2000s

25 Books in 25 Days: #18 Mr Thundermug

StuckinaBook All , , 4 Comments

I read Caroline by Cornelius Medvei a few years ago, lent to me by my friend Mel cos it was about a donkey and she knows how much I love donkeys. Since then, I’ve bought a couple other of Medvei’s novels – but not til now have I read another, which is Mr Thundermug (2006). Incidentally, I love the cover illustration on my copy, by Richard Bravery.

It’s a novella about a baboon who has learnt English (nobody is quite sure how; it seems to have arrived complete) and tries to integrate in everyday life.

Nobody ever established where it was that the baboon came from, or what had brought him to this unnatural habitat. The basic facts are confusing – clearly, baboons are not native to this region; but, on the other hand, Mr Thundermug spoke our language perfectly, with no trace of an accent, and there is no evidence that he knew any foreign languages.

There were in fact numerous theories as to the baboon’s origins, but it was impossible to know which, if any, was true; all they had in common was their lack of supporting evidence. This in itself was not surprising, as our city excels in the manufacture of rumours. Nevertheless, the theories I heard were so often attributed, at various removes, to Mr Thundermug himself, that I began to think the baboon must have taken a perverse delight in providing contradictory accounts of his origins – tailored perhaps to his mood and the company.

He is hampered by having a wife and children who are non-speaking baboons, and by the discrimination he faces by those around him. For instance, the council try to evict him from his home as it is inhabitable because of a cockroach infestation – though, as he points out, he and his wife ate the cockroaches, so that problem is dealt with. As the novella goes on, he gets embroiled in an unlikely legal case.

I enjoyed Medvei’s writing, which plays with the surreal in a matter of fact way, and Mr Thundermug is an excellent character. His combination of optimism, disappointment, occasional grumpiness, and common sense in the face of bureaucracy, would be winning whatever sort of creature he were. I don’t think I entirely understood the point of the story – there might be a meaning to the parable that passed me by – but Medvei is an engaging storyteller with a vivid and unusual point of view.

 

Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras

StuckinaBook All , , , , 2 Comments

People often say that the best thing about book groups is getting to read things you wouldn’t usually pick up. To be honest, I’m not often looking for new things to pick up – I’m in a book group so that I get to talk about books with people and, more often than not, I’m not particularly bowled over by the book choice. Which is why it was a lovely surprised that I enjoyed Kamchatka by Marcelo Figeuras so much. Published in Spanish in 2003, and translated into English by Frank Wynne in 2010, this didn’t sound at all like something I’d like – but I really did. (A thank you to Annabel for giving me her copy!)

The novel concerns the political crises in Argentina, specifically the coup d’etat, in the 1970s. Now, you’ve quite possibly either thought “Oo, sounds intriguing” or “Um, no ta” right off the bat – but the latter group of you should keep reading. I knew almost nothing about Argentina in the 1970s, or any other period, and had rather conflated Evita with the disappearances. But this puts me rather in the same place as the young boy who is at the forefront of Kamchatka (in a narrative that is simultaneously from his young perspective and from that of a his adult self, looking back on events – a dual perspective that is handled extremely deftly). He also doesn’t really know what’s going on around him, and is swept up in events that control his life without being comprehensible.

His parents are evidently on the wrong side of the new ruling power, and they must go into hiding – though at first his mother maintains her work as a scientist (I love that this was her role), and they don’t travel too far. They do assume new names, though. The unnamed narrator becomes Harry, after his idol Harry Houdini. His funny, wild younger brother (known as ‘Midget’, which wasn’t very comfortable to read) chooses Simon – hurrah! And an older boy, on the cusp of adulthood, also joins the family. He says he is called Lucas, and Harry and Simon shift from an initial distrust of him to a really beautiful love for him.

And why is the novel called Kamchatka, when that is nowhere near Argentina? You (like me) might know the placename only from its appearance on the Risk board – the board game where your figures battle each other to achieve world domination. But it’s also the word that Harry uses for his mental escape – his imaginary refuge – and thus what he labels the strange place they’ve gone.

