2000s

Grace

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

I’m getting lazy in my old age, and always on the look out for friends to write guest posts here – especially when it means getting down my piles of review copies. A while ago I mentioned Grace by Alex Pheby in one of Stuck-in-a-Book Weekend Miscellanies (which never happened at the weekend when I remembered it was my Blog Birthday, sorry!) – well, it sounded like it would suit my housemate Mel, who has written a great review, below… (Oh, and do comment and say whether or not you’re intrigued, because I definitely am!)

I’m not really sure how to review a book, so I’m tempted to say: ‘it was good’ and leave it there. But I think Simon will give me a withering stare.

So…. Grace tells the story of Mr Peterman (his first name has become irrelevant), who has been in a secure psychiatric hospital for a long, long time. He escapes, is badly injured, and is nursed back to health (and sanity?) by the reclusive occupants of a weird, filthy little house in the middle of a forest, full of animals, dirt, and the clothes of dead Nazis. They are ‘Granny’, an old lady of ninety-nine who is a no-nonsense communist philosopher:

“I see you are shocked,” the old woman smirked, “but I will not apologise for the squalor. I have long since passed the age when I had energy to waste maintaining an illusion of cleanliness, if indeed I ever had it. Even the most pristine home is, in truth, a swarming mire of microscopic filth… The body must acclimatise to this fact, not deny it. Do you agree?”

Peterman clutched his leg defensively.

“I don’t know.”

…and her nameless twelve year-old ‘granddaughter’.

Being treated like a normal person in their house, away from his medication, Peterman becomes quite sane, recovers his character, and begins to tell them his story in return for theirs. I don’t want to ruin the whole thing for you. But the distrustful old woman and the innocent girl come to trust him, believe he is sane, and believe he is innocent, and eventually he starts to agree with their opinion. And most importantly, love comes back into his life.

I love books about crazy people. Let’s put that another way: I love books that deal with the issue of whether or not somebody is sane, where you can never quite be sure whether to trust the narrator and what is true and what is imagined. Maybe it’s the psychologist in me. Anyway, this is one of those stories, skilfully done.

‘Part Two’ of the book was my favourite – it’s a graphic portrayal of life in the secure hospital, and so well written that you start to doubt Peterman’s sanity yourself, even though for the first half of the book you have been totally convinced that he’s okay. Everything you’ve just read is thrown into question. These chapters made me worry that a sane person really could end up trapped in a world that believes they’re crazy. Once Peterman is inside and everyone believes he’s delusional, there’s no getting out by telling the truth…

Or IS it the truth?!

At this point, the book was so good that I almost missed my stop on the train.

So, my only slight reservation about this novel is that I was a bit disappointed by the ending. I’m not going to give it away. Upon reflection, this must have been a pretty difficult novel to end – Pheby was left with a choice between twee and unbelievable, devastatingly tragic, or some ambiguous third way. I won’t tell you which he chose. But I’m not sure what else he could have done. Oh, and I was also irritated by not being able to work out which country it’s set in. The UK, I think, but there seems to be way too much snow. I probably needed to just let that go… The ending aside, this is still a book that will really stick with you for a while… I am still thinking about it and it paints some vivid pictures you won’t forget in a hurry.

It’s a bit depressing when someone write a first novel this good. Basically, read it, it’ll be a worthwhile use of your time.

The Haunted Bridge

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

First things first, thank you for all your lovely birthday wishes! And now onto another review…

Despite having a card index system of all my books (yes, sorry, I do) I am usually a disorganised person. Just ask my family, who claim to love me, disorganisation and all. Some bloggers have very complex systems with the books they receive for reviewing – shelved in date order, say, or kept in a separate part of the house from their other books. I sort of have a shelf for them, but the shelf was filled about a year ago, and the rest get put wherever I can find some space. And so, of course, I often forget I have them. Ironically, something placed on my ‘must read very soon’ shelf (only it’s not a shelf, it’s a bit of my desk next to a CD player and a mug-in-a-jumper of pens) is likely to be overlooked for a long time.

