Pedro Páramo

Imaginary cover from here

Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo
(Translated by Lysander Kemp)

"Noises. Voices. Murmurs. Faraway songs."

I first came across the name of Rulfo amoung many other Mexican writers in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. I had no idea what to expect but the cover looked interesting and the excerpt on the back saying that Rulfo "views history as a tragic circus in which evil impresarios betray clowns by making them believe in their own masquerade" was intriguing.

And this is a strange and intriguing book. On one level this is the story of an immoral, Macchievellian ranch owner which could form the basis for a Sergio Leone film. On another it is a Mexican The Waste Land, with a vertiginous chorus from beyond the grave whispering parts of their stories into our ears as the wind blows the dust through the empty landscape or the rain turns the dust into mud.

The Radetzky March

The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
(translated by Michael Hofmann)

Early on in this book  reading is discussed. - "Then he took his booklist out of his pocket, and handed it to his father. 'Some solid reading matter there!' said the District Commissioner. 'Now. Tell me the plot of Zriny!' Carl Joseph gave a résumé, act by act. Then he sat down, tired, pale, his tongue parched." At times this blog's demand that I report on each book can start to resemble a sort of formal grilling. It is somehow harder when the book is richer and broader and seems to demand a response that does it justice.

This has probably been the highlight of my reading year so far. It is a magnificent book. It manages to combine in it's pages broad comedy (Carry on Hapsburgs) with individual heartbreak, history, philosophy and the ache of centuries.

X-Ray

X-Ray by Ray Davies

Kronikles of a Kink

This is a genuine oddity - rock autobiography as metafiction. Rather than give us a straightforward memoir (never really on the cards) Davies talks to us through a fictional nineteen year old orphan who has been brought up to be a faceless mediocrity by the all powerful Corporation and has now been told to "document the life and times of one Raymond Douglas Davies, who was a composer and the lead singer of the Kinks, one of the leading beat groups of that era*." (*the sixties)

A series of interviews then take place in "the legendary Konk studio" "festooned in cobwebs and dust." MetaDavies waits in the gloom and one of the first things he says is that "There is no time here. No future nor past."

The Wrong Kind of Blood

*

The Wrong Kind of Blood - Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes' name will always have a resonance for me because of the experience of seeing his play Digging for Fire. I still remember the strong feeling that I had during the play that I could get out of my seat and simply stroll onto the stage and belong there. These were my peers, talking like we talked and with the same references we shared. Drink, Emigration, AIDS, The Pixies and a sensibility that seemed to be perfectly realised.

When I saw his name on the cover of a crime novel I was intrigued enough to buy it and finally (it's been there a while amoung the hundreds of unread refugees from charity shop bookshelves) I got around to reading it.

Deliverance

Deliverance - James Dickey

Four men set off for some white water rafting and a spot of illegal hunting in a 'wild' landscape of hills and a river that is due to be covered by damned water in the near future. (That's water held back by a large concrete edifice and not H₂O from Hell).

The journey is planned over steins of beer and main instigator Lewis sells it to the other three as an opportunity to have a 'real' experience before 'the real estate people get hold of it and make it into one of their heavens.'

Lewis is someone who "tries by any means - weight lifting, diet, exercise, self-help manuals from taxidermy to modern art - to hold on to his body and mind and improve them, to rise above time.' The narrator, Ed, has accompanied him through many of these interests and admires him although he can see that he holds a type of death wish. He too seems concerned with the onset of middle age, and unsatisfied with his relatively successful city life and marriage.

Rebecca

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

This book famously begins with the account of a dream. Another dream features at the end. Indeed the whole book inhabits a dreamscape charged with the emotions of the nameless narrator.  Indeed at times it seems as if the narrator is being annihilated by the powerful emotions raging around her.
The novel opens with that famous first line "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." On one level this tumbles us into the story and as it progresses we are always trying to catch up to that initial moment and all that is implied within it. Why is it that it is now only in her dreams that the narrator goes to Manderley? And Du Maurier goes further, telling us us more and more of what is to come in the opening salvo of this novel as the first two chapters set in the NOW of the narrator prefigure the events that we have yet to hear in our journey into her past.

