2000s

The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery

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The GourmetThis is one of those rare, rare occasions where I’ve actually joined in with a reading week/month etc. at the right time, and with the book I intended to read! I’m sneaking into the end of August to celebrate Women in Translation Month, hosted by Meytal/Biblibio.

One of my favourite writers is a woman in translation (in translation when I read her, at least): Tove Jansson. I could have re-read one of hers, or explored the Moomins more, but I decided to kill two birds with one stone and read a book with food as a theme – which is on my Book Bingo scorecard. And, embarrassingly, I’ve had The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery on my shelf since 2010, when I was given it as a review copy by Gallic Books. It was originally published in French in 2000, and translated by Alison Anderson for this 2009 edition.

Perhaps one of the reasons it had stayed on mount tbr for so long was that I hadn’t been entirely enamoured by the Barbery that everyone has read: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I thought it was rather overwritten (either by author or translator, or both) and couldn’t quite see why it was so praised. I was rather snarky about it. So, how would I fare with this one?

First things first: the concept. It’s an intriguing idea. A celebrated food critic is dying, and longs to capture a taste from his past. It was the most delicious food he’d ever eaten, but – since it came before the days of his knowledge and fame – he can’t remember what it was. Around him, his adoring but poorly-treated wife, his rightfully resentful children, and his fantastic cat, wait for the end to come…

Pierre Arthens is a monstrous character. Monstrously selfish, monstrously uncaring (he doesn’t feel any guilt at not loving his children), and monstrously single-minded in pursuit of food. All this makes him a fascinating character, and easily the most interesting one in the book. Barbery made the decision to give alternate chapters from his point of view, while the other alternate chapters come from a wide variety of characters, most of whom only get heard from once. That was rather a flaw, I thought; it’s just not interesting to hear the in-depth thoughts of a person whose not been heard of before or since. I ended up skimming the non-Pierre chapters, and waiting to hear more about his culinary (and other) experiences throughout his life. It’s mostly musings, rather than plot, but it works well from his self-obsessed persona.

And the writing? I still found it a little overwritten at times. Again, I don’t know whether it’s Barbery or Anderson (I assume Anderson conveyed the sort of writing Barbery chose), but there’s no excuse for sections like this:

The cave of treasures: this was it, the perfect rhythm, the shimmering harmony between portions, each one exquisite unto itself, but verging on the sublime by virtue of strict, ritual succession. The meatballs, grilled with the utmost respect for their firmness, had lost none of their succulence during their passage through fire, and filled  my professionally carnivorous mouth with a thick, warm, spicy, juicy wave of masticatory pleasure.

Shudder. But, for the most part, I could cope with the overblown rhetoric – it worked for the character. In fact, if I hadn’t read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I might not have noticed it as much.

I don’t think I embraced all aspects of Arthens’ culinary memories as much as I have done, but that’s because most of the luscious descriptions are about meat and fish, which don’t appeal to this vegetarian. The odd moments when, say, asparagus took his fancy, I could enjoy it rather more.

So, has this Woman in Translation become a firm favourite? No, but I enjoyed reading the book, and certainly like Muriel Barbery more now than I did before.

Have you joined in Woman in Translation month? If not… it’s not too late!

Nabokov’s Butterfly by Rick Gekoski

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Nabokov's ButterflyDid I write, when I bought Nabokov’s Butterfly (2004) in the US, that it was called Tolkien’s Gown in the UK? It was one of those facts that I kept telling people when I was jet-lagged. Sorry to all those people.

Anyway, it was one of the books I bought from the books-about-books shelves in the US, and I believe Gekoski is American. So it felt a little less exotic than expected when I opened it to find Iffley Road, Oxford mentioned early on – since I live off it. He also mentions Cowley Road bookshop, which no longer exists, perhaps unsurprisingly.

This book has quite a lot in common with Old Books, Rare Friends by Leona Rostenberg & Madeleine Stern, in that Gekoski is a rare books dealer. Indeed, the Radio 4 series from which this book derives was called Rare Books, Rare People. Unlike those ladies, though, his main interest is the 20th century, rather than incunabula and the like. And it will come as no surprise that that was rather more up my street. This collection looks at 20 different famous works of the modern period, from The Picture of Dorian Gray (sneaking into the ‘long’ 20th century bracket) to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – discussing the genesis of each book, and also any notable copies that had ever passed through Gekoski’s hands.