I loved how well Figueras built the story from a collage of what Harry would have found important – Houdini, Risk, his family – and from the stuffed toys, school uniforms, and other everyday objects that created his world. We never quite see what the dangers are, or hear about what has happened to those who vanish – but we see enough to feel his fear, or his shame when his old best friend can no longer see him. In short, short chapters – often no more than two or three pages – we enter his world.

And another thing Figueras does well is combine narrative and philosophy. We’ve probably all seen this done badly enough times to know how difficult it is to achieve. But Figueras will move from the general to the specific, or draw out the essential human truths of a situation, masterfully – and without making it feel as though we have lost touch of the narrator’s striking voice and unusual angle on things. Here’s an example that I found affecting, even with an abiding dislike of geography:

Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in geography books. The result of centuries of research, they tell us how the Earth was formed, how the incandescent ball of energy of those first days finally cooled into its present, stable form. They tell us about how successive geological strata of the planet were laid down, one on top of the other, creating a model which applies to everything in life. (In a sense, we too are made up of successive layers. Our current incarnation is laid down over a previous one, but sometimes it cracks and eruptions bring to the surface elements we thought long buried.)

Geography books teach us where we live in a way that makes it possible to see beyond the ends of our noses. Our city is part of a country, our country part of a continent, our continent lies on a hemispheres, that hemisphere is bounded by certain oceans and these oceans are a vital part of the whole planet: one cannot exist without the other. Contour maps reveal what political maps conceal: that all land is land, all water is water. Some lands are higher, some lower, some arid, some humid, but all land is land. There are warmer waters and cooler waters, some waters are shallow, some deep, but all water is water. In this context all artificial divisions, such as those on political maps, smack of violence.

A word should also be said for Wynne, the translator, of course – who manages to keep not only the poetry and vividness of Figeuras’s writing, but also coped with all the wordplay that recurs in the novel. Well done, Wynne!

So, yes, something rather out of my comfort zone, but a real success – I very much recommend it.

Who Was Sophie? by Celia Robertson

StuckinaBook All , , , 4 Comments

I can’t remember why I ordered Who Was Sophie? (2008) online, but I can tell you that it arrived on 6th June 2011 – and, while I was browsing and looking for some unusual non-fiction to read, I picked it up. Since I also didn’t remember anything about the what the book was about, it all came as rather a surprise – strange, intriguing, and rather special.

Having now read it, I have to assume that it was the Virginia Woolf connection that led me to pick up this book. It concerns Joan Adeney Easdale who, as a teenager, became an unexpected prodigy – published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. This biography (by Easdale’s granddaughter) looks at her life – and what led from her being feted by the literati to being a destitute, lonely, eccentric old lady by the 1970s. As for the ‘Sophie’ of the title? That’s Joan too – a name she went by much later in life, and a fact that is only properly addressed after about 200 pages. Suffice to say, I don’t think I’d have called the book Was Was Sophie? if it had been my decision!

Robertson doesn’t include footnotes or references (beyond a broad list at the end), so it’s not always clear where all her information came from – but we follow Easdale from childhood, and presumably she has gathered good research. Indeed, we start a bit earlier – looking at Easdale’s parents, and particularly her pushy mother Ellen. Ellen was determined that Joan and her brother would become successful – and not just successful, but be recognised as geniuses. And her brother did, indeed, end up as a renowned musician. Joan started earlier – when Ellen optimistically sent off her poetry to the Hogarth Press, it was recognised as special.

Some of her poetry is included in the book (and, indeed, the final section is the entire facsimile of her long poem Amber Innocent, which she works on for many years – a lovely touch). I don’t particularly enjoy it myself, but it’s fascinating to read how Joan considered her own work – and to compare Ellen’s letters to friends with Virginia Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf was, it turned out, rather laughing at the family as people (though respectful of Easdale as a writer).

I found all of this section really interesting – though there also looms over it the knowledge that things will change. I shan’t type out all of the rest of Easdale’s life, but it can be broadly summed up by the effects of mental illness. It spoils her marriage and alienates her children; it destroys her relationships with those around her, and perhaps also contributed to the end of her writing. As she gets older, she seems not to want to consider herself a writer at all – despite her husband’s fervent encouragement – and it is one of many leaves that drop from the tree.

