2000s

Home by Marilynne Robinson

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Since I’ve got a review copy of Lila on my shelves (the third of Robinson’s novels to concern the good people of Gilead), I thought it was about time that I read Home (the second, from 2008, after 2004’s Gilead). When I read Gilead, I was completely bowled over. How could an elderly minister’s reminiscences create such a stunning work of fiction? On the strength of one book, Robinson became the living writer I admired the most. A subsequent read of Housekeeping did nothing to diminish this, and reading Home has cemented her position. Nobody else holds a candle to her.

Home covers much of the same time period as Gilead, although it is not a requirement to have read the former before you read the latter. Indeed, it would be interesting to read all three of this series in various orders – it’s been so long since I read Gilead that I have forgotten a lot of it, so it was a bit like coming to the characters for the first time. And, indeed, different characters take centre stage. While Gilead is narrated by the Rev. John Ames, Home looks at his neighbour’s house. Ames’ closest friend, Rev. Robert Broughton, is old and ailing. His wife has died, and he is looked after by the only child who has remained at home – Glory, a spinster who is kind, good, and a little regretful. The novel sees how they cope with the return, after twenty years, of Glory’s wastrel brother Jack.

His return will be familiar to readers of Gilead, and Ames certainly did not approve of him, but seeing him through the eyes of his family is a different matter. Glory is some years younger than him, separated by several siblings, and never felt that she knew him very well. Robert has longed for him to return – their dynamic is very much that of the Prodigal Son and the Forgiving Father – but even his patience and hope have their limits.

It’s very difficult to talk about great writers, or to pinpoint what makes them great. Home details the awkwardness of people who are biologically very close and emotionally very distant, but not through arguments or slamming doors. Instead (and no author does this better) Robinson shows us the silences – the emotions that family members cannot discuss, the past hurts they cannot confront, and the future hopes they dare not express. All the more impressive that this is done in the third person, so – although it feels like we know all three key players intimately – we are never actually taken into their perspective wholly. Being very close to my nuclear family, particularly my brother, I can’t quite understand the awkwardness of Glory and Jack’s relationship, but (being a family of introverts) I can understand the reluctance to discuss depths of emotions – and yet communicating them at the same time.

Like Gilead, there is a background of faith to the novel. But, where Gilead is a beautiful depiction of a life of faith, Glory is a little less certain. She seems occupied more with duty and goodness than with grace, try as she might. She sums up the theme of the book while musing on the Bible:

What a strange old book it was. How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance. “I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.” Yes there it was, the parable of manna. All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in this flesh, in this life. Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it mean to come home.
‘Home’ is, unsurprisingly, the biggest quandary in Home. What makes a home? What does it mean to come home?  For Glory, home is a place of safety and continuity, but also a place of disappointment and a sense of failure. For Jack, it is a mirage and somehow dangerous. For Robert, it is chiefly an ideal in his mind.

One of the loveliest things in both this novel and Gilead is the friendship between neighbouring ministers. Friendship is depicted so seldom in literature, and it is touching to see one that has proved far more constant and successful than romantic or paternal relationships. And for readers like me who dearly love Ames, it is a joy to see him again – albeit frustrating at how little we see of him! Not to mention illuminating to see a different vantage of a man that any reader of Gilead will know intimately. It’s like hearing your best friend described by somebody who only knows them a little.

I quote this passage partly because Ames is in it, but mostly because it’s a lovely example of how beautifully Robinson writes a domestic scene:

Then Ames arrived with Lila and Roddy, the three of them in their church clothes, and she took her father into the parlor with them, the company parlor, where they sat on the creaky chairs no one ever sat on. It had been almost forgotten that the were not there just to be dismally ornamental, chairs only in the sense that the lamp stand was a shepherdess. Ames was clearly bemused by the formality her father had willed upon the occasion. The room was filled with those things that seem to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them – porcelain windmills and pagodas and china dogs – and Robby’s eyes were bright with suppressed attraction to them.
Home has so many nuances and is so rich in insight that it would be futile to go much further. I don’t love it as much as Gilead – perhaps because I missed the first-person voice that Robinson handles so extraordinarily – but I am still amazed by what a great work it is. Sometimes I wonder which writer from our time will be remembered in future generations and centuries. If there is any justice in posterity, Robinson will be among that number.

Tove Jansson

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You probably know that one of my very favourite authors is Tove Jansson – but I didn’t know very much about her beyond what she’d put of herself in her fiction. So I was thrilled to learn that a biography of her was going to be published by Sort Of Books – indeed, translated (by Silvester Mazzarella) as, unbeknown to me, it was actually published in 2007.

