Monday 6 June 2016

Of Human Suffering

Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel

I read this in English translation and my impression is that it is a good one.  The short story, a novella, is told in simple style and this poignant, moving and ultimately sad novel did indeed stir feelings that remained with me after the final sentences had been read.

Traumatized by memories of his war-ravaged country, and with his son and daughter-in-law dead, Monsieur Linh and His Child is a remarkable novel with an extraordinary twist, a subtle portrait of friendship and a dialogue between two cultures.
 Monsieur Linh travels to a foreign land to bring the child in his arms to safety. The other refugees in the detention centre are unsure how to help the old man; his caseworkers are compassionate, but overworked. Monsieur Linh struggles beneath the weight of his sorrow, and becomes increasingly bewildered and isolated in this unfamiliar, fast-moving town. And then he encounters Monsieur Bark. They do not speak each other's language, but Monsieur Bark is sympathetic to the foreigner's need to care for the child. Recently widowed and equally alone, he is eager to talk, and Monsieur Linh knows how to listen. The two men share their solitude, and find friendship in an unlikely dialogue between two very different cultures.

In contrast to Monsieur Linh and His Child , my subsequent read is a 700-page novel which was short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker.  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a bleak, unrelentingly harrowing story of four young men who meet at college and focuses on one of the quartet in particular.  Malcolm, JB, Willem and Jude, randomly assigned as college roommates, become best friends. Bright, ambitious and talented, they all move to New York, pursuing different careers: handsome Willem works as a waiter while auditioning as an actor; JB creates trendily experimental art while dreaming of fame as a representational painter; Malcolm comes from a wealthy, demanding family and worries that his architecture career will not impress his father; Jude is a young lawyer, working for the public defender’s office. The reader predicts that some will succeed, some will fail; some will build happy relationships, some won’t; tragedies will strike and be overcome. 
The reader is quite mistaken, however: before long, all four friends are blessed with immoderate professional success, while two of them rapidly recede into the background, with Jude St Francis emerging as the novel’s protagonist.

His first 15 years consist of unrelieved, grotesque, extravagant abuse: and then an authorial switch is flipped. For the rest of his life (with the important exception of one disastrously abusive relationship), Jude encounters only selfless love and kindness: the patron saint of lost causes becomes a lost cause surrounded by saints. His friends are all very concerned with Jude, to the exclusion of being concerned about anyone else, including themselves.  In real life, people tend to get tired of other people’s repetition compulsions, largely because they are consumed by their own dramas. But this is a little life that tilts toward a large fairy tale, about cruelty and nobility, evil and goodness.  The novel deals with Jude's anguish, his self-hatred, his life-long habit of 'cutting' - the unfathomable tendency of people so wounded and traumatised by what others have inflicted upon them, that they blame themselves.  I lost count of the number of times Jude utters the words "I'm sorry."  You get the feeling as the novel progresses that there cannot be a redemption, a happy ending.  This haunting novel is one to which my thoughts will often in a world where instances of child abuse, many of long-years standing, continue to surface to the light of day.

In Steven Galloway's novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, the author mixes real and imagined characters.  It is set in Bosnia's capital during the civil war of the Nineties, opens with a cellist sitting by a window. He is playing Albinoni's Adagio while outside a queue of people wait to buy bread. Seconds later, a shell explodes in the marketplace and they are killed. The cellist stands at the window all night and all the next day. After 24 hours, he carries his cello down to the carnage-strewn street. He positions a stool in a crater and begins once again to play the Adagio. He goes on to do this every day for 22 days, one day for each victim.

Snipers in the hills overlook the shattered streets of Sarajevo.  But Arrow believes she's different from the snipers on the hills around the city. She shoots only soldiers.  But they kill unarmed civilians. Knowing that the next bullet could strike at any moment, the ordinary men and women below strive to go about their daily lives as best they can. Kenan faces the agonizing dilemma of crossing the city to get water for his family and neighbour.  He dare not take his household to help for fear they will be killed by the snipers. If he dies, what will happen to his family?

The last of Galloway's four characters, the baker Dragan, lives mostly in the past and, gripped by fear, does not know who among his friends he can trust. . He no longer knows which is the real Sarajevo: the one he sees today or the one in his memories, 'where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict'.

Galloway threads these individual stories together, narratives crisscrossing: three weeks in the lives of individuals struggling to survive as their beloved city is besieged. The characters of Arrow and the cellist are based upon real people, but in his examination of their feelings and motives, Galloway makes them his own. They are worn out with war, fearful of what will become of them and their loved ones. Only the cellist and his music brings hope - hope that mankind is still capable of humanity, that the old world is not completely lost, that the war has not destroyed everything. This short novel employs a sparse style with the simple prose of a short story.  Galloway's style is sparse, pared down; his prose has the deceptive simplicity of a short story.

Reading the book was an experience similar in some ways to that of reading Monsieur Linh and his Child.  People, emotionally wounded, trying to live their lives as if things were normal, when that is far from the case.  Such reads are made all the more powerful for the brevity with which the story is told.  They are gems of literature.


