Monday, April 29, 2013

The Great Gatsby read-along - with Stephen Colbert!!! (and me)

Bibliohubby and I adore Stephen Colbert. We tape the Colbert Report every night and watch it religiously after Iggy has gone to bed. We complain loudly when he takes a break and the show is put on brief hiatus (we don't begrudge him his holidays, of course not, we just miss him terribly while he's away).  When we planned our last trip to New York, Bibliohubby spent months in advance of our touch-down hunting tickets to the show, and was ultimately - yay! - successful. So along we went, and came away even more impressed by his near-faultless live performance. The man is a genius.

(Also, we are convinced that if he could only meet us and get to know us a little, he would feel as strongly about us as we do about him and we would all become the best of friends and regularly invite each other over for dinner.)

We seriously considered asking him to become Iggy's godfather. Because, you know, he would definitely go for that, even though he's never met us personally and we live on the other side of the world. He just seems like such an all-round good guy, as well as sharing our political persuasions and being crack-up hilarious. Our favourite ever Colbert moment is what we like to call the Munchma Quchi moment. YouTube it, now. You'll see.

Anyway, my fandom only increased when he announced a reading challenge the other night (ostensibly as part of the inauguration of the O Colbert Book Club - a spoof on Oprah's book club). Viewers are encouraged to read The Great Gatsby before his show on 9 May, when he will be hosting Jennifer Egan (!!) and Baz Luhrmann to discuss the text, in anticipation of the launch of the movie.

Huzzah!

Anyone who started reading this blog at the beginning of the year, when it first started, and has stuck with it since (I'm not sure anyone exists who fits this description; if there is - Hello, you fool, I love you!) may remember that re-reading The Great Gatsby was one of my early goals for 2013. And now here we are; yet another reason to get to it. Also, since writing the first draft of this post I have discovered that The Great Gatsby is also The Guardian's May book club pick.

So I'm inviting all of you to join me. Or join Colbert. Or The Guardian. Whatever. Just read the book, watch the show, and then come back here* and tell me what you think / thought of Egan and Luhrmann and Colbert, and what you thought of the book. Fun!

* It occurs to me that there is a high likelihood that no one will take me up on this challenge. Unlike Colbert, I do not have an established fan base. But I will be discussing the book and the show anyway, so you may as well drop by to read that, in early May-ish. Assuming the birth of Baby hasn't thrown everything dramatically off-course by then, which it may well do seeing as today is the due date.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Sunday Salon - Book addiction and withdrawal



Last week Sophie Kinsella released a new book, called Wedding Night. I had pre-ordered it on Amazon and so it was automatically delivered to my Kindle on the release date.

I have written before about Sophie Kinsella, and the fact that she has also been published in the past under the name Madeleine Wickham (her real name). But I don't think I was sufficiently effusive in my praise of her comedic chick-lit writing, or open enough about my enthusiasm for her books.

A new Kinsella book for me is a bit like a shipment of drugs for an addict. That may sound extreme, but here is what happened when the book arrived on my Kindle: I opened it up that evening, started reading, and more or less did not stop reading until I finished the book a day later (except when I was forced to, like to pay attention to my son or to cook dinner for Bibliohubby). I stayed up late in the night and read in the dark, I read while the TV was on, I read in between the chopping stages of my cooking, I read while I lay next to Iggy encouraging him to sleep (I am an excellent multi-tasker).

And the strange thing is, I'm not sure it even made me happy. I mean, I enjoyed the book immensely, as I do with all of hers. It made me laugh out loud in places, and chuckle in others, and I was fully absorbed from beginning to end. But the thing with this kind of obsessive reading is that it feels obsessive. It feels like an addiction. Which means that sometimes, whilst reading, I knew that I should be doing other things, or that overall I might enjoy my day more if I spent a bit of time outside - but I was tethered to this book. It was such a strong compulsion it felt like my freedom was being compromised!

And further, when things were not going well for the characters, it affected me emotionally. When I was interrupted in my reading, it genuinely upset me.

I think Bibliohubby finds it quite odd - and rather disconcerting - that my grumpy mood can be caused by something as ephemeral as a novel! But it can. And it was.

And then, I finished the book. This came with a weird kind of release - ahh, I will now have time to do other things! I can re-focus my eyes and get up from the couch and walk from one room to the next without dragging my Kindle along with me. Of course, alongside the relief was a sense of real loss - the characters and the life I had actually been living, alongside my own life, for the past 24 hours, were gone. What would occupy my imagination now? All of a sudden I was released back into my reality of waiting, waiting, waiting for this baby to come.

So tell me - am I an oddity? Is it very strange that I occasionally get so involved in a book that the borders between fiction and my reality start to blur? Am I the only one who suffers from withdrawal when a particularly absorbing book is finished? Tell me I'm not crazy!