And you guessed it – I’m pointing you towards my Shiny New Books review of Boel Westin’s biography of Tove Jansson!  Not only that, though – Silvester Mazzarella very kindly agreed to write a brilliant piece about translating the book.  It’s a long and interesting book that I don’t feel I entirely did justice to in my review, written when cold-ridden, but I always think it’s difficult to write properly about a biography – because, almost by definition, they have so much, and so much variety, in them.

The Teleportation Accident – Ned Beauman

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Can we be superficial for a moment?  This cover is amazing.  I love it so much.  I’ve had a hunt through the paperback to try to work out who designed it, and failed, but kudos to him or her.

I read Ned Beauman’s first novel (Boxer, Beetle) shortly before meeting him at a Sceptre party – thanks Sceptre for sending me this one too! – and was very pleasantly surprised.  I don’t think there is any way in which I could have been sold a book about boxing, beetles, and Nazis which would have made me think I might like it – but it was brilliant, energetically and stylishly written, and utterly captivating.  I was even lucky enough to interview him about it.  So, when The Teleportation Accident (2012) came out and got longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, I was naturally rather keen to read it… and lax enough that I’ve only just finished it.  Writing about a novel that’s a couple of years ago can feel more dated than writing about one from a hundred years ago, so I hope you will forgive the indulgence.

The Teleportation Accident is one of those novels which demands either a shortish review or an enormous one.  I can simply enthuse about Beauman’s extraordinary imagination and scope, or I can begin to try and explain how that is manifested… and the latter would end up taking thousands of words.  There is just so much in the novel; it’s a real tour de force.  Boxer, Beetle showed that Beauman could meld together disparate and surreal elements into a coherent and entertaining narrative – The Teleportation Accident does more of the same.

Even the title itself refers to various layers.  A 17th-century Parisian set designed, Adriano Lavicini, destroys a theatre and kills dozens after his teleportation device tears apart a theatre.  A scientist in 1930s America tries to replicate the device.  And the main character of the novel – a German called Egon Loeser, whose main preoccupation is how seldom he has sex – is fascinated with Lavicini.

Sound complicated?  I haven’t even started on the people pretending to attach monkey glands to people’s necks for health reasons, the macabre serial killer, the man suffering from an extreme form of agnosia, the film director with a secret, and the curiously named (but very beautiful) Adele Hitler…

How does Beauman make it all work?  I don’t know, but he does.  After an opening few paragraphs which make a solid attempt at Kundera-esque postmodern semiotics, he settles down into a prose style which is equal parts verve and pizazz.  I sometimes wondered (with both novels) if he folded up bits of paper with surreal things on them, pulled some out of a hat, and dared himself to write a novel joining them all up.  Well, he wins the dare.  Somehow the tone remains consistent throughout – I think it is that unchanging sense of style, as well as the very grounded, fairly carnal preoccupations of Loeser – which allow a mad box of novelistic tricks to succeed as a single entity.

It also helps that Beauman seems to be having a lot of fun (although I’m sure it was also a lot of hard work).  Here’s a paragraph I jotted down – I’m not a fan of sci-fi, but I loved the way he wrote about teleportation:

The point is, you can’t just delete the subject in one place and create a copy in another.  If you did that to a human being, all you’d be doing is murdering someone and replacing them with a clone a few minutes old.  That way, no one who believed in a soul – like my parents, for instance – would ever be willing to set foot in a teleportation device.  So instead you have to move the object itself, really move it.  But it can’t move through the intervening space.  It has to be in one place, and then, snap!  Suddenly in another.  It has to change its position all at once.  Well, what’s position, anyway?  It’s not a function of space.  There’s no more such a thing as space than there’s such a thing as the ether.  Space is just objects, and position is a function of those objects.  So if you can – the Professor always warns me against the Pathetic Fallacy, but it’s so hard to avoid sometimes – if you can make an object forget its old position, and then persuade it of its new position, then that’s teleportation.  But how do you do that?  
Ultimately, teleportation is a hook to hang the novel on.  I found I didn’t much care whether or not the machine (indeed, the various machines) actually worked.  I wasn’t even hugely invested in what happened to Loeser – I was invested in the zany rollercoaster on which the novel took me.  Even events which, in the hands of a less talented writer, would be sordid seemed to me simply surreal and part of the vivid, myriad pattern of The Teleportation Accident.

