Books

Loving – living in his way

This is my review of Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut.

E.M.Forster, known as Morgan, hates the stuffy conventions and snobbish prejudices of middle-class Edwardian society, yet is unable to break away from living with his mother who reaches the ripe old age of ninety. He recognises his sexuality, but for years is only able to express it abroad, in Egypt or India, by forming risky unequal relationships with young men from the other side of the race and class divides. In similar vein to Colm Tóibín's novel, "The Master", based on Henry James, Damon Galgut has chosen to fictionalise Forster's life rather than produce a biography, no doubt because this gives free rein for his creative imagination to get inside the author's head and embroider facts to suit his interpretation. He is at liberty to pick and choose what he wishes to include and emphasise.

Although I often found Morgan's furtive fumblings quite tedious, it is undeniable that Galgut's subtle prose has the power to enable heterosexual readers to understand the complex, shifting feelings of a sensitive and introspective gay man seeking fulfilment at a time when this was against the law, or the topic of mocking gossip. In one telling scene, an English official in Egypt is prepared to help get one of Morgan's young native friends out of a scrape, but is desperate to counsel him against the liaison, without ever managing to overcome his reticence to speak plainly. "Tall and dry, composed of jointed segments like a large, untidy bird, Robin seemed always uncomfortable, but more than usually so at this moment".

The title "Arctic Summer", re-using that of a novel which Forster was unable to complete, conveys the concept of being "blocked" in two senses – as a writer, and a man. In the kind of profound insight in which Damon Galgut excels, it is only in the final pages that he uses the term "Arctic summer" to describe how Morgan catches sight of himself in a café mirror, in which the angle of the light makes him seem to "stand alone in the middle of an immense whiteness – nothing moving, nothing alive". This coincides with his pain at overhearing the gossip of two strangers who have recognised him as a famous author, "He's a timid soul. They say he hasn't really lived at all, except in his mind."

Another important thread is the often painful process of writing, in particular Morgan's struggle to complete what came to be regarded as his masterpiece, "A Passage to India". Inspired by his first visit to that land, he knows that he must write about it, but for years cannot see how to bring it to fruition. Impressed by the "spiritual hostility" of the Kailasa cave, he is convinced he has found what he has been searching for, "a terrible incident, a crime of some kind. But when he tried to focus on what it was, it became unclear, all of it retreated from him".

Galgut also conveys the strong sense of place that makes Morgan a successful travel writer: walking back from an evening with a poet who has described the history of Alexandria, Morgan realises for the first time how old the city is although there is little trace of its history beneath the "ordinary and banal" modern buildings – this highlights, of course, the tragedy of the recent loss of ancient buildings and carvings in countries like Syria.

My only criticism of the book is that some of characters, like Morgan's English male friends, seem undeveloped and two-dimensional, but this may be intentional to show how little they really impinge on Forster's introspective world – plus they all seem to let him down by getting married as a way out of their dilemma.

With his well-crafted, expressive prose, full of insight, flashes of humour (I enjoyed the one-sided row with the combative D.H. Lawrence) and poignancy, Damon Galgut is an unusual writer who deserves to be more widely read and praised.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

Arctic Summer

That time gone forever

This is my review of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.

This novella which contrives to pack more into 115 pages than many a rambling, self-indulgent saga, captures the lives of Americans living on the harsh yet beautiful frontier of the north-western states in the first half of the twentieth century. The main character is Robert Grainier, a simple, semi-literate casual labourer who repairs railroad bridges and hauls forest timber. A brief period of personal happiness with an acre of land in the Moyea Valley, a wife and baby daughter, is destroyed by a ferocious forest fire. Yet, Grainger finds the dignity and resilience to rebuild a life which may seem insignificant, but forms part of the great wave of human effort to settle a continent. This is what gives an ostensibly sad book a note of optimism.

Although he spends most of his life in mourning, there are frequent touches of humour – comic scenes arise unexpectedly, as when he agrees to help a disreputable friend, who wants to assist a widow in moving house so he can lay hands on her money – , lurking superstitions about "wolf-girls" and touches of the surreal fed by the scale of the surrounding wilderness, contact with the local Kootenai Indians, and the nocturnal howling of wolves and coyotes, which Grainger begins to copy to gain a sense of release. There is a keen sense of nature, as when Grainger notices " it was full-on spring, sunny and beautiful. and the Moyea Valley showed a lot of green against the dark of the burn. The ground was healing….A mustard-tinged fog of pine pollen drifted through the valley when the wind came up".

The strength of the book lies in the quality of the clear and vivid prose, which struck me as poetical before I knew that the author has won prizes for his verse.

Here is a description of the aftermath of the fire, which you may appreciate if you have visited areas like the Yellowstone National Park:

“The world was gray, white, black and acrid, without a single live animal or plant, no longer burning yet still full of the warmth and life of the fire….he felt his heart’s sorrow blackened and purified, as if it were an actual lump of matter from which all of the hopeful, crazy thinking was burning away. He drove through a layer of ash deep enough, in some places, that he couldn’t make out the roadbed any better than if he’d driven through winter snows”.

I would place Denis Johnson on a par with Cormac McCarthy, but without the brutality.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

Train Dreams

The risks of happiness

This is my review of Delicacy: Film Tie-in Edition by David Foenkinos.

Beautiful Nathalie, whose kneecaps alone make men swoon, has an idyllic marriage to handsome high-flier François, a burgeoning career in her own right, and the sense of proportion to rise above the jealousy of work colleagues. What could go wrong? Yet, "Such happiness can make you afraid". Disaster inevitably strikes. The rest of this light romance is the tale of Nathalie first failing to come to terms with sudden bereavement, then finding unlikely happiness with a man whom her scandalised colleagues regard as totally unworthy.

There is plenty of wry humour in this story, and some moving insights into grief, as when Nathalie is struck by the placement of a book mark: the pages before belong to the time when François was still alive, those after to when he ceased to exist – to such a degree that she might have imagined him.

Although David Foenkinos seems capable of writing what you might call "literary fiction", he seems to be playing to the gallery here with some gimmicky formulae, such as interspersing the main text with short chapters, some only a sentence in length, by way of digression. For instance, after a passing reference to astrology, Chapter 34 is a list of Nathalie's small work team – most of whom we never meet – and their star signs. On another occasion, after a character has punched someone, a "chapter" gives us the result of one of Mohammed Ali's matches.

More serious charges are that the somewhat two-dimensional characters seem to fall in love out of lust or emotional neediness, and that the author tends to tell us what we should think about them rather than reveal it.

This is an easy read in French with some useful idioms, but if French were my native language, I would not wish to spend time on "La délicatesse", nor would I bother with it in translation. It has lent itself to a light-weight film starring Audrey Tautou, but the fact I cannot remember how its plot varies from the original book speaks volumes.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

Delicacy: Film Tie-in Edition

Paved with good intentions

This is my review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty,Arthur Goldhammer.

The Industrial Revolution saw an increase in inequality resulting from increased capital accumulation by the wealthy. The economist Kuznets misread the evidence in arguing that an "advanced phase" of industry would lead to a more equal spread of wealth, for "the sharp reduction in income equality in rich countries between 1914-1945 was due to the violent economic and political shocks resulting from two world wars…. The resurgence of inequality after the1980s was due to political shifts as regards taxation and regulation of finance". Piketty aims to enhance his academic credentials by analysing and presenting a vast amount of data between 1700-2010 to explain the above more fully and to support his central thesis that there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilising, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.

At first, the style seems very clear, well-translated, with minimal use of obscure formulae beloved by economists and graphs which relate to actual numbers on the axes rather than indicate trends, although Piketty admits that such complex data over long periods of time comes with many caveats. He tends to reiterate points, which apart from reinforcing learning helps readers who wish to dip into chapter sections. However, such repetition adds significantly to the length of the book.

Length seems a major problem. If I were an economics student, I would not wish to trawl through so much verbiage to glean the useful nuggets of knowledge. As a general reader, although the history of wealth distribution is quite interesting, I am most concerned about the final section on regulating capital, that is, the reduction of destabilising inequalities of wealth in this century. Here, I find the author skirting round the problem in a woolly and diffuse fashion, as in the single 25 page chapter (out of 577 pages, excluding notes) in which he considers aspects of "A Global Tax on Capital" which he introduces, not for the first time, as a utopian idea "which it is hard to imagine the nations of the world agreeing to any time soon". Other chapters in this section each go off at a tangent without being clearly related to the book's central theme of "capital", such as Chapter 14, "Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax" which is confined to examples from the US, France, Germany and Britain .

The author's heart is in the right place but since the arguments for redistribution are controversial, they need to be thought through and presented more strongly. A shorter book would have been more effective: the first part his research, the second his reasoned case. How many of the purchasers who made this a best-seller have actually read it?

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Not much left to learn except for algebra

This is my review of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

The better to appreciate Harper Lee's recently discovered prequel to this celebrated classic about life in segregated 1930s Alabama, I decided to reread it. I was surprised to find that the dramatic trial in which principled oddball lawyer Atticus Finch provides the convincing defence of a black man accused of rape, which only a prejudiced white jury could reject, forms a relatively small section of the novel.

I now see the book as a C20 female American writer's response to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, for at its core lie the attempts of feisty tomboy Jean Louise, nicknamed Scout, to understand the contrary adult world in which people speak one way and act another and the confusing social divisions in the inward-looking, gossip-ridden, tightknit factions of the backwater community of Maybury. Some of the escapades of Scout and her brother Jem are entertaining, I was fascinated by the Southern turn of speech and vivid portrayal of small-town life in another age.

And yet, like some other recent reviewers, I was not impressed to the degree I had expected and hoped. The whole business of the childrens' obsession with catching sight of their reclusive neighbour Boo Radley becomes wearisome, although I admit that it proves relevant to the denouement – a tale which often seems clunkily plotted and rambling manages to pull the threads together for a satisfactory conclusion.

Although dealing with an adult subject, everything is seen from the perspective of a child between the ages of six and eight. Thus Scout frequently misconstrues the situation, which may be amusing for a more mature reader who is "in the know" although this can get tedious after a while. The problem for me is that, despite her fear of hot steam ghosts and penchant for sugar sandwiches, Scout often seems to have too precocious a grasp of vocabulary and thoughts too sophisticated for her age, which is a common problem with a first person narrative, although admittedly in this case there is the excuse that she is writing years after the event, able to put an adult construction on matters and to employ dramatic licence to recreate detailed conversations word for word.

So it is that I found the story funny and moving, yet at the same long-winded, corny and sentimental at some points and think that for the greatest impact it needs to be read for the first time by teenagers untroubled by the pros and cons of good creative writing.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099549484/ref=nosim?tag=nowordlimitco-21NaNTo Kill A Mockingbird

“What a true work of art looks like”

This is my review of The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald.

Like the recent French Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, author W.G. Sebald was preoccupied with memory, nostalgia for the past and a haunting sense of loss. In a superb, sensitive translation from the German, "The Emigrants" comprise four freestanding sections, each recording the life of a man forced to leave Germany at some point in the last century, either to find employment in the States or to evade Nazi persecution.

Sebald has a very distinctive style, often described as dreamlike – and in the course of his meandering he sometimes resorts to recalling in detail real or imagined dreams, and tends to merge plain fact with probable invention. Slotted into the text to illustrate points, the frequent small, grainy photos of people, houses, scenery and objects are in some cases evocative and compelling, in others just quirky, such as a couple of keys for opening a cemetery gate, which in fact do not work. The first person narrator often finds out about his emigrants through the memories of others – perhaps emigrants themselves – but slots their commentary into his text without any inverted commas, creating in the process a stream of consciousness.

Opinions will differ, but I was most impressed by the final section on "Max Ferber". for which I would give five stars. In this, Sebald reveals himself to be an immigrant: a young German postgraduate student who came to Manchester in the `60s and found that he preferred not to return permanently to his homeland with its amnesia over the recent guilty past. Sebald "never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialisation had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation". But the most moving part is his friendship with the reclusive Jewish painter Ferber, who was sent on a flight to England by his once wealthy parents before they were themselves deported. Ferber inspires some of the author's most magical prose. The artist's method was to apply paint in a thick layer, only to spend hours scratching it off, leaving "a hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings mixed with coaldust..in places resembling the flow of lava". Ferber "never felt more at home than in places where matter dissolved, little by little into nothingness." He reflects: "I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced – consciousness – and so perhaps extinguishes itself". Ferber gives to Sebald the journal kept by his mother, which the author incorporates into his account – how much of this he actually writes himself is unclear. In any event it is a fascinating description of an ordered, carefee life in the one-third German village of Steinach at the start of the C20, all the more poignant since, "It goes without saying there are no Jews in Steinach now".

This strange account of people damaged by loss has the power to alter one's perception of life and is worth rereading for the quality of the writing and the insights expressed.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

The Emigrants

Il faut cultiver notre jardin

This is my review of Candide Voltaire Larousse by Voltaire.

Having discovered "Candide" through a recent lecture on Voltaire's role in the Enlightenment, I would say that it is definitely worth reading, ideally in French. On one level this satirical account of the surreal experiences of a naive and optimistic young man seem very dated and rather silly. On the other hand, put in the context of C18 Europe, it is Voltaire's scathing exposure of the corruption and intolerance of his age, and a justification of reason and open-mindedness. He was genuinely moved by the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake in 1755, clear grounds for refuting the philosopher Liebnitz's simplistic belief in "théodicée", a perfect God, who had created everything for the best in "le meilleur des mondes possibles" as parrotted by the buffoonish Professeur Pangloss. It is fascinating to realise that Voltaire's work was seized by the authorities for its dangerous principles as regards religion and tendency to deprave public morals – yet it still managed to be a bestseller. In these troubled times, Voltaire's concerns remain surprisingly relevant.

I particularly enjoyed the bored Venetian killjoy Pococuranté, sated with privilege and pleasure, disgusted by all his possessions and finding pleasure only in criticising everything – again, a character for any age.

This well-presented book is value for money, with useful footnotes to explain more archaic terms, clear explanation of the context, and in the final section "Pour approfondir" a detailed dissection of the text to assist those unfortunate enough to need to study it for the Bac, which I am glad not to have to do as it could just turn one off this work for ever.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

Candide Voltaire Larousse

Dividing the world

This is my review of The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 by Roger Moorhouse.

This readable and informative analysis of the infamous 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact covers an aspect often confined to a few paragraphs in a history of the Second World War. In upsetting "the ideological clarity of the bipolar world of communist versus fascist", this Pact dismayed many in both camps, justified to communists by the specious argument that: "Soviet leaders had a responsibility to the working class of the world to defend the USSR and could, if necessary, for this reason make an alliance with the devil himself".

On one hand, mistrustful of imperial Britain and the US, Stalin felt more comfortable with an agreement that would leave Europe to exhaust itself through conflict at little cost to the USSR. He also saw a chance to regain and occupy eastern Europe – parts of Poland, the Baltic States, Finland and Bessarabia (from Romania), sanctioned by the secret protocol which his henchman Molotov signed with the Germans, but always denied.

On the other hand, the Pact gave Hitler the confidence to fight on a single front in 1940, sweeping through the Low Countries, France and Norway, humiliating Britain in the process. The map showing Europe largely under Axis control or neutral in June 1941 reminds us of how scaring it must have been to be living in the UK at this time.

By then, the stage was set for Operation Barbarossa, since the unnatural alliance had fractured under Hitler's fears over the long-term Soviet designs on Europe, and his hubristic underestimate of the risks involved in overextending his forces in the throes of a Russian winter. Moorhouse points out the irony of the German troops' advance into Russia, fed by Soviet grain, tanks fuelled by Soviet oil, boots made of rubber transported on Soviet trains, weapons made from Soviet manganese-hardened-steel as a result of the mutually beneficial trade under the Pact. In turn, the surprisingly effective Russian tanks had been manufactured with machine tools imported from Germany.

Moorhouse shows how there was little to choose between the two powers as regards their callous and brutal resettlement policies for those judged to have unacceptable views or the wrong ethnic origin. He cites the two trainloads of Polish refugees travelling opposite ways on the Nazi-Soviet frontier, "each group astonished that the other was fleeing into the zone they were trying to escape". He also reminds us how, until Gorbachev's regime, discussion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was taboo, the new histories of the 1960s covering it only briefly with "the expected omissions, evasions and justifications".

Moorhouse has chosen to omit concluding references to the Germans' defeat in Russia after the carnage of their initial blitzkrieg, and to the new alliance formed by Stalin with the UK and USA. Neither is there an attempt to speculate on the course which events might have taken if this alliance had been formed earlier, instead of a pact with the Germans.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

From the dim ruins of the Enlightenment project

This is my review of The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters by Anthony Pagden.

In the eighteenth century, conditions combined to create a demand for the right to think for oneself. Avoiding simple clear-cut definitions, Anthony Pagden deploys his encylopaedic knowledge to explore the factors which gave rise to the enlightenment, its complexity, strengths and weaknesses and why it is still relevant. A scholarly page-turner, which somehow manages to be engrossing yet flawed, this is a book to keep on one's shelf and revisit from time to time, as it includes too many ideas to grasp in a single reading.

Each chapter is like an encounter with a passionate expert thinking aloud as his mind flips back and forth, linking the ideas of respective "lumières" with extensive quotations and frequent little digressions and asides "(more of him later)". No philosopher or thinker is introduced without a few nuggets of potted history, which tends to be distracting. Despite the author's penchant for convoluted sentences, his approach is gripping and thought-provoking, but can create a kind of overstimulated mental fog. A reader with some prior knowledge of the main enlightenment thinkers is likely to cope best. I decided that the best course is to read this through once to get an overview and then study chapter by chapter to fix some key insights. I could have done with a chart to show the dates of the various philosophers to clarify exactly who was influencing whom, and to note their respective works, often with long and similar titles.

Some assertions seem open to question, but it is perhaps no bad thing to face the challenge of explaining why one questions a certain argument. The typos noted by other reviewers did make me wonder whether the proofreader(s) hadn't become too numbed by the spate of information and ideas to check the sense properly, but this is a minor point. The major criticism is that the book is somewhat chaotic in structure, repetitious and longer than it needs to be – but Pagden certainly conveys a sense of the enduring fascination of the subject matter.

I was looking forward to the "Conclusion: Enlightenment and its enemies", but Pagden seems to have run out of steam at the end, not dissecting "communitarianism" and the Catholic philosopher MacIntyre as forensically as he does the earlier anti-enlightenment thinkers and ending with a final confirmation of continued relevance which seems rather woolly, I suppose due to the sad fact that our enlightenment has not built on that of our visionary eighteenth century ancestors to the degree that they might reasonably have hoped.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters

Loving to hate

This is my review of The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike by Philip K. Dick.

Energetic, pushy and prickly, realtor Leo Runcible has great ideas for property development in rural California, but he will probably never gain acceptance in 1960s Marin County, being not only an outsider but Jewish. An exaggerated grievance against his neighbour Walt Dombrosio sets off the quirky chain of events which form the theme of this novel.

As he continually switches his viewpoint between four of the main characters, so that Walt and his classy wife Sherry are as central to the tale as Leo and blurrily drunken Janet, I became engrossed in his capture of how they perceive each other and of the continuous small shifts in emotions – the observation of psychology and social life. This is a match for Philip Roth, I found myself thinking. Then, the narrative slips more into black farce and although I accept that the early 60s was a period of male chauvinism, of the sense that a man was emasculated if his wife worked, of unabashed racism and callous dismissal of the disabled, I began to have a nagging concern as to exactly how misogynist and non-PC Philip Dick may have been himself – or perhaps this is a mark of his skill as a writer.

It seems that this was one of the mainstream novels which remained unpublished in his lifetime, since his cult status was achieved only through his sci-fi, which does not interest me personally. Although I agree with a reviewer who found the end of this book somewhat rushed – he sets up an interesting final twist but fails to develop it adequately – he has clearly been underestimated as a writer with a keen eye, sharp insights into how mismatched people may tear themselves apart in relationships, “hell is other people” leavened with wry humour and a laconic style. I shall read another, but perhaps that will then be enough.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike