To Be Read...

So how did January go...?

January has been strange. Very, very strange.

To my utter amazement I have managed to keep to my no-more-new-books (Double Dare) pledge! I wonder quite how many years it is since I last went a month without adding to Mount To Be Read?

I have also made some progress on various other reading challenges - and this rather the point of it all - I have read some very good books.

Resolution 1 was to Read More Big Books, and James Robertson's hugely impressive And the Land Lay Still is definitely big - smallish type pages, and covering a huge canvas, with enough storylines and sharply drawn characters to fill three novels.

I began my Read the Walk literary stroll to Zoo City, with W Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, a very English novel about an artist who turns his back on England with some ferocity, travelling to France and then Tahiti in the manner of Paul Gaugin.

And I began my other own-creation challenge, 19/72, to read 19 novels by UK- based writers that were first published in 1972, with The Players and the Game.
 
I read The Newspaper of Claremont Street as part of Kimbofo's Australian Challenge, and could easily dally Down Under, perhaps as part of the 2012 Global Reading Challenge.

Finally, I tried a bit harder to read more non-work non-fiction and The Hare with Amber Eyes, drawn from Mount TBR, was a quite brilliant, five star start to 2012.

1972: What a momentous year...

How many of these UK authors published a new novel in 1972?

Here are some of the names I thought of when first contemplating my 19/72 Challenge (reading 19 novels from 1972): Kingsley Amis, JG Ballard, Malcolm Bradbury, Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell, Grahame Greene, David Lodge, John Le Carre, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell, Colin Wilson and Evelyn Waugh.

Some rereads, and some famous names that had somehow passed me by... Splendid!

Then I started checking around.

As you will have guessed, but to my great suprise, the answer was, of course, that none of them presented the world with a new novel that year.

Perhaps I should have chosen 1973 - JG Ballard's Crash was 73, as was Grahame Greene's Honorary Consul. Muriel Spark published in 71 and 73, as did Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch; John Le Carre  selected 71 and 74. Lawrence Durrell published a collection of poetry in 1973, The Suchness of the Old Boy (but younger brother and my boyhood hero, Gerald's Catch Me a Colobus was 1972!).

Evelyn Waugh had been dead seven years...

 

The best selling books were Watership Down and Joy of Sex. PG Wodehouse published Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin

19/72: The Players and the Game, by Julian Symons

The Players and The Game opens with an extract from the journal of a deranged man, obsessed with Dracula and Frederick Nietzsche, who recalls watching a television programe in which people leaving a horror film were interviewed.

One chap said "I like it when the monster gets the girl. That's me I thought. That's me. But I've never met anybody else who would admit that.

He does however meet a woman who identifies with Bonnie Parker (as in Bonnie and Clyde). Nothing good will come of this.

Extracts from the the journal appear througout the novel, but most ofthe narrative centes around Paul Vane, marketing manager of Timbals Plastics. Against his wife's wishes, Vane moves to the leafy suburd of Rawley, to be closer to the management team at Timbals. It is a world of tennis clubs and dinner parties, and endlessly finessed social niches, dominated by the pig-like managing director Bob Lowson (who just happens to like £20 discipline sessions with a Soho 'doctor').

Despite him being a prolific crime writer, I an not sure I had ever heard of Julian Symons (Wikipedia) before reading a Martin Edwards Forgotten Books post. Edwards notes that "Symons shifts viewpoint rapidly, introducing a good many characters, but he sketches them with great clarity."

This is true, but forty years on some seem like stereotypes, and the names could be from Benny Hill - 'trick cyclist' Dick Service and Peter Ponsonby ('a bachelor in his forties, thought by some members to be queer').

Both Vane and his wife are socially rather inept, and don't quite fit into Rawley life. This seems more to do with Alice having some funny ideas, "I shouldn't be surprised if she is a vegetarian" - than that he has had a couple of incidents with very young girls that were frowned upon but were not sufficient to cost him his job.

Several girls go missing, and there seem to be links to Vane; certainly enough to interest the local constabulary, from the ridiculous Sir Felton Dicksee downwards. Vane has, for instance, some connection to Louise Allbright, who also knows newspaper reporter Ray Gordon, who mentions to a polce contact, Plender, that she seems to have disaapperaed.

"We did have a bit of a squabble last Saturday at the tennis club. She was playing with a conceited bastard called Vane, just come to live here, and we had a few words. Nothing really."