Although he is Nicola Beauman’s son, his novels could scarcely be more different from those published by Persephone – and yet I love both.  I am ultimately very attracted to a novelist who has a vast imagination, and (crucially) knows how to control it and use it very wisely.  Beauman is that novelist.

Somewhere Towards the End – Diana Athill

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I’m over at Vulpes Libris at the moment, with a review of Somewhere Towards the End (2008) by Diana Athill.  It does fit in my new century, but I actually finished it at the end of 2013.  I did like a lot of it, but struggled with some of it, and my review is mostly about what I struggled with… which I found difficult to explore and express properly, but valued trying!  Head over and read it, if you so wish, here.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – David Sedaris

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Ok, confession time.  I’ve often seen David Sedaris’s book Me Talk Pretty One Day in bookshops, and thought it was a good title.  At some point along the way, this noticing must have developed into delusion, because for some reason I was sure it was a novel about a girl with mental development problems.  Erm… nope.  Turns out it’s memoir.

A similar thing happened with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) which I received from my friend Laura in a book group Secret Santa in 2011.  I took it up to the Lake District with me, thinking it was a novel.  Indeed, I was about thirty pages into it before someone referred to the narrator as David, and I suddenly realised that (a) the narrator wasn’t a woman, and (b) it was autobiographical.  I felt somewhat justified in my false assumption, though, scouring the blurb, because nowhere does it say that it’s autobiographical.  Lots of talking about him being a humorist par excellence (more on that anon), comparing him to Woody Allen and Oscar Wilde (because they have so much in common…), and talking about ‘his world’, which I suppose is a clue, but could equally apply to the world created by a novelist.  Eventually, in tiny letters by the barcode, I found the word ‘autobiography’, and all was solved.

As when I read Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet and only discovered halfway through that Ali was a man, it was an instructive lesson in how such things influence my reading.  When I thought it was a novel, I was quite enjoying it; when I discovered it was a sequence of autobiographical essays, I started to really like it.  And I wouldn’t be able to tell you quite why that was, except that true events don’t need to be as sparklingly innovative or well-structured – they have the virtue, instead, of being true.

Many of the anecdotes do have the ring of fiction, though – truth stranger than fiction and all that.  I found the tales of Sedaris’s life in his first apartment away from home rather unnerving, with the kleptomaniac young girl next door – then there is the time he is mistaken for an erotic cleaner.  As you are.  But the word ‘family’ is in the title for a reason, and it is Sedaris’s vivid depiction of his family which makes this book so extraordinary (and, one presumes, the same is true of his other memoirs – indeed, I don’t know how he had this many stories left to tell after publishing all those other essay collections).

Don’t go thinking this is Swiss Family Robinson or Little Women, though – Sedaris’s family is a pretty bizarre bunch, with many unpleasant elements.  And Sedaris doesn’t sugar coat.  His sporty, brash, vulgar brother is no treat; there is more affection when he discusses his sister Lisa, and her feelings about potentially being portrayed in a film of his books.  There is, of course, an irony in publishing an essay about choosing to shield his family from intrusion, but it is still a beautiful moment nonetheless.

There are a couple of misfires in the collection.  I could have done without his story of manipulating children to undress and sit on his knee – not (to my mind) wholly redeemed by the fact that he was also a child at the time.  The vignette of house-hunting and finding the ideal home in Anne Frank’s attic was a one-line dark joke which didn’t work as an essay.  But that is not a bad hit rate, out of 22 essays.

What makes these essays special, and wonderfully readable, is Sedaris’s eye.  He lets us into his family circle – with every blemish well known, and every annoying trait magnified through repetition, but also with a glow of affection – sometimes, for Sedaris, reluctant – which cannot truly evaporate.  How he gets this into words, and through the most eccentric anecdotes, I have no idea.  But it works brilliantly.  I am far from the first to discover the wonder of Sedaris’s tone, but perhaps I am not the last – and I want to encourage you, particularly if you are in the US where his books are everywhere (why didn’t I buy any when I was there?!) to pick this up and see what you think.  The good personal essay, the expertly wry memoir, are seldom found.  My thanks are due to Laura, for giving me a copy of this at a Secret Santa and giving me a chance to find an excellent practitioner of that rare form!