I loved so much about it, even if a lot was already familiar. Those of us who love 20th-century literature – and particularly those of us who have studied it – will probably already know how Ulysses came about, or the events that surrounded The Satanic Verses. But, then again, I knew little about the background to Lord of the Flies or the little-known Graham Greene work After Two Years. And I am always willing to read somebody enthusing about A Confederacy of Dunces.

The potted histories of these works (and Lolita, Bridehead Revisited, Animal Farm, On the Road, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, etc. etc.; there is a lovely variety) is done extremely well. Nothing would astound a fan of each individual work, but having details together, concisely and well-managed, is a treat. And then we get to hear how Gekoski spent time with Graham Greene, was indirectly mentioned in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, ordered a limit edition of a book and bought all of them, and so on. There is a personal angle that is unique to Gekoski’s perspective.

And that perspective is certainly unusual. I bemoaned, in Old Friends, Rare Books, that they prized books for their monetary value over the content; it didn’t sit well with a bibliophile like myself who cares little for condition or edition. And Gekoski is fighting this in himself, in seems. Early on, he says almost exactly that:

I knew very little about first editions at the time, and if you had told me I would spend a good part of my adult life dealing with them, I would have been astonished and horrified. Who cared about what edition you read? It was content that mattered.

And, later, when discussing why books must be pristine to be worth a lot of money, he writes:

All I ask, in the gleaming light of such perfection, is: why? With antique furniture we value the effects of time on the surface of an object, and call it patina; with paintings, we howl when inept restorers reproduce the way an oil painting would have looked on the day it was painted. The criterion that an object be in perfect, original condition is usually reserved for the collecting of piffling doo-dahs – of stamps, teddy bears, or dinky toys. But books? Books?

How did this happen? And for what reason? What, as an analyst might inquire, is the pathology behind it? because this ludicrous insistence on perfect condition strikes one more as a symptom than a rational goal.

He doesn’t have any answers. He is not a renegade in the book industry – at least not in this way. The nearest he gets in these laments, and pointing out that children’s literature that does well in the rare books world now must never have been appreciated properly by its intended audience.

So, yes, I didn’t much care when he listed how much various books had sold for at different points in his career – not least because (a) it’s at least ten years ago, and will all have changed, and (b) each time the amount was given in dollars in brackets, which got tedious. (Somehow the editors were able to do those exchanges, but didn’t bother removing various references to Tolkien’s Gown in the introduction.) (Did I mention it had a different title?) (Yes, of course I did.)

Basically, it would be difficult to find a book about books that I didn’t like a lot. Throw in humour and a focus on the 20th century, and I’m sold. It was also a perfect book to read on the aeroplane, because I could read it in bursts of concentration between bad films (Horrible Bosses 2 is fabs, guys) and being given endless tiny cups of water.

This review ended weirdly. Sure, ok. YAY BOOKS!

Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

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Swimming in a Sea of DeathA while ago I pulled a pile of novellas and other short books off my shelves, intending to do an intensive reading weekend. As it turned out, for reasons I forget, I only finished one book – and that book was David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death: a Son’s Memoir (2008). I’d bought it on a whim in Oxford’s £2 bookshop (now under the similar, but crucially different, name of £3 bookshop), with the assumption that I’d probably never actually get around to reading it. Yes, I should question my purchasing decision. But, in this case, I was wrong – and it was on my shelves for just under two years before making the cut.

Oh, and there is a quotation from Oliver Sacks on the front. I think I’d forgotten that, but it must have made me more likely to buy it in the first place; nobody writes about difficult subjects more sensitively than Sacks.

In case (like me) you didn’t know, David Rieff is Susan Sontag’s son. And I’m going to assume you know who Susan Sontag is, but, if you don’t, her Wikipedia page will fill you in. And it’s best to know about her beforehand, because we learn surprisingly little about Sontag from Rieff’s memoir. Because it isn’t really a memoir of her life. I’ve read a couple of books about grief – C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice, which I wrote about together – both of which were as much about life (and/or theology) as they were about death. Rieff’s book really is swimming in a sea of death – the gruelling and cruel process of Sontag dying from leukemia, and his own anger, helplessness, and frustration. Which made it both a difficult book to read, and a very focused one.

Rieff’s anger is not just at the cruelties of fate but at the insensitivity of certain doctors and unhelpfulness of the information provided. His narrative moves between documenting the failing health of his mother, the ineptitude of certain parts of the medical system, and a broader philosophy of dying. Or perhaps not a philosophy of dying so much as an attempt to make an abstract sense of what was happening. Not a conclusive sense, understandably, but a way of formulating his thoughts and response.

