every cast of characters feel so vivid and real. There’s something in the way they speak to each other that would be easy to identify as Cunningham from a hundred paces.

I think The Snow Queen is still my favoured of the two Cunninghams I’ve just read, because there is something special in the way he condensed so much. But Flesh and Blood is extraordinary, and I’m sad at how few Cunninghams there are left on my shelf – just Specimen Days and a collection of short stories. But surely we must be due another novel before too long?

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

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My love for Janet Malcolm continues apace. I’ve been buying up her books but initially hadn’t bothered with The Silent Woman (1993) because I’m not especially interested in Sylvia Plath. Then somebody told me, probably on here, that it’s much more about the ethics and process of writing a biography than it is about Plath – and that sounded completely up my street.

Malcolm sets out the key moral quandary at the heart of writing and reading biographies, and she puts it so well that I’m going to quote a long passage:

The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

One of the catalysts for this exploration was Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography of Plath, Bitter Fame, which Malcolm describes as ‘by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date’. This was 1993, and I’m sure plenty have been written since – but Malcolm tracks down all the biographers and memoirists who had written about Plath, critically and sympathetically, from personal experience and none. Because, though Malcolm admires Stevenson’s book, it was apparently received very critically – because it is sympathetic to Ted Hughes.

This is all before Hughes published Birthday Letters and the tide started to turn a little on seeing him as the villain of the piece. At the time, any criticism towards Plath or sympathy towards Hughes was seen as giving into the dominant force of the Plath estate: Olwyn Hughes. She is the most vivid character in Malcolm’s book. As Ted Hughes’ sister, she is the gatekeeper to Plath’s works and archives, and tries fiercely and hopelessly to determine the narrative. Well, again, Malcolm puts it best:

After three and a half years of acquaintance with Olwyn – of meetings, telephone conversations, and correspondence – I cannot say I know her much better than I did when she first appeared to me in her letter. But I have never seen anything in her of the egotism, narcissism, and ambition that usually characterise the person who welcomes journalistic notice in the belief that he can beat the odds and gain control of the narrative. Olwyn seems motivated purely by an instinct to protect her younger brother’s interests and uphold the honour of the family, and she pursues this aim with reckless selflessness. Her frantic activity makes one think of a mother quail courageously flying in the face of a predator to divert him from the chicks scurrying to safety.

And there is some truth to the reputation Stevenson’s book apparently had. She is so beset upon by Olwyn, every word of the biographer examined and questioned, that (in interviews with Malcolm) she describes the experience of writing the book as a kind of trauma. In many cases, she gave up. But when Malcolm meets and interviews the others who have written about Plath, she also pierces through all of their veneers, finding the real moral and personal choices behind their books (as well as the academic or supposedly objectives ones).

Malcolm is always arrestingly honest in a way that makes it seem like candour was the only option that occurred to her. She relays conversations with all her interviewees without even seeming to notice when they have exposed themselves and their flaws. There is an astonishing immediacy to it all and, given the discussions in the book about the difficulties of getting permission to quote from letters, I’m amazed that everybody involved signed up. Malcolm must be very persuasive. Some of the letters between Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes, for instance, are quite shocking. At one point, it’s almost like watching an abusive relationship from the inside.

As I say every time I write about a Malcolm book, she is the main draw. Don’t pick this up if you chiefly want to know the facts of Plath’s life. But if you’re at all interested in the ethics and practicalities of biography, or even just in how people interact when there is a lot at stake, then The Silent Woman is a brilliant and fascinating book.

My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq

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A lot of the books I’m reading this year are ones I bought in 2011 – and I’m remembering that I bought a lot of books that year, because I only bought 24 in 2010 and I was making up for last time. One of those was My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq, published in 1998 and translated from French by Helen Stevenson in 1999. I thought it would be good to pick up now, because August is ‘women in translation month’ in book blogging land.

My husband’s disappeared. He got in from work, propped his briefcase against the wall and asked me if I’d bought any bread. It must have been around half past seven.

Did my husband disappear because that evening, after years of neglect on my part, irritated and tired at the end of a hard day’s work, he was suddenly incensed at having to go back down five flights of stairs in search of bread?

This is the opening paragraph of this short novel. I’m normally not at all drawn to books about people disappearing, because it seems such an overdone genre – but this is not a gritty crime novel. We don’t learn a great deal about the woman’s husband, as a person, nor about how the investigation is proceeding. Rather, we spend the 153 pages of this story in the mind of the unnamed narrator as she tries to understand the new world she is in. And as her perceptions start to splinter.

Darrieussecq’s writing, in Stevenson’s translation, is an impressive mixture of the spare and the poetic. Every sentence is beautiful and not at all showy. Whether it’s the narrator being momentarily distracted from her emotional turmoil by a sunset, or things on a kitchen counter, or reflections on what she misses most about her husband’s presence, Darrieussecq brings the perfect amount of weight and beauty to each observation. The writing becomes more fluid as the novel goes on, and felt positively Woolfean at times.