The Compleat Mrs. Elton – Diana Birchall

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I wouldn’t normally count a book from the author as a Reading Presently candidate, but in the case of The Compleat Mrs. Elton (2004) by Diana Birchall (consisting of The Courtship of Mrs. Elton, A Defence of Mrs. Elton, and Mrs. Elton in America) things are different – because Diana is a friend of mine, and you may know her blog.  We first met online – through a book discussion email list – but have now met at least three times in person, and Diana gave me a present of this book (and the biography she wrote of her grandmother Onoto Wantana) at a lovely riverside tearoom in Oxfordshire.  Photographic evidence…

I suspect most of you will already have worked out what the book is about, if you do not know already, for – yes- it is Mrs. Elton from Emma, once Augusta Hawkins, the fairly ghastly woman who ends up marrying the vicar.  If any of Austen’s characters ever needed a defence, it is she, with her ‘caro sposo’ and ‘Mr. K’ and vulgarities here and there.

At least, that is the generally agreed line.  Diana disagrees.  Of the three, I found the Defence of Mrs. Elton both the most intriguing and the most controversial – but I will come to that in time, starting at the beginning with Augusta’s courtship.

Firstly, I should say that Diana writes Austen beautifully.  A long time ago I wrote about Diana’s sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma (which is brilliant) and there is no doubt in my mind that Diana is among Jane’s most faithful imitators – and it is a joy to read her taking on Austen’s mantle.  The courtship between Mr. Elton and Augusta Hawkins shows the future Mrs. Elton to be as aware of her age and singleness as Austen’s better-loved heroines… it’s a nice tale, and starts the defence:

If our lovers were in fact a venial pair, marrying only in a spirit of self-seeking, how much worse were they than half the world?  It was such a perfect case of like marrying like, that the most elevated love between two pure souls could be no more perfectly matched.  With a strong mutual wish for matrimony, and for each finding a partner who could bring benefits to the other, and a determination and resolve to be bettering themselves, Mr. Elton and Miss Hakwins stood a great chance of finding as lasting a happiness as exists in this mutable world.
Which leads me onto In Defence of Mrs. Elton.  Scenes from Emma, from Mrs. Elton’s arrival onwards, are shown again from that lady’s perspective, away from the satirical and subjective slant of the narrator.  In my opinion (and I would love to enter into a debate), Diana doesn’t so much defend Mrs. Elton’s character as give her a different one…

Augusta knew, even as she was speaking, that everything she was saying was wrong […]
Did she?  Hmm… of course, people often say one thing and mean another, or don’t come across in the way they intend, but it is perhaps too easy a defence to take a character’s objectionable qualities and say they were not really there.  Diana does, however, is more convincing and does a very good job when attacking the other characters – I hadn’t really noticed quite how awful Emma et al are to the newcomer, and Augusta’s plea swayed me…

They were all her enemies, yet what had she done to any of them?  Her ways, her manners, were not like theirs; she knew that well enough.  She was not capable of their sort of superior insolence, the exquisite politeness that only pointed up the disdain beneath: when she thought a thing, she said it.  If they were so pretty and exacting as to mind such a difference in her, and disapprove of the manner when the heart was right, what hope had she of ever living in harmony with any of them.
Onto the next and final story – whizzing through these, but hard to write about three novellas in one post!  Well, it’s the one where things go a bit mad, and it’s great fun.  Not only does Mrs. Elton go – with husband and children – to America, they travel among the Native Americans.  There is scalping…  From anybody who loved Austen less, I might not have forgiven the narrative world Diana takes her characters to, away from the English village life they call home, but I know that Diana would fall down dead rather than be disrespectful to Jane Austen.  The writing is good enough to support the scenario.  There is even much discussion of slavery – a wry comment on those who see slavery hidden behind Mansfield Park, I wonder?

“Yes – it is very painful,” agreed her husband, shaking his head.  “We cannot be glad enough that there is not such an evil institution in England as slavery; and hope that it can be removed from this country in the natural operations of time, so that America may one day be as fair and untainted a land as ours.”
From an English writer, this might come across as snobbery – but Diana is an American gal born and bred, which makes her tour of early America through the Eltons’ eyes particularly intriguing.  It’s a crazy idea, but it somehow works – and is a darn sight more entertaining than the next Lizzie-and-Darcy bonkfest penned by every author fixated with the 2005 film…

So, there you have it!  For those of us who adore Austen’s novels and are on the look-out for intelligent, sensitive, and adventurous explorations of her characters – look no further.  Now, in the comments… thoughts on Mrs. Elton?