Home

Home - Marilynne Robinson

This book reminds me of the stealth of dandelions, when the breeze catches them and the air is suddenly filled with their wafting seeds, catching the light like miniature suns. Gentle yet devastating.

Home is Marilyne Robinson's third novel. I have been a fan of her first novel, Housekeeping for many years but only recently found out that she had written not one but two more recent novels after a gap of twenty years. Housekeeping (1984), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Gilead and Home are companion novels both set in the town of Gilead and recounting the same events from different viewpoints. Having read Home I will now be looking out for a copy of Gilead and may actually have to stray outside the shelves of charity shops because I can't wait.

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

If you like your pots boiling over this is a good read.  Every time you think you've reached a plateau another log is thrown on the fire. The Kite Runner is a melodramatic tearjerker of a novel that attempts to portray some of the pain of a country that has been ripped apart again and again. It doesn't suggest any answers but tries to highlight the humanity behind the headlines.

The tale takes us from pre CIA/Russia Afghanistan through regime changes and across the globe to San Francisco. It raises questions about how people can find redemption from crimes of commission or omission. It is not a radical book, either politically or in terms of its literary form.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote

Holly Golightly is one of the most famous characters in fiction, due in no small part to the film starring Audrey Hepburn. I've seen pictures and clips, but, to the best of my memory I've never seen the film so I came to the book with less preconceptions than I might.

Breakfast in Tiffany's is a frothy confection bubbling like champagne but remember there is emptiness inside each bubble.

Holly Golightly glitters brightly because all her energy is invested in her surface. What lies underneath is too painful and is in chaos like the inside of her apartment.

The Gathering

This is book no 18 in my attempt to read 100 books this year and respond to them all in this blog. I'm just about keeping the target in sight although I'm lagging a little. However, I'm finding it a rewarding experience and have yet to have to wrestle with a book that I'm not enjoying.

The Gathering - Anne Enright

What a wonderfully rich and evocative title this is. The Gathering. With slightly ominous tones. The gathering of the clans, the gathering darkness, the gathering of material, an abscess, the gathering of yarn to spin a tale.

Saints in the Grass

"Today is the day when the Irish everywhere celebrate their slaveowning past. In an ironic turn a returned slave brought a sytem of mental slavery to Ireland which taught the Irish that they deserved whatever they get.

I thought one man suffered to expiate the sins of many but it appears that many suffer for the sins of a few.

In the future will we have St Brians Day?  In honour of a public servant who made the public servants?

Green is the colour of nausea, the post twenty pints of Guinness colour, the colour of our hangover.

Wear it with pride.

Confessions of a Window Cleaner

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was one of the key books of my adolescence and was much discussed as 'everyone' had read it. I picked it up in the local charity shop thinking I'd read it again someday. Ended up starting to reread it that very day as I finished the book I was reading while out and had no other book to hand. It's interesting to read books that you have almost forgotten and turning pages is like an act of memory as much as discovery. Anyway, to the book iteslf...

"There was a bed in the middle of the room. It was like a platform in the theatre. Tomas ordered her to stand in the corner while he made love to Sabina. The sight of it caused Teresa intolerable suffering."

My Name is Red

"I am the only historical novelist in the world who can point out his subjects with his finger." Orhan Pamuk

This is the first book I have read by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. It won't be the last. This is a wonderful feast of ideas, on one level a historical murder mystery set in the sixteenth / seventeenth century but on another an exploration of art and artistry, of the interplay between images and psychology, the sweep of history and the way Istanbul is at the nexus of  Christian and Moslem worldviews.

A central theme of the novel is perspective. The miniatures are painted from the specultive perspective of Allah. There is a growing awareness of Venetian painting and the increasing realism of Western painting and their use of different perspectives. A preacher rails against this 'blasphemy' and this stirs up trouble amongst the miniaturists who are working on a book of illustrations using elements of the western 'style'.