This is all a long run-up to saying that, somehow, it took me ages to read Jane Gordon-Cumming’s The Haunted Bridge and Other Strange Tales of the Oxford Canal, despite the fact that it appealed as soon as it dropped through the letterbox. Jane G-C, you may remember, wrote the funtastic [spelling error deliberate on my part, in an attempt to be youthful and hip] A Proper Family Christmas, which I reviewed back here. This time she has turned her attentions to ghost stories…

Now, if your first response to the words ‘ghost stories’ is – like me – to curl up under a duvet and repeat happy thoughts to yourself over and over again, then fear not. The stories in this collection – well, except ‘Landscape of Ghosts’, the final one in the book – aren’t scary. They’re interesting and fun and send a tiny little shiver down your spine, but not in a hide-behind-the-curtains way. This coming from a man who was incapable of watching Scream 2 – and, indeed, the spookier episodes of Doctor Who. So, fear not… and read on, as Mr. Bennet would say.

Each story is nice and short, quick impact, and takes place along the Oxford canal. There is a nice touch (suggested by Colin Dexter, no less) of a map in the front, indicating where each story takes place, and the collection is organised geographically – moving up the river.

My favourite story is ‘Flying With The Angels’, which takes place at Shipton-on-Cherwell (drove past there today on a return visit to Jane’s Teas) which has parallel stories of a Victorian girl and a modern woman travelling along the same track on Christmas Eve in 1874 and ‘today’ respectively. I wanted to type out a section for you, but I think any chunk would actually spoil the impact, so I shan’t…

All in all, this is a fun little book – especially for anybody who knows the canal or Oxford, it would make a great gift or souvenir. And Jane Gordon-Cumming is a natural storyteller who, thankfully, cannot resist a light and humorous touch even when she’s writing scary stories. Take note, Stephen King, take note.

(If you want to hunt down a copy, try Amazon or, even better, Jane G-C’s website directly…)

Can Any Mother Help Me?

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I don’t remember where I first heard of Jenna Bailey’s book Can Any Mother Help Me? but it has been across the blogosphere like wildfire over the past year or so. Ironically, a few people bought it because of a mention or two here at Stuck-in-a-Book in the past – because I got my copy in mid 2008. It was one of those titles I just *needed* to own immediately, had to read immediately… and then, of course, it somehow languished on my bookshelves for the best part of two years. But no longer!

Can Any Mother Help Me? tells the story of the Cooperative Correspondence Club – known to its members as CCC – which began in 1935 when a young woman wrote to Nursery World:

Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbours. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books. I dislike needlework, though I have a lot to do! I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I’m alone in the house. I sew, read and write stories galore, but in spite of good resolutions, and the engaging company of cat and dog, I do brood, and “dig the dead.” I have had a rotten time, and been cruelly hurt, both physically and mentally, but I know it is bad to brood and breed hard thoughts and resentment. Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude “thinking” and cost nothing!

The solution was to set up a collective magazine (of which there were apparently over two hundred that are known about) to which women would contribute, under pseudonyms ranging from ‘Sirod’ (Doris backwards) to ‘Cotton Goods’ (for the proudly working-class) to ‘Elektra’ and ‘A Priori’. The members came and went, but over half a century these women sent around their contributions on all manner of topics, but mostly simply about their own lives. Ad Astra organised it all, and sent them out in the beautiful homemade covers shown in a picture below.

The book is essentially a selection of articles from different magazines, with editorial material provided by Bailey. She has grouped the articles thematically: issues of raising children (members had to be mothers – the issue was raised of allowing non-mothers to join, but it was decided against); the war; everyday life; marriage; working; hard times; growing old. There are quite a few ‘voices’ in the book, and only a few become really familiar, but it’s certainly an interesting sample and cross-section of a fascinating project.