Phantoms on the Bookshelves – Jacques Bonnet

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My friend Clare has struck gold again with Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet, which she got me for my birthday a month ago.  Admittedly it was on my Amazon wishlist (and thus must have been mentioned by someone in the blogosphere… was it you?) but girl still done good.  I’ve added it to my 50 Books You Must Read About not simply because it’s wonderful, but because it is so perfect a book for the bibliophile blogger.

Published in 2008 in French, and translated by Siân Reynolds in 2010, Phantoms on the Bookshelves is a sort of memoir and sort of essay collection about what it is like to live with and love books – but on a scale few of us can imagine.  Bonnet is the proud owner of several tens of thousands of books – about 40,000, if memory serves – and talks about people with similar numbers of books as though they were in secret fraternity, which is rather adorable.  Better yet, he is first and foremost a reader, and his books reflect that:

I’m talking about a working library, the kind where you don’t hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results from keeping everything you have ever read – including paperbacks and perhaps several editions of the same title – as well as the ones you mean to read one day.  A non-specialist library, or rather one specialized in so many areas that it becomes a general one.
People who collect books primarily for their value, or who think a first edition is infinitely preferable to a tenth, are anathema to the whole-hearted lover of reading – I could empathise so much with Bonnet, although I have no plans to have a library quite as large as his.  I can see myself getting to ten thousand, though, especially if I use Bonnet as my conscience – he has the delightful habit of many bloggers I know; being able to justify any and all book purchases.  I’m sure some of you are longing to write in the comments about betraying libraries or cutting down trees or the lust of avarice, but Phantoms on the Bookshelves is not a book for common sense responses, it is a book for illogical aspiration and unashamed book-adoration.

But practicality is certainly not left behind.  I love reading about the ways in which people organise their bookshelves, and this is all the more important if books are likely to disappear forever if disorganised.  Bonnet writes fascinatingly about finding space for big collections, and about the various schemes he has considered for his own collection – which reveals it to be far broader than I can boast.  He worries about where to put authors born in Yugoslavia, now that it no longer exists, what to do with his Frisian books, and all sorts of other considerations which my largely-British largely-literary library has never really had to worry about.

His chapters on not just on organising bookshelves, of course. He writes wonderfully about reading itself (‘every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it’), about diaries, dictionaries, destitute authors, and – heartbreakingly – those libraries lost to destruction.  Not just Alexandria and the like, but personal libraries lost to fire, and what the possessors did afterwards.  Bonnet also suggests – another way in which these bookshelves are filled with phantoms – that the enormous library is possibly a doomed creature:

we may be pretty sure that vast and unwieldy personal collections of a few tens of thousands of books are likely to disappear, taking their phantoms with them.  This little book is being written from a continent which is about to be lost forever
He blames e-readers, I think, but perhaps the premium of space will also play its part.  But I can’t see why there wouldn’t still be just as many people who can afford to have this luxury as there were before…

The mark of a great book about books is whether or not familiarity with the titles mentioned matters.  One of the reasons I love and cherish Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing is because so many of the authors she writes about mean something to me, either through having read or meaning to read.  I love Alberto Manguel’s books on reading, but tend to skim bits about Borges (and love the bits about Lewis Carroll).  Well, Jacques Bonnet mentioned maybe one book I’d read, and another couple I’d heard of, and it didn’t matter at all.  Even though a sizeable portion of the books mentioned have never been translated out of French, I still loved reading about them.  That’s impressive work, Monsieur Bonnet.

I name-checked Manguel there (and a review of A Reader on Reading is forthcoming) – I love his books, but not in the same way that I love Phantoms on the Bookshelves.  Manguel is a great reader, of course, but he is almost always scholarly at the same time – Jacques Bonnet is more like the friendly face at your book group who will enthuse about managing to squeeze another bookcase into the corner of the living room.  More of a bibliophile friend, in general.  Phantoms on the Bookshelves certainly isn’t a philistines’ book by any means, but nor does it alienate with erudition.  It would be another perfect Christmas gift for the bibliophile in your life (or to drop heavy hints about) – it was the perfect birthday gift for me.

Beowulf on the Beach – Jack Murnighan

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I’m not great at reading on ‘planes, and I thought (on my recent trip to the US) that it would be best to take a book I could read in short segments, rather than attempting to sustain a narrative.  While rooting through my books-about-books shelf, I stumbled across Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits (2009) by Jack Murnighan.  It was first suggested to me by an online friend, Sheila, and I put it on my Amazon wishlist – from where it was bought by my brother a few years ago.  Thank you Colin, and thank you Sheila if you’re still reading SiaB!