Robertson documents the life extremely well (even though I would have loved footnotes!) – sensitive, and combining a good level of objectivity and subjectivity. We do not forget that she is the subject’s granddaughter, but we still feel in the safe hands of a biographer. My only criticism, in tone, is that she occasionally writes about her own journey as a biographer – particularly when travelling to Australia to follow Easdale’s life – but not enough. Some biography purists would prefer the biographer to be completely absent. I really love biographies that integrate the journey of discovery into the narrative itself, but it has to be done to a sufficient amount to feel deliberate. In Who Was Sophie?, it was perhaps a bit too sporadic.

Ultimately, I’m still not quite sure what brought this to my shelves – nor how Robertson managed to persuade somebody that this forgotten writer was worthy of a biography – but I am very grateful that both things happened. It was exactly the sort of unusual non-fiction I was looking for.

The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

StuckinaBook All , , , 8 Comments

This beautiful Slightly Foxed edition has been on my shelf for a few years, and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (originally published in 2001, and a SF Edition in 2013). I do remember that I accidentally gave the SF team the wrong address for my review copy, very embarrassingly, and bought my own after my rather unpleasant ex-landlords never forwarded anything to the address I gave them. OH WELL. I finally picked it up, and wolfed it down in a few days.

If the name Ysenda Maxtone Graham rings a bell, it might be because her oral history of girls’ boarding schools – Terms and Conditions – was a bit of a hit a couple of years ago, and deservedly. What you might not know is that she is Jan Struther’s granddaughter, though she was born some years after Struther died. The family connection is the perfect rationale behind this insightful, slightly gossipy, and largely unscholarly examination of Jan Struther’s life and career.

When I say unscholarly, I mean there are none of the apparatus of your Hermione-Lee-style biography: no footnotes, no index, no appendices. No anecdote is referenced and, in much the same delightful way as Terms and Conditions, it feels more like a friend telling you everything they know on a topic, vague anecdotes and all, than a biographer carefully weighing the evidence. I mean it all as a compliment.

I suspect most of you know who Mrs Miniver is, even if you haven’t read the book or watched the film (and I recommend heartily that you do both). She was the British everywoman (well, upper-middle-class everywoman) whose tales of everyday events – going to the dentist; hosting a tea party – became a bestseller when collected from the newspaper into a handy edition. And she then became Greer Garson, noble British housewife facing war – and one very over-the-top angry Nazi in her kitchen – in the film that apparently helped persuade the American people to join WW2. Even though the initial book was published before war was declared.

And Jan Struther (real name Joyce Anstruther, later Joyce Maxtone Graham), of course, was the woman who created her.

Joyce went out of Printing House Square and walked along Upper Thames Street, thinking of all the ‘M’-words she could. Every one she thought of was either too long or too short, or a real name, or didn’t sound like a name at all. Then she noticed a man carrying a bundle of skins out of one of the furriers’ warehouses, and this set her thinking about the heraldic names for fur which her father had taught her. Vair and counter-vair, potent and counter-potent, ermine and erminois… and what was the other one? It was on the tip of her tongue for several minutes. Then she remembered it. She went straight back to Printing House Square.

“What about calling her ‘Mrs Miniver’?”

That’s a pretty good example of the sort way Maxtone Graham approaches the biography – the account doesn’t have any sort of referencing, and we are taken into Struther’s mind almost as though we were reading a novel. It does occasionally mean I wanted to take her anecdotes with a pinch of salt, but it made them nonetheless interesting to read.

Unlike most Slightly Foxed Editions, The Real Mrs Miniver isn’t a memoir – and it doesn’t focus on only part of the subject’s life. We see Struther from cradle to grave, though Maxtone Graham wisely focuses on the story surrounding Mrs Miniver and her various incarnations. The title is something of a misnomer because, despite being inextricably linked in the public consciousness, Struther was really very different from Miniver – not least in her marriage. Where the Minivers were the perfect couple, Struther’s marriage started off joyfully and became strained. The other focus of this biography is the dwindling marriage, and the love affair Struther started next with a younger refugee escaping the Nazis.