"How old?"

"Nearly 19."

"Doing a bit of cradle snatching, weren't you?"

Ray's embarrassment deepened. "Sounds like that I daresay, but she could look after herself. Well, in a way. She didn't exactly want sex, she wanted adventure."

Plender goes to the house and is met by an indignant father. "You've got to consider my position. I can't afford to be made a laughing stock."

"What is your position? Plender asked politely.

"I am at Timbals. Assistant works supervisor, Moldings division." He puffed out his chest as though a medal were on it.

"And why would you be a laughing stock?"

He looked incredulous. "What... if it got to be known that George Allbright can't control his own daughter."

• An author's preface states that Players has some similarities to the Moors Murders and the American Lonely Hearts murders, which suggests even more unpleasantry than that which unfolds. Apparently Ian Brady was obsessed with Nietzsche, but quite why this is flagged up I am not sure.

 

The Newspaper of Claremont Street, by Elizabeth Jolley

 

Even though my attention had been caught by a review, it is rather unlikely that I would have read The Newspaper of Claremont Street without the prompting of the Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month. Even then I was initially interested because it seemed to be a novel about journalism but in fact the Newspaper is an elderly cleaning lady, known to one and all as Weekly.

 

Weekly is a prickly character, who passes on information about the householders of Claremont Street, a gossip, yes, but somehow sparing with her words, even rather brusque. She is ferociously hard working, and cleans with ferocity.

Everyone tried to get as much work from her as possible and she was expected to go into every room in the houses where she worked. But after all these years there was nothing, not even The Seducers Cook Book, that could upset her.

If she surprised people in their nakedness that was their affair. Clearly, in her opinion, showers should be taken before eight in the morning...

She was used to people being in bath towels or in bed at all our hours of the day. The intimate things which she could not help perceiving did not interest her much. If at the time of cleaning, various sexual or alcoholic activities of the householders were in the way, she simply cleaned around them.

Her services and and her access to the private information give her a strange sort of power, but this is little help in fighting her many demons, including the long shadow of an unpleasant and selfish brother, and a mother who went to prison to hep help him.

The characterisation is vivid, and it is the power of Elizabeth Jolley's writing that carries the novel. Her style is deceptive, delivered lightly, with strong accents and rough vernacular (the words of Weekly's friend Nastasya - Narsty - are delivered almost phonetically) but there is a steely edge to the narrative.

The telling is sympathetic but rarely sentimental, though I did like it when the Newspaper recalls her father's longing for the countryside.

Railing against modern farming, he says: "There's nothing so beautiful as the sun shining through a happy pig's ears."

Quite right, too.

The Afterparty, Leo Benedictus

Philip sat at his keyboard determined to write something about The Afterparty that didn't include 'post-modern', Paul Auster, or suggest that he wasn't really "Philip" at all. Something that didn't include email exchanges, or references to Twitter campaigns or metatextual marketing...

Not easy. (Though I am pretty confident I am not the real Rebekah Wade).  

I seem to have turned up unfashionably late to The Afterparty. All the hip folk arrived back in April but I only tagged along after being handed a late invitation from a Reading Matters books of the year thing. Even then, I was mostly tempted by a Scoop! Journalists in Fiction diversion.

Ostensibly, Leo Benedictus is telling the story of William Mendez, a freelance journalist from London, who in his spare time has been working on a novel called Publicity, or Publicity****** as it later becomes, tells the story of  "a night that changes everything for nerdy Michael, a Fleet Street worker ant, when he agrees to take his boss’s invitation to an A-list party at a London club. Inside, reclusive movie star Hugo Marks is announcing his re-entrance to society."

  ‘Oh, I’m just a subeditor.’ ‘I see. Which paper?’

‘The Standard.’

‘So you write their headlines?’

Hugo knew what a subeditor was, though he could not for the moment guess why one was at his birthday party.

‘Some of them, yeah,’ Mike said, ‘and I make sure everything’s spelled correctly. It’s a day job,’ he shrugged.

Quite whose story it is, and quite who is telling that story is one of the mysteries of The Afterparty. It is a very cleverly constructed novel and Benedictus pulls off the tricky challenge of combining arch post modernism with quite a good story and almost sympathetic characters.  

 

Malmö City Library

This Must Stop: Malmö Unites Against Shootings

The Hare With Amber Eyes, by Edmund De Waal

"Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters."