I think there are two things most bloggers and bibliophiles think when they see a list of books: (1) yay! a list! (2) wait, how could they have missed out/included this/that…  Well, Beowulf on the Beach is an extended exercise in both (1) and (2), tied together with Jack Murnighan’s very amusing style – so, of course, I loved it.

Let’s start with the gimmicks – and, no mistake, this is a very gimmicky book.  It would have to be, really.  Murnighan has selected the 50 ‘greatest hits’ of literature, and tells us what they’re about, what the ‘buzz’ is, the best line, fun facts, what’s sexy (!), and what to skip.

When I read, I hope the book will reach me in at least one of three places: where I zip, where I button a shirt, and where I put on a hat.
A neat sentence, and once which tells you the sort of literary scholar Murnighan is – one who isn’t afraid to talk about what is ‘sexy’.  Yup, he’s not using the word to mean ‘the best bits’, he literally means ‘is there sex in this book?’  Which is obviously a bit silly, and very awkward when we get to Lolita, but… well, it’s a gimmick, as I said.  Equally untenable is the ‘what to skip’ bit – perhaps it works when he’s talking about Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Homer’s Odyssey, but it’s pretty ridiculous to advise skipping huge chunks of a modern novel, which probably wouldn’t make sense.

But none of that really matters, because I don’t think Murnighan intends us to take those sections particularly seriously.  What I really enjoyed is how Murnighan refuses to put on a scholarly voice, and instead brings out how enjoyable reading great works of literature can be.

Anna Karenina is like a sundae with a dollop of Madame Bovary as its base and a squeeze of melted Middlemarch poured over the top.
Since I’ve not read any of those three novels (well, the first hundred pages of the third), I can’t comment on the accuracy of Murnighan’s simile, but I love the idea of it nonetheless, and it is a good example of his lack of holy cows.  Charles Dickens becomes Chuck, Murnighan refers to ‘zingers’, etc. etc.  It’s all very informal, and great fun – but also very informative.  Murnighan is nothing if not passionate about literature.  Here’s part of what he has to say about One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Forget magic realism.  Right now.  If I hear you say the words, I’ll sneak up behind you with a piano-wire; I’m not kidding.  Yes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is associated with that dimwit’s category (lumping him with the epigone Isabel Allende and other charlatans), but his imaginative leaps are the least important about this book.  To reduce Garcia Marquez’s narrative genius to such an infantilizing pseudoconcept as magic realism is high treason in itself, but to allow that academic manure to be what people talk about regarding this novel, as if humanity doesn’t need to be sat down, as a whole, at grandpa Gabo’s knee and told what’s really important, that is utterly inexcusable.  Literature classes have a sacred book on their hands and they make it sound like the trip journals of a peyote fiend.  For shame.
Eeks.  Truth be told, Murnighan’s tastes could scarcely be more different from mine.  He says Paradise Lost is the best work ever written (I don’t even think it’s the best work Milton wrote beginning with the word ‘Paradise’), Moby Dick the best novel (snore), and Faulkner the best novelist (haven’t read any, but…).  While he covers more of the globe than I do with my reading, there is a rather shameful paucity of female writers responsible for these 50 books – Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison.  Of course, he is not to blame for the sidelining of women throughout literature’s history, but the inclusion of authors like Robert Musil, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy rather than (say) Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, and Muriel Spark – all of whom have at least equal claim to canonicity – does speak some prejudice.  Make no mistake, Murnighan is a big fan of overtly masculine, guns-and-big-themes literature, and proudly states it; we were never going to coincide in our literary tastes.  (His chapter on Pride and Prejudice is, by the way, pretty poor… I don’t think he got the point, since he thinks it’s all about ‘romantic fantasies’, instead – as I would suggest – of being chiefly about self-knowledge.)

I was also left wondering whether Murnighan ever read anything that wasn’t canonical, since he seems to have read all fifty of these books dozens of times.  Does he ever pick up something he’s never heard of, and discover an unexpected gem?  That (as I’m sure you’ll be aware) is one of the greatest joys of the reader’s life.

But these are small criticisms for a book which, as I suggested at the beginning of this post, could only be found perfect by a bibliophile were that bibliophile to compile the list themselves.  Whether or not you’ll use Beowulf on the Beach as a manual for the reading life, skipping the bits Murnighan advises against and bookmarking the sexy bits… well, I doubt you will – but any lover of literature will delight in a very witty, very intelligent, entirely biased and totally enthusiastic reader sharing those enthusiasms.  A perfect Christmas present for the bibliophile in your life – and a perfect birthday present to me from Colin back in 2010.