The same subtlety is seen in the way the novel progresses. The first sign of things not being quite ordinary are the horror tropes that recur. The narrator thinks about being stabbed in the shower, about being buried alive. Sometimes these thoughts are fears and sometimes they are warped comforts. And somehow this bleeds into her thinking about the nature of existence. She begins to wonder if her husband has somehow dematerialised.

I paced round the room, resigned. My husband had to be somewhere, maybe in form of a gas at the very outer edge of the universe, but he still had to be somewhere, leaning over the edge (what we have to image as its edge) and watching me now; like the dead, whom the living know are still present, stuck in the mist or under the table or behind the door, out in the barn rapping with their knuckles, in the kitchen bending the spoons, in the corridor rattling their chains and, for the more subtle among them, rippling the curtains when there’s no wind outside. My husband, in imitation of the dead, would send me a sign and bring me back to life.

As the days pass and she begins to hallucinate, it is not always clear what is happening and what is not. Being all in her voice, there is an evenness to it all – because she never questions her sanity, even as we see her confusion and unhappiness turn her mind.

The whole thing is mesmerically beautiful and quietly unsettling. The reader is always on shifting sand, and Darrieussecq is too clever a writer to let us stand firm even at the end.

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (25 Books in 25 Days #14)

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I still haven’t read any Proust, but I have read three books about reading Proust, or about Proust more generally. One was a few days ago (Proust’s Overcoat), and Phyllis Rose’s wonderful The Year of Reading Proust wasn’t that long ago. I’ve now made it a trio with 1997’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, published when Alain de Botton was only 28.

It’s an intriguing book that combines many different genres. It’s styled as some sort of self help guide – or rather a Proust help guide, where a reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu can help give life lessons. This covers all manner of things, from friendship to romance to how to read a book. But there are layers – and de Botton incorporates biographical details of Proust and a literary analysis of his writing. Indeed, it often seems like he is making no distinction between Proust’s letters, his fiction, and his actual life events – all are mixed together to draw out potential advice, filtered through a philosophical lens. Each section ends with a ‘the moral?’ conclusion.

The moral? To recognise that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the gratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

What holds it all together is de Botton’s engaging prose and his wit. And it’s often a very amusing book, being light with Proust’s life as well as the various friends, relatives, and critics who popped up in it. It’s all an odd concoction, and perhaps on that would make more sense reading after I’d read some Proust – but with enough verve and confidence to keep me enjoying it throughout.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

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I had a credit to use on Audible a while ago, and was looking to fill either 1980 or 1999 in A Century of Books – but couldn’t find anything that appealed. So, naturally, I took to Twitter. Twitter has been a real help with the tricky years, and Gareth kindly stepped forward with a suggestion…

I’d already read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow – and the fact that I really liked it would have made me trust Gareth’s suggestion even if I didn’t already trust his taste (which I did). So I promptly downloaded An Equal Music (1999) by Vikram Seth and listened, without really checking what it was about.

Which is just as well. If I had looked up the plot or theme, I might not have bothered. Because it’s about ardent musicians, and I tend to find that difficult to read about. It’s the sort of novel where people non-ironically say “Oh, I’d love to study that score”, and spend years tracking down the perfect viola. I struggle whenever characters are snobs in any area of the arts, or have the attitude that being brilliant is more important than enjoying yourself. It’s why I really disliked Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows earlier this year (because the author seemed to share her characters’ views). And I would have been wary about it in Vikram Seth.

Well, it was certainly there, at least to an extent – and the main character (Michael) isn’t particularly likeable. He is obsessed with reconnecting with Julia, a woman he loved many years ago in Vienna – and has been trying to track her down, unsuccessfully, for some time. At the same time, he and his string quartet are preparing to perform… erm… some arrangement of some piece, I forget which. Or maybe it was something arranged for a quintet that is better known as a piano piece, or something like that. (Again, the problem of listening to an audiobook – I can’t go back and check!) Of course, he does find her – she is married, with a child, and there is a twist in the narrative that I shan’t spoil, but is done very satisfyingly and intelligently.

Lovers of classical music (and, dare I say it, music snobs) will get a lot out of this that I probably didn’t. I do also wonder how much one might miss if you don’t play the piano and violin – I play both, which helped me understand various discussion points and technical moments, though I don’t think any of them were particularly essential and could probably be skated through.

Why did I like it, when it had quite a few ingredients that turn me off? Partly it was the excellent reading by Alan Bates, who never tries to do “voices” (except where accents are needed for, say, the American characters) but manages to convey character entirely through tone. The audiobook also meant they could include sections of music when they were referred to as being played, which was rather lovely. But mostly it was Seth’s quality of writing. He is very good at detailed depictions of changing emotions and relationships, so that one is deeply interested even if not particularly sympathetic.

I don’t know if I’m ready for the doorstopper A Suitable Boy just yet, but I’m very glad Gareth suggested this one. And it’s a useful reminder that good writing can overcome all the prejudices I have in terms of topic and character. I suppose every theme has its variations.