What A Carve Up!

What A Carve Up! - Jonathan Coe
(US Title The Wimshaw Legacy)
(The US title of the film What a Carve Up! was No Place Like Homicide)

"Mum, I want to stay and see the end."

In this earlier post I explained how I and some others decided to read this together. Hopefully all have progressed and there will be  a bundle of posts over the next few days. I will link as I discover them.

Here's Jacqui at JacquiWine's Journal
Here's Guy at His Futile Preoccupations or The Years of Reading Aimlessly…..

How do you package anger and disgust, at yourself and the world you live in? Here is one answer, with a mixture of bile and belly laughs. Coe's book goes straight to the top table of comic novels that I have read, and is also one of the best political novels I have read. That's the gush done with, for now at least.

Coe parodies many styles, but it is mostly a cod gothic novel which reminded me of Cold Comfort Farm and Gormenghast. There are multiple narratives at play, all of which are pulled together by fantastical coincidences. Michael Owen, author of two moderately well received novels, is offered very attractive deal (any deal that involves money is attractive to a novelist!) to pen the history of the Wimshaw family for the vanity publishing firm Peacock Press. The rich, greedy Wimshaw's are almost all an odious crew, solely motivated by money. Their home, Wimshaw Towers, is a grim, gothic pile overseen by a 'gaunt, solemn' butler called Pyles. "As for the mad conglomeration of gothic, neo-gothic, sub-gothic and pseudo gothic towers which gave the house its name, they resembled nothing so much as a giant black hand, gnarled and deformed: its fingers clawed at the heavens, as if to snatch down the setting sun which shone like a burnished penny and would soon, it seemed, have descended inexorably into its grasp."

The Shipyard

The Shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti
(Translated by Nick Caistor)

"Many people swear they saw him that lunchtime in the dying days of autumn. Some claim he looked like his old self resurrected in the exaggerated way, almost caricatured, that he was trying to recapture the indolence, the irony, the sparse disdain of the postures and expressions he had employed five years before; they recall how keen he was to be noticed and identified, his two fingers ready to rise jerkily to the brim of his hat at the slightest hint of greeting, at any look which remotely suggested surprise at seeing him again. Others on the contrary remember him as indifferent, hostile, resting his elbows on the table, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, parallel to the drenched Artigas Avenue, as he peered into the faces of those coming in for no other reason than to keep a personal tally of loyalties and betrayals, acknowledging either response with the same easy, fleeting smile, the same involuntary twitch of the mouth."

Larsen, the focus of this novel, is banished from the city and his return is brief. On a journey to a nearby town he meets the "idiot girl" of local industrialist Jeremias Petrus and later gets a job managing the shipyard of the book's title. The shipyard is in an advanced and advancing state of decay and Larsen and the two other staff (Galvez and Kunz) who work there are involved in a sort of self-delusion that alone can give any meaning to turning up to plan for the future of a clearly ruinous and derelict facility. They are not paid, although they have contracts and nominal salaries. Ends are made to meet by selling off a load of the rusting equipment in the sheds to scrap merchants once a month. Galvez and Kunz live in the shipyard, Galvez with his pregnant wife in "an enlarged version of a dog kennel", Kunz in a "doorless, abandoned office, with wooden planks for walls."

Memory of Fire: Genesis

Memory of Fire, 1: Genesis - Eduardo Galeano
(Translated by  Cedric Belfrage)

Genesis is the first part of Galeano's ambitious and brilliant retelling of the history and mythstory of the American continent. Short, anecdotal passages jump from location to location, leapfrogging through time to build a picture of the civilisations that existed in pre-Conquistador America. It's a couple of months since I read Genesis and I stopped part way through the second book in order to complete some reading I had committed to. I hope to get back into it soon, as it has lived up to my high expectations so far, expectations raised by my reading of another of his books: Upside Down, A Primer for the Looking-Glass World.

A Scots Quair

A Scots Quair - Lewis Grassic Gibbon
(Sunset Song; Cloud Howe; Grey Granite)

This trilogy reminded me strongly of Thomas Hardy with it's powerful sense of the lives of the rural poor and the vagaries of fate. The books were written in the early 1930's in a poetic Scottish dialect and the action covers the years before, during and after the First World War. I became aware of them through the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Although popular in Scotland they had not previously attracted my attention. I'm glad they did. Indeed they are likely to meet with a surge in popularity as the great Terence Davies has just begun filming Sunset Song. The mix of tenderness and brutality he brought to the screen in Distant Voices, Still Lives would appear to be on the cards for a reprise.

Embers

Embers - Sándor Márai
(Translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

"A lamb was brought, a white lamb, and our host took his knife and killed it with a movement I shall never forget . . . a movement like that is not something one learns, it is an Oriental movement straight out of the time when the act of killing still had a symbolic and religious significance, when it denoted sacrifice. That was how Abraham lifted the knife over Isaac..."