I loved the idea of the CCC, and did enjoy reading the book, but somehow it didn’t *quite* match up to what I was expecting. Or rather, what I was hoping – because I didn’t know how I expected Bailey to arrange the material. She could only really pick and choose certain pieces, it would be impossible to give the feeling of belonging to the group – instead, I felt a little like an eavesdropper. Also, once all the articles were typed up, with marginalia noted in neat little font, the feel of the magazine was lost. I’d have loved a facsimile edition of one or two copies of the magazine – so that all the original handwriting and margin notes and crossings-out would have been reproduced. But perhaps that wouldn’t be possible, or too expensive, or even illegible.
When Claire reviewed the book, she pondered over blogging as a modern equivalent of the CCC. In a way it is, but much closer (in my experience) is the Yahoo Group I’m in. Are other people in these sorts of email groups, where people send out emails to a whole group, and correspond that way? They’re not as popular as they once were, but the one I’ve been in since January 2004 (a quarter of my life!) is incredibly dear to me. The experiences of the CCC sounded very familiar – the cautious and slightly nervous initial face-to-face meetings, which become regular and joyous occasions; the feeling that you can share close, personal events with people you’ve never had the opportunity to meet; the joy of kindred spirits. Who knows whether we’ll still be going in fifty years’ time (with some record-breaking-aged people, if we do) but I know that it has been, and will continue to be, a very special part of my life.

If Bailey’s book couldn’t quite convey this sense of intimacy and special-ness, that’s only to be expected, because the reader must remain an intrigued outsider to the group. At the same time, it is the only way that we can now remember such wonderful groups and I applaud Bailey (and the Mass Observation project which held the material, and also gave rise to significant books like Nella Last’s War) for immortalising the CCC and making their venture accessible to many.

Oh, and for anybody reading this in Oxford… the £2 bookshop has a number of copies…

Beside the Sea

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Continuing in the books-in-translation theme, but moving to the other side of the Channel, step forward Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi. Yet again, imagine the accents. This novel, published as Bord de Mer in 2001, has been translated by Adriana Hunter and is one of the first books from new publishing house Peirene Press.

Let’s talk about Peirene first, for a moment, actually. They translate and publish contemporary European novels, giving those of us with zero language skills a chance to experience the best of continental literature (n.b. for American readers, British people rather oddly refer to ‘Europe’ as though we weren’t part of it. That’s the ego of an island, that is). Best of all, for me – they don’t publish anything over 200pp. Oh, Peirene, how I do love thee! It is not just yours truly who likes his books short and sweet. Their line is: bored watching films? Read a two-hour book instead. (Oh, and see their rather witty blog too).

But Beside the Sea, though short, is not sweet. That is to say, it’s a pretty devastating read. From the beautiful cover, lovely thick pages, and generally pretty luxurious feel to the physical book, I was expecting the novel inside to be equally elegant. The written version of Audrey Tautou or Marion Cotillard, wearing a beret, sipping from a champagne flute and eating vol-au-vents. That sort of thing. So when the protagonist said that she ‘didn’t give a stuff’ on one of the first pages, I was a little taken aback. So she’s not elegant; this is not an elegant book. Ok.

Instead, we have a mother taking her young boys, Stan and Kevin, away to a grotty hotel by the sea. It’s not lived up to her expectations, but she is determined that they will enjoy their stay – even with hardly any money, and rain, and fears continually crowding into her mind. Throughout all the activities, her main worry is that she isn’t good enough as a mother, and that her children will outgrow her and leave her behind. She loves Stan and Kevin desperately, and tries to show this affection, but never feels that she is getting it quite right: Maybe the only real cuddle is in your tummy, when you’ve still got the baby in your tummy, I mean. No one to tell you what to do, to say you’re pampering it too much or not enough or not at the right time. You mustn’t wake a baby. You mustn’t ruin his appetite. You mustn’t hurt his head. You’re just with him. That’s all. You’re with him.
For their parts, Kevin and Stan try to cope well with the situation, but everything is a little fraught, detached, anxious. Stan takes refuge in words…
Are they good? I asked Stan. He didn’t answer. He’s gone off somewhere, he’s good at that, Stan, slipping his moorings – oh, he’s mine alright. The teacher lends him books and it’s the same when he reads: he leaves us. Sometimes I think he carries on reading his books when he’s given them back, he still thinks about them, he can read them even without the words, he’s really very good at being somewhere else.I was initially thrown by the tone of the novel, being so different from what I expected – and I did worry that it would be like so many other novels, in a ‘real’ voice which is so jarring and unsatisfying. But Olmi is much cleverer than that – though the reader might think at the start that this is an average mother, it is soon obvious that she is not. Unreliable narrators always make for interesting reading, and this one gives away only so much – and how much of that is true or reasonable is difficult to gauge…

Olmi manages to build tension without explaining much – the novel is haunting and continually advancing towards an unknown climax. The writing also gets better and better as the novel progresses – I loved the section where they visited the fair:

