2008

All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

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I see quite a few people write about Alberto Manguel’s non-fiction, about reading and libraries, but not so often his novels. I picked up All Men Are Liars (2008, translated from Spanish by Miranda France) in Washington D.C. in 2013, off the back of enjoying that non-fiction, and it’s interesting to see how the kind-hearted wisdom that characterises his non-fiction does or doesn’t transfer here. I was also drawn by Jason Booher’s excellent cover design.

The title is a quote from (some translations of) Psalm 116 – but this isn’t a biblical book, or even the feminist polemic you might expect from that title. In context, the phrase is really about the way different accounts of the same instance will contradict.

The instance, or at least the person, is a writer called Alejandro Bevilacqua. He has died in suspicious circumstances, falling from his balcony the day before his masterpiece was published, and the various characters of the novel take it in turn to narrate their history with him – and what they know of his death. Amusingly, the first of these men is an author called Alberto Manguel…

While at times it feels like they are under police inquiry, they are actually speaking to a journalist called Terradillos, who is piecing together the truth about Bevilacqua’s life, or is at least trying to. Each account is as much about the speaker as it is Bevilacqua, and we quickly get a sense of their character.

He had something of the provincial gentleman, Alejandro Bevilacqua, an unruffled air and an absence of guile which meant that one toned down jokes in his presence and tried to be accurate about anecdotes. It’s not that the man lacked imagination, but rather that he had no talent for fantasy. Like St Thomas, the Apostle, he needed to touch what he saw before he could believe it was real.

That is why I was so surprised the night he turned up at my house and said he’d seen a ghost.

Each person has their frames of reference, their own go-tos for metaphor, and their own placing in the geopolitics that is the true heart of All Men Are Liars. Because almost everyone involved is an Argentinian ex-pat whose lives were forever changed by the brutal politics of the period. Bevilacqua was imprisoned and tortured for reasons that were unclear to him, and other speakers in the novel have experienced similar ordeals.

There are central questions in the novel – who truly wrote Bevilacqua’s masterpiece, which his lover found amongst his belongings and got published without his involvement; what machinations led to Bevilacqua’s torments and death – but above all it’s an experiment in perspective. What even is lying, if people can tell untruths without realising? Where is the line between deceit and subjectivity?

All Men Are Liars is an interesting and pretty captivating novel, though I did feel a bit at sea by my poor knowledge of mid/late-century Argentina. Manguel is a delightful companion even when he’s writing about dark topics, and there were continual chinks of light coming through the miseries and antagonisms he describes.

I think I’d still start with his non-fiction and treasure books about reading above this sort of fiction, but there is probably more urgency to All Men Are Liars than anything else I’ve read by Manguel. And I think that’s the truth?

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

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I’ll be honest, I could happily have gone my whole life without visiting Bradford. With apologies to anybody who lives there, it’s not exactly on a ‘must see’ tourist list of the UK. But it did have the nearest football team to our holiday cottage when my brother and I recently stayed in Yorkshire, and apparently going and seeing twenty-two men try to get a sphere from one place to another place is a vital part of a holiday. Naturally I wouldn’t dream of going to a football match, so that left me with a couple of hours to kill in Bradford.

I did pop into the beautiful (but not especially well-stocked) Waterstones, but most of my time was spent with a book in Caffe Nero – specifically the novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden. It was published in 2008, I bought it in 2009 – and finally, after ten years sitting on my shelves, I read it! And it’s a great argument against those people who suggest you should get rid of books that have been on your shelves unread for years – because it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

The action of the ‘present day’ is pretty sparse. The narrator – unnamed, I only now realise – has borrowed the Dublin home of her friend Molly Fox, and spends the day reminiscing and trying to get on with her new play. For she is a successful playwright, who came to fame after turning an awkward moment as a housekeeper into a narrative about class and friendship. Only her most recent play has not been such a success, and she is starting to doubt herself. Molly Fox, on the other hand, is recognised as one of the foremost stage actors of her generation. Their mutual friend Andrew, an art historian who is doing well on television, completes something of a love triangle, albeit one that has settled into some sort of quiet inaction. And he turns up at the house during the day – which is, of course, Molly Fox’s birthday. Though she doesn’t like to celebrate it.

About the most eventful thing that happens in the present day is the narrator breaking a drug, but the whole novel shifts back and forth in time through memory and reflection. We see Andrew and the narrator meeting as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin – and her shock when the Andrew she meets again in England has reinvented himself, changing accent and appearance to distance himself from his upbringing. We see Molly and the narrator first meeting, when Molly acts in a play the narrator has written – and the narrator proceeds to fall in love with the other person in the play. Touches of their friendship over the year build together into a natural, organic sense of their relationship – without saying too much, there is an enormous depth here. We sense the narrator’s love of Molly, mingled with jealousy, uncertainty, protectiveness. The attempts at objectivity that can only be subjective.

When the public fails to recognise her in her daily life it is not just because they see her face only infrequently on the cinema or television screen. It is because she has a knack of not allowing herself to be recognised when she doesn’t want to be. I have no idea how she does this, I find it difficult even to describe. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It is as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. It isn’t me. I’m somebody else. Don’t even bother to ask. And they almost never do. What gives her away every time is her voice. So often have I seen her most banal utterances, requests for drinks or directions, have a remarkable effect on people. ‘A woman with such a voice is born perhaps once in a hundred years,’ one critic remarked. ‘If heaven really exists,’ wrote another ‘as a place of sublime perfection, then surely everyone in it speaks like Molly Fox.’