Thursday, April 25, 2013

Maggie O'Farrell - The Hand That First Held Mine

After I finished work, in a stressful sprint to the finish line, I found that my brain had temporarily stopped working. Or like my Russian obstetrician with the bedside manner of a KGB henchman said to me yesterday, "very leetle brain activity". So anyway, I needed something lighter to read, and a friend of mine recommended the fiction of Maggie O'Farrell - well-written chick lit, she said. And I like chick lit, but I do require that it is well-written, so this seemed to fit the bill. Then I read an article in The Guardian that said this book, The Hand That First Held Mine, marked O'Farrell's transition from chick lit to big 'L' Literature. Hm. Not so sure about that.

It is true that Maggie O'Farrell writes well, although her style is not  always to my taste. Occasionally, in this book, she writes from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who is self-consciously standing on the outside of the action, looking in - like the Morgan Freeman narration of an epic film. For me, this doesn't work so well; I would always prefer to be caught up in the action, and the occasional plot give-aways handed out by the narrator seemed unnecessary - and sometimes even jarring.

The Hand That First Held Mine follows two different storylines which eventually collide in a way that, by that point, comes as no surprise to us readers. The rebellious Lexie Sinclair runs away from her suburban childhood home to settle in London where she leads a glamorous life in 1950s bohemian London. She becomes an art critic under the guiding hand of Innes Kent, the star editor of a ground-breaking arts magazine. After tragedy strikes her life for the first time, Lexie leads a complicated existence involving several love affairs, one of which leaves her with a son to whom she is entirely devoted.

Elina and Ted are a modern-day couple, dealing in today's London with a newborn and the aftermath of a traumatic caesarian birth. As Elina gradually recovers from the temporary memory loss incurred by that trauma, she finds her relationship challenged when Ted starts suddenly to remember things from his childhood that are not in keeping with the memories he has always had about his own family.

Whilst O'Farrell's experienced hand kept me reading from beginning to end,  it took me a while to develop any significant interest in the story. I wasn't quite sure why I was supposed to care about these characters. When it started to become clear how the two disparate storylines were connected, my interest grew and I did want to know how things would work out, how the characters would be brought together, what would happen.

In the end the storylines were deftly woven together and I found the book ultimately satisfying. However, I wouldn't necessarily say it was memorable.

Admittedly O'Farrell might have suffered by comparison, in that my reading recently has focused on writers like Edward St Aubyn and Jennifer Egan. At the end of The Hand That First Held Mine I still wasn't quite sure why I should care about this story; it was diverting, and an enjoyable read, and I know that should be enough - but I have been spoiled, recently, by writers whose story-telling is matched by their ability to explore broader themes, and I missed that, here. I wonder whether that is also what separates big 'L' literature from genre fiction. A topic for another time.

Overall assessment: 3 out of 5. It was a good distraction, this read, and I would recommend Maggie O'Farrell if you are looking for well-written women's fiction to pass the time.

Monday, April 22, 2013

P. D. James - Death Comes to Pemberley



I am not a fan of spin-off fiction - unless there is a good reason for it, like writing back to the Empire, turning the political tables. In Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, Jean Rhys uses Jane Eyre as a starting point from which to launch her political and philosophical tirade - which is all the more powerful because it is written on the tableau of a canonical work. This I do not object to; far from it, in fact, I celebrate it.

But generally speaking, I have no time for those writers who attempt 'sequels' of books written by other (usually long-dead) authors, trying, no doubt, to profit from the immense popularity of the earlier work even though they had nothing to do with its creation. Nor am I a fan of satirical fiction such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I know this sounds pompous, but as a student of literature, I just can't bring myself to go there. I promise you, I am more fun in real life than this makes me sound.

So it is with some surprise that I find myself writing this review of P. D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley, which, as the title suggests, is a crime novel set in and around the home of Mr and Mrs Darcy - yes, the very same Elizabeth and Darcy of Pride and Prejudice fame. My mother, who also is not inclined towards reading faux-sequels or mock-satire, gave this book to me a year or so ago. It sat on the shelf until early this year, when for some reason I picked it up and flicked through, and became immediately absorbed in the early pages, during which James describes the relationship between Mr and Mrs Darcy, as they now are, as spouses, parents, master and mistress of Pemberley. I have to admit that, for anyone who loves Pride and Prejudice as much as I do, it was thrilling to get an insight (fictional though it is), of their life together. James does this well at the beginning of the book, so much so that one imagines she herself is a huge Austen fan who has spent time day-dreaming about whatever happened to the Darcys after Pride and Prejudice finished. I particularly loved the descriptions of Elizabeth's days spent in the Pemberley library, of Darcy's gradual education of her in the ways of books she might otherwise never have had access to, of the close relationship that has developed between Mr Bennett and Mr Darcy as they add to the Pemberley library and help the Bingleys create their own, proper library. It was like getting an Austen fix that I thought would never be available, and so I was won over, early on.

Unfortunately, the magic stopped there, and it has taken me a good three months to get through the rest of the book. I have no doubt that P. D. James is a brilliant crime writer. Sadly this particular mystery failed to capture my imagination. I think the problem was partly that all of the characters populating the novel are already developed at the beginning of the book - we know Elizabeth and Darcy, and Jane and Bingley, and Wickham, and it's clear that James doesn't want to interfere with characterisation that was perfected by Austen and has been lauded by literary types for years ever since. So there is a static feeling to this book. None of the characters behave against type, none of them hold any surprises for us.  And yet - isn't that the point of a mystery novel, really? That some people occasionally will behave in a very unexpected way, when put in particular situations?

And maybe it is my pregnancy-addled brain, but I didn't get any of the clues along the way so I didn't derive the usual satisfaction one hopes for from books in this genre. I never thought "Oh, I bet I know who it is! I bet it's so-and-so!". I didn't really end up caring terribly whodunnit, and by the time the truth eventually came out at the end I had to flick back through the pages to figure out who was who and how the pieces fit together. This was obviously partly because I took so much time - and distracted time, at that - to read the book, but it was also because the mystery in and of itself didn't pique my interest.

So I felt, really, that James had set out to do two things: continue the story of Pride and Prejudice, in some way, and tell a good mystery / crime story, and that she ended up doing neither well.

Overall assessment: 2 out of 5. James writes well, and it was nice to be back at Pemberley again. Sadly her use of a pre-existing cast prevented her from developing her characters, and somehow stilted any excitement that might have been created around the murder mystery central to the book.

Hello hello!

Apologies to any regular readers for my brief hiatus. With no notice whatsoever (as is typical with these things), our home internet conked out in the same week that I finished work to go on maternity leave. So it's been a week and a half for me with no internet access, save for on my phone - which is fine for checking emails but not so great for writing blog posts.

For Bibliohubby, the loss of internet for any period of time is akin to losing a limb. I'm not keen either, but at least I have been able to keep busy as I sit and wait for this new little bub to show up in our lives, by trying to get vaguely organised during the three days each week when Iggy is in daycare. A week ago the new baby had no bed, no drawer space allocated to her sweet little pink clothes, and I had no hospital bag packed. Now, less than a week away from my due date, I feel like we may be able to cope if she turns up tomorrow.


Tiny weeny bed ready for our little girl


A few books read or finished in the meantime, too, so stay posted for new reviews coming soon. 

Thanks for your patience.


Sunday, April 14, 2013

Sunday Salon: The books I didn't finish



It is very rare for me to start something and not finish it; and particularly rare for me to pick up a book which I don't finish. I usually push through until the end, even if I have decided halfway through that I'm not thrilled by it. It might take me longer to read it, I might take a break and read other things in and around a book I'm struggling with - but I almost always come back and finish it eventually.

Having said that, there are a small number of books that I will list here, which I stopped reading partway through and am unlikely to ever go back to. For some reason this occurred to me recently, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Mainly, the subject makes me wonder whether the books I don't finish reading say anything about me as a person. So let's see...

1. D. B. C. Pierre - Vernon God Little

A book by an Australian writer which won the Booker Prize in 2003, Vernon God Little is about a teenager in Texas who is scapegoated at school when his best friend commits suicide having killed 16 classmates in a shooting spree. He then goes on the run to Mexico.

I know that last bit of my synopsis only by reading summaries on other sites. I never got deep enough into the novel to know what happens to the protagonist.

Why did I pick it up? There was hype around this book, and it won the Booker. People raved about it.

Why did I put it down? Quite honestly, I couldn't get past the narrator's voice. I know, I know - it's meant to be clever and original and John Carey, Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University, said that "reading Pierre's book made me think of how the English language was in Shakespeare's day, enormously free and inventive and very idiomatic, and full of poetry as well."

Well, I found it contrived, difficult to read, and filled with anger and hate in a way that made it difficult to sympathise with any character sufficiently to inspire me to put the effort in to get past the roadblock of the language.

Interestingly, Pierre's second book was not well received, and one of the objections critics had was the language. Ludmila's Broken English is apparently written in broken English - but not deliberately. I'm not saying his Booker for Vernon was not well deserved, but perhaps the unusual narrative voice Pierre adopted for it hid a host of sins. Or maybe he was just less focused the second time around, who knows.

What I do know is that this book did not feel like it was written by a nice person. I didn't want to spend any time with the narrator, the protagonist, the author - and that is not something that is ever likely to change. This is the book I feel surest about - I will never go back and finish it. And I'm also fairly certain that if I ever met D. B. C. Pierre in person, we would not get along.

2. Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

This makes me wonder whether I have an aversion to reading about mass shootings, at least from the perspective of the perpetrator or the perpetrator's friends / family. Because here is another book about a school massacre, written in the wake of Columbine.

Why did I pick it up? Again, this is a book that was met with enormous critical acclaim. It won the 2005 Orange Prize. Unlike Vernon God Little, however, I feel badly about not having finished this one. It is often raised and discussed, and I think the premise is fascinating. This story is told from the perspective of the mother of a boy who kills his father and his sister before opening fire on classmates and a teacher at his school.