I’m taking you to the fair, I said. My voice was wrong, I didn’t want to say it like that, in a whisper, I’d like to have said it all loud and happy, the kids didn’t react. I took a deep breath and tried to shout, I’m taking you to the fair! but it came out faded and tired… the boys didn’t move. Mind you, I’d have sworn they’d have followed me to the ends of the earth, but I realised the three of us didn’t need to talk to each other any more. We could do things. Anything. The weirdest, craziest things. But without talking. We followed each other instinctively. We were sure of ourselves, like animals who never question, who just know what you should do and what you shouldn’t.But far and away the best writing comes in the final ten pages. The climax has arrived and, though perhaps the reader has predicted it, that doesn’t make its arrival any less affective. Like Susan Hill’s The Beacon, it’s one of those gasp-out-loud-stare-at-for-five-minutes final pages, final lines.

Obviously I’m not a mother, and I think being a parent might make Beside the Sea even more arresting – but, though it was not the novel I expected when I turned the first page, this is a very good portrayal of quiet desperation and irrationality in a dark, dismal, but real world which never crosses the line into the gratuitously macabre or seedy. Peirenne Press are obviously a publishing house to keep an eye on…

The Blue Fox

StuckinaBook All , 13 Comments

My weekend of reading those short books in translation is going apace, with two and a bit down. I also read possibly my first book by an author with only one name, since I’ve never read anything by Cher… oh, wait, no, there’s Saki too. Anyway. It’s definitely the first Icelandic book I’ve read, The Blue Fox by Sjon. Imagine the accent on the ‘o’, if you will – apparently this penname means ‘sight’.

I’d heard about the novel (novella?) in a few places – first at dovegreyreader, methinks, then later when Scott Pack chose it as his first Blogger’s Book of the Month – and Claire at Paperback Reader has also written about it – there you go, three reviews to read before I even get past a weak Cher joke. And they all liked it – you can add me to that pile.

Published in Icelandic in 2004, Victoria Cribb’s translation was published by Telegram Books in 2008. I always make sure to credit translators, because it is one of the jobs which impresses me the most, being about as far away as possible from own (incredibly limited) skill set. And, though I cannot compare Cribb’s translation with Sjon’s original, I’m pretty certain that the atmosphere of the book has been carried across.

The Blue Fox takes place in January 1883, and the first section follows the priest Baldur Skuggason as he is on the trail of the elusive blue fox. Each page has a paragraph or two of text on it, slowing down the reading process and giving the words the form, as well as the language, of poetry. Not that it is overly full of imagery or anything like that – rather, the language is sparse and deceptively simple. And there is a subtle humour throughout. One page reads simply: ‘The night was cold and of the longer variety.’ We follow the slow and careful hunt, and even if (like me) you’re willing the fox to escape, this is still beautiful writing. Completely unlike anything I’ve read before.

Just as the trigger is pulled on the gun, we jump back a few days, to the world of Fridrik B. Fridiksson and his charge Abba, who has Down’s Syndrome. Apparently it was rare, in the mid-19th century in Iceland at least, for babies with Down’s Syndrome to be left alive. No witnesses were needed; before the child could utter its first wail, the midwife would close its nose and mouth, thereby returning its breath to the great cauldron of souls from which all mankind is served.Once more the structure is strange, as it’s going backgrounds. We meet characters before we know their histories; sometimes we are told they are dead before they even appear. It all lends a disorientating feeling, but fairy-tale-like rather than sinister. Perhaps it is the mediation of translation, or perhaps it is in Sjon’s writing, but The Blue Fox feels almost mystical, as though it is read through a glass darkly.

I’ll be honest – I wasn’t *as* bowled over by the novella as Scott Pack was, but I am very glad that I’ve read it. The sections of the hunt, especially – which continue at the end of the book, increasingly and beautifully surreal – were haunting and mesmeric and so different from anything else I’ve read. For a taste of Icelandic literature, and a glimpse of a wholly different world and time, I suggest you pick up The Blue Fox – you’re unlikely to read anything else similar this year.