Sunday 5 June 2016

Last Days and Last Letters

Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China by David Kidd

I doubt I would have heard of this book were it not for the fact that David Bowie has it itemised on his list of 100 good reads.  And this list might not have come to my attention had not the death of David Bowie in January this year given rise to the publication of that book list.  There the book is listed as All The Emperor’s Horses .  What we know about the author is that he has taught Transcendental Meditation for twenty-eight years. He has been an environmental activist for nearly twenty-five years, and a vegetarian for thirty. He lives in Canton, Ohio.
From photographs in the book we can also see that Bowie carries a certain resemblance to Kidd.

Here is what Kirkus Reviews has to say about the novel, under the title of All the Emperor's Horses.  "Set in Peking during the first days of Mao's entry into official power, this is a personal, and delicate depiction of what to some is a disaster, to others a deliverance. The author, an American university professor, marries Aimee, the daughter of an ex-justice of the Chinese supreme court, just as the entire order from which springs her dignity and grace is receiving its death blow. Like the crumbling mansion so vital to Buddhist mythology, the palatial home of the Yus quickly succumbs as the various members of Aimee Yu's family go about finding a way of survival within the new order of things. The author, highly suspect as an American and as a member of the aristocratic Yu menage is, himself, subject to scrutiny and even arrest, although with comic rather than dire results. Throughout his ordeal he maintains a perspective on the situation which admits nostalgia, awe, and humour. David Kidd writes with restrained composure. The atmosphere he evokes is strong, exercising a poignant effect on the senses. He is discreet and despite the chain of lamentable events he reveals-- often with humour--one does not feel that a political judgment is being made. Here, rather, is a picture of a world in transition, a world which, under the scrutiny of the author, emerges rich, refreshing and real. "

Last Letters from Hav by Jan Morris was my choice to fulfil a category on the BookRiot Read Harder Challenge.  (Read a work either by or about a transsexual.)  Jan Morris is a  is a Welsh transgender historian, author and travel writer. Last Letters from Hav is a narrative account of the author's six-month visit to the fictional country of Hav.
The novel is written in the form of travel literature. The work is structured in an episodic format with each chapter corresponding to a month spent in Hav. Hav itself is imagined to be a cosmopolitan small independent peninsula located somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. The novel proceeds with little in the way of connecting plot but contains several episodes describing the author's subjective experience in Hav. The author narrates a string of evocative episodes including visiting a languid casino, a courteous man claiming to be the true Caliph, watching a city-wide roof race, and a visit to the mysterious British agency. The novel concludes with the author's invited visit to a strange ritual conclave where she observes several cowled men whom she thinks she might recognize as her acquaintances from her time in Hav. The author then recounts the rise of strange and ill-defined tensions in the country. The author decides to leave the country amidst the growing unrest. On the last line of the novel the author writes that she could, from the train station, see warships approaching on the horizon.

The title appeared on the Man Booker Shortlist as a work of fiction, which it is.  However such is the vivid account of the imagined Hav - just look at the book cover image - that the book really does have the feel of a travelogue, a first-hand account of the author's visit to that country. 


A Paris Wife, a Colourful Life.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

I was unfamiliar with the story of The Paris Wife, not having read A Moveable Feast which is Hemingway's memoir of the Paris he knew in days when he and Hadley were "very poor and very happy."  A Moveable Feast was written some 30 years after Hemingway left Hadley for her friend Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become the second of his four wives.

McLain's story opens in Paris, before an extended flashback in which Hadley remembers her early years in St Louis, her meeting with Hemingway, and their brief courtship. Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship they married in September 1921 and within months had moved to Paris, the magnetic centre of artistic life in the west in the 1920s, in part because it was comparatively cheap for expatriates just after the First World W. The young Hemingways were soon befriended by Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, James Joyce, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Modernism was taking flight: in February 1922 Sylvia Beach would publish Joyce's Ulysses, and in December 1922 TS Eliot and Pound published The Waste Land.


McLain's account is true to known facts, whilst at the same time she employs some fictionalisation.  She conjurs up the atmosphere of the garret apartments in which they lived; the notorious trip to Lausanne during which Hadley lost all of Hemingway's drafts, three years' work; the outings to the Paris races, skiing in Austria and bullfighting in Pamplona – the trips that would inspire The Sun Also Rises. It was an era of "open" marriages, although the openness was often one-sided.  McLain resists the facile idea that such ménages were a jolly party in the first era of free love: as Hadley gradually becomes aware that Hemingway might be unfaithful, first with Lady Duff Twysden, the inspiration for Brett Ashley, and later, much more seriously, with her friend Pauline, she must decide how "modern" she's prepared to be.

McLain portrays Hemingway's legendary charisma, whilst at the same time revealing his tendency to bully and boast.  But the book is principally about the Paris Wife and McLain attempts to flesh out her character by imagining Hadley's feelings, and depicting facets of her character. For example she describes Hadley's enjoyment of accompanying Hemingway to Spain to attend bullfights whilst at the same time sewing baby blankets between the fighting. .