The Crafty Art of Playmaking – Alan Ayckbourn

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I loved hearing about your favourite theatrical experiences on the previous post!  Lots of us seem to cherish special moments of seeing our acting heroes.  I restricted myself to one – otherwise I’d have had to include Judi Dench in Peter and Alice, Judi Dench again in All’s Well That Ends Well, Tamsin Greig in Much Ado About Nothing, Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles in The Rivals… etc. etc.

Well, all is revealed – the book, which I’ve realised I actually mentioned the other day, is The Crafty Art of Playmaking (2002) by Alan Ayckbourn.  I actually bought it earlier in the year, and when I started I hadn’t even remembered that the play I was about to see, Relatively Speaking, was by Ayckbourn.  It wasn’t until I turned to p.3 and saw the play mention (and, er, spoiled a bit) that I realised I should put the book to one side until I’d seen the play.

When I went back to it, I found The Crafty Art of Playmaking an invaluable companion to seeing Relatively Speaking, but it is a fascinating book for anybody interested in the theatre whether or not that have recently watched one of Ayckbourn’s plays.  I’ve written before about my interest in the theatre, but usually (when I read theatrical books) is acting memoir from the twentieth century, or similar.  Other than when actors take a step into the director’s chair (that metaphor fell apart) have I read much from that side of the fence, and I don’t think I’ve read anything particularly thorough about writing plays, although A.A. Milne’s autobiography has a brilliant section where he traces a few of his plays back to their roots.

That is where discussion of Relatively Speaking starts, but I don’t really want to say what he writes, in case it spoils it for you… well, look away now if you don’t want to know, ok?

Initial inspiration – that essential starting point – comes in all shapes and sizes.  Years ago I had the tiniest idea for a situation wherein a young man would ask an older man whether he could marry his daughter.  The twist was that the older man didn’t have a daughter.
And there you go!  From there, Ayckbourn takes us through the various considerations which led to the play being set in two locations, and certain key plot points, and the like.  He also talks about many of his other plays, of course, but (having just seen this one) it was the dissection of Relatively Speaking which I found fascinating.

Throughout the book, Ayckbourn highlights ‘Obvious Rules’, which number from 1 to 100.  Some are not obvious, but it’s a nice conceit to structure the book, and tends to summarise what he has discussed, with examples, in the previous section.  So, we have things like ‘Use the minimum number of characters that you need’ or ‘Don’t let them go off without reason’ – and thins which aren’t really quite rules, like ‘You can never know too much about your characters before you start’.  It works well to keep the playwriting process grounded and achievable, while also showing that you can’t (or shouldn’t) sit down one afternoon thinking that, with a pithy epigram or two, a play will more or less form itself.

The second half of The Crafty Art of Playmaking (and the reason why it’s Playmaking rather than Playwriting) concerns directing.  This was slightly less conceptual, because, instead of make-up characters and potentially infinite plots and dialogue, Ayckbourn is writing about lighting designers and wardrobe mistresses and the like.  He does seem to lump entire professions into single characteristics (wardrobe mistresses – or was it costume designers? – are apparently prone to hysterics; assistant stage managers are universally level-headed; sound engineers are over-ambitious, etc. etc.) but is perhaps being a bit tongue-in-cheek.  Hard to say.

Obviously there is a significant difference between a playwright and a director.  Well, there are many.  But a chief difference is that anybody can try being a playwright from the comfort of their own desk.  They might be appalling, but all they need are pen and paper (or electronic equivalent).  The director must have actually persuaded someone to let them have a job – and, while Ayckbourn does describe the various ways that might happen, it is with a tone of incredulity that it possibly could.  And once it has, I suppose one is no longer an amateur.

Ayckbourn’s model of the director is very power-hungry and micromanaging, but perhaps that is a necessity.  Almost every section seems to end with ‘but don’t let them make any decision without consulting you’, or something similar.  A director in this mould, who trusts nobody to do their jobs properly, would be a nightmare.  But for the first-time director, I suppose it is wise not to be ridden over roughshod.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this two-angle way of looking at playmaking is the contrast.  Ayckbourn often wrote and directed (writes and directs?) his own plays, but it is intriguing to see how he treats the potential director in the first half of the book, and the hypothetical writer in the second half.  All I can say is, he must be sometimes rather conflicted when he is doing one or the other! Incidentally, his plays are almost exclusively called the sort of unmemorable things one expects plays to be called.  Six of One, As You Were, After A Fashion, A Matter of Fact… those are all made up by me (as far as I know!) but you understand the sort of thing.  Bits of expressions, or everyday sayings, and entirely forgettable titles – curious for someone so inventive!