White is for Witching

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You may remember that I was feeling all smug and public-service-using the other day, when I got White is for Witching out of the public library – my first public library book for about six years, I’d imagine. I *had* asked for it from Picador, but not heard from them for a few weeks, so off to the library I went… and, when I was halfway through the book, guess what came through the postbox? Thank you, Picador, I now own my very own copy. Sorry, library. But I did go and get another one out – Identity by Milan Kundera. Having decided not to read another Kundera for a while, I realised I was missing his writing, and that he’d written something nice and short…

Anyway. I was very impressed by The Icarus Girl – my first encounter with Helen Oyeyemi – back in August 2008. I was also a little sickened that she wrote it during her A Levels, got another novel out during her time studying at Cambridge, and now seems unstoppable. And then I read Eva’s lovely review of White is for Witching, which (a) was very enthusiastic, and (b) mentioned Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a point of comparison. Yes, the very same novel which is in my 50 Books You Must Read list. I couldn’t not read it, could I?

The novel follows Miranda, from her sixth-form to Cambridge – she has a twin brother [twinlit – check], has pica and thus eats chalk [quirky and original – check], and seems to be in tune with her dead ancestors and her very human house [weird houses – check]. All very Gothic and haunting. I’d love to explain more about the plot, and the characters, but I don’t think I can… despite all those ‘checks’, I was disappointed by White is for Witching. Mostly because I hadn’t got a clue what was going on.

I was a bit confused by the ending of The Icarus Girl, but I liked the ambiguity – the climax of Jessamy battling her double – but this seemed to seep through all of White is for Witching. Was this just me? Was it just because I was reading it while a bit tired, and later when I had a headache? Or did the novel give me a headache?

There are various narrators – Eliot, Miranda’s twin brother; Ore, her friend and sometime-lover at Cambridge; a third-person narrator; the house; maybe her dead mother? But they were never announced. I was usually halfway through a narrative chunk before I’d identified the person who was speaking. It didn’t help that I thought Eliot was a girl and Ore was a boy, when in fact it’s the other way round. What I did like was that narratives would blur into each other, connected over a word that they both use, for example:

‘I can only explain it in comparison to something mundane – my adjustment to Lily’s ghost was sort of like when you’re insanely thirsty, but for some reason you can’t get the cap on your water bottle to open properly so you tussle at it with your teeth and hands until you can get a trickle of water to come through. A little water at a time, and you’re trying to be less thirsty and more patient so that the water can be enough. The thing with having seen Lilly was just like that, a practical inner adjustment to meet a need. At least she is there, I’d thought, even if she is just a ghost and doesn’t speak, at least she is

there

was a bird on the windowsill later in the afternoon. I looked up from Thus Spake Zarathustra and saw it sitting motionless. [etc.]’

But there was a little too much structural experiment for my liking – I love experimental writing, but doing it with the way words are laid out on the page always seems, somehow, like the laziest method.

And there are all sorts of unexplained things – or, at least, things I didn’t find explained. The novel opens with Miranda disappearing completely, and tracks back to find out why – which is deliberately not resolved. But what was the bizarre stabbing incident? Why does she not look like her old photographs? Why does she think she is dead? What was that bit about someone being kept in a walk-in closet for years? SO CONFUSED HEAD EXPLODING EYES POPPING OUT OF MY HEAD. Ahem.

I haven’t read Oyeyemi’s second novel yet, The Opposite House, but I’d be interested to see the progression. For me, White is for Witching took all the elements I really liked in The Icarus Girl, and then went too far with them.

I really wanted to like this novel, and so I’m waiting to be convinced… did I just read it in the wrong frame of mind? Or has Oyeyemi got too experimental for her boots?

A Kind of Intimacy

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I’ve spent a long weekend at home in Somerset with the rest of my family, doing restful things and enjoying the countryside (though the train journey home was a nightmare – took eight hours from door to door, and is two and half hours in a car…) When I’m on trains, I try to catch up with some of my non-university reading, especially things I’ve promised that I’ll read for months and months…

But A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth isn’t a review book (plenty of those waiting, looking at me impatiently) but one my housemate Mel lent me a while ago. (She first heard about Jenn when Jenn submitted work to Mel’s flash fiction website, The Pygmy Giant. Go have an explore.) Oh, and it came second in the Guardian’s ‘Not The Booker’ prize. A Kind of Intimacy is a novel from earlier this year, about Annie – ‘morbidly obese, lonely, and hopeful’, says the blurb, though I should add that the blurb gives away most of the plot and should be ignored before reading. Annie moves to a new neighbourhood, with just Mr. Tibs the cat for company. As she’s bringing the boxes in, she meets her next door neighbour Neil, who initially mistakes her for the removal man. She recognises him, but can’t place where they’d previously met.