The intriguing question explored here is whether a killer is made or born. The mother has felt throughout her son's life that he is antagonistic towards her. The readers are given information throughout which could be interpreted in two ways: Kevin is an innate sociopath, or Kevin's mother has never loved him properly, which has caused him to exhibit sociopathic tendencies. Kevin's father, Francis, believes in his son throughout because Kevin behaves differently in front of him. I think - though I don't know from firsthand reading experience - that the readers are kept wondering about the truth until the very end of the novel, and even then there is room for interpretation.

Why did I stop reading this one? I find it harder to express my aversion to this book than I did with Vernon. I like Shriver's writing. But I didn't sympathise with Kevin's mother. I was uncomfortable with the feelings she had about her son, and felt that she was a cold person - and this was before I myself became a mother. I have a feeling it would be even harder for me to read this now, having become the mother of a young boy since first laying it to rest.

On a plane last year I saw the first half of the movie that was made of this book, starring the amazing Tilda Swinton, and it was incredibly chilling but also 100% absorbing. Unfortunately the plane landed before I could watch the end of the film and I would actually like to see the rest of it one day - in lieu of reading the rest of the book, perhaps.

3. Lionel Shriver - The Post-Birthday World

And... weirdly, another Lionel Shriver. As I said, I like her writing - so this is odd. I think she just makes me feel uncomfortable, though I'm not sure whether that is because she picks difficult subjects to write about or because of the way she chooses to write about those subjects.

Why did I pick this up? My mum was reading it and I thought it looked interesting. This is a very original book, written in a bi-fold manner, about a woman who has been married to the same man for a long time and contemplates an affair. Alternating chapters tell the story of what happens if she does have the affair, and what happens if she doesn't have it - a kind of Sliding Doors scenario.

Why did I stop? I got about halfway through this and then had to stop because it made me feel very depressed. It resonated with me on a personal level and it was written in such a real way that I found it confronting. The relationship between the protagonist and her husband reminded me of a relationship I had experienced in the past, which ended badly, and reading this was like going back to that time - it brought back all of the feelings from that time and, having moved on, I really didn't want to have to deal with those feelings again.

I suppose you could say this is a real strength of Shriver's storytelling, that I found two of her books so confronting, though in very different ways, that I had to put them down. But here, like in We Need to Talk About Kevin, part of the problem was that I didn't very much like the narrator, and so there was little reason to go back to the book when the story was getting me down.

Conclusions?

So, are there any conclusions I can draw from this trio?

If there is a commonality, it appears that lack of sympathy with the narrator is the most likely cause I will stop reading a book. There must be other problems with it too, but if on top of those issues I also do not feel bonded to the narrator for one reason or another, I probably won't go back to read the rest of the novel.

When I say lack of sympathy let me clarify: I don't have to love a narrator. I am all for tragic flaws. But something about them must compel me to want to hear their voice, to live with that voice in my head for a few days. And if that's not there, well - unless there are other compelling reasons for me to keep reading, it is awfully tempting to put the book aside in favour of another. There is so much to read, after all!

What about you? Are there any books that you have given up on, or do you always push through to the end? Can you find a common cause to your unfinished reads?


Thursday, April 11, 2013

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Jennifer Egan - Look at Me



So, I turned back to Egan as promised in order to determine whether she really does hold a place as one of my favourite female writers, whether A Visit from the Goon Squad was her literary highlight, whether her voice in more traditional story-telling mode is as magnetic.

Look at Me is a hugely ambitious book. It is beautifully written and plot-driven, but it also acts as an in-depth exploration of larger themes and philosophical questions, particularly over the nature of identity, and the modern prioritisation of image at the expense of authenticity.

Egan took six years to write this book and it shows; it is populated with a large cast of characters, each taking turns in the narrative spotlight, and each illustrating Egan's theme from a new perspective.

Really, though, this is a tale of two Charlottes.

Charlotte Swenson is a 35 year-old model whose face has been wrecked in a car accident and whose reconstructive surgery leaves her with a face so different from her old one that nobody recognises her. Charlotte is an enigma. She is consumed by the desire to succeed in the public eye, to enter what she calls "The Mirrored Room", that elite space reserved for those in our modern society who have obtained a glorified celebrity status - the rich and famous, the beautiful. Her ticket in, before the accident, was her beauty, her face. Although she never made it to the realm of true, stratospheric stardom, she was close enough to be considered 'one of the beauties' on a circuit of wealthy hotspots around the world and in the exclusive nightclubs of New York City. But there is a deeper side to Charlotte, revealed in her ability to glimpse people's 'shadow selves' - their true selves, their real identity, which most people take great pains to hide from the world in favour of what they want the world to see. After her accident Charlotte also starts seeing the 'shadow self' of Manhattan - old signs, hidden behind modern buildings, still plastered on old brick walls, representing a bygone era. Interestingly, these glimpses of the past soothe Charlotte, who otherwise seems so preoccupied by flashy facades.