How to reconcile the reality of human mortality with the reigning assumption in the rich world that every disease must have a cure, if not now then sometime in the future? The logic of the former is the acceptance of death. But the logic of the latter is that death is somehow a mistake, and that someday that mistake will be rectified.

And…

How, above all if you struggled to find the right doctors, and braved the most gruesome treatments, can you really say to yourself that none of this really had much to do with why you were still walking on the earth rather than dissolving under it? It is hard enough for any cancer patient to really resist the idea that some failure on his or her own part brought the illness on. After all, Reichian explanations of psychological repression causing cancer have in our time tended to give way to explanation based on one’s having eaten the wrong foods, the basis of such self-blame, and the assumption that the cancer patient is in a deep sense the author of his or her own disease is still very much in the air.

You can understand why I feel ill-equipped to write very much about this book – both because I have experienced nothing similar myself, and because – well – how can one write about it? (Yet somehow I managed with Simon Stephenson’s excellent Let Not The Waves of the Sea.)

What do we learn about Sontag? There was this tantalising tid-bit that I wish had been developed further…

She told me more than once that she believed that hope and will had been all she had to see herself through her alienated childhood, get herself out of the Southwest and on to the University of Chicago, where, at seventeen, she agreed to marry my father after knowing him for a little more than a week. Seven years later, that same sense of being able to remake her life no matter the obstacles – and not just remake it but also to make version two, or three, or four better than their predecessors – had given her the strength to extricate herself from the marriage.

Rieff iterates the description that she is ‘someone who loved reason (and, more crucially, loathed appeals to the subjective)’ – or words to that effect – throughout. I find people who loathe the subjective completely inexplicable – life is subjective! – and no characteristic ignores me more than those who use ‘logic’ as a cover for not considering emotion. All of which meant that I had the interesting experience of reading about the terrible circumstances surrounding a woman whose outlook on life was poles apart from mine; I couldn’t rely on natural empathy, which made the book all the more fascinating and moving to read, somehow. (Incidentally, Rieff mentions towards the end ‘I have preferred to write as little as possible of my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life, but suffice it to say that they were often strained and at times very difficult.‘)

So I didn’t come away from Swimming in a Sea of Death feeling the way I did to C.S. Lewis’s wife, Simon Stephenson’s brother, or Calvin Trillin’s wife; it’s not that sort of book. Rather, it shows precisely how witnessing dying and death are transformative experiences for a relative even when there isn’t a great relationship, and (obviously to a lesser degree) for an observing reader, even when the reader does not instinctively warm to the person in question.

Miss Garnet’s Angel by Salley Vickers

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I’m afraid (to give you advance warning) this is going to be one of those reviews about a book that I finished ages ago. So, apologies if I get a bit vague. It’s also a review about a novel that I’d been intending to read for about a decade: Miss Garnet’s Angel by Salley Vickers. Back when I joined dovegreybooks in 2004, it was the novel that everyone was talking about. Dutifully, over the following ten years, I bought five novels by Vickers – but had never read any of them until somebody chose Miss Garnet’s Angel for my book group. So, was it worth the wait?

Well, I remain conflicted. I didn’t love it as much as I thought it would, but that is largely because it wasn’t quite what I expected. I thought it might be a charming tale of a spinster wandering around Venice, heartwarming and witty in turn, and perhaps not without a healthy dose of the fey and whimsical (which I am sometimes – nay, often – in the mood for). Well, that’s not quite what it was.

It does start off in a similar vein (as you may well know). Julia Garnet’s closest friend dies and, lonely and unattached, she decides to go to Venice for six months. Before long she has managed to become entangled with a handsome art dealer named Carlos, a young boy who runs errands for her and whom she unsuccessful tries to teach English, and a young man and woman engaged in restoring a church or something. Incapable of making friends in England, she seems beset with them here.

So far, so charming. But did I mention that Miss Garnet’s Angel mirrors the Apocryphal account of Titus? And that that story is also retold in sections between chapters (that, I have to confess, I started skipping)? This is a technique with some literary precedence – Stella Benson did it in the 1930s with Tobit Transplanted, which I’ve yet to read – but I don’t know the original story well enough to notice how close the influence was.