Embers is set in the first half of the twentieth century. Much is set in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The two main protagonists are trained as soldiers and move in circles that intersect slightly with the circle of the King / Emperor. (King in Hungary and Emperor outside) The General, Henrik, is from a wealthy aristocratic Hungarian family and Konrad is the son of impoverished Polish Aristocrats who have had to sell much of their property and possessions to put their son through military academy.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

I lost this book mid-stream and so there was a large gap between starting and finishing it as I waited to find another copy. The book contains a lot of characters over a long period of time and the loss of my initial impetus affected my reading of the book. I was really enjoying it when I lost my copy and I don't think I quite reached the same level of enjoyment during my second bite, although I did enjoy it.

I have also lost some impetus in my blogging. I usually like to write within a few days of finishing, while my emotions while reading and the detail of the book are still fresh and alive. However, my blogging feels a little uphill at the moment and it is a few weeks since I finished this, and given the complexity of the books structure, that has involved a quick trawl through the book to refresh my failing memory. I never do this, and as I have typed out a load of  information such as the lengths of the chapters, the characters in each etc, I am going to use it in this post, just to impress myself. This may lead to SPOILERS so tread carefully.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie

I've been finding it difficult to gather the time and attention to read for the past few weeks and I thought I'd try something a bit lighter to try and get those pages turning for me again. It has been anything up to thirty years since I read any Agatha Christie but I did read a large number of her books in my early adolescence. I may or may not have read this one, at times it seemed familiar but familiarity is one of the reasons to read Christie.

Indeed I found myself reminded of other books from my childhood that I've recently been reading for my ten year old and that I probably read at around the time I was reading books by Christie - Enid Blyton, The Hardy Boys etc. Christie is far more sophisticated than these but there are many structural similarities. It moves swiftly from set up to denouement with the minimum of excess writing. At its heart is an England of leafy lanes and villages, upstairs and downstairs, gardeners and parlour-maids, with the addition of intrigue and murder most foul.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

""You know," Sammy said, "we're, uh, we've all been really worried ... about Hitler ... and the way he's treating the Jews and ... and all that. When they, when you were ... invaded ... My mom was ... we all ..." He shook his own head, not sure what he was trying to say."
They say that the first time is tragedy, the second time farce. The third time it's a soap and no matter how many times you repeat the operation the bubbles remains on top.

This is a book with a wide scope, vividly imagined scene and the acclaim for it was led by the Pulitzer committee, who awarded Chabon the prize, and Bret Easton Ellis, who called it one of the three great books by his generation. So if I seem vaguely nonplussed, I may well be wrong.

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

"Fortunately among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father. Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but he had won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages. He was a wealthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife. To crown it all he had taken two titles and had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars. And so although Okonkwo was still young, he was already one of the greatest men of his time. Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered."

I was around half way through this book when I heard the news of Chinua Achebe's death. It's the kind of thing that makes you feel connected to your reading, somehow. Things Fall Apart is certainly something to have left behind, fully deserving its reputation as one of the classics of twentieth century fiction. I was pulled into an unfamiliar world and the story of a pretty unsympathetic man but came away feeling I had been granted an extraordinary window into that world, and a greater understanding of the forces that make a man what he is.

The Kreutzer Sonata

The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy

"that only happens in novels"

The opening line of Anna Karenina is one of the most famous in literature. It is often brought out to illustrate the difficulty of writing about happiness, as if it could only occur within a framework of cliched mundanity. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

However the main character in The Kreutzer Sonata, Pózdnyshev, posits an opposing view, that all families (marriages at least) are unhappy, and that the differences are slight. Love, he says, is an illusion. "The husband and the wife merely deceive people by pretending to be monogamists, while living polygamously. That is bad, but still bearable. But when, as most frequently happens, the husband and wife have undertaken the external duty of living together all their lives and begin to hate each other after a month, and wish to part but still continue to stay together, it leads to that terrible hell which makes people take to drink, shoot themselves, and kill or poison themselves or one another..."

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll
(Translated by Leila Vennewitz)

"(since this is merely a report, not a judgement, we will confine ourselves to facts)"

I am delighted be posting on this book in parallel with Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos, one of the finest book bloggers out there. This is at the suggestion of Richard who noticed that I have been developing an interest in Böll - see my reviews of The Safety Net and Group Portrait with Lady. Being second to the punch I can tell you that Richard's three letter review on Twitter was 'meh', which will give you an idea of what his longer review is like.

The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

I find it hard to believe that it has been 24 years since this book came out and that it has taken me this long to get around to reading it. I guess my expectations of the book had been somewhat dampened at the time, having overheard conversations, one in particular where the quality of the book and Rushdie's own personality were called into question by people who, nevertheless were loudly condemning the Fatwa and defending Rushdie. Not that they should like the book, or Rushdie, to object to the Fatwa but it lowered my expectations. Which is a good way to approach a book.

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino

"You know the best you can expect is to avoid the worst."

As I read I tend to make notes of quotes which seem particularly interesting and may help me in this blogging enterprise. The problem with If On a Winter's Night a Traveller is that it would take me days to type out the quotes that I have noted. If you are interested in the process of writing or reading, or both as they are inextricably intertwined, this is a kind of motherlode.