The Paris Wife was popular with readers, and made the top of the New York Times best-seller list soon after its release in 2011.  Reviews however were mixed: Sarah Churchill of The Guardian and Helen Simonson, an Amazon reviewer,  praised the book.  The latter wrote "I loved this novel for its depiction of two passionate, yet humanly-flawed people struggling against impossible odds—poverty, artistic fervor, destructive friendships—to cling on to each other."  However the New York Times criticised McLain's characterisation of Richardson, writing, " She’s thick, and not just in physique. She’s slow on the uptake, and she can be a stodgy bore."

I came across a short biography of Hemingway by Anthony Burgess. In Ernest Hemingway and His World Burgess writes from a position of authority and brings insight into a life which moves from a happy childhood into the reality of the First World War, and later his experiences in the Second.  We learn of his literary life in 1920s Paris, his reporting of the Spanish Civil War and the excitements of African safari and finally to the sombre last years in Cuba. Hemingway was rich and successful from an early age, but yet public acclaim for his writing and even the Nobel Prize could not disguise the fact that he was a moody, suffering, and sometimes vicious figure -- a man who, in the view of Burgess, was finally unable to live with his own image.

 

Wednesday 1 June 2016

Women Betrayed by Men

The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge is the concise, tautly written narrative of a naïve, foolish and deluded young woman who believes she is being wooed by a soldier-boy.  Bainbridge is known for her psychological fiction, dealing with often macabre tales set among the English working classes.  She was five times nominated in the Booker Shortlist.

I so agree with what the novelist Mavis Cheek has to say in her Guardian review:  "Something has happened to novels in the past 40 years - they have got bigger and fatter and, perhaps, more self-consciously and weightily heroic. The lives of ordinary people showing the reader extraordinary things seem to have given way to big issues and big lives and more and more words. When I look at my bookshelves, I can only admire and envy the rows and rows of slim volumes published mostly between the 1950s and 70s: Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, John Wyndham, Iris Murdoch, Jean Rhys, Albert Camus, Edna O'Brien - each a perfectly crafted, fatless, wholly readable yet intellectually beguiling work of fiction. And sitting there, like queens among royals, are the novels of Beryl Bainbridge. Short little books with innocuous titles - A Weekend with Claude, A Quiet Life, Injury Time (surely one of the funniest books ever written), Winter Garden, Sweet William - all of them about 160 pages long. They are spare, sharp and disturbing."

In The Dressmaker the central character, Rita, is being brought up by her aunts, with her father known as Uncle Jack, in the background.  It is set in Liverpool during World War II and like others of Bainbridge's earlier novels is semi-autobiographical.  The story is in part inspired by a relationship that she had with a soldier as a teenager.  What makes The Dressmaker so readable is the author's ability to tell a good story in bleak and funny prose and yet ignorance, repression and narrow-mindedness cannot help but lead to tragedy. The novel was written at the beginning of the 70s, at a time when women were just beginning to break out of the repression, constraints and modest expectations that hitherto been placed upon them.

In Water, Carry Me, Una Moss, orphaned as a child and sent to live with her hard-drinking, blarney-spouting grandfather, manages to grow up sheltered from the violence all around her during the Troubles in a benighted Ireland  . She is vaguely aware of the hushed talk about politics and the cryptic comments her grandfather makes about her parents' accidental death. But, generally speaking, she's a normal, bright student with a circle of mischievous girlfriends, and a healthy obsession with boys. When Una meets Aidan, she is swept off her feet. He is solid and dependable, and he is in love with her. Or so she believes.   But Aidan, to Una's endless sorrow, is not whom she thinks he is. Water,Carry Me is a captivating novel of betrayal, set against the backdrop of contemporary Ireland. Ultimately the author, Thomas Moran, has created a heartbreaking story which even in the final pages the reader believes will come right in the end.




Conundrums and Intrigue in London Settings.


Loitering with Intent short novel by Muriel Spark was a lot of fun to read.  It is slow to build as it tracks the progress of Fleur Talbot who takes a job 'on the grubby edge of the literary world' as a secretary to the pompous and tetchy Sir Quentin Oliver, director of the Autobiographical Association - a group of eccentric egomaniacs working on their memoirs in advance.   At the same time Fleur is working on her own piece of fiction Warrender Chase.  "How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot marvels. Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur works at her job.  But when Sir Quentin, steals the manuscript of Fleur's new novel, fiction begins to appropriate life. The Association's members begin to act out scenes exactly as Fleur herself has already written them in her missing manuscript. And as they meet darkly funny, pre-visioned fates, where does art start or reality end? It is a delicious conundrum,"
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Capital by John Lanchester is also set in London and  poses another conundrum. Who is sending the postcards "We Want What You Have" to the residents of Pepys Road?  The author is a British free-lance journalist as well as novelist.   By way of a cast of characters depicting some sterotypes of our times Lanchester charts a time of tension and financial crisis in the city and the domestic dramas which are played out behind certain of the closed doors in Pepys Street.  It is a potted state-of-the-nation novel set on a single street in South London. In this 'big, fat London novel' Lanchester is writing a report on London in 2008, peopling it with fictional but precisely observed Londoners – a touch of Mayhew as well as Dickens, so writes Claire Tomalin in her review for The Guardian.