So, why was I not entirely sold? Well, I guess I found the writing and plotting just a bit blah. Here’s an excerpt I noted, though I forget why…

The notion which had come to Julia Garnet, as she lay looking at her fingers twisting the fringe of the pearl-white coverlet (which, she had learned, during the course of the Signora Mignelli’s care of her, was a survivor of the Signora’s once extensive dowry), was that there existed in life two kinds of people: those who tangled with their fate, who took issue with what life brought them, who made, in short, waves, and those who bore heir circumstances, taking life’s meaning from what came to them, rather than what they wrested from it.

It seemed to her, lying watching the bars of the sun cross the white walls and making them jump from side to side as she tried the child’s experiment of winking alternate eyes, that from her limited knowledge St George, Florence Nightingale and Old Tobit fell into the first class, while Socrates, Jane Austen and Tobias fell into the second. Jesus of Nazareth, she decided after further contemplation, belonged to both categories – and so possibly did Karl Marx.
And I suppose there’s no reason why Vickers should have created a sweet character in Miss Garnet; I have myself to blame for my expectations. I’d have loved either a sweet character or an amusingly cantankerous one. What we actually got was rather an unpleasant woman, I thought. She thinks, of a friend who visits, ‘There were horrible depths of meanness in her character – no wonder she found herself on her own now.’ Well, Julia G, you’re also on your own now. And how come you absolutely loathe your closest friend, who has made the effort to visit you?

These things I could perhaps have forgiven, but the tone of the novel takes a serious knock on a couple of occasions, where Vickers launches into sexual controversy (including paedophilia) for no obvious reason – and certainly no sense of consistency in the novel.

I’m aware that these may not be popular opinions, particularly given the praise I’ve heard lavished on Vickers over the years. I didn’t hate the novel by any means (if I had, I’d probably have reviewed it far more quickly! I love writing those reviews, when of sacred cows), but I did feel rather disappointed. It simply didn’t do very much for me, and left me a tiny bit underwhelmed. It was fine. Which does not a compelling review make, does it?

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

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Back in the days when I’d only dimly heard of David Sedaris, the book I had heard of was Me Talk Pretty One Day. Based on the title alone, I was under the assumption that it was a novel about a girl with mental development problems. It was perhaps that which led to me getting an embarrassingly long way into Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim before realising that it was not a novel about a young girl. But now, on my third Sedaris book, I’m in the swing of things – he writes humorous essays about his own life.  But you probably know that already.

This collection is (I believe) his bestselling title, and it is extremely funny. The focus is not so much on his family as it was in the other two books I read, although the first few stories do take place among those many brothers and sisters. They’re anecdotes, really, more than stories – about how David’s father forced them all to play instruments, with the misguided idea that they would become almost instantly proficient; about his overly-invested speech therapist; about tanning competitions on the beach. His eye for an anecdote is perfect. Sedaris is endlessly dry, self-deprecating, and able to find the humour in any experience – often through the throwing in of a bizarrely specific detail or unlikely piece of dialogue. Are all his reminiscences accurate? One assumes not. They are exaggerated at the very least. But that doesn’t matter a jot.

The two main sections of Me Talk Pretty One Day deal with Sedaris’ student years and his experiences trying to learn French. I’m always amazed at how many things Sedaris has crammed in his life, and one of those is a period during which he thought he’d try his hand at performance art. It is all extremely amusing (as that topic is more or less set up to be), even given my discomfort at reading about drug-taking. What makes it so brilliant is the dry, eye-rolling narrative that subtly looks back on disaffected, youthful David from the vantage of disaffected, middle-aged David. And when it comes served with sentences like the following, what more could you want? He is the master of putting together a sentence that neatly wraps up the ridiculous without making a song and dance about it:

I enrolled as an art major at a college known mainly for its animal-husbandry programme.
But the most sustained theme I’ve seen in the three books I’ve read so far is, as mentioned, his attempts to learn French and live in France (thanks to the French-dwelling of his partner Hugh). It is these experiences that give the collection its title – with a sort of oh-I-see sense that eluded me with Dress Your Family in Corduory and Denim and Let’s Discuss Diabetes With Owls. From his first venture to France, knowing only the French for bottleneck, to his intense lessons with an aggressive teacher, to living fairly confidently off phrases cribbed from medical audiobooks… His lessons sounded brutal, but also led to some amusing moments (of course), and this one gives a good example to Sedaris’ style for those who haven’t read him:

“And what does one do on the fourteenth of July? Does one celebrate Bastille Day?”

It was my second month of French class, and the teacher was leading us in an exercise designed to promote the use of one, our latest personal pronoun.