I found the director half of the book a bit harder to get my head around, as it is further from anything I have ever done or would ever want to do, and he is very coy about actual experiences in this area (very few names and dates, and lots of ‘an actress once said…’) but anybody thinking about going into directing would, I think, find it invaluable.

I don’t intend to be either a playwright or a director, but I found Ayckbourn’s book a fascinating glimpse behind these processes – and I think anybody interested in the theatre generally, let alone Ayckbourn specifically, would find a lot to like here.

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs – Jeremy Mercer

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First things first: I added an Oxford comma to the title of this book in the subject line, and I’m going to be doing the same throughout.  That’s just how I roll.

Secondly – I’ve found that any exercise which makes one turn to unread books on one’s shelves, whether that be the TBR Double Dare, A Century of Books, or Reading Presently, brings up all sorts of unexpected joys.  That’s hardly a surprise, perhaps, but it does give me pause for thought – how many wonderful books are waiting for me in my own room?  I have about 1000 unread books, probably – if a tenth of them are as good as Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs (2005) is, then I’ve got some definite treats ahead of me.  Thank you Charley, for buying this for my birthday in (gulp) 2010.

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs was published as Time Was Soft There in the US, but for some reason the publishers decided we Brits couldn’t cope with such high-flown language, and gave us this variant title – rather unfairly, since at one point it is made clear that there weren’t any bedbugs.  I’m getting ahead of myself – this is Mercer’s non-fiction account of living in Paris’s famous Shakespeare & Co bookshop for a year.  I’ve visited it myself – indeed, the first ever photograph I put of myself on Stuck-in-a-Book is outside the shop – and although it isn’t much of a treasure trove for the secondhand bibliophile, being mostly new books now, it is an amazing place to visit.


But I was a few years too late to move in.  Although (unbeknownst to me) George Whitman was still alive when I visited in 2010 – he died in 2011 – it was no longer a haven for artistic types from around the world.  When Jeremy Mercer arrived at the turn of the 21st century, he could not really be considered an artistic type.  Before I started reading Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs, I’d rather assumed it would be about cosy, literary folk, and that Mercer myself would be the sort of bespectacled, cardigan-wearing book-fiend that I am myself.  Turns out, no.  He was only in Paris (from his native America) because someone had threatened his life after some criminal confidences were broken.  Mercer was a crime reporter who also wrote trashy true crime books, and his past exploits include attacking a neighbour and drug dealing.  Not exactly a lovable guy – and, although he is mostly repentant, I have to say I had a hard time reading the bits where he complained about being judged for attacking the neighbour.  Hmm.

But, if Mercer isn’t exactly a man I’d invite round for a night watching As Time Goes By, he certainly knows how to write an engaging memoir.  In exchange for bed and board, he was chiefly expected to help out around the shop, and follow George’s often curious whims:

The official store hours were noon to midnight, but most days George opened earlier to accommodate the crowds.  The major rule was that residents were expected to be out of bed in the morning to cart out boxes of books for the sidewalk display and sweep the floors before the customers arrived.  Beyond that, George liked everyone to help out for an hour each day, whether it be sorting books, washing dishes, or performing minor carpentry chores.  More idealistically, George also asked each resident to read a book a day from the library.  Kurt said many chose plays and novellas to meet the quota, but he was still tackling novels.
George does sound rather a strange taskmaster, expecting everyone to live on food taken from restaurants as they close for the night, criticising anyone for spending any money at all – but then losing thousands of francs by leaving the till unattended or hiding wads of notes behind books (some of which ended up being a nest for mice.)  George is 86 at the time that Mercer moves in, and as eccentric as they come – but still with an affection for young ladies.  This isn’t romantically reciprocated by any of them, but it does explain why so many young women find themselves working curious hours at Shakespeare & Co.  And then Mercer discovers that George has a teenage daughter, and decides to reunite them…

That’s quite a big moment in the memoir, engineering significant upheaval, but for the most part Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs just tells of Mercer’s everyday experiences with the hopeful, but yet slightly hopeless, artistic people surrounding him – from the ageing poet Simon to handsome, lost Kurt.  It;s not at all the portrait of Shakespeare & Co that I was expecting, but it is a fascinating glimpse into a small society that has only recently disappeared, and yet stretches back to the camaraderie and ethos of another time.