ACOB2018

Stonecliff by Robert Nathan

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Robert Nathan is one of those names now known only, it seems, to people who’ve enjoyed the films based on his work. Portrait of Jennie and The Bishop’s Wife are both, apparently, regarded as classics in the movie world – but less known is their author, who was extremely prolific. I love his novels, which take only a couple of hours to read but transport the reader away for a while. When I read about Stonecliff (1967), I knew I had to get hold of a copy.

Stonecliff is the house of Edward Granville, noted writer. He is a recluse, and Stonecliff is isolated on a cliff in California, but he accepts a visit from Michael Robb – the narrator. He has been commissioned to write the great man’s biography, and is allowed to stay.

I have been sitting here at my desk with the last page of my book in front of me – my book, still untitled, the biography of the novelist Edward Granville. It is all done, complete, with names and dates and places, facts gathered from many sources, including Stonecliff itself. And yet in a real sense it is not done at all, for I know that the life of the book itself has escaped me; the mystery that baffled me then eludes me still.

That’s the opening of the novel, and consider me hooked. The greatest mystery is Granville’s wife – absent from the house – and the young woman who is there and whom Robb finally meets; she is beautiful, captivating, and elusive. He gradually begins to suspect that she is the creation of Granville – has he called her to life with his pen? And what exactly is their relationship? How should the biographer interpret what he sees, and can he get to the bottom of the mystery?

I rushed through the book gleefully. Nathan is not a great prose stylist, but there is also nothing obstructive in his writing – and he is an expert at conveying atmosphere. So I wouldn’t want to quote many of the lines out loud, but he builds wonder and romance (in the traditional sense of the word) so adeptly that I loved my short stay in Stonecliff. It’s the fourth novel I’ve read by him, and I’ll certainly seek out more. They so perfectly suit certain moods. And if you happen to be in America, you can snap them up very easily.

Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull

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Who doesn’t love the British Library Crime Classics? I’m amassing them far faster than I can read them, but earlier this month I did read Excellent Intentions (1938) by Richard Hull, which is one of their more recent publications. I was beguiled by the description of it being an unusual twist on the detective novel. And the reason it’s a twist is because we start in the courtroom, with the accused in the dock…

“May it please your lordship – members of the jury.” Anstruther Blayton rose to his feet and, as was his habit, moved some papers that were near him in an unnecessary and fussy manner. At the age of fifty-two he was, he knew, comparatively young to have been selected by the Attorney-General to act as leader in a trial which was arousing a certain amount of public interest. Even though he had been known for some time as a leading K.C. on the circuit, it was his chance and he meant to make the most of it.

That’s the opening paragraph, throwing us right into the midst of the trial. But – crucially – we do not know who the accused is.

As the trial continues, the scenes described run parallel to it. So, as the brilliantly-named Anstruther Blayton talks us through the scene of the death, we then jump to seeing it – Mr Cargate, taking snuff on a train, and dying almost immediately. Cargate is that stereotypical murder victim from this genre – universally disliked, and rightly so. All manner of people are suspected, from his household staff to the inheritors to a group of people involved in (of all things) the stamp trade.

I don’t know if Hull was a philatelist or simply did a lot of research, but buckle up to learn a huge amount about stamps. Unless you already know it, in which case… well, I hope he got the details right. I could have done with perhaps less of this information, not least because I spent the whole time marvelling that anybody could care whether or not a particular stamp did or did not have a dot of ink in a particular place. But Hull does a good job of immersing us in this world.

Hull writes with wit, which always helps this sort of novel, and many of his characters are very vivid – particularly in the silent sparring within the courtroom. The actual plot seems like it might be rather flimsy, but don’t form your opinions until the final page… and perhaps not even then. A worthy addition to the BLCC series.

Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Was Sophie? by Celia Robertson

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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.

Hunt the Slipper by Violet Trefusis

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Last Bank Holiday weekend, I decided to go and spend a bit of time at a National Trust property, enjoying the sunshine and reading a book or two (or three). None of the books I was reading at that juncture felt quite right – and so I scouted round my shelves until I found something that did. And I chose Hunt the Slipper (1937) by Violet Trefusis.

I’ve read a couple of other novels by Trefusis before. I loved Echo, and quite quickly read Broderie Anglaise, which I didn’t much like. Then I came to impasse and waited a few years, clearly. The cover to Hunt the Slipper was enough to persuade me – that, and the fact that it fitted one of my empty years in A Century of Books.