I found anything connected with Mrs Miniver fascinating – from the origins of the columns to the whirlwind surrounding the film (and the welcome way in which Greer Garson took on the mantle of ‘the real Mrs Miniver’). Struther lived in America for several years during the war, and reading about her publicity tours and radio appearances was so interesting. And, truth be told, Struther didn’t achieve much else, career-wise. We don’t hear much about her hymn-writing (‘Lord of all Hopefulness’ is still very familiar to many of us, I’m sure) but do see how she struggled to follow up on a success that was due to serendipity perhaps as much as purpose or even talent.

Maxtone Graham writes sensitively and rather movingly about Struther’s romantic strife, writing block, and a period of mental breakdown. The whole book is crafted brilliantly because Maxtone Graham is such a good storyteller – not adhering to the usual forms of biographies, but creating her own unique and inspired version. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, and it’s made me want to dash back to Mrs Miniver – both book and film.

Literary Feuds by Anthony Arthur

StuckinaBook All , , 4 Comments

Literary FeudsI have a guilty love for celebrity gossip that I have had to quash, because it so often comes with paparazzi and invasiveness and all sorts of immoral things like that. So I take my need to find out the squabbles between famous people to those who are either dead or were happy to flaunt it, or both. I’m talking Bette Davis vs Joan Crawford levels. And so I was completely tempted by Literary Feuds: a century of celebrated quarrels – from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe (2002) when I saw it in Maryland last year. I’ve just written ‘Maryland’ on the inside, so I don’t actually remember where I was, but perhaps Thomas would be able to tell me.

This book is basically a who’s-who of people I’ve never read, I’ll be honest. It’s worth listing them all, in case you can’t make out the words on the book cover. Ready? *clears throat*

Mark Twain vs Bret Harte
Ernest Hemingway vs Gertrude Stein
Sinclair Lewis vs Theodore Dreiser
Edmund Wilson vs Vladimir Nabokov
C.P. Snow vs F.R. Leavis
Lillian Hellman vs Mary McCarthy
Truman Capote vs Gore Vidal
Tom Wolfe vs John Updike

Now, I’d heard of all those people except Bret Harte, and knew at least a tiny bit about all of their lives, but the only two I’ve actually read complete books by are Gertrude Stein (not a success) and F.R. Leavis. I did try to read Lolita once, which was… also not a success. The focus is certainly heavily towards Americans, presumably because this is an American book, rather than because American authors are more predisposed to feuds.

I guess my point is, you don’t need to know and love these authors to find this book interesting. Each chapter looks at the two authors in question, developing how far they’d got in their careers when their paths crossed, and then talks about their initial relationships. What I hadn’t expected, going in, was how many of these pairings started off as friendships – particularly Hemingway and Stein. Literary Feuds ended up being sadder than I’d imagined, as it’s much less fun to read about friendships turned sour than it is to read about catty, knowing enmities.

So, some feuds centre about ambitions – Dreiser and Lewis fell out over which of them won a Nobel Prize, which isn’t a sticking point I’ve ever had in a friendship (though, as a – for the time being, at least – member of the EU, I am a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, donchaknow). Leavis launched an extraordinary attack on Snow, for the presumption of trying to find some common ground between literary scholars and scientists – and Arthur has fun in this chapter, highlighting what a ridiculous character Leavis ultimately was. The most extraordinary feud, I think, was between Hellman and McCarthy – which centred around a libel charge Hellman initiated after watching a McCarthy TV interview.

But Arthur isn’t a gossip merchant. What makes Literary Feuds such an impressive book is the amount of research Arthur has put in. Each chapter is essentially the work of a biographer; he may not give us every moment of the sparrers’ lives before and after the feud, but what he does say gives the impression that he knows it all. And, what’s more, he throws in something of the literary scholar too – assessing, on occasion, which author has been more deservedly remembered; analysing which are the authors’ greatest successes and biggest failures. As I say, I’m a newbie to most of these authors, so these segments provided useful tips for future reading – particularly in the Lewis/Dreiser chapter.

So, I came to the book shamefacedly looking for gossip. What I found was much more than that – intelligent, empathetic analyses of authors’ lives and works, alongside the storytelling ability to outline the issues each pair encountered in an enjoyable, page-turning way.