After realising that her new face means she will never succeed again at modelling, Charlotte finds a new way to sell her soul - to a dot com start-up. Extra/Ordinary commoditises lives on the internet, in an attempt to capture reality and expose it for the masses to see. Inevitably, the 'life' represented online is a departure from reality rather than its essence - it is manufactured, with the manufacturing done by other people: ghost writers, film directors, 'experts'. Even as she achieves the kind of success that she has always dreamed of, Charlotte becomes deeply uncomfortable with the artifice of her manufactured life. She has sold her soul to gain entry to the mirrored room, which she ultimately recognises for what it is: an arbitrary space filled with empty, superficial people, "chimeras... the hard, beautiful seashells left behind long after the living creatures within have struggled free and swum away". She finally realises this is not what she wants, after all, and it thus becomes clear that the loss of Charlotte's face in fact marked the start of her painful journey towards authenticity.

Charlotte Swenson's life is played out against the life of another Charlotte, a high school girl who lives in model-Charlotte's hometown. Young Charlotte suffers at school because of her plain looks and her initial unwillingness to play the games that characterise some of the more shallow social interactions between teenagers. She is a strong young woman with a fierce sense of her own independence and self-worth, traits which have no doubt been developed in response to her younger brother's struggle with leukaemia and her parents' understandable preoccupation with their son's well-being. As she distances herself from her cliquey school and her popular friends, young Charlotte finds herself increasingly drawn to two men. One is her uncle, Moose, who battles against a madness caused by an epiphany he had years earlier, in which he recognised the past as ever-present behind the superficial trappings of modern day America - much as model-Charlotte sees the shadow-self of New York City behind its new facade. Moose's x-ray vision, however, has led him to believe that the modern structures of current-day society, which hide beneath them the true history of America, spell the doom of humanity. He is frustrated by his inability to relay this vital doomsday message to anybody else and hopes that young Charlotte might be his protege, teaching her obsessively about the history of their small town in the hope that her own epiphany lies around the corner.

The other man in young Charlotte's life is a mysterious maths teacher called Michael West, who is not from the West at all, but who arrived in America from somewhere far East with the intent of destroying America, or some part of it. Michael West believes, upon arriving in the States, that the intoxicating images that are exported from the USA to the world, of beautiful women in night clubs and tall buildings made of steel and glass, and the global dissemination of these artifices through ubiquitous fast food and Hollywood movies, are signs of an American conspiracy to take over the world through eroding the authenticity and cultural reality of other places. It is not until he arrives in America that he is gradually lulled into the peaceful acceptance that there is no conspiracy. Americans themselves, he realises, believe in the images they project, and they are too drugged by the artifice to recognise the danger these represent to the rest of the world.

A South African friend of mine once said that the secret to world peace was a backyard and a two car garage - that once people were relatively happy with their lot in life they were far less likely to go and fight wars. Michael West's desire to destroy America dissolves as he gradually absorbs the American life, even going so far as to adopt a layer of fat over his taut physique from ingesting McDonald's, that iconic symbol of American imperialism. He comes to realise that he can be a part of the image he had previously so despised, and that this is a much easier way to live than maintaining his struggle against the artifice and a rage so intense it has caused him to walk out on marriage after marriage, life after life.

Young Charlotte, fighting against the perceived importance of beauty that is the reality at American high schools, feels a kindred tie to both of these men, but does not consciously recognise why she is drawn to them. She is looking for something but cannot explain even to herself what that is.When her own beauty gradually emerges - through the artifice, of course, of well-applied make-up and (like Clark Kent into Superman) the removal of her glasses - she finds the complications of trying to live like her Uncle, or emulating the secrecy and just-suppressed rage of Michael West, too difficult. What she most wants, after all, is what all high school students ultimately want: to fit in, even if that is at the expense of their true selves.

In direct contrast to model-Charlotte, she moves from determinedly gripping onto reality and actively pursuing authenticity, to embracing shallow artifice.  Like Charlotte, though, the vehicle for her transformation is her face, in this case the adoption of a false one which allows her to sink easily into the contrived homogeneity of a high school crowd.

The various storylines of this book eventually collide and we are left with a scathing view of modern society, and a dire prediction for the near future, a future which has, to a large extent, already come to pass since the publication of the book in 2001. With the advent of Facebook, the rise and growth of reality TV, the obsession with sharing our lives with the world through Twitter, Instagram and so on - much of what Egan seems to be warning against in Look at Me has already happened. I wonder whether she now feels that it is too late for the world.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I really enjoyed this book, but somehow it hasn't touched me as deeply as I think it should, given the subject matter. One reason for this may be the ending, which for me didn't quite come together with the emotional impact it could have, or should have. The project may have been overly ambitious. Many clever parallels are drawn between the two Charlottes that don't quite add up - model-Charlotte's obsession with 'Z' and young-Charlotte's obsession with Michael West, for example, mark a mid-point in both of their journeys where they were in the same place, emotionally, though moving in opposite directions on their journeys to/from authenticity. But this doesn't hit home for readers in any significant sense because the story is too big.