Calvino starts down one road, doubles back on himself, sprays red herrings with abandon and refuses to let us continue the wild goose chases that he sets up over and over again. But all the time he keeps certain questions to the fore: Why do people read? Why do people write? What do books do? What are words? What are books? How are we drawn into a story? Is our need to have complete narratives now outdated? etcetera...

Prize Stock

Prize Stock -  - Kenzaburo Ōe
(from Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, a collection of "Four Short Novels by Kenzaburo Ōe".)

The second story in this collection, Prize Stock, is shorter than the first, only sixty pages long. It is narrated by a young boy, or should I say his older self, remembering. It is set in a small village in the woods, somewhat isolated from the nearest town. An american bomber crashes in the woods and the villagers capture the survivor, something that causes great excitement amoung the village children.
""He's black, you see that! I thought he would be all along." Harelip's voice trembled with excitement. "He's a real black man, you see.""

Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

(CAUTION! : SPOILERS)

"I asked the second in command, 'What's this place called?'
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantom's of those haunted late years began to take flight."
This passage is the gateway from the mess of wartime England into the narrator's youth between the wars, bathed in nostalgia. The prologue and epilogue are set in the narrator's (Charles Ryder's) present but we spend the majority of the time in the past, a past that is in danger of disappearing altogether.

Resolutions 20.13

Resolutions 20.13

My resolution for 2012 was to get through À la recherche du temps perdu and a shelf of books that I had set aside. After reading 85 books in 2011 I set a target of around 50, thinking that that would be realisable and taking the size of the Proust into account, and the fact that I was targeting a number of the longer books on my shelves. However I ended up only reading about thirty one books and apart from the Proust, skirting the longer books. (See my edited Resolutions 2012 post) I guess having a slightly crazed two year old (& four & ten year olds) in the house allowed less reading time. She will be slightly more self reliant this year but I'm not going to take it for granted. I've also found myself dozing off in the evenings and spending more time writing, on blog and off.

Hunger

Hunger - Knut Hamsun

This is a book that I approached wary of its great reputation but neither my wariness nor its reputation spoiled my appreciation. It seems to look backwards to Dostoievsky and forwards to Samuel Beckett. I also found parallels with Robert Wasler's Jakob Von Gunten, which I finished not long before this.
Both books deal with renunciation, although in Jakob Von Gunten the renunciation is deliberate but not successful whereas in Hunger it is successful but not deliberate.

White Teeth

White Teeth - Zadie Smith

Right at the start of this book we are shown that there will be some darkness in this light comedy of modern metropolitan life in London. We arrive "Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975" to witness the suicide attempt of Archie Jones, recently divorced. Smith loads this one image with religion, marriage and war, three of the big themes taken on in this big, sprawling, comic novel "He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel: scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage licence (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him." The image of the hoover tube which is to form a part of the failed suicide attempt stayed with me, it "lay like a great flaccid cock on his back seat, mocking his quiet fear.."

The overriding theme of the novel is identity, particularly as it is formed in the furnace of cultural expectations. More specifically the competing cultural expectations at play on the second generation, represented in this novel by Archie's daughter Irie, and Millat and Magid, the two twin sons of Archie's best friend Samad, great grandson of Mangal Pande, the sepoy who fired the first shot in the Indian rising of 1857. (The uprising upon which J G Farrell based his comic masterpiece The Siege of Krishnapur). The uprising was a result of bullets being covered in "a grease made from the fat of pigs, monstrous to Muslims and the fat of cows, sacred to Hindus. It was an innocent mistake - as far as anything is innocent on stolen land - an infamous British blunder." And the date, New Years Day, introduces the idea of new beginnings.

Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

“The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.”  Carl Jung

I was a latecomer to the phenomenon of Haruki Murakami. This is only the second of his books I have read. And yet I have already started to wonder how much more there is to be drawn from the particular well he draws his water from. He swims in the sea of Jungian archetypes, trusting that the unconscious has a message for us.

The problem with the idea of the collective unconscious is that it can, no matter how strange or bizarre its denizens appear, be strewn with cliches, the collective phrases and ideas worn of the friction and risk that makes great literature.

The Woman in White

The Woman in White®- Wilkie Collins

If you like long meandering gothic tinged plot lines, villainous aristocrats and comic 'foreigners' with an edge of threat, this is the book for you. Throw in some proto-feminist comments on the place of women and a few more labyrinthine plots and you're almost there. You can add multiple voices, from diaries, comments written in diaries, letters, lawyers notes, a confession and even straight narrative. It's genesis as a serial in one of Dicken's magazines is betrayed by enough hooks, tantalisers and cliffhangers to keep even the most demanding audience engaged.

Right from the off Collins is busy setting the tone and letting us know some of what we are in for. He also tells us that the story will be told by many narrators. Then there is a humourous interlude where we meet Walter Hartright, painter, and his best friend, the Italian, Professor Pesca, a comic innocent who seems not very far from  Roberto Benigni in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law. But when Walter Hartright leaves his mothers and sister to head back to his room a sense of mystery is introduced as he walks by Regent's Park.   "The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it."