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

the-thing-around-your-neckThe nice people of A Great Read got in touch with me a while ago, asking if I’d like a free book in exchange for mentioning their website – which I was more than happy to do, because their website seems great. Basically, it’s an online independent bookseller – and I think many of us are on the hunt for an ethical alternative to Amazon: A Great Read could well be it.

I also liked that they weren’t just after a link – they were keen for me to find a book I wanted to read, and write a review of it; they love books and want to spread that joy. I don’t mind a book myself. And I had my eye on getting another of those beautiful Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reprints, so asked for the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, originally published in 2009. Writing about short stories is always difficult, and I seem to have ended up writing an enormous review.

Rachel and I discussed short stories on our ‘Tea or Books?’ podcast recently, and agreed that we wouldn’t naturally race towards them – and only really read them if we were in the right mood. I was intrigued to see how Adichie – whose strength lies, I believe, in her gradual creation of enormous depth to her characters – would handle only being able to have a handful of pages to create each world.

And these worlds are mostly in Nigeria or America. Adichie looks at people at different stages of life – from long-distance marriages (where the wife knows the man is having an affair), to the dark cruelties of Nigerian prison, to a writing camp where a white Englishman dictates to various African writers what is and is not considered an accurate depiction of the African experience. The last of these, ‘Jumping Monkey Hill’, is probably Adichie’s least subtle, in terms of message, but also the one which leaves the reader questioning how autobiographical it might be.

Political issues abound – either openly and vividly (bonding between two very different women who have taken shelter in a shop during a murderous riot; a woman queues for an American visa after her child has been killed and her journalist husband exiled) or more indirectly (an arranged marriage in America is laced with disappointment; two Nigerians who meet at university have very different experiences of home and of America). Many stories look at the differences between Africa and America – for instance, in ‘On Monday of Last Week’:

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one’s child were the exception rather than the rule.

Perhaps only one story (‘Tomorrow is Too Far’) has little to say about race or politics – it is a strong and surprising story of memory and guilt – and only one story, the last in the collection, struck me as rather weak. Adichie’s writing is usually assured and precise, and her structuring so even and perfect that you don’t even notice that each story has a framework. They don’t feel too ornamentally exact in their arc of action, but nor do they feel scattergun. The exception is this final story, ‘The Headstrong Historian’, which tries to cover too much ground, and does so slightly clumsily in its jumps forward in time.

The title of the book is also the title of a story, and it is probably the collection’s most innovative in style – in that it is entirely in the second person. Throughout the story, there is an iterated image of the ‘thing’ of the title – though Adichie never elaborates what exactly it represents.

At night, something would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you fell asleep.

In this case ‘you’ are a Nigerian student at an American university and ‘you’ start dating a man who is fiercely un-racist, rich, and perhaps a little too protective. He (does he have a name? I don’t think so) is a superbly complex character, and this is a nuanced relationship. Rather less nuanced (but, in this instance, very effective) are the broad brushstrokes in which the rest of America are painted:

You knew by people’s reactions that you two were abnormal – the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice. The old white men and women who muttered and glared at him, the black men who shook their heads at you, the black women whose pitying eyes bemoaned your lack of self-esteem, your self-loathing. Or the black women who smiled swift solidarity smiles; the black men who tried too hard to forgive you, saying a too-obvious hi to him; the white men and women who said ‘What a good-looking pair’ too brightly, too loudly, as though to prove their own open-mindedness to themselves.

 

The protagonists in Adichie’s stories are not necessarily all that similar. Yes, they are almost all black women from Nigeria, but that obviously no more binds them together than Katherine Mansfield’s (later) short stories mostly being about white women in England, for example. What does feel repetitive, though, is how they are almost all – all? – women to whom things happen. They are noble, passive people, victims to the prejudices and misunderstandings of others. They experience disillusionment and disappointment, except in those instances where they don’t have any illusions in the first place.

On one level, sure, this makes sense – black women face a great deal of sexism and racism in America, and the experience of those who’ve emigrated from Nigeria doubtless encompasses those lives that Adichie portrays. I don’t take any issue with her depiction of the way these characters are treated – but why are they all so good? They have so few flaws. They all seem to be the voice of reason in the face of prejudice; moral compasses surrounded by those going to the bad. The stories would have been even more interesting if she had allowed them to have more imperfections; if they had always represented the Right Opinion. As a social writer pointing out the wrongs of the 21st century, this failing doesn’t matter; as a short story writer demonstrating her craft, it does. The latter is, yes, rather less important – but since they aren’t mutually exclusive, I’d love to see both in her next collection.