Pros / favourite part(s): Egan's writing is beautiful; I highlighted large sections of text simply to remind myself later how extraordinarily apt were her metaphors, how unusual her capacity to describe ordinary things in a way that made them somehow extraordinary. Her writing reminds me in some ways of Jonathan Franzen's, or perhaps it is the other way around - they certainly share some similarities. Her story-telling is for the most part gripping, and reminds me in places of Anne Patchett's. It is safe to say that Egan does now hold a position in my library as one of my favourite female writers.

There were scenes in this book that gave me chills. For example, soon after returning to New York post-accident, model-Charlotte thinks she still has a chance to succeed in the modelling industry when she is offered a photo shoot with Italian Vogue.  Paparazzo turned fashion photographer Spiro is at the helm, having become an instant sensation after a shoot replicating gang violence, which has spawned a trend in fashion photography for photographing 'real' people 'from the news', rather than mere models. All seems to be going well until the make-up artist takes out a razor blade and it becomes clear that, in this shoot, authenticity is to be won through actually cutting the models and recording their fresh blood. Charlotte, with her fragile, newly recovered face, a face put back together with 80 titanium screws, refuses to go through with it - only to be told that she 'doesn't get it', she's not real enough. She is replaced on set by a real refugee of North Korea, a girl so empty of power that she cries silently as the razor blade slides across her cheek.

As Egan writes towards the end of the book, reality, or truth, is something that burrows further inside a dark, coiled privacy when the light of publicity is shone on it - "it dies the instant it is touched by light" because "life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes". Moments like these were deeply touching.

Cons: The ending is disappointing. I feel as though Egan had wanted to write a climax in which all of the strands of her story came together powerfully, in one momentous scene (like the ending of John Irving's A Prayer from Owen Meany, one of my favourite books), but it didn't quite work. For one thing, the life of model-Charlotte somewhat outshone that of young Charlotte, and so it was difficult to see them or treat them as two sides of a coin, which I think they were meant to be. Young Charlotte's transformation did not seem nearly as meaningful as the transformation of model-Charlotte, which was perhaps a result of the fact that Moose and Michael West to some extent took over as minor protagonists of their own in her story.

I still finished the book feeling it had been a very good read, and a fascinating one at that - but I was also left thinking that at the time of publication, Egan's potential as a story-teller was yet to reach its zenith. Perhaps the Pulitzer-prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad is that zenith, or perhaps it is still to come. I hope for the latter.

Note: Egan suffered upon release of this book because it came a few short months after 9/11, though she had finished the writing of it well before that tragedy. The terrorist character of 'Z' in this book is therefore sometimes seen as outdated, and she has written a note at the end of the book to explain the reason for this. For my part, I wasn't irked by my awareness of intervening events in America, although it does date the book. American readers might feel differently.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Edward St Aubyn - Some Hope

I hope this isn't too boring for all of you. Once I find an author I like, I can be like a dog with a bone - I like to read through a number of their books immediately,  until I am familiar enough with their work to know if I will want to buy the next-released book as a matter of course, or whether the book I read first was a stand-out anomaly. So I emerged from Edward St Aubyn's explosive Bad News and turned immediately and greedily to his next Patrick Melrose book, Some Hope. I do promise that I will pick up a different writer next, to prevent this blog from becoming exclusively St Aubyn-themed!
This novel opens on Patrick Melrose in his 30th year. I now feel that it would be accurate to describe at least the first three parts of this five part series as the story of Patrick and his relationship with his father. Although his father is dead by the time the second novel begins, the personhood of Patrick throughout his life is obviously shaped by his feelings about his father. In this third instalment, we see Patrick clean, after successfully battling his addictions through numerous stints in rehab, still miserable, trying to find a way somehow to make peace with his dead father so that he can move on and, perhaps, find a way after all to live a useful life.

The backdrop to all of this internal strife is the gathering of various guests for a grand party at a country estate, in honour of Princess Margaret. St Aubyn here returns to the omniscient third narrator he used in Never Mind, and again uses it with wild abandon - the first half of the book leaps around to so many different characters that I found it quite difficult to remember who was who, and started wishing I had kept notes to remind myself. I actually think this would have helped my reading. As it was, I read this far more slowly than I did the first two books, with less absorption. But in the end it didn't matter - eventually the plot coalesced and the description of the party itself is a riotous read, rife with the colourful depictions of grotesque English upper-class arrogance that were so successful in the first book of this series. Really the success of these books is the ability St Aubyn has of defining and commenting so astutely on an entire class and country of people whilst keeping readers meanwhile occupied with the intriguing but smaller story of just one member of this class. As it stands, the Patrick Melrose series is a scathing indictment of the British upper class and what it represents, and how archaic, ineffectual and irrelevant it now is. In this book, St Aubyn flirts with controversy by including royalty in his critique. Princess Margaret is painted as a fatuous, mean-spirited megalomaniac - not very different from many of the other attendees at the party - and I felt as I read the account of her that St Aubyn had probably got it spot-on.