Trefusis’s novel is about privileged, artistic, middle-aged types – experimenting with love and with detachment. At the centre is Nigel Benson, on the cusp of 50, and living with his sister Molly. He has been something of a lothario, but is becoming a little more interested in fine furniture and architecture. Into his life – because she is the new wife of his close friend Sir Anthony Crome – walks a young woman called Caroline. She has little time for manners, airily says what she thinks, doesn’t really understand the mores of his world. And they fall awkwardly, uncertainly in love. In Paris, of course.

Trefusis has a rather assured and engaging tone – quite arch, witty, and the right level of detachment from her characters. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Molly Benson was clipping a small yew with a virtuosity, a flourish that would have put many a professional topiarist to shame. The click-click of her secateurs, monotonous, hypnotic, was sending her brother to sleep, the newspaper on his knees had slithered to the ground, and his head lolled… Molly had hoped this would happen. Poor pet! He gets so little, she thought, meaning sleep. She was glad to contribute to that little. An excellent sleeper herself, she was rather proud of his insomnia. It set him aside as a superior being. Like Nietzsche, he only obtained by violence what was given others freely.

It’s her wonderful writing style that stands out. And particularly the ways that characters observe and misunderstand each other – and how they see a whole scene, including crockery, sideboards, walls, landscapes. They each build their own interpretations of surroundings, and Trefusis convinces us that they are whole people. Often her turns of phrase and small similes are perfect – and this helps elevate the story above the traditional love triangle tropes. I rather liked this excerpt:

“Well, good-bye, my dear,” he said, with a sickly heartiness. “I shall look forward to seeing you in May. Don’t forget my address is the Grand Hotel, Florence.” 

“Good-bye, Nigel. I can never forget all you’ve done for me.” They were like guilty correspondents who imagine that so long as the end of their letters is above-board, nobody will inquire into the rest.”

I certainly preferred the sections of the novel that weren’t about love affairs. It’s something I find rather tedious to read about, and is the reason Broderie Anglaise was a misfire for me – but she is rather more clever about it in this book. We don’t get pages of people pouring their hearts out, or a narrative that expects us to weep when they weep. The characters are no less sincere, but Trefusis knows better than to expect us to buy into it completely.

Incidentally, the title is explained at one point:

He did not suspect that by one of Love’s infallible ricochets she was behaving to him as Melo had behaved to her. Her cruelty was Melo’s legacy; her indifference to him was out of revenge for Melo’s indifference to her. Love had passed from one to the other, furtive, unseizable, like the slipper in ‘Hunt the Slipper’.

I still wish I could read a Trefusis novel where she’s not writing about romantic love – because I think she’s better and more interesting on other topics – but I’ll keep reading whatever she has written. She might mostly be remembered now as a footnote in Bloomsbury love triangles, but I think she deserves more than that.

Tea or Books? #57: save vs binge, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd vs The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

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Murder mysteries and binge-reading – enjoy episode 57!

 

In this episode, we compare an uncharacteristically modern novel – The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton, published in 2018 – with Agatha Christie’s classic Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In the first half, we debate whether we binge-read authors or spread them out to save them.

Feel sorry for Rachel this week – she’s rather croaky with a cold, but she powers on admirably! I’ve edited out most of her coughing, poor thing, but apologies for any that have snuck in.

You can check out our Patreon account – where you can support the podcast at various different reward levels, including having a book sent each month. We also have our iTunes page, and you can read Rachel’s reviews of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
Charlotte Bronte: A Life by Claire Harman
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Iris Murdoch
A.A. Milne
E.M. Delafield
Richmal Crompton
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Charles Dickens
P.G. Wodehouse
Jane Austen
Miss Read
Enid Blyton
Point Horror
The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
Albert the Dragon by Rosemary Weir
Further Adventures of Albert the Dragon by Rosemary Weir
Barbara Pym
Dorothy Whipple
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Bowen
Sanditon by Jane Austen
The Watsons by Jane Austen
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
Beverley Nichols
Anne Tyler
Rose Macaulay
The Loved One by Edith Olivier
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
Cousin Rosamund by Rebecca West

The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald

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The nice people at Post-Hypnotic Press gave me some codes for review copies of their Betty MacDonald audiobooks… approximately forever ago. I listened to The Egg and I (which I’d previously read) and finally remembered that the codes were still kicking around somewhere – so I recently downloaded and listened to The Plague and I (1948). As with The Egg and I, it was narrated by the excellent Heather Henderson.