Still, this drawback doesn’t prevent The Thing Around Your Neck from being a fantastic collection, elegantly written and beautifully engaging. And, in these lovely covers, it’s even more desirable for the shelves.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

StuckinaBook All , , , 2 Comments

purple-hibiscusI’m still playing catch-up with Shiny New Books reviews – and so onto my review of Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Definitely my most coveted books of 2016 are these reprints. And the book was excellent too, of course! The full review is here, and below is the opening of it…

It might seem strange to include a novel in the reprints section that is only 13 years old – but Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has recently had all of her books to date reprinted by 4th Estate with beautiful African prints for the covers, and it seemed like an excellent opportunity to acquaint myself with her first novel: Purple Hibiscus.

Everybody else got on the Adichie train years ago, but I only encountered her earlier in 2016 while reading Americanah. While her most recent novel is more ambitious and broader in scope than Purple Hibiscus, there are many of the same hallmarks in her debut – perhaps primarily the confident, sensitive storytelling.

3 books about reading

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , , 6 Comments

I am so proud of everybody for the response to my most recent post. You’ve really shown the positives that can come of people coming together on the Internet. It brings a tear to the eye! I’m excited about my Furrowed Middlebrow books arriving, and will certainly report back on what I think of the books.

But for today – let’s look at some books about reading. This has certainly my go-to comfort-genre of choice over the past year or so. I picked up quite a few in my trips to America, and I am endlessly entertained, informed, and charmed by them – thankfully there are plenty more to read on my shelves. As I often turn to them when I want episodic distraction, I don’t always get around to making proper reviews of them – so I’ve grouped three together for mini-reviews. Sound ok?

Why I Read (2014) by Wendy Lesser

why-i-readThe subtitle to this one is ‘the serious pleasure of books’, and Lesser is certainly not taking the role of the average reader. She wears her education heavily (if that is the opposite of ‘lightly’ in this instance), and it becomes rather farcical how often she mentions Henry James, BUT it’s still an enjoyable and extremely thought-provoking look at the different elements of reading. She divides her chapters in ‘Character and Plot’, ‘The Space Between’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Authority’, ‘Grandeur and Intimacy’, and ‘Elsewhere’ – make of those what you will – and her thoughts and arguments cover great swathes of territory and many writers and nationalities.

I would certainly need to re-read to familiarise myself afresh with her lines of argument, and this is closer to a scholarly book than most of the books-about-reading I enjoy, but is still certainly accessible to the non-scholar. Indeed, it would be infuriating in a scholarly context, because there are no footnotes or referencing

Why does she read? The whole book is, of course, building that answer – but I also liked (if did not agree with) the summing-up of sots of ‘I read […] for meaning, for sound, for voice – but also for something I might call attentiveness to reality, or respect for the world outside oneself’. I’d certainly recommend Why I Read – and it is also beautifully designed and printed – but somebody should have a word in her ear about how often one can get away with throwing in Henry James. I shall always wryly smile in recollection of ‘Very little in the world can compare with the experience of reading, or even rereading, The Golden Bowl, but we cannot always be reading The Golden Bowl‘. Well quite.

The Art of the Novel (2015) edited by Nicholas Royle

art-of-the-novelI asked for this collection of essays for my birthday last year – thanks Rhiannon! – because my friend (can I say that on the strength of meeting once?) Jenn Ashworth has an essay in it. You may recall I raved about Fell earlier in the year; in this collection she writes on ‘Life Writing / Writing Life’. Everybody in the collection discusses different angles on how to write, from genre (Leone Ross on magical realism; Livi Michael on historical fiction) to broader concerns like place, details, plot twists, etc. Besides Ashworth, I’d only heard of a handful of the authors (Alison Moore, Stella Duffy, and – believe it or not – two Nicholas Royles, whom I’d got confused on a previous occasion) but I am hardly the benchmark for knowing about modern literature. Only one contributor, one of the Nicholas Royles in fact, takes a weird tangent – into the concept of the death of the author – which has little to do with practical advice.