At times while I was reading this I thought nothing much was happening - but then I finished it and realised that actually tons had happened. Patrick determines that perhaps one way of dealing with his past is to be truthful about it, to talk about it, and he takes the giant step of confessing to his great friend Johnny Hall what happened to him as a child. Whilst this doesn't immediately heal all, it does help Patrick realise that forgiveness, something that has been eluding him for years, might not be necessary after all; perhaps a simple acknowledgement and acceptance of the person his father was, and of what had shaped him, was enough. Various characters from the previous two novels in the series return, some quite surprising. Bridget, who was a pretty but common girl brought along to France as the sexual plaything of the contemptible Nicholas Pratt (and so he is) in the first book, reappears after a society marriage as the hostess of the chic party central to Some Hope. Her husband, Sonny Gravesend, has been having an affair that everyone knows about and which will come to a head at the party itself. One of Patrick's acquaintances from the drug years returns in a very unexpected cameo. And the French ambassador to England has an embarrassing and very public moment when he accidentally spills sauce from the dinner he is eating over Princess Margaret's dress and is required by Her Highness herself to kneel before her and clean it up, in front of everybody.

Critics have compared St Aubyn's brilliantly sardonic comic writing to Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene - or an English Philip Roth. Certainly he has a sensational power to paint vivid pictures in the mind, and to draw memorable characters. It is increasingly clear as the series progresses that St Aubyn is also deeply interested in the notion of identity, what it means and where it comes from. Patrick is the perfect vehicle within which to explore this theme, and I look forward to seeing where he takes us next. At the end of this book we are left - as the title would suggest - feeling that there might be some hope for Patrick after all.

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5 - not quite the same level, for me, as the earlier two novels in this series, but fascinating nonetheless, and certainly this book does not detract from the genius of the enterprise as an entirety.

Pros / favourite passages: Patrick's obsession with and difficulty escaping from the legacy of his father is brilliantly portrayed. "The memory of his father still hypnotized him and drew him like a sleepwalker towards a precipice of unwilling emulation." "He wanted to break into a wider world, to learn something, to make a difference. Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent." "How could he find any firm ground when his identity seemed to begin with disintegration and go on to disintegrate further? But perhaps this whole model of identity was misconceived. Perhaps identity was not a building for which one had to find foundations, but rather a series of impersonations held together by a central intelligence, an intelligence that knew the history of the impersonations and eliminated the distinction between action and acting." "What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?"

On telling the truth about what happened to him as a child: "But which words could he use? All his life he'd used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe. How could they avoid being noisy and tactless, like a gaggle of children laughing under the bedroom window of a dying man?"

Cons: The narration here moved awfully quickly and for me prevented a full surrender to the story until quite late in the book.

Also, and this is not really a con, but an observation of something I find troubling: these people are awful towards their children! After the wry observations by David Melrose and Nicholas Pratt in Never Mind, here Bridget represents stiff-upper-lip British parenting: she leaves her young child with a brutal nanny and refuses to spend time with her. She is also awful towards her own mother, which, as a mother myself, I found somewhat hard to believe - if there is anything motherhood teaches you, it is how much you owe your own parents! Interestingly St Aubyn uses the notion of attentive parenting to define Bridget's turn-around towards the end of the book: when she finally, bravely decides to walk out on her appalling husband (at least temporarily), she takes her daughter with her, and her mother, leaving the nanny behind. Perhaps there is hope here, too, although what is fascinating is that this move simultaneously represents a return from upper-class society back to the common origins from which Bridget stems. As though St Aubyn is telling us that belonging to the upper crust of British society is mutually exclusive with real emotion, with genuinely close family relations, with loving one's children.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Sunday salon - e-books vs 'real' books




Happy Easter everyone! I thought I would honour the long weekend (several days late, as it happens - sorry about that!) with an appropriately significant discussion: the Big One, or at least a part of it. I have been thinking about this topic for a long time, but was initially reluctant to visit it here because I have so many complicated feelings about e-books and I know that these emotions will likely get in the way of any objectivity I might lend to the topic. There are a lot of different discussions to be had about e-reading but here I want to talk about preferences - whether I prefer, and whether you prefer, reading electronically or on paper.

Here's the thing: I get mad when people tell me print books are dying. It upsets me because the physical books that I own are probably my most treasured material possessions (after family photographs). I have been collecting books since I can remember. I still own the books I read as a child, my Enid Blytons and Joan Aikens and Judy Blumes, and I can't wait to share these with my own children. The thought of sitting Iggy in my lap and reading to him from my old edition of The Magic Faraway Tree fills my heart with joy. My brother still owns the treasured hardback copies of The Hardy Boys series that my father kept from his own childhood, and which my brother and I both tore through voraciously when we were young. Bibliohubby knows that if he wants to get me a special gift, hunting down a signed first edition of one of my favourite books is guaranteed to bring a giddy smile to my face. When I was at University, my room had piles of books teetering in every corner of the room, and I returned from every bookshop sale laden with yet more brown bags of books. Numerous men over the years have loudly complained whilst helping me move about the sheer number of boxes filled with brick-like tomes that they were required to carefully shift from one apartment to another. And as you all know, one of the things I love to do whilst traveling is visiting bookshops in the towns we visit, perusing the shelves to see whether there is a treasure somewhere, waiting to be found.