What I most enjoyed, I think, is the way Madden writes about the theatre – how the plays develop from the perspective of the writer, but also the atmosphere of backstage life, and how the creative process of writing and the public process of reception can clash. I do wonder whether many playwrights are permitted as much intrusion and control as the narrator gets, and it is slightly coincidental that almost every important figure in the narrator’s life becomes publicly notable, but we can forgive those things.

And Madden’s extraordinary strength is captivating the reader through writing about people and their shifting feelings about one another. The writerly voice is careful never to judge anyone, even when the narrator does – if that makes sense. There are no heroes and villains, but fully-formed and complex people. What’s particularly impressive is that this extends to Molly Fox – because she is an enigma even to her friend, and we see her in such fragments. Through the eyes of the narrator, through Andrew’s eyes to an extent, and from the perspective of the avid fan who turns up at the door, disappointed to meet the narrator instead of her hero – though thank goodness she did, as she came bearing a peacock feather, which Molly Fox has a deep-set superstition about.

Moments connected with the Northern Irish Troubles are perhaps tonally a little out of place, shattering the everyday surface of the rest of the novel and its eternal questions of friendship, love, loyalty, faith – but this is undoubtedly a beautiful, extraordinary novel. Any writing that conveys beauty and keeps you hooked, all without knowing quite what makes it so good, is writing worth hunting out. I’ve since bought another Madden novel, and I’m excited to find out more.

Have you read any Madden novels? What would you recommend?

A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller

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I don’t remember where I first found out about the dancing epidemic of 1518, but I know that I’ve read the Wikipedia page for it several times over the years. And finally I decided I should follow the notes at the bottom of the page, and get a copy of A Time to Dance, A Time to Die (2008) by John Waller. He’s written another book about the phenomenon, or possibly the same book under a different title – I can certainly see why it would fascinate a researcher.

In short, in 1518 France a woman started manically dancing. She seemed to be in something of a trance, and without much knowledge of what was going on. Gradually other people in her community started dancing too. Eventually dozens – possibly hundreds and thousands; accounts differ – of people were dancing alongside her. They danced for days, and many died of exhaustion. Why did it happen?

Waller does a great job of putting it in the context of other similar events from the medieval period. In different places across Europe, contagious dancing would spring up – not that often, and sometimes only with a handful of people, but 1518 certainly wasn’t an isolated incident.

One of the reasons that 1518’s dance epidemic turned out to be so protracted and have so many casualties is that physicians and religious figures actually encouraged the dancing. They believed that the dance was a curse from St Vitus (connected now with the medical condition known as St Vitus’s dance – apparently without reference to the 1518 event). And they suggested that the only way to placate St Vitus was to voluntarily dance. A bit of a Catch 22, no?

Waller is working with fairly minimal historical documents, some of which contradict each other. There are frustrating gaps in what is available. So it’s understandable that the account he gives has those same gaps – and that he has to be a bit repetitive with what he can say. But it’s such an interesting and intriguing event that that doesn’t really matter. Better Waller’s approach than that he tried to make things up or assume too much.

The final chapter looks at other instances of mass hysteria, autosuggestion, and psychological ailments over time. This is the chapter I wish had been extended a bit – because he covers so much so quickly, and with many different cultures, histories, and manifestations amalgamated. And Waller is certainly not of the perspective that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. I suppose I was not as willing as he was to rule out the involvement of God in some of these experiences. (Which is certainly not to say that I think St Vitus was cursing people – but I also believe not everything in this world can be explained without reference to God.)

I don’t know if I learned an enormous amount about 1518 that I hadn’t already garnered on Wikipedia, but Waller’s book benefits from much better contextualisation and some narrative storytelling spark. If the idea has caught your attention – maybe start on Wikipedia and see where it takes you?

Proust’s Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini (25 Books in 25 Days: #5)

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I’m a sucker for any book that deals with the writer’s fascination with another writer, and I imagine that’s why I picked up Proust’s Overcoat in 2015. It was published in Italian in 2008, and translated into English by Eric Karpeles in 2010, and is (of course) about a Frenchman, so it has been round the geographic houses. And I read it on the train, on the way to meet up with a Canadian – specifically Clare from The Captive Reader.

In the case of Proust’s Overcoat, it is not Foschini who’s obsessed with Proust, though she is certainly beguiled by learning more about him. Rather, her tale is largely about Jacques Guérin and his obsession with Proust. Guérin was the inheritor and manager of a very successful perfume manufacturer, but his private life was spent in gathering what he could of Proust’s papers and possessions.

Foshcini winds together the outline of Proust’s life, chiefly looking at his relationship with his doctor brother Adrian, with the account of Guérin – who knew Adrian, and used this tentative connection to get access to what was left of Proust’s possession after A. Proust’s widow burned them. It could have made a much longer book, so it’s interesting that she chose to make it such a short one. I almost never want a short book to be longer, even when I’m not doing 25 Books in 25 Days, and I was happy for this one to be a snapshot – almost a curio. And threaded throughout is that fur-lined overcoat – from which Proust was apparently inseparable, summer or winter. Foschini’s book opens with her seeing it, and closes with mention of it in the discussion of Proust’s legacy.

That legacy is broad and interesting, and Foschini’s little book forms an intriguing, unusual, and oddly charming corner of it.

Who Was Sophie? by Celia Robertson

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.