Annie senses a closeness between herself and Neil, not hindered by his partner Lucy, who is everything Annie is not: very young, thin, beautiful. But Annie realises that she has to keep an eye on Lucy, if she is going to rescue Neil from his current life, and set one up with him. These attempts are increasingly bizarre, but all very just in Annie’s mind. She overhears Lucy insulting her – so she pushes handfuls of garbage through her letterbox. She digs up Lucy’s primroses; she even takes washing from Lucy’s washing line.

The novel is from Annie’s first-person perspective, and so Ashworth deftly gives us a viewpoint of somebody who is unbalanced, but is unaware of it – the narrative manages to tread the line between internal logic (all Annie’s actions make sense to her) and insanity (the reader slowly realises how unhinged Annie is.) But unhinged isn’t perhaps the right word – because we also see, in flashbacks, what events have led to Annie’s current state – her relationship with her parents, for example, and her first boyfriend. There is the ongoing questions as to whether or not she has a husband and child – she tells some people that she does, and some that she doesn’t.

It is no easy task, showing us Annie’s perspective, while still allowing the reader to understand how limited and delusional that perspective can be. She notices everything – ‘Neil shuffled, took his hands out of his pockets, and sat down next to me on the couch. Our knees pointed at each other, which I knew from my reading about non-verbal communication was a good sign.’ – but not the motives behind the actions. She interprets Neil’s glances with Lucy as trying to let her down gently; her neighbour laughing at her as anxious concern. The reader is able to see the truth through the mist of Annie’s misconceptions – though there is still often a haze, as Annie’s most bizarre actions are only mentioned in passing, by others. A Kind of Intimacy has a lot in common with Lisa Glass’s excellent (though very disturbing) book Prince Rupert’s Teardrop, which I reviewed here – Ashworth’s novel is perhaps not quite so clever as Glass’s, nor so unsettling, but that doesn’t stop it being pretty clever and unsettling anyway.

As a character study, and as an experiment in how narrative can be used to reveal and conceal, A Kind of Intimacy is a triumph – that the novel is also fast-paced, compelling, and of escalating intensity makes it exceptional. Perhaps not my normal fare, and not gentle or relaxing, but it’s always good to jolt myself with this sort of novel – I recommend you give it a go yourself.

Pistache

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I’ve never read a pastiche of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and I would like to, but I have a feeling that she might be one of those authors who’d defy spoofing. Her characters are so intentionally stylised and unnaturalistic, that a parody might appear only imitation. But the same cannot be said for those targeted in Sebastian Faulks’ witty collection Pistache [sic, if I may] which my lovely friend Lorna gave me for Christmas 2006. It’s been a while since I read it, but I do remember enjoying curling up with it on Boxing Day. Each pastiche is about a page and half long, and most began life on Radio Four’s The Write Stuff, though they have been edited and polished, apparently.

This is the perfect book for anybody who’s ever wondered what The Waste Land would look like as a limerick, how Emma would fare on an 18-30 party, or how AA Milne could be altered for this grittier age: Hush, hush, whisper who dare,
Christopher Robin has gone into care.As always, with this sort of thing, it only works when you’re familiar with the author being pastiched. Sections on Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Raymond Chandler etc. left me cold, because I’ve read nothing by them – but, for the most part, they’re authors you’re likely to know. Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, Geoffrey Chaucer, PG Wodehouse… all the old staples, really. My two favourites were Dan Brown at a cash-point and Virginia Woolf at a hen-party. The mind boggles, doesn’t it? But I shall give you a taste, and type out the Dan Brown section (which is longer than most, actually). This is for everyone, like me, who wasted hours of their life reading The Da Vinci Code…

The world-renowned author stabbed his dagger-like debit card into the slot. ‘Welcome to NatWest,’ barked the blushing grey light of the screen to the forty-two-year-old man. He had only two thoughts.