“Might one sing on Bastille Day?” she asked. “Might one dance in the streets? Somebody give me an answer.”

Printed in our textbooks was a list of major holidays accompanied by a scattered arrangement of photograph depicting French people in the act of celebration. The object of the lesson was to match the holiday with the corresponding picture. It was simple enough but seemed an exercise better suited to the use of the pronoun they. I didn’t know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.
I love that sort of pay-off at the end of that; the detail that is curiously specific and off-kilter, but carefully within the world that Sedaris has created. This world isn’t the real world, and isn’t a fictional universe, but it’s a beautiful, bizarre, grumpy, and very amusing realm that Sedaris has both created and made his own.

Oh, and I forgot to say – Liz very kindly gave me this copy; thanks so much, Liz!

Land’s End – Michael Cunningham

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While I was cat-sitting for a friend recently, I read (or finished) five books in quick succession, and it wasn’t until I got there that I realised that three of them were books I got when I was in Washington DC last October. I mean, I bought so many books there that I was almost inevitably going to find them about my person somewhere (I jest…). I wonder if it’s worth keeping track of how longer I have books on my shelves before I read them, and see if 15 months is the optimum time…

Anyway, I bought Land’s End (2002) because I’ve been wanting to read more Michael Cunningham ever since I loved The Hours back in 2003 or thereabouts. I’ve only got as far as watching Evening, the adaptation of Susan Minot’s novel for which Cunningham wrote (or, rather, rewrote) the screenplay. I have to confess that I was also sold on the Cunningham because of this:

Thomas/My Porch informed me that signed Cunninghams are ten a penny Stateside (they have pennies in the US, right? Whilst we’re on that, how confusing is the tax thing there? You just have no idea how much you’ll have to pay when you get to the till). But this is something fun and rather special. And I had my fingers crossed that the book would also be fun and special…

It’s a non-fiction book about Provincetown, Massachusetts – the very tip of Cape Cod. My horrendously inadequate geographical knowledge was, for once, approaching adequate – as I had heard of Provincetown, and knew of its peninsular qualities and unusual character. For why, you ask? A couple of my favourite vloggers (Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart) went there during their HeyUSA tour, as you can see here. From which I learned that Provincetown is full of creative people and drag queens (with, presumably, some overlap).

Cunningham’s view of Provincetown is not as an insider or an outsider. He definitely defines himself in opposition to the tourists, who make the streets jam-packed during the summer months, so that getting groceries is almost impossible. But he does not live there all the year round, despite owning a house there; he prefers the anonymity of New York. Because Provincetown is apparently the gossip capital of the East, and everybody knows everybody. The year-round population (Wikipedia tells me) is around 3,000; this goes up to twenty times that number in summer.

I have trouble with travel literature. Visual descriptions don’t work for me, and writers of travel lit often want to give purple depictions of flora and fauna. But a genre I do love is memoir, and Cunningham treads the line between the two – falling, thankfully, more heavily into memoir. Or, rather, he describes Provincetown through a personal lens, rather than the anthropologist’s. If he is neither insider nor outsider to the town, then he is closer to the former than the latter.

The beautiful setting I read it in.

There is plenty for the anthropologist in Provincetown, though. Its character differs strongly from the surrounding area; it is (Cunningham says) the refuge of the outsider and eccentric. Some of those outsiders (and I now realise I’ve overused that word) are from the LGBT community, and – um – anything apparently goes in Provincetown. Cunningham very casually describes the beaches where you’ll find men having sex in the undergrowth, and those where you won’t. He mentions (and repeatedly re-mentions) this with such calm that it seems like a normal thing, to find people having sex when you pop down to build a sandcastle. Hmm…

But once we’ve left all that behind, I felt more at home in Provincetown – with its focus on art, friendliness, community, and (yes, I confess) gossip. Cunningham does a great job of explaining why he finds the town so special, more from the warm tone he uses than the facts he states. He incorporates the history of the town – did you know that the Pilgrim Fathers landed there first, before heading off to Plymouth Rock? – and its primary exports, but it is the affection with which he writes that really sells Provincetown.

I say ‘sells’; I still don’t think I’d go out of my to visit, still less live there, but anybody writing with wisdom and passion about their favourite place, and the experiences they have lived there, will win me over. From meeting his partner (and not forgetting his dramatic ex-partner) to the 2am gatherings outside a place that sells middle-of-the-night pizza, Land’s End is a curiously charming and almost old-fashioned depiction of a not-at-all old-fashioned place. Here is an excerpt to finish with, and to give you a taste of how he combines the personal and the observational:

If you do walk to Long Point, you will find yourself on a spit of sand about three hundred yards wide, with bay beach on one side, ocean beach on the other, and a swatch of dune grass running down the middle. It sports, like an austere ornament, a lighthouse and a long-empty shed once used to store oil for the light. You will be almost alone there, through the water around you will be thoroughly populated by boats. It is a favorite nesting ground for terns and gulls. When I went out there years ago with Christy, the man with whom I lived then, he strode into the dune grass and stirred up the birds. If I tell you that he stood exultantly among hundreds of shrieking white birds that circled and swooped furiously around him, looking just like a figure out of Dante, grinning majestically, while I stood by and worried about what it was doing to the birds, you may know everything you need to know about why we were together and why we had to part.
What a beautiful image, and moving reflection.

Anybody read this? Or been to Provincetown??

Marrying Out – Harold Carlton

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You know that I love Slightly Foxed Editions – I don’t shut up about it – and the latest one I read is up there with my favourites now. I pretty much read it all in one setting. It’s Marrying Out (2001) by Harold Carlton, originally published as The Most Handsome Sons in the World!, a memoir about the fall-out in a Jewish family when one of the sons wants to ‘marry out’.

More in the Shiny New Books review…

The Literary Conference – César Aira

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I guess my blog is, if anything, a bit of a celebration of well-written middlebrow, mostly English, mostly oldish, and mostly about tea cups and cats. Fair? Well, I also love to try things that are a bit different sometimes (especially – scholar that I am – if they are short, so the experiment needn’t be all-encompassing). So, when I went off to a literary conference in the summer, I thought I’d take The Literary Conference (2006) by the Argentinian author César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver (one of three Aira novels sent to me by Hamish Hamilton a while ago, in a boxset of three with the cover designs below).

Somehow I got distracted, and only finished it recently – which, considering it’s only 90 pages long, isn’t very impressive, but it isn’t because I didn’t like it. I was delightfully baffled and bemused by the whole thing. It’s surrealism mixed with postmodernism, with a dollop of science-fiction for good measure.

Our hero – and seldom has the term been used with less justice – has the same name as the author, and is off to attend a literary conference. We see extremely little of this. Instead we see his arrogance, his venom against rivals, and his determination to succeed. All are seen in the curious opening, where he discovers the secret of the ‘Macuto Line’ – a rope that has pirates’ treasure on the end of it, under the sea, only nobody has worked out how to solve it. Guess who does?

But that is an overture to the main event. The protagonist wants to clone his rival, and has – since he is, he is willing to confess, a genius – devised a cloning machine, and secures a cell from Carlos Fuentes by means of a trained wasp.

Upon my return to the hotel, the excitement of the past few hours reached its anticlimax. The first part of the operation, the most demanding part for me, was over: I had obtained a cell from Carlos Fuentes, I had placed it inside the cloning machine, and I had left the machine to operate under optimum conditions. If you add to this the fact that the previous day I had solved the secular enigma of the Macuto Line, I could feel momentarily satisfied and think about other things. I had a few days to do just that. Cloning a living being is not like blowing glass. It happens on its own, but it takes time. Even though the process is prodigiously accelerated, it requires almost a week, according to the human calendar, for it must reconstruct on a small scale the entire geology of the evolution of life.
The climax of the novella is undoubtedly the way in which this clone goes awry. I want to say what happens so much – it is so strange, and yet extremely fitting (and goes back neatly to the beginning) – but I won’t do Aira the disservice of spoiling the ending, in case you choose to read it.

I have no real idea what I thought about The Literary Conference. It did remind me of the two novels I’ve read by Adolfo Bioy Casares – in that it pretty much confused me, without alienating me. Perhaps it was more of a tourist venture into the tastes of others, but… it was fun, nonetheless.

Pleasures and Landscapes by Sybille Bedford

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Another book review to point you to in Shiny New Books! This one is by an author I’d love to know more about – Sybille Bedford. She seems so fascinating. I loved her novel A Favourite of the Gods, and so I took Daunt Books up on their offer of her collected travel writing, Pleasures and Landscapes (2003, although collected from mostly 1950s and 1960s articles).

I usually don’t like travel writing, so I was nervous, but I really liked the way Bedford writes – and the unusual (often food-orientated) take she has on the world. If that’s tickled your fancy, you can read the whole review on Shiny New Books…