I did a little poll on Twitter to try and establish whether ‘plague’ rhymes with ‘egg’ in American English – it sort of does when Henderson says it – to work out whether or not the title was intended to be a pun on The Egg and I. Jury’s out. But the ‘plague’ in question in TB. Back in the days when this was a much more real threat in America, Macdonald caught it from a man in her office – who, it turned out, had known he had TB and hadn’t bothered to do anything about it. The only cure is to go and rest in a sanatorium – not in the Swiss alps, as one might imagine, but in an American facility that was free to those who couldn’t afford the enormous bills of most places. As a young single mother, Macdonald was shunted high up the waiting list.

But we don’t get there for a while. I’ve discovered that Macdonald likes to ramble around a topic for a while before she gets to the gist of a book. And so we hear all about her family’s history of hypochondria and illness for a while – for rather too long a while, in my opinion, as by the time we get to the main point of The Plague and I, it feels as though we’ve been waiting impatiently in the wings for hours.

Once we get there, though, The Plague and I is dependably funny – Macdonald writes wonderfully about all the different roommates she has – but also rather harrowing at times. Fans of The Egg and I will know that Macdonald can write very amusingly about hardship, but there is a distinction between calamitous events on a farm and the Kafkaesque cruelty of the sanatorium. On the one hand, they are trying to save their patients, and perhaps have to be cruel to be kind. On the other hand, there are so many draconian rules (no talking, no coughing, no using the bathroom) – that they won’t tell people until they break them – and patients never have anything explained to them. To be suddenly moved into solitary confinement, or taken for an operation without being told what it will be – it must have been terrifying, and Macdonald manages to convey that, while also finding (with hindsight) the ridiculous in each situation, and laughing at it.

Her fellow patients include Kimi, a Japanese girl who is kind, delivers occasional sharp humour, and forever mourns that she is too tall to find a husband. I could have done without Henderson’s impersonations of a Japanese person – it felt a little uncomfortable – but I don’t really know what is usually done in such situations with an audiobook. And then there’s another sympathetic patient, whose name escapes me for the moment – who complains a lot, but is intelligent, and sees Macdonald as a comrade in arms. Besides them, most of the others get short shrift from Macdonald – whether the femme fatale type, forever talking about how sleepy she is, or the young woman who doesn’t take any of it seriously.

We know, of course, that Macdonald survived TB – but, from within, she never knew how long she’d be there, or how well she was. The whole experience sounds maddening and horrifying, but she turns it into an entertaining and often laugh-out-loud book. Henderson’s narration wonderfully judges the frustration, bonhomie, and nervousness that make up Macdonald’s persona in The Plague and I. If you haven’t read this, or any Macdonald memoir, I very much recommend listening to the audiobook.

Sphinx by David Lindsay

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As I’ve probably already mentioned, part of my plans for A Century of Books was to go back to the books I’ve had waiting on my shelves for years and years – particularly the rarer ones. If I’ve been lucky enough to find copies of them, I should probably the next step and actually read them. And Sphinx (1923) by David Lindsay is certainly one of those books. I tracked down a copy after loving his novel The Haunted Woman (though I liked it a bit less on a re-read), and I’ve been intrigued to try it ever since.

Lindsay is best known now for A Voyage to Arcturus, which I have not read, but some of his other novels took place solidly in this universe – though always with the supernatural and metaphysical at play. In The Haunted Woman, it was a room at the top of a staircase that only occasionally appeared and revealed people’s innermost beings – but they forgot everything that happened whenever they left the room. In Sphinx, Nicholas Cabot rents a room in the village of Newleigh, intent on developing his machine that can record dreams – and translate them into a curious psychical experience.

It’s a very curious novel – in that Lindsay has essentially superimposed a strange psychical phenomenon over the top of a fairly paint-by-numbers novel of love affairs and thwarted love. The family he is staying with has three adult daughters – Audrey, Evelyn, and Katherine – while there is a composer nearby (Lore) and a vampish widow (Celia) also in the neighbourhood. A violent, temperamental rogue called Maurice Ferreira seems to be having, have had, or thinking of having love affairs with all of them – but he has something of a mechanical mind, so Cabot hires him to put together some of his dream machinery.

As the novel progresses, Evelyn and Cabot experiment with the dream machine – but begin to see (or, rather, to experience) Lore being hunted through the woods – and they begin to worry for her safety, unsure whether the machine is showing truth or fabrication.

There are definite strengths to this novel. At the outset, Lindsay writes more naturally than I’ve seen elsewhere – the back-and-forth conversation of sisters and their uncertain guest is even quite amusing. And Lindsay is good at describing how fantastic phenomena can disrupt the everyday – fully immersive:

Suddenly Evelyn was in the middle of a nightmare!

The room streaming with sunlight, the open window with its blind only half lowered, the glorious green, blue, and golden world outside, the sweltering heat – all, without warning, had given place to a mad, fantastic dream, into which she had not even time to wonder how she had fallen. Se was not frightened, but it seemed to her as if her nature had parted from its moorings and that she had somehow become transported into chaos!