NatWest is a perfect heptogram.

Scratching his aquiline head, frantically trying to remember a number, the sun came up at last and rained its orange beams on Dan Brown. ‘What do you want to do?’ asserted the blinking screen. His options were stark for Brown, more than ever now. ‘Get Mini Statement’. ‘Withdraw Cash’. ‘Change PIN.’ For what seemed an eternity, trying to remember his PIN, the screen mocked the famous writer.

Someone somewhere knows my four-figure PIN.

Whatever my PIN was once is still my PIN and in some remote safe someone somewhere still knows it.

In Paddington Station, an iconic railway terminal with a glass roof like the bastard offspring of a greenhouse and a railway station, a line of fellow travellers was waiting on Brown. Brown frowned down at his brown shoes and for the hundredth time that morning wondered what destiny may have in store for the Exeter, New Hampshire graduate.

The sandy-haired former plagiarism defendant felt his receding temples pounding in his guts. Four figures. Four figures, you halfwit, he almost found himself murmuring in Brown’s ear, close at hand.

Tentatively his fingers pounded their remorseless melody upon the NatWest keyboard, numerically. He watched his fingers work with sallow eyes.

He type in anything, literally anything, desperately. He didn’t know what affect it may have.

The headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland resides in a hydraulically sealed ninety-eight-storey building guarded by hair-trigger sensitive nuclear firedogs at 4918, 275th Street in Manhattan, America, whose security protocol is known to only six elves whose tongues have been cut out for security by the Cyrenian Knights of Albania, the capital of Greece.

In an instant, the famous writer remembered their bleeding skin from barbed wire.

Of course. They must pass on the secret PIN. An unbroken chain whose links are not forged (not in that sense).

9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . .6. His fingers pronounced the Sigma number. The Sigma number was almost impossible to fake, whereby the Liberace Sequence was quite easy to forge for prominent author Dan Brown.

The cash machine cleared its throat and breathed in with a rasping exhalation that seemed to shake its very belly. Then finally it expectorated wheezily up twenty-eight million dollars into the fingers pregnant with expectation of the forty-two-year-old man.

‘Take you cash now please,’ pleaded the mocking screen, no longer mocking.

It’s like giving candy to a baby, it occurred to the universe-celebrated prose stylist.

It’s like shelling eggs.

How To Save A Life

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments

There is a pile of books by one of my bookcases – actually, there are many piles of books by most of my bookcases – but there is one in particular which holds all the books I’ve recently read, but haven’t yet blogged about. They go in that pile, waiting for me to exert myself enough to write a proper review, and I promptly forget nearly everything about them. Not an auspicious way to start a review, I know, but I like it when bloggers give little insights into the geography of their books…

I think Oxford University Press’s A Very Short Introduction series is a great idea, though I must say it’s not one I’ve investigated closely. They have these books, about A6 size, covering more or less every topic conceivable – Autism to Particle Physics; topics as wide as History and as specific as The Dead Sea Scrolls; Animal Rights, Machiavelli, Free Speech, Emotion… even, intriguingly, one called Nothing. You get the picture. I must admit, my only previous dalliance with this series was Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory, much bought by panicking finalists – and it wasn’t particularly good. Too fuzzy, and asked a lot of questions rather than giving much of use. I suppose it depends how you interpret ‘Introduction’ – it should send you off to find out more, but I feel it should also give you an understanding of key terms and central ideas.

Which is pretty much what A Very Short Introduction to Biography by Hermione Lee does, thankfully. In 140pp (plus thirty odd of notes and index) Lee gives a whistle-stop tour of biography’s vogues, peaks, ideas, and stars. She kicks off by looking at various metaphors for biography, trying to understand the impulse for telling the stories of lives, and the ethics of it. Then by going through ‘ten rules for biography’ (The story should be true, the biographer should be objective, etc. etc.) she demonstrates how often the rules are broken, and ends the list with no concrete definition at all. Which is perhaps to be expected.

From here we look at the various vogues biography has experienced – exemplary lives, from the Bible and before, through increasingly ‘honest’ (read: critical) biographies, to the type we expect today. Freud’s influence is examined – even the most anti-Freudian is likely now to use his language of childhood trauma, dreams, and so forth. More or less every aspect of biography is touched upon – the attempts of the Dictionary of National Biography and others to collate biographical information; the aesthetic arguments against even attempting biography; even the ways in which Marilyn Monroe has been treated.