And Edmund De Waal tells the story of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke with great skill, combining erudite scholarship with great sensitivity and understanding.

The wooden and ivory objects are tiny but the canvas for this family histoy is vast, stretching from Odessa to Paris, from Vienna to Tokyo (and Tunbridge Wells), and encompassing both great riches and immeasurable loss. It is a book about touch, about memory, but also about family, and inherent to that, about belonging and being Jewish.

The story gathers pace in the Paris of Proust and of Zola, with the amassing and display of huge wealth, not least in the portrait of the banker, Charles Ephrussi, a friend of Proust and a model for Swann, but also with the impact of Dreyfuss Affair. (The anti-Semitism shown by Renoir and Degas is particularly distateful).

The collection of netsuke, and so the narrative, are shipped to Vienna, where once again, suspicion and  resentment turn to a devastating hatred. De Waal casts, for me at least, new light on the Austrian experience, and the nation does not emerge well from this telling. 

The big events grab the emotions, but it is the powerful evocation of touch, the sensations aroused by holding beautifully crafted pieces that will live on for me, and for many other readers of a truly splendid work.  

Hare has been comprehensively and reviewed, and the superlatives are all deserved. Here a few links:

Edmund de Waal discusses  The Hare With Amber Eyes - 3.54 minute video  

Edmund de Waal discusses Proust with Boyd Tonkin - 7.40 minute video 

Edmund's Hare website

 

2011 End of the Year Book meme

1. Best Book of 2011: In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar, was my best read.

2. Worst Book of 2011: I have been reading Agatha Raisin for my PR in Fiction project and struggled with Vicious Vet, but Amberville, by Tim Davys, was the only book I abandoned.

3. Most Disappointing Book: Simon Lelic's The Facility on the grounds that, after Rupture, we had every right to expect so much better...

4. Most surprising (in a good way) book: Colour Scheme, by Ngiao Marsh or The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie

5. Book you recommended to people most: When people ask about Scandinavian crime I suggest Johan Theorin

6. Best series you discovered: Dept Q is hardly my discovery but Jussi Adler-Olsen's  Carl Morck novels have great promise

7. Favourite new authors you discovered: Ernesto Mallo is the new-to-me crime writer I am most likely to return to

8. Most hilarious read: War With the Newts, by Karel Čapek

9. Most thrilling, unputdownable book: Splinter, by Sebastian Fitzek

10. Book you most anticipated: The Troubled Man, by Henning Mankell. Not the best Wallander novel but Kurt is a dear friend!

11. Favourite cover of a book you read: Possibly Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes, but as I read it on Kindle, my vote goes to The Hare With The Amber Eyes, because it is simple and feels so nice. If I had read the same version as Rob did, I would definitely have gone for Death and the Penguin.

 

12. Most memorable character: Holland, the father in Eucalyptus, Zinzi December in Zoo City or the Misha the Penguin in Death and the Penguin

13. Most beautifully written book: Eucalyptus, by Murray Bail

14. Book that had the greatest impact on you: Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (or, possibly They Who Do Not Grieve by Samoan writer Sia Figiel, in that her world was so far from mine).

15. Book you can’t believe you waited until 2011 to finally read? The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal was a Christmas 2010 present and I only started it on New Year's Eve.  

2012 Reading Resolutions

Although only half the novels I read in 2011 counted towards Challenges, I suspect I made some decisions based on speed of completion, and in doing so vaguely confirmed my suspicion of Challenges.

So Resolution One is Read More Big Books. 'Big' is not easy to quantify. It doesn't mean slogging through overblown thrillers, but does mean Roberto Bolano's 2666, Peter Esterhazy's Celestial Harmonies and Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, among others, must graduate from Mount TBR.

This in turn will help me stick to the TBR Double Dare challenge of buying no new books until at least April 1. Resolution Two is my most fervent commitment and also the one which will be hardest to keep.

I am confident I will abide by Resolution Three, my Read the Walk literary stroll to Zoo City, and plucking from Mount TBR will take me at least to France!

My other own-creation challenge, 19/72, to read 19 novels by UK- based writers that were first published in 1972 will be tougher but, hopefully, Resolution Four will be equally rewarding.

Resolution Five is to read more (non-work) factual books.

And, because the 2011 incarnation was so much fun, and led to all five of my Best Reads of 2011, and seven of my 12 five star reads, I will sign up for the 2012 Global Reading Challenge  at Expert Level.

A good year ahead, I think...