The walls of our living room are lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves, and there are bookshelves also in the study, the bedroom and the nursery. And the kitchen has a special shelf for cookbooks.

Books are precious to me.

So it might seem odd that I was one of the early adopters of the e-reader. I was thrilled to get an Amazon Kindle for Christmas when they first came out, five or so years ago. Our family is spread all over the world and we have always traveled. After too many trips lugging kilograms of books from country to country, loathe to part with them even once they had been read, I could see the appeal of a single device that allowed me to carry more books than ever before with no additional weight. It was a matter of practicality.

Over the years, I have developed greater appreciation for the e-reader and the e-book. Electronic reading is convenient for travel, yes, that assumption has been borne out, but even at home I have now started reading e-books. My new Kindle with its backlight makes for particularly convenient night-time reading. The Kindle app allows me to check in and read on my phone when I have nothing with me at all, no book, no e-reader (I should add that these moments are rare, as my habit of carrying a book everywhere I went started when I was very young  - you never know when you might be caught in a queue). The one-click page-turn saves me from needing two hands to read, a real bonus when I am also cooking, for example, or breastfeeding (which will soon be a concern all over again). And now that I am reviewing books, it is handy to be able to highlight sections and draft notes as I read, without needing to pull out a pen or a pencil and mark up delicate pages.

I also had a breakthrough a few weeks ago that I am loathe to admit here. I was reading Ian McEwan's new book, Sweet Tooth, which I had pre-ordered in hardback from Amazon. Because I was under pressure to read it quickly for a book club, I also purchased an e-book copy so that I could be sure I would have it with me wherever I was. After doing most of the reading electronically, I picked up the hardback on the weekend to finish it off. And... I found it very uncomfortable. The hardback was large and unwieldy and difficult to hold. It had a dustcover which kept coming loose and, being very pregnant at the moment, this was particularly frustrating when I lay on my bed to read, trying to find a position that was both comfortable for my belly and comfortable for holding the book. My hand got tired and after a while I ended up switching back to the e-reader. Outrageous!!

I have to say that this is really only a problem, though, with a hardback book, or with what I call 'the new hardback', those hardback-sized paperbacks that are too large to fit in a handbag (honestly, what is the point? What were you thinking, publishers??). Or, as fellow book- and lifestyle-blogger Trish (from Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity) points out, paperback tomes that are 1000+ pages. I have recently started reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and I don't think I would done so this year if it had required me to carry that massive book around with me. The ideal paper book for comfy reading is flexible and small enough to hold in one hand and fit in a regular-sized handbag. Given the choice, I would always prefer to read a real book in this kind of paperback form than an e-book.

But I have so many books in my collection that there is really no need for me to own copies of every book I now read. For example, I feel no desire these days to own copies of the lighter reads I pick up, the chick lit and romance I might read on a beach holiday. Novels that I am interested in from a literary perspective, books that stay with me, which might merit a re-read later in life - these are a different story. I still like to own them on paper, even if I have first read them electronically.

I was surprised to find that this behaviour, which I had wondered about and considered strange, is in fact consistent with the patterns of most e-readers. Digital bestseller lists are dominated by genre novels, like romance and thrillers. Like me, people tend to read 'airport fiction' on e-readers, but they still read literary fiction in paper form.

Interestingly, Nicholas Carr of the Wall Street Journal suggests that the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon would not have happened without e-books, because reading electronically allowed people, who otherwise might have been embarrassed to be seen reading the trilogy, to do so in public with no-one the wiser. So there is another benefit of an e-reader: public privacy, as it were.

But the results of a study done by Pew Research Centre earlier this year found that almost 90% of e-readers also continue to read physical volumes. I was very pleased to hear this. In other words, it is not that e-reading is replacing paper reading, but rather that the two seem to be co-existing - for now - and serving different purposes for the same people, as they do for me. E-reading is a complement to paper reading, much like audio books.

So there you have it. E-reading, thus far, has added to our reading options, rather than reducing them. As for me? I prefer e-books for travel, and for the purpose of reading genre fiction or 'big' books. Literary fiction, books that I treasure, I prefer to own in hard copy - either immediately or after first reading them electronically and discovering how much I love them. And for collecting? I prefer signed first-edition hardbacks, please!

What about you? Do you prefer the ease of an e-reader? Have you succumbed so completely to this new technology that you now read e-books exclusively? Or are you a traditionalist who refuses to pick up an e-reader? Or do you, like me, prefer one or the other depending on the book and the time? I am curious about other people's reading habits, so drop me a line and let me know!