It’s all there, then, or at least it’s introduced. It is, if you like, a biography of biography. So why did the book not really work? No, I need to phrase myself better, because the book did *work* to a large extent – why didn’t I love it? What prevented all these fascinating facts and angles from making a captivating ‘life’? I think, mostly, because it is quite dry. The style is teacher-y; the occasional verbal tricks felt like they’d work in a lecture, but perhaps not in a book. I wasn’t counting, but I think ‘V.S. Pritchett’s fine short Life of Turgenev’ might have been the only evaluative comment made. And Lee only elliptically mentions her own life as a biographer, which would surely have been of interest – it is after all, one presumes, the reason she was asked to write this. She states, for example, ‘Biographers are often asked what effect the superseding of letters by email and texting will have on their work’ – an interesting question, which I don’t think she ever attempts to answer. A hundred other times I’d have loved to hear what *she* experienced as a biographer… but maybe that would be a very different sort of book, and most of her audience might have resented it.

Perhaps the problem is the comparison with what I was hoping for. If I had set out to get a pocket outline of the history of biography, then I’d be happy. Lee’s research is vast, her selection of angles intelligent. What is missing (what can so often accidentally slip out of a biography, whatever the number of facts and stories) is humanity. A Very Short Introduction to Biography is a very good resource, an excellent introduction, but you won’t find yourself curling up in bed with it.

The Paper House

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

Wow, thanks everyone for your great comments on yesterday’s post – it’s such an interesting concept, the book that started the transition into a world where, as Hayley so wonderfully put it in the comments, classics were no longer ‘worthy books that I thought I should read rather than living things I wanted to read.’

A book like Howards End is on the Landing (yes, it’s becoming second only to Miss Hargreaves in how often I’ll mention it… everyone got their copies of Miss Hargreaves by the way, since she happened to come up?) – sorry, as I was saying, a book like Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill doesn’t just finish when you close it. Rather it sends you off in all other sorts of directions, and one of those was The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez. (With some Argentinian accents which apparently aren’t compatible with Blogger’s HTML, sorry…) Hill wrote that it was ‘a charming novella about the perils and dangers of books and book owning […] about a man who has many thousands of books which not only take on personalities of their own but come to replace people in his life.’ And she also quoted this excerpt:

…it was unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by Garcia Lorca, whom the Argentine author once described as a ‘professional Andalusian’. And given the dreadful accusation of plaigarism between the two of them, he could not put something by Shakespeare next to a work by Marlowe, even though this meant not respecting the volume numbers of the sets in his collections. Nor, of course, could he place a book by Martin Amis next to one by Julian Barnes after the two friends had fallen out, or leave Vargas Llosa with Garcia Marquez.
Lazy blogging on my part, I realise, but I thought I should share something which made me leap to A Certain Website to buy The Paper House. If you can resist a description and a quotation like that, then you don’t have the same relationship with books that I have (does ‘relationship’ sound more or less healthy than ‘obsession’? Hard to say.) The novel follows the narrator as he tries to track down Carlos Brauer, a bibliophile who has mysteriously sent a cement-damaged copy of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line to one of the narrator’s colleagues, recently deceased. Hit by a car, in fact, whilst she was reading Emily Dickinson’s poems. The narrator sets off on a journey to find out who Brauer is, and why he’s sent the book…

But the plot is only half the book’s point: this is a novella for those who love the sight, feel, idea of books. (Incidentally, the illustrations by Peter Sis – which include the cover image, and the image reproduced below – are bizarre and yet fitting… certainly unique.)


I love reading bibliocentric books, because it makes me feel a lot more sane in my book addiction. Which of us won’t nod in empathy at the following sentences (except perhaps the bit about giving books away…):

Every year I give away at least fifty of [my books] to students, yet I still cannot avoid putting in another double row of shelves; the books are advancing silently, innocently through my house. There is no way I can stop them.

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.[…] Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books.This is a very quick read, but a magically bookish one, which will make you feel a little saner about your own book collection. I’ll think I’ll revisit it over the years…. and anticipate quite a few of you doing the same?