Camus' Plague - A Cruel Mirror

Unlike Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, (one of my favourite books -showing , perhaps, an unhealthy interest in the darker side of human experience) Camus is not trying to build a socio-realist vision of a visitation of the Bubonic Plague. That is not to say that there is not much that is compellingly realistic in this book.

Rather he is using the plague both as an allegory for the Nazi reign in France and as a cruel mirror in which we may see how philosophies for living hold up in the most testing of circumstances. Like pressing mercury on tin to make a mirror, Camus presses the plague bacillus onto thin veneers of meaning and looks at our reflections there.

We have scientific, religious, romantic and variations therof, embodied in diferent characters who all find their beliefs sorely tested. We even have a Harry Lime type who revels in The Plague as it gives him respite from the law and many opportunities to make a killing.

Never Let Me Go

Right from the start of this book we know that we are only getting part of the picture. We know there's something happening but we don't know what it is. Carers, donors, privileged estates, Hailsham....

When we go back into our narrator's past, we find Hailsham to be a boarding school, or something very like one. The casual cruelty of children, being 'in' with the right people, the cult of particular teachers, the importance of particular belongings, rules...

"... how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning."

All the King's Men

This is a book full of  the putrid vitality of politics and much else besides. The book is narrated by Jack Burden, a journalist who becomes the right hand man to rising political force Willie Stark (The Boss). He wrestles with the meaning of his life and the ethics of wielding power. We jump backwards and forwards in time as he tries to understand what the past has meant to him and how to divest himself of its burden.

The effort to understand is often blunt and so are many of the voices and personalities that fill the book. Some of the politics had a resonance with the General Election raging around me here in Ireland as I read. I could imagine some candidates having very similar conversations to this one between Stark and Burden.

"They didn't seem to be paying attention much tonight. Not while I was trying to explain about my tax program."
"Maybe you try to tell 'em too much. It breaks down their brain cells."
"Looks like they'd want to hear about taxes, though," he said.
"You tell 'em too much. Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys, and forget the rest of the tax stuff."

What We Leave in Our Wake

People who know me would not think it strange for me to say that I am (at best) somewhat bemused by life.  The shape and values of the tide of life often seem in permanent ebb and most of our culture is like driftwood, smoothed and blunted by saltwater and sand.


What We Leave In Our Wake (trailer 21st) from Harvest Films on Vimeo.

It is invigorating to see an Irish film taking up Joyce's great challenge to ' forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.' Pat Collins has made an important  film whose contribution to the Irish may be greater than anything arising out of tomorrows 'most important election in our lifetime'. It has certainly stirred thoughts in my mind and I will be taking advantage of it's presence on the RTE Player to watch it again before it disappears. (It's there until Monday 14th March)

He shows us an Ireland of garage forecourts and stone walls, of nondescript urban landscapes whose inanity is a challenge to identity. The land gives back remnants of our past like a Connemara navvy spitting his bloody teeth on a Kilburn sidewalk, his very language already stolen from his mouth.

Still Wearing Blue Shirts?

General Eoin O'Duffy

Leo Varadkar

Separated at birth but still grooving at the same party?

Go Ahead Punk, make my day....

Book no. 12 in my quest to read and review 100 Books in 2011

The Sex Pistols shot like a comet presaging doom through the medieval dives of 1976/77. Led by the fiery red heads of John Lydon and Malcolm McLaren they were always destined to crash and burn but their parabola described a future without the truisms of the establishment or even the late sixties anti-establishment.

A few tame words to a partly pickled and provocative chat show host made the Pistols Public Enemy No. 1 and the release of God Save the Queen in the week of H.R.H.'s jubilee made them targets for violence wherever they went.

The Speckled People

This memoir of the childhood of the son of an Irish father and German mother is an impressionist masterpiece. Hamilton's book has a dark core but the stories and descriptions are intensively burnished so that the book is suffused by the light, smells and sounds of childhood. The past is often starkly immediate in these pages. In a similar but less experimental way than Joyce's Portrait of an Artist we are immersed in a child's understanding and this understanding grows as the book progresses.

"When you're small you know nothing."