The world in which she now was bore much the same resemblance to the ordered world of reality as a cubist painting to an actual scene or group of persons. It was a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds, odours and skin sensations. Everything was accompanied in her by such a variety and rapidity of emotion that she had scarcely the ability to realise her internal feelings at all. She was just one big nerve!… All was hopelessly mixed together – darkness and brightness, heat and coolness, one landscape and another, triumph, gloom, laughter, exaltation, grief!… The things only came in vivid hints and momentary splashes, immediately to be lost again. It was no dream, but the dream of a dream. Supposing reality to be solid and dreaming fluid, this was gaseous. The elements of life were in a condition of disintegration. They still existed, but in combinations so impossible that she could not even understand their meaning…

I think that is rather brilliant, and shows us the world from an entirely new perspective. But the main problem with Sphinx is that all the women are essentially the same. I gave up trying to distinguish them after a while. The dialogue may be amusing, and Lindsay’s ideas are certainly unusual and (in their own way) brilliant – but he isn’t quite capable of encapsulating these within the confines of a novel. It is almost a truism, among those who write about Lindsay, that he was a first-rate novelist trapped with the prose of a third-rate novelist. Here, his prose is perfectly serviceable – but his characterisations and (to a lesser extent) use of structure are too weak to hold or sustain the ideas he has. A shame, but Sphinx remains fascinating – and I don’t doubt that Lindsay will retain the small but devoted following he has for at least another generation.

Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

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I spent a month in the Philippines in 2006, and it’s still one of the best experiences of my life. Hopefully not too much in a gap yah way, but it is my only experience of a country outside Europe and North America. Ever since then, I’ve been intending to read at least one book by a Filipino author – and, indeed, got a copy of Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado when it was published (in the original English), in 2010. It’s taken me eight years to read this review copy – and I had to persuade my book group to read it, to get it to the top of tbr pile – but I ended up thinking it was really rather good.

I should start with the caveat that the other three people who read it for book group really disliked it. And it is certainly a quirky novel – but I have a lot more patience with structural experimentation than stylistic experimentation. Nobody needs another Ulysses (or, frankly, the original Ulysses) but there is plenty to be gained from seeing how the structure of a novel can be played with to bring something new. In Ilustrado, the lead character – also called Miguel Syjuco – is on the track of Edmund Salvador. This (fictitious) man was one of the most famous Filipino writers, and has recently been found dead in a river. ‘Syjuco’ (I’ll use inverted commas to distinguish between character and author; apologies if it gets annoying) heads from New York to Manila to find out more about what could have led to it – and to find the elusive manuscripts of Salvador’s rumoured final, enormously long manuscript.

The main thread of the novel is in the third person, following ‘Syjuco’ on this journey. He is a determined, slightly obnoxious character – he sexualises most of the women he meets, obsesses with his quest, and hasn’t got over his failed relationship. But he is also intensely human and (thus?) sympathetic – experiencing the mixed feelings of the Filipino-American returning to his homeland. He is both stranger and familiar, living a life that is disjointed from those of the people he meets with, stays with, eats with.

The airplane comes down low. From above, the city is still beautiful. We pass over brown water off the coast, fish pens laid out in geometrical patterns, like a Mondrian viewed by someone colour-blind. Over the bay, the sunset is startling, the famous sunset, like none anywhere else. Skeptics attribute its colours to pollution. Over there’s the land, the great grey sprawl of eleven million people living on top of each other on barely over 240 square miles – fourteen cities and three municipalities, skyscrapers and shanties, tumbling beyond Kilometre Zero and the heart of every Filipino, the city that gave the metro its name: Manila.

This thread was certainly the most enjoyable part of the novel. It was often quite funny, occasionally slightly broad, but an observant, somewhat beguiling narrative. I felt pulled along by his quest, even when not finding him the most pleasant character – perhaps it is the shared belief in the power of literature, and the need to pursue it.

Alongside this thread, though are others – not parallel storylines, exactly. One is ‘Syjuco’s’ journey told in the third person, as though by an omniscient author. And then there are excerpts from many of Salvador’s writings – whether his gang novel, his autobiography, or ‘Syjuco’s’ unfinished biography of Salvador. There are snippets of very well-judged imitations of Paris Review interviews with Salvador. And there are various paragraphs that tell jokey anecdotes about village idiot types. Thrown into all of them is a lot about Filipino politics (particularly those around when it’s set – which is 2000/2001). Syjuco doesn’t give much context, and expects you to know who the various people are – but a bit of judicious googling would help anybody out there.

Some of these worked really well. The biographical excerpts and the interviews really help to build a picture of Salvador, and give us the context for ‘Syjuco’s’ obsession. The bits from his books, though, seemed a little pointless – they didn’t add anything cumulatively, and felt a bit like Syjuco had included them simply for the fun of writing them. And the stereotyped anecdotes were just a distraction.

And yet, even the parts that felt unnecessary helped add up to the whole. I thought of Ilustrado a bit like an Impressionist painting – up close, the brushstrokes don’t seem to make much sense – but take a step back, and creates a whole picture. To pick another visual metaphor, it was like a collage. I thought the whole book, taken as a whole, worked really well, and quite unlike any other novel I’ve ever read. And yet I didn’t find it indulgent or pretentious – it was still pacey and intriguing. The prose style was well-honed without being showy. And, particularly towards the end, the plot takes centre stage and it all gets pretty page-turnery. There’s even a rather impressive twist that helps put the whole novel into context.

My enjoyment of Ilustrado was certainly also helped by my (albeit small) familiarity with Manila. I certainly don’t know it in the way a resident would, but I could picture the streets he described, the small places to eat, the homes. And it was all laced a little with my happy memories of being there.  But don’t just take my word for it – it won the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Book group made clear that this is rather a divisive novel – and it’s certainly not the sort of thing I usually read. But I thought it was compelling, original, and well-handled. And I’d love to know any other recommendations of Filipino novels – particularly any that were originally written in Tagalog?

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

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I love Milan Kundera, and I haven’t read one of his books for a while – so it was nice to revisit his writing on my recent holiday. I’ve still not read his most famous novel (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but have read Immortality, Identity, The Joke, and The Festival of Insignificance – which is both the order I read them in and how much I liked them. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is one of the best Kundera novels I’ve read – in a translation by Aaron Asher. And translations really matter with Kundera – he is notoriously choosy, but approved of this one. Which, interestingly enough, was translated from the French translations of the original Czech. An earlier English translation – in 1980, directly from the Czech – obviously didn’t quite cut it.

That sort of patchwork is quite appropriate for a book like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I hesitate to call a novel or a collection of short stories – it is something in between. It is, indeed, a book of laughter and forgetting – themes which haunt the book like characters, offering the only unity available. And why (Kundera seems to ask) should not themes be a book’s unifying thread, rather than characters, time, and place?

Structurally, the book is divided into seven sections. To emphasis the iteration of thoughts and cross-connections, two are called ‘Lost Letters’ and two are called ‘The Angels’. It’s probably best (if you want a full summary) to head over to the Wikipedia page, rather than me paraphrasing what they say. But each section looks at a slice of life in various Czech people’s lives – from a man travelling and being followed by suspicious government agents, while thinking of his past love, to a fanciful scene in which schoolgirls fly away with angels. Most are connected with sex or politics, or both – which are often the two keynotes of Kundera’s created worlds.

But sections are not simple, discrete tales. Within each, Kundera shifts from image to image, thought to thought – in the first, for instance, he includes a description of a 1948 photograph of Vladimir Clementis and Klement Gottwald, from which Clementis was erased when he was no longer acceptable to the politicians’ propaganda. This is one of the senses of forgetting in the book. He also includes himself – or, at least, an author called Milan Kundera – and each section incorporates tangents, anecdotes, fables, parables. There is a section held together by the concept of litost – a Czech word without direct translation, which Kundera describes as ‘a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery’. The book is all a patchwork that requires astonishing deftness, and Kundera is astonishingly deft.

He is very good on the significance of gesture, or of stereotyped movements and how they can be interpreted – it is, after all, the wave of an arm that kicks off the stream of connected images at the beginning of Immortality. Here he is on one of the varieties of laughter in the book:

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of bad films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running, and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theatres: “We’re happy, we’re glad to be in the world, we’re in agreement with being!” It’s a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter ‘beyond joking’.

All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on their billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.

Kundera has a level of control, and imagination, that makes these patchworks succeed. Indeed, his novels that try to follow a traditional narrative structure are the least successful, to my mind. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is such a triumph because he seems to throw out all the rules, and start from scratch with what a book can be. The characters and their paths, as they appear, are still vivid and vital – and there is a pain and hope throughout that can only come one whose homeland has been political hell. And there is, indeed, much humour – sometimes cynical, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes almost naively joyful.

It’s a brilliant mixture that I (at least) have to be in the right mood for, or it doesn’t click. Luckily I was in exactly the right mood when I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – and I very much recommend you give him a try.