Michael Strogoff – Jules Verne

My grandma taught me how to read when I was 4. By the time I was 5 I was a boring kid reading scientific publications on dinosaurs and wild animals. By the time I was 6 and in elementary school most people around me had also learned how to read, so I stopped and, essentially, didn’t open a book until I was 14.

Because of my long literature-free years, I am now often forced to embarrassingly catch up on books that I wish I had read in my early teens, like Michael Strogoff. I half-heartedly read 20.000 Leagues under the Sea when I was 12 (one of the few books that I was forced to read in that period and, because of the mood I was in, I think it’s best if I don’t write anything about how I felt towards Captain Nemo then), I later loved Around the World in 80 Days, but Michael Strogoff was the Jules Verne book that intrigued me the most (that said, I managed to postpone reading it until now although I had asked for it as a Christmas present probably 10 years ago).

It was a delightful read despite the fact that, more than Around the World in 80 Days, the novel is so extremely dated (its national stereotypes, its depiction of women, nationalism, courage, morality etc.) – but my edition still had the old 19^th century illustrations which made me tingly inside, and I must say I actually had goosebumps when Michael carries Nadja towards Irkutsk. It was also interesting to look at how quickly each event was described: with one hit Michael kills a bear, with one jump he runs away and so on and so forth – all those actions are described in one quick line, whereas in a 20^th century adventure they would probably last for a few epic pages.

Also, I’ve probably loved the book because it finally gave me an idea of the geography of some of those mysterious territories in the top-right corner of the Risk board…

The Rotters’ Club – Jonathan Coe

A book that my mom tried to persuade me to read for years. All it took for me to read it was for my boss to recommend it…

There are a number of reasons why I particularly enjoyed this novel: being used to Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, Hari Kunzru, etc. it was refreshing for once to read a (relatively) recent light-hearted and socio-political British novel that wasn’t set in London. Also, despite the fact that my political allegiances lie elsewhere (very much so), it was a welcome change to read a novel about the personal growth and the self-doubts of a little Tory (despite the fact that Ben’s lefty friend Doug is clearly my favourite character).  Lastly, a scene in the final pages is set in the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, a place that was wonderfully quaint and still oozing – between its cracked walls and leaking pipes – of Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith when my dad took us there 20 years ago (before it got refurbished and very much revamped).

From a stylistic point of view, Coe does a great job of alternating registers and viewpoints. His little plot twists leave you disheartened (at the very end of the first part), warm inside (during a dialogue apparently with himself that Ben has mid-way through the second part), giggly (when you discover who is the actual author of some of the most hysterical letters that the editor of a school journal can ever receive), or give you hope for the future of mankind (with Ben’s decision to go home before the end of a disastrous family holiday in Wales).

It’s been a while since I’ve last expressed this trite idea – The Rotters’ Club is clearly not a masterpiece, but hell it’s a really enjoyable read…

Fontamara – Ignazio Silone

Another book stolen from my granddad’s bookshelf. It must have been sitting there for some 40 years. I’m not someone who sees poetry everywhere in the world, but I really find it kind of neat that it smells just like my grandparents’ flat… Clearly, this is another book about Italian Fascism and it is, surprisingly, the one that seems to be best known abroad. Given the recent new evidence published about Silone’s dealings with the Fascist police, I have the feeling I will struggle to be fully objective, but anyway here it goes.

I do realize that Fontamara was published during the “years of consensus” for the Fascist regime  and that Silone’s position was fairly radical and incredibly dangerous at the time (although he published the novel while in exile). However, 80 years on, I am a much bigger fan of Fenoglio’s gritty or Vittorini’s epic anti-fascism than of Silone’s fable-like one.

As I already mentioned a couple of times, I’m not exactly fond of great allegoric portrayals of human nature: I’d be much happier if the evil entrepreneur represented just himself and not the whole of capitalism and its aggressiveness, or if the fickle lawyer was not meant to be a portrayal of the Italian upper-middle class and its acquiescence to Fascism. Also, while the idea of telling the story from the points of view of three members of the same family (a couple and their son) was undoubtedly avant-garde for the period, the fact that the style of the narration doesn’t change when it’s a teenage boy or a middle-aged woman presenting the story makes me question the quality of Silone as a writer.

 

That said, the book is a great display of how in many ways the Fascist revolution was “unrevolutionary”, and how the poor and oppressed remained poor and oppressed. After all that was what my Ph.D. was about, so at least from that point of view I did find the book extremely interesting…

La Tregua – Primo Levi

 

I’ve stolen this book from my granddad’s bookshelf. It was a gift for him by my mom some 20 years ago. His memory is really rather wobbly now, I don’t think he’ll realize it’s gone (or, sadly, that he’s ever read it).

I’ve read it because my mother – rightfully, as is sometimes the case! – scolded me for saying that often Levi’s writing is (understandably, obviously) quite humourless. I stand by what I said in relation to books about the holocaust. But La Tregua is more than that. It’s about the long journey home, about the light at the end of the tunnel, about the desire to live. Also, La Tregua was written in the early 1960s, 15 years after Se Questo E’ un Uomo, and I’m sure that this played an important role in the way in which Levi recalled his turbulent days in 1945 and 1946.