This was one of the books I read in Edinburgh, and it was entertaining – I was reading it more out of interest than seeking advice – but I did particularly like how each essayist ended their section with a list of books they admired or recommended. It was interesting how often Muriel Spark’s excellent book The Driver’s Seat came up.

The Whole Five Feet (2009) by Christopher R. Beha

the-whole-five-feetThe most personal of the three books featured today, and the most unusual in concept (is there a word for ‘gimmicky’ that isn’t negative?) – and by far the longest subtitle. *Clears throat* ‘What the great books taught me about life, death, and pretty much everything else’.

The great plants in question are the Harvard Classics – Beha decides that he will try to read all of the Harvard Classics in a year. They supposedly take up five feet on a shelf, hence the title. For those not au fait with the series (as I was not), it was created in 1909 to be the best literature, fiction and non-fiction, made available to the everyman, in 51 chunky volumes. It is quite an unusual collection of works; the blurb describes it as ‘from Plato to Dante, Shakespeare to Thoreau’, but it also includes some more idiosyncratic choices – like Two Years Before the Mast, an account of sailing by Richard Henry Dana, Jnr.

What makes this book so engrossing is how well Beha combines the reading experience with personal accounts of his own life – losses and illness chiefly – that accompany the year, writing with a empathetic dexterity that makes the reader warm to him and care deeply. The actual responses to the books become less important as The Whole Five Feet continues, and it ultimately seems more of an endurance test than an engagement with literature. In some ways, this is more memoir than a book-about-reading, but it is none the worse for that.

Celia’s Secret: an investigation by Michael Frayn and David Burke

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

Celia's SecretI seem to be rather a fan of niche non-fiction. One of my favourites is the biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett written by her secretary, but I love the idea of books looking at one aspect of a career or a very particular angle on a person. This being the case, I couldn’t resist picking up Celia’s Secret (2000) by Michael Frayn and David Burke last year on Charing Cross Road. And that’s despite its frankly horrendous title, sounding like the worst sort of romance novel.

I’ve only read one novel by Frayn (Spies) and have seen none of his plays; I certainly know nothing the play Copenhagen, around which this book centres. It doesn’t really matter, though I’m sure fans of Copenhagen will enjoy this even more; Frayn quickly glosses it as characters ‘discovering quantum mechanics and developing nuclear fission, then exploring some of the philosophical darknesses of the human mind’. And then he less quickly glosses (in the introduction)…

The subject of Copenhagen, I should explain, is itself a mystery – the strange visit that the German physicist Werner Hesienberg paid to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. They were old friends and colleagues, but Denmark was now under German occupation, and Hesienberg had become an enemy. Though he couldn’t say it openly to Bohr, he had also become the head of the Nazi Government’s nuclear programme. The two men had a private conversation which ended abruptly and angrily, and their great friendship along with it; but no one has ever been able to reconstruct what they said to each other, or to agree on what Heisenberg’s intentions were in making his unwelcome but evidently pressing visit.

To be honest, the play sounds pretty boring – but the aftermath of it is very interesting. The director of the play received a letter from a Celia Rhys-Evans, the current resident of the house where the physicists were interned in England. Celia had discovered notes in German, hidden under the floorboards, and thought the director of the play might be interested in them. The director spoke no German, so he passed them onto Frayn.

From here, Frayn begins a correspondence with Celia. She is an odd character, only giving one sheet of paper at a time, filling her letters with eccentricities and even suggesting that Frayn start paying her for the letters. He deals with these eccentricities because he is so intrigued by the documents he is being sent. And those documents are bizarre. The first seems to be instructions for assembling a table tennis table, but with curious lists and amendments that indicate a code…

The book is divided between Frayn and David Burke, one of the actors in Copenhagen, with whom Frayn discusses the issue. I shan’t spoil what happens in the book, but Celia’s reasons for sending the papers are not all they seem. There are winding paths here, and more surprises and character development than many novels. Indeed, it could easily have been the plot of a novel.

I imagine this was a bit of a gamble for the publisher, as the natural audience for Celia’s Secret might be quite select – but I am evidence that one doesn’t need to have any prior familiarity with Copenhagen to enjoy it.