Levi’s self-mocking when describing his lack of street smarts is endearing, the plethora of secondary characters with very often stereotypical national quirks is extremely funny (at times actually hilarious), and the never-ending road back to Turin is of such an epic and heroic kind that I am sure McCarthy would love to have written La Tregua. And, clearly, the anecdotes that Levi magisterially recalls in La Tregua are of the kind which can only be lived and told by the chosen people.

Saturday – Ian McEwan

 

I found an autographed hardback copy of the novel on the second-hand bookshelf at my local urban farm. It was selling for 1£. It says a lot about the value of literature these days...

The book is beautifully written. No wonder, it’s McEwan. The book is about rich people and their perfectly imperfect lives. No wonder, it’s McEwan. The book actually annoyed the hell out of me, which is a shame because, after all, it’s McEwan...

I’m not quite sure whether McEwan depicts a Henry Perowne that is irritatingly detached from reality or if that’s actually a reflection of the author’s outlook on life in London (the autobiographical elements in Saturday are clearly many and at times it’s hard to disentangle pure fiction from McEwan’s experiences).

The book annoyed me because Henry Perowne and McEwan seem to mock those who protested against the invasion of Iraq. I did back in the day, I’m quite proud of that, and I’m happy I carried those signs that he seems to find fairly meaningless. It annoyed me because I had little intention of spending half an hour reading about a stupid squash game. It annoyed me because during the squash game one of those supposedly average athletes in their 50s jumps “two or maybe even three feet into the air” (you’re either a real athlete, or you are delusional if you think you can jump that high with a couple of steps). Similarly, you don’t run a half marathon in less than an hour and a half if you’re little more than a casual jogger (trust me on that).

It annoyed me because the book hates on the student halls in Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia where I lived and worked for years. It annoyed me because, protected by his fancy car on Tottenham Court Road, Henry Perowne/McEwan thinks that everyone around him is fundamentally happy (the guy selling The Big Issue? The old lady diving for reduced to clear sandwiches at Tesco? The underpaid McDonald’s staff?). It annoyed me because, for all the medical research he’s had to do to write this book, Perowne’s mom has the same illness that Briony develops in Atonement (which he wrote four years before, without publishing any other novel in the meantime).

The novel’s greatest merit has been that of arousing something similar to a weird nationalist pride in me (something I’ve never possessed and that I hope I’ll get rid of by tomorrow morning). As an unknown Italian archaeologist impregnates Perowne’s flawless daughter, McEwan allows himself to label the Italians as pueri aeterni (eternal teenagers) and says that Italian men won’t get up in the middle of the night for the cries of their teething children. Screw that, I have a right to say those things if I want to. You, rich and pompous foreigner, don’t.

A Weekend with Claude – Beryl Bainbridge

A book that my mom bought on an audacious trip to Fopp, knowing little about Beryl Bainbridge other than the fact that An Awfully Big Adventure is a hell of a good novel.

Despite not being of the same literary significance as An Awfully Big Adventure (although A Weekend with Claude also mentions the same Peter Pan quote), this is a highly enjoyable novel, and one that would deserve something better than a quick comment by the Daily Telegraph on its front cover.

A Weekend with Claude is what The Big Chill would have been had the characters not really liked each other. The multiple viewpoints, oddly enough for me (I’m really not a fan), work quite wonderfully, and the shooting of Shebah is a great addition. I loved the chain of mutual jealousies and mistrust in this circle of friends, although I kind of wish that Edward – the only likeable character and the newest (and short-lived, we presume) entry into the group – was given a chance to speak his mind, either directly or indirectly, both by Bainbridge and by the people around him. 

Siberian Education – Nicolai Lilin

The author of the book is a tattoo artist who used to work in my tiny Italian town. The novel/memoir was an incredible success story in Italy (published by Einaudi) six years ago. Back then I resisted the urge to read it, but I was forced to pick it up when I found it selling in Fopp for a couple of pounds (I didn’t feel particularly guilty about reading the book in an English translation, since I assume it was heavily edited also in its original Italian version).

For the first couple of hundred pages, the book is a vividly interesting portrayal of Siberian criminals in Transnistria. After that, however, the reader gets the idea: the criminals are ruthless but adhere to a very strict code of moral values. And the book just gets fairly boring. In addition to that, I have enough of romantic portrayals of mobsters with an etiquette (there are enough books and movies about the Italian mafia for that).

To top it all up, I just had the feeling that, in this fictionalized auto-biography, the author of the book was painting himself to be way cooler, smarter, and more skilled than he actually is in reality. I often felt that he was lying and just recounting the stories of his friends and of the people he had grown up around as if they were his own. Something which is totally fine by me, but that I believe could get him severely punished according to the moral code he spends more